In all movements for the betterment of prisoners and the welfare of prisoners, organized labor has assisted. Every law enacted in the United States, changing and bettering prison conditions has either been initiated or strongly supported by the labor unions. The improvement of sanitary conditions in the prisons; the providing of dining rooms are all improvements largely due to the efforts made by organized labor.
The adoption of the foregoing plans will make of the penal institutions of our country industrial institutions for the saving of morally sick men and women committed to them. The inmates of such institutions will return to the body politic with a corrected perspective due to a training under a state government that desires to reform as well as correct. They will again take their places in society not only willing, but able to do their share of the world’s work. This is the attitude of organized labor toward convict labor.
TURNING BEGGARS INTO WORKERS
By O. F. Lewis, General Secretary
Prison Association of New York
[In the Summer of 1911, Mr. Lewis traveled through Belgium, Holland, Germany, England and Scotland, studying European methods of dealing with delinquents, and especially the beggar colonies of Central Europe. The following article is a part of one chapter of Mr. Lewis’s report to the Prison Association of New York, which will be presented to the Legislature in 1912. The report has special significance because the state of New York is to build a compulsory farm colony for habitual tramps and vagrants.]
Foreign countries, notably Belgium, Holland and Germany, have had lengthy and varied experience with the problem of vagabondage and mendicancy. Indeed in Central Europe the vagrancy problem is not alone a generation old, but a century old. Napoleon devoted some of his genius to the problem of the suppression of vagabondage. When the Dutch possessed Belgium as well as Holland, Dutch benevolent societies sought the reformation and rehabilitation of the vagabond. A half century ago Holland was segregating over one thousand vagabonds and beggars on the bleak heath in the north of Holland near the Zuyder Zee and already turning the arid plain into a blooming oasis. Belgium was creating fifty years ago local beggar colonies, and recognizing that vagrancy is one of the great social dangers of a nation, a danger increasing inevitably with the progress of civilization. Germany was thirty years ago this year establishing its first voluntary labor colony at Bielefeld in Central Prussia. Pastor von Bodelschwingh, the great organizer of philanthropic institutions for defectives of all kinds, founded with deep religious conviction his first farm colony for the “brothers of the highway.” Compulsory workhouses, semi-penal in nature, have come to number about thirty in the kingdom of Prussia, containing not thieves, not cases of assault, not robbers, not other criminals of greater or less degree, but solely vagrants, mendicants, and that despicable class of human beings, the souteneurs, who traffic in human flesh.
Today the accumulated experience of generations can be found in the records and in the methods of administration of Belgian beggar colonies, Dutch vagrancy colonies, German free labor colonies and German compulsory workhouses. It is unthinkable that the United States, ever ready in commercial and industrial lines to profit not only by the mistakes but by the successes of other nations, will be blind to the wealth of experience that European countries can offer us.
With the purpose of rendering a slight contribution to American information on this subject, a considerable part of my last summer’s tour in Belgium, Holland, Germany, England and Scotland, as general secretary of the prison association of New York, was devoted to the first-hand study of the administration of institutions for vagrants and mendicants and the study also of their history and of the laws under which at various times they have been operated. In several chapters following this introductory chapter I present a somewhat careful study of Merxplas the world-famous beggar colony of Belgium; of Veenhuizen, the less known but remarkably interesting vagrancy colony of Holland; of the free labor colonies and the compulsory workhouses of Prussia and Germany; and of conditions and problems of vagrancy in England and Scotland.
Several general observations may well precede the special chapters.