A VALLEY OF LIFE[A]
If some one of the prison officials of New York were to suggest the turning out of hundreds of the prisoners on Blackwell’s Island and Sing Sing into a colony in the fertile valley along the Hudson or the Mohawk river, under the care of a superintendent and a half dozen assistants without an armed guard, the inhabitants not only of New York state but of all the states in the Union would immediately hold mass meetings of protest and set their political organizations to work to have the official making the suggestion removed from office and incarcerated in an insane asylum. This would be the action taken in this far advanced, civilized country.
Yet in the Philippine islands this very thing has been done, and done with success. It has been done with a people said by leading officials of this country and other countries to be incapable of self-government.
To be explicit, there are today 1,423 prisoners, or “colonists,” as they are now termed—prisoners of all classes and sorts, serving terms of from five years to life imprisonment, and for crimes from petty thievery to murder—living without a guard in a small, fertile valley along the river of one of the islands in the archipelago just south of Luzon, the largest island, of which Manila is the capital.
Here the 1,423 convicts live, not alone, isolated as the prisoners of Siberia are, but much the same as they would have lived had they never committed a crime against the community—in peace, prosperity and happiness, with their families, engaged in the pursuit of agriculture-and the only guns on the place are those mounted at the superintendent’s office for saluting purposes and the “six-shooter” the superintendent keeps locked up with his cash in the safe of the penal colony office.
There is a guard on the reservation, but it is only a police guard, and the only arms its members carry are a small policeman’s club, which is more ornamental than useful.
With this lack of military display on the part of the authorities, there has been but one outbreak or attempt at escape, and that occurred soon after the colony was first established and before the valley had been drained and rid of malaria and cholera. Since that first outbreak and the subsequent capture of all but one of the nineteen who escaped (and that one died) there has been peace and quiet on the reservation.
It was in 1904 that George N. Wolfe, then warden of Bilibid, the “bastile” of Manila, now director of the bureau of prisons of the Philippine islands, found the prison fast becoming overcrowded. He had male and female inmates confined there who were serving sentences for all manner of crimes. He was confronted with the problem of finding an additional housing place. He took the matter up with the superintendent of prisons with the result that it was determined to establish a colony of prisoners under a guard.
Accordingly, in November, 1904, the superintendent of prisons appointed Warden Wolfe, Prof. William S. Lyon, horticulturist of the bureau of agriculture, and Dr. Arlington Pond, star pitcher on the old Baltimore Oriole baseball team in the McGraw and Keeler days, then city health officer of Manila, to select a site for a penal colony.