Prisoners Idle; Insanity Growing.—Hundreds of prisoners idle, discipline ruined, disease spreading and insanity increasing, are the results affecting the Ohio penitentiary brought about by a law passed in 1906, publicly declare prison officials in that state. The startling situation was graphically described recently by the Cleveland (O.) Plain Dealer, in part as follows:
“Penitentiary officials are facing a critical situation, resulting from the constantly increasing number of prisoners they are compelled to confine in the idle house. More discouraging than the existing conditions is the prospect that, in six months at the outside, practically all the prisoners will be idle. Conditions cannot improve; they will become graver and graver unless relief is given during the present session of the legislature.
“In the meantime, on an average 300 men spend twelve hours each day on the benches in the idle house. This number is augmented on days when the weather does not permit working the prisoners about the yard. In one month, when the last contract expires, another hundred will join these ranks. In six months at the most, when all the contracts will have been cleaned up, all save the men employed in the administration of the big prison, which means about 1,000, will be idling. All the contracts but one have expired; yet most of the men employed in most of the old shops are still at work. This comes about only through sufferance; the companies holding contracts are being allowed to work up the raw material they had on hand at the expiration of their contracts. This keeps a few men going, but at best is only putting further away the problem that must be faced.
“Since Dec. 1, more prisoners have become insane than during any average eight months before the condition arose. In a little over one month, eight men have been taken to the prison asylum. When all were working, there was seldom more than an average of one a month who became insane, and usually it averaged less. This prison officials attribute directly to increased idleness. Moreover, discipline is more or less ruined. The men, sitting day after day, with nothing to do but to stare at the ceiling and turn over in their minds their misfortunes, are gradually becoming more and more morose, sullen and ugly. Not a day passes but that prisoners approach the guards and beg to be set at work. Guards, their hands tied by the legislature, are powerless to help. Nothing awaits the prisoner but a refusal.
“The air in the room is necessarily foul from the exhalations of these 400 men. Blazing coal stoves at frequent intervals keep the room at a temperature which, to one going in from the outside, is nothing short of sickening. The benches themselves are rather narrow, with twelve or fourteen-inch backs, which, from all appearances, would become very hard and uncomfortable in little or no time. The floor is sprinkled with lime at intervals, but after the men have marched in in the morning presents a dirty gray appearance—that of a thick coat of dirt covered over with whitewash, mud from innumerable pairs of boots tracked into it. Wooden boxes, filled with shavings, do duty as cuspidors. The men, fortunately, are allowed the consolation of a chew, and to chew one must, in plain English, spit. Yet the possibilities of acquiring disease are fearful to contemplate.
“Papers and magazines, with a liberal sprinkling of missionary tracts, are furnished. Most are necessarily out of date, and all are grimy with much handling. Those facing the windows read with certain injury to their eyes; those in the center of the room have not light enough to read at all, while the few at the rear of the room, who have light from the rear, can read with comfort. But at least half of these idlers are foreigners and cannot read at all; these can think. Such are the physical surroundings in this room, intended to house two-score and at present containing 300 to 400, with several hundred more to be added in the next few months.
“These men it is who each day beg to be put to work. They feel that to be put to work. They feel that the hardest drudgery, indoors or out, would be far preferable to such an existence.
“The cause? A simple one, say those at the head of the big prison, notably Warden T. H. B. Jones and Capt. C. W. Naas, who had charge of the contracts. They tell it in three words. The Wertz law. In 1906 the legislature passed this act, which just now is working such havoc with the penal institution. The law abolishes contract labor, at the demand of labor organizations that competition with prison made goods was unfair to labor. It provides that convicts must be employed in remodeling the institution and in making only such goods as are used in state institutions. The legislature neglected to provide money for installing machinery necessary for so doing and also neglected to compel state institutions to use the prison made product.”
Unusual Prison Supervision Proposed in Texas.—By a bill now pending before the legislature of Texas it is proposed to place at the head of the penal system of the state an officer with the title of “Supervisor of Prisons,” who shall have had some scientific training in the subjects of criminology and prison sanitation. His salary is to be $2,400 a year and his term of service to be two years. The office is to be an appointive one, made on the recommendation of the prison commission. Two assistant supervisors may also be appointed, at salaries of $1,500 each.