After hunting up and looking over several sites the committee finally selected Iwahig, a small valley on the Iuhuit river on the southern point of the island of Palawan and directly opposite the town of Puerto Princesa. The valley is about ten miles long and contains something like 270 square miles.
The site selected, sixty prisoners of all classes and confined for all manner of crimes, most of whom were hardened criminals, were sent there under an armed guard.
At first health and discipline were not good. Malaria and cholera made great inroads upon the little band. The valley, while of fertile soil, was covered with water more than half the year, and that which was not under water was densely overgrown with bamboo timber. The first sixty dwindled down to less than one-third that number. Others were sent to take their places and they, too, became either infirm or more hardened criminals. Conditions got worse, and one day there was a mutiny, in which nineteen of the prisoners made their escape. All but one of the nineteen were captured and sent back to the colony. Things became so bad that Warden Wolfe decided to make a change in the superintendent of the colony, and he made a request therefor to the superintendent of prisons.
At that time the penal institutions of the Philippines were under the jurisdiction of the secretary of the department of commerce and police. They were later placed in the bureau of public instruction and under the bureau of prisons.
The governor general of the Philippines in 1906 appointed Major John R. White of the constabulary superintendent of the colony.
Major White immediately set to work to cure the evils. He got several physicians and sanitary officers of the Philippine government to lay out general plans for draining the valley, so as to rid it of the malaria and cholera. He was more than successful; in fact, in 1907, when he turned the colony over to the present superintendent he had obliterated both diseases. Major White also started a radical reform in the system of handling the prisoners, and instead of driving them and herding them in a few buildings he used kindness.
The real change from a penal colony to a “Golden Rule” colony took place in the latter part of 1907, when Carroll H. Lamb was appointed superintendent.
Mr. Lamb had ideas of handling the prisoners that were different from those of his predecessors. He exercised from the first a humanitarian policy, and instead of asking for the worst behaved of the convicts of Bilibid he asked for the “trusties,” who were the greater in number. His requests were granted.
Superintendent Lamb consulted with sociologists and leading criminologists, after which he laid down for himself and the prisoners the following principles by which a good convict might be made a good citizen:
“Proper environment and association, fixed habits of conduct and industry, intellectual and moral instruction and industrial and practical teachings.”