An excellent campaign of publicity has been carried on this year for this bill by the charity organization society, and the association for improving the condition of the poor in New York through their joint application bureau. Rarely has any bill before the legislature found so much favor in editorials and news columns.
Hospitals for Inebriates.—The special committee of the New York Board of Estimate and Apportionment has unanimously reported in favor of carrying into effect a law which provides for the establishment of a board of inebriety and a hospital and industrial colony for inebriates for New York City.
The committee made an exhaustive investigation of conditions before reaching a conclusion. It found that the 29,461 persons arrested in New York last year and arraigned in the magistrates’ courts on the charge of public intoxication constituted more than one-sixth of all the arrests made for all causes. The records disclose that, of the 20,291 held for trial, about 15,600 were committed to workhouses, either directly or in default of payment of fine. Commenting on these and other statistics the report says:
Inebriety, therefore, furnishes a very large percentage of those who keep the police officers busy, clog the magistrates’ courts, and fill the workhouses and jails. It furnishes also a very large number of cases for treatment in our public hospitals. Seven thousand male drunkards are treated annually in the alcoholic ward of Bellevue and allied hospitals. Carefully compiled records show that in the one year ended May 1, 1909, 498 men were treated for intoxication more than once in that ward, and over 100 from four to twelve times, and that in the course of a few years some individuals have been treated in the alcoholic ward over twenty times and have been committed to the workhouse over sixty times.
The committee does not overlook the moral effects of the treatment of inebriates under the plan which it has approved, but it especially points out the economic features. It finds that New York is spending annually on Blackwell’s Island the amount of $80,000 for cases committed for intoxication, and in addition there is the cost of two overflow wards at Bellevue, amounting to not less than $65,000 per annum. The proportion of expenses in maintaining magistrates’ courts chargeable to intoxication is at least $125,000 a year, and a large additional expense is incurred in maintaining police officers for the city prison and for the alcoholic wards in hospitals. To use the language of the report: “As a result of all these expenses under the present system there is a complete lack of accomplishment. There is no pretense even that the individual is helped; quite the contrary, he is rather confirmed in his habits of inebriety and is permanently fastened on the community as an expense and as a bad example.”
The New York Times recently published the following book review:
Tramps in the Making.—“The laboratory method in philanthropic work has never had more signal demonstration than in Alice Willard Solenberger’s “One Thousand Homeless Men,” (New York: Charities Publication Committee, $1.25) a study of original methods in the true scientific manner and spirit. The author was for four years in charge of a district of the Chicago Bureau of Charities and during that time compiled, in the regular course of her work, the statistics whose analysis and discussion make up this work. She endeavored also to trace the later histories of her subjects and, whenever this was possible, she had included it in her data. Mrs. Solenberger’s untimely death, before she had written the final chapter in which she has purposed to sum up the conclusions to which she had been led by her long study and intimate knowledge of the homeless-man problem, lessens somewhat the interest of her book for the general reader. But her analysis of her tables of statistics and her discussions of the inferences to be drawn from them are so lucid and so practical that philanthropic workers will find the volume valuable alike for its facts and for its suggestions.”
“Perhaps the most striking of the phases of the vagrancy problem brought out by Mrs. Solenberger’s figures is the extent to which it is a native problem. Of the group of confirmed tramps, more than a fifth of the whole number of cases studied, 76 per cent. are native born. Of the vagrant runaway boys, nearly all were born on American soil and of American parents. The chapter devoted to these boys is particularly notable for its sympathetic but level-headed treatment of the causes which lead to boyish vagrancy, of its results, and of the methods by which it might be combined. Among these methods she thinks the most important would be the satisfying of adolescent “wanderlust” by normal, wholesome means and the closing of the railways to vagrants.