JEWISH FEDERATION IN DENVER
The Jewish Social Service Federation of Denver has been made a permanent organization. It will work in the field covered by United Hebrew Charities in other cities. It is primarily a federation for the centralized collection of funds for Jewish societies.
The following organizations constitute the federation: Jewish Relief Society, Jewish Ladies’ Aid Society, Denver Sheltering Home for Jewish Children, Jewish Free Loan Society, Hachnosos Orchim Society, philanthropic committee of the Council of Jewish Women, Ladies’ Shroud Sewing Society and the Moas Chittim Society.
The beneficiaries of the federation include the National Jewish Consumptives’ Hospital at Denver; the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society at Denver; the Jewish Orphan Asylum at Cleveland, and the Sir Moses Montefiore Kesher Home for Aged and Infirm Israelites at Cleveland.
DETAINING THE DEFECTIVE DELINQUENT
The province of Ontario, Canada, is trying to provide a means for more adequately handling the delinquent girl or woman who is also feeble-minded or suffering from venereal disease. It is well known that a third or a fourth of the boys and girls sent to reformatories are mentally deficient, but in many places there is no legal treatment for them except that of the reformatory which is designed for normal people.
An act now before the Ontario legislature provides that any female between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five who has been sent to an industrial refuge, which is a house of correction, and who is discovered to be so feeble-minded that she can not take care of herself shall be kept in the refuge until the medical officer, with the approval of the inspector, orders her discharge. All girls found to have venereal diseases, or to be suffering from contagious or dangerous illnesses, are to be kept in the refuge until they have fully recovered.
CRIME AND ITS TREATMENT IN COLORADO
The wider resort to agricultural and manual labor as an educative and reformative force for young and old alike in our correctional institutions was urged at the Colorado Conference of Charities and Correction. Coupled with this was a plea for employment in the open and for training in useful pursuits. The institutions of Denver, it was declared, need more land that these things may be done.
Thomas J. Tynan, warden of the state prison, recommended that the state conduct a scientific farm and that it pay prisoners what their labor produces. It is the opinion of Warden Tynan that economic conditions affect the size of prison populations. For several years past there has been a steady decrease, he said, in the number of inmates in his penitentiary; this he ascribed to a general increase in prosperity. Men who commit daring crimes, requiring courage, make the quickest and most permanent reforms, he thinks, because they have the character to adhere to newly made resolutions. From the fact that there are now only nine women in the Colorado state prison and that the average heretofore has been twenty-six, Warden Tynan argues a decrease in crime among women in his state.