So piled, so criss-crossed, so intricate, so vast, contradictory, perplexing, so vexed by customs, so hampered by foolish laws, so bound by mercenary ends, so fettered by political ambitions, aspirations, asperities and jealousies, to say nothing of the immutable laws of natural descent as related to crime—so discouraging was all this to be faced from the latter half of a busy life that I wearily and gladly turned and laid the burden down on the hands of you skilled laborers, and have mainly been content to feel and leave it there.
The subject of prison reform seems to me to be so vast, and the methods by which it is to be attempted so varied, that it can scarcely be touched in one talk.
The first question might be, What is meant by prison reform? and in what degree? Palliation or cure? I well remember the one question which always confronted me from visitors at Sherborn—“Miss Barton, how is it, do you really reform any one here?” My reply was, “That depends upon what you consider reform to consist in. If you mean to ask if we take women here, badly born, worse raised, with inherited, habitual, vagrant crime in their natures, with the grogshop and the brothel for their teachers, who never lived a decent day or knew a decent night, filthy inside and out, and that by a residence of a few months here we are able to send them out to you not only good, well-behaved, industrious, cleanly, sober, orderly, honest, respectable members of society,—something they never were before,—infallible, proof against all the temptations and vices which you of the free community on the outside may throw in their path, so they shall never fall again; then, No, we reform no one, and our prison is a failure; but, if reform may mean that the habits which must incidentally grow up in the minds, characters, and tastes of these women during a term of two years of sober, industrious, and instructed life, in which they shall see only cleanliness and order, where the workroom shall replace the street, the quiet cell, the school-room, and the chapel in the place of the grogshop and the brothel, kindly spoken words of advice, prayer, praise, and song in the place of oaths and vulgarity, and a resolution at least to try to lead a better life,—if all this may be accounted in the direction of reform, then, Yes, a thousand times Yes, we reform all that come within our reach.”
The prison in itself is all well, but the danger lies beyond in the temptations, the lures, and the traps of the community into which this poor, weak creature is plunged in her first hour of regained liberty. I never saw one of these women go out with her little bundle of freedom suit, and watched the eager yet timid and half-frightened look on her face, and felt the childlike, clinging grasp upon mine, and heard the universal “Good-bye, don’t forget me,” that through the tears a great prayer did not rise up in my heart, “O God, strengthen her weakness—guard her from the temptations and the snares leading her down to death, of Thy virtuous and free, outside these prison walls.”
I recall once an official visit from about twenty members of the State Legislature, at Boston, for the purpose of overlooking the prison and seeing what it might need and how it could be best officially served; accordingly they appealed to me for my opinion generally—if the prison were what it should be in its appointments, if it were large enough or too large, etc., and in a general way what I would recommend to them to do; as by recent Act they had made me not only Superintendent but Treasurer and Steward as well. I replied: “This Prison is all very well—a model prison and certainly as large as it ought to be for the size of the State; and it is very probable that there is not very much that you can directly do for it at present, as an Institution; but, Gentlemen, the Institution from which you come has the making of the laws by which this Institution exists; any time when you there will find a way to make it impossible for the people of this State to get intoxicating liquors, upon which to get drunk, I will guarantee that in six months the State of Massachusetts may rent Sherborn for a shoe manufactory.” I am not sure that they believed what I said, but I did and still do.
True, crime will exist without drunkenness, but to no such extent as to require two miles of prison galleries for the women of Massachusetts.
In this country I regard drunkenness as the great father of crime, and the mother of prisons, almshouses, asylums, and workhouses—the parent of vice and want and the instigator of murder. Whatever bears ever so little against this is to my mind “Prison Reform.”
Then follow in their mournful train the sin-bound cortège of primal and secondary causes of vice and crime and which make necessary the various methods of treatment which have been so ably discovered that no words of mine could throw a single ray of added light upon the subject. I can only concur, or perhaps express suggestively some preferences which may have presented themselves to me.
In regard to intermediate sentences: I may not be sufficiently clear upon the technical points as presented by our good brother, but in a general way I would say I am unequivocally in favor of an unfixed term of imprisonment when the sentence is given. A fixed time of release is an independence to the prisoner beyond the power of his keepers and stands directly in the way of all reform.
I would earnestly advocate everywhere, in all prisons, police stations, houses of detention—in short, everywhere, the placing of arrested women and women prisoners in charge of women only, and men in charge of men. It is just and right for every reason of virtue and decency; here again it is largely this contact that has destroyed; it cannot restore.