The pioneer in revolutionizing prison-management was neither penologist nor philanthropist. The first step was taken for purely practical ends. It happened, when the twentieth century had just begun, that Mr. John Cleghorne, a newly appointed warden of a Colorado penitentiary, found that the State had provided neither cells nor workshops within the prison for the number of convicts sentenced to hard labor. To meet this exigency this warden decided to put a number of men to work outside the walls, organizing a camp and putting the men, then in striped clothing, on their honor not to escape. The experiment was altogether successful; but so quietly carried on that it received little attention outside the borders of its own State until the appointment of the next warden, Thomas J. Tynan, who recognized the beginning of true reform in the treatment of convicts and openly advocated the changes from humanitarian motives.
While to Colorado is given the precedence in this movement, a notable feature is the nearly simultaneous expression of feeling and ideas practically the same in widely separated localities, from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic, and even on the shores of Panama. Naturally the movement started in the West, in newer States less trammelled by precedent than the older States, where traditions of prison discipline had been handed down for two centuries; but the time was ripe for the change and it has been brought about through men, some of them trained penologists, others practical men of affairs, but all united in faith in human nature and in the one aim of fitting the men under their jurisdiction for self-supporting, law-abiding citizenship.
Sceptics as to the effect on the prisoner of this liberalizing tendency are silenced by the amazing response on the part of the convicts in every prison where the honor system has been applied. This response is unquestionable: a spirit of mutual confidence is displacing one of suspicion and discouragement, and in supplanting the old antagonism to prison authorities by a hearty sense of co-operation with them an inestimable point in prison discipline is gained. We hear much these days of the power of suggestion, and the suggestion, conscious and unconscious, permeating the very atmosphere of these progressive prisons is hopeful and helpful.
Never before in the tragic history of prisons has a spiritual force been applied to the control of prisoners; and yet with one consent the first step taken by these progressive wardens is to place convicts on their honor: not chains and shackles, not bolts and bars, no form of physical restraint; but a force indefinable, impalpable, invisible, applied to the spirit of these men. In bringing this force to bear on their charges these wardens have indeed "hitched their wagon to a star."
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Morrison I. Swift, Atlantic Monthly, August, 1911.
[15] Atlantic Monthly, August, 1911.