The prison physician is an up-to-date man, fully in accord with the views of the warden, and with admirable hospital equipment where excellent surgical work is done when required. The two chaplains have a missionary field of the highest opportunities, where a sympathetic friendship for the prisoner during six days in the week becomes the highway to their hearts on the seventh.
The faces of the prisoners bear witness to the life-giving influences at work among them; the downcast apathy has given place to an expression of cheerful interest, and the prison pallor to a healthful color. And the old prison buildings—the living tomb of hundreds of men—are themselves now doomed. On the adjacent farm the prisoners will eventually build new quarters, either one modern prison into which God's sunlight and the free air of heaven will have access, or, better still, a prison village, a community in detached buildings, after the plan which has proven so satisfactory in other State institutions.
And what of the women sent to prison in this State? For fifteen years and more they have been housed in a separate institution. This has never been a place of degradation. Every inmate has a light, well-ventilated, outside room, supplied with simple furnishings and toilet conveniences; white spreads cover the beds, and the home touch is evident in the photographs and fancy-work so dear to the heart of woman. The prisoners in their dress of blue-and-white check are neat and trim in appearance as maids from Holland. They number but sixty-five, and conversation is allowed.
The women have a recreation playground for open-air exercise and an assembly-room for evening entertainments. They are given industrial training and elementary education; and though the discipline is firm the life is kept normal as possible; and wilful violation of rules seldom occurs. The present superintendent is a woman of exceptional qualifications for the position—a woman of quick, responsive sympathies, and wide experience, with fine executive ability. A thorough course in domestic science is fitting the women for domestic service or future home-making, and some of them are skilled in fine needle-work and embroidery.
The lines in the old picture of prison life so deeply etched into my consciousness are already fading; for while I know that in too many States the awakening has not come, and the fate of the prisoner is still a blot on our civilization, the light has broken and the way is clear. Not only in my own State but to every State in the Union the death-knell of the old penitentiary, with its noisome cells and dark dungeons, has struck. The bloodless revolution of the reform movement is irresistible simply because it is in line with human progress.
Not until the present generation of criminals has passed away can adequate results of the widespreading change in prison management be expected; for a large percentage of our convicts to-day are the product of crime-breeding jails, reformatories, and prisons. The "incorrigibles" are all men who have been subjected to demoralizing and brutalizing influences. In the blood-curdling outbreaks of gunmen and train-holdups society is but reaping the harvest of evils it has allowed. Not until police stations, jails, workhouses, reformatories, and prisons are all radically changed can any fair estimate be made of the value of the recent humane methods.
CHAPTER XV
The basic principle of reform in those who prey upon society is the changing of energies destructive into energies constructive. It is the opening of fresh channels for human forces. Change of environment, the breaking of every association connected with criminal pursuits, life in the open in contrast with the tainted atmosphere of crowded tenements and dance halls—all this has a healthful, liberating influence on the mind; abnormal obsessions are relaxed, different brain-cells become active, and the moral fibre of the man as well as his physical being absorbs vital elements. That the laborer is entitled to a share in the fruits of his labor is true the world over, and industry and efficiency are stimulated by recognition of the relation of achievement to reward.