wise aid in education and vocational guid

ance.

The solid rock of any system of prison reform is discipline, and there are as great dangers in a foolish sentimentalism as in a brutal tyranny. The average convict is one whose life has been lacking in discipline, and his need is to learn the habits of obedience, order, and respect for authority. When I say that the atmosphere at Great Meadow is that of a school rather than of a place of punishment, I am trying to say that Warden Homer has found the firm ground that permits warm personal interest without sacrifice of control and mastery.

The results of the Great Meadow idea can be shown in plain, understandable figures. During the four years of the Homer régime, over eighteen hundred men have been released on parole, and of this number fewer than one hundred have relapsed into a life of crime. Under the old system, seventy-five per cent. of discharged convicts invariably committed crimes that sent them back to the penitentiary for longer terms.

The "honor and trust" method also saves money as well as men. It is economical as well as humane. Great Meadow receives an annual appropriation of $150,ooo, but when the labor of the inmates is measured in dollars and cents, it will be found that the institution is more than self-supporting. In the products of the In the products of the farm and the dairy, in the four million young trees turned out of the nurseries for the use of the Conservation Commission, in the manufacture of concrete and the erection of buildings, in the sale of crushed stone, in the matter of live stock, poultry, and swine, in the building of roads and sewers and bridges, in the making of their own clothing, shoes, and hosiery, may be found a return to the taxpayer that shows profit without competition with free labor.

Before Warden Homer took charge, the one item of "preliminary improvement of grounds" cost the State $75,000. Three times the amount of work has since been done by the inmates without a cent of cost

to the State. A dam, for which contractors asked $30,000, was completed by the men for $473, and a $30,000 water system is being installed for no more than the $10,000 necessary for materials.

The results achieved at Great Meadow are not due to physical advantages, for a less favorable laboratory for social experiment could not well be imagined. While the farm has 1080 acres in it, only 440 acres lend themselves to tillage, and the heavy clay soil cakes greasily in wet weather and bakes hard in hot. The summers are short, the winters long and hard, and Comstock's inaccessibility makes it almost impossible for the relatives of the poorer inmates to visit them.

I know that many kindly, honest people are convinced that prison reform is a mere cloak for mollycoddling the convict, but when the dividends in lives mended and dollars made are counted up, I feel sure that even the most prejudiced must gain some glimpse of the values that can be induced to flow from these sane adventures in reclamation.

Not only from my observations of the Great Meadow experiment, but from my study of the results obtained in Colorado, I am unalterably of the opinion that prisoners must be taken away from high walls and stone pavements and put upon the land. Even were it not the case that the majority of criminals are sick of mind or body, needing the wholesome corrective of outdoor labor, there would still be the fact that the wide, clean spaces of a farm are best adapted to the work of characterbuilding.

As governor, I have followed the various reforms at Sing Sing with deepest interest and keenest sympathy, but, I must confess, with little hope of any great permanent betterment under existing physical conditions. The institution, to my mind, is one of those ugly, impossible things that call for destruction rather than for a program of improvement.

Huddled down on the damp, river level of the Hudson, the ancient cell block is cut up into cubbyholes measuring seven feet long, three feet four inches wide, and

six and a half feet high. Each one allows only 168.67 cubic feet of air, although the tenement-house law requires 400 cubic feet for rooms; yet even to-day the repulsive spectacle is witnessed of two human. beings cooped in these stifling little torture-chambers, Without plumbing, without toilets, the men in them drag through days and nights that are filled with dangers of sickness, disease, and moral de

generacy.

Sing Sing was condemned as unfit as far back as 1848, and in 1905 general indignation culminated in legislative action providing for the purchase of a new site. That a new and finer Sing Sing has not yet arisen may be construed as an indictment of bungling administrative machinery rather than a proof of public indifference. In the State of New York the prison problem is committed to the jurisdiction of seventeen separate boards and officials, creating such confusion that anything approaching intelligent, united effort is almost impossible. The crying need is for one central department with full powers of control, so that a program, when agreed upon, can be presented effectively and fought through to success.

An end to the pull and haul of conflicting boards and officials, and a new, wholesome Sing Sing on a farm site, are tasks to which I have addressed myself as governor; for I hold that social advance is as much measured by the condition of prisons as by schools, hospitals, and libraries.

Larger importance must be attached to the selection of wardens, and I look for the day when experts in this great work will be made the object of competitive bidding by the various States, just as German cities now bid for the services of municipal experts. It is unthinkable that the lives and hopes of the erring and unfortunate should continue to be cheap stakes in the game of partizan politics. The dawn of this new conception of a wardenship as a man's-size job is attested by the fact that I have been able to place Sing Sing in charge of Professor George W. Kirchwey, formerly dean of the Columbia Law School, who is continuing the work un

selfishly begun and carried on by Warden Osborne.

During my work as district attorney in the City of New York, called upon daily to prosecute the sad hundreds caught in the net of the law, the truth was brought home to me that while certain men are congenitally evil, the majority of criminals. are transgressors by reason of mental or physical defects or by lack of some advantage that life should have afforded them. Out of these observations I have gained the conviction that every State should provide a species of anteroom for its penitentiary, a receiving-station where sentenced men could be subjected to inspection and study.

This winnowing process would discover those of feeble mind, and set apart the diseased, the depraved, and the irreclaimable. As it is to-day, half-wits, degenerates, habitual criminals, first offenders, evil old age, and impressionable youth are all herded together in one ghastly jumble, and the sorting out is left to time and the vigilance of wardens. Sing Sing, with its ancient cell block torn down, and certain improvements made, might well serve as this clearing-house.

Education is another principal plank in any sound platform of prison betterment, for illiteracy plays no little part in the manufacture of criminals. Of the one thousand inmates of Great Meadow, for instance, 248 were unable to read and write, and an equal number possessed only the most elementary knowledge. Warden Homer employs one head teacher, and this man, with eight assistants drawn from the inmates, conducts thirteen daily classes for the instruction of 637 prisoners. The opening of this door, so long closed to them, has done as much as any other one thing to arouse hope and ambition in the men. The educational facilities of prisons should be bettered and broadened, for the State commits a crime against itself as well as against the individual person when it sends unenlightened ignorance back into the world.

In presenting Great Meadow as an example of sane and successful experimenta

tion with the prison problem, I have no desire to set it down as the last word in reform. While Warden Homer has done all that is humanly possible under existing conditions, much remains to be done, and in the doing there will be the imperative need of an open mind on the part of people as well as of lawmakers. Change for the excitement of change is no more stupid than the standpattism that is based on traditions and prejudices. Extreme age must not be permitted to perpetuate evils, and every suggested reform, no matter what the source, must have its fair hearing.

New York stands with the most advanced States in the matter of indeterminate sentences, but the question is one that still calls for sincere and intelligent thought. For instance, some method must be found for insuring equality of punishment, so that two men, convicted of precisely identical crimes, will not enter a prison with widely different sentences.

Study must also be given to the day when the prisoner, released at last, steps out of the penitentiary gates to take his place in the world once more. It is at this point that the efforts for reform have stopped in the past, yet it must be clear that the very finest reformative work may be wasted on these men if they are to be turned adrift without money and without prospects. The majority of States give the discharged prisoner five dollars, but New York is more generous in that it allows him ten. This amount is too narrow a margin for safety, since the man's one recourse is to vagrancy and crime unless he finds a job before his money goes. It must be remembered, too, that the hunt for work is complicated by the tyrannies. of policemen and the suspicions of employers.

In this connection, warm praise must be given to the individual wardens and the various volunteer agencies that have grappled splendidly with this task of providing work for the released convict; but the duty is too imperative to be left to unofficial and haphazard hands. I feel that an employment bureau should be created in the department of correction so that

the securing of work for these wards of the State may be made a matter of administrative routine.

With regard to the question of money, there are many and conflicting views, but I am confident that some measure of compensation for the labor that convicts perform in prison provides a safe way past the difficulties.

I do not by any means go to the length of putting the convict on a par with free labor, but I do feel that a certain percentage of his earnings should be allotted to him, either to go to the support of his family, or for his own use on the day of release.

At the outset of this article I employed social insurance as the term best fitted to convey my idea of the purpose of prison reform. Surely even the most prejudiced opponent of the new penology must agree that the honor and trust system at Great Meadow, with its ninety-six per cent. of reclamation, carries more safety to society than the Bastille method, which plunges seventy-five per cent. of discharged convicts into darker ways of crime.

The punitive theory of imprisonment has proved a tragic failure at every point. Europe, as recently as one hundred years ago, persisted in the torture-chamber, with its thumb-screw, iron boots, spiked chair, lash and water torment, but crime increased by leaps and bounds.

The theory of deterrence has fared little better. In England, in 1780, there were two hundred and forty crimes punishable by death, and every highway had its line of gibbets; but crime was fanned only to a more furious blaze. During the reign of Henry VIII, seventy thousand thieves were hung; but it was found that more pockets were picked during the hangings. than at any other time.

To-day, when the maintenance of penal institutions is one of the principal items in every state budget, it would seem to be the part of wisdom to give careful, patient trial to the theory that prisons are not society's revenge or society's threat, but society's effort to correct and reclaim.

Wherever tried, the record is one of