trol, the respect for law, and the proper regard for your word of honor that justifies us in permitting you such a large measure of freedom. Remember when tempted that trustworthiness is the bed-rock of character.

If the prisoner reaches the parole date without violating any regulation, he is permitted to keep both card and bond as evidence that in all things he conducted himself as becomes a man and a good citizen. That is the sort of thing that the old wardens call "talcum-powder treatment." It may appear childish flummery, but because convicts are children, it works. During the ten years that the system has been in operation in the Ohio reformatory twenty-six hundred prisoners have been allowed to work in the open without guard. Only eighteen ever attempted to escape. The others preferred their healthy, interesting work in the open, and the bond and the card.

These methods of treatment, after all, simmer down to a personal equation. A penitentiary is only the lengthened shadow of the warden. He has in many ways a curiously despotic power over the inmates. He can make life hideous for the unfortunates under him or he can immeasurably lighten their burdens. One of the new progressive wardens recently told me how a perception of this power and its awful responsibility was borne in on him.

"Three days after I came into this position," he said, "I suddenly realized that I held the happiness, the peace of mind, and perhaps even the eternal salvation of over a thousand men in the hollow of my hand. I saw how I loomed as the biggest fact in any of their lives; how I could punish, reward, embitter, enlighten, free, or enslave any or all of them. And in that moment I went down here on my knees by my desk, and lifted up my voice to God, and asked for divine wisdom to guide me right while I remained in this prison."

Many of the new reforms are the inspiration of individual wardens. There is the "honor system of scenic road building" conceived by Cleghorne and perfected by Tynan in Colorado, the "golden rule" of Wells in Kentucky, the base-ball league of Johnston in California, the "free speech" development of Moyer in

the federal prison at Atlanta, the fishing and berrying parties of Homer at Great Meadow, New York, the "bond-and-card" idea of Dr. Leonard in Ohio.

Wonderful in its way is each of these improvements. Each adds its bit of illumination to the general enlightenment. Each has left its mark on the lives of hundreds and even thousands of weak men.

Yet beyond the "honor system" and the "golden rule" and "free speech" for convicts lies the necessity for certain basic and fundamental changes in our convict sysThese changes are already under way, although for the country at large we have only seen the dawn.

tem.

Doubtless the worst element in our convict system to-day is contract labor. A tremendous change has occurred in that, also, in the last decade, yet at the beginning of 1914 there are still twenty-four States that sell the labor of their convicts to contractors who have no moral or human interest in their sorry slaves.

It was only seven years ago that I spent three months in the convict turpentine camps of Florida and Alabama, and there secured definite proof of the fact that men were being hired in lots, like slaves, at an average cost of eleven cents a day when free labor brought from a dollar to a dollar and a quarter a day; that the traffickers in this bondage used bloodhounds and the whip to enforce their desires for work accomplished; that they surrounded their purchased convicts with such temptation, and so removed from them inducements to reform, that in the majority of cases the pitiable men existed many years beyond their original sentences in peonage or practical slavery.

In the intervening seven years the force of public opinion has largely changed the condition in those two States, although the laws providing for contract labor have still to be abolished. The whip, however, has been abolished, and the price of contract labor has advanced from eleven to thirty cents a day. Apparently the State. is profiting, if not the convict.

But is the State profiting? Is it profiting when it succeeds in implanting in the minds of its convicts that not only their liberty, but their labor, has been forcibly taken from them? Is it profiting when it embitters free labor through starving it by this unfair competition?

All of these questions have been answered in the negative by the most advanced States, notably by New York. There the state-use system of convict labor, as distinguished from the contract-use system, has been in operation for seventeen years.

Under the state-use system no convict ever does any work for private profit. The prisons manufacture only those commodities which can be sold to other institutions of the State. The idea is widened sometimes to accommodate county and city institutions and even the schools and the departments of government. Thus desks for the schools, brooms for the streetcleaners, shirts for the firemen, and shoes for policemen now frequently come from a penitentiary, but they are sold openly at an established price.

Though the advantages of such a system are obvious, it took exactly a hundred years for New York to discover it. The first open manifestation against convict competition with free labor occurred in New York in 1796. The state-use system, as it now exists, was not established in New York until 1897. Between those dates lies a century of bitter struggle on the part of organized labor, free manufacturers, and social workers.

And yet the first fifteen years of the state-use system in New York were years of failure. Due to political manipulation of men who desired it to be a failure, it appeared that only about half the output of the prison factories of the State could be used by other public institutions. Other States in which it was proposed to introduce the new system and abolish the old contract labor invariably sent commissions to New York to "investigate" the condition there. Invariably they reported it a failure. Had it not been for that political maladministration of the stateuse idea, perhaps half of the twenty-four States which still adhere to the contract system would now be in the vanguard with the enlightened States.

It was only with a thorough cleaning out of old officers in 1912 that the New York state-use system reached the point of efficiency where it was costing the State less in money than the old system, and was producing enough work for all the inmates of the penitentiaries.

Under this new system, which is only a

half-way stop on the road to ideal prison management, if the State fails to reform its convicts, it at least does not deform them, as the contract system invariably does where it is employed.

However, the state-use system is only the embryo of the scheme for the utilizing of convict labor which is doubtless destined to be eventually installed in most of our prisons. It took a century for that embryo to appear, but it will not take another century for it to reach its full estate.

Already another step has been taken, and more successfully than did New York in her corrupt and halting manner. This is in the Minnesota state prison at Still

water.

It is worth while to describe the Minnesota prison, for it stands to-day as the best type of prison known. Recently the German Government sent four commissioners to this country to study our penological institutions, and at Stillwater they found, so they said, the best prison either in Europe or America.

The Minnesota state prison was established for the "confinement and reformation of convicts." That is the language of the statutes, and similar language is found in the laws of only four other States.

The new cell block was built at a cost of over $3,000,000, and satisfies every advanced idea of prison construction. No more than one prisoner is permitted in a cell; the sanitary arrangements are excellent; light and heat and ventilation are like those in a school.

The discipline is very strict, but consistent. Everything, except some of the machines, operates noiselessly and with precision. There is no dark cell, no whipping-post, no chaining device, or any other manner of corporal punishment. In lieu of these a system of rewards and punishments has been evolved. The prisoner who does not behave gets less food than the others. If he persists in his contrariness, he is put in a darkened, not a dark, cell. As the very limit of punishment his tobacco is taken from him. The loss of his tobacco usually appeals quickly and strongly to a convict's judgment.

In so far the Stillwater prison is similar to the best elsewhere; but in the use of its manufactured products it is unique. Within the prison is located the best

equipped factory for the production of binder twine anywhere in the country, and it has the third largest output of any similar factory.

Here is the revolutionary fact. The manufacture of binder twine in the Minnesota prison is so well managed that it entirely supports the prison, and earns enough more to give every convict a small daily wage.

Now, then, we come to the very core of this matter of prison reform-its economics. No matter how correct, how humane the moral attitude of the prison management toward the prisoner, no matter how skilfully the psychology of the prisoner is understood and developed, nothing permanent can be accomplished unless his economical relation to his fellows is founded on justice that is broader than the present legality.

And from this platform we must ascend to the future, for the prison reform of the coming decade will be concerned very largely with economics. The moral reform is already fairly comprehended. It still has to penetrate certain dark spots, but it is inevitably and indisputably on the

way.

How slowly this truth has penetrated our consciousness is shown by the fact that Minnesota is cited as a State in the far vanguard when her prison is willing and able to pay its convicts only about nine cents a day for their labor. So firmly has the contract system been saddled upon us that we still only dimly perceive the new light.

This new light, the light of the future, is merely an economic recognition of the moral truth which has already been recognized; namely, that prisons exist for the reformation, not for the punishment, of criminals. Therefore, though the State possesses an accurately defined right to limit, to confine, and to direct both the labor and the pay of a convict, it has no right to deprive him absolutely of either. If he is not treated as an independent economic unit while in prison, how can the State expect him to become an independent economic unit when he leaves prison?

"The day that we drove our last contractor out of our prison was a red-letter day in our history," said a warden, recently. "Now we can tackle our real problems."

And they are real problems. What sort of work shall be given these branded men? Shall we flounder along in our present absurd way of employing them in trades which will give them no employment when they leave prison? The prison farm has great vogue just now, and there is a tendency toward placing all prisoners to work on farms. Is that wise when more than half our criminals are the products of great cities of whom no power on earth is very likely to make farmers? What percentage of their earnings shall be turned over to these felons who have already cost the State so dearly; in fact, as much as the education of all her free children? And how and when shall it be turned over to them?

We have been charging head on into this problem, and making little progress. Perhaps a solution is coming from an angle. Take such an apparently unrelated fact as the passage, three years ago, through the Missouri legislature of the Mothers' Pension Law. Who would have thought that such a law eventually might solve the problem of how to treat economically the problem of a criminal's pay? Yet within the year it has broken the ice in over half the States of this country.

The Missouri Mothers' Pension Law provided incidentally for the support of all mothers whose husbands are in state prison. The measure quickly justified itself, and was soon on the statute-books of Illinois, Ohio, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and other States. Over twenty other legislatures either this winter or last winter have considered similar laws.

The only link required now to chain. that law to the solution of the convict's economic independence is to require that his earnings, while in prison, shall go to the mother of his children. Then she will not be receiving a pension, as charity, but only her basic human right. Better even than that, the husband will have added to other outlooks the strongest kind of moral incentive to work faithfully and comport himself properly while in prison.

Of the half-million men who go to prison every year about one third are married. Of course many have never supported their families, but probably a half of the married men have done so. More than that, fully half the men who go to prison are under moral obligation to sup

port some one. Take from them not only the obligation, but the opportunity, and you stamp them deeper into the mire of criminality.

Thus this pathetic cry of the innocent wife and children of the man in the cage bids fair to point the way to a proper system of work and pay whereby he regains in prison that economic independence which he usually has lost before he goes there.

In the coming prison, what a difference from the old régime confronts the convicted criminal! Formerly he went to hard labor, without recompense; his wife and children or his dependents were left to shift for themselves or to starve; for the period of his incarceration he was to wear stripes, have his head shaved, lose his name, and have no communication with the outside world; he was to be taught nothing useful; his word was never to be accepted; he was to be trusted in nothing; he was the arch-enemy of society, different from other men, enchained, brutalized, damned, and forgotten.

To-day the best prisons have no stripes except for the worst grades of recalcitrant prisoners; heads are not shaved; in at least three the men keep their names; they are paid a little something, if only a few cents a day, for their labor; they are otherwise treated like men, it being assumed that they have honor until they prove the contrary; they are permitted to communicate with friends and receive visits; where before they had no recreation, they now indulge in all manner of healthful sports.

The convict of the future will be still better off, for we are in a passing stage of development. His economic independence will persist in prison, as it is outside; energy and industry will be rewarded within, just as without, and laziness will be similarly punished.

Finally will come the last step. No convict will ever be sentenced to any specific term or to any specific institution. Neither judge nor jury will be able to do more than convict an accused person of a specific crime. The atonement for that crime, and society's special privilege of the conduct of that person during the period of his atonement and his reëstablishment of character in the eyes of his fellows, will be placed in charge of men who have had nothing to do with his prosecution or trial.

In other words, when the new convict steps into prison he will begin an absolutely new life, on which his past will have only such bearing as he himself places there. Every opportunity to reform will be extended to him, and the length of his incarceration will depend entirely on the impression he makes not on the judges of his past, but on the judges of his present.

For prison should be to a man's moral and economic life what the confessional is to the soul of the Romanist, what the bankruptcy court is to the finances of the business failure. It should wash him clean, and remove from his weak and uncertain shoulders the burdens of his past

errors.

Toward that ideal of a prison we are rapidly approaching.