A Programme for Prison Reform

EDITOR OF THE Atlantic Monthly DEAR SIR, —

The time is ripe for an effort toward improvement in the prisoner’s condition which is solidly based and free from emotion. This must lie in making it more generally advantageous to treat, the prisoner well. The doctrine is not novel. In fact it is a hundred years since Elizabeth Fry first set forth the truth that the lot of the prisoner could be made tolerable only by giving him productive work to do, and practically every step of progress in improving the lot of prisoners and lifting the level of prison administration has been brought about by applying Elizabeth Fry’s doctrine. Productive employment in prisons is the only sound basis for their steady progress toward sound conditions. Furthermore, the productive employment must be organized in such manner that gradually the prisons will become self-supporting. As a business man I can see no necessity for the heavy taxation imposed on law-abiding citizens in order to maintain able-bodied, mentally sound law-breakers.

The goal at which all efforts for amelioration should aim is that every prison shall be a workshop for restoring prisoners at the end of their term to civil life in condition to be useful members of the community. Unless the prison fulfills a remedial function; unless it brings about an actual improvement, physical, mentally, and morally, in those who are subjected to its treatment, it is, in a very large sense, a failure.

Happily progress has been made during the past ten years toward giving the prisoners productive labor, and enabling them to recover at least a part of their economic self-respect.

There is still an immense work to be done in this direction, and a little observation will show how serious are the obstacles. The prisoner cannot be occupied properly at productive labor unless there is a market for what he produces. Here there have arisen a great number of obstacles. Where can such a market be found in which prison products will not compete unfairly with the products of free labor? The logical market for prison products is in the commodity requirements of state institutions and departments— for only when the state sells its products to state institutions and departments is its selling department adequately protected from the manipulations of the politician. Unfair competition with the products of free labor is also eliminated by governmental consumption of prison products, and in working to better the condition of the prisoner we should not forget the welfare of the workman outside the prison, to say nothing of the welfare of the employer.

How can prison labor be directed so as to produce what the institutions can consume when, as too often has been the case, those institutions are numerous, heterogeneous, and under diverse management? If you have, as was the case in the State of New York until recently, fifty-eight purchasing agents, each one exhibiting originality, or at least variation, in his requirements and standards, it is clear that the prison will hardly stand any chance of producing goods suitable for such an immense and unpredictable variety of commodities. This has wrecked many an attempt to employ prison labor on a productive basis and herein has lain one of the great obstacles to prison reform.

Some years ago efforts were begun to bring about uniform standards and centralized purchase within the states, so as to obviate the unreasonable variety of demands and multiplicity of purchasing agents. This movement, so obviously reasonable and economical, has made much progress. It has been embodied to a greater or less extent in the legislation of all but eight of the states, while twenty-three have the full provision, and there are grounds for hope that it will be pressed to acceptance and adoption in all the states of the Union. It is simply the application of the purchase methods adopted by all successful business corporations to the purchase methods of governments. A mere glance will show the advantages to be obtained from uniform standards and central purchase. They make it possible for the requirements of state institutions in such simple matters as shirts and shoes to be made uniform, and so enable the production of these articles by prison labor in such quantity and on such simple standards as to make their production economical.

An adequate market for prison products makes possible the payment of adequate wages to prisoners. If there is an established market and demand for the product of the prisoner’s labor, and if he can produce the articles required at a reasonable price, he has already taken his place among the profitable workers. It follows that he may, and in justice should, receive payment for his work. He is lifted from the level of a mere burden on society, and in some cases a menace to its welfare, into the class of the producer. If this can be recognized in the only proper manner, —by payment for his work and by giving him the conditions of labor in which self-respect will be possible, — plainly a very great step has been taken in the direction of making him once more a safe, useful, and self-respecting member of society.

That is the goal which enlightened and humane persons have kept before themselves from generation to generation. It is, of course, intolerable that men should be incarcerated under such conditions as are almost certain to degrade, if not to brutalize, them and which tend to make them thus a greater menace to the society which they have already injured. The very self-respect of the community, as well as the instinct for self-preservation, demands that it prevent the degradation of the prisoner and do all that is possible to bring him into sound and decent relationship with society. But the goal is still a long way off. The ideal set by the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor is in brief: —

1. The administration of penal institutions by competent men and women, selected for their fitness to train prisoners and to conduct prisons on a basis so fair and just that the prisoners receive incentive to become law-abiding members of the community when released from prison.

2. The remanding of every person convicted of crime, after conviction and before sentence, to a classification station for thor-

ough examination, physical, mental, and according to work record and other previous experience in life.

3. The fixing of sentences according to the report and recommendations of this examination. The distribution of men and women physically and mentally capable of work to industrial prisons and of those physically and mentally diseased to hospitals or other custodial institutions.

The release of men and women from the industrial prisons only when so trained that they are competent to take a useful place in society.

4. The employment of all persons confined in industrial prisons at work as nearly as possible adapted to their capabilities and for which they receive adequate wages from which shall be deducted the cost of their keep — the balance of wages so paid to be the property of the prisoners and available for the support of their dependents or funded against the day of their release.

5. The abolition of the practice of confining persons sentenced for crime in jails under county control, with the resulting idleness and degradation, and the substitution of a system of state control over all persons convicted of crime, so that they may be taken care of under the state penal system.

Let us work together for an American prison system which will answer the age-long challenge — What shall be done with the men in prison?
Yours truly,
ADOLPH LEWISOHN.