“_Education as an Element of Reform Among Criminals._”
“The course of education, training and discipline in a penal
institution should be one that would stimulate, develop and strengthen
the criminal physically, mentally and morally--one that will show and
impress upon him the folly and personal loss of defying the laws,
and becoming an outcast, and that will lead him to understand, and
therefore to desire the benefits that honesty, sobriety, industry and
thrift will afford him; that is, to aim to create in him a desire for,
and abhorrence of, the associations, the conditions and penalties of
a criminal life, and instil into him a respect and desire for the
associations, conditions and regards of an upright life. The ideal
penal institutions should combine with elementary mental training and
the functions of a sanitarium, a reformatory and an industrial school.
“In order that the State may attain more satisfactory results in its
efforts to educate its criminals into good citizens and diminish the
number of this class, I deem it necessary that the methods followed
in the several classes of penal institutions to have close relation
one to the other; this can only be brought about by adopting a general
plan of administration, whereby the State shall take charge of all
places for the detention of criminals, and shall control them through
a central directing head, thus locating the responsibility, and by
the inauguration of a comprehensive and systematical system of labor
and discipline to insure a continuity of correctional and educational
training that may easily be made productive in material results and in
salutary influence on the prisoners.”
Mr. Collins indicated, that for first offender criminals, the State had
a fixed standard of criminality and punishments, but that the State
either feebly enforced it, or refused to establish it.
Our object is, or should be one that would strengthen and uplift the
prisoner, to utilize all the conditions of whatever uprightness there
was in him, by Christian teaching, industrial education, good dietary,
baths, shops, cells, etc., in fact, physical and spiritual training.
Every prison needs one or more dentist and oculist, we need many for
our 4,300 convicts. Some of the convicts are credited with small
earnings, received when they go out. The number of the illiterate is
less than ten per cent. We need auxiliary helps to give employment.
In Sing Sing there is a bi-weekly paper, contributed, edited and
printed exclusively by State’s prisoners, it has a great educational
influence, called “Star of Hope.” At the Paris Exposition, it so
impressed the leaders in France that they have decided to adopt it.
A parole under proper restrictions is what is hoped for; idleness is
the general cause of all county jails. Now if you will only rescue all
classes, say for even less than a year, by proper parole, there is no
telling how much progress we can make.
Don’t put the old offender and the first offender together; the third
or more term men should be cellular. A general plan of administration
with a central head of government in charge of all the condemned of the
State (like the Bertillon Bureau) is to be desired everywhere.