[Reprinted from The Independent of May 18, 1914.]
The three-car train came out of the Canadian woods from the south and
stopped by the stationless road. Twenty-five young fellows jumped
down, formed in twos, and, led by an older man, and followed by two
older men, walked up the road over the concrete bridge to the prison
buildings. They were prisoners, convicted of crimes and serving time.
That morning they had left the Central Prison of Toronto--left the
forbidding old building, with its bolts, its gloom, its cells and
corridors; and now, but a few hours later, they were hastening without
shackles, without armed guards, without prison garb, toward the latest
Canadian prison, the Central Prison Farm of Guelph.
This means a new era, this method of treating prisoners--an overturning
of the old traditions of prison government, a serious break with the
past, an almost scornful disregard of the cherished traditions of bars
and cells, tortures and punishments. It means an amazing change in the
attitude of society toward the prisoner, and a startling change in the
feeling of the prisoner toward society.
You have read in recent months about the mutinies at Sing Sing in New
York State; how the prisoners have been for almost a century forced
into atrociously small cells, with insufficient light and air. You have
read how prisoners have been doubled-up, two in a cell, because of the
congestion of population. You have learned that prisoners have had to
stay in their cells some fourteen hours out of the twenty-four; that
these cells are carriers of tuberculosis and venereal disease. And many
other terrible things you have read.
In the light of that story, hear this tale of a prison farm.
When I alighted from an earlier train I looked for Warden Gilmour in
vain. In the road stood a man in civilian’s clothes. “I’m Sergeant
Grant,” said he, “and the warden was to come on this train. He’ll come
later, though, with the draft.” We walked toward the prison. On the way
we crossed an attractive concrete bridge. “All built by prisoners,”
said the sergeant, “and we had hard work to find the bottom for some of
the piers. We made this macadam road, also graded up the approaches to
the bridge, designed the balustrades, and even hydrated the lime that
went into the concrete, after having quarried it from the limestone
quarries up there.”
Approaching the prison I looked for the wall and found none. Not a
thing apparently, to prevent the men from running away. I asked the
sergeant how many escapes they had. “About one and a half per cent.
of the population. We’ve lost from three to five this year. Fact is
there’s nothing in the way of guns to prevent the men from breaking
away any time. There isn’t a guard here that carries a revolver. The
warden says: ‘We haven’t taken away the guns from the guards, because
we haven’t ever given them guns!’ As a matter of fact, I carry a
revolver,” said the sergeant, “but I’ve never used it in eighteen
years. But I feel more comfortable with it.” Which made me smile,
because it was an example of an age-long tradition dying hard.
The dinner whistle blew at 11:45. Here I saw what in the old-line
prison would be the unbelievable. From all parts of the farm came the
men in to dinner. It was the reverse of the usual factory procession.
Here the crowd poured into the door of a factory building temporarily
used as a dining-room and kitchen. There was absolute order. The garb
was not unlike that of the average farmer’s helper. Even the customary
vizored cap of many prisons was absent, and the old straw hat had
taken its place. On the tables, for dinner, were meat and vegetables,
tapioca, soup and milk--a liberal amount.
Meanwhile Warden Gilmour had arrived with his detail of prisoners.
He has been in prison work for seventeen years; before that he was a
physician. He is regarded as one of the best prison administrators in
the country. He loves the land, not for what it produces alone, but in
humanity also. The frequency, moreover, with which bits of biblical
quotations drop from his lips leads one to believe that the injunctions
of Holy Writ form a considerable part of his sanction for life, and for
that of the men in his charge. There is nothing mawkish or apologetic
in his adherence to Holy Writ as a guide. There is a certain severity
of viewpoint in his daily work. Nothing is happy-go-lucky about the
Guelph Prison Farm; it has all been thought out, and the warden is the
dominant personality.
“Remember,” he said, “this is not run on honor, this prison. I don’t
believe in the so-called honor prison, as the word is generally
understood. This is a prison that is successful because the supervision
is successful. Supervision will do what formerly guns and wall
accomplished.
“We talk about the originality of a prison like this? Why, originality
consists in doing what other people are afraid to do. I have not been
afraid to build this prison without walls. But we are everlastingly
watchful. Thirty miles east of Toronto, at Whitby, I have a hundred
prisoners building an asylum for the insane on the cottage plan.
The plaster, the lime, the sashes and the window frames are shipped
from here. Here at Guelph we can perform with prison labor more than
seventy-five per cent. of the building operations.
“Punishments? We don’t have them here. That is, if a prisoner gets bad
here, disturbs the order of the place, and we cannot make him see that
he must conform to the rules, we send him back to the Central Prison at
Toronto. But most of the men prefer the life out here a thousand times.
We take men that generally have still some months to serve. We have
been taking men whose sentences run up to two years, but more recently
we have received men with longer sentences. Let me tell you about one
man who was here.
“I asked this boy, some time ago, who had been in the Toronto prison,
what he found the greatest difference between the prison in the city
and the farm out here. He said, ‘Warden, the getting away from that
cell! To sit there,’ the boy added, ‘on Sunday, every evening and on
holidays, and have that cell gate staring you in the face, is hell!’”
We walked toward the new building--all of them being built by the
prisoners. Under construction, in a kind of hollow square formation,
were kitchen and dining hall, several dormitories and cell buildings,
an administration building and officers quarters. One of the largest
and best dairy and hay barns that I have ever seen is already up; also
a little creamery building. Most of the work is of poured concrete.
As we went through one building, where some score of prisoners were
silently working at plastering, painting, carpentering and stone
cutting, Warden Gilmour said: “You see, I have my cells only on one
side of the central corridor. I mean that all the cells shall have
southern exposure. Each of the cells contains eight hundred cubic feet.”
I thought of the twelve hundred cells at Sing Sing, still used, which
contain less than two hundred cubic feet of air space, and have no
windows opening to the outer air as at Guelph.
“Then we have dormitories,” continued the warden, “not the big
dormitories of olden times, but comfortably small rooms that will
accommodate from twenty-five to thirty men. We are trying the
experiment. I don’t know yet how it will work out. We are expecting to
have here ultimately about seven hundred men.”
I asked him about the expense of all this. “Are you saving money or
saving men?” was his sharp retort. “Nevertheless, we are demonstrating
every day the economy of using prison labor, as well as the economy of
giving these men reasonable accommodations. I can’t give you as yet
the figures you want. We are teaching these men how to work, and the
usefulness of work. The bulk of them, when they leave here, are not
going upon farms, but back to the cities from which they came. So we
are teaching some city trades, but without neglecting farm industries.
We are raising about all we need to eat, as well as the stock we
raise for food. But a prison farm without important and diversified
industries is a mistake.”
I looked around the eight hundred acres. There was a sweep of horizon,
a tingling acid in the air, a quietude, a blessed monotony in
comparison with the feverish city, a spaciousness of possibilities,
as compared with the walled-in prisons like Sing Sing; in short, an
approximation to the sanest kind of normal life.
“Work?” The warden smiled. “Why, we’re working here ten hours a day;
seven to twelve, one to six. Each man that works here gets a gratuity
of two dollars a month, but he loses a part of that gratuity if he
offends against the rules of the place. They get the money when they
go out. Our payments to prisoners amount to between one hundred and
fifty and two hundred dollars a month. We discharge each month about
thirty to forty men. They get, in addition, a ticket back to the place
from which they were sent.”
I asked the warden if he was ultimately going to build a wall around
the place. “Not if I can help it. I don’t think bars on cell windows
are necessary; but supervision is. However, we may as well proceed
with reasonable speed in our modern ideas. Ultimately we may need the
protected windows.”
For the completed prison, Warden Gilmour is planning a number of
industries, all directly related to the life of the institution. There
will be tailoring, carpentry, shoemaking, a woolen mill, a machine
shop, a tile factory and other industries. And as for recreation, plans
are not failing. There is already a ball team that has beaten, with one
exception, all the teams that have come from the surrounding towns.
There is fishing and swimming in case of good behavior. And when the
warden gets the prison all built, he is going to turn much of the land,
which is not used for farming, in to a kind of natural park.
Up there, across the line, some thirty miles north of Lake Ontario,
where the summer heat gets into the nineties, and the winter cold sends
the bulb down to thirty and more below, there is going to be a radical
overturning of old prison regime. Inevitably the influence of Guelph
and of a dozen other prisons in the “States” will send the walls of the
older prisons crumbling. For Guelph means nothing else than a reversal
of the theories of prison administration.
The old prison believed in dungeons and bars. The new prison
substitutes therefor single rooms and God’s outdoors. The old prison
feared an escape like the plague. The new prison forces an escape
into its proper perspective as a serious episode in the training of
the prisoner for honest life. The old prison shut out life and hope
by monstrous walls. In the new prison, walls for all prisoners are
regarded as monstrous things. The old prison drove men like brutes to
work and often to mutiny. The new prison blows the whistle at noon, and
the men come in from all over the farm to dinner, and go to their rooms
or to the dormitories afterward for a short rest, and then back to
normal work. The old prison--and there are many of them still--believed
in squeezing the life blood out of the prisoners for the benefit of
the State and of private contractors. The new prison believes in the
working of the men for State profit, if for profit at all. And the
modern chiefs of new prisons are giving sober attention to a fairer
division of the profits of prisoners’ labor between the prisoner and
his compulsory employer, the government.
The old prison believed in wretchedly small cells, in a minimum of
fresh air, in messes of poorly prepared food; in the lock step, the
stripes and the shaven head; in punitive methods. The new prison
believes in an ample cell and an outdoor life so far as possible; in
decent food, the abolition of the lock step, a decent head of hair and
a decent uniform--in reformation, if possible.
As to the future, who can tell? The new prison is an experiment. So
far, it has worked in general remarkably well. Its sanction lies in
the fact that it makes on the average mind the impression of being a
common-sense proposition.