The Philadelphia County Prison is composed of four different
departments, one of which is called the “Debtor’s Department,” so
denominated because it was destined to receive and retain those who were
to be incarcerated for not paying their debts. The merciful laws of
Pennsylvania have abolished imprisonment for debts by contract, and now
the building is used for the detention of some United States prisoners,
for some who are adjudged to be in contempt of court, some who are
detained on mesne process, &c., or who are sentenced to pay fines or
costs. With these and others under the charge of the sheriff, the
committee have had little intercourse; their circumstances, or the
temporary character of their almost nominal confinement, not rendering
it probable that visits would be acceptable or profitable.
The south wing of the prison is devoted entirely to male vagrants,
drunkards, breakers of the peace, those who await a trial, and some who
are sentenced to short imprisonment and fines. The middle building
contains male convicts, sentenced to separate confinement and labor, and
also those who have been sentenced to capital punishment. Among the
inmates of these two buildings the visitors of the Society are constant
and assiduous in their labors, and we have already referred to some of
the results of their visitations.
The north building is entirely separate from the other, having two lots
of ground and a high wall between that and the male convict department.
The northern building is exclusively devoted to females. The vagrant,
the drunkard, the accused, and the female criminal of every class, are
here kept, under the care of a male keeper, and a matron and assistant
matron. And as this department presents a peculiar field for the action
of our Society, we shall make special reference to the character of the
inmates, the nature of their offences, the circumstances of their
committal, and the character and results of labors for their moral and
physical improvement; not because these labors are greater or more
effective, but because the pursuits, the misfortunes, the errors, and
the crimes of the prisoners differ from those of the males, according to
the circumstances of their condition and sex, and require some
additional means to secure an amelioration of the state of their lives.
In dealing with female offenders, we have to encounter the same
incentives, the same passions that influence the males; and most of the
same crimes that are punished in the male convict department are here
expiated by the females. But the mode of dealing must vary with the
varying circumstances of the prisoner; and those circumstances must
greatly depend upon the character of the individual, resulting from her
sex and the condition of her earlier life.
It is calculated that more than one thousand females divide their time
between the cells of the county prison and the practice of those vices
or the committal of those crimes which send them there. For a large
number of these, no more than thirty days imprisonment can be given at
one time; and many of those thus committed are discharged much sooner:
so that there is little time for any moral dealings with them, and even
were it practicable to deal with them in exhortation and advice,—were
the time of their imprisonment sufficiently long to warrant a hope that
they could be persuaded to form good resolves, still the fact that more
than one, and often four or five, are found in the same cell, renders
almost hopeless any attempt to induce the drunkard to forsake her resort
to the bottle, or the impure to avoid the haunts of vice which she has
frequented. The evidence of contrition which kindness and faithful
dealing on the part of the visitor may call forth from the prisoner, are
inducements to her companions in the cell to ridicule the moral teacher,
and to laugh the repenting one out of her half-formed resolves. The
experienced visitor learns to fix a just estimate upon the tears and
promises of those expectants of favors; but the good female visitors who
occasionally seek to bring “glad tidings” to the miserable offenders of
their own sex, usually suffer deep mortification at the disappointment
of pleasant hopes, and are compelled to seek their consolation in the
consciousness of good intention and perfect fidelity to the object which
they profess to serve. The great, almost the only mode of serving the
inmates of this part of the prison, is to induce them to enter some of
the asylums in the city, and yield themselves to the gentle discipline
of institutions founded for the good of those who have lost their
self-respect and forfeited the good will of society. And the records of
the “House of the Good Shepherd,” of “The Magdalen Asylum,” “The Rosine”
institution, and some other associations for the meliorating the
condition of the frail, the vicious, and the guilty, will show what
valuable auxiliaries these institutions have been to the Society for
Meliorating the Condition of Prisons.
While on this branch, we may as well say that, by an Act of Assembly,
the Inspectors of the County Prison may, at their discretion, discharge
at once any person committed for vagrancy, drunkenness, and disorderly
conduct, or a breach of the peace. Of course, a sound discretion is to
be used; and it is within the knowledge of all who are conversant with
the administration of the County Prison, that great good has resulted
from the exercise of this power by the Inspectors, and incalculable
evils have been prevented. Without any effort on the part of this
Society, it has happened that more than one of its appointed visitors to
the County Prison have been Inspectors; and in the exercise of the power
conferred on the latter, the duties of the former have been most
valuably discharged. The condition of many prisoners has been meliorated
by a timely inquiry into the cause of their incarceration and the duties
that awaited them at home. If it should appear that accidental
association had brought a poor innocent girl to the cells, it is a
beautiful and profitable exercise of power to send her home before she
should make acquaintance with the habituées of the prison, or before a
knowledge of her misfortune should become general among her
acquaintances, by a notice of her absence from the scene of her ordinary
duties. Take one example as illustration of the idea.
A girl about seventeen years of age, well dressed, was seen emerging
from the van, that at the prison
“Each morning vomits forth its sneaking crowd”
of police committals. Her neat appearance and unusual sadness arrested
the attention of one of the visitors of this Society, who was there on
duty as an Inspector. He learned that the girl, going home on a summer
evening from work, by which she maintained herself and mother, was
annoyed by the appearance and bad language of a drunken woman. The
disturbance drew to the place a police officer, who did not see the real
offender escape, and finding only the poor girl there, he arrested her,
and she was sent down for “disorderly conduct.” Close examination into
the case might have shown the mistake, but there were many more cases,
and so the poor girl took her place among a crowd of miserable wretches
of her own sex. Her story was found to be true, and she was at once
dismissed.
It is not worth while to dwell on the importance to that girl, and her
mother dependent upon her labor, of the prompt release. Since that time,
the arrival of the van has been watched, and the appearance of its
inmates carefully noticed, and other cases have presented themselves for
the prompt and valuable exercise of the power entrusted to the
Inspectors.
But it is not alone the entirely innocent that receive the attention of
the Inspectors. Inquiries are made into the circumstances of the poor
inebriate, of the temptations that beset her, of the chance of finding
some employment abroad; and the promise of amendment is rather taken
than depended on, and a discharge is granted. It often happens that the
promise is kept much longer than was supposed probable, and thus so much
time is redeemed from the waste of vice and crime. The repetition made
the actor, at least, no worse than a continuance in idleness would have
made her. If she had been detained for thirty days, she would probably
have found no employment, and a return to vice would have been almost
the certain result.
And on that point it may not be improper to make a remark. A large part
of the poor females who are habituées of the prison, depend less on
regular engagements in the houses of their employers, than on demands
upon their time and labor in seasons of emergency,—such as house
cleaning in the city, or garden work in the country. It often happens
that in the midst of the demand for these women, they are in the cells
of the prison for “vagrancy,” “disorderly conduct,” or “breach of the
peace.” If they can be released, they may earn something, in the spring,
summer and autumn, to support them in the winter; or at worst, they are
supported while they are at work. If they are detained during the
demand, they lose the present and the future employment and its
remuneration, and leave the prison, when their thirty days shall have
expired, with no expectation of immediate engagement; and they return to
the prison by the way of the haunts of vice, from which labor would have
saved them, temporarily at least.
It is in such cases that the exercise of the power to release on the
part of the Inspector becomes greatly useful to the community and to the
prisoner; and certainly it is eminently in furtherance of the plans and
wishes of this Society. It may be added, that numerous instances might
be cited of the entire reformation of females by their timely discharge
from prison when there existed a demand for their labor.
In this department of the prison is found the best illustration of the
vast difference of the influences upon the minds and character of the
prisoners wrought by the separate and the social system of
incarceration. It is true that all convicts are or ought to be
separately confined; but a very large proportion of the female prisoners
here are awaiting trial, or held for some offence below felony, in such
numbers as to render it quite impossible, even with all the discharges
granted by the Inspectors and procured by the Agent, to limit the number
of that class of prisoners to less than from two to four in many of the
cells. Here, then, side by side, or in close vicinity, is found an
example of the social and the separate systems, and to some extent a
judgment is easily formed of the effect of the two modes. In the cell
where are more than one female, (we speak of females, because,
accidentally, our means of information, as it regards the condition of
that sex, in prison, are more ample than they are concerning the males,
though the circumstances being the same, the effect of similar treatment
would be different only in proportion to the constitutional difference
of the sexes—the female being much more social, and much more ductile
and impressible, and thus more easily influenced by her associates,)—in
these cells monitions and advice are offered by the visitors, and for a
moment there seems, beneath the respectful attention of one or two, a
kind of resolve to try to do better,—books and tracts are accepted, and
perhaps read, and there is a promise, which to the unexperienced visitor
seems well founded, that the miserable object of his or her care will
seek to amend a course that leads so directly to disgrace and misery.
But scarcely does the visitor leave the door of the cell, when the
deluge of ridicule poured out by the companions of the “promising”
offender, obliterates all sense of compunction, and all resolve of
amendment, if any were formed, and virtue and decency are coarsely
ridiculed, and their humble advocate laughed at as an easy dupe. But the
visitor to the cell of the convict, or the prisoner separately confined,
has easy access to the feelings of the inmate, and the lesson given is
allowed time to have some favorable effect. The resolution for good
which the unhappy woman forms upon the evidence of unwonted interest in
her fate, may not be permanent,—the feelings may have acted rather than
the judgment,—but the repetition of the visit and of the lesson scarcely
fail to beget that sense of wrong doing which is the parent of
repentance; and especially, if the visitor makes evident a deep feeling
of affection, and gentle sympathy in the character and condition of the
prisoner as a human being, may there be hope that good will follow.
There must be heat applied, before the iron can be wrought into useful
shape.
It is not to be supposed that all who seem to maintain to the last day
of their imprisonment their resolve to amend their lives, do indeed
carry into effect that resolve beyond the prison wall. That would be too
great a harvest to hope for. When the resolution is taken, the pain of
punishment is felt, the sense of confinement is keen, and the view of
personal degradation in presence of a virtuous teacher is mortifying;
and the force of former habits forgotten, and the attractions of vice
underrated, and especially the sense of shame among those who knew them,
not calculated on, they go forth in the resolution of amendment—they
meet the suspicions of the good and the imitation of the bad—and they
allow passion to triumph over virtue.
“The bow well bent and sharp the spring,
Vice seems already slain;
When passion rudely snaps the string,
And it revives again.”
But discouraging as such cases are, and especially in their frequency,
there are many cases where the convict, after having promised, in the
crowded cells of the vicious and accused, to mend her life, and then
returned to vice and crime at the suggestions of her vicious companions,
has been led by the gentle invitation of the faithful visitor to resolve
on good, and where the solitude of her confinement has led to that
reflection which gives permanency to her resolution. And, it may be
added, that it is probable that of the many failures of success which
are to be deplored, some are due to the want of entire separation of the
convict, consequent upon the form and location of the cells, that forbid
entire seclusion, at least render unfruitful all attempts to prevent the
occupants of neighboring cells from holding conversation with each other
by message, viva voce, or some conventional signal or sounds.
Marvelously ingenious are the contrivances and the resorts of the human
mind when an exclusion from outward objects assists in the concentration
of faculties upon some desired end. It may be added here, that almost
all the success that attends the efforts of the philanthropist to reform
females in the County Prison, is due to separate confinement; and even
when the inmate is “sent down” only for drunkenness and disorderly
conduct, judgment, founded on her appearance and manner, has been well
exercised in placing her either in a separate cell, or if that be not
possible, then in selecting her a companion, and thus bringing her
within the genial action of visitors of her own sex, without the danger
from subsequent ridicule of her cell-mates. In this relation, too, has
proved highly beneficial, the habit noted elsewhere, of meeting the van
as it reached the prison, and selecting at once those who are new to the
place, and, after inquiry, if not dismissing them to their family, at
least placing them apart from the more abandoned of their sex.
Before closing this division of the Report, it may not be amiss, even
though it be a partial repetition, to notice that the visitors to the
two prisons in this city agree, as it is elsewhere stated in this
Report, that all other things being equal, the hopes of successful
dealing with a prisoner rest much upon the length of his sentence, and
the completeness of his separation from all intercourse with other
prisoners. Hence the little hopes expressed of favorable results from
advice and persuasive dealing with the inmates of the vagrant and
drunkard’s cell, whose imprisonment does not extend beyond thirty-one
days. We may remark that usually the convict is less a victim of vice
than of crime; and he generally has more mind upon which to operate by
argument, though, perhaps, he may have less conscience to be affected;
and this applies especially to men, who, as convicts, seem by a strange
law of society, to be exempted from censure for their vices, while the
female convict is made responsible, not only for the crime for which she
suffers, but for all the vices that are incident to an erring female.
But it seems almost certain that if the vicious female should be made
the inmate of a separate cell, and be the object of the gentle
attention, and persuasive argument of moral visitors for as long a time
as is the criminal female, she would be as likely to yield to those
moral allurements as is the convict. To produce the means of alleviating
misery, we must have a change in prison economy; we can, perhaps,
scarcely hope for success till the House of Correction supplies the
means.
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