Prisons and Prayer Part 82

The warden or superintendent is the one official who can give tone, expression and color to the inst.i.tution. He is distinctly and positively its actual managing head, and upon his intelligence, interest, zeal, tact and discretion will depend, almost entirely, its weal or its woe.

He must be a man of intelligence, and be willing and anxious to increase his fund of knowledge and information.

He should be a profound student not only of the ordinary subjects that attract the student, but of prison systems, of laws, business, government, society as it exists, and of human nature in all its many phases.

HE MUST BE AN ORGANIZER.

No difference how elaborate a system may be found in any inst.i.tution of this kind, the warden will always be an intensely busy and greatly occupied officer.

If he would prevent chaos and confusion and obtain from every official the highest and best work of which he is capable, he must organize every department thoroughly. Every officer and every inmate must know his exact duties, so far as it is possible to know them, and be made responsible for those duties and the warden must be enabled to appreciate a high order of talent and the accomplishment of good work, and to locate the blame for omissions and short comings, and provide for their correction.

Thorough system in every detail will conserve the capacities of all his subordinates and leave him in a measure free to observe the actual conditions and to plan and to put into effect improvements along moral, industrial, physical and financial lines.

HE MUST BE A FINANCIER.

The financial question in every prison in the land is an extremely important one. Funds for prisons are doled out grudgingly, and the demand for absolutely necessary purposes is always far greater than the supply.

A warden performs no more important function than when he sees that the funds of the inst.i.tution are so used as to effect the highest possible results, and that all the forces of the prison are so energized and conserved as to permit, under ordinary conditions, a satisfactory and proper earning and economizing power. With the many demands made upon him for means for increasing the usefulness of his inst.i.tution, a high order of financial apt.i.tude is an absolutely necessary characteristic in a successful warden.

DISCIPLINE.

Discipline in a prison is its first requisite. Nothing can be accomplished until officers and convicts are under its sway and control.

The warden who would have control of those under him must himself at all times, be under self control.

The maxim "No one knows how to command who has not first learned how to obey," is a trite and a true one. The population of a prison is made up of a heterogeneous collection of people whose first instincts have been and are, not to obey.

To bring such people into habits of obedience and control requires the highest type of skill, tact and discretion. Punishments and reward must be so blended and combined as to effect the needful results with the least possible friction, and in the most humane and rational manner possible.

No warden can afford to delegate the matter of enforcing discipline entirely or partly, if at all, to another. His first duty to himself, that he may know actual conditions as they exist, is to preside over or a.s.sist in, the trial of offenders and to order discipline.

Individual treatment is a necessity in our dealings with delinquents, and a study of the many phases of delinquency is a prime requisite in a successful warden's repertoire.

Brainard F. Smith says: "Many a prisoner has been reformed--or, if not reformed, made a better prisoner--by punishment."

Will the warden have any higher duty to perform than to face his delinquent delinquents and to order in merciful severity, rational punishments for their short-comings?

But a warden's disciplinary powers are apt to be taxed more severely in another direction. The great problem ordinarily, is not so much the discipline of convicts as that of subordinate officers. If subordinate officers will obey the spirit and the letter of the rules, the convict has the potential influence of a powerful example to aid him. "Like master like man."

In inst.i.tutions where officers are appointed solely with reference to their fitness, comparatively little trouble should be had in the matter of proper official discipline. But where places are given to heelers, ward-workers and political strikers, the matter of efficient discipline is a question of grave concern to the warden. In the absence of better material, however, he must address himself to organizing what he has to the highest efficiency possible, and insist and require a rigid regimen and adhere to his demands and requirements with Spartan firmness.

THE PRISON SCHOOL.

The educational work of a prison is of the highest, I may say, of the first importance. The education of the hands to work comes naturally, partly as an incident of the necessary work carried on in prison.

Nearly all convicts are densely ignorant. The polished, scholarly, shrewd criminal of whom we hear so much, and to whom the papers and books give so much prominence, is the exception, not the rule, in prison.

If the prison is to have a reformatory feature, it must come very largely through the school. Many prison schools are such only in name.

The work accomplished is very meager. The results are very unsatisfactory.

To no part of prison work should a warden address himself with more ardor and determination than so to organize the prison school as to make it the great positive factor in dispelling ignorance and its attendant viciousness, and in quickening and enlivening the moral sense in those whose moral judgment is exceedingly obtuse.

The course of study in a prison school is necessarily a very elementary one, and unless followed by a supplementary course of reading and study, will be of little permanent and practical benefit.

Many prison libraries, largely the result of indiscriminate and heterogeneous donations of all kinds of literature, good, bad and indifferent, chiefly the latter, are not in a position to be a positive force.

Let the warden see that his library is so arranged, cla.s.sified and used as to be a source of information, profit, help and pleasure to the inmates, and that a course of reading along rational lines is laid out, encouraged, and, if possible, adhered to, in order that the preliminary school course may not have been in vain.

COURAGE NEEDED.

The warden must be a man of courage. I do not refer to the kind of courage necessary to face a regiment of depraved and wicked men shorn of their power and their stimulus to do evil, but that high moral courage necessary to clean the Augean stables of abuses of customs, to reverse policies of long standing that are nevertheless wrong in principle and in practice, to fight against unjust, improper and unwise legislative propositions concerning his inst.i.tution; the kind of courage that prompted the chaplain in Chas. Reade's "NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND," to fight and destroy the iniquitous prison system of Keeper Hawes and his minions; the courage that will keep to the fore-front a persistent opposition to prost.i.tuting penitentiaries into eleemosynary inst.i.tutions and political cribs and feeding troughs for political strikers.

He must have the courage to weed out and eliminate useless barnacles in the shape of incompetent and worthless employes, and subst.i.tute in their stead men of capacity, character and intelligence, who are in love with their work and believe in its dignity and usefulness; the courage to face demagogues in their efforts to take from the prison its educative, moral, reformatory and economic force, the right of the unfortunate inmates to learn the gospel of labor under right and just conditions.

OPTIMISM NECESSARY.

The warden needs to be intensely optimistic. He must have a reserve fund of enthusiasm. He must believe profoundly in the high character of his office and educate others constantly to believe in it. The ignorance of the great ma.s.s of the people as to the real function of penitentiaries and the methods by which they are carried on is amazing and mortifying to prison officials.

A part of the warden's mission is to acquaint the outside world with conditions as they exist inside, and to inspire the interest and support of the general public in measures for bettering and improving prison conditions. Legislative bodies especially, need to be brought into closer relations and the law makers made to realize their duty to the public and the convict in the enactment of wise, proper and righteous legislation.

Longfellow, in his beautiful poem, "THE BUILDING OF THE SHIP," tells why the master builder achieved success. It was because

"His heart was in the work and the heart Giveth grace to every art."

The warden's heart must be in his work. His whole soul must be animated and permeated with an honest and sincere desire to bring penology up to a higher and n.o.bler standard.

He must have a reserve force of enthusiasm that will not be daunted and destroyed by temporary failures or the lapses of some discharged or pardoned convicts, who, in spite of care and pains, will return to their evil ways. The enthusiasm that can bear the harsh and ignorant criticism and misrepresentations incident to his work; the enthusiasm that in its contagion will inoculate directors, subordinate officers, the press and the people with a desire for more light on penal problems and a purpose to be governed by that light; the enthusiasm that will beget great patience for the exacting, difficult and trying problems before him; that will make him believe that "a convict saved is a man made"; that will make him believe with the great English novelist "It is never too late to mend," and that as infinite care and pains finally brought Robinson, the twice convicted thief, up to the estate of honest manhood, so, infinite care and pains should be exerted with every man under his charge.

Pessimism has no rightful place in a penitentiary. In the language of Socrates, "Why should we who are never angry at an ill-conditioned body, always be angry with an ill-conditioned soul?"

The ignorant Hawes believed in the profitless crank, the black-hole, the deprivation of food, of bed, of clothing, the tortures of the waist jacket and the collar, and a sign over the door, "ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE."

The twentieth century warden believes in the gospel of productive labor, of education of hand, head and heart, in the deprivation of privileges, largely as punishment, the segregation of the desperate and nearly hopeless, the enlightenment of an all-powerful, all potential, all influential example and the motto of Pope Clement, "It is of little advantage to restrain criminals by punishment unless you reform them with training and teaching."

THE CHAPLAIN.

The chaplain occupies an extremely important but delicate position in prison management. It is possible for him to be of vast influence and power for good.

The chaplain needs to be a man of large heart, aided by an abundance of sound common sense. He needs to bear in mind constantly, in the difficult and delicate work he is called upon to perform, that the discipline of the prison must be upheld and enforced.

a.s.sociate officers are frequently disturbed with the fear that the chaplain's influence will subvert the discipline of the prison; that the shrewd, unprincipled convicts by pouring into his ears their imaginary tales of woe, may succeed in working him.

The chaplain's first requirement, if he would succeed, is not to lose sight of the majesty of the law and of the prison rules.