The Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy 1919 (New Series, No. 58)Pennsylvania Prison Society
History
The Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy 1919 (New Series, No. 58)
Pennsylvania Prison Society
Charities -- Periodicals; Prisons -- Periodicals
The second important development in the direction of specialization
in the provision of institutional treatment of delinquents appeared
in the establishment of a House of Refuge for juvenile delinquents in
Philadelphia in 1828. Though this was at first a private rather than
a State institution and was of very limited capacity, it marked an
epoch in the progress of Pennsylvania penology by making possible some
elementary differentiation on the basis of age, degree of criminality
and relative susceptibility to reformation. The next attempt at further
differentiation came with the erection of the State Hospital for
the Insane at Harrisburg between 1841 and 1851, chiefly as a result
of the agitation initiated by Dorothea L. Dix. This and the other
State hospitals for the insane, subsequently erected, provided for a
treatment of the more important types of mental disorder, though no
adequate provision was made for removing the insane from the prison.
Not until 1905 was an act passed providing for the erection of a State
hospital for the criminal insane at Fairview which was opened in 1912.
During the quarter of a century following 1850 there was an active
agitation to provide a means of differentiating the treatment of
criminals on the basis of age, sex and degree of criminality. The first
important achievement in this direction was the further development
of reform schools for juvenile delinquents through the removal and
enlargement of the Philadelphia House of Refuge in 1850-54 and the
erection of the Western House of Refuge at Allegheny during the same
period. Juvenile delinquents, if petty offenders, could thereafter be
removed from their degrading confinement in the state prison or worse
county jails and receive the properly specialized treatment which their
circumstances demanded. No provision for the differentiated treatment
of the less definite and confirmed types of adult delinquents was made
until the opening of the reformatory for men at Huntingdon in 1889
and the authorization of the State Industrial Home for Women at Muncy
in 1913. The provision of reformatories and juvenile correctional
institutions marked a double process of differentiation, in that these
institutions not only called for a diversity of treatment according to
age, sex and degree of criminality, but also from the fact that they
were clearly differentiated from the State prisons and the county jails
in making reformation rather than punishment or detention their chief
aims.
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