The Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy (New Series, No. 50) November 1911Pennsylvania Prison Society
History
The Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy (New Series, No. 50) November 1911
Pennsylvania Prison Society
Charities -- Periodicals; Prisons -- Periodicals
At the subsequent session of the Legislature a bill, approved by the
Board, was introduced designed to remedy the unsatisfactory and often
disgraceful conditions existing in the prisons of various counties, and
placing the control and management of all the county prisons and jails
and the inmates thereof in Boards of Prison Inspectors to be named by
the courts, one inspector to be a physician, and another, if desired,
a woman. This carefully drawn bill, which, if it had become a law,
would have inaugurated a most salutary reform where it is most needed
in our penal system, passed the House, but was killed in the Senate. It
was re-introduced in the last Legislature, but never even came out of
committee.
A joint resolution, likewise approved by the Board of Charities,
providing for the appointment of a commission to consider and report
upon the advisability of establishing a state system of workhouses for
misdemeanants, so that county jails and prisons could be used solely
for the imprisonment of persons awaiting trial or otherwise detained,
and for convicts sentenced to brief terms, met a similar fate. So also
an act authorizing the pensioning of deserving superannuated employés
of penal, reformatory and charitable institutions of the State.
Another bill, strongly approved by the Board, but which after its
introduction never again saw the light of day, provided for the
establishing of a State Reformatory for Women between the ages of
fourteen and twenty-one. That such an institution is most urgently
needed is only too well known to charity workers throughout the State.
It is almost incredible that such a wealthy and otherwise progressive
State like Pennsylvania should be considered too poor to make at least
a beginning of an institution of this kind. Were the people of this
Commonwealth familiar with the work done and the results achieved by
such an institution as the Massachusetts Reformatory Prison for Women,
they would compel their legislators to take action. Great movements in
behalf of the social welfare can after all be carried through only when
there is an intelligent, widespread and persistent public sentiment
behind them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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