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
And the woman expressed a great verity. This little episode I relate
to show you that society has two obligations: one to the man shut up
within the prison, and perhaps an even greater obligation to the poor
woman and children dependent upon the man shut up within the prison.
It is necessary to lock up a certain class of men that society may be
protected, and that these men may be improved; but when we do that
are we going to put their families in a position in which they will be
impelled into either vice or crime? I think it is Milton who asks the
pertinent question:
“What boots it, by one gate to make defense
And at another to let in the foe?”
In dealing with the wives and children, as well as with the prison
inmates over in our place, we find an immense help from the Salvation
Army. We have a prisoner’s aid association and they work harmoniously
together; but the Army has one or two advantages in this work that
no other organization possesses. In the first place, they are not
sentimentalists. They detail one man to give his time to it. He is
as free to go into our prison as I am, and I think he spends as much
time there as I do. He is there at night, on Sundays, on holidays, at
noon hours, and he is going from cell to cell--he becomes thoroughly
acquainted with every inmate. That gives that man an immense advantage
in dealing with those men when their terms expire. The prison worker
that expects to meet the discharged prisoner at the prison gate the
morning he comes out, is much more apt to be worked by the prisoner
than he is to work the prisoner. In three cases out of five he is
clay in the hands of a designing man. One of our governors some
years ago said that Canada was a land of magnificent distances. The
same remark applies to your republic; but we get prisoners thirteen
hundred miles from our prison. The Army, learning the condition of
the families dependent on the man within the prison, writes to the
corps, the Salvation Army corps in the town or the city where the
man came from, and they are able by their very extensive and highly
perfected organization, to make a study of each family, in addition to
having arrangements made there for the employment of that man when his
term has expired. We try, just as far as possible, to get all of our
ex-prisoners out of the city. We do not wish them to colonize; we try
to get them back to their homes where they came from, for unless a man
is willing to go back and face society and live it down, the chances
are that he will be driven into what is wrong sometimes through fear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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