Evening Star Newspaper, June 7, 1931, Page 77

THE SUNDAY 'STAR, WASHINGTON; D: C, JUNE 7, 1931. New Federal Penitentiary to End Riots Radical in Design and in Operation, Uncle Sam’s New “Big House’ Now Is Being Built in Pennsylvania as the Government’s Answer to a Drastic Prison Problem—It Will Follow a - New System of Penology and Calls for a New. and More Ef fective Plan of Security. I BY HUDSON GRUNEW ALD. ICTURE, if you can, a penitentiary with private rooms, unbarred windows and plain ‘wood-paneled doors, to which each convict is given his own key; a peni- tentiary without rows of steel cages opening on galleries, without interior cell blocks where prisoners are filed away at night; a penitentiary where overcrowding and the “herding” of numbered inmates are things of the past, and where instead each prisoner is treated as an individual, studied, “classified,” given every chance to improve and shown the way to freedom, and you will have a model prison unlike any in the world today. But such a penitentiary is now actually being built for the United States Government near the town of Lewisburg in Central Pennsylvania. It will be the new Federal penitentiary for the northeastern section of the country, the first penal institution to be built in accordance with a new congreassional policy calling for a revolu- tionary plan of prison construction and opera- tion, the first real step toward the solution of a gdrastic prison problem. The Lewisburg Penitentiary is being built to put a stop to prison rioting once and for all. But although turreted outer walls, medieval in design, may give it the appearance of a fortress heavily garrisoned, heavily guarded, from which escape would be an impossibility, these are not the prime elements of its security. A new factor enters into the scheme at Yewisburg. A new system which Congress be- lieves will prove more effective than armed guards and riot squads, more certain than high walls, steel doors and machine guns. y There will be no rioting at Lewisburg, it is fioped, because there will be no cause for rioting. But more important than this, the new penitentiary aims to give the prisoner a greater chance to win his freedom and return to society a better man than when he left, and plans to set a new standard of penology for other prisons to follow. HE plan upon which the new Federal peni- tentiary is being built is designed to provide for an individualized system of discipline, care and treatment, by facilitating the proper class- fication and segregation of Federal prisoners according to their character, the nature of the crime they have committed, their mental con- dition and other factors of consideration, and will put an end to the wholesale method of g$reatment now in common use. “The planners have not assumed that every inmate is to be a wild beast who must be placed in a steel cage and removed entirely from any 1 contact with his fellows, air and direct sun- k\ligm,." reports the Burcau of Prisons of the epartment of Justice. “They have concluded rather that there are different kinds of prison- ers, just as there are varying types of indi- viduals.” In a recent survey made at the New Jersey State Prison by the National Prison Emergency Committee in co-operation with the National » Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor, four .. separate classes into which prisoners may be ! grouped were developed. These are listed by . Col. Joseph D. Sears, who had charge of the \vsurvey, as follows: “Pirst, the ‘difficult class’ composed of pris- oners who are recidivists, who have anti- social tendencies or who are diagnosed as psycopathics and constitutional defectives. Sec- 73 ond, the ‘better class’ made up of normal pris- ~ oners who are mentally and physically able to ‘be adjusted to society. For the purpose of cus- tody and training this class has been divided into three groups: Prisoners who because- of the type of crime committed or the length of sentence require close custody, but are suitable The new Federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa. for shop work and will probably form the backbone of the prison shop organization; those who are belicved to be stable and trustworthy and may be employed at prison farms, road camps and so forth, where only limited security and supervision are necessary, and young prisoners who are stable and trustworthy who have average intelligence or better and are capable of accepting trade training in various vocations at farms and shops where only minimum security is necéssary. “Borderline feeble-minded and simple feecble- minded, which include high and low grade morons and high-grade imbeciles, made up the third general class, while the fourth class de- veloped by the study is composed of aged or senile, chronically ill and the seriously crippled.” It is this type of grouping which will be car- red out by the new system at Lewisburg, based on the similar experience of the Bureau of Federal Prisons to that of New Jersey. HE Lewisburg Penitentiary will not be a big house with row on row and tier upon tler of steel cages into which men may be locked away and forgotten while prison officers and the rest of the world rocks along, according to the Prison Bureau report. “It will have nothing in common with the early Pennsylvania type of prison, xyhich consisted of a series of cells with an adjoining courtyard into which the prisoner was isolated for years without seeing or com- municating with his fellows, his friends or his family.” Punishment will not be the principal aim of the new system at Lewisburg. Oppression will not be tolerated. Severe measures will only be used in those cases where all else fails. It will be sought to disprove the old theory of “Once a criminal always a criminal.” Correc- Effects of overcrowding are illustrated in this picture, taken at the Federal Penitentiary of Atlanta, showing how four cells have been combined by the removal of partitions to accomodate eight men. Conditions such as these will be eliminated at the new Lewisburg Penitentiary. tion will be the ideal. And this will be accom- plished through training, scnooling and proper discipline, while the prisoner will be given every incentive to improve. Not only will the prisoner at Lewisburg be given a chance to shorten his sentence by good p LI “A penitentiary with private rooms to which each convict is given his own kq." behavior, but he will be given an opportunity to lessen the restrictions placed upon him and to move into better and less confining quarters with each step in his progress. He will be graduated through various kinds of environ- ment until he is at last sent out again into the community. “The prison is unable to discharge its full duty in protecting the public from those who temporarily come under its influence unless it can turn the men out of prison better than when received,” says Sanford Bates, director of the United States Bureau of Prisons, under whose supervision the nev. Federal penitentiary will be maintained. “The main object of all our work is to secure if possible some improve- "ment in the character of our inmates. It has been deemed necessary to adopt immediately some program for individualized treatment. We cannot reform men in the mass. Something must be known about their individual problems and some intelligence must be brought to bear _upon their solution before the real work of the _prison can be accomplished.” Study and analysis of the individual prisonery at Lewisburg will be conducted by a staff of " trained workers, whose function will be first of all, to secure the necessary information about each prisoner on which individualized treatment can be based. This will include information on his previous criminal record, his family his- tory, his environmental background, his educa- tional and occupational record, his plans for the future, and so forth. A complete case history of the individual will be secured by reference to the records of court and probation officers, the criminal records supplied by other governmental officers and collected by the record clerk, mail inquiries directed to the com- munity from which the prisoner came, to former employers and others who are familiar with his past, and careful interviews of the prisoner himself. WHEN the prisoner is brought to Lewisburg he will be housed in a receiving building. This building will contain quarantine cells in which the newcomer will be placed for a period of two weeks or more, or until such time as his observation and examination will have been completed. It is in this building that the most important and far-reaching work under the new system will be conducted. The Federal authorities believe that the least they can do toward seeing that the prisoner is discharged in a better eon- dition than when he was received is to remove his physical handicaps and upbuild his physique so that he can earn an honest living if he wishes. They also want to have facilities which will enable them to answer conclusively state- ments frequently made that all criminals are mental defectives. In the receiving building the most modern facilities for the diagnosis of mental and physi- cal ailments will be provided, and the prisoner will be studied, analyzed and classified accord- ing to his record, his criminal tendencies, the character of his mind and his physical condition. Here he will receive a complete medical ex- amination and if he is found to have some defect which can be corrected by medical or surgical attention he will be moved to the hospital. This hospital of 90 beds, also a part of the receiving building, will be one of the out- standing features of the new penitentiary. Maintained and operated by the United States Public Health Service, recently placed in charge of Federal Penal Medical Service, it will be a complete unit in itself, comprising every facility of a modern city hospital and including operating rooms for major and minor opera- tions, clinical laboratories, a complete X-ray department, a dental department and the latest equipment for hydro and electro therapy. “Realizing that if the prison is to perform its full duty toward its inmates, adequate medi- cal service must be provided to remove the physical and mental handicaps which so often induce GCrime,” states Prison Director Bates, “the départment approached the United States Public Health Service with a view to securing its co-operation. After the necessary legislation had been obtained an arrangement was made with the Public Health Service for the entire supervision and conduct of the medical and psychiatric work in the prisons by that splen- didly organized and equipped service. It is confidently expected that the Federal institu- tions under this arrangement will be able to make a demonstration of the important and constructive role which the medical service must play in the rehabilitation of the criminal.” - If the prisoner at Lewisburg is found to be a “chronic defective” he will be removed to the new Federal hospital for defective delinquents now under construction at Springfleld, Mo., as part of the new prison program. The prisoner who is pronounced mentally and physically normal will be removed from the quarantine cells and placed in one of the stronger types of housing until he demonstrates that he can be trusted in the barracks or dormitories. If he is found to be of the “bad man™ or “tough” type, a hardened or habitual offender likely to cause trouble for himself and his fellow inmates and in need-of disciplining, he will be placed in the “disciplinary building,” a three-story structure containing the only inside cell rooms in the institution. These rooms, 66 Continued on Thirtzenth Page