Evening Star Newspaper, November 1, 1931, Page 83

Prevention, Police, Probation, Prison and Parole Are the Five “P’s” in This Penologist’s Hu- mane Program Which He Would Carry Out Without Resort to Brutali- ties and Capital Punishment. ° BY DOUGLAS CHURCH. l l AIL is where we put the unsuccessful criminal,” Warden Lewis E. Lawes said as he sat in his office at Sing Sing Prison and pointed to a group of failures in the yard below as they toiled under the watchful eye of a guard. He took a puff from his long, thin pan- atela and was lost in thought for a moment. “The successes,” he added, “are all too often respectable members of society, and the more money they have made the more respectable they are.” I was half inclined to demur at the cynicism of his statement, but he only smiled and ad- mitted prisons were likely to make one cynical, no matter which side of the bars one was on. On the other hand, he added, a sense of humor was essential to one who wished to retain his mental balance there. “If most of us were not hypocrites, we would admit that prison is for the failures,” he went on. “Most of us know personally some suc- ocessful bootlegger, gambler, race-track tout or others who make their fat livings in divers and questionable ways, and a great many of us, I'm afraid, secretly admire them for it. “During the truckmen's strike in New York City we all knew that carloads of gunmen were sent down from this locality to break the strike, hired and protected by the most powerful truck- ing corporation in the city. I am not telling any state secret when I make this statement— in fact, every inmate of this prison knew it at the time. One may well imagine the effect on & man sentenced to years in this prison who could look over the wall and see his more suc- cessful confreres driven to town and paid to do the very thing he was incarcerated for doing. 1T HE Wickersham Commission has just stated that the four or five hundred thousand convicts in prison today represent only about 10 per cent of those actually engaged in crime, which means there are about four to five mil- lion persons in this country who make crime their livelihood. Multiplied by five, the average for a family, there are 25 000,000 here who are vitally interested in m-:'n~ crime a paying business. This does r~ e the amateur and occasional erimina “The average agc «. those sent here for erimes of viclence, ~cularly robbery, has dropped alarmingly in late years and is now between 19 and 21 years. But the percentage THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, ‘NOVEMBER 1, 1931 Warden Lewis E. Lawes of Sing Sing Prison, who looks for the good in men and says he usually finds plenty of it. of those convicted gf robbery has increased, ac- cording to the records, to an unbelievable degree. The man who robs is armed and a potential murderer. In 1910, 4 per cent of those sent here were convicted of robbery; in 1914 it was 17 per cent and 20 per cent in 1919; in 1930 it was 37, and for the first six months of 1931 it was 42 per cent. “The reason?” he asked. “Well, I think it is because we have lost the feeling of equality in this country. Until recently we have all felt we shared a certain equality of opportunity, of which this new era of great wealth has robbe_d us. The unrest of the people in gen- eral is reflected in the unrest of the prisons.” Warden Lawes went on to say that prisons were very different places today from what they were 25 years ago. Vast strides have been made for the material comfort and freedom of the convict, and yet it seemed the more that was done for him in that way the more the unrest grew. In fact, prison riots never occurred under the old system, and now they are quite common. The well meaning, though unin- formed, take this as an indication that we should revert to the old order of severity and inhumanity, but Warden Lawes sees the reason for this unrest from another angle. “We have riots because we have taken hope from the prisoner, the one thing a man must have to make life behind the bars bearable. To sentence a 19-year-old boy, a first offender, to 15 years for burglary is criminal. It is worse than that—it is stupid—and the people who rule the country with their wealth and posi- tion are to blame. They insist upon severity far beyond the limits of humanity or reason because they sense their own insecurity and are afraid, although they have not the intelli- gence to do anything constructive about it. “They will'put a man in prison for 10 years for some offense against the vested order of things which may or may not be debatable ethically. They might have made & decent ONE BILLION DOLLARS annually the cost of crime in America, accord- ing to recent revelations of the Wickersham Commission. In 48 States expenditures annually of approximately $52,000,000 for penal and correctional institutions and parole. The Federal Government contribuiing nearly $53,000,- 000 annually to criminal justice. Every large city in the United States paying about $10,000,000 each year for crime protective agencies. Whal's to be done about st? How is this juggernaut of crime to be overcome? Here's what the man in charge of the men behind the bars — Warden Lawes of Sing Sing Prison—has to say about it. 3 | WARDEN LAWES OF SING SING HAS FIVE WAYS TO PREVENT CRIME IN AMERICA for life.” ARDEN LAWES went on to til the advent of cannot successfully fight organized society. the convicts here trusted one another, we could not hold them within those walls an hour.” Lawes believes in the five P’s, them, as preventives to crime and enumerated i BT g 1 £t m for a moment in the execution chamber. It is a sordid, shabby rcom, about whose bare white walls a terrible stillness seems to brood. There is a sign, “Silence,” over the door which leads from the cells. This room is devoid of furniture, except for the chair and three long wooden benches in & cormer upon which the spectators sit. No. 25 invited me to have a seat in the chair,