THE INDIANA PENAL FARM.

[This article, by Henry A. Montgomery, Staff Correspondent of the Detroit News, was incited by the plan of Detroit to build a large and expensive House of Correction. What other communities or States are doing will be told by Mr. Montgomery.]

Greencastle, Ind., March 13.—“Reform them? No, you don’t reform them. You can’t change a man’s real nature. But lots of them are not naturally bad. We get the alcohol out of their systems, give them all they can eat, make them keep regular hours and do a man’s work, and the good in them has a chance to show itself.”

That is the way Charles E. Talkington, superintendent of the Indiana State Farm, defined reformation.

The farm is situated in some of the most beautiful farming country in western Indiana, about midway between Indianapolis and Terre Haute. The site selected for the colony is particularly well adapted to the needs of a penal institution, being rich in its deposits of limestone, having plenty of tillable soil and considerable timber. The beautiful hills and deep ravines lend the tract beauty and make it possible for the landscape gardener with little effort to make it look like the estate of a wealthy landowner. Although general farming is engaged in, the products of the garden form so great a share of the subsistence of the men that this has developed into one of the most important features of the work. When present plans have been realized there will be at least 160 acres devoted exclusively to gardening.

It’s an unusual sight that one encounters on arriving at the top of the long hill where is built the little village, the home of the 700 social misfits. Two rows of long, squat frame buildings form the “street” of this strange town. Nobody would guess from the appearance of the buildings what they were intended for. They resemble the Billy Sunday tabernacle type of structure. There is nothing attractive about them, but they are temporary quarters and they are serving their purpose well.

The first of these buildings is the office and sleeping apartments of the officers. It is here that the prisoner is first taken. His history is recorded, he is subjected to a medical examination, his clothes are fumigated and stored away for his use when he is released, and he is given a bath, shave and haircut, and a suit of clothes. The clothes consist of the heavy working jacket and trousers, underclothing and corduroy cap.

The first interview with the prisoner is considered important. The assistant superintendent gives him detailed instructions as to his own conduct and tells him with great care about the theories that are being worked out. The number of men who, immediately following this talk, are placed on their honor and given as much freedom as it is possible to give is remarkable. Few of them violate the trust.

Often the man sent to the farm for six months walks forth from the office, strolls over to the recreation room to await his work assignment and never feels for one minute the influence of restraint, except, perhaps, the realization that in the watch towers placed at various points of vantage about the farm there is stationed a man—a fellow prisoner—whose duty it is to notify headquarters if any prisoner starts to leave the grounds.

The prisoner eats in a dining room and sleeps in a dormitory which are kept spotlessly clean, and there is neither bar on the window nor lock on the door. Each dormitory is occupied by about 200 men, and one officer is all that is needed to maintain order.

“We do not say our plan is perfect,” said Superintendent Talkington, “nor do we make any great claims about our ability to reform a man during the short time he is here. But we do say this is the best manner yet devised for handling them. We take a man from the gutter, and at least make it possible for him to improve. We give him health, and direction enough to get him into some employment at which he can earn his living. Although we refuse to put forth any claims about how much good we do for the man, we at least know that we do not injure him. And that is more than can be said for any jail or prison. We aren’t running any school for crime here. We do know that. We also know that we can make this institution self-supporting and a means of revenue for the State. What more can you ask?

“The wide-open policy of freedom, I believe, has been carried to the extreme here. Although the great majority of men can be handled and trusted in absolute freedom, there are, in a population of 700 men, some who can never be given liberty. There is need for not more than 50 cells. Any farm colony ought to have them even if the cells are never used. Even so, we are getting along very nicely without them, and it shows to what great extent this policy can be carried successfully.

“We never had even punishment cells until a few days ago when four were completed. We aren’t going to have to use them much, either. Confinement on bread and water is the only form of punishment permitted in this colony—no flogging, no dungeons, no ball and chain, no stripes.

“We have prisoners living down on the lower end of the farm working under a prisoner-foreman. We see them only when we are making the weekly round of inspection.”

One could not help but feel, in discussion with Mr. Talkington, that one was listening to a practical man who is anything but the dreamer or idealist usually found advocating so revolutionary a plan as the one on which the superintendent is working. He made no claims to super-knowledge in the handling of men. He had no illusions about the matter. He knew the faults of the plan and he knew the virtues. When he undertook the present work, his only assets were his experience as a farmer and school teacher.

“I feel,” said Mr. Talkington, “that your officials, before spending more than a million dollars on the old type of prison, should see this farm and the one at Guelph, Ont. I’m confident they would change their plans. This may be a new thing in this country, but it is not untried in the old. The most famous of the European farm colonies is the one at Witzwil, Switzerland. It has solved all the problems of handling men, it pays thousands of dollars annually into the treasury of the canton Berne and there has been no trouble experienced in competition with free labor.

“The farm colony has come to America to stay, and I hope Detroit won’t take any action which will postpone for perhaps half a century an improvement they are entitled to now.”

One of the bad features of Indiana’s temporary arrangement is the lack of opportunity to segregate prisoners into classes or groups. The dormitories are too large and the facilities for recreation are very limited.

“The men should be divided into smaller groups,” said the superintendent, “and I believe the recreation room should be a part of the dormitory. I would not place more than 25 to 50 men in each group. That would give a chance to segregate the youths from the older men and permit keeping apart the more dangerous type from the man who is here on some comparatively trifling charge.

“Another of our greatest needs is the establishment of industries to supplement the work on the farm. We are going to get these. There should be a furniture factory, a canning factory, brick yard or other suitable industries where the men can be worked when weather conditions are bad or outside work slack.”

The greatest factor in the maintaining of discipline is the use of the honor system. There are good jobs on the farm and bad ones. And the good jobs go to the men who have the best records and have shown their ability to take positions of responsibility.

“You can’t tell me that you can run any prison with any such sort of discipline,” a prison superintendent recently told me. “There are some men who must be strung up and there are some who must be spanked. If we didn’t resort to extreme methods at times we would have a riot on our hands all the time.”

The best answer to this is found in the record of the Indiana farm. There hasn’t been a strike or a serious riot since the institution was founded. There are no guards standing or sitting around idle. The guards are working foremen who perform as much actual labor as any prisoner. The employed guards have guns in their pocket, but the guns are never used and some of them aren’t even loaded.

There is a provision in the State law of Indiana which permits the drafting from the penitentiaries of trusties to take jobs as foremen, sentinels and lookouts. Of course, this probably could not be done in Detroit, because the house of correction is a city institution. But in Indiana it assists materially in keeping down the payroll. It makes this difference—the farm colony at Occoquan, Va., has a payroll of about $5000 a month; the Indiana institution gets along with $1700. And the two institutions are very much alike.—From The Delinquent, March, 1917.