IN THE PRISONERS’ AID FIELD
Reading edition
THE ORIGIN OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE FRIENDLESS.[1]
The Society for the Friendless grew out of the efforts of Rev. and Mrs. Edward A. Fredenhagen to apply the methods of Jesus to the redemption of the submerged masses.
The first home was opened at 1219 Washburn Ave., Topeka, Kansas. Previous to this, a group of leading men had been interested in the work. Foremost among these was Judge T. F. Garver. He became the first president and the counsellor, and his wise counsels as well as his legal talent have aided in directing the society to its present carefully developed legal and philanthropic status.
The first tour, to investigate Kansas, was made in December, 1900. The family reached Topeka in the Christmas holidays of the same year. Work began at once and culminated in April, 1901, in the organization of the first board of directors and the incorporation of the Kansas society for the friendless.
The society was welcomed heartily by Governor W. E. Stanley, and by J. S. Simmons, superintendent of the reformatory at Hutchinson.
The following June Rev. R. A. Hoffman, just leaving the chaplaincy at the penitentiary, became the first district superintendent, with headquarters at Salina, and served the society for six years. He did a great deal of hard and capable work and left to go to the Colorado prison association. The next superintendent to join was Rev. Frank Brainerd, a neighboring pastor of the general superintendent in Illinois. He remained with the society for seven and a half years and did excellent work. He left to become general secretary of the associated charities in Kansas City, Kansas. The third superintendent was Rev. George S. Ricker, a scholarly pastor, who desired to give the remainder of his life to work among the lost classes. He is still with the society, and is senior among all the district superintendents.
By the autumn of 1901 the employment department and the temporary home were well established. Then the next important step was taken in the organization in the Kansas Penitentiary of the first of a series of prison leagues, which were to form the nucleus of the important department of jail and prison evangelism. Chaplain McBrian became the superintendent of this league and for the eight years of his chaplaincy, was the unwavering friend of the Society.
It soon became evident that the religious work in the prison would not have its rightful opportunity unless the department of prison reform should be developed in the state. So the society began a campaign for the passage of the indeterminate sentence and the parole law to apply to the penitentiary the same as it was operating in the Reformatory. This passed the legislature in 1903, and has been one of the most successful laws bearing upon the crime problem, operating in Kansas. Under it the penitentiary has been changed from an old type punishment prison to an up-to-date reformatory. The improvement in prison management has kept pace with the change in the criminal code.
Finding children in the jails of Kansas, the society began, in 1903, a campaign for the juvenile court act. The bill to introduce it in the state senate in 1903 was defeated. Then followed the campaign, covering two years, in which there was delivered over two thousand addresses. Over twenty thousand calls were made on individuals in the state during the biennium. Leading philanthropists came to the society’s aid.
The bill passed unanimously both house and senate, and a juvenile court was established in every county in Kansas. The juvenile court system of this state is modeled after that of Colorado.
Taking the Kansas society as a nucleus, the general superintendent accepted calls into Missouri and outlying states. The first step was to organize a league in the Missouri state penitentiary, under Chaplain Geo. J. Warren, D. D. Since then the general superintendent has made twenty-six major and many minor national tours, the longest one being seven thousand miles. During that period, fifteen states have been opened to the work of the society. Of these eleven still maintain the society for the friendless. Ministers of ability and consecration have accepted calls to be superintendents. There are seventeen of these now in full service, with two laymen giving part time.
There are twenty centers of religious activity in penal institutions, originally projected by the society.
When the society was nine years old the first national convention was held in Kansas City, in January, 1910. In 1906 the original society had been expanded from a state organization to one including all the states and territories in the United States. At the first national convention in 1910 the first elective national board was chosen. Previous to this the board of directors of the “Kansas and Missouri division,” (Kansas and Missouri having been united in one unit of territory), was a holding board for all the work in the other states. In November, 1908, the general office was moved from Topeka to Kansas City, the office being in Missouri and the temporary home on the Kansas side of the line. The first national convention came as a natural sequence. It was to more completely develop this slowly evolving organization, so that it would cover all the territories occupied by the living organism—the society itself.
NEW PRISON HEAD NOMINATED IN MASSACHUSETTS.
Warren F. Spalding, Secretary of the Massachusetts Prison Association, has been nominated by Governor Foss, chairman and executive of the Prison Commission, succeeding Mr. Pettigrove. Of the appointment the Boston Transcript says editorially:
The Governor has supplanted one good man with another good man. That Mr. Pettigrove was not to be reappointed was announced by the governor some weeks ago, and yet Mr. Pettigrove’s friends hoped that he would reconsider, as he had done on so many other occasions. There will be regret at the passing of Mr. Pettigrove, who, in the many years in which he has been prison commissioner has served the State well and given his department the benefit of long experience and real ability. The public, while regretting the departure of Pettigrove, will welcome the incoming of Spalding. As secretary of the Massachusetts prison association for many years, and backed by his long experience in prison labor affairs, Mr. Spalding has been one of the foremost prison men of the United States. The association of which he is the secretary has been a leader in progressive ideas on prison management, and in this Mr. Spalding has been the executive officer and initiator. There will be no question whatever of the progressiveness of Mr. Spalding’s administration and of the value of his services to the State.
Mr. Spalding is not unfamiliar to that office, having been secretary of it from 1879 until he resigned in 1888.
Mr. Spalding was born in Hillsboro, N. H., Jan. 14, 1841, but was educated in the public schools of Nashua, N. H. After leaving school he engaged in the furniture business in his native place for several years, and in 1870 came to Boston. There he became connected with the Boston Daily News, and later worked for the Globe and the Commercial Bulletin, both as a reporter and an editor.
Since 1872 he has been a resident of Cambridge and represented a district in that city in the general court during 1894 and 1895. He has been engaged in prison work for many years, having been secretary of the Massachusetts Prison Association since 1890. In 1896 Mr. Spalding was elected to the Cambridge Board of Aldermen. Mr. Spalding was a private in Co. F, 1st New Hampshire Heavy Artillery, during the Civil War and is a member of Post 186, G. A. R.
The governor’s nomination must be approved by the governor’s council.
PRISON SUNDAY.
This day was observed as usual in several states on either the fourth or last Sunday in October. The Connecticut prison association, in issuing a call, directed attention to the fact that the great need in that state is a change in our treatment of petty offenders. “We made great progress in the treatment of these cases when we established the probation service, which keeps many out of jail. But during 1910 there were 10,468 commitments to our county jails. Six thousand and fifty of these, by their own admission, has been in prison before.”
In New York the prison association sent special letters to about 1,500 pastors, 200 of whom responded favorably. Special literature was furnished each pastor.
NEW YORK’S PRISON NEEDS.
In an interview in the New York Sun, O. F. Lewis, general secretary of the prison association of New York, said recently:
“The principal prison needs of this State are a separate cell for each prisoner in State prisons, employment for eight hours a day for all able-bodied men in State prisons, the marketing of all prison-made products in this State to the State and its political subdivisions, such as counties and cities; the introduction and development of industries in our county penitentiaries and jails; the centralization of administration of our penitentiaries and jails under a proper department of the State; the abolition of idleness and filth in many of our jails; the development of the women’s farm and the farm colony for vagrants and tramps; the creation of a separate institution or separate wings of an existing institution for feeble-minded criminals, not the insane criminals—and other things too numerous to mention.
“They had just such a jail situation in England thirty years ago, when the State took over all the local prisons, that correspond to our county jails. To-day all these institutions are under the management of the prison commissioners of England, a body that no one would think of accusing of the least bit of graft, and the institutions are run with regard to the rights of the prisoner and the welfare of society. That is our great need—that the state should manage the correctional institutions within its borders through boards of managers, at least in part.”