THE IDEAL OF A TRUE PRISON SYSTEM FOR A STATE
By Z[EBULON]. R[EED]. BROCKWAY
Superintendent of the Detroit House of Correction
6. SEPARATE REFORMATORIES FOR WOMEN are also necessary. These should be under the immediate management of women, and that exclusively. The movement in this direction in Massachusetts and Indiana is worthy of all praise. Wayward women must be won to virtue by their own sex, if they are won at all. Build homes for these, eighty per cent of whom "are what they are through no fault of theirs;" cultivate their natural love for home life; furnish them with womanly affection; fit them to earn an honest and sufficient support; find them employment and a friend; follow them with friendly acts and faithful guardianship, and fear not for their future. Full fifty per cent of them (possibly more) may be reformed, when full control, for an indeterminate time, is vested in a suitable board of guardians, and the family system supplants prison-houses for females.
The success of the prison system through these institutions will be governed much by the efficiency and intelligence of the state police or agents of the board, to be located in each county, before alluded to; for the supervision of prisoners discharged conditionally will devolve upon them, and the duty of rendering regular reports of their character and conduct, until absolute release is ordered; also to re-arrest and return to custody such as slip through unworthily, as it is expected some will do, developing again publicly the instincts of their diseased and degraded natures.
[NOTE.—The limits of this paper forbid any description of the establishments and instruments of a properly organized poor-system.]