St. Johnsbury Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1867-1919, 1880-01-23
Letter from Cooperstown, N. Y.
JANUARY 20, 1880.

JANUARY 20, 1880.
THE MOVEMENT FOR REFoRMATORIEs.
Ia a previous letter l wrote you that
an effort is about to be made to do
away with the practice of incarcerating
women and girls in the county jails and
state prisons of this State for all sorts of
offences, and to have Reformatories es-
tablished in which those not too fargone
in transgression may have some chance
of regaining a lost reputation and char
acter. Miss Cooper of this place, whom
| mentioned before, is at the head of
this movement.
HER INSTRUCTIONS.
She first presents facts as to how the
plan works in states where it has been
adopted, both as to the saving of money
and the reforming of the unfortunate
classes on whose behalf she is striving.
The Indiana Reformatory for women
and girls has been in operation six
years. There are two distinct depart
ments-the wOmen's prison and the
girls reformatory. All the women
convicts in the state are sent here.
The two departments contained last
summer about two hundred women and
girls. The entire management of both
departments is exclusively in the hands
of experienced women.
The reformatory girls are
THE WORK, AND THE WORKING OF IT.
The women and girls do the entire
labers of the establishment, all the gar
dening, attend to five cows, two horses
and a carriage, and take in much work
on contract, knitting socks by thous-
ands of pairs. A school is taught dur
ing the day, the girls leaving work to
attend it. In the penal department the
school is kept in the evening, FIVE
mouths of the year. The girls as well
as the women are generally ignorant,
but the school has been quite successful.
Eighty-twO per cent of the women
pllSOuoiS HoiO nave uccu IoIOIuleU, anu
are now living respectable lives in the
world. Of the reformatory girls, sew
enty-twO per cent. have been saved.
THIS MISS COOPER PKAYs FOR
A petition to be sent to the legislature
from many counties in the state, and
signed by thousands, represents "That
during the year 1873, fiom fifty couD-
ties in the state, not including the coun-
ties of New York and Kings, five hun
dred and one women between the ages
OF fifteen and thirty years, committed
to the county jails and penitentiaries,
many for the second, third and fourth
time; that many of these women, when
not under sentence of Imprisonment,
are still supported by the public in the
county poor houses; that many of them
are already the mothers of children
when they cannot maintain, and who
inherit from their parents tendencies to
pauperism, drunkenness, insanity and
crime, which render them also depend
ent upon the tax payers, and that this
dependence continues without inter-
ruption from generation to generation
that, in most of the county jails and in
some of the penitentiaries, men and
women, the young and the old, are i'm
prisoned together.
Wo therefore, earnestly pray that
your Honorable bodies will consider
what are the best means for checking
the entailed decentralization of female
prisoners and paupers, and relieve our
county jails of convicted women by
providing separate institutions for their
detention and reformation, to be under
the charge of officers of their own sex.
And your petitioners will ever pray
Governor COrnell's dig at the poor
houses and, jails, in his inaugural mes
sage, will not hurt the cause of these