The age-herald., 1901-02-18
PENiTENTlARY DEPARTMENT.
Defense of the Administration During
 Governor Johnston's Term.

To the Editor of the ge-Herald.
 The archives of the State are to be in- creased by the large volume of testimony taken by the late joint committee of the Geenral Assembly on penitentiary.
 - This testimony, most unfortunately, is all ex parte. There was no trial because there was no defendant at bar There were no witnesses, save the witnesses called by the committee, and there was no cross-examination of these,
 To acquire, through the work of the committee, a comprehensive knowledge of the administration of the penitentiary was the duty of the General Assembly, and to facilitate this purpose was the legitimate limit, no more and no less, of the province of the committee. To lodge in the archives of the State a huge print ed volume of ex parte testimony, with comments by a report, intended to arraign the conduct of a State institution as a blot upon four years of civil government, may not afflict the archives with an in fiimity In this instance, but such a lodg ment Is not of that essential feature of State archives, namely, a feature without suspicion, which is tantamount to solemn judicial pronouncement of the de- posting agent of the State.
 There is evidence in tho premises, long known to the public and which the com mittee therefore did not discover For in stance the pententiary has in four years past added 8 large fund, about $s5.ooo, to the cash in the State treasury, a contin- gent larger from this source than ever known before. The penttentiary in the last four years has been administered by a greatly reduced corps of officers and employees, on salaries less per capita, than any like institution of corresponding proportions in the United States. For example, the three penitentiary planta- tions of Alabama, with four prisons con- taining between four hundred and five hundred prisoners, employed in the ag- gregate, say, thirty-two men, wnrdcns, doctors, guards, bookkeepers, etc. This does not include the employees of the Ala bnma cotton mill at the Speigner planta- ton. A recent official report of New England penitentiary gave a total of one hundred and forty prisoners confined un- der twenty-two officers and employees. In
 
 on the plantations at work, over thou sands of acres of land, while in the other case the prisoner laborers are nearly all confined within narrow walls. In Ala bama there has been one officer and em- ploye to, say. fourteen prisoners but in the other state there Is reported one to, say. six prisoners. Where an Alabama guard gets $36 per month, the guard in the other case gets $45; the Alabama prison warden gets, say. 5000 salary but the other gets $250O.
 The committee reports an ignoble agri- culture conducted by the penitentiary, yet this. too, is a borrowed fact and existed in tangible If not disgraoeful evidence already filed in the archives. Governor Johnston testified to this fact throughout the whole four years of his administra- tion. He went so far at length as to or der the immediate and final abandon men. of one of the plantations of two thousand acres of exteemely fertile land, highly improved. MT. Trapp, in his last biennial report, emphasized the Govern or's action by recommending that the State shall, at once, sell all the peniten- LldTy ldiiuS dilu llS CottoH iiitii, dDdIl- don the State employment of convicts in( agricultural pursuits or manufactures and degrade the penal system to a mere hir- ing out agency, standing at the county jail doors and letting out the convicts to private bidders for their labor. The com mittee may be excited and impressive upon the general subject of the penite-- tiary agriculture and its grovelling char acter but the committee must, at last, rely upon the records of the Convict Bu- reau, already on file, for proof of it's al- legations. To print the testimony taken on this point by the committee places the archives under double burden of tax and incumbers the crowded shelves with an unnecessary and unproftable addition to their pre-existing load.
 But, let it not be for a moment inti- mated, here or elsewhere, that the hon. orable joint committee kept close shore. The committee went out far into the tempestuous water. The variations of the needle that guided 1t, the non-workable condition of the rudder of the craft In which they took passage are printed as facts, bound and Stored in the archives of Alabama for future historians to ponder