The Idaho Republican. [volume] (Blackfoot, Idaho) 1904-1932, 1911-11-03

upon the road II hardens their mus
Giles, takes the minds from the crime
which they have committed, makes
them think better things, and when
you give a reward of some kind to
them, it gives them hope and an as
piration which they can get only from
open air exercise, so necessary to
health. (Applause.)
And the amount that is spent by
physicians treating these prisoners Is
reduced to a minimum when they go
upon the public road.
We have been having in our state
for some years little construction
work by convicts, but we never took
them away from the penitentiary.
They were just simply working
around where the penitentiary was
located-two or three or five or six
miles from there-and we were
afraid that they would escape, and
they did escape; and so a problem
came to us as to how we could, at
a minimum cost, get those men to
work and yet not escape, and
so we conceived the idea that If we
could pass little law giving these
convicts a Communication or dimin-
ution of sentence of one-third of the
time which they worked, or ten days
out of every thirty days of work,
that 1t might solve the problem, and
SO two years and half ago the leg.
islature of the state of Colorado pass
ed such law providing that persons
who were confined in the peniten-
tiary, when designated by the war
den. could 60 outside of the peni-
Tertiary walls and work upon the
public highways, and for his work
could receive diminution Of SEN
tence of ten days for every thirty
days worked.
We have warden out there who
is a most excellent man. He loves
prison work. He has attached to
him every man that is in the prison.
He is firm and yet at the same time
h has never yet applied the extreme
punishments usually meted out in
state prisons. He is man who has
looked into and studied the character
of each of the men. We give in Col
orado a certain amount of time for
good conduct, which is considerable.
in sentence, but this greater
amount of one-third of the time being
diminished was something that was
somewhat experimental. The result
was that we placed on the road some
men in gangs, sometimes close to the
p nitentiary and other times forty,
fifty and sometimes two hundred
miles from the penitentiary. These
men are not guarded in the day time
at all. There are two superintend-
ents that have control of one gang
of say sixty men. They are not lock-
ed, and inasmuch as we have a great
deal of rock work, it takes men of a
skilled mind to designate, to let them
know just exactly how the work is to
be done and where to work. The
result is we have one man, and he
a convict himself, who guards the
camp at might.
The camp is composed Of tents =
no wire guards around it, not fenced
in, no enclosure whatever. They
generally start the camp right where
the work begins, or where they are
going to start their work on the
road, and they generally drift about
half mile to a mile and half from
that before they move the camp. The
result is that there is nothing to con-
troll these men if they want to make
break, but they have never yet
made a break. One or two have
strayed away but the warden of the
penitentiary reported it to me at the
end of my first term that the net loss
from men escaping from road gangs
was simply two. There had been
more than. that, but they had either
come back or been captured and
brought back. We have had num-
Der of them come back. We have
had them write to the warden that
they wanted to come back and serve
out their term, and what has been
peculiar about it is that the form
that the warden goes through seems
to impress the convict more than
even the crime he committed to get |
in the penitentiary. The warden
makes him hold up his right hand
and swear that under no circum-
stances will he ever attempt to es-
cane and that ha will nrevant II noc