Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1931-01-04

that win house prisoners engaged on road work,
reforestation swamp drainage and the like
costs only $50 man. Which amounts to an
enormous saving to the taxpayers when it is
recalled that no less than 20 per cent of all
convicts can be trusted without bolts and bars,
and that further percentage is safe with
what is known as medium rity-working
outdoors in the daytime, locked in at night,
but not necessarily in bastille. So New
Jersey, in building accommodations for 1000
more prisoners to take care of the present
phenomenal rate of increase, is going to save
the tidy sum of 100000 on construction alone.
say ION construction alone" because prison
farms are virtually self-maintaining after the
first year, whereas bastilles are proverbially in
the red.
From the psychiatric point Of view the find
ings show that AZ per cent Of the prisoners
show psychosis; 80 per cent constitu-
tional detectives; 1s per cent are chronic alco-
holics; 2 per cent are drug addicts, with the
remaining 5 per cent split up among 10 CLASSIC
fcations ranging from "psychopathic person-
atty to "paranoid condition"
These findings a result of the most thorough
going analysis ever made of the prisoner mind
and its quirks as basis for understanding how
to deal with him, are being studied with great
interest by other States several Of which have
classihcationS of their own in the making.
Massachusetts, especially, where the very able
commissioner of correction, DIR. A. Warren
Stearns, himself a psychiatrist and authority
on convict types has under way system SIM
liar In purpose. And New York State no less,
where the Commission on Prison Administers
ton and Construction, headed by DR.. Walter N.
Thayer (also psychiatrist of repute4, is going
at classification from the ground up, and so
with other States.
Interest in New Jerseys working model"
win be brought to a focus ct q highly impor-
tant conference of Eastern and Southern States
which opened recently at Raleigh, N. c., under
the auspices of the National Prison Emergency
Committee. In fact one of the main purposes
for which this conference is assembled is the
co-ordinating Of experience in the studying and
handling of prisoners in the face Of congested
conditions and the difficulty of providing the
best training and employment Classification
along New Jersey lines, or any lines that
bring results, will be urged as the crux of the
situation.
As now operating in the State where Mr..
Morrow inaugurated it, classification means
that each prisoner is sorted and graded accord
ing to what he is, rather than according to
what he did. The old way-and it was the
only way then possibie-was to consider new
arrival on the basis of his commitment order.
If he came tagged -Four Years for Man-
slaughter" that pgeonholed him as to his crime.
but it did not give any hint as to what sort Of
work he should be tried at, nor what sort of
cellmate he would prove to be. So the only
thing to do was to try him at one thing and
another, hoping to get some results out of him
before his term was up and he was turned
loose upon society again. For of all those who
matriculate about three-fourths are graduated
within three years, very few of them cum laude.
As to the cell he was assigned to, there was