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be read by every one interested in the proper study of mankind. It is one of the most humanizing books ever written; and what is essential to the progress of the new penology is the humanization—not of the convict, but of the man outside of the prison. The citizen who has kept within the law must be made to understand that conviction for crime does not necessarily imply that the convicted man is a different order of being. The circumstance that Mr. Osborne, as his book shows us, spent a week with men who among them had committed the blackest crimes written in the calendar, and whom we might have been justified in believing to be totally depraved, and found there kindness, sympathy, helpfulness, unselfish friendship, and, in one instance at least, nobility of soul, is calculated to set people to thinking.

Readers of The Outlook are already acquainted with one outcome of Mr. Osborne's prison experience through the article by Orlando F. Lewis, General Secretary of the Prison Association of New York, entitled "The New Freedom at Auburn Prison," which appeared in The Outlook of August 15, and first informed the outside world of the working of the Mutual Welfare League in that institution. Describing the entertainment got up and carried out by the prisoners themselves on the Fourth of July, Mr. Lewis wrote: "I wish I had the power to make the readers of The Outlook sense in full the enormous significance for both present and future of this recent Fourth of July in Auburn Prison."

Of equal significance was the scene in Sing Sing on the first Sunday of the present month, when, for the first time in the history of the prison, Warden Osborne assembled all the prisoners in the chapel and ordered the guards from the room. (The men came in two divisions of about seven hundred each, the chapel not being large enough to seat them all at once.) Those most familiar with the State prisons had felt that the experiment of self-government as applied in Auburn might be dangerous in Sing Sing, which has always been the most turbulent of these institutions, partly because physical conditions make it impossible to keep the inmates decently comfortable a large part of the time, thus generating bad humor among them, and partly because it is the prison for first offenders, who are always more unruly and more easily incited to violence than men who have become accustomed to obey their keepers.

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Nevertheless, as was the case (pointed out in Mr. Lewis's article) in Auburn, on the Fourth of July there could not have been found a more orderly group of men anywhere between the Atlantic and Pacific than that gathered in the chapel at Sing Sing on Sunday afternoon, December 6.

And less than two years ago the warden of Sing Sing felt it necessary to put a loaded revolver in his pocket when he went into the prison yard! It was only a year ago last July that the prisoners in Sing Sing mutinied and set fire to the shops! It may be remarked incidentally that, again for the first time in the history of Sing Sing, not one infraction of the prison rules was reported for the twenty-four hours ending on the Monday morning following the assemblage of the inmates in the chapel without their guards.

The reason given by Warden Osborne for the dismissal of the guards from the chapel on this Sunday afternoon was that he might discuss alone with the Golden Rule Brotherhood (the Sing Sing organization modeled on the Mutual Welfare League of Auburn) fifteen almost revolutionary changes suggested by the Brotherhood in the prison rules. The most important of these changes was one whereby the prisoners asked that they be permitted to discipline themselves, without initial intervention of warden or keepers. They couched their request thus:

We ask that the system of discipline be materially altered, and that the Executive Committee of the Brotherhood, sitting as a court, shall be allowed to examine all minor cases of discipline and determine, if practicable, the nature and extent of the penalties to be inflicted for violation of the prison rules or the rules of the Brotherhood. It is requested that court be held between the hours of three and four in the afternoon; that the sergeant-at-arms (an officer of the Brotherhood) be authorized to procure the attendance of the witnesses, and that a right of appeal from this court to the Warden's court be given-such appeals to be made by either the inmates whom it is proposed to discipline, or by one of the prison officers appointed by the warden to be present at the hearings. The suggestion is also made that the court may warn and caution the inmate or may suspend him from any or all of the privileges of the Brotherhood, and that while so suspended he shall cease to enjoy his grade privileges, and shall wear on his arm a "bull's eye" the color of his grade disk.

To this Mr. Osborne replied that he was fully in sympathy with the suggestion, and that he would carry the idea further and allow

the Brotherhood to decide all breaches of discipline, with appeal, where the justice of a decision was disputed, to the Warden's court -which is composed of the Warden himself, the principal keeper, and the prison physician. The roar of delighted applause that greeted this announcement was an augury for the successful operation of the new order. Incidentally I saw an old man in prison garb standing in the rear of the chapel move behind a pillar to hide his tears from his cheering companions. Even so short a time ago as a year the suggestion on the part of the convicts of Sing Sing that they be allowed to try one another for infraction of the prison rules would have been regarded as an impudent ebullition of humor.

One of the suggestions made by the Brotherhood, entirely of its own initiative, moved the new Warden considerably. It was that the beds in the dormitory—the former chapel, where the overflow from the cells is accommodated, and the most comfortable place in the prison to sleep-be assigned first to those inmates who are suffering from heart trouble or epilepsy, or who are crippled. "I am greatly pleased," Mr. Osborne told the men, 66 to have this evidence of concern for the general welfare. The places in the dormitory should, of course, be given to those who suffer most from the bad conditions of the cell block. I will have a list made of those who should be changed at once."

Of the suggestions for changes in the prison rules Mr. Osborne immediately approved all but two, and in these instances he merely held matters in abeyance. One of these was the removal of the screens in the visitors' room. At present a visitor to a prisoner is compelled to sit some four feet away from him, with two thicknesses of coarse wire grating between them, so that there is no possibility of their coming into personal contact. This practice is said to have been introduced after a convict had killed his wife, who had come to pay him a visit in Sing Sing. The new Warden told the men that personally he did not consider the screen a necessity, but that it was so old established an institution that he did not feel like abolishing it without further consideration. The other request that he told the men he would think over was with regard to their having the Sunday newspapers in their cells. One reason for not granting this request at once was that to deliver the bulky New York Sunday editions to fifteen hundred men would neces

sitate a great deal of additional Sunday work for the keepers. The request that the prisoners be allowed to see visitors on Sundays and holidays, which had not up to that time been permitted because of the inconvenience it worked to the keepers, was granted by Mr. Osborne, however, with the comment that he fully realized that many of the friends of the inmates of Sing Sing were unable to leave their work on week-days without suffering pecuniary loss. Up to the first Sunday of the month there were many restrictions upon the writing and receiving of letters, and upon the receiving of the small amounts of money prisoners are allowed to expend for tobacco and other such luxuries, which restrictions the Brotherhood asked to have removed. The Warden granted these requests, with the observation that most of the restrictions ought never to have been made. Another rule that Mr. Osborne declared should never have been promulgated, and which he promptly abolished at the request of the men, prevented their receiving sweaters and shoes from friends or relatives outside of the prison. "As gray is the fashionable color here," he said, referring to the prison uniform, "ask your friends to send you gray sweaters, however. As to shoes-the more you get from outside, the less expense the State will be under." The Warden also, at the request of the men, allowed them to change the time for the weekly moving-picture show and entertainment from Saturday to Sunday afternoon, in order that they might have an extra hour out of their cells on the day of rest. He further promised them an exhaust fan in the mattress shop, where they complained that the floating lint and dust produced bad sanitary conditions.

Thus in an hour on that Sunday afternoon three weeks ago the new Warden made life in Sing Sing immeasurably better worth living for the hundreds of men within the walls and for many hundreds more to come. The heartiness of the applause of his audience as one after another of their requests was granted was sufficient evidence of unqualified appreciation of his brotherly efforts on their behalf. They even cheered enthusiastically when he gave his reasons for reserving his decision with regard to the screen and the Sunday newspapers. No speaker ever had an audience under more complete control than had Mr. Osborne this aggregation of crimenals at Sing Sing. They responded to his every mood, which was continually changing

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from seriousness to humor, from admonition to appeal. If he began to speak before laughter or applause he might previously have evoked had subsided, a warning "s-s-s-h!" rose at once from every part of the chapel, followed by immediate silence and eager attention.

There is one outcome of Mr. Osborne's self-inflicted term in Auburn Prison which he did not anticipate when he began the ordeal; that is, he has won the respect as well as the affection of his prison-going friends—as he terms them in and out of their presence. Through the interchange of prisoners between Auburn and Sing Sing all the inmates of both institutions have come to know that he never shirked his prison tasks; that he did not-as one of them expressed it—" sneak up to the warden's table " for even one meal during his week's incarceration; and that during that period he actually lived their life. with all its hardships and privations. The fact that he did two weeks' work with one of the prison highway gangs last July, laboring at road-making eight hours a day under the blazing sun-also something of an ordeal for a man of middle age unaccustomed to manual labor—and sleeping and eating in the convict camp, has not lost him anything in the estimation of the men in the State prisons. Further, these men have acquitted Mr. Osborne on the charge they first brought against him, that of being a reformer (in which they, in their blindness see the last refuge of an unsuccessful politician), all unaware that he has already brought about greater reforms in our prison system than any other one man.

Mr. Osborne's intererest in the prison problem did not begin with his determination to find out by personal experience how prisoners live. As long ago as 1906 he suggested this plank for the Democratic State platform : "A more enlightened system of justice which shall include the administration of both county jails and State prisons; a system which shall aim at reform rather than punishment; which shall encourage those unfortunate fellow-men who have broken the laws to learn to adapt themselves to the proper conditions of organized society." As a director of the George Junior Republic, which was successful in its training of wild and mischievous boys, he had been first brought into touch with the prison system, and he afterward became interested in the Elmira Reformatory and paid visits there when Mr. Brockway was superintendent.

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Quite by chance," Mr. Osborne says, I became acquainted with a certain prisoner in Sing Sing, and, through him, became interested in other prisoners there and in Auburn. In due time I began to appreciate the importance of the general prison problem and the difficulties of its solution."

The new Warden of Sing Sing finds fault with the law in that it not only proceeds upon the theory of revenge, but that it attempts also to make a nicely graduated system by which the exact amount of guilt in the offender must be weighed and determined, and the exact and proper amount of revenge administered-for so much crime, so much punishment. "A very few moments of serious consideration," he says, "will show us that in doing this the law undertakes an impossibility, and an impossibility which tends to bring the whole system into disfavor if not contempt. It is absolutely impossible for any human being-for any number of human beings-to weigh and determine the guilt of each criminal by the mere facts of his crime. It is still more impossible to gauge the amount of criminality in this one as compared with that one; these are things which transcend the powers of humanity; they rest with God alone.'

"Who can determine the exact amount of responsibility which each one of us carries ?" asks Mr. Osborne. "Who can estimate the inheritance, the early training, the effect of environment, the influence of others, the results of unforeseen circumstances, in order to find the exact amount of real blame deserved by the perpetrators of each and every crime and the relative amount of punishment it would be fair to give to each? So, as this is manifestly impossible, the law practically ignores the whole psychological problem, and confines itself almost entirely to the crudest possible set of facts in each case. But it so happens that the crude facts are the least important and the psychological facts are the most important in determining the real guilt of the criminal."

To illustrate this point, Mr. Osborne cites the cases of two noted criminals of fictionBill Sikes and Don José. "The very souls of these men, the brutal burglar in Dickens's 'Oliver Twist' and the young soldier in Mérimée's Carmen '-best known through Bizet's wonderful music-have been laid bare for us by the genius of these authors," he says. "The one, a hardened ruffian, the product of the streets, brought up as a burglar,

The

has murdered his mistress in cold blood because he learns that she has revealed some of the wickedness of him and his gang. other, a rather weak young fellow of good impulses and good training, who has been entrapped and his career ruined by a heartless woman, has killed her in a moment of wild passion. What possible affinity is there between these two cases? It is true that they have both committed murder in the first degree, but what then? If you should set Bill Sikes free, he would return at once to his old life of theft and murder; he would continue a criminal, for he knows no better. If you should liberate José, he would go back to his mother's cottage, his mad passion for Carmen all burned out, and soon he would be married to his old flame, the good girl Machaela, and settled down to a useful, lawabiding farmer's life. To place two such men in one and the same category, to deem them guilty of the same crime, is to shut our eyes to all the facts of human nature, while to mete out to them the same punishment is to be ridiculous as well as inhuman. Yet under the present theory of the law such things are inevitable. Nor are they the worst. One man, a habitual criminal, prepared to commit murder if need be, is caught at burglary and, after a few years' imprisonment, returns to prey again upon society, while another, inflamed with unaccustomed drink and passion, or overcome with the effects of some baleful drug, fires a pistol for the first and only time in his life, and is sentenced to life imprisonment."

Mr. Osborne will work for the abolishment of Sing Sing and for the erection of a new prison on a farm as near Ossining as possible, so that the prisoners may be put to work on the buildings. He told the Golden Rule Brotherhood during his first talk with its members that he would take great pleasure in lighting the fuse that would dynamite the cell block at Sing Sing. The new Warden believes that convicts should receive sufficient pay for their work in prison to support their families outside, instead of the pitiful one and a half cents per day that is now their wage. Every man in prison feels that the balance is on the wrong side," he says; "and it is. Let us admit that the State has a right to exile him; but has it a right to deprive him of his earning power or of his right of speech, or to lock him in a stone cell seven feet long, six and one-half feet high, and three feet and four inches wide, where dampness reeks

from the walls, and where he is almost certain to suffer disease? My cell at Auburn was palatial compared with the cells at Sing Sing, for it was six inches longer and six inches higher. The cells at Sing Sing are not fit to keep pigs in. There are twelve hundred cells and fifteen hundred prisoners. The place is so damp that it sends a chill to your bones, the food has been execrable, and the labor-well, what is to be expected? Slave labor is always inefficient. Any one who thinks that slavery is abolished need only look at Sing Sing. What is slavery but being forced to work under inhuman conditions and without pay?

"Discard the old idea that there is a criminal type," says Mr. Osborne. "The old theory of Lombroso that certain characteristics and traits denoted the criminal has been exploded by actual tests in England. Convicts do not differ physically from their fellow-men, and from my personal experience they do not differ in other respects either. There are no mental or moral criminals. I find the same characteristics inside and outside a prison."

The foundation of our prison system, Mr. Osborne believes, should rest on these three principles: First, the law must decree, not punishment, but temporary exile from society until the offender has proved by his conduct that he is fit to return; second, society must brand no man as a criminal, but aim solely to reform the mental conditions under which a criminal act has been committed; third, the prison must be an institution in which every inmate shall have the largest practicable amount of individual freedom, because "it is liberty alone that fits men for liberty."

While the new Warden of Sing Sing is a sympathetic man, he is not a sentimentalist. He uses the "big, big D " on occasions where unusual emphasis may be necessary. He is

a fine type of physical manhood; and, while his countenance is of an ascetic cast, the mouth is humorous. He smiles frequently during his conversations with his wards, but when the smile freezes on his face he does not need to frown to let the other man know that he has made a mistake. Mr. Osborne is fortunate in having as his deputy and col league Charles H. Johnson, one of the leading social workers of the State, who has for over a decade been superintendent of orphan asylums, and is thoroughly trained in the de tails of institutional management.