FEMALE REFORMATORY.
Mr. EDWINS, from the Special Committee appointed to investigate the Female Reformatory, submitted the following report:
THE REPORT.
Mr. SPEAKER--Your Special Committee, raised to investigate the Female Prison and Reformatory and inquire into certain charges of uncommon cruelty to the imates thereof, as published in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Chicago Times and divers other papers and persons, beg leave to make the following report and submit the entire evidence given before the Committee to the House:
Your Committee, after the examination of over seventy witnesses under oath, find that such publications were made without any sufficient foundation in fact, and the charges therein contained are no sustained by the evidence.
The Committee have given the matter close attention, and have subjected the witnesses to a vigorous examination, and are of the opinion that the discipline of the Institution is maintained as far as practicable by kindness and appeals to the moral sense of the inmates, and resort is had to punishment only when other efforts have failed. The management do not attempt to conceal the fact that from time to time punishment is resorted to both upon the penal and reformatory sides of the Institution, and they avow that sometimes such punishment as been severe, but that the same has been rendered necessary, by the circumstances of the case, and has not been out of proportion to the offense for which it was inflicted; and in our opinion, this claim of the man-
page: 225[View Page 225]agers is fully sustained by the evidence, and that the modes of punishment resorted to are reformatory in their character and in the main, well calculated to restrain and check offenders from a repetition of the offense.
We are of the opinion that with the number of officers (which we consider insufficient) in the Institution and the means at their command, the management has been all that could reasonably hav been expected.
We can commend the Board of Managers of the Institution and the Superintendent for the patience, wisdom and vigor with which they have conducted its affairs, and we report that considering all the surroundings, much more has been accomplished in the way of reformation than could have been anticipated,
Your Committee are fully aware of the fact that Indiana is entitled to the proud position that she contains within her borders the only Female Prison in the world governed, guarded and financed by females, and when we see its condition from a sanitary and moral standpoint, its freedom from political convulsions, its surroundings so wholly in consonance with the female instinct and character of what is and should be womanly, we can not but express our admiration of the pioneers of such a movement. Punishment by the bath and water we find has been abolished.
We would earnestly recommend the abolishment of corporal punishment on the naked persons of young females, and recommend in its stead confinement in the lone cell.
And we are constrained to say that in our opinion the system which provides for the placing of young children in the same institution, and in contact with older girls, who have become hardened and degraded by vicious and polluting practices, if not by commission of actual crimes, is to be condemned.
And we accordingly report it as our earnest conviction that as soon as practicable the State should provide an entirely separate Home for all children under the age of fourteen years, now intended be provided for by the reformatory department of this Institution, so that, while its inmates, they shall not be contaminated by its associations, and ever after leaving it be the subject of reproachful remark on account thereof.
Respectfully submitted. EDWINS, Chairman, MARSHALL, J. P. CARR, HENRY C. MEREDITH. I agree with above report except as to mode of punishment. D. MCCLURE.
The report was concurred in.
