The American Prison Association met in annual convention in the city of Richmond, Va., November 14-19, 1908, with an attendance of five hundred and twenty registered members and visitors. All but ten States of the Union were represented, together with the District of Columbia, Canada and Cuba. Pennsylvania had thirty-nine representatives to its credit, ten of whom were members of The Pennsylvania Prison Society, including its President, Vice President and the Secretary of its Acting Committee.
The sessions began on Saturday evening in the auditorium of the Jefferson Hotel. After the invocation by the Rev. Russell Cecil, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, addresses of welcome were made by the Hon. D. C. Richardson, Mayor of Richmond, and the Hon. Claude A. Swanson, Governor of Virginia. These were followed by a brief response by Prof. Charles R. Henderson and the address of the President of the Association, the Rev. Dr. J. L. Milligan.
At 3:30 P. M. the conference sermon was preached in the First Baptist Church by its pastor, the Rev. George W. McDaniel, D. D. It made a profound impression, and is here reproduced in full.
“He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives.”--Isaiah 61:1-3; Luke 4:18.
The eminent theorists and practical exponents of enlightened prison administration composing this national congress are arousing public sentiment to a necessity for an improvement of the physical and moral conditions in prisons and creating a growing interest in discharged prisoners.
Their philosophic conception and wise application of penological principles are hastening the abolition of cruel punishments, the substitution of reformatory for retributive systems, and the adoption of preventive instead of punitive measures.
The fruits of their labors are seen in the establishment of juvenile courts, the appointment of police matrons, the separation of the sexes and also of new from old, and incidental from habitual offenders; the humane treatment of the criminally insane; the study of the criminal, his history and environment; probation without imprisonment for first offenders, with friendly surveillance; the recognition of labor as a disciplinary and reformatory agent; the indeterminate sentence of the prisoner and his commitment to salutary influences; the abolition of public executions and the substitution of electrocution for hanging, and the establishment of higher standards of prison construction and administration.