Nor is the last Legislature to be commended for what it failed to do.
In his report of November 10, 1909, Mr. Bromley Wharton, General Agent and Secretary of the Board of Public Charities, called attention to the needs of the county jails in these words: “This is a matter which has received serious attention at the hands of your Board. The prevailing system of government of the county jails is, in many respects, unsatisfactory. In most of the counties the jails are in charge of the sheriff, who, as a rule, knows little or nothing of hygiene or sanitation. Few jails have yards for exercise, or workshops, which results in the prisoners loafing in the corridors, smoking and playing cards. The filthy and unsanitary condition of some of the jails causes the long-term prisoners to welcome their transfer to the penitentiary.”
At the subsequent session of the Legislature a bill, approved by the Board, was introduced designed to remedy the unsatisfactory and often disgraceful conditions existing in the prisons of various counties, and placing the control and management of all the county prisons and jails and the inmates thereof in Boards of Prison Inspectors to be named by the courts, one inspector to be a physician, and another, if desired, a woman. This carefully drawn bill, which, if it had become a law, would have inaugurated a most salutary reform where it is most needed in our penal system, passed the House, but was killed in the Senate. It was re-introduced in the last Legislature, but never even came out of committee.
A joint resolution, likewise approved by the Board of Charities, providing for the appointment of a commission to consider and report upon the advisability of establishing a state system of workhouses for misdemeanants, so that county jails and prisons could be used solely for the imprisonment of persons awaiting trial or otherwise detained, and for convicts sentenced to brief terms, met a similar fate. So also an act authorizing the pensioning of deserving superannuated employés of penal, reformatory and charitable institutions of the State.
Another bill, strongly approved by the Board, but which after its introduction never again saw the light of day, provided for the establishing of a State Reformatory for Women between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. That such an institution is most urgently needed is only too well known to charity workers throughout the State. It is almost incredible that such a wealthy and otherwise progressive State like Pennsylvania should be considered too poor to make at least a beginning of an institution of this kind. Were the people of this Commonwealth familiar with the work done and the results achieved by such an institution as the Massachusetts Reformatory Prison for Women, they would compel their legislators to take action. Great movements in behalf of the social welfare can after all be carried through only when there is an intelligent, widespread and persistent public sentiment behind them.