His Brother's Keeper

His Brothers' Keeper

TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS IN SING SING --Lewis E. Lawes--Long &; Smith ($3). Not chance but a childhood in Elmira, half a mile from the New York State Reformatory, brought Warden Lawes to his prison-keeping career. On Saturday afternoons, from a safe distance, the boy watched the Reformatory inmates at work. They did not look very unhappy or dangerous to him. And the uniformed guards were things of beauty, in their way. At 17 he was in an Army uniform himself. Three years of drab post-Spanish-American War service led him to seek a career elsewhere. Why not be a prison guard? Friends suggested dog-catching instead, but he was serious. He passed the civil service examination, was ordered to report at Clinton Prison at Dannemora, then known as the Siberia of America. After a tedious, solitary trip he found himself one day standing on the deserted railroad platform, surrounded by dense forests, high mountains. The desolate atmosphere made his heart sink. When was the next train out? Luckily for U. S. penology, not until the next morning. Up to the grey silent buildings with the heavy bars walked Lawes alone. The gates clanged behind him, and he was in.

"Tread softly and carry a big stick," were his first instructions, for the inmates were desperate men, and their treatment was desperate too. Total silence was enforced, the work-gang shuffled from & back to their cells. But it was from these same creatures who once were men, Old Chappleau at Clinton, and Mike the Rat Catcher later on, that Warden Lawes learned new penological lessons behind the parallel bars.

Transferred to Auburn, then to Elmira, he saw the Penal System in all its severity, saw that severity alone would never work. After eight years of it, he obtained leave of absence, began to study Social Reform. Soon after, he was appointed overseer of the New York City Reformatory at Hart's Island, in 1915, and then began his true career as a liberator within bounds. After a year he had moved his Reformatory boys away from Hart's Island, up the State to New Hampton, housed them in barracks without surrounding walls, built a New Reformatory. He successfully introduced the honor system, even let his prisoners take part in the filming of a military movie, without guards. None tried to escape; and Lawes's fame spread. In 1920 he became Warden at Sing Sing.

"The quickest way to get out of Sing Sing is to come in as warden," was the saying in those days. Warden Lawes has stayed twelve years. In that time he has built a new prison, developed sports, introduced, among other things, a flower garden, even a bird house; organized an industrial system that turns out some 70 articles, turns over some $3.000,000 annually. Prison life at best is bad, thinks Warden Lawes, but men are always men. His central idea is to set his prisoners to doing work useful to themselves, instead of simply doing time. Segregation of prisoners according to mental types he advocates, capital punishment he attacks. He has been present at the legal death of 150 men and one woman but he has never seen an execution. Most of all he advocates a change in the public attitude towards crime, for, as a prisoner once told him, "When the public makes up its mind that a fellow is bad, he will become bad."

Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing is the May choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

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