The cover image was produced by the transcriberand is placed in the public domain.
VOLUME I, No. 3. MARCH, 1911
THE REVIEW
NATIONAL PRISONERS’ AID ASSOCIATION
AT 135 EAST 15th STREET, NEW YORK CITY.
| E. F. Waite, President. F. Emory Lyon, Vice President. O. F. Lewis, Secretary and Editor Review. | E. A. Fredenhagen, Chairman Ex. Committee. Charles Parsons, Member Ex. Committee. | G. E. Cornwall, Member Ex. Committee. Albert Steelman, Member Ex. Committee. |
A VALLEY OF LIFE[A]
If some one of the prison officials of New York were to suggest theturning out of hundreds of the prisoners on Blackwell’s Island and SingSing into a colony in the fertile valley along the Hudson or the Mohawkriver, under the care of a superintendent and a half dozen assistantswithout an armed guard, the inhabitants not only of New York state butof all the states in the Union would immediately hold mass meetingsof protest and set their political organizations to work to have theofficial making the suggestion removed from office and incarcerated inan insane asylum. This would be the action taken in this far advanced,civilized country.
Yet in the Philippine islands this very thing has been done, and donewith success. It has been done with a people said by leading officialsof this country and other countries to be incapable of self-government.
To be explicit, there are today 1,423 prisoners, or “colonists,” asthey are now termed—prisoners of all classes and sorts, serving termsof from five years to life imprisonment, and for crimes from pettythievery to murder—living without a guard in a small, fertile valleyalong the river of one of the islands in the archipelago just south ofLuzon, the largest island, of which Manila is the capital.
Here the 1,423 convicts live, not alone, isolated as the prisonersof Siberia are, but much the same as they would have lived had theynever committed a crime against the community—in peace, prosperityand happiness, with their families, engaged in the pursuit ofagriculture-and the only guns on the place are those mounted at thesuperintendent’s office for saluting purposes and the “six-shooter” thesuperintendent keeps locked up with his cash in the safe of the penalcolony office.
There is a guard on the reservation, but it is only a police guard, andthe only arms its members carry are a small policeman’s club, which ismore ornamental than useful.
With this lack of military display on the part of the authorities,there has been but one outbreak or attempt at escape, and that occurredsoon after the colony was first established and before the valley hadbeen drained and rid of malaria and cholera. Sin