THE NEW HAMPTON FARMS
By Philip Klein
“There is plenty of room at the table, and we’ll have a bunk to spare too, I guess,” was the answer to my request to be taken care of at the New Hampton Farms that I was about to inspect. It would have sounded like a joke to me had I not been acquainted with the plans for the farm from the very beginning. The answer was to be taken literally. It is nothing new in this country to take prisoners outside the institution walls; to leave them unguarded at their work; for officers to talk with them as man to man; for them to live in temporary, frail quarters. But the New Hampton Farms goes beyond that. Its thirty-odd young inmates and four of the five ‘officers,’ including the superintendent, sleep in the same bunkhouse, and eat at the same tables. The bunkhouse is as rough as can be, the eating arrangements no less primitive. The whole physical outfit of the farm is a striking demonstration of how much practical genius and invincible enthusiasm can make of the most inadequate means, of the poorest equipment. Yet even this is not the striking feature of this institution.
The City Reformatory for Misdeamenants of the City of New York is situated on an island of about 100 acres, within the limits of the City of New York. Its buildings are inadequate and overcrowded, its officers insufficient, its methods largely repressive. It receives misdeamenants between the ages of 16 and 30. On the same island is situated a branch of the Workhouse of New York City, where the most useless of the city’s criminal population is confined. To prevent intercourse between the inmates of the two institutions is well nigh impossible. As a result of all this, the Reformatory has hardly deserved its name. After long and painful efforts, the purchase of a 600 acre farm in Orange County, 60 miles from New York, was effected, in order to remove the Reformatory to the country, and to make it worthy of its name. So there was the farm, but without appropriations for building the institution. And the overcrowding at the Reformatory was worse than ever.
It was not only a question of relieving the congestion, though that certainly was a large factor; nor was it chiefly to remove the Reformatory from the vicious proximity of the Branch Workhouse. The plans that had been developed for the New Reformatory were based on penological principles quite at variance with those necessarily carried out at the present location. The new institution would have to permit the utmost possible classification and individualization; but above all it would have to establish the possibility of practical inspiration of its inmates by the encouragement of self-respect, by the exercise of individual responsibility, by healthful contact between officer and inmate. And in many other ways it was to strike out into new treatment of reformable young men. To this ambition for a reformatory on such lines was added the possession of a large fertile farm, the approach of spring—and the enthusiastic propositions to Commissioner Katherine B. Davis from the present superintendent of the Farm, Robert Rosenbluth.
“Let us build up the spirit with the institution” was his plan in brief. What was this spirit to be? “Just what are the essentials of your experiment?” I asked Mr. Rosenbluth. “It is,” I said, “a commonplace, of course, to talk of the advantages of agricultural occupation, of fresh air, hard work, and ‘honor system’; and the economic advantage of utilizing, instead of wasting, a good farm for a whole season surely could not have created in you the amount of enthusiasm which you are carrying into this thing; after all, even though you do produce quite as much as $10,000 worth of farm product, it will hardly cover your expenditures for the year.”
“You are right,” he said, “those things are all very well but they are not fundamental. None of those things counts a heap towards reformation; the honor system is simply a more sensible, more effective method—it’s a fairer method of preserving discipline, an easier method of running your institutions. It does not touch your real man. It is all a matter of habit. Now take those Dannemora prison fellows with whom I worked in the forests around the prison; they were repeaters, many of them hardened evil doers. And take these fellows here—young fellows—and just hear them talk among themselves, as I had a chance to hear them talk, night after night—nothing but crime. It’s an obsession. Naught else has any interest for them. If it is not their own exploits, then it is the latest from the newspapers (for you don’t suppose all the regulations and punishments on earth can keep the newspapers out of a prison). The only thing they are interested in is crime. Everybody talks crime. How can you reform a fellow whose mental habit is crime? My idea is this: You have got to change their topic of conversation. You’ve got to coax their minds to a higher level. And you can’t just tug at them from above. You have to be taken into their community, into their confidence, you’ve got to be one of them. You must push their thoughts upward from within instead of pulling from above.
“My officers are all first class men. They are graduates of schools of agriculture or forestry. And they have all lived in close contact with men. They sleep in the same room, on the same rough bunk in our three-decker, go to bed with the boys, rise with them. Their food is exactly the same—neither different nor more. They do their day’s work just like the boys. Their hardship is no less than that of the boys. And the boys know that and feel it. Now, see, my point is this, I have a right to expect the same thing from the boys that I expect from my men, who are required to undergo the same hardships as the boys. In this way I establish an equality which enables us to get into the community of the boys, and naturally control their conversation and their thoughts. Thus they are really reformed without their knowing it.”
The spirit among the boys and the officers was certainly remarkable. They joked, called each other by their first names, and were “kidding” each other at a great rate. I was wondering what would happen when the question of authority arose. I was not disappointed. Alongside the joyous camaraderie, there was a willing recognition of unquestioned authority.
“You’ll be up in court, Kid; you went fish’n without permission”, I heard one of them yell to another, and a little later, when one of the recent arrivals wanted to go to the farmhouse to see the incubators, an older member of the colony instructed him in a casual way.
“You gotta git p’rmission from Bob first.” “Bob” is Mr. Rosenbluth.
How open and frank the spirit of the conduct of the “court” is, and how it reflects the character of the whole institution, I could only guess, for unfortunately no session of the court could be held that Sunday, as is the custom. In the midst of conversation of a group of some ten of the boys one of them remarked that there would be no court that day.
“We ain’t got many cases, Bob, only one fight, one fishin’ without asking, and one fellow smoking out of time.” There was no secret report or accusation; only a cooperative policing, with apparently no trace of grudge. Yet the boys average probably more than twenty years of age.
The unfortunate circumstances that prevented court session, as well as the regular base-ball game and morning service that Sunday, was the lamentable drowning of one of the boys while taking a swim, the Thursday preceding. Despite the presence of several good swimmers, and their desperate efforts to save him, he went down beyond aid. The river was dragged the same day, but no trace of his body was found. The next day and the day following was the real test, in my opinion of the spirit of the Farm. The officers were preoccupied, the coroner, undertaker, reporter were busy about the place; some of the boys were taken from their regular work to search for the body; supervision was practically naught. But the season was late. The farm behind time. Work had to be continued. And the boys did work, though with hearts heavy with real sorrow. The next day, Saturday, the coroner dynamited the river in order to bring the body to the surface. Curiosity was added to possible desire to shirk work. Yet all but those aiding in the search were at their ploughs or hoes. Several acres were ploughed and five acres of corn planted by less than twenty boys on Saturday afternoon alone.
Early next morning the body was found by one of the boys on search duty. The body was taken to Middletown, three miles away, by the coroner’s undertaker. Morning service was postponed. The rest of the morning was given over to bathing and to visits to the boys. The visitors roamed the farm with the boys at will. The day was ideal, and with the remarkably attractive scenery, helped lift the gloom from the little colony. Even death cannot darken very long such a beautiful spring day in Orange County. Dinner came along for a hungry two-score, with spirits still somewhat subdued, but no longer blackened by the shadow of death. To the regular dinner crowd there were added now the wife and child of the officer occupying the farmhouse.
There were three long tables, with benches on either side, all constructed of boards such as were used for building the bunkhouse. The carpet of the dining room was rich green grass, and the ceiling green foliage and blue sky, all gilded with bright warm sunshine. A brisk fresh breeze made electric fans superfluous. Roast beef, gravy, brown baked potatoes, coffee with real milk in plenty, (from the four cows borrowed from another institution) and the most delicious of lemon pies rapidly disappeared.
Soon after dinner a service was held. I confess I was quite curious to see this service, without minister, conducted by “Bob,” separated from his group by the deepest of sectarian differences. At these services occurrences of the week and plans of the coming week are talked over, and a kind of rough-and-ready, heart-to-heart moralizing is done. The subject, this day, was of course the death of their unfortunate comrade. I did not know then, that the most impressive of all funeral services I have ever seen, was to come that afternoon. The boys and instructors (that is what the officers are called) lay in a group on the grass under the shade of tall trees, and Bob sat on a stump. His face showed signs of the deep anxiety and sleeplessness of the last few days. The talk was brief. The boys were asked to meditate over the decease of their friend, and draw their own lessons. One point only was enlarged upon. Some neighboring farmers had criticised the management for continuing to work during the two days following the day of the accident. “If sorrow is heartfelt, it does not require that duty towards the living be sacrificed to empty form in regard to the dead.” Only the words were simpler, more explicit.
The afternoon was spent in gathering flowers to give to the parents of the dead comrade, who were to arrive that afternoon. There was a wreath of white lilacs, and bunches of lilies of the valley, and white wild flowers. When the parents arrived, boys and instructors stood bare-headed in front of the old dilapidated framehouse that had been patched up to serve for the various purposes of the farm, and as a kind of general field headquarters. Some twenty to thirty feet from the house each boy had planted a tree on arbor day. After a few words from Bob, the tree that had been planted by the dead boy was dug up and transplanted to a place of honor. Then amid deep silence, the father spoke to the comrades of his lost son. It is impossible for me to render the simple words in their true effect. He hoped that the death of his son might teach the rest of the boys the same lesson that his life could no longer teach, namely, that the efforts of good men could not fail to save them from evil careers, if they brought but a little good-will towards those that were willing to help them regain their true selves.
Not an eye remained dry, and the instructor who offered the simple closing prayer—in the absence of any minister—could hardly choke down his tears. They had lost their son when he was all but saved from the abyss of crime, by nature and by good men.
Under the stress of such an intense day, following days of hard labor under untoward conditions, I came to understand why Mr. Rosenbluth insisted so much upon the personality of his helpers; why he had spent large sums of his own private funds, to persuade men to leave better paying, often more than twice as renumerative positions, to come to the farm. These men sacrificed money, comfort, even the one day in the week freedom, to spend all their time with the boys, to reform them by sheer force of personality. In labor, in fun, in sorrow they understood and were understood by the boys. They could laugh with them and keep silence with them. I want to congratulate them all: Mr. Rosenbluth and his aids Messrs. Blue, Buck, Ford, Wissner for their remarkable ability to dispense with the pleasure of pleasure-seeking, for the pleasure of service.
The success of the New Hampton Farms as an experiment in reformation lies surely not in its fertile soil, its excellent location, the unprecedented plans for the classification of its future inmates, for the erection of the future buildings. The crops of the farm in this handicapped year may prove economically profitable or disastrous. Individual inmates may escape, or otherwise disgrace the little colony. Many may fall again into temptation, among bad companions, filthy, immoral environments, and their own vicious inclinations. But the farm has already shown that there can be a vastly different spirit between a different type of officers and the same inmates, and that this “spirit can be built up with the institution.”