JOTTINGS
PRUSSIAN COLONIZATION
Six million dollars will be spent by Prussia this year for the cultivation and colonization of moor lands by farmers and agricultural laborers. Part of the money will be used to provide cheap credit to settlers.
Because of its local appeal a performance of Galsworthy’s Strife is being given by the Madison Square Church House at the Murray Hill Lyceum, 160 East 34th Street, New York. [April 25.] The men and boys in the cast have been trained by Jean Marcet and Inez Milholland. Members of the Barnard College Dramatic Club take the female parts.
Modern progress and practices which savor of the middle ages sometimes go hand in hand, says theEngineering News. A press dispatch from a city in the Canadian Northwest states that the city council had voted to buy a motor-driven chemical and hose wagon, and at the same meeting decided to engage a water finder hailing from Hamiota to “make a thorough investigation with his magnetic instrument of all possible sources of water supply.”
The Department of Social Service of the Girls Friendly Society offers a well worked out program for practical study and work by an “associate” of the department. The program begins,it may be said in passing, with a recommendation to subscribe toThe Survey. Other general recommendations are that the associate inform herself about social work, especially among women and children; that she cooperate with established societies and with such movements as that for early shopping; that she recommend to her local group the circulation among the membership of copies of state laws affecting women and children, and arrange for conferences on social topics, both formal and informal.
The Girls Friendly Society has a membership of 44,000, in 700 locals scattered throughout the country.
The Jewish Social Service Federation of Denver has been made a permanent organization. It will work in the field covered by United Hebrew Charities in other cities. It is primarily a federation for the centralized collection of funds for Jewish societies.
The following organizations constitute the federation: Jewish Relief Society, Jewish Ladies’ Aid Society, Denver Sheltering Home for Jewish Children, Jewish Free Loan Society, Hachnosos Orchim Society, philanthropic committee of the Council of Jewish Women, Ladies’ Shroud Sewing Society and the Moas Chittim Society.
The beneficiaries of the federation include the National Jewish Consumptives’ Hospital at Denver; the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society at Denver; the Jewish Orphan Asylum at Cleveland, and the Sir Moses Montefiore Kesher Home for Aged and Infirm Israelites at Cleveland.
The province of Ontario, Canada, is trying to provide a means for more adequately handling the delinquent girl or woman who is also feeble-minded or suffering from venereal disease. It is well known that a third or a fourth of the boys and girls sent to reformatories are mentally deficient, but in many places there is no legal treatment for them except that of the reformatory which is designed for normal people.
An act now before the Ontario legislature provides that any female between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five who has been sent to an industrial refuge, which is a house of correction, and who is discovered to be so feeble-minded that she can not take care of herself shall be kept in the refuge until the medical officer, with the approval of the inspector, orders her discharge. All girls found to have venereal diseases, or to be suffering from contagious or dangerous illnesses, are to be kept in the refuge until they have fully recovered.
The wider resort to agricultural and manual labor as an educative and reformative force for young and old alike in our correctional institutions was urged at the Colorado Conference of Charities and Correction. Coupled with this was a plea for employment in the open and for training in useful pursuits. The institutions of Denver, it was declared, need more land that these things may be done.
Thomas J. Tynan, warden of the state prison, recommended that the state conduct a scientific farm and that it pay prisoners what their labor produces. It is the opinion of Warden Tynan that economic conditions affect the size of prison populations. For several years past there has been a steady decrease, he said, in the number of inmates in his penitentiary; this he ascribed to a general increase in prosperity. Men who commit daring crimes, requiring courage, make the quickest and most permanent reforms, he thinks, because they have the character to adhere to newly made resolutions. From the fact that there are now only nine women in the Colorado state prison and that the average heretofore has been twenty-six, Warden Tynan argues a decrease in crime among women in his state.
A special train from Chicago to the National Conference of Charities and Correction to be held at Seattle July 5–12 is being planned by a group of charity organization society workers. Others who wish to go, however, will be welcome to join the party. If the number reaches one hundred, a special train will be provided, leaving Chicago Sunday evening, June 29.
All day Wednesday will be spent at Banff and Laggan. The train will remain on the tracks at Laggan, departing early Thursday morning to give an all-day trip through the Canadian Rockies. The party will arrive in Vancouver on Friday and proceed to Seattle by boat. The day’s sail down Puget Sound will be broken by a stop of three hours at Victoria. Return is possible by any route preferred.
The cost of the round trip from Chicago will be $63, not including sleeper.
The committee arranging for this trip is Francis H. McLean, Eugene T. Lies, Fred S. Hall and James Minnick. Those planning to travel with this party should buy round trip tickets at their homes and arrange for sleeper reservations through James Minnick, Chicago Tuberculosis Institute, 10 South La Salle St., Chicago.
When a mother has to work, what is she to do with her young children?
In co-operation with the Child Helping Department of the Russell Sage Foundation, the Edison Company has produced a motion picture film which is one answer to the question. The reply, as given in theKinetogram, a semi-monthly bulletin of moving picture news, is that “she should board her baby with some mother who is capable of caring for and feeding another child than her own.” The film is described as follows:
“In this picture the mother has twins, one she boards with a foster mother and the other is put into an institution because the foster mother will take only one. The mother of the twins is compelled to do this because so handicappedshe cannot get work. The work of the care of infants in an institution is shown and the only fault to be found is that the individual attention that an infant must have is lacking, owing to the fact that a nurse in an asylum often has as many as fifteen babies to care for alone. That is where the infant suffers. It is not, however, due to any fault of the nurses but to conditions. In this case the fostered child lives while the institution child does not. Seventy per cent of asylum babies succumb while seventy out of a hundred live where individual care is exercised.”
The first literature on sex hygiene to be published in this country in Yiddish has been issued by the American Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, 105 West 40th Street. Through the generosity of a Hebrew philanthropic organization in New York city the society has been able to publish a Yiddish edition of its pamphlet on Health and the Hygiene of Sex. This new booklet will be distributed through such organizations as the Educational Alliance, the Hebrew Young Men’s Association, the Hebrew Educational League and the Hebrew Sheltering Arms. An edition of 5,000 was printed, but in less than a week it was exhausted. Large orders have been received for subsequent issues. As yet only local Hebrew charities have been given this pamphlet for distribution.
The same pamphlet in English is being distributed to boys in preparatory schools and colleges and through Y. M. C. A.’s and boys’ clubs all over the country at the rate of a thousand topics a month.
The society hopes during the coming year to publish Italian and other translations of its pamphlet and to issue new pamphlets for special distribution among settlements and organizations dealing with uneducated groups of boys and girls.
The spread of preventive measures from city and town to outlying county and rural districts seems to be gaining headway. In Minnesota a county conference of charities and correction was recently started and at Cumberland, Md., a strong plea was made last month for a county-wide charity organization society. Speaking before the Maryland Conference of Charities and Correction, Margaret F. Byington, associate field secretary, Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation, told of the effective work that had been done by county organizations in New York and New Jersey. She was met with the response that the association of Cumberland would probably employ an additional paid secretary in the near future to work entirely outside the city.
The last legislature authorized the establishment of a juvenile court for Allegheny County, of which Cumberland is the county seat. One of the discussions of the conference dealt with the difficulties surrounding the work of such a court with a jurisdiction extending over some fifty or sixty miles of territory.
As a result of the conference it is probable that a state-wide housing law will be presented to the next legislature, that all acute cases of insanity will be transferred from the local almshouses to the state hospitals and that a branch of the Maryland Children’s Aid Society will be established in Cumberland.
Three distinct social agencies have been recently developed in Birmingham, Ala., from one association, the Boys’ Club and Children’s Aid Society. They are the Juvenile Court with its probation system, the Children’s Aid Society and the Boys’ Club proper. The story of these changes is expressive of the development of social organization in the southern cities.
The parent society has for several years been one of Birmingham’s most vigorous efforts toward the betterment of the conditions affecting child life. In 1903 the Boys’ Club had just one room at the City Hall. By 1909 a New Year’s dinner and a summer camp had become regular features. Next a special reading room and shower baths were added. Children’s aid work was then undertaken more systematically. Two men and one woman devoted themselves to the interests of dependent and neglected children. Probation work was also introduced, and the club has twice moved to larger quarters.
It was largely through the instrumentality of the Boys’ Club that the Juvenile Court was established in October, 1912. Following the suggestion of A. J. McKelway, southern secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, in his article in the Birmingham number of THE SURVEY[6]the functions of each of the three new social agencies have been clearly defined. S. D. Murphy is the judge of the Juvenile Court and Ralph S. Barrow is chief probation officer. The present superintendent of the Boys’ Club is Burr Blackburn.
That beginners in law-breaking will have the benefit of real rather than nominal probation work is expected to be the result of the recent establishment of a central probation bureau in the magistrate’s courts in New York. Heretofore each probation officer has remained in court while it was in session. His duty was to receive such cases of probation and make such investigations as the magistrates ordered. This compelled him to spend much time in court, where his duties were similar to those of a warrant officer or a court attendant. His real work, which should be that of looking up the history of law breakers and keeping closely in touch with them, had to be done after court adjourned or on occasional days assigned for the purpose.
Under the new system the probation officer will receive his cases and assignments for investigation from the chief probation officer. He will then be free to spend all his time in the field keeping in touch with his probationers. Another advantage will be greater equalization of workamong officers. Formerly some officers have had as high as 150 cases, while others have had fewer than twenty. Under the new arrangement the chief probation officer will make all the assignments and will be able to distribute the work more evenly. The existence of a central headquarters will enable the officers to meet together and discuss their problems and so work much more effectively as a team.
The problem of the arrested woman is one of the baffling difficulties which the police of our large cities face. How New York handles one phase of it is noted in the recent annual report of the Women’s Prison Association of this city. Matrons are assigned to nineteen of the police stations in Manhattan and the Bronx. Women arrested in any of the fifty-two precincts in these boroughs are transferred to one of these station houses.
In Brooklyn, Queens and Richmond the same plan is followed, for but ten of the fifty-three station houses have matrons. Women offenders, after being taken from the station house of the precinct in which they are arrested, to the nearest station having a matron must be again transferred to court. Of this the report says: “This dragging of women from station house to station house is most demoralizing to prisoners, officers and the general public.”
Of the nineteen precinct station houses to which matrons are assigned only five, says the report, have properly ventilated and sanitary prisons for either sex. In five of the police stations the report goes on, the prisons for both sexes are in the same corridor, and men and women can converse freely. To quote again: “From the fact that thousands of prisoners and officers have been lodged in them for many years, 70 per cent of our station houses are unsanitary and can never be made otherwise. Over 130,000 men and women prisoners in all stages of disease and dirt pass through them yearly. Many are lodged for hours in their prisons and leave behind them disease germs of every kind. Thus the prisoner becomes not only a danger to his successor but may become a prey to the condition of his or her predecessor.”