Greensboro News
Sooner or later North Carolina will be forced to recognize the fact that the prison camp system as it now prevails must be overhauled in its entirety and possibly thrown away altogether. In its place the State must find a system which does not breed, as though designed for the very purpose, the barbarities which reached their perfect flower in the Rocky Mount special camp but which exist in one form or another in scores of other camps.
Sooner or later that is going to be done. It ought to be done now. The murder of the negro ought to be enough to drive the state into action. Other barbarities ought to have been enough. The plain testimony of every unbiased person with knowledge and intelligence ho has investigated the system ought to have been enough. The disclosures which have come out of Gaston, despite their hurried covering up, ought to have been enough. Other disclosures in other years ought to have been enough. The common sense of the state ought to have been enough. Other disclosures in other years ought to have been enough. The common sense of the state ought to have been enough. The sheer humanity of the people, a decent regard for human life and hatred of human suffering ought to have been enough. That indefinable thing we call civic duty ought to have been enough.
None of them has been enough, all of them together have not been enough. It is easily possible that we shall have to beat the flog and bully and mutilate and in the end kill other prisoners before the state awakes to the plain facts of the situation. Those plain facts, put in their simplest terms and omitting much that is important, and are that the counties turn their prisoners over to men who neither by nature nor training nor aptitude nor inclination, nor knowledge, have any real conception of the task committed to them. With exceptions the men are not qualified for their work. And as they continue in it, they become inured to brutalities, coarsened and hardened by suffering, and indifferent to anything save the one objective of driving the prisoners to their work. Worst of all, with such men in charge, there is no real supervision by trained and experienced penologists. The salaries are small, the work is not such as to attract many men of ability, the seclusion in which the camps are conducted is almost perfect, the equipment is frequently inadequate and county officials and the public generally do not care. Thus is the seed planted and thus comes the crop as North Carolina is forced to see it today.
It is not a pleasant matter. It is not an easy problem. Good citizens, men and women shun it. But for the very reason it tends to become worse and worse until by some such sudden disclosure as that near Rocky Mount the state is forced to see what has been going on under cover.
The state commission of public welfare is quoted as saying that three things are necessary:
1. The abolition of flogging;
2. The obtaining of better men in charge through increased salaries;
3. The institution of state supervision.
Every one of these suggestions will be fought fiercely. Flogging will be held up as essential; increased salaries will be called impossible, state supervision will be denounced as wrong in principle and ineffective in practice. But none of those objections, which are not recognized here as sound, takes away the plain fact that the present system is wrong and, if continued, will produce countless other instances of cruelty and perhaps death. Who knows today what is going on in other prison camps in North Carolina.
From page 6 of The Concord Daily Tribune, June 10, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1925-06-10/ed-1/seq-6/
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