Mrs. Kate Burr Johnson, North Carolina Commissioner of Public Welfare, writes the following editorial on the chain gang system in this week’s issue of Public Welfare Progress:
“In the last five months there have come to the attention of the State Board of Charities and Public Welfare no less than eight instances in which prisoners attempting to escape from prison camps have been shot by guards, and in five of the eight cases the escaping convict had been killed. Two instances are fresh in the minds of the public. In October a young white man serving a sentence of six months for theft in Guilford County was shot by a guard and died within a few hours, and in the same month a negro prisoner serving a 30-day sentence in Wake County was shot and killed instantly, in attempting to make good his escape.
‘In either case, if the escaping convict had been captured and brought to trial, he would have been held for a misdemeanor only; yet under the present state of affairs, the guard is allowed to sentence the man to capital punishment, and to inflict that penalty himself in the twinkling of an eye.
“In inflicting the death penalty for a misdemeanor, the guard exerts a power which no court in the land possesses.
“The disciplining of prisoners is, at best, a hard problem, and in this present condition the trouble is, as usual with the type of men who serve as guards. In the recent hearing regarding the charges against the superintendent of the Stanly County chain gang, one of the guards on the witness stand admitted allowing a prisoner to throw human filth in the face of another prisoner. Think of entrusting such a man with the power of life and death over a human being!”
“According to the Bureau of Vital Statistics of the State Board of Health, there is no class of deaths which is more inadequately reported than those which occur in prison camps. This is typical of the generally careless and indifferent attitude assumed by officials and others in regard to the killing of convicts.
“No report has ever been made to the Bureau of Vital Statistics of the deaths of the three convicts who died while serving sentences on the Stanly County chain-gang. A true bill for murder against the superintendent of the chain-gang, N.C. Cranford, in two of these deaths, has been returned by the grand jury.
‘The conditions in our convict camps which have allowed the unceremonious and prompt executions of five prisoners, three of which were negroes and two white men, in the last few months can be attributed to two things: a general lack of a feeling of responsibility on the part of the public, and a system which is a “relic of barbarism.”
“These ‘indirect sentencings to capital punishment’ form only one outcropping of a system which is wrong and must be rebuilt from the bottom up. In order to maintain a fair standard of treatment, all prisoners should be under State control, system which is used in many states. The State’s Prison at Raleigh should be a clearing-house to which all committed men are sent. Here they should be given physical and mental examinations and classified accordingly. Those mentally and physically deficient and incapacitated should be weeded out and provision made for caring for them.
“If necessary, district road camps could be formed, and prisoners under State control could be sent out to any county which desired them for working on the roads.
“More industries should be provided to absorb the energies and time of the able-bodied normal prisoner and at the same time provide a source of revenue. Standards in the way of education, training and charactes(?) for men in charge of prisoners should be maintained and these men paid a decent wage.
“As for the county chain-gang system—it is hopeless. As Governor Bickett once remarked, “The only thing to do with it is to cut its head off.”
From the front page of The Daily Advance, Elizabeth City, N.C., Saturday evening, December 19, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92074042/1925-12-19/ed-1/seq-2/
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