Reforma

1877 · ref. BK0163 — New York: National Printing Company 1877. 8vo 56 pp. Original printed wrappers. "Compliments of Dr. Wines" slip affixed to title page. Near fine with a small tear to front wrapper at seam. Proceedings of an important national conference on prison reform organized around a program prepared by Enoch Cobb Wines the leading American prison reformer of the period. Wines had served as secretary of the New York Prison Association and was instrumental in organizing the landmark National Congress on Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline at Cincinnati in 1870. The Newport conference met seven years later to formulate a practical system of penal institutions and policies that could be recommended to state legislatures. Much of the pamphlet is devoted to the conference's "Outline Draft of a System of Preventive Reformatory and Penitentiary Institutions and Discipline" which attempted to address criminal justice as a single system extending from childhood through incarceration. Its recommendations begin with compulsory education and institutions for neglected and delinquent children and proceed through reform schools houses of detention women's prisons county jails and state penitentiaries. The conference was particularly severe in its judgment of the existing jail system: "The county jails of the United States numbering about two thousand are with few exceptions schools of vice nurseries of crime and feeders of the penitentiaries. Their construction and management are alike bad; indeed the former is so radically defective as to render any good administration of them impossible." The conference occurred during a period when many of Wines's ideas were beginning to find practical application most notably at Elmira under Zebulon Brockway. Its recommendations ranged from compulsory education and separate institutions for juveniles and women to trained prison officers productive labor improved sanitation and greater state oversight. The "Compliments of Dr. Wines" slip gives this copy a nice association with the man chiefly responsible for both the conference and the program it produced. . National Printing Company unknown books