The chief officers may be either men or women, at the pleasure of the Governor, these being superintendent, steward and treasurer, the remainder being all women, and including a deputy superintendent, a chaplain, a physician, school mistress, and clerk. The wishes of the founders were carried out in making the superintendent a woman, Mrs. Edna C. Atkinson’s name having become the synonym for patient and most faithful labor in this untried field. There are others as worthy, but with her, they shrink from any public recognition, content to have laid silently the foundation of a work which is copied in detail wherever the same results are desired.
The hospital is a model of its kind, three stories in height, and thirty-two feet wide by seventy-seven long. The dispensary and wash room, the doctor’s sitting room and some small wards for special cases are on the first floor. The second one has a large ward, sunny and airy, with space for twenty beds, and at one side bath rooms, and a small room where the dead are laid until burial. The convalescent ward is on the third floor, and in each and all, is the exquisite neatness which is a revelation to every occupant. Of the physical misery that finds alleviation here, one can hardly speak. “Intemperance, unchastity, abuse from male companions, neglected childbirth, hereditary taints, poor food and clothing,” have all done their work, and demand all the skill the physician can bring to bear. The work is hard and often repulsive, but the sick prisoner is especially susceptible to influence, and often, when all means have been tried in vain, yields at last under the pressure of pain and gratitude for its relief, and goes out from the ward a new creature spiritually as well as physically.
From the beginning they are made to feel that here is one spot where love and sympathy are certain. There is no convict dress branding them at once as infamous. Each division has its own; blue check of different patterns being chosen to distinguish the different grades. The upper ones have neat white aprons for Sundays. Night dresses and pocket handkerchiefs are provided to teach neatness, and every woman is required to have smooth hair and a well-cared-for person. In the nursery, an essential department of a woman’s prison, the babies show well fed, happy faces, and are as neatly and warmly clothed as the mothers. This department has sixty rooms, each ten by twelve, with a bed and crib for mothers with infants, while above it is a lying-in ward, with all necessary appliances. Often there is not the slightest hint of maternal instinct, and the mother must be watched to prevent the destruction of the child, but more often it is strong, and desire for reform is first awakened with the longing that the child should know a better life. The bright, clean quarters, the regular employment, the sympathy and encouragement, on which, no matter how skeptical or scoffing in the beginning, they come to depend, all foster this desire. Indifferent even to common decency in the beginning, unknown instincts awaken, and here is one answer to the argument sometimes made, that criminals have no right to attractive quarters. Here, again, the same worker already quoted may speak: “In the first place, the loss of liberty is a terrible privation, especially when the term of confinement is long. Most persons will bear any hardship rather than be confined, even in a pleasant place. The depraved women of our prisons are indifferent, at first, to the things which please a higher taste. The dark and filthy slums of Boston are far more charming to them than the clean and sunny prison. The work is hateful to their idle habits, and being unpaid, it has no motive to incite them to performance. The silent, separate rooms, the quiet work room, try them inexpressibly. There is no danger that the prison will be too tempting. They long for the intoxicating drink, the low carousals of their usual life, and when discharged from an ordinary prison, with no reformatory influence, eagerly rush into the old haunts, and begin anew the foul life.… Ferocious, indeed, are they, when long habits of intoxication, joined to ignorance and strong passions, are subjected to the restraints of a prison.”