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22 Prison J. 144 (1942)

handle is hein.journals/prsjrnl22 and id is 1 raw text is: President's Report The outstanding event in penal reform in Pennsylvania during the past year was the enactment of the new Parole Law directing the Governor to appoint a Parole Board, composed of five com- petent persons, required to give up their entire time to the work of deciding what prisoners should be paroled and supervising the individuals so paroled. Except for certain minor changes the Act as approved by the Governor is identical with the bill which was adopted by the previous legislature and which was heartily en- dorsed by him but vetoed because of the failure of the legislature to make an appropriation for its enforcement. Now, fortunately for us in Pennsylvania, we have this law on the statute books and it will go into effect on June 1, 1942. At this time of national defense emergency, when State and municipal services should be raised to maximum efficiency, the State is to be congratulated on the prospect of having, instead of our present imperfect State parole system a new system, said by all who have examined it, to be as good as, if not better than, any parole system in the country. All depends on the Governor's appointing com- petent and conscientious men to serve on the new Parole Board. le has not as yet made his appointments, but when he does hand them down we hope that we shall find that persons of the right sort have been appointed. A second admirable report, prepared under the supervision of Dr. Thorsten Sellin, was recently printed and given to the public by the Board of Inspectors of the Philadelphia County Prison, which, it will be remembered, has two branches, Moyamensing, with its Convict and Untried Departments at 10th and Reed Streets, and Holmesburg, used solely for the confinement of convicts, in the northern section of our city. The report contains mauch interesting and valuable information with regard to the diversified population of both prisons, and it shows, as did the earlier printed report for 1939, the troublesome problems that the Inspectors have to meet. Added to the duty of having to take care of and make rules for untried as well as sentenced prisoners, the Inspectors are continu- ally confronted with the impossibility of doing a good job with insufficient funds, our City Council not giving them the money that they need for caring for the large number of inmates in both institutions. We have in the past submitted recommendations as to what might be done in order to improve conditions, and the Inspectors have accepted certain of our recommendations. We recommended the establishment of a thorough-going merit system for the selection of employees, and on reading Dr. Sellin's explan- ation of the manner in which new guards are now chosen and the extremely small turnover that has occurred during the last year, it would seem doubtful whether a better method could be followed until the merit system is extended by law to the appointment of employees in this and all other similar institutions of the County. We recemmended the establishment in each prison of a staff or 144

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