294 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



air of industrious cooperation so noticeable in the present stage 

 of the farm's development. Few people could be put at the 

 task of building a town where none had been before and not be 

 interested. Each prisoner can see the beginning and end of his 

 own job, and its relation to the work of others. He can see a 

 bustling community taking form before his own eyes and as a 

 result of his own efforts. Work, under circumstances like these, 

 is more than a mere means of passing time ; it is fascinating, con- 

 structive, creative, and it has caught the slumbering interest of 

 many a roving spirit whose previous acquaintance with the law 

 was limited to iron bars and walled idleness. 



A large part of the work in walled prisons is either not found 

 at all outside of these prisons or is monopolized by women or 

 handicapped classes like the blind. It is not educative and adds 

 little to the prisoner's wage-earning capacity. Nothing could be 

 stronger than the contrast between this and the industrial op- 

 portunities on Indiana's penal farm. The buildings, even to the 

 cutting and sawing of much of the timber, have been erected by 

 the prisoners. The sewer system is now being installed by pris- 

 oners. Prisoners are building two and one-half miles of railway 

 switch over rough land, doing the grading themselves. They are 

 building their own roads. They are laying thirty miles of fence. 

 They will install their own power plant. They are now mak- 

 ing handles for all their implements and tools. This winter 

 they will make brooms. They not only erected, entirely unaided, 

 the toilet facilities in the dormitories, but installed the plumb- 

 ing and shower-baths as well. 



Indiana is not the first to establish a penal farm. Such farms 

 are common in Europe. There are three in this country besides 

 Indiana's, one at Cleveland, Ohio, one at Kansas City, Kan., and 

 one at Occoquan, Va. 



Indiana has learned that she cannot build congregate insti- 

 tutions fast enough to take care of her insane. So she has 

 changed her plans. She has decided to provide the tonic of 

 farm life for all her insane who can profit by it. When the leg- 

 islature of 1911 appropriated $75,000 for the purchase of such 

 a colony, Governor Marshall and his advisers selected the East- 

 ern Hospital for the parent institution. 



Unlike the villages for epileptics and the farm for misde- 



