284 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



merit for winter months and stormy days, but these are as full 

 of light and fresh air as a model factory. The institution im- 

 presses you as a training-school with a helpful, hopeful attitude 

 toward life. 



The Province of Ontario, under the direction of the Provin- 

 cial Secretary, W. J. Hanna, is developing an outdoor prison at 

 Guelph. The spirit of fellowship, cooperation, and confidence 

 prevails. Some temporary buildings shelter the prisoners who 

 work under the open sky, cultivating the soil, ditching, grading, 

 and making roads. One of the Canadian pastors, who perhaps 

 had been skeptical about the project, walked over the farm and 

 saw the groups of men laboring in the fields. He said to me, "I 

 was so moved by it that I went off by myself and cried." In 

 his enthusiasm the head officer declares that "the prisoners 

 have done a great work." With this attitude the Guelph Prison 

 Farm will do much for the imprisoned, and still more for the 

 citizenship of Ontario. 



In Cleveland we began the outdoor treatment by purchasing 

 a group of farms ten miles from the city, and before any perma- 

 nent buildings could be erected we tested the plan by taking 

 "trusties" and other prisoners from the City Workhouse and 

 lodging them in the old scattered farm-houses. Our farmer 

 neighbors were frightened. Our friends prophesied that the 

 prisoners would all run away. The plan worked. Most of the 

 men completed their sentences, giving faithful and willing ser- 

 vice. We ourselves have been surprised at times at the results 

 of some of our ventures with these men. The confidence placed 

 in them, the useful work in garden and field, the tonic of the sky 

 and trees, developed a new sense of honor and a common senti- 

 ment that it is a mean and cowardly thing to "take a sneak from 

 the farm." 



In four years five thousand prisoners served time on the 

 Correction Farm. These men have worked at excavating for 

 our buildings, quarrying and crushing stone, grading, road-mak- 

 ing, under-draining the land, clearing dead timber from the 

 forest, and doing general farm labor. They have had better 

 food, for they have raised it themselves. The officers in charge 

 of the working groups of laborers have been really foremen 

 rather than typical prison guards. The purpose has been not 



