should be employed at once. An adequate office should be provided for the department, and a capable follow-up record system and field investigation system should be adopted. The chief probation officer should be the liaison officer between the Municipal Courts and the other official and non-official organizations capable of assisting the courts in determining all the facts of the personal, family, social, educational, and industrial histories of prisoners.

3. The courts in the various counties of the State should be authorized to organize their own probation departments.

4. The Common Pleas and the Municipal Courts should join with other public and private agencies in establishing proper diagnostic and treatment centers in the public schools, the city's new general psychopathic hospital, the various hospitals, the School of Education, the Western Reserve University Medical School, the Health Department, and the large industries of Cleveland.

5. If the two courts are combined on their criminal side, as recommended in the section of this Survey devoted to the criminal courts, the chief probation officer of the Juvenile Court should become chief probation officer of the combined city and county criminal court.

Τ

CHAPTER IV

PAROLES, COMMUTATIONS, AND PARDONS

HE Ohio General Code vests the managers of the workhouses with considerable discretion in discharging and paroling inmates committed thereto.1

In the city of Cleveland the Director of Public Welfare, the parole

1 Sections 4133, 4134, 4135, 4136, and 4137 of the code granting the authority to release, re-arrest, and return inmates of the workhouse, read as follows:

"Discharge and record thereof. An officer vested by statute with authority to manage a workhouse, may discharge, for good and sufficient cause, a person committed thereto. A record of all such discharges shall be kept and reported to the council, in the annual report of the officer, with a brief statement of the reasons therefor.

"Parole of inmates. Such officer also may establish rules and regulations under which, and specify the conditions on which, a prisoner may be allowed to go upon parole outside of buildings and enclosures. While on parole such person shall remain in the legal custody and under the control of the officer, and subject at any time to be taken back within the enclosure of the institution. Full power to enforce the rules, regulations, and conditions, and to retake and reimprison any convict so upon parole, is hereby conferred upon such officer, whose written order shall be sufficient warrant for all officers named therein to authorize them to return to actual custody any conditionally released or paroled prisoner. All such officers shall execute such order the same as ordinary criminal process.

"Violation of parole. Such officer may employ or authorize any person or persons to see that the conditions of a parole are not violated, and in case of violation to return to the workhouse any prisoner so violating his parole, and the time between the violation of the conditions of such parole, or conditional release by whatever name, as entered by order of the officer on the records of the workhouse, and the reimprisonment or return of the prisoner, shall not be counted as any part or portion of time served under his sentence.

"Return of paroled to custody. Any prisoner at large upon parole who fails to return to the actual custody of the workhouse as specified as one of the conditions of his parole, or commits a fresh crime and is convicted thereof, shall be, on the order of the officer, treated as an escaped prisoner and subject to the penalties named in Sec. 12840. But no parole shall be granted by any such officer without previous notice thereof to the trial judge.

"Officers to have police powers. The superintendent, assistant superintendent, and each guard of the workhouse shall have such powers of policeman as may be necessary for the proper performance of the duties of his position."

officer of the department, and the superintendent of the workhouse jointly exercise the powers conferred by law upon the director alone.

ADMINISTRATION

The parole officer prepares the records of prisoners whose cases are under consideration for parole. The so-called records are in reality the results of his own and the director's personal investigations, as no information about cases is furnished by the courts or the probation officers save what appears upon the commitment papers. The director hence puts in a great deal of time upon the investigation and consideration of individual cases.

Under the existing arrangement, extensive consideration of cases is largely labor lost, for the workhouse keeps practically no records. When a man presents himself for consideration, information concerning him is furnished verbally by the superintendent of the workhouse. If the superintendent's recommendation is favorable and the man has a letter from a friend or an alleged former employer or an alleged relation, his chances of parole are good. If he is paroled, he is merely turned out of the institution and allowed to look after himself without supervision, unless there is an unremitted fine to look after or some adjustment with respect to children, in which case the parole officer looks after the case. Many men who spend the winter at the workhouse at the city's expense are released when the ice goes out with the hope that they may get jobs on the lake during the navigation season. Under prevailing conditions. adequate and necessary supervision of men on parole is impossible.

Director Blossom and Parole Officer Miller are conscientious and use good judgment in handling cases, but the whole system of parole is so crude and undeveloped as to be wholly inadequate. Under existing conditions, where there is no record system either in the institutions or in the central office, a single parole officer should not be required to handle more than 50 cases. If an adequate system of institutional and parole records were installed, such as we are filing with the Survey Committee as a part of this report, a single parole officer should be able to handle 100 cases.

If the courts did not attempt to handle the cases by the form of sentence imposed, by the great number of changes in dispositions and the number of recalls, the pressure exercised by the prisoners would doubtless have forced a better parole system long ago, but, although the judges are admittedly without adequate information concerning the prisoners, they are apparently content not only to guess and guess again, but also to change their guesses frequently in particular cases,

as statistics collected in the course of this survey clearly show. In this connection we confine ourselves to a study of the manner in which 626 and 696 prisoners previously sentenced to the workhouse were released therefrom during January, February, and March, 1920, and during July, August, and September, 1920, respectively.

TABLE 7.-SUMMARY OF THE MANNER IN WHICH 626 AND 696 PRISONERS WERE RELEASED FROM THE WORKHOUSE DURING STATED PERIODS IN 1920

Table 7 shows the great preponderance of court action and the relative infrequency of parole department action in bringing about the release of prisoners at the workhouse.

Space does not permit detailed analysis here of the data1 summarized in Table 7 and also in Tables 2 to 6 inclusive. From the material at hand the conclusion may be drawn that judges, in sentencing prisoners to the workhouse, are seriously overworking fines and do not give sufficient attention to the factors which determine whether prisoners are fit to return to the community as law-abiding citizens. The courts in Cleveland, like the courts all over the country, are confining their action too closely to the determination of innocence or guilt, and have not only lost sight of the equally significant consideration of preparing prisoners for return to society, but also, in attempting to determine in advance how long prisoners shall remain in correctional institutions and the manner of their release, have so hampered and restricted the institutions that the latter have not been able to function adequately. Courts, pro

1 The detailed analysis is contained in 10 statistical tables which, because of the limitation of space, are filed with the Cleveland Foundation, where they may be consulted by those interested.

bation officers, institutions, and parole departments all have their parts to play, but they must not be allowed to function in isolation. The laws, no less than the mental habits governing the work in Cleveland, should be so modified that these agencies can and will function together.

The insistent claim as to the proneness of prisoners on parole from State institutions to commit serious crimes led us to try to determine. the truth or falsity of these charges. As there was not sufficient time. at our disposal to complete such a study, and preliminary investigation indicated that there were not enough cases to demonstrate beyond doubt that the charges were true, we applied to Warden P. E. Thomas, of the penitentiary at Columbus, and were furnished by him with an analysis of the number of cases received at the penitentiary during the years 1918, 1919, and 1920. The percentage of parole violators among those received for each of the years is reported as follows:

1918...
1919...

1920..

5.6 per cent.

4.9 per cent.

4.4 per cent.

Warden Thomas states that his figures for the eight years from 1913 to 1921 show only 196, or 4.15 per cent., of 4,713 prisoners serving indeterminate sentences, previously paroled from the penitentiary, who were returned parole violators. Also that about 18 per cent. of the total population of the penitentiary at the present time previously served terms in the State Reformatory at Mansfield. If we are to accept these figures at their face value, the charges against the system in Ohio are clearly disproved, for the percentage of violators is phenomenally low. Only a most careful investigation would show clearly why the percentage is so low. It is necessary to determine whether released prisoners have gone to other States, whether they have been clever enough to use others as "cat's-paws," or whether the police in the various Ohio cities and the parole work of the penitentiary have allowed a number to operate with immunity. These would be fruitful lines of inquiry, and until they have been followed, the parole system is entitled to considerable benefit of the doubt.

In order to bring about the most efficient court, probation, institutional, and parole work, we recommend that a law be enacted somewhat similar to the New York legislation (Chapter 579 of the laws of 1915 of the State of New York, as amended by Chapter 287 of the laws of 1916), pursuant to which offenders of various classes, if twice con

Copies of these statutes were attached to this report but were omitted because of lack of space. They are on file at the office of the Cleveland Foundation.