Mr. HARLOW. May I say, in connection with the matter that you have just mentioned, about the limitation of 420 officers applying only to the men paid from that appropriation, that Mr. Bennett's proposition, as I understand it, is to transfer from this appropriation a certain sum of money to the appropriation carried in the Treasury bill.

Mr. BACON. No, not to the other appropriation bill, but to the Public Health direct.

Mr. MCMILLAN. Out of this appropriation, which he will do if that provision of law is carried in this bill.

Mr. BENNETT. Exactly; or we can say so much of this shall be available for pay of regular commissioned officers in the Public Health Service.

Mr. MCMILLAN. That will leave you no alternative but to do what the law says, and with that assurance in the law, the Public Health Service men being taken care of, they would then secure these promotions as they are entitled to them.

Well, gentlemen, this is a very interesting problem and I hope something will be worked out for them.

Mr. BENNETT. I shall submit at this time a draft of language to allow detailing of commissioned medical officers to penal institutions by the Public Health Service.

MEDICAL AND HOSPITAL SERVICE, PENAL INSTITUTIONS, BUREAU OF PRISONS

Medical and hospital service: For medical relief for, and incident to the care and maintenance of, inmates of penal and correctional institutions, including personal services in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, medical, surgical, and hospital supplies, materials, equipment, and appliances, together with appliances necessary for patients, and the furnishing and laundrying of uniforms and other distinctive wearing apparel necessary for employees in the performance of their official duties, including not to exceed $99,000 which shall be transferred to the Public Health Service as supplementing the appropriation "Pay of commissioned officers and pharmacists" to be available for the same purposes and to be used in such manner as to permit the detail of approximately 30 commissioned officers to the Federal Prison Service, which number shall be in addition to the number otherwise authorized by law, and the remaining amount,in the discretion of the Attorney General, may be transferred to the Public Health Service for direct expenditure under the laws, appropriations, and regulations governing the Public Health Service.

PERSONNEL REQUIRED FOR NEW INSTITUTIONS NOW IN OPERATION

Mr. MCMILLAN. I might have you give us a supplemental statement with respect to the new institutions at Los Angeles, Sandstone and Tallahassee, Fla.

Dr. FULLER. The institution at Los Angeles is approaching -completion. It will be occupied very shortly. It will have a capacity of some 600 beds. The hospital part will be on two floors; the bottom floor, the out-patient department, separate from the in-patient department which will be on the second floor.

The medical effort there will be to give each incoming man at thorough physical and mental examination. That is something that is done at very, very few jails. For instance, in the District of Columbia, with a population of something in the neighborhood of 850 and a vearly turn-over of approximately 19,000, there is but one medical officer, who cannot begin to give adequate treatment to the

inmates under his care, let alone do any constructive rehabilitative examination of new men to attempt to classify them and attempt to see why they entered into law breaking; if they had some physical defect, for instance, that made it impossible or very difficult for them to follow an honest livelihood and made it easier for them to refert into some easy-which is usually some illegal-way of gaining a livelihood. It is impossible for him to study the mentality of offenders in the District of Columbia to see whether or not those offenders are feeble-minded or constitutional psychopaths, or whether they are liable to continue on in their law-breaking careers for the rest of their lives, or whether there is some hope of straightening them out.

That rehabilitative effort is neglected entirely in most jails, and we feel that there is definitely some hope of decreasing the course of crime commission by investigating those matters. In fact, we know that it is possible. We know that it is possible to get hold of the young man, and by leading him in the right direction to keep him from going in the wrong direction, if he is on the border line, in a goodly percentage of cases. We know that those efforts do pay a dividend that is worthwhile. We wish to equip this hospital so that we can do all sorts of surgical work and all sorts of mental work to see if we cannot really influence some of those men who would not be otherwise influenced to leave their lawbreaking career and to straighten up.

That jail will be very well equipped. It will have a part-time, consultant staff made up, first, of some practitioner in the city of Los Angeles who specializes in psychiatry, and who will visit the institution once a week or once every 2 weeks and assist the resident staff in diagnosing cases. Second, there will be a consultant in surgical work to come out and do difficult operations; third, a consultant in eye, ear, nose, and throat; fourth, a visiting dentist to straighten out the mouths of these offenders. The resident staff will comprise an acting assistant surgeon and guard attendants. In other words, there is planned a well-rounded staff that will be able to do its full part in telling us, in a few years from now, whether or not this whole effort of rehabilitative work is worth while.

Mr. MCMILLAN. I assume that a similar schedule is worked out for Sandstone and for Tallahassee, Fla.

Dr. FULLER. Yes, sir.

Mr. MCMILLAN. We are very much obliged to you, Doctor.

GENERAL HEALTH OF FEDERAL PRISONERS

Mr. BACON. I would like to ask the Doctor one question as to the general health situation among the Federal prisoners. Will you give us a brief statement on that? I think we had it from Dr. Treadway last year.

Dr. FULLER. The health of any prisoner body-and this is true of the Federal prisoner is, by and large, mentally and physically, not as good, probably, as the health of the community at large. We find a tremendous amount of work to be done with prisoners. As an indication of how this work has increased in the Federal service in the past, in 1934 there were 194,000 hospital days; that is, days that prisoners spend in hospital. If an individual spends 1 day in hospital, that is 1 hospital day; if he spends 2 days in hospital, that is 2 hospital days. In 1934 there were 194,000 such hospital days. That went up in 1935 to 300,000; in 1936, 349,000; in 1937, 385,000.

The out-patient days-that is, the number of treatments that were given the prisoners in the out-patient department-went from 385,000 in 1934 to 900,000 in 1937.

That is an indication of what we are trying to do, and of how successful we are, in at least the mathematics of the problem.

There are countless operations to be performed. Why do we perform operations on prisoners? For this reason: Let me give you a case, of which there are dozens and dozens. This man I knew at the prison camp at Fort Lewis in the State of Washington. He had been a farmer in a small way; he had a poultry farm, and in the depression his farm was squeezed away from him, so that he did not have any farm any more, and he had to support his family by day labor. He had an old hernia that had never bothered him very much, and hard manual labor caused this thing to bother him a good deal, so that when the depression went on a little further, and they let men off, this chap, being the weakest and relatively the most useless individual in the crew, was the first one to be let out. He could not get any other work.

There was a friend of his up in the hills who had a still, and this friend said to him, "If you can't find anything else, if you will distribute some of this alcohol I will give you a share of it." He did, but he was an amateur, and inside of 2 weeks he was caught and sent up for 8 months at the prison camp. He was not a criminal in the professional sense of the word. He had been an honest, law-abiding man until necessity based upon ill health, warped his path. He was not a constitutional psychopath; he was not feeble-minded; he had no desire to commit crime, but he had to, as he saw it. We fixed his hernia and turned him out. I get letters from him every once in a while. He is as straight as a die, works regularly at hard labor, and is getting along in very satisfactory shape.

Mr. BACON. In other words, you try to turn them out when their terms are up in as good physical condition as you can?

Dr. FULLER. Yes, sir; so that they will have no excuse, so far as their physical condition is concerned, for not leading a law-abiding life. The same thing applies, of course, to mental conditions. We study the criminal to find out if he is feeble-minded. If he is feeble-minded we try to make a plan for him when he comes out, so that he will be under some supervision.

We are studying the problem of the constitutional psychopath. The constitutional psychopath probably makes up the great majority of offenders. They have been a problem clear down through the ages, and they are just as much a problem now as they ever were, and we do not know much more about them than was known a thousand years ago. We are trying to find some answer to the problem of the constitutional psychopath. At the present time all we can say is that it is a condition, not a disease. We cannot cure it, and the most hopeful suggestion for the solution of the problem of the malicious. constitutional psychopathic criminal is the indefinite sentence. We are hoping to find a better answer to it, and if we do not find it-and by "we" I mean Federal, State, county, and city prison workers-I do not believe it will ever be found. It is a problem that we have to contend with, and we have to contend with it in an intelligent, forwardlooking, constructive way.

Mr. BACON. I suppose you find that most of these prisoners, when they come in, have something the matter with them physically?

Dr. FULLER. A good proportion of them have; yes, sir. Mr. RABAUT. The increase in hospital days that you speak of is not due to a greater run-down condition on the part of those people with whom you come in contact, but to a greater alertness on the part of the medical staff; is that correct?

Dr. FULLER. Exactly; yes, sir. The prisoner body is now very much as it was 20 or 30 years ago, I imagine, but we are trying to find out more about them.

Mr. RABAUT. You are trying to give them greater assistance with the idea of correcting their tendencies?

Dr. FULLER. Yes, sir.

ANNUAL PER CAPITA COST OF MEDICAL SERVICES IN PENAL AND

CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTIONS

Mr. MCMILLAN. Doctor, I will ask you to submit for the record a comparative statement of the annual per capita cost of medical services in the several institutions, showing the average, say, for the past 3 years. I do not necessarily want the details, but just the total per capita cost in each of the institutions.

Dr. FULLER. I will be glad to furnish it, Mr. Chairman. (The statement requested is as follows:)

Comparative statement of annual per capita cost for medical service in Federal penal and correctional institutions, fiscal years 1939, 1938, and 1937

NOTE.-Annual average per capita cost for all institutions during the 3-year period is $33.68, or $0.092 per day per capita. Miscellaneous expenses for travel, transportation, laboratory service, etc., shown in previous tabulation as a lump sum, have been distributed as overhead to each individual institution above.

UNITED STATES PENITENTIARY, LEAVENWORTH, KANS.

SALARIES AND EXPENSES

Mr. MCMILLAN. The next item we will take up is United States penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kans. There was appropriated last year $953,370 for this institution, and it is estimated for 1939 that $982,860 will be required, or an increase of $29,490. Will you justify that increase, Mr. Bennett?

Mr. BENNETT. That is made up of two items, one of $11,240 for additional personnel, and an item of $18,250 for increase in mainte

nance and operation due to an estimated increase in the population from 2,900 to 3,000.

The additional personnel requested consists of one clerk, who will be a general assistant to the warden, at $1,800 per year. The warden now has a secretary, but the administrative work in his office is such that he has had to utilize three inmate clerks, and it has not worked out as successfully as we could wish, because of the fact that the inmates in the office are under pressure to give out information to the other inmates. There is always danger of chicanery, or leaks of confidential information, if inmate clerks have access to our records; and it is to take care of that situation that this additional clerk is requested.

We also, Mr. Chairman, are requesting an assistant steward, at $2,000. At the present time, on the so-called main-line mess, there is only one steward. I think that is not economical, and it is placing too much of a burden upon this one man. This is the only institution where we have only one steward on the main mess.

The other four positions are four junior officers, at $1,860 a year. They are required for additional fixed posts, which we think are necessary for the security of the institution. Those are some of the positions which the Budget submitted last year. You gave us some of those we requested, but not all, and we still feel that if the institution is to be adequately protected and that if the prisoners are to be worked properly, we need these additional positions.

Mr. MCMILLAN. Mr. Bennett, with regard to this clerk, have you any instance where these leaks, to which you have just referred in your justification of this item, actually occurred to the detriment of the service?

Mr. BENNETT. Yes, sir; I think we have had such leaks.

Mr. MCMILLAN. Has there been any instance of it at this institution?

Mr. BENNETT. Yes, sir, there has. I was trying to recall an exact case. I do not believe that I can tell you the name of the inmate involved, at the moment, but I would be glad to look it up and let you know.

PRESENT POPULATION OF PRISON

Mr. MCMILLAN. May I ask you what is the present population at this institution, as compared to that of a year ago?

Mr. BENNETT. The actual population on December 1 was 2,801 inmates.

Mr. MCMILLAN. How does that compare with the same period a year ago?

Mr. BENNETT. It is slightly less. On December 1, 1936, the population was 2,970.

The average population from July 1 of this year to November 30 was 2,821. The average during the fiscal year 1937 was 2,956.

Mr. MCMILLAN. Then, the $1,800 clerk that you want for this institution is not occasioned as the result of any increase in population but to improve the condition to which you have referred?

Mr. BENNETT. Exactly. There is no justification for the position on the basis of increase in population, but I feel that the warden ought to be allowed a clerical assistant of that kind.

Mr. MCMILLAN. There is no increase in the population to justify an assistant steward?