Library Collections: Document: Full Text


American Charities

Creator: Amos G. Warner (author)
Date: 1908
Publisher: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York
Source: Straight Ahead Pictures Collection

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483  

When he has at last developed delirium tremens, or some phase of insanity, he may be committed to an insane asylum; or when he has finally committed a crime, he may be sentenced to prison. He may originally have been a weak good man of bad heredity, or a vicious criminal, but in either case the treatment received is quite undiscriminating. (176)


(176) Wilson, p. 149.

484  

In 1899 an advisory committee to the mayor of Boston made a report of great value, illustrating the futility, injustice, and expense of the present method of police court commitments. Table LXVI. shows the number and per cent of first commitments and recommitments for drunkenness to all penal institutions in Massachusetts for the year ending Sept. 30, 1898.

485  

The calculable cost of the procedure pictured in the table was reckoned as follows: --

486  

26,157 arrests for drunkenness at $8.04$210,494.74
10,431 committals to various penal institutions, served all together 1698 years at a per capita cost from $84.70 to $184.69 per year129,008.12
Total$339,602.86
Income from fines23,490.78
Net cost of arrests and imprisonment$316,012.08

487  

NUMBERPER CENT
Whole Number of Commitments20,222. . .
Number of First Commitments8,99443.46
Total Recommitments11,43956.54
Number of Times previously committed:
1 time2,11318.47
2 times2,41521.11
3 times1,52413.32
4 times1,0218.92
5 times8167.13
6 to 15 times2,70123.61
16 to 30 times6895.58
31 to 50 times1601.38
More than 50 times50 .43

488  

The Advisory Committee urged the extension of the probation system to all first offenders, and longer sentences for the habitual offender. With these penal aspects of the drink question we have nothing to do at present; nor is it a part of technical charities to discuss the various methods of temperance legislation and of temperance reform, however useful they may be. It is useless to wait for total abstinence to provide a remedy for habitual drunkenness, although such agitation has resulted in making moderate drinkers more moderate and many moderates into teetotalers. As Dr. Brantwaite says, we are neglecting the main source of the supply of drunkards, the drunkard himself. The charitable problem is how to secure earlier control of the hopeful inebriate and the sequestration of the hopeless drunkard. The habitual drunkard will very rarely submit himself to prolonged confinement in a hospital or reformatory; and, on the other hand, unless placed under treatment early in the course of the disease, he has almost no chance of permanent cure.

489  

The experience of the Massachusetts State Hospital at Foxboro clearly illustrates this point. Of 235 patients first admitted in 1905-1906, the average duration of inebriety had been seventeen years, and in one-third, over twenty years. The superintendent classifies these patients into: the recent or curable type, the chronic who is not of evil repute apart from his habits of inebriety, and the incorrigible drunkard, who often has some criminal record. He recommends hospital treatment for the first class, custodial care on a farm where they may be partly self-supporting for the second class, and penal commitment for the third. He urges that the courts should have discretionary power in. the case of those not of the chronic or criminal type, to commit to the hospital instead of a penal institution for a period of not less than thirty days. A new State law also permits voluntary commitment.

490  

In view of the fact that the average age of patients was forty-one years, and the average duration of inebriety seventeen years, the results at the Foxboro State Hospi-tal are encouraging: 230 persons were discharged between July 1, 1905, and July 1, 1906. Their apparent condition after Oct. 1, 1906, was as follows: temperate, 40 per cent; improved or drinking less, 16 per cent; unimproved or drinking as before, 23.9 per cent; could not be found, 16 per cent; died, 3.5 per cent.

491  

The public institutional care of inebriates has only just begun, but is destined to increase in proportion as the close interrelation of inebriety with other neuroses is generally recognized. The State of Iowa opened a hospital in 1905 similar to the Massachusetts Hospital, and Minnesota in 1907 established a hospital farm to which inebriates are to be committed on an indeterminate sentence.

492  

Analogous to the institution for inebriates would be one where persons convicted of habitual offences against chastity might be committed for treatment and especially for detention. In case cure or reform, whichever we choose to call it, should prove to be impossible, they could then be detained during the remainder of their natural lives, working for their own support in a colony. New York has at present a custodial home for feeble-minded women. (177) Short commitments for this class of offences are manifestly as futile as in the case of habitual drunkards. Further than this, this class of persons are especially subject to disorders analogous to feeble-mindedness; and in all institutions for wayward girls the number verging upon feeble-mindedness is found to be especially large. The managers of reformatories and refuges for fallen women frequently complain that those who come to them need hospital treatment and prolonged detention, which only the custodial home could give.


(177) The late Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell was a strong advocate of such measures during the whole of her life as a charity worker and official.

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