Ideas from an Important Contributor, on Convicts and the Electoral Franchise

Journal of Correctional Education, Jun 2005 by Gehring, Thom

Correctional Education Historical Vignettes

William George founded the Junior Republic juvenile facility in New York according to a democratic management plan in 1895. Thanks to Orange County, CA correctional educator Teri Hollingsworth, the Center for the Study of Correctional Education recently acquired a copy of an untitled manuscript of an unpublished book George wrote in 1919 from the Rare Manuscript Collection of Cornell University's Kroch Library. The following passage, from pp. 4-5 is from George's description of an ideal adult prison, which he called a social sanitarium. It reveals that George advocated maintenance of voting rights in for convicts.

He [a person being received into George's ideal prison] enters the Sanitarium not as a convict, but a man. It is just as conceivable to think of him as a man, instead of a convict, when we recall that there are nineteen men equally guilty, whom we do not look upon as convicts at all. This social sanitarium will perform one good job. If it comes to be accepted in sending men to the scrap heap that humiliating appellation, 'convict'....[I]t goes without saying that the government of this enclosure and [its] general conditions are exactly the same as in any other community in the land. The Social patients will not lose their franchise any more than if they were sent to a Sanitarium for a nervous breakdown. It will be no worse for this group of men to vote than it is for the other nineteen who escaped trial or conviction. In other words the major force of political self-government which is taken from a convict under [the] present system will be one of the principal factors in recovering their social health within the Social Sanitarium. Political and individual self-government will be emphasized no[t] amputated.