Hon. Harris R. Cooley

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Hon. Harris R. Cooley



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THE CLEVELAND FARM COLONY
These three pictures give some idea of how the prisoners are given normal environment and remade into normal men and women.



Metropolitan Dailies Say:

Toronto World
Mr. Cooley at once held the attention of the audience and maintained it unbroken during a lengthy address.  He is a ready and fluent speaker, with real dramatic power.


Cincinnati Enquirer
A realistic and pathetic story of the unhappy lives of the poor and criminal classes in a great city was told by Rev. Harris R. Cooley at the Vine Street Congregational Church last night.  Mr. Cooley aroused the large audience to a high pitch of enthusiasm and when he closed the assemblage burst into a storm of applause that lasted several minutes.


London (England) Tribune
The Director of the Department of Correction and Charities is Dr. Harris R. Cooley, who was formerly pastor of the church of which Mr. Tom L. Johnson is a member.  Dr. Cooley has done a great work in Cleveland, in that he has tempered justice with mercy, and given to charity its ancient significance.


Milwaukee Daily News
Harris R. Cooley of Cleveland, director of the department of Public Service of that city, and regarded as one of the greatest authorities in America on the subject of corrections, declared in an address before the Wisconsin Federation of Women's Clubs at Plymouth church that much of the treatment of the socalled criminal class today is Pagan.



HON. HARRIS R. COOLEY   Lecturer
M R. COOLEY is presented to the Lyceum Public this year in response to repeated calls for his services.  In the past he has felt constrained to decline to spend time away from his cherished work merely to talk about it.  Having determined to master the details of his work in the Department of Charities and Correction of the City of Cleveland, he gave himself to problems that arose daily and by a close study of each individual case, by careful research in the literature of the subject and by personal inspection of similar work in this country and abroad, he has come to be recognized as the highest authority on the advanced methods of dealing with dependents and criminals.

Now after nine years in his responsible position a part of the task of carrying on the beneficent work has been placed upon other shoulders and he will now widen the circle of his helpfulness by showing how the wonderful results that have been accomplished may de duplicated in any city or town where poverty and crime exist.

The thoughtful public wants to sit at the feet of men who have done things and feel the inspiration of their enthusiasm.  In Mr. Cooley is combined the authority of one who knows and knows that he knows and who is able to tell it with the simple directness of a Dickens, together with the dramatic vividness of a Shakespeare.

As tradegy, pathos, comedy and drama mingle in everyday life, so they are mingled in these lectures.



SUBJECTS:

The Conservation of Human Life
Social Studies Abroad
The Underworld, or The Poor and Criminal of a Great City



Current Magazines Say:

The World Today
Mr. Cooley has made a study of penal and philanthropic institutions in both this country and Europe.  He stands for a broader spirit of brotherhood in dealing with the criminal classes.


The Outlook
Mr. Cooley has so revolutionized the city's attitude toward its dependent classes that Cleveland has become much such a laboratory to those interested in this work as the City of Glasgow is to those who want to study municipal ownership.


The Saturday Evening Post
Mr. Cooley is the preacher in politics; the clergyman who, ceasing to be a mere preacher, has become a minister and a minister indeed, and as Director of Charities and Corrections has befriended the poor, the forgotten, the imprisoned,—all that host of a city's population who are down and out.


McClure's Magazine
The really remarkable results achieved under this gentle clergyman at the city prison and at Cleveland's Boyville, a farm in the country, where bad boys are proved to be the best boys in the slums, these certainly are of good government.




A CITY IN THE LIFE SAVING BUSINESS
AN EXCERPT FROM AN ARTICLE IN The Outlook By FREDERICK C. HOWE
TWO YEARS ago, in one of the joint debates which have become a feature in the local campaigns of Cleveland, it was charged that the workhouse had failed to make money out of its prisoners.  The answer came back: We are not trying to make money out of prisoners; we are trying to make men.

This is the motive of Dr. Harris R. Cooley, who has been identified with the administration of Mayor Tom L. Johnson as Director of Charities and Correction during the past nine years.

To him the question has been: What does society owe to its poor, its destitute, its weak, its friendless, its offending members?  not, How will we get rid of them at the lowest cost and with the least trouble?

In the administration of Cleveland's institutions, kindness has taken the place of punishment; help has been substituted for fear.

The laboratory where this experiment is being tried out is known as the Cleveland Farm Colony.  It is a nineteen-hundred-acre farm, which lies back ten miles from the lake, high above the surrounding country, with an inspiring outlook which covers the city below and Lake Erie in the distance.  Elsewhere is a municipal tuberculosis hospital.  On the highest point of land is the infirmary group of buildings.

I recently visited this colony with Mr. Cooley.  We came upon a large gang of men engaged in grading the land and in constructing roads and sewers.  It was a little startling to be told that they were workhouse prisoners.  They looked like other men, for they wore no prison garb.  They were not locked together by a ball and chain.  They moved about as freely as any other men might move at that sort of work.  I looked for a guard.  There was no such person in sight.  Nor was there any stockade or other inclosure to prevent the escape of the men.

How do you manage it?  I inquired of Dr. Cooley.  Oh, we have no trouble about that, said Dr. Cooley.  We trust these men, and because we trust them they respect the trust.  Instead of punishing these men by exacting tasks for which they are unsuited, we now put them on this beautiful farm.  They live out of doors.  They are working at something for which they are fitted.  We have work here for a generation to come.  We have a splendid quarry from which we can build miles of roads, and lay the foundations of our buildings.  Then, too, we have this great estate to farm.  Even from a financial point of view this experiment justifies itself.  But that is the least important consideration.  The principal thing is that we restore the prisoner's self-respect.  And a very large percentage of these men never come back.

Four or five years ago, when many prisoners were paroled by Dr. Cooley from the workhouse because they could not pay their fines, the ministers of the city and newspapers united in a protest against the wholesale jail delivery which was going on.  Dr. Cooley quietly justified his policy by saying: The rich avoid imprisonment by paying the fines which the police court imposes.  The poor can not pay their fines because they are poor, and are sent to the workhouse in consequence.  That is imprisonment for debt, a debt due the city.  And imprisonment for debt is contrary to justice and humanity.

Some miles from the city, in another direction from the farm colony, is Boyville.  Boyville is Cleveland's farm for boys.  It is 285 acres in extent.  Prior to its opening, boys who were guilty of truancy and other petty offenses were lodged in the police station or put in jail.  Now these boys are taken to Boyville for the less serious offenses.  Here they are assigned to cottages which bear the name of Washington, of Jefferson, of Lincoln, of Jackson.  Each cottage is a home, presided over by a motherly matron.  The main administration building is a school where the boys are taught the same subjects as in the public school.  They are kept here until released by the city.  The whole atmosphere of Boyville is that of a home, not a prison.  It is no disgrace to have been at Boyville.  It is an Alma Mater which leaves no stain of criminal confinement.

This process of stopping crime at its source has been still further promoted by the opening up of a dozen play-grounds all over the city.  Three all-the-year-round bath-houses have been opened in the poorer districts.  All over the city are public ball-grounds laid out by the City Park Department.  There are fifty such diamonds in all.  In the winter as many skating-rinks are open.  Vacant lots, loaned to the city by their owners are flooded and kept in condition.  During the summer months upwards of a hundred band concerts are given in various parks of the city.

The policy of the administration has been to make the parks the people's commons, and by generous expenditure for public recreation, to check the growth of vice and crime by offering a substitute.

Cleveland has established a new idea in criminal and philanthropic administration.  It has blazed a pathway which will profoundly influence the future.

(Dr. H. R. Cooley has been the promoter and chief originator of this humane system and justly merits the high honor he has received in the philanthropic world.—Ed.)

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