Social Welfare History Project Programs Page 22

What is Professional Social Work? (1923)

Social work does not consist of maintaining any social activity which has become standard and permanent. Social workers are continually originating certain activities and vindicating them and making them standard and permanent but after they have reached that stage they are not rated as social work. At one point kindergartens which are now a regular part of our educational system were promoted and maintained as social work. Some activities that are more or less permanent and standardized in regard to their procedure such as the relief work of old family welfare societies are nevertheless exceptional activities because the circumstances of the different individuals require and receive special treatment in each case. Even relief giving may pass out of the realm of social work if it is put on the basis of flat pensions and paid for out of taxation, as in the case of soldier’s pensions; or if pensions are given as a part of a fixed policy of a big corporation toward its employees, there is no reason to class the administration of these pensions as social work.

Corrections: Part IV – Reformation As An End In Prison Discipline

“Reformation as an End in Prison Discipline: Report of The Standing Committee,” by F. H. Wines, Chairman. ,A presentation at the Fifteenth Annual Session of The National Conference Of Charities And Correction, 1888. “We assert, therefore, that there can be no recognition of reformation as an end in prison discipline in any prison where the warden or superintendent is not, by his education, habits of thought, personal character, and conviction of duty, qualified to administer to convicts the moral treatment which they require.”

Corrections: Part II – Background and Jails 1878

Presentations and reports of standing committees at the annual meetings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction during the late 19th century reveal that social welfare leaders and progressives were actively involved in efforts to reform the nation’s criminal justice system.

Corrections: Part VI – The Treatment of The Criminal: 1904

By F. H. Wines, LL. D., Chairman of Committee on Treatment of Criminals. “The subject assigned to this committee is the treatment of the criminal, a subordinate phase of the larger problem of the treatment of crime. The criminal is the concrete embodiment of the abstract conception of crime. Crime is an act, while the criminal is the agent of the act; but there can be no act without an actor, and it is through the criminal that the law strikes at crime, which it is the aim of the law to prevent or to suppress, caring little for the criminal actor, but much for the victim of his deed.”

Corrections: Part III — A Model Prison System 1878

Prison Discipline In General: The Elmira System – A letter From Z. B. Brockway of Elmira, N.Y., To F. B. Sanborn of Concord, Mass. Presented at the Fifth Annual Conference of Charities, 1878. “Labor for prisoners lies at the very foundation of their reformation; and I hope to see, before I die, the great army of idle prisoners, congregated in the common jails of our land, brought together in workhouses, where they shall be wisely and profitably employed, and held in such custody as shall protect society from their crimes, or the burden of their support as paupers, — held until they give evidence to experts of cure or reformation.”

Corrections: Part V – Progress: 1873-1893

“The Prison Question: Progress Over Twenty Years, 1873-93,” by General R. Brinkerhoff, Chairman, Committee on the History of Prisons. “In a resume of progress for twenty years in so large a country as the United States, of course only a brief outline…”