Word: maccormick
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Long on the list of WPA projects was a bright colorful mural for this Manhattan jail. Commissioner of Correction Austin Harbutt MacCormick is an avid psychologist, a firm believer in the use of color in the mental readjustment of female prisoners. So is Prison Superintendent Ruth Elizabeth Collins. She had already accepted a collection of travel posters to enliven the bleak, white-tiled corridors of the jail. So now the prisoners march to their individual rooms, the workshops and mess hall through halls burgeoning with such signs as VISIT SPAIN, TRAVEL IN INDIA, SEE SORRENTO. But both Commissioner MacCormick...
...Commissioner MacCormick had not sounded the most deplorable depths of Welfare Island until he went to the mess hall at noon. In fluttered a huge chorus of perverts, their lips and cheeks blushing with rouge, their eyes darkened with mascara, their hair flowing long. In their cells were found heaps of feminine underclothes, nightgowns, perfume, lipsticks, suntan powder. They were confined to the laundry during work hours, but at other times were not segregated. Unless close watch was kept on these tainted characters, other prisoners would fight as desperately for their favor as they would for a woman...
Commissioner MacCormick could not change Welfare Island overnight from a crowded, filthy firetrap to a model institution, but he could and did put Cleary, Rao & Co. in solitary confinement to await possible dope-peddling trials. The Commissioner sent narcotic addicts and diseased prisoners to the hospital, while young prisoners were segregated. He took from the perverts their frippery, sent them squealing to the barber to have their locks trimmed, saw that they remained alone in their own eating and living quarters. He charged the deputy warden with breaking almost every rule in the city's penological code, stripped Warden...
...sooner were the first incredible reports of the MacCormick visit to Welfare Island announced than half a dozen agencies preened themselves on having instigated the raid. Among them were the Daily News, the World-Telegram, the New York Foundation, which had paid for an investigation begun two years ago, a grand jury which had recommended an investigation of the prison's "gross mismanagement" last year. Plain, however, was the fact that it took an anti-Tammany administration to dig to the bottom of Welfare Island's cesspool of corruption...
Commissioner MacCormick's clean-up was a windfall for Vanity Fair which got its February issue on the newsstands six days before Welfare Island made big black headlines. In that smartchart was an article about the prison which knowingly described most of the evil conditions uncovered by the raid. Its author was a onetime deputy Commissioner of Correction, Joseph Fulling Fishman, who calls Welfare Island "the hardest prison in the world to manage." He points to its unparalleled turnover of 30,000 inmates a year, remarks that it harbors more drug cases (1,200 a year) than all Federal...