GAOL RESEMBLES MANSION

Evening Star, Issue 21116, 31 May 1932, Page 2

GAOL RESEMBLES MANSION

PROVISION FOR WOMEN MALEFACTORS BEDROOMS AND ROOF GARDENS IN LUXURY APPOINTMENTS Easter was the season chosen lor the Opening of New York’s latest home for women—a prison erected at a cost of £360,000, which looks like a fashionable block of mansion Hats. It is intended to replace the dingy quarters provided for women malefactors on Welfare Island, and it has altogether 410 bedrooms instead of colls. It is twelve stories high, in-Green Village, New York’s Chelsea, with a delightful roof garden on which arc* tennis courts, a gymnasium, and sun pnrloußs. _ No oiie would suspect it to be a prison. Indeed, within a few weeks scores of women have stopped to inquire about the rentals, eliciting from the Irish doorman, who enjovs the situation immensely, his stock formula: “No, ma’am; nothin’ doing. You’ll have to shoot your husband to get in here.” DIET KITCHENS. Tlie upper floors beneath the roof playground are devoted entirely to hospital quarters and diet kitchens with rooms for nurses and doctors. The lower floors are offices, and the middle Hoors contain the prisoners’ sleeping rooms, eacii lOjft by 6Jft, with hot and cold running water and an immovable window with an outside exposure. Each class of offender is strictly segregated, so that it will be unnecessary, for instance, for a nice refined husband-shooter ever to come into con tact with a husband-stealer or criminals of a lower order. Elaborate precautions have boon taken architecturally to make this house of detention for women the most sanitary prison in the world. Its walls are of buffcoloured glazed terracotta, easily cleaned; and the builders say the establishment will have none of the characteristic prison odour. The recreation rooms arc equipped with electric sewing machines, and one of the features of the new institution, which is organised so that no offender, youthful or other-: wise, will find it a school for crime, is a picturesque row of reception booths in which the prisoners may see and converse with visitors and lawyers. A heavy bullet-proof glass partition separates the prisoner from the visitor, whom she can see and talk to in whispers by means of a microphone. New York’s new model prison for women is staffed exclusively by women. The doctors, as well as the nurses, are women, and so are the wardens. The inmates have the privilege, when writing to their friends, of giving only the street address of the prison without betraying the nature of their home. On week days they will wear uniforms, not in the traditional drab grey, but of a brighter colour, and special Sunday garments will be supplied. The library contains 5,000 volumes of varied literatures.