George W. Cable on Prison Reform

Abstract

BEGINNING IN 1881, George W. Cable organized and conducted a citizens' campaign for prison and asylum reform in New Orleans that drew wide support, was remarkably successful locally, and produced results extending far beyond the limits of the city. His program included three phases: collecting information on local abuses and shortcomings and also on improved practices in such institutions elsewhere in the country and abroad, drafting and presenting to city officials ordinances and regulations to produce the needed improvement, and publicizing widely the conditions in need of remedy and the steps proposed to improve them. He relied mainly on newspapers to develop public demands for action and himself wrote a series of essays for the Times-Democrat, which adopted his reform program as its own. An inquiry from Frederick George Bromberg of Mobile, Alabama, gave him an occasion to print and distribute a broadside on prison reform, printed below. Bromberg had been active in public affairs for the preceding fifteen years and remained prominent through a long career in law and politics. He had been appointed a school commissioner in Mobile in 1865; he had served as city treasurer (1867-69) and postmaster (1869-71), as state senator (1868-72), and as a member of the United States Congress (i1873-75).1 Cable had become prominent on the national literary scene with his stories and novels of early New Orleans: Old Creole Days (1879), The Grandissimes (1880), and Madame Delphine (1881). Late in the year I88I he had given up other employment to rely on his pen for a livelihood. On September 19, 1882, he went to New York and Boston in the interest of his literary work. When he returned home late in October, Bromberg's inquiry, dated October 1i1, was on his desk. It was in keeping with his zeal for prison reform at the time-and for other reform efforts at other times-that within a few days he had printed his open letter to Bromberg, dated November 4. In programs of the Prytania Street Presbyterian Church, Cable had earlier followed his bent for social betterment and had met gratifying success in winning followers. After writing the report for a grand jury of which he was secretary, he set out to improve conditions in the local