Because a state of crisis has been reached in Missouri prisons, the Women’s Crusade Against Crime is calling on members of the Appropriations Committee and other state officials to re-evaluate the budget and find the $15 millions necessary for two mediumsecurity institutions.
According to Crusade leaders, Mrs. James S. McClellan and Mrs. Ann Slaughter, “if something isn’t done now, Missouri corrections officials may have to follow the Florida example of refusing to accept new prisoners. Then we will have even more criminals roaming the streets.”
The Women’s Crusade suggests the sensible thing to do is to accept the necessary alternative — build the needed institutions. With crime on the upswing throughout the state, the Crusade has launched on all-out effort to get Missourians to back a movement for corrections funding.
“What is the point of pressuring police to arrest criminals and the courts to try them if there are no places to put them?” ask Mrs. McClellan and Mrs. Slaughter. “Today, police and judges are in a frightful position,” they say.
Establishment of new facilities in the Kansas City and St. Louis areas would free the critically overcrowded state penitentiary for use in housing only the most dangerous and hardened of criminals. At the same time, they would provide space for the less hardened while also permitting more constructive rehabilitation programs.
“Unless the lesser offenders are segregated from the hardened criminals,” the women point out, “our system will create worse criminals, more than 90% of whom will return to our streets. As it stands now, we are placing a number of salvageable potatoes in a bag with rotten ones — and these ultimately will be ruined, too.”
A state-wide movement for prison reform is vital to the state-wide reduction in crime, they added.
For further information contact: Geraldine Epp Smith Women’s Crusade Against Crime 231-0425
Originally published in The Paper, April 1975.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1975_04.pdf, printed page(s) 2; PDF page(s) 2.
