Prisons & Power

New York State gained national attention and considerable imitation when it first led out stiffly against Crime with its famed Baumes Laws. These severe penal statutes overcrowded the state's prisons with life-term felons, helped breed the fierce despair among herded inmates which fired last year's deadly riots at Auburn and Dannemora (TIME, Aug. 5, et seg.).

Prison reform was naturally Item No.1 on the political program at Albany last week when the legislature convened to receive the annual message of Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Officials throughout the land pricked up their ears to hear what New York was going to do next about crime. To the legislature Governor Roosevelt proposed: 1) large additional appropriations for prison construction; 2) five emergency prison camps for outdoor work; 3) increase of prisoner's ration allowance from 21-c- to 26-c-; 4) more prudent selection and training of guards.

Crime has political significance only locally, however. Outlanders listened even more attentively to what the country's prime Democratic officeholder, the governor of the state which contains Niagara Falls, would have to say about Water Power. For six years New York's Democratic governors and Republican legislatures have bickered violently but fruitlessly over hydro-electric control. Alfred Emanuel Smith, as Governor, laid down the Democratic plan: state ownership, control and development of St. Lawrence River power sites. The Republican plan: control and development of power sites by private interests under mild state supervision.

Why Governor Roosevelt, contrary to custom, withheld his message until just before delivery became plain when the legislature heard him reiterate the Smith plan and then add in his own right:

"The state [hydroelectric] agency should provide the financing of and retain the fee to any system of state-wide power transmission of electricity made necessary by the new [St. Lawrence] power development. . . . This would reduce the cost of electricity many millions of dollars each year . . . insure a fair and reasonable rate to the consumer, especially the household user. . . . The families of this state have been paying too much for their electricity and are therefore not in a position to use to a proper degree the many labor-saving devices of modern invention."

The extension of the state-ownership theory to include transmission as well as sites, plus the appeal to the family pocketbook, left no doubt of Governor Roosevelt's purpose to continue to press Water Power as a leading political issue in his State, perhaps in the nation.

New York Republicans have been losing campaigns on the power issue. Fortnight ago Congressman Bertrand Hollis Snell, House Rules Committee Chairman and most potent New Yorker in Congress, urged G. O. P. state leaders to modify their position on power, to compromise with the Democrats sufficiently to get the issue out of politics. William H. Hill, Hoover-appointed leader, echoed the Snell entreaty: "If Roosevelt will not accept the Republican offer of a compromise, give him what he wants but by all means get the question out of next year's campaign."

Governor Roosevelt's message was calculated to make it harder than ever for the Republicans to compromise, to get power out of politics.

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