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No 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 prisons combined,* more homosexuals (200) and alcoholics (1,500) than any other U. S. penal institution. Only untimely bit in Mr. Fishman's article is the cachet he gives Warden McCann for the small number of escapes from the prison. "Such an escape record," says Mr. Fishman, "could be achieved only by a warden dog-like in his devotion to his job."
*Last week Surgeon General Hugh S. Gumming asked the House Appropriations Committee to change the name of the U. S. Narcotic Farm at Fort Worth, Tex. "The name would indicate," explained the Surgeon General, "that it is a farm on which we raise narcotics."