nine months, and in the latter, four years, ten months and sixteen days, notwithstanding persons are sentenced to State prison for far more trivial offences at the South than at the North; in Tennessee, for instance, for stealing a fence rail, valued at eight cents. The extremes of sentences at the North are in New Hampshire and western Pennsylvania, being five years, six months, and twenty-nine days in the former State, and two years and four months in the latter. The extremes at the South are in the same States that furnish the extremes for the whole country, viz., Virginia and South Carolina, as already given-eight years and two years. The proportion of life-sentenced men for the whole country is within a fraction of five to every hundred; and the period of detention for this class of convicts is, on the average, between seven and eight years. A man sentenced for life has a better chance for a speedy release than one sentenced for twenty or even fifteen years.

Twenty-eight per cent of the inmates of our State penitentiaries are returned as wholly illiterate, not knowing their letters; seventy per cent as intemperate; and seventy-seven per cent as never having learned a trade. These figures show, very clearly, to what a fearful extent ignorance, drink and idleness are stimulants or occasions of crime. Give knowledge to all, withhold the means of drunkenness from all, and train all to the habit and love of work by training them to skill in it, and, though we might not expect to see men changed into angels, or even saints, we should see them, almost to a man, observant of law; our police force and our criminal courts might be disbanded; and our vast penitentiary establishments turned into great industrial houses, in which, with no iron doors to bar egress, and no grated windows to frown upon the passers-by, the cheerful hum of free and virtuous labor would be heard the livelong day.

There is one column of percentages in the table we have constructed partly from the reports and partly from returns made by the prison authorities themselves-which has a sad significance; a column showing that nearly one-fourth of all the inmates of these grim abodes of guilt, and crime, and wretchedness are minors—mere boys, ranging from twenty years down even to the child that has not yet reached his teens! Who can contemplate such a fact, and not feel the fountains of his sympathy stirred to their very depths? Who can think of it and not ask himself, How far am I, along with the rest of society, by my selfish indifference, neglect and failure in duty to these wretched children-half of them orphans, and more than a moiety of the remaining half worse than orphans, through the brutal ignorance and fiendish wickedness of their pa

rents-how far am I thus responsible for this state of things? And will not all Christians, all good citizens, be moved by such an exhibition, first, to devise preventive agencies to save these youths from falling into crime; and, secondly, when they have fallen, to found reformatory homes-houses of discipline, in which curative, healing processes shall be applied to them, through which they may be "redeemed, regenerated and disenthralled "?

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There is another column of a less painful interest, and which yet affords abundant food for thought, viz., the one which gives the percentages of pardons, showing that in some prisons more than twenty out of every hundred receive executive clemency, and that the proportion in the whole country rises to one-tenth, which would give as the whole number pardoned in 1868, one thousand six hundred and thirty-one (1,631). These sixteen hundred pardoned criminals represent many times that number of applicants; in fact, the proportion that do not apply is a lean minority. Gov. Hoffman informs us that he examined over six hundred applications last year, or an average of more than two for every working day of the year-enough almost to fill his whole time. This desire and expectation of pardon on the part of convicts, and the extent to which it finds expression in the form of petitions to the executive, have become a sore evil. While it is an onerous and unreasonable tax upon the time and strength of our chief magistrates, its effect upon the convicts is far from beneficial. They are always hoping, planning, working to get out; and this makes them restless, irritable and indisposed to yield themselves to the reformatory influences that might be brought to bear upon them. The true method is to place our prisons upon a proper basis, make their administration permanent, put them into the hands of competent officers, and then say to the incarcerated criminal: "When you show yourself a reformed man, and convince us by satisfactory proofs that it is safe to let you be at large, you can go; but not before." This would place every man's pardon in his own hand, and free our governors from a world of anxious toil, and from a responsibility to which they ought not to be subjected; especially when, by all the pains and care they can give to the work, they can scarcely hope to escape mistakes, and may well congratulate themselves if the errors into which they fall are not numerous, and sometimes of a grave character.

The percentage of foreigners in our State prisons, taking the whole country together, is out of all proportion to that which exists between the total population of native-born and foreign-born inhabitants, being considerably more than one-fourth.

IV. REPORT ON THE STATE PRISONS OF NEW YORK, AND MEMORIAL IN FAVOR OF AN AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION RELATIVE TO OUR PENITENTIARY SYSTEM.

BY THE PRISON DISCIPLINE COMMITTEE.

To the Legislature of the State of New York:

The Prison Association of New York, in the exercise of the powers conferred upon them by their charter, and in execution of the duty imposed upon and required of them by the act of the Legislature of 1869, to examine "with reference to the moral and financial administration of the prisons of the State and the reformatory agencies employed in them," respectfully

REPORT:

That, thus far, they have been enabled to give their attention only to the State prisons, leaving the other prisons in the State, also embraced in the duty imposed, for future consideration; and in their present examination of the State prisons they have confined their attention to the subjects of "moral and financial administration" and "the reformatory agencies employed."

FIRST.

FINANCIAL ADMINISTRATION.

The Inspectors, in their annual report made January 1, 1869, asked from the Legislature appropriations to the amount of $1,005,900 for the current year, to wit:

* The same provision of law was contained in the legislation of the previous session (1868). In obedience thereto, a special committee made an exhaustive investigation by personal inspection and sworn testimony, the results of which were embodied in a paper printed in our Twenty-fourth Annual Report, to which the Legislature is respectfully referred for important details relating to the "moral and financial administration."

And they reported that the annual earnings of the prisons fell $242,734.88 short of their ordinary annual expenditures.

This financial result, causing our prisons to be a yearly drain upon the State treasury, is not a sudden event, arising from recent occurrences, but is the legitimate and inevitable result of our pursuit of the same system for more than a quarter of a century.

Referring to the second report of the inspectors (that of last year being their twenty-first), it appears that the deficiency in the first year under the existing system (viz., 1848) was $61,640.48, and it has gradually grown to about $250,000.

Amid this continuing and growing result of annual deficiencies, the question has ever been uppermost: How does it happen, that, with 2,000 to 3,000 full-grown prisoners, and most of them ablebodied and in good health, enough cannot be earned to pay expenses, which at most do not much exceed $200 a year for each person?

It is at least half a century ago that the idea of making the prisons self-supporting was embraced, and it has ever since been the all-controlling spirit of our system of prison government, controlling so far, at one period, as to cause the idea of reformation of the prisoners to be lost sight of.

At one time it was thought that the "contract" plan, whereby the labor of the prisoners could be hired out, would answer. It was tried; but it was supposed to interfere with mechanical industry outside the prisons, and restrictions were thrown around it, and now, after many years of trial, with and without such restrictions, it has clearly failed in its object of making the prisons self-supporting.

It was in furtherance of the leading idea above mentioned that one of our prisons was located at Sing Sing, in order, out of the marble quarries there, to earn the requisite amount without interfering with the outside mechanical industry.

And so with the prison at Clinton, that the same result might be obtained from the iron in that vicinity.

Thus far, both these experiments, also, have failed, and both of these prisons have fallen further short of meeting their expenses than the Auburn prison, where the "contract" plan has most fully obtained and has been most successful, though now terminating also in failure.

The failure of the contract system would, in itself, as a financial result, be disappointing and discouraging; but we cannot be blind to the fearful sacrifice of sound principle which has been made, and has been and is justified only by that very financial result. That system puts the prisoners under the control, not of State officers, but of traders.

For the whole working day these convicts, whom the State holds in trust to reform them and return them to a virtuous life, are not under State control, but under the absolute government of men whose only interest is to obtain from each an amount of labor exceeding the sum paid for it, and to whom the minds or souls of the prisoners are of little value in comparison with the product of their toil.

What the causes of these failures? and what the remedy for them? are questions of very grave import. They seem to flow naturally from experiments long, and patiently, and faithfully, and, we cannot resist the conclusion, fully tried. It would be rash for us to advise a continuance of them, and perhaps as inconsiderate for us to believe that they ought to be abandoned.

For instance: Why is it that convict labor remains now at about the same price at which it ranged twenty years ago, when within that time every thing else has so enhanced in price that the ordinary expenditures for the prisons have risen from $168,416.39 a year to $589,913 ?

Why abandon the marble quarry at Sing Sing, when heretofore the produce-which was of an inferior and condemned quality-was taken from the surface, and now when it is taken thirty, forty or fifty feet below the surface it is said to produce a very superior article, and that said by the State officers and the experienced men who are working it, who are so confident of results as to be willing to guarranty that, with 500 prisoners engaged in the quarry, the whole cost of the prison can be paid?

And, finally, why abandon the iron business at Clinton, when it is declared that the failure there has been entirely owing to the "contract system, and that, with the labor of the prisoners, conducted alone under State authority, that prison also can be made to be self-supporting?

These are grave questions, which we have not had time fully to investigate between the date of this report and the time when the nature of the law of the last session came to our knowledge, and the Association cannot answer them.

But the time has come for a full examination of them. The experiments the State has been trying have been tried long enough. The disastrous results have continued long enough, for they are annually swelling rapidly, without any hope of diminution under our present system of administration. One result, however, of our experiment is, that they have at length brought us to such a point that we can now investigate them with a fair prospect of attaining certain results. Such results can, however, be obtained only by the examina- ›