the advantages of voluntary aid and effort, wherever they may be attainable.

If it were necessary to fortify our position by authority, such support is at hand in the published opinions of some of the most intelligent and experienced of our prison officers- Mr. Haynes, of Massachusetts, Mr. Prentice, of Ohio, Mr. Rice, of Maine, Mr. Cordier, of Wisconsin, and Mr. Miller, of Missouri. These gentlemen have expressed themselves as decidedly favorable to the creation of central prison boards in our States, as likely to be productive of many and important reforms in prison discipline.

But experience is the best and most fruitful teacher; and this we have on our northern border. What the prison system of the new Canadian Dominion is, we are not informed; but under the late provincial government, a central prison board was created in 1859. Within the eight years of its existence, reforms of great breadth and importance were inaugurated. Many new jails were erected, and many others materially improved, on plans approved by the board; a uniform dietary was established, whereby the annual cost of rations was brought down from $89.25 to $32.85 per capita; carefully prepared registers were introduced into the jails, by means of which criminal statistics of great value were annually collected and published; and central prisons, intermediate between the provincial penitentiary and the common jails, in which a reformatory discipline could be introduced, either had been, or were about to be established, at convenient points throughout the province. Not a tithe of these valuable and gratifying results could have been secured, otherwise than through the existence and agency of this central board.

OUR COUNTY JAILS.

A popular preacher in Brooklyn said recently in a sermon: "Look at our jails. They are a disgrace to civilization. Some of them are fit to put wild beasts in, but most of them are not." The rhetoric is strong here, but there is a terrible basis of truth underlying it. There may be a half dozen of the sixty-eight jails in the State (though we could scarcely name so many) properly constructed to meet the exigencies of the existing system; but, in general, they are as faulty in construction and arrangement as they well can be-dark, damp, cramped, ill-ventilated and gloomy in the extreme. It would seem to have been a study with those who built them to shut out all the light and air they could, and to make them as comfortless as possible. The thought does not appear to have ever occurred to them that what they thus sought to exclude, was not only essential to the health of the prisoners, but might be made to contribute to their

moral improvement as well. Quite a number of our jails are in the basements of court-houses, and almost wholly under ground. The

jail of Orange county, at Newburgh, for instance, in which thirty prisoners are often confined at a time, is in a cellar entirely beneath the surface, and so damp that a fire has to be made in it 365 days in the year. Of course it is extremely unhealthy, often either developing the seeds of consumption when latent in the system, or implanting them where they had no existence before. The jail of Warren county is also almost wholly under ground, and few prisoners are confined there for any considerable time without becoming either rheumatic or consumptive. There are other jails in the State scarcely less unhealthy than the two just named, and from the same cause.

We propose to offer a condensed view of the condition of our common jails, and the leading facts connected with their management, as they have come to our knowledge through repeated visitations.

Overcrowding is a sore evil in our jails. In many the accommodations are not more than half, in some less than half, what they ought to be, considering the number of prisoners confined in them. We have seen seventeen women confined in a room of the Albany jail sixteen feet by fourteen, with the thermometer at over ninety. The same night, when they went to bed, they must have covered the whole floor, so as almost to touch each other. In the same prison. the cells for the men are eight by four by seven feet, affording therefore only two hundred and twenty-four cubic foet of air; yet not unfrequently three prisoners are locked up together in the same cell, during the whole night and for a considerable part of the day. In the jail of Warren county, mentioned above, there are three cells, each twelve feet by six. Five or six prisoners are sometimes crowded into every one of them.

From this defect results another-that of an inconvenient, unsatisfactory and demoralizing internal arrangement of the jails. No classification, of any value, is or can be attempted. The drunk and the sober are, in some instances, separated into two groups; but even this is not in most cases possible. Everywhere the young and the old, the innocent and the guilty, the novice and the expert, the transgressor who has fallen but once, and the hardened offender who has committed his score of felonies, are thrown together in a common apartment, where they have nothing to do the live-long day but to recount old deeds of villany, or concoct schemes for the commission of new ones. Here the young, the inexperienced, those who have taken but few and trembling steps in the way of transgression, and even the wholly innocent and uncontaminated, have their passions excited and their imagination inflamed by impure or thrilling reci

tals, and are quickly and surely initiated into all the arts and mysteries of crime. Does it require the gift of prophecy to foretell the future of the inexperienced and young offender, who has been subjected for weeks and even months to influences such as these? They are as sure to become criminals as they are to grow older, unless a miracle of grace supervene to prevent it. The result is as our reports have over and over declared-to make our jails nurseries of crime instead of schools of reformation. What horror would seize the people of this State, if any one should propose to open in every county a school to train our youth in vice and make them adepts in crime! Yet just such schools are the greater part, if not all, of our common jails. They are better adapted, and their tendency in point of fact is, rather to make criminals than to reform or even to punish them.

The examinations of jails made by this Association, have revealed the fact of the want of a proper separation of the sexes therein. It is not meant by this statement that men and women are actually confined in the same apartment (though even this has been reported as to some jails; but in more than half the jails in the State, the sexes are in such relative positions as to be able to converse together with the greatest ease; and in many they can see each other through grated doors, or through a hole for passing food, or open-work iron floors, the women being over the men. In one jail the turnkey was found sleeping in the corridor, with only a wooden grating between him and the female prisoners, with his bed not six feet from theirs, with a light burning in the prison, and with the key of their apartment in his pocket. This facility for conversation between the sexes, is most corrupting and pernicious. The jail keepers have spoken of it as a monster evil; in several of the counties it has been presented by the grand juries; this Association has denounced it again and again as an influence not to be tolerated; but thus far to little or no purpose.

The Association has found an utter want of uniformity in the method of keeping the records of the jails. Nothing can exceed the looseness, meagreness, and lack of system, with which the statistics of the jails, with a few honorable exceptions, are kept, when kept at all. A few years ago the Association was instrumental in getting an act passed by the Legislature prescribing a form of register, requiring every county to be provided therewith, to keep its records in duplicate, to retain one copy in a strongly bound book, and to send the other in sheets at specified periods to the proper officer. The execution of the law was committed to the Secretary of State, and not, as had been asked, to the Prison Association. The next year,

on the plea that "the act relating to jail returns had given him infinite trouble," he procured its repeal; since which time chaos has come back to the jail records, there being now, as aforetime, no uniformity but a uniform irregularity.

Nowhere, in our numerous inspections of county prisons, have we found the inmates provided with regular employment. In most of the jails the prisoners scrub, whitewash, saw wood for the use of the prison, assist at housework, and perform other little services; but in none of them is any branch of productive labor pursued. This is a sore evil, because, first, "an idle brain is the devil's workshop," and because, secondly, the labor of the inmates might be made to contribute materially to their support.

Our inspections of jails have not shown, anywhere, the existence of much that could be called discipline. Their keepers, as a general rule, are quite satisfied that they have done their duty, if they keep safely the bodies of the prisoners committed to their custody. When prisoners are noisy or quarrelsome, they are locked in their cells, or chained to the floor, or handcuffed, or shut up in a dungeon. Good advice, moral suasion, is resorted to by some jailers; but this agency is not extensively used. But little punishment is inflicted; very little indeed is required. What necessity can there be for disciplinary measures where the whole multidude are tumbled together and permitted to gossip and amuse themselves pretty much as they please? We do not blame the officers for this. They cannot help it. It is the system that is in fault; and it is they who framed and continue the system, who are responsible for its evils.

Another essential defect of the jails of the State which our committees have exposed, is a total lack of the means of secular education. A little, a very little, is done in some of them by the keepers and their families in this direction; but it is as irregular as it is limited. There is not a library in a single common jail in the State. In some of them not a solitary book is found—not even a Bible, hymn book, tract or scrap of printed matter of any kind. This is a lack which cannot fail to bear bitter fruit. For its own sake at least, if not for the sake of the men and women immured within the jails, society should see that the prisoners are supplied with suitable reading matter; and this especially, as the weary hours are beguiled by no manual employments.

A still more important lack brought to light by our committees of inspection is that of religious instruction. The law provides that there shall be a Bible in every cell. In a few cases this provision is complied with to the letter. In perhaps rather more than a moiety of the jails, one or more Bibles are found; in very many there is not

a single copy. Two or three counties employ a chaplain for their jails at a slight remuneration; in three or four more, gratuitous preaching is pretty constantly had from volunteer clergymen. All the others are without stated preaching, though in a few of them an occasional sermon is heard. The total annual cost of the common jails of the State is not less than a quarter of a million; but of this large sum not $500 are expended with any view to meeting the religious wants of the prisoners. And for the improvement of their mental condition, which, in the case of numbers, is one of darkness and degradation, not a dollar is laid out. Not a book is bought, not a lesson given, not an effort of any sort made to pierce the dense folds of ignorance, and let a modicum of light into the darkened chambers of the soul.

Our inspections have revealed, and our reports repeatedly announced, that the dietaries of the jails, as a general rule, are abundant and good. There are exceptions to this, but they are not numerous. But the style of serving the meals is quite commonly repulsive, and tends to coarseness rather than refinement. The mode of providing the rations is objectionable. The plan is for boards of supervisors to allow a certain weekly sum per capita, the sheriff supplying the rations at his own discretion. The Association has more than once expressed its strong dislike to this method of furnishing supplies to the prisoners. "Such a trade," in the words of the Philadelphia Prison Society, "seems abhorrent to the best feelings of humanity." Let proper supplies be provided, and let the county pay the costs-nothing more. This would take away all temptation to reduce either the quality or quantity of the food with a view to profit. Such is the method pursued by the Commissioners of Public Charities and Correction in supplying the City Prison of New York (the Tombs) with rations, and the consequence is, that the cost in that institution is less than one-fourth the average outlay for the same purpose in the county jails. The price allowed to the sheriffs for the board of prisoners varies in the different counties from two dollars to six dollars per week, the latter being almost at hotel rates in the country.

The sheriffs of the several counties are, ex officio, keepers of the county jails; an arrangement which this Association has, at different times, vigorously combated, and for the following reasons: First, sheriffs are not selected with the slightest reference to their qualifications as jailers. Secondly, the duties for whose performance they ure chosen necessarily call them away a good deal from the jails and the care of the prisoners. But thirdly, the controlling objection to the system is, that the office of sheriff is not permanent, whereas