7. Cleanliness.-Many of the jails visited were in a horribly filthy condition-unscrubbed, unswept, not whitewashed, with filthy beds and bedding, and in some instances excrements scattered over the floor and daubed upon the walls.

8. Diet. The inmates of our jails, almost without exception, speak well of the food furnished them, both as to quality and quantity. In several counties the fare was too rich for persons deprived of exercise. As a rule, the jailor sends his prisoners a portion from his own table.

9. Classification.-The greatest of all the faults in the construction of county prisons, is the absence of any means of classifying prisoners.

The sane are not separated from the insane.

The guilty are not separated from the innocent.
The suspected are not separated from the convicted.
Hardened criminals and children are thrown together.
The sexes are not always separated from each other.

The effect of this promiscuous herding together of old and young, innocent and guilty, convicts, suspected persons and witnesses, male and female, is to make the county prison a school of vice. In such an atmosphere purity itself could not escape contamination.

Separate cells are not a remedy for this evil, What is needed is the absolute prevention of all communication.

10. The Sick.-Hospital accommodation for the sick is a thing unknown.

11. Occupation. The prisoners, in nearly every instance, are absolutely without employment for mind or body. There are no libraries in the jails; even a bible is ordinarily wanting; papers are rarely furnished, and no work is provided for prisoners, much less required of them. Idleness is a fruitful source of vice; and enforced idleness has developed, and always will, the most debasing passions and habits.

12. Instruction.—(Intellectual.) No attempt at secular instruction and education is made, in any jail in Illinois.

(Religious.) Religious instruction is more common, but still very infrequent. The clergy rarely visit the jails, and the same may be said of the laity. There is here a field of christian effort which has been almost wholly neglected.

13. Records. As has been already stated, the records commonly kept are incomplete and almost valueless; and they are the property of the jailor, who retains them in his possession upon leaving the prison.

14. Reformation.-The efforts made at reformation of criminals, in the jails of this state, are unsystematic, unintelligent, fitful, and in most of the counties wholly wanting.

These statements, every one of which can be abundantly verified by illustrative instances, if necessary, constitute a serious indictment against the prison system of Illinois.

The truth is, that the system rests upon a false basis.

INFLUENCE OF JAIL LIFE.-The arrested criminal is, from his very situation, keenly sensitive to the influences which may affect him, after the commission of crime. The majority of those arrested are seized for a first offense. The arrest is a turning-point in the life of each-and the criminal feels it to be such. It ɛeparates the innocent aspirations of youth and purity from a future of crime and moral debasement. Torn by conflicting emotions, balancing between the innate love of virtue and the dark abyss of crime and pollution before him, how potent for good or ill, at this moment, are his external surroundings! All which he sees or hears or feels, at this crisis of his life, is indelibly impressed upon his memory. Every influence is a weight on one side or upon the other of the balance in which his judgment and purpose are suspended.

At this critical period he is introduced to one of our county jails. The turn of the key shuts him out from the world. He is left to his own reflections. Around him are a score of prisoners, some, like himself, young in crime; others, hardened villians, who seek to initiate him into all the dark secrets of vice, which they have learned so well. The prison is dark, damp and fetid. A feeble ray of light reaches him, through a small and heavily grated window. The air is close and suffocating. After sleep he awakes with a pain in his head, oppression of the whole system, and a stifled sensation, from breathing impure air. He is also compelled to breathe the horrid effluvium from the putrid excretions, from his own body and those of his fellow prisoners, and denied any opportunity for privacy and those proprieties which even the beasts practice.

Is it not reasonable to suppose that every feeling of decency Vol. I-25

and self-respect will be eradicated from his mind; and that he will become beastly in character, tastes and feelings? Any remains of virtuous resolution which he previously cherished, will soon fade out, in this stygian den.

Enraged at the cruelty of which he is the victim, and at the indecency and filth with which the public force him to endure, he curses the state, the ministers of the law, and all mankind; and who will say that he is wholly without excuse?

His manhood, instead of being fostered and developed, is brutalized and crushed-to say nothing of the injury to health and liability to disease, to which he is subiected, by confinement in such quarters.

Many of our jails are reproductions, upon a smaller scale, of Andersonville and Libby prison. An ex-officer of the Union army, in one of the counties visited, accompanied the commissioner to the dungeon beneath the court-house, misnamed a prison, and on coming out, remarked, with deep feeling, "I was a prisoner at Andersonville, for some months; but I never suffered, as these men have to suffer."

WITHOUT EXCUSE.-Such treatment is inexcusable, whether we view it in the light of the rights of the prisoner, or of the interests of society. A reform is imperatively demanded.

We are often told, that "the criminal ought to suffer; it is the penalty due to his crime."

There are three objects in view, in all criminal legislation—first, the satisfaction of justice; second, the protection of society; third, the reformation of the offender.

As to the first of these ends, vengeance is a divine prerogative. The second and third are the only ends which society has the right to seek to accomplish.

But be it so. Admit for argument's sake that the public has a right to torture the criminal in its power, simply because he deserves torture. What then?

Then let the law prescribe what and how he shall suffer. If he is worthy of death, hang or behead him; but do not, without color of law, kill him by inches, by refusing him air to breathe. If he has taken his neighbor's goods, let him by hard labor atone for the act. Let him make restitution. But do not deny him the light of day; do not compel him to be idle, for weeks or months; do not disgrace our boasted Christian civilization, by forcing him

to live, eat and sleep, over an open privy-vault, used by a score of prisoners.

But a county jail is not solely nor principally a place of punishment. It is more properly a place for safe-keeping of persons awaiting trial, about one-third of whom are, upon trial, declared to be innocent. The jail is also used for the detention of the insane, and of witnesses-persons not suspected of crime.

That a person guiltless of crime should be forced into such a place, and there confined for weeks or months, his health destroyed, and all his finer feelings outraged, is itself a crime against humanity.

Such a policy makes great criminals out of little ones.

THE REFORM DEMANDED.-If the views here advanced are just, as they seem to be, then it is evident that any radical reform in the treatment of criminals, must and will sweep the county jails, as houses of punishment, out of existence, for the following, among other reasons:

Nothing but the overthrow of the system will ever put an end to the present abuses, for they cannot be corrected by individual effort, but are inherent in the system itself.

The number of criminals undergoing sentence in any county jail is too small to justify the employinent of a competent prison officer, capable of making the prison financially self-supporting and reformatory in its influence upon prisoners. The territory embraced in a single county is not large enough to furnish a sufficient number of inmates for this purpose.

Yet every prison might, and should, be made self-supporting. To make the prison system of this state such, it is only necessary to substitute district prisons for county jails, and to make labor in them compulsory. These district prisons should be under state control. They should form no part of the political machinery of the state. Incompetent officers should not be appointed to take charge of them; and competent superintendents should be retained in office during good behavior, regardless of party affiliations. Prison management and discipline is a business, which can only be learned by experience, and which needs to be conducted upon. business principles.

Financial success and reformation are so closely allied, that although one does not necessarily involve the other, yet failure in either is failure in both.

The establishment of district prisons would not, of course, do away with the necessity for county jails, as houses of detention, previous to trial.

But confinement, while awaiting trial, should be purely solitary, in order to prevent the corruption of the innocent, especially of the young, and the further debasement of the guilty.

The confinement of those whose guilt is as yet undetermined, ought to involve no peculiar hardship, such as would be in itself a wrong to the innocent.

The establishment of district prisons, as suggested, under state control, would render the classification of prisoners not only po8sible, but easy. Such classification is one of the most important

elements in the enlightened treatment of criminals.

IRISH SYSTEM.—In the Irish system of prison discipline, which is generally regarded as the best yet devised, the classification of criminals is a leading feature.

The germ from which the Irish system sprang, was the "mark system," of Captain Alexander Maconochie, the able and distinguished superintendent of the British penal colony of Norfolk Island, nine hundred miles east of New Zealand, concerning which he was able to say, "I found it a hell; I left it a well ordered community." The principles upon which this noble man founded his system of discipline, were the banishment of slavery from the list of punishments; reliance upon influence rather than upon force, as a means of government; the surrounding of prisoners with motives to self-improvement, as well as with walls; and the substitution, as far as possible, of measures of prevention for those merely remedial.

The supreme aim of the Irish system is the reformation of criminals. The two bases upon which it rests, are the subjection of the convict to adequate tests prior to his discharge, whereby his reformation can be determined with a reasonable degree of certainty, and individual treatment, according to individual character and necessities.

The Irish system embraces three distinct stages of imprisonment proper. The first stage, at Mountjoy, is highly penal. In it, the cellular or separate system of incarceration is adopted, and the convicts are wholly isolated from each other. The duration of this stage is eight months, which may be shortened by good behavior, or lengthened by bad. Two impressions are here made