lege, the professional school, in due succesion, until at last he takes his degree, an accomplished lawyer, physician or other professional man. But it is no such grim satire on the term ' prison discipline' of which we are now speaking; but rather of such a gradation of prisons as shall exclude from each higher stage those who have passed through and been benefited by the lower prisons. That would be the ideal system which would dismiss forever from the minor prisons those who have been instructed in a reformatory, and would exclude from the state prison those who had undergone the minor penalties. And the nearer we bring these different classes of prisons under one general management, the more effective shall we find their deterrent and preventive power, now confessedly so small. Naturally enough, we see the best examples of this centralization of prisons in the smaller states, and, perhaps, Rhode Island comes nearest to what is here spoken of. In the year 1871, however, the state of Maine passed a law which has greatly simplified the management of its local prisons, and is worthy of imitation elsewhere. The power to employ convicts in the county prisons of Maine, and to transfer them from one of these sixteen prisons to another, is now vested in the three Inspectors of the state prison at Thomaston; so that, practically, all the Maine convicts, except the boys in the State Reformatory, are under one board of control. The results, pecuniarily and moral, are declared to be good, and after a longer trial of the new system they will doubtless be still better.

THE PRIMARY PRISONS,

properly speaking, should not be reckoned the houses of arrest and detention, but rather the reformatories to which young offenders are sent for months or years. Guard houses and jails are the waystations and waiting-rooms in which crime is temporarily checked, but not systematically dealt with as crime; they are the mere vestibules of the prison-house of a commuuity. In the truant school and the reformatory, we enter upon the prison house itself— the lower stories, above which are the houses of correction (or, as these are sometimes called, work-houses) and penitentiaries or State prisons-" convict prisons" as they are termed in England and Ireland. And it is interesting to observe-especially when the observer favors the application of the Irish or Crofton system of prison discipline-that in the upper and the lower stories of our three-story prison system, the method of Maconochie and Sir Walter Crofton 9-C. & R.

(Doc. 15.)

has already made an entrance and established itself quietly and gradually. In the State prisons the "commutation laws," by which sentences are shortened for good behavior, are the entering wedge of the new system; followed rather feebly, as we see, by the efforts, public and private, to provide for discharged prisoners, not yet, as in Ireland, under strict police supervision. In the reformatories the whole discipline aims, and has long aimed, at what the Crofton method seeks and in some degree accomplishes. Hope rather than fear, and the constant pressure of good motives rather than bad ones, are relied upon in these prisons for boys and girls; and it is in the same line that Maconochie and Sir Walter worked among their mature and gray-headed culprits. Scarcely a lad in any of our reform schools serves out his whole sentenee, if, as it ought to be, it runs during his minority. He is instructed, disciplined in labor and in self control, and then sent out into the world on ticket of leave. The same should be done in all our prisons; and when this principle is once admitted and acted upon methodically, we have all that is intrinsically valuable in the Crofton system. This is applicable, we doubt not, to all grades of prisons; to some with more difficulty than to others, and to none with entire ease. But we look to its introduction, and to a better appreciation and utilization of what is best in the separate system of Pennsylvania, for whatever improvement the coming generations shall witness in our prisons.

66 THE DETAILS OF DISCIPLINE.

"Edward Livingston, our greatest and wisest American writer upon penal legislation, says in the introduction to his Louisiana Code, and says very truly: "The details of imprisonment, especially if coupled with labor, must be strictly defined by law. Any discretion left to the jailer as to the mode of inflicting it makes him, and not the judge, the arbiter of the culprit's fate. He may, without proper limits to his authority, change the sentence of a few years' confinement into the same period of exquisite misery, followed by loss of health or of life; and he may do this without incurring any penalty. If he may at his discretion inflict stripes for disobedience or want of respect; if it his duty by all the means in his power to make the convicts feel the awful degradation and misery to which their vicious courses had reduced them,' then imprisonment is the worst of all punishments, because the most unequal. The law, then, must, in every particular that can

be foreseen, regulate the conduct of those to whose keeping the prison is to be committed.'

"These remarks are eminently true, and the experience of all our large prisons is daily proving their truth and wisdom. Equally pertinent to our time and country, especially since the close of the civil war (which gave a great and by no means wholly beneficial prominence to the military spirit and type of character) are these observations of Captain Maconochie, who had himself been a soldier: The military type now universally followed in our prisons should be abolished, and a clerical or missionary one substituted. The objects of military and prison discipline are directly opposed, and they cannot therefore be advantageously pursued by the same means. The one is meant to train men to act together; the other should be to prepare them safely and advantageously to separate. The one is, further, the type of force, which never created virtue yet, and against which a brave spirit, even instinctively, rebels; the other should image persuasion and exhortation, the approved method in every case of obtaining an end sought. A necessary object in the one is to subdue individual character, and reduce all to parts of a compact machine; while that of the other should be specially to strengthen individual character, and instilling right principles into it, encourage and enable it to act on those independently. Of minor incidents in our existing jail practice, accordingly, none appears to me much more pernicious than the endeavor to ape military demeanor in it.'

"It is well to bear this thought in mind when considering the present condition of our American prisons. Many of their wardens and superintendents were soldiers in the war, and were appointed with no very clear notions, on the part of the appointing power, as to what prison discipline is, and how it differs froin military discipline, with which it is often confounded. This is an important point, because we have a natural prepossession, since the war, in favor of

66 APPOINTING SOLDIERS

to office. A. B. was a good soldier and a meritorious officer; it was, therefore, inferred that he would make a good prison warden. And, up to a certain point, a good soldier is likely to prove at least a tolerable warden. The externals of discipline will be maintained; the convicts will probably be well fed and well clothed, (except those on hospital diet, perhaps, since an army hospital gives but

little variety of food); the contractors will probably be subordinate to the warden and not superior to him, as in some prisons; and there will be less waste and peculation than in many prisons. But along with these obvious and acceptable merits will go, in most instances, the soldier's foibles. He will fret at restraints of law; overestimate his own wisdom, and the virtue of force and arms; rely too much on drill, pipe clay and the pistol; and will cherish an open or ill disguised contempt for plodding method, human effort, school instruction and religious devotion. What the poets have pointed out, long ago, as the scholar's character, will be his, 'whether in the field, the civil service, or the prison; he will be jealous of honor, sudden and quick in quarrel "

Acer et indomitus, quo spes quoque ira vocasset

Ferre monum: et nunquam temerando parcere ferro;

resent the verdict of public will exact punishment and These faults were conspicu

Ten chances to one he will think there is nothing which brusque courage and a Colt's revolver cannot do; he will arm himself and oblige his officers to carry deadly weapons; he willconstrue remonstrance from a convict as insolence, to be punished in the guard house or with the ball and chain; he will chaft at authority over him, even that of the law; he will opinion even while yielding to it: he neglect reformation and instruction. ous even in Capt. Elam Lynd, the founder of the Auburn system of prison discipline, whom Edward Livingston praises for his moderation and his knowledge of human nature, qualities by no means common in the military type of prison officers. Cap. Maconochie and Col. Montesinos, of Spain - both military officers — seem to have been free from such faults; and both of the se very successful prison wardens dispensed almost wholly with the use of deadly weapons in guarding and controlling convicts.

"We should be inclined to say, were it inquired what is the most important single detail of prison discipline to be observed by every officer, 'above all things never go armed with a deadly weapon.' For the courage, moderation and good sense which would enable an officer to obey this injunction would be his best security and his highest testimonial. Let it be understood and accepted, once for all, that a prison officer's life, at least in a congregate prison, is always at the mercy of the convicts. A whole arsenal of weapons,

a whole regiment of soldiers, will not protect him from assassination, if his prisoners are determined to murder him. His life is in their hands; just as the life of the sailor is at the mercy of the winds and waves; just as that of the soldier in battle is at the mercy of shot and stab, from which no armament of pistols can certainly defend him. Having once calmly accepted this truth-for it is true-the good prison officer will walk among his men as fearless as the sailor walks the deck; he would no more think of charging his pistol to protect himself, than the mariner thinks of shooting at the hurricane or the breakers. The skill of both is to avoid, not to confront, the deadly peril. I merely throw out these observations; but we are deeply convinced that they point to the innermost secret of success in prison discipline.

"IT IS LESS IMPORTANT

that prisons should be well-built than that they should not contain too many convicts. The worst built prison, with one or two hundred prisoners, promises better for their discipline than the best built one with 1,000 convicts. We have never heard of so large a prison which was managed with the highest success for a long period; and could we decide the size of prisons, none should ever be built for more than 500 convicts. Nor are the architectural proportions of a prison, whatever its size, so important as the rules by which it is governed. This is a principle almost invariably lost sight of in America. The corrugated iron barracks of Lusk are better built for prison uses than the costliest and most scientific arrangement of cells and work-shops, kitchens and bath rooms. Beyond security and separation little is essential in prison architecture. The work room and the school room are more important than the ornamented guard room or the ostentatious outside; the hospital and the chapel are of subordinate, but still considerable, consequence. One great merit of the Pennsylvania system, which dispenses with any chapel, is the cell visitation and instruction which it requires, and which is far less neglected there than in the congregate prisons.

"The prison diet should be as plain, and at the same time as varied as a proper economy and the health of the prisoners will permit. The hospital diet should be as good as the same diet elsewhere. The notion of preserving moral distinctions and inflicting culinary punishments among fever patients and consumptives is not yet 'dismissed to the moon,' but it should be ere the next full.