Pennsylvania Journal of Prison Discipline, and Philanthropy

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1848 edition. Excerpt: ... No. 5.--Something still to be done for Prisoners! A late Boston journal contains an abstract of a sermon or address by a Unitarian clergyman, in which the stale of prisons is specially noticed. He spoke, (says the reporter, ) more particularly of the neglect of the comfort of the prisoners in the county jails--the herding together of all classes of criminals in close, damp cells, --and showed, that in a majority of cases, the prisoner, instead of becoming a reformed man, under such a careless system, was made a greater foe to society than he was before his deprivation of liberty. He instanced the county jail at Alfred, (Maine?) in four small cells of which were fourteen prisoners confined--boys of sixteen years of age being thrust into the company of the hardened criminal--thus learning in the prison, deeper lessons in villany, and defeating what should be the object of all punishment, the reformation of the delinquent This, from what we have heard of the crowded state of Leverett street jail, will apply to our own city. During the whole of the summer, this prison has been filled to suffocation, and the sufferers in many cases are innocent of all wrong--men confined for debt, or awaiting examination or trial for crimes charged upon them. This should not be permitted. Our city, within a few year?, has doubled its population, and more than doubled its crime, from the fact, that much more than formerly of its increase of population has been from the immigration of the ignorant, and, we fear, of many of the starved-out rogues of the old countries. It is a moral murder to thrust those who have slightly strayed from the path of virtue, into the same cell with those who have become gray in crime. No. 6.--Tracts for the Dissolute. At page 193...