boy or girl to be contented in them. Far the greater number were in tenement-houses. These houses were occupied by many families, having numerous children, and the rooms were usually untidy, and, in some cases, filthy. From ten to twenty families under one roof were frequently found. One house was occupied by thirty-two families, having, in the aggregate, ninety-six children. In some cases the officer found the parents so much under the influence of drink as to be unable to give intelligent answers to his questions.

"Is it any wonder that the children find greater attractions in the streets than in such homes? It is well, in considering the causes of crime, to give large attention to the influences in and surrounding these homes, that it may be ascertained to what extent they contribute to this great evil, and to inquire if, through legislation or otherwise, these hurtful influences and conditions surrounding these unfortunate children may not be corrected."

The domestic life of the common people is so intimately associated with the moral and physical history of their children, and with all the conditions under which the vicious and criminal classes are nurtured until their own depraved characteristics are entailed as a family herit age, that any definite and comprehensive improvements in the habitations and circumstances of the poor in our large towns and cities will contribute to the prevention of crime and the suppression of some prolific sources of it. Even the opening of wide streets through the most crowded portions of the Fourth and Sixth wards of New York has been followed by a marked decrease in the predatory crimes and all sorts of crimes against the person. The clearing up and sunlighting of dismal old tenements and alleys, as sanitary measures, have been followed by a decided improvement in the peace and security of their neighborhood, and the decrease of vices and crimes occurring in the tenements so improved. The experience of London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Paris, in the opening of the dark and crowded quarters where poverty, ignorance and crime were once interchangeable synonyms in all descriptions of their inhabitants, has shown that dwelling improvements and the sanitary regulation of cities may more effectually repress certain prolific causes of crime than all the discipline of the felon prisons.

In the Thirtieth and Thirty-first Reports of the Prison Association, there was a body of evidence presented in regard to the growth and entailment of crime in degenerating and degraded families and com- . munities in certain interior counties of New York. That kind of evidence is discovered in almost every county, and has been witnessed by the writer even in the wilderness of the Adirondacks and of the Oswegatchie. The details concerning the heredity of criminal character and family infamy are too sad and sickening to be recited, but the

injuries and burdens which these classes inflict upon the community, and the duty of society in breaking as many as possible of the links and alliances of hereditary causes of crime and vicious pauperism, are profoundly interesting the local committees of this Association and enlightened citizens in every county and city. The ignorance, brutality, habitual crime and utter infamy which continually make the dark places in cities dangerous and forbidding, and which are visible plague-spots in numerous towns, mark the very name and record of social and physical causes of degeneration and prominent vices with which society never interferes sufficiently nor soon enough, for it is not the out-door relief and the endurance of poor-rates and court and jail expenses caused by those depraved and degenerating families, which can remedy their condition. Society will be protected from the dangers and the cost inflicted by its habitual offenders only when the causes that nurture them are superseded by agencies that will redeem or permanently restrain them by the discipline of labor, instruction and obedience.

RECORDS OF COURTS AND PRISONS. CRIMINAL STATISTICS.

Public justice and personal right are often dependent upon correct and adequately complete records of facts. Defective, inaccurate or ambiguous records are sure to cause injustice and wrong, sooner or later, and in all proceedings against crimes or offenses the State itself is so responsible for the forms and verification of whatever enters into the record of the individuals and events at the bar of justice and in the custody of law officers, that any avoidable defect in the records of courts or in the registration of essential facts regarding each prisoner must be esteemed as culpable negligence.

"Courts of record" have exclusive jurisdiction, in cases of crime punishable in felon prisons, but the jurisdiction of the same courts extends downwards to misdemeanors and petty offenses so variably in different States of the union, and under so many different statutes that regulate the jurisdiction of the minor courts of police justices and special sessions in the twenty-four cities in the State of New York, as compared with the service of committing magistrates and the sessions courts of rural dis tricts, that the practical value of the term "convictions in courts of record" is quite untrustworthy. Yet it is mainly by means of the transcript returns from this class of courts that the public is kept informed of the increase or decrease, and the specified movements and kinds, of crime in the State.

The police or justices' courts in the twenty-four cities, and the courts of special sessions in every county, are required by statute to file their records of official proceedings with the county clerk. The act of the Legislature (chap. 97, 1861, sec. 5) constituted all the city police justices'

courts to be courts of special sessions, and, at the same time, specially required them to make a formal return to the county sheriffs concerning all convictions by said courts.

The jurisdiction of the police justices' courts in cities has been variously modified from time to time, so that the actual record of crimes in any county in which a city is located cannot be correctly understood without an examination and analysis of the convictions as well as the commitments by these courts.

The sheriffs are roundly paid for the schedule-records which, as the statute requires, they transmit to the Secretary of State, at Albany. It is a perfunctory service in which no attempt at accuracy is thought of, yet many particulars are given with a heedless hand in scheduled columns. There is no well-kept jail register at hand to enable the sheriff to verify the outline of personal records which he receives from the police courts. The errors in those papers are magnified by the sheriff's process of completing them to appear to comply with the required forms specified in the statute.

Plainly enough, the correctness of records of all minor courts must depend upon the greatest faithfulness possible in personal descriptions or statements which are entered in the court lists, and upon a thoroughly truthful or well-kept jail register. It is at this point that the necessity of correct and complete jail records becomes apparent. The State has no such system and no central supervision of criminal statistics. The office of the Secretary of State merely receives such returns as the sheriffs and the county clerks shall make, but no officer is charged with the duty of making or proving such returns to be numerically complete or specifically correct.

The statutes require that the county clerks shall promptly forward to the office of Secretary of State a transcript of all the records of convictions which reach him. The sheriffs, in like manner, are required to obtain and send forward to the Secretary of State, and in the form and particulars required by him, certain specific kinds of information concerning the individuals who have been convicted in courts of record, in city police courts, in courts of special sessions, or before any justice or other judicial officer before whom any person shall have been convicted of a criminal offense.

The statute which prescribes all these duties also defines the duty of the justices and other judicial officers and the district attorneys, in regard to the official returns which they shall respectively make to county clerks and to sheriffs to enable the latter officials to complete their own returns to the Secretary of State. The absence of a central bureau and special officer to set in motion the entire machinery of the official returns that are thus required by the laws, leaves all to the mischances of an auto

matic and irresponsible service in which any one of the officials concerned, may neglect his own duty, and may, in turn, suffer and fail in consequence of the failure of other officials in the series of those from whom records and information should have been received by him. The sheriff, and sometimes a county clerk, in their embarrassing position, may give some apparent completeness to his schedules of returns by filling up the blank spaces in merely clerical manner, without regard to the facts. Not only does this occur in some of the largest cities, but there are numerous counties in which the returns from courts of special sessions and from police justices and city recorders' courts, are fragmentary as well as generally inaccurate.

The existing basis for the criminal statistics of New York is too untrustworthy to be continued. The act of 1867 comprises all the authority which the State has provided for this purpose; it also wholly repealed all former laws relating to the official returns of the records of convictions, imprisonments, etc., and left this important piece of law to execute itself. The method of jail registry relapsed into the old form which had been prescribed in the statute of 1847, and which is simply a kind of blotter-memorandum of each person admitted to jail, whether committed or not. The jail records in this State are, therefore, unavailable for any practical uses as criminal statistics or in verifying and completing the elements of individual records of crime. The jail register, under the existing laws, has no official demands made upon it for any record except that of prisoners' board accounts. Thus, from the first to the last of the accounts recorded of proceedings against crime, there is an utter failure to provide for a system of criminal statistics and for a correct and verified record of individual offenders and their crimes.

The uses to which the records and statistics of any department of the government are applied, require that the utmost accuracy and completeness should characterize them separately and collectively, and that the primary records, from whatever source returned, should be faultless and uniform.

The most essential key to the successful returning and perfect preparation of the primary records (transcripts and forms) concerning the crimes and offenses which are brought to conviction in the several counties, seems to be in the prescribing and supplying of the official forms and blank sheets to be employed by the sheriffs and by magistrates, or at least by county clerks, for the returns which are to reach the State office for permanent registry. The statute of 1867 partly concedes this as a duty. (Sections 4 and 9 of the Act of 1867.) All experience in statistical and official returns shows that it is quite important to have a central office, for the State, assume this duty. The most perfect official

returns are based upon schedule forms which are supplied in blank by the central offices.

The faultiness of the primary returns as now sent from special sessions' courts to county clerks, and by sheriffs to the Secretary of State, and in some classes of cases (all special sessions' returns) by the county clerks, can hardly be remedied except by the official assumption (by the Secretary of State or a department of statistics) of the whole service of preparation and supplying of blank forms for the required returns.

The next point which is prominent in the faultiness and deficiency of the county returns, relates to the failure in correct book-keeping by sheriffs, as respects jail inmates and the convictions in the courts of special sessions. A close inspection of the jail-registers throughout the State in three successive years proved that less than half of the jailers kept correct and reasonably well-posted jail-registers. Even the mittimus papers were wanting in numerous jails, and oftener still no jailregister was found. Moreover, the sheriff usually removes his jailregister when his own three years' term of office expires, so that the newly-elected sheriff finds no office-register left by his predecessor. In some instances, the new sheriff finds himself unable to make the official returns for the last two or three months of the previous year, in which his predecessor omitted to make returns. This causes certain deficits and errors in the statistical records of crime for the year, and for the county and the State. But the statutes concerning jail-registers have been so far repealed that the sheriffs may now have their own way in making up jail accounts and county charges. [The Acts of 1861 and 1866 were repealed in 1867.] In one county a jail-keeper so kept and manipulated the jail-register that the supervisors had overpaid the sheriff some $14,000 for care of prisoners before the fraud was discovered; and, in another county, a sheriff put his hand into the county treasury still deeper than this. In yet another county, the ex-sheriff confessed he had burned books and mittimus papers. That the jail-registers are badly kept, and that some amendment of law relating to them is necessary, are obvious facts. The county jail records in the State of Michigan are at present kept upon the best plan in the United States. Yet New York ought to have even a better system than that of Michigan.

The next point noticed in the defects of the records of crime is that of the failure to obtain the full number of returns and the particulars of each convicts' status as an offender, as required from the justices of special sessions. This defect is a radical one. It cannot be overcome without the exercise of an imperative authority, emanating directly from the central office of the State, which shall quickly ascertain who is failing to make the returns required by law.

The next point of default in the statistics of crime is in the annual