Besides this, the law should be amended so as to permit and regulate the incorporation of Reformatories, Industrial Schools, and schools and asylums for delinquent and vagrant children under voluntary association, to be maintained partly by the State, partly by voluntary contributions, and partly by assessments and contributions from parents and guardians.

That such incorporated institutions should receive juvenile delinquents, vagrants and neglected children of the class which its charter of incorporation allowed, but no institution should be permitted to gather indiscriminately within its walls the unfortunate and the criminal youth, nor the two sexes. That the magistrates might commit children, coming within the jurisdiction of the courts, to such institutions as received the certificate of the Inspector of Reformatories, but such commitment not to prevent the inspector from transferring any child from one institution to another if the standard of the institution to which the child is committed should fall below the standard established by law, or if the child prove to belong to a different class from that for which the institution was incorporated. That the State pay a pro rata sum for each child so committed to an incorporated reformatory, &c. That such institution shall demand and collect from parents and guardians a portion of the expense of the child's maintenance, and have legal power so to collect.

II. The change in the government of reformatories should, in its main outline, consist of the abolition of the congregate system, of cell life -except, perhaps, as a mode of punishment,- and of team industry. The maximum number in any institution under one superintendent should be four hundred. The establishment of agricultural colonies under the family system for our State institutions, and the nearest approximation to this form of administration in incorporated institutions under boards of managers. With such changes we should get rid of the odious features of State prison life in our reformatories, make it possible to get efficient management by the restriction of numbers, and enable the establishment of families of boys under proper tutors, so as to secure some of the advantages of domesticity, the foundation stone of all good

citizenship.

III. The State prisons of our State have, from the time of their establishment, been administered with the primary object of repaying the State for the cost of administration. This seems to have largely pervaded the management of our reformatories. The result has been that while the avowed object has been the reform of the boys, the actual working has been the replenishment of the treasury. We must change the order of importance in the training of our Arabs, and no rule is perhaps more safe as a guide in educational matters than to provide that kind of instruction for the child which he will most need in life. With

the delinquent it will be found that this order requires that moral training shall take precedence, followed by true industrial training and school instruction last. In some grades of industrial schools, industrial training might, perhaps, come first in order because its children are morally more sound than the delinquent class. But we must rid ourselves of two dominant errors in respect to education; that reading and writing are, in themselves, moral agents, they are only instruments which may or may not be used for good purposes; and that the memorizing of texts of scripture, the perfunctory repetition of prayers and the concerted chanting of hymns teaches neither morality or religion. They only teach words which the ear recollects and the voice reproduces, but not necessarily ideas or conceptions of right and wrong. Morality consists in acts performed which are a benefit to our fellow-creatures and to ourselves, or the abstaining from acts which are harmful to either or to both. Religion consists in believing in a Superior Being and in acting according to what we believe to be His law. These two important parts of human life can only be learned by acting them out, and we must insist on a mode of carrying out this purpose which shall most effectually insure this end. It is for this reason that the "Kindergarten" Education is urged as the best possible model. It enables the teacher to train the hands of the child to a variety of labors, to think, to combine, and at last to produce articles of use and beauty. Here we get industrial training of the best kind. At the same time the moral training can be prosecuted. The things a boy has made he may be trained to give away, which is the opposite of stealing the things of other people. Each boy may thus become the owner of various property by labor or by exchange. This is the basis of all commercial morality, and commercial morality is that kind which refuge boys most need. Instead of the play-ground being the theater of a mingled struggle of brutality and a school of contamination, a proper supervision could convert it into a school of manners free from servility, because the manners would be gracious acts performed towards play-fellows, or rude acts abstained from because unjust or improper, instead of being a perfunctory and enforced obeisance to officials. The ultimate test of morality is, how will it make a human being behave towards his peer in social position or his inferior in strength. If he is just and considerate towards them, he has reached the point of being a good citizen, and at this point the State ceases to have any right of interference with his liberty, and he is entitled to be liberated from prison or reformatory, they having accomplished all they were designed for.

1

MEMORIAL SKETCH OF HON. JOHN W. EDMONDS.

[A brief account of the State prisons of New York, as he found them thirty-three years ago, and the improvements he endeavored to effect in them by the aid of the Prison Association.]

By CEPHAS BRAINERD,

Recording Secretary of the Prison Association.

His long and

This sketch is not intended to call attention to the late Judge Edmonds save as he was interested in the work of Prison Reform. interesting public career is left to other pens, or more likely to that fleeting tradition which preserves but for a lifetime an uncertain memorial of the career of most great lawyers. As a wise and earnest reformer in all branches of the great science which claims the services of the members and friends of the Prison Association of New York, his life and work are entitled to far more extended treatment than is here allowed for them.

John W. Edmonds was born at Hudson, New York, December, 1799. He graduated at Union College, studied law, and began practice in the city of New York. He shortly removed to Hudson, where he gradually attained prominence as a lawyer, and soon became widely known as a public-spirited citizen and an active politician. In April, 1843, he was appointed one of the inspectors of the Sing Sing State prison, and held that office until February, 1845, when he was appointed circuit judge. Ceasing to hold the office of judge of the Supreme Court, he resumed the practice of law in New York, where he died 5th April, 1874. The condition in which he found the prison is best described in a letter addressed by Judge Edmonds to Governor Bouck, in June, 1843.

* * Free admittance was granted to all who would pay a small fee; frequent and almost unrestrained intercourse with their friends was allowed to the convicts. They conversed with their keepers, with the contractors and with each other. Knots of them would assemble in the yard and other places in unrestricted conversation with each other. They had newspapers among them, knew what was going on without the prison, would inquire the result of the elections and have been known to amuse themselves by going through the manual exercise with hoop poles. In the Sunday-schools convicts were allowed to be teachers. Three hundred or four hundred convicts would assemble in the chapel, be divided into classes of eight and ten each, and with only two or three keepers in the room it was impossible to prevent free intercourse between them. Frequent instances were discovered, and the offending convicts dismissed

the school. And there is no doubt that a recent attempt at an escape was devised between the teacher and one of his class in the school. These things did not comport with just notions of a penitentiary, and whether they were a necessary part or consequence of the change in the discipline or not, they demanded immediate reform.

"The prison is regarded by the Inspectors as a place of punishment and reform, and not one of relaxation, and so far as the convicts are to be taught from books, they ought to learn only such things as would teach them the nature of the crimes they had committed, and their duty to the society whose laws they had violated. But the Inspectors found in the prison, belonging to it, and purchased at an expense of $650 to the State, quite a miscellaneous library, in which books of fiction and sectarian essays had common entrance; and they found, in the possession of convicts, newspapers, songs, story books, obscene pictures and novels, among which were Handy Andy, Barnaby Rudge, The Burglar's Companion, History of Buccaneers, Comic Almanacs, "The Murderer,' Convict's Journal, Chronological Dictionary, Lady of Refinement, and Lives of Females. The Inspectors also regarded it as the duty of the officers of the prison to deal with entire impartiality towards all the convicts and make no discrimination between them other than that necessary one between those who behaved ill or well or that between the hale and the sick. Yet it was discovered that the relatives and friends of convicts who had means or who resided in the vicinity of the prison, by the freedom of this intercourse, were enabled to afford them many luxuries and comforts which were denied to poorer and more friendless prisoners. Hence in some of the cells were found such articles as writing materials, novels, tobacco, snuff, pipes, matches, flints and steels, ardent spirits, ornaments, penknives, pocket-books, canes, gloves, and looking-glasses. In some were eight or nine blankets, in others surplus shirts, coats, and other articles of clothing; and in some, book-cases, bureaux, stone-hammers, chalk, drill-hammers, leather shoe-knives, onions, sewing implements, brad awls, scissors, silk, nails, spikes, skeins of yarn, files, gouges, chisels, kits of tools and shoe nails, constituting a miscellaneous collection of articles, in no respect necessary to the comfort of the prisoners or to the enforcement of due punishment upon them. In respect to cleanliness, so essential to health, the change in the discipline dis played its effects. In some of the cells dirt and filth and decaying provisions were found, while others were infested with lice and bed-bugs." In the language of the keeper, who, under the directions of the Inspectors, examined the cells, he found in them "a good many unnecessary articles, such as alcohol, tobacco, boxes with secret drawers, matches, books of a nature not calculated for convicts, newspapers, clothing, provisions, decaying or spoiled. In some of the cells the air was intoler

able; I vomited several times in the operation. Most of the ventilators were stopped up by stuff and rubbish. I found obscene pictures and letters of the same kind, novels, plays, stories and obscene paintings on their walls and in their books."

The picture of the prison as it then was, is completed by an extract from the report of Mrs. Farnham, the new matron of the Female Prison, made to the Inspectors shortly after, in 1844:

"It is known to you, gentlemen, that at the time I assumed the duties of matron, the prison was in a deplorable condition. Scenes of violence between the convicts or attempts on their part against their officers, seem to have been of frequent occurrence. Misrule and disorder were the prevailing characteristics of the institution. Your last report set forth a painful and forbidding state of affairs, which was amply confirmed by the statements of the officers then in charge. The duties to which I was appointed were undertaken with the hope and intention of reforming the condition of things and reducing the convicts to a sound state of discipline, obviously the first necessity in all institutions of the kind. I believed not only that this could be done, but that it could be effected by means which had not hitherto been tried, viz., by substituting kindness for force, and other restraints, imposed through the mental constitutions of the prisoners, for those founded in fear of suffering, or growing out of physical inability to be disobedient and refractory. It is painful to observe that almost every facility requisite for carrying out such views was wanting in the commencement of the effort. The construction of the prison and buildings attached thereto permitted but little attention to the laws of life, or the many conditions which are indispensable alike to the existence of physical and moral purity, and still more so to the restoration of that purity where it has been extinguished by long persistence in depraved habits. There were no means of inflicting that mode of correction which must be mainly relied on here for the graver offenses, except by confining the offenders in the common cells of the prison, darkened and wholly deprived of fresh air, by the use of plank doors hung inside. As these cells opened directly into the common hall, where, at that time, most of the prisoners were seated during the day at their different kinds of labor, the seclusion was at best very imperfect, while the violent or turbulent had a better opportunity than at any other time for giving utterance to foul language, profanity or any abuse they might wish to heap upon their officers or fellow-prisoners. The sleeping cells were insufficiently ventilated; there were no arrangements whatever for bathing; the bedding was of such a description that any thing like cleanliness, in so much of it as came in contact with the person, was entirely out of the question; there was no provision for exercise, unless taken in a very small yard for a