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The number under training in the ROMAN CATHOLIC institution presents a greater variety of character and occupation. Domestic work of all kinds-rearing fowls, milking, cooking, and washing, on a considerable scale, are all vigorously carried on. The dress of the women is cheerful, and the well-being of the inmates is promoted in every way.

We copy some remarks by Miss Jellicoe on these female refuges :

"These refuges afford the opportunity of doing for these joint heirs with us of immortality what has been so abundantly done for ourselves. Here they can be striven with as women, by women, won by love to the paths of virtue and respectability, made to feel that justice can be tempered with mercy, and established in a position where the fires of temptation may rage less fiercely and fatally around them.

"The fundamental principle on which the whole mechanism rests is one which must be acknowledged, by all who have studied the cause of human degradation, to be the only sound basis of permanent reformthe intelligent co-operation of the individual herself in the efforts for her own amendment. By placing a premium on qualities totally dif ferent from those which led into crime, the system gradually accustoms the prisoner to the loosening of the moral swathing bands by which she was at first restrained, and by infiltrating, as it were, habits of industry, self-denial and self-respect, without which no woman can be reclaimed, places her in circumstances to secure herself from a relapse into crime. To so comprehensive an aim is added the elevating influence of religion."

To one who is seeking means for forming an opinion. upon modes of prison discipline, the minutiae of detail are vastly important, and we regret, therefore, that we lack space to give as full an account of all the daily proceedings in the "Irish convict" prison as we have received. To one who has been conversant by long ex

perience with the management of prisoners, it is evident that a knowledge of these details is as necessary to the comprehension of a system, as the practice of them is to the development of the system.

The "Irish system," it must be borne in mind, is for "convict prisons," where long terms are usual, the lowest term being five, and the longest fifteen years; and though in some of the county prisons in Pennsylvania there are convicts serving out twelve years, yet they are so few that they scarcely form a class upon which an experiment of the Irish system could be made. It is in the Penitentiaries that the experiment must be tried.

But before we proceed to inquire whether the Irish system is adapted to the circumstances of this country, it may not be amiss to ask whether any other system than that now in use in the Eastern Penitentiary is required for the punishment and the improvement of the convicts, and for the safety of society against the future felonies of these prisoners.

Few prisons, we believe, have ever been constructed with a more successful effort to secure the health of the prisoner, and his certain incarceration, than is evident in the plan of the Eastern Penitentiary. Very few escapes from its cells have been made by the convicts; and the health of the inmates has been almost universally good. The objection raised in some quarters against the system of separate confinement, fully adopted and carried out in this penitentiary, is that "it tends to produce insanity."

We are not able to treat this subject scientifically it is one that is the speciality of another profession; but

this we can say, that it does not appear that the minds of the inmates of the Eastern Penitentiary have been injuriously affected by their separation from intercourse with other felons. An inquiry shows that if the number of insane in the Penitentiary is proportionately greater than in society at large (which we do not know) it is certainly not greater than in other penal institutions where the associate system of confinement is practised.

Because a prisoner becomes insane in his cell, it does not follow that it is the cell that makes him insane. Mortification at detection and conviction may operate to produce insanity in one who had been born in affluence, and reared with respectable persons; reaction, in consequence of withdrawal from active and perhaps dissipated life. Those who are conversant with prison life know that there are other causes for insanity as operative in the associate as in the separate system. And it has appeared to us that in inquiring for the cause of insanity of a prisoner, people fail of ascertaining the true cause, by supposing that nothing but imprisonment has produced that which is only more fully developed in the prison. If we go back we may, perhaps, find in the crime for which the criminal is suffering an evidence of his insanity. Jostling in society, passing from one business to another, or obstructed from social intercourse by excessive devotion to one kind of employment, the peculiarities of language and conduct escaped close criticism; men are sometimes said to be "odd," " eccentric," given up to business," "oil-coal-money making is on the brain." The silence and the solitude of the convict cell may not make the unfortunate man worse, but it

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will enable others to judge more correctly of his mental condition, and failing of the diversity of pursuits, and of numerous associates, by whom his conduct is judged only by parts, he will present the real state of his mind for a correct judgment. The whirl of active business life made his plans and his language present fair combinations and sound deductions, as the rapid movement of certain toys present pleasant combinations; but the stillness and quiet of the cell show the poor man's mind broken, as the resting of the toy exhibits the elements or broken figures of which the moving picture was composed.

In any comparison between the separate (the Pennsylvania) system and the Irish convict system, it is proper to recollect that one great argument in favor of the separate system is derived from the fact, that the convict in one cell of the Penitentiary knows nothing of the name, condition, or crime of his next cell neighbor; and hence the "amended" and discharged convict is not in danger of exposure and mortification by the enforced association of some "Penitentiary companion," while the ticket-of-leave man, who is trying to do well, is always in dread of being discovered by some companion of his "second stage," who has got his ticket-ofleave, but has not acquired resolution to do right. This unfortunate recognition has often overcome, and almost as often resulted in the ruin of the man who had tried to do well, while we have numerous instances of men serving in the same factory, the same iron works, in the same military company in time of the war, and enjoying considerable intimacy without either recognizing in the

other his fellow-prisoner for years in the Eastern Penitentiary. The same thing has occurred with men who were for two years contemporaneously confined in neighboring cells in the County Prison. The fact became known to the writer hereof through the reception, by their moral instructor in this city, of a letter from each of them, who were in the same regiment, and each had the same thanks to return, the same promise to make, and above all, each was rejoicing that he had got away from companionship with bad men, and was where no one knew that he had ever been a tenant of a prison. cell. Yet each of these men occupied at the same season a cell in the County Prison, the one having cell H., and the other K., and were visited several times each week by the same moral and religious instructor. Surely this is a most important result, and well worthy the consideration of those who desire to have the prison a place of improvement as well as of punishment; who desire especially that the repentant and discharged convict shall not be frightened from his propriety by the appearance of one who was an associate in vice and its punishment, without having shared in the repentance and reformation.

It will be understood that it is not alone the actual recognition of a former companion in crime and imprisonment that does injury to the repentant offender, but knowing that very many with whom he was in daily and nightly intercourse while he was undergoing punishment in the "associate system," or the "second stage" of the Irish convict system are abroad, he lives an unsettled life wherever he may be, startled at every ap

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