The annexed testimony shows a number of cases in which prisoners have been harshly and cruelly treated by the officers, to such an extent that health has been injured in some instances, and in one where there is much reason to believe that life was shortened. In several instances prisoners have been struck and beaten in violation of law.

But upon the prisoners themselves the effect must have been still more injurious. They have been left almost entirely at the mercy of the contractors and keepers. The interest of the contractors tends to lead them to regard the convicts only in the light of machines from which to procure as much labor as possible. There are contractors whose moral sense is higher than their love of accumulation, and who feel compassion for the fallen men who labor for them. But all are not so.

And as to the keepers, reason and all experience show that the possession and constant exercise of arbitrary power, and the daily and hourly contact with the evil passions which yet reign among the erring men, with whom almost all their waking moments are spent, will tend to corrupt and harden them. From the aggressions which may justly be apprehended from these two causes, the law has provided an adequate protection in the Inspectors. If that is withdrawn and the prisoners feel that they have no appeal from the action of those whose interest or passion causes their suffering, it is vain to expect any great reformatory effect from our penitentiary system.

If the intention is merely to keep prisoners from depredating on society, the purpose is tolerably well answered by our system as at present administered, during the time the convict remains within the walls of the prison. But if the object is to make him a better member of society, so that he may safely again mingle with it-and that surely is the object, for with few exceptions all are again turned loose upon the world-that purpose cannot be answered by matters as they now stand. And upon the Inspectors more than upon any one else does that great duty devolve.

They alone are not brought into immediate and frequent contact with the prisoners, and are unaffected by the contamination

of their evil passions. They have no interest to be served by overworking them. They can have no inducement to treat them unkindly. They have it in their power to shed throughout the whole system a healthy reformatory influence. They can teach the convicts directly and through their subordinates, the great lesson, (the neglect or ignorance of which has sunk them so low,) of the infinite value of truth and justice in every relation of life. They can remove from the prisoner's minds the idea which so often prevents their reformation, and causes so many of them to fall again, that the hand of every man is against them. And from their prison house they can send them into the world with aspirations for good, and can cheer the rising hope that may be awakened within them.

But this great duty, in which more than in any thing else connected with our prisons, society is most interested, cannot be performed by visiting the prisons only once or twice in a year, and that only for a few days-by so arranging private business as to be unable to perform a public duty, nor by pleading that they are "excused by the other members of the board," but only by that devotion to public duties voluntarily assumed, which our people exact from all their public servants.

The committee see no remedy for the evils which they have but faintly pictured, but in a radical change of system. The inspectors have the whole control, the whole power of appointment and inspection centered in themselves, and there are scarcely any means of detecting their aberrations from duty, except an occasional investigation like this.

Much good might have been done, if the act of the Legislature, passed May 9, 1846, had not been practically nullified by the Inspectors. That law provided for an annual inspection of the State Prisons under the directions of the Chancellor or a judge of the Supreme Court or circuit judge, by members of the "Prison Association" thereby incorporated, and directed them to "annually report to the Legislature, their state and condition, and all such other things in regard to them as may enable the Legislature to perfect their government and discipline."

That law was for a while faithfully executed and several reports were made to the Legislature replete with valuable infor

mation which had never before been obtained in respect to the workings of our penitentiary system. The inspections were made by persons of high standing, over whom neither contractors nor officers could exert any influuce, and a most salutary influence was produced by the constant apprehension of an inspection, which no acts of theirs could color or affect. Facts of much importance thus found their way to the ear of the Legislature which were not found in the reports of the Inspectors. But in 1848 the Inspectors adopted a regulation which allowed those inspections only upon conditions which would render them utterly valueless, namely, that they should be conducted only in the presence of some officer of the prisons, to be selected by the Inspectors, and thus closing the door to the reception of information which could not be asked or expected under such penalties as the Inspectors might inflict on those who gave it.

That subject is so clearly stated in a letter from one of the Vice Presidents* of the association, published in their last annual report, that the committee hereto annex some extracts from it:

"One of the most valuable features attending the inspections by the Association, and it is one which never attends the inspections of the public officers, is the personal examination of each prisoner, which the Association always exacted of its committees of examination. It is exceedingly difficult to convey an adequate idea of the irksomeness and pain of executing this task in such a manner as not to interfere with the discipline or the labor of the prisons. I have, myself, stood day after day, for hours at a time, at the doors of the cells of the prisoners, listening to the details of human depravity and human suffering, until the sickness of the heart was even more intolerable than the weariness of the body. Still it was a duty which our experience told us ought not to be omitted, and which our Association rigidly exacted from those upon whom they devolved the duty of examination.

"We, of course, were not unaware of the danger which attended these communications. The fear of the officers of the prisons often sealed the mouths of the prisoners, and it was not until we had gained their confidence that they would speak freely to us. And when they did we were also aware that the communications Judge Edmonds.

we received came sometimes from men too depraved to estimate the obligation of truth, and sometimes from men who were full of hatred towards those whose duty it was to restrain their evil passions and vicious conduct within due bounds. We therefore know how much allowance to make and what credit to give their statements.

"We found a universal law prevailing among the officers of the prisons, that the word of a prisoner must not be taken for any thing. Yet we found those officers taking it every day, and in all the affairs of the prisons; we found that the law had made their testimeny good in certain cases even when in prison; we found the Governor often pardoning them that they might be witnesses; and we found that from their statements we often obtained clues to abuses, which enabled us to trace them out and ascertained their existence by irrefragable testimony.

"We found more. We found that it was absolutely necessary that we should obtain their statements, because to the world at large all within the walls was darkness and secrecy, and from that source no testinfony could be obtained, and from the officers we could not easily procure the knowledge of their own misconduct.

"How easy it is for the officers to conceal their own conduct, was exemplified to me when I was an Inspector at Sing Sing.

"I was astonished and worried by frequent complaints of the prisoners that they did not get enough to eat, and I gave peremptory orders that they should have enough. I directed the assistant keepers to send their men to the kitchen whenever they complained. One of them, who saw that one of his best workmen could not do a day's labor from weakness, sent him to the kitchen in vain. He went himself and could get no food for his man. He then complained to the principal keeper. That officer when he found out who it was complained, beat him over the head with an iron rule until it broke in his hand, then beat him with the hardwood handle of a stone hammer, and when that flew out of his hands, from his own violence, attacked him with a stone axe and would have struck him with it in his passion, if he had not been prevented. The poor convict was then tied up [Assembly, No. 20.]

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and whipped with some fifty lashes of the cat and ended the incident by some two weeks confinement in the hospital, and all for having complained of being hungry.

"Although I was frequently at the prison and gave to its affairs as close inspection as any Inspector ever had done, months elapsed before this outrage was made known to me; and it was not until a committee of the Legislature was sent down to investigate the affairs of the prison, that I learned that the keeper had been in the habit of subduing by starvation the prisoners of whom he was afraid.

"It was so easy for the officers to conceal even from me, with all my attention and vigilance, their abuses of authority and wanton cruelty.

"Hence the wisdom and propriety of receiving the statements of prisoners though receiving them cautiously and with many allowances; and hence the rule of the Association, upon which they acted while they were allowed the opportunity of investi gating them, to receive them but never to give them to the world unless supported by other and satisfactory evidence.

"The aid which the Association was disposed to give to discharged convicts brought to their office many such persons, and their statements were listened to as a matter of duty. Its officers were prohibited by the conduct of the Inspectors from investigating the truth of those statements. They were made by different persons at different times, and under circumstances which precluded the idea of pre-concert. They worked conviction in the minds of the officers of the Association. What should they do?

"If they concealed them, who was to know the complaints of the prisoners, and who redress their wrongs. What ear was opened to their complaints but ours? And where could they resort for relief but to us?

"Warned by our own experience, we would have investigated their complaints with due allowance for exaggerations of passion and depravity; but by the conduct of the Inspectors we were deprived of the opportunity of investigation, and we were placed