punish him more. The judge is then to make distinctions according to circumstances. A person who has -committed an offense for the first time requires different treatment from an old offender. A number of convicts, between twenty and forty years of age, who come to the penitentiaries for crime, are mentally diseased at the time they are convicted; it is astonishing when you come to look through these prisons. Crime runs in families. I remember the case of a young man of about twenty, who was in our institution serving his third sentence for the third offense; and his father and mother had both been in the lunatic asylum; also a sister. What <jan we do with such cases?

Now in regard to labor. Of all the abominations under the sun, the contract labor system, in my judgment, is the worst; there is nothing in it to recommend it, except that it maybe economical; but I do not believe that any State would desire to make money at the expense of its convicts. When a person is confined, the State becomes, as it were, a parent to him, and surely it is the desire of every good parent to raise his children so as to be a credit to him rather than to make profit out of them. In our institution, we manufacture goods and sell them, and the party who gets the goods has no more to do with their manufacture than you or I, who are six hundred miles away. We do make the prisoner understand that labor is a part of his punishment. We teach him to look upon it as a part of the discipline required for his reformation. When a prisoner begins to realize that, when his time is out and he goes back to society, he will have acquired a means of earning an honest livelihood, we have made a better man of him, and if he returns to his dishonest practices he is no worse than when he first came. And another thing. How little you understand the circumstances that drive men to pauperism and crime. Where a man is dependent upon steady daily employment, a week's idleness almost means no home. With the bitterness of poverty staring him in the face, a man will do that from which in comfortable circumstances he would shrink with horror. Under such circumstances, will anyone contend that such a man should be as severely punished as the hardened criminal, who coolly contemplates his crime and prepares for it? When he goes home, where there is nothing, and his wife meets him with upbraidings made bitter by the situation, what can he do?

You cannot undertake to do with her as you do with a man. You must treat her in a certain way. She becomes violent. Where does he go? Some other place than such a home, for that pity and comfort that he should receive at home, and in such a case he is ready to do anything. Is not this an element in crime-cause?

Mrs. Spencer protested against the last remarks of the speaker as an imputation upon her sex.

The Conference then took a recess till afternoon.

SIXTH SESSION".

Wednesday Afternoon, September 26, 1883.

The report • from New Jersey was presented by the chair in the absence of the delegates from that state.

REPORT FROM NEW JERSEY.

BY A. S. MEYRICK, CORRESPONDING SECRETARY.

The Charitable and Correctional Institutions of New Jersey, have not changed in character or management in any marked degree since the meeting of the National Conference at Madison last year, at which a pretty full report of their condition was presented. The number of convicts in the State Prison, and of inmates of the Reform Schools and State Lunatic Asylums, has not greatly increased during the year, and no additions have been made of any great importance to the buildings of either. The over-crowding at the State Prison — the number of convicts greatly exceeding that of the cells provided for their reception, still continues; successive legislatures having turned deaf ears to the appeals of the officers of the prison whose administration of its discipline is rendered difficult and sometimes dangerous by the necessity of putting in many cases, two to four prisoners in one cell, as well as to the occasional recommendations of the Governor of the state, and the earnest remonstrances of philanthropic citizens, in spite of all which this blot upon the prison system of New Jersey remains.

The partial revival of business has enabled the prison officers to reduce considerably the number of unemployed convicts, but fully one hundred able-bodied men are most of the time maintained in idleness at the expense of the tax payers of the state. This is entirely the effect of the law passed by the legislature of 1881, limiting the number of convicts to be employed at any one branch of industry to one hundred. Only by a very liberal construction of this law, making the manufacture of shirts, collars and cuffs, collar boxes and laundry ing distinct industries, has it been possible to secure contracts for much more than half the available labor of the prison. A single firm by thus subdividing its business being enabled to contract for the employment of a possible four hundred men. The loss to the state has been over $40,000 yearly, as a single manufacturing company of the highest responsibility was ready and anxious to contract for the whole available working force of the prison, at rates from ten to fifteen cents per day higher than the smaller operators, on whose bids the prison officers have been obliged to fall back, can afford to pay. And the prison shops, and store rooms for manufactured goods and raw materials, which would have been ample for the employment of more than six hundred men under one contractor, are scarcely sufficient for four hundred and fifty under separate concerns, so that the Governor in his message to the last legislature was obliged, to recommend the building of large shops and store rooms, in order to make it possible to employ the men who are idle for lack of room to work.

This particularly brilliant piece of legislation was followed this year by the enactment of another law, requiring all goods manufactured in the prison to be stamped or branded conspicuously. "Manufactured in the State Prison of New Jersey." Most of the goods being sold to jobbers who have their own names and trade marks stamped on them and sell them as their own manufacture, the existing contracts are not at all likely to be renewed at their expiration, and unless the state can reach other means of employing the convicts, it is nearly certain to have them idle upon its hands. These laws were concessions to the clamor against convict competition with free labor, which seems destined at no distant day to banish every kind of productive labor from our penal institutions.

THE ASYLUM FOR THE DEAF AND DUMB

at Trenton is nearly completed, and will soon go into operation, enabling the State to provide for a considerable number of its unfortunate children whom it has hitherto been necessary to send to institutions in other states. Handsomely located, easy of access, carefully planned, and arranged for the comfort and convenience of its inmates, there is good reason for expecting it to compare favorably with similar asylums anywhere.

During last year, the first attempt was made to collect by legal authority the Statistics Of The Jails Of New Jersey, of which no one in the state had previously been able to form any intelligent estimate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics prepared registers and forms of return for each jail in the state, and was able to report with some approximation to accuracy the number, age, sex, color, date of commitment and discharge, social condition; cause of commitment and other details of the person confined in our jails during the six months preceding October 1, 1882, and expects with good reason to give much more and more reliable information in its report for the year now closing.

From the data supplied by it, it appears that in the six months mentioned, there were 7,533 commitments to the jails of the State of which 5,851 were males, 1,230 females and 321 under sixteen years of age.

Of these, 599 had been committed once previously, 503 twice, 259 three times, 221 four times, 121 five times and 467 six or more times.

Twelve hundred and thirty-four claimed to be "temperate/' 1908 "moderate drinkers," and 1,957 "intemperate."

In only two of the county jails in the State was there any kind of systematic employment for the prisoners, and the earnings of neither of these were scarcely appreciable, compared to their cost.

THE JAIL SYSTEM OF NEW JERSEY

is, therefore, to be described as herding together in gross promiscuity during the day, criminals of all the lower grades, tramps, thieves and vagabonds generally with children of tender years; not unfrequently with vile women, in idleness and instruction in all manner of indecency, immorality and degradation. It is to this system that we commit lads who have been guilty of a single petty offense. It is to associations of this kind that we sent last year considerably more than six hundred boys and girls, less than sixteen years of age, of whom only about one hundred found their way, after some weeks of saturation in vile associations, to the two Keform Schools. These jails — the hotels and chosen resorts of tramps and vagabonds—are the principal means provided by the laws of New Jersey for the punishment and prevention of minor offenses. We place the novice in guilt or vice in the enforced companionship of old and hardened sinners for periods varying from a few days to several months, and after getting him thoroughly familiar with the evil, and all the evil his associates can teach him, we turn him loose, here in New Jersey, and bid him "go and sin no more." Is it wonderful that he prefers rather to execute the villainy we have so carefully taught him, and with his selfrespect, his honor, his lingering remnants of humanity