this look to the need of a classification, in these
institutions, that we now have not?

In some cases the women's cells are in the same wards with the men's,
and they can freely talk together, though locked in separately, and
probably never allowed to associate further. But there is a living
remembrance of wrong, daily seen in Concord, which should cause us to
blush, in the person of an unfortunate boy, who had his birth in jail,
the mother having been in durance there one year previously as a
candidate for State Prison,--another sad lesson for comment and remedial
labors.

Our jails are cultivators of indolence. Men, women and children are
locked in there with no useful employment,--except in that at
Manchester,--nothing to do but to impart and study lessons of crime; and
some manage to remain there the most of the time, preferring this to
honest labor. These all go to swell the burdens of the tax-payer. Why
not have some sort of industries connected with these places? Set these
fellows at work on something. Keep them out of idleness, so far as can
be. If the employment does not bring in largely of dollars and cents, it
will, in what may be better. And are not some of our jails themselves
nuisances, a disgrace to the State?

We need, at least, two work-houses. They may not be of great expense at
ornamenting, but appropriate, substantial, fitted every way to their
use. Then fill them with this vagabond population now floating back and
forth between the establishments catering to vice and the jails. Give
them really corrective sentences. Modify essentially this
short-time-sentence system. If one's wrong habits are not corrected by
one sentence, let the next be longer, or till thoroughly reformed,
reform being the object aimed at. Then should we take the keepers of
these rum-shops, billiard-saloons, gambling-dens and houses of ill-fame,
with those of their frequenters that need be, and put them here at work,
too. This would be a wonderful purifier of society. Give each a dose,
say of six months, when, if that don't cure, repeat it till the work is
accomplished in them also.

Then, here are numerous other connected questions for us to study,
discuss and settle in regard to securing a general punitive system, a
system in advance of what we now possess, more corrective of crime. And
what shall be done for those children coming up in idleness, ignorance
and vagrancy?

49. _Fourth of July at the prison in '71._ Th