Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/361

Rh bered that whenever a gross evil or scandal has arisen, the natural and businesslike procedure to prevent recurrence of the wrong has been to provide suitable regulations to define and enforce the responsibility of local officials.

2. On the second point—the correction of abuses and the improvement of conditions of local prisons—we have reached the following conclusions:

The flagrant, persistent, and notorious physical and moral evils of local prisons are, as a long history proves, incurable under any form of local control, whether by courts, sheriffs, county commissioners, or other county or municipal authority. England, the mother-country, never succeeded in carrying out the reform measures proposed by John Howard in the eighteenth century until it introduced central control of all its local prisons. The conditions in our country are not in essential particulars different.

Mere supervision and publicity, by means of visitors, is not an adequate remedy for the abuses, nor an adequate method of sustained and enlightened administration. Experience demonstrates that locally elected officials will not regard the advice of visitors who have no legal power to make and enforce regulations. Parsimony and ignorance mock at the lessons of the world's best wisdom and the world's highest law of humanity.

So far as county jails provide separate departments for the detention of persons awaiting trial or held as witnesses, they are, of course, instruments of the court and should respect the orders of courts in relation to such subjects. This is provided for in the European national regulations. But when persons are once convicted and sentenced to punishment under the penal law of a state, then the state itself should provide a method of administering its penalties down to the most minute details. Otherwise there will be the crying injustice of having as many systems of penalty as there are jailers and sheriffs in the commonwealth.

That which is true of county prisons is also true of city and county workhouses, and the argument need not be repeated.

3. Lastly we recommend that all convicts who are paroled and released on condition of good behavior should be held under the.