Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/92

 Yaku-tsuke, were entrusted to men of the "degraded class," compulsory contact with whom was in itself a severe punishment, and even the sick had to depend on the ministrations of these outcasts. Thus the jails of Japan, though on the whole not inferior to those of contemporary Europe, were so mismanaged that many of their inmates perished miserably, and permanently broken health as well as moral degradation were almost inevitable results of long incarceration. Things remained in that state until the Restoration in 1867, when one of the first cares of the Government was to revise the criminal laws and reorganise the prison system. Within a short time the Rō-nanushi and the Yaku-tsuke were replaced by officials of different type; the employment of beggars and outcasts in connection with prisons was discontinued; citizens living adjacent to jails were relieved from the duty of supporting them, the Government assuming that burden; Buddhist and Shintō priests were appointed to give religious instruction in prisons, and all barbarous methods of execution, such as burning, sawing asunder, and spearing on the cross, were abolished in favour of decapitation or hanging. The prison regulations issued under this new regimen had for preface a declaration that the purpose of imprisonment was to reform men, not to torment them; that pity, not retaliation, should be the motive of the penal law-giver, and that