It is not to be supposed that all who seem to maintain to the last day of their imprisonment their resolve to amend their lives, do indeed carry into effect that resolve beyond the prison wall. That would be too great a harvest to hope for. When the resolution is taken, the pain of punishment is felt, the sense of confinement is keen, and the view of personal degradation in presence of a virtuous teacher is mortifying; and the force of former habits forgotten, and the attractions of vice underrated, and especially the sense of shame among those who knew them, not calculated on, they go forth in the resolution of amendment—they meet the suspicions of the good and the imitation of the bad—and they allow passion to triumph over virtue.
“The bow well bent and sharp the spring, Vice seems already slain; When passion rudely snaps the string, And it revives again.”
But discouraging as such cases are, and especially in their frequency, there are many cases where the convict, after having promised, in the crowded cells of the vicious and accused, to mend her life, and then returned to vice and crime at the suggestions of her vicious companions, has been led by the gentle invitation of the faithful visitor to resolve on good, and where the solitude of her confinement has led to that reflection which gives permanency to her resolution. And, it may be added, that it is probable that of the many failures of success which are to be deplored, some are due to the want of entire separation of the convict, consequent upon the form and location of the cells, that forbid entire seclusion, at least render unfruitful all attempts to prevent the occupants of neighboring cells from holding conversation with each other by message, viva voce, or some conventional signal or sounds. Marvelously ingenious are the contrivances and the resorts of the human mind when an exclusion from outward objects assists in the concentration of faculties upon some desired end. It may be added here, that almost all the success that attends the efforts of the philanthropist to reform females in the County Prison, is due to separate confinement; and even when the inmate is “sent down” only for drunkenness and disorderly conduct, judgment, founded on her appearance and manner, has been well exercised in placing her either in a separate cell, or if that be not possible, then in selecting her a companion, and thus bringing her within the genial action of visitors of her own sex, without the danger from subsequent ridicule of her cell-mates. In this relation, too, has proved highly beneficial, the habit noted elsewhere, of meeting the van as it reached the prison, and selecting at once those who are new to the place, and, after inquiry, if not dismissing them to their family, at least placing them apart from the more abandoned of their sex.