The south wing of the prison is devoted entirely to male vagrants, drunkards, breakers of the peace, those who await a trial, and some who are sentenced to short imprisonment and fines. The middle building contains male convicts, sentenced to separate confinement and labor, and also those who have been sentenced to capital punishment. Among the inmates of these two buildings the visitors of the Society are constant and assiduous in their labors, and we have already referred to some of the results of their visitations.
The north building is entirely separate from the other, having two lots of ground and a high wall between that and the male convict department. The northern building is exclusively devoted to females. The vagrant, the drunkard, the accused, and the female criminal of every class, are here kept, under the care of a male keeper, and a matron and assistant matron. And as this department presents a peculiar field for the action of our Society, we shall make special reference to the character of the inmates, the nature of their offences, the circumstances of their committal, and the character and results of labors for their moral and physical improvement; not because these labors are greater or more effective, but because the pursuits, the misfortunes, the errors, and the crimes of the prisoners differ from those of the males, according to the circumstances of their condition and sex, and require some additional means to secure an amelioration of the state of their lives.
In dealing with female offenders, we have to encounter the same incentives, the same passions that influence the males; and most of the same crimes that are punished in the male convict department are here expiated by the females. But the mode of dealing must vary with the varying circumstances of the prisoner; and those circumstances must greatly depend upon the character of the individual, resulting from her sex and the condition of her earlier life.
It is calculated that more than one thousand females divide their time between the cells of the county prison and the practice of those vices or the committal of those crimes which send them there. For a large number of these, no more than thirty days imprisonment can be given at one time; and many of those thus committed are discharged much sooner: so that there is little time for any moral dealings with them, and even were it practicable to deal with them in exhortation and advice,—were the time of their imprisonment sufficiently long to warrant a hope that they could be persuaded to form good resolves, still the fact that more than one, and often four or five, are found in the same cell, renders almost hopeless any attempt to induce the drunkard to forsake her resort to the bottle, or the impure to avoid the haunts of vice which she has frequented. The evidence of contrition which kindness and faithful dealing on the part of the visitor may call forth from the prisoner, are inducements to her companions in the cell to ridicule the moral teacher, and to laugh the repenting one out of her half-formed resolves. The experienced visitor learns to fix a just estimate upon the tears and promises of those expectants of favors; but the good female visitors who occasionally seek to bring “glad tidings” to the miserable offenders of their own sex, usually suffer deep mortification at the disappointment of pleasant hopes, and are compelled to seek their consolation in the consciousness of good intention and perfect fidelity to the object which they profess to serve. The great, almost the only mode of serving the inmates of this part of the prison, is to induce them to enter some of the asylums in the city, and yield themselves to the gentle discipline of institutions founded for the good of those who have lost their self-respect and forfeited the good will of society. And the records of the “House of the Good Shepherd,” of “The Magdalen Asylum,” “The Rosine” institution, and some other associations for the meliorating the condition of the frail, the vicious, and the guilty, will show what valuable auxiliaries these institutions have been to the Society for Meliorating the Condition of Prisons.