The distinguishing feature of the discipline which this Society has advocated for Penitentiaries, is that which the world misrepresents by denominating it _solitary_ confinement, and which it discredits by arguments founded not on past experience, but resting upon the probable effects upon the minds of the prisoners of total solitude and utter separation from association, sight and converse with man. We do not pretend to say what would be the effect of such a condition. Our object is not the condemnation of an untried system, but the exposition of the benefits of that which has been well tested. The amelioration not the augmentation of prison discipline is the object of our Association. The permanent benefit of society through the improvement of individuals, or the eternal benefit of individuals, by making the prison a school of reform rather than a place of torture. Separate confinement is the object that has been proposed—and wherever obtained, it has produced, if not all the good which had been hoped for, at least more than any other system that has been adopted, and has satisfied those who are engaged officially or voluntarily in its administration, that its benefits are progressive. By the separation of the convict from his fellow criminals, he is taken from the concerted plans and practices of crime, and placed where none may approach him but officers charged with the care of his person, or those who visit his cell with messages of kindness. People who, sensible of his guilt, but hopeful of his reformation, approach him in a spirit of kindness, and, satisfying him that they seek his good, and not their own benefit, gain admittance to his heart, win his confidence, and produce, perhaps, solemn resolutions to amend. He sees, in the narrow confines of his cell, and he feels, in the strictness of the discipline to which he is subjected, the terrors of the violated law. But he comprehends, in the oft-repeated lessons of love that are given to him by the Society’s visitors, that, prone as he is to crime, he is the object of human solicitude and the subject of divine mercy. And in time he understands also, that, had he been released with the first resolution to repent, he would have missed of reform. He comprehends that time and retirement were necessary to the germination of the seeds which had been planted in his heart, and a long season of abstraction from society could alone have matured the fruits of repentance. Solitude—entire solitude—might have embittered his heart against the social compact by which he was suffering. He may have had learning, but he probably lacked that moral education, that culture of the heart, by which he could easily discern the rightful dependence of punishment on crime, or his responsibility to society for the talents he possessed, and the uses to which he applied them. In utter loneliness, he would have brooded over his privations, and, recalling the hundreds whom he knew equally guilty, but wholly unpunished, he would have regarded his condition as of special, unequalled, and gross injustice, and might have sought liberty and life to revenge himself on man; or, wearying of existence, and despairing of relief, he would have “cursed God and died.” Utter solitude to the ignorant and the bad is rarely productive of benefit. Solitude may be the occasion and the means of beneficial progress to the good. It may enable the repentant to avoid the errors which have injured him and by which he has injured others, and it may enable him to work out his own benefit, doing good to himself, but not communicating it to others. The whirlwind of passion disturbs the solitude, but God and good are not in the disturber. The small still voice of reason and revelation calls him to repentance, but he cannot understand. Like the child Samuel, he hears the call, but until there be some one to instruct him how to respond, he remains in his darkness, unimproved.