The Society is represented in its labors at the prisons in Philadelphia by two Committees. The duties of one of which are confined to the Eastern Penitentiary, in Coates street; the other committee is appointed to labor at the County Prison, in Moyamensing. These two committees are really practical operatives. They have little to do with theories or plans. Their work is in the cells of the prisoners or at the doors of the cells, and their dealings are directly with the individual.
In the experience of the visitors of the Society to the two prisons, there is necessarily great difference arising out of the different circumstances of the inmates of the County Prison and those of the Eastern Penitentiary. In the latter the length of incarceration and the closeness of the application of the rule of separate confinement, seems to break up so entirely the relations of the prisoner with the world from which he is banished, that many seem willing to listen to the admonition of visiting friends, and to accept the invitation to review their lives and to form resolves of future amendment. Not merely do the monitions and invitations, of the visitors to the cells, lead prisoners to promises of good, but the isolation of their condition and a want of outward objects to strike their senses and occupy their minds induce them to thought, to meditation, and lead them to the commencement of that reformation, or, at least those solemn resolves of reformation which are the object of their imprisonment. It can scarcely be doubted, that almost every prisoner in the Penitentiary who has been frequently visited by those who evince an anxiety for his temporal and spiritual good, has been led to resolve to refrain from the crimes which placed him in prison, and to seek a maintenance in the world by means which that world sanctions and which God approves; but it is certain that a large portion of those who thus resolve, find it easier on their return to the world to resume their associations and habits and to become three fold more offenders against the laws than they had been. In vice and crime there is no halting, they are progressive; he who has yielded to their influence must be carried forward with their advancement, or he must renounce entirely their influence. The _arts_ of crime are like all other arts by which a man undertakes to acquire position or a living; they demand advancement. Pride in success leads to undertakings of difficulty, and he who enters a jail a “sneaking thief,” may be stimulated by professional emulation to advance in crime till he attains the dignity of a penitentiary cell for some boldly executed robbery, or some brilliant act of extensive forgery. The released half converted criminal feels all this, but he feels the difficulty of relinquishing plans of life which seem to have been devested of a part of their chances of defeat by the very imprisonment into which they led him; and, as a resolution to reform does not always include the means by which virtuous living may be obtained, the outgoing prisoner finds in his circumstances an excuse for violating the resolutions of good, or postponing their fulfilment till at length he becomes involved in the same labyrinth of difficulties and crimes that caused his former incarceration. Is he then to be neglected? Is he then to be cast off? Is he then to be marked as one who has forfeited, with the esteem of the good, the right to the cares of the good? The Great Master of benevolence gave no such advice, nor did He sanction such conduct by example. He to whom all hearts are open, and who, aware of the evils and hostility of vice and ambition, at once their object and their pardoner, He never but once refused time and attention to the profitless; and His only positive direct malediction was upon the unfruitful fig-tree that had outlived its time of usefulness, and which, under His frown, withered into a leafless and lifeless condition, that could experience no resuscitation.