ADDRESS.
CAPTAIN EDWARD S. WRIGHT, PRESIDENT OF THE ASSOCIATION.
We all retain memories of having regard for all the men and women who have been helpers in the work we have in hand. One name will always stand highest, that of General Rutherford B. Hayes, for ten years our President, and to many of us a type of a gallant American gentleman. His life and labor in the promotion of humanity in prisons, and the reformation of the imprisoned, are crystalized in the records of the proceedings of the Association.
Following the history of prison reform work in the world, and especially in this country, he said, “Thus it has come about that a cellular system of confinement in separation in the intervals of work has come to be called the American System of imprisonment. In nearly all the prisons of this country details may vary in some points, but in the main the prisons closely resemble each other. No better form of imprisonment has yet been devised. Nearly all these changes in prison discipline of the United States have taken form in the latter part of the century.”
“The Constitution laws, of nearly all the States have been enacted since the National Prison Association took strong grounds in favor of this feature, in which reward and punishment go hand in hand. A system of classification first introduced in the Elmira Prison Reformatory has been adopted in substance by the majority of all classes and