Hon. Edward Livingston, says, 'it is a great point to produce the conviction of the important and obvious truth, denied only by a false economy, that Prisons, where there is not a complete separation of their inhabitants, are seminaries of vice, not schools for reformation, nor even places of punishment.'
Roberts Vaux, of Philadelphia, lays down five fundamental principles of Prison Discipline, the first of which is, 'that convicts should be rigidly confined to solitary life.'
There is no disagreement between the opinion of these distinguished individuals, and the opinions of various commissioners, directors, &c. who have written on this subject.
The Commissioners of the Massachusetts Legislature, in 1817, ask, 'how it is to be reconciled, that in any civilized country, convicts are brought into promiscuous association, to pass years together, all united under the influence of a public opinion, as strong in its support of vice, as that which rules the community, is, in its support of virtue?'
The Commissioners of the Connecticut Legislature, in a very able Report, written by Martin Wells, Esq. say, 'it is in the cells, that every right principle is eradicated, and every base one instilled. They are nurseries of crime, where the convict is furnished with the expedients and shifts of guilt, and, with his invention sharpened, he is let loose upon society, in a tenfold degree a more daring, desperate and effective villain.'
The Commissioners, Samuel M. Hopkins, Stephen Allen, and George Tibbets, of the New York Legislature, say, "we believe that we do but repeat the common sentiment of all well informed men, when we say, that as long as it is necessary to confine several prisoners in the same room, our State Prison at New York can be no other than a college of vice and criminality."
A highly respectable committee of the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, in the city of New York, in a Report on the Penitentiary System, which is one of the most valuable documents ever published on the subject in this country, have the following language, 'Our Penitentiaries are so many schools of vice, they are so many seminaries to impart lessons and maxims calculated to banish legal restraints, moral considerations, pride of character, and self-regard.' 'They have their watchwords, their technical terms, their peculiar language, and their causes and objects of emulation. Let us ask any sagacious observer of human nature, unacquainted with the internal police of our Penitentiaries, to suggest a school, where the commitment of the most pernicious crimes could be taught with the most effect; could he select a place more fertile in the most pernicious results, than the indiscriminate society of knaves and villains, of all ages and degrees of guilt?'
This is a frightful picture of human depravity and proneness to sin; and if the system of separate confinement at night should not remove or prevent these evils, the mind may be led to seek the source of them, not in the circumstance of few or many being lodged together, but in the cruelty and inhumanity of the keepers.
In the SECOND REPORT, pages 38-43, the Society states its objections to solitary confinement by day, and adopts the theory of labour by day and separate confinement by night. The following is its language:—
"Solitary confinement day and night. On this subject, there is great interest excited, at the present time, in America and in Europe. It will be our object to present such facts as are known to us concerning experiments already made in this country.