“The old method of collecting money fines which compelled the defendant to pay or replevy the same the moment he was fined was always a source of great hardship on the poor. It was unreasonable to expect a common laborer arrested late at night and convicted in the morning to be prepared to settle with the state. If he was unable to pay or make arrangements to have his fine stayed for the statutory period, he was sent to prison, not because the judge had given him a term of imprisonment, but because he was poor, which is in effect imprisonment for debt.
“In those cases where a defendant had others dependent upon him for support he has been released on his own recognizance and the case held under advisement for thirty or sixty days, as the circumstances seemed to justify, at the expiration of which time he was required to report to the court that he had paid in the
amount designated as the fine and costs to be entered against him.
“At the close of the year eight hundred and thirty persons had been given an opportunity to pay their fines in this way. Of this number 64 were re-arrested and committed for their failure to pay their fine, and the affidavits in 32 other cases are held for re-arrest. The balance lived up to their obligation with the court, and paid in more than $7,100.
“This plan operates to the benefit of the defendant in several ways: It saves him his employment; it saves his family from humiliation and disgrace, as well as from the embarrassment incident to imprisonment; but more than all it saves him his self-respect. With but a single exception not one to whom this opportunity has been given and who has paid his fine in full has been in court a second time.”
Of the suspended sentence and the withheld judgment Judge Collins says:
“During the past year sentence has been suspended in two hundred and thirty-six cases and judgment withheld in thirty-four hundred and seventy-four. The majority of these were first offenders. In those cases where the judgment was suspended the court has had to set aside and commit the defendants in only two cases, and where the judgment has been withheld less than two per cent have been returned to court for a second or subsequent offense.”
SIR EVELYN RUGGLES-BRISE REPORTS OFFICIALLY.
London, April 7.—The English home office publishes the report of Sir Evelyn John Ruggles-Brise, chairman of the English prison commission and the British representative at the Prison Congress held at Washington last October. In his report Sir Evelyn commends American state prisons and reformatories, but condemns the system in vogue in city and county jails. He says that among the latter “many features linger which called forth the wrath of John Howard, the great English philanthropist, noted for his exertions in behalf of prison reform at the end of the eighteenth century.
“Promiscuity, unsanitary conditions,