PRISON DISCIPLINE means the method in which criminals, or other persons sub jected to imprisonment are managed. In this, which is its original sense, prison disci pline, as actually practiced, may be good or bad in the estimation of the person speaking of it. Of late, however, the term has obtained a new meaning, having been used to express not merely the practice of ruling prisons, but the science of properly ruling them. It has gone even further, and sometimes has been used to express the principles of renal administration or the philosophy and practice of punishment. This has arisen from the circumstance, that gradually other punishments have been dropped in this country, and detention within edifices and the grounds attached to them has become almost the only method of punishment for crimes. Torture, exposure in the pillory, and other like dedi cations of the offender to public vengeance, have been long abandoned as barbarous. Death-punishment has been much narrowed in its application; and transportation, apart from any question as to its effectiveness, has been rendered impracticable, except within a very narrow compass. We get nothing from the practice of the times an terior to Christianity, nor yet from that of the middle ages, to help us in estimating modern systems of prison discipline. They are a development of civilization; and, contradictory as it may seem to say so, of personal liberty. The institution of slavery renders any such system unnecessary. It removes the function of punishing ordinary criminals from the public administration of the affairs of a state, and places it in private hands. Hence, we have no criminal law, properly speaking, coming down to us. from antiquity. The corpus furls, so full of minute regulations in all matters of civic right, has very little criminal law, because the criminals became slaves, and ceased to be objects of the attention of the law. When imprisonment became a func tion of the state in the administration of justice, it was often carelessly, and hence tyrannically, exercised, because the practice of awarding it as a punishment arose more rapidly than the organization for controlling its use. On several occasions, grave abuses have been exposed by parliamentary inquiries and otherwise in the practice of prison discipline in this country. The exertions of Howard, Mrs. Fry, and other
investigators awakened in the public mind the question, whether any practice in which the public interest was so much involved, should be left to something like mere chance—to the negligence of local authorities, and the personal disposition of jailers. The tendency lately has been to regulate prison discipline with extreme care. The public sometimes complain that too much pains is bestowed on it—that criminals are not worthy of having clean, well-ventilated apartments, wholesome food, skillful medi cal attendance, industrial training, and education, as they now have in this country. There are many arguments in favor of criminals being so treated, and the objections urged against such treatment, are held by those who are best acquainted with the subject to be invalid; for it has never been maintained by any one that a course of crime has been commenced and pursued for the purpose of enjoying the advantages of imprisonment. Perhaps those who chiefly promoted the several prominent systems expected from them greater results in the shape of the reformation of criminals, than any that have been obtained. If they have been disappointed in this, it can, at all events, be said that any prison in the now recognized aystem is no longer like: the older prisons, an institution in which the young criminals advance into the rank of proficicats, and the old improve each other's skill by mutual communication. The system now received is that of separation, so far as it is practicable. Two other systems were tried—the silent system and the solitary system. The former imposed entire silence among the prisoners even when assembled together; the latter endeavored to accomplish their complete isolation from sight of or communication with their race. By the sepa rate system, the criminals are prohibited from communicating with each other; but they, are visited by various persons with whom intercourse is more likely to elevate than to debase—as chaplains, teachers, scripture-readers, the superior officers of the prison, and those who have the external control over it.