and far less degrading and indecent.

[Illustration]

"There is another prison near New York which is a house of correction.
The convicts labor in stone-quarries near at hand, but the jail has no
covered yards or shops, so that when the weather is wet (as it was when
I was there) each man is shut up in his own little cell, all the
live-long day. These cells, in all the correction-houses I have seen,
are on one uniform plan,--thus: A, B, C, and D, are the walls of the
building with windows in them, high up in the wall. The shaded place in
the centre represents four tiers of cells, one above the other, with
doors of grated iron, and a light grated gallery to each tier. Four
tiers front to B, and four to D, so that by this means you may be said,
in walking round, to see eight tiers in all. The intermediate blank
space you walk in, looking up at these galleries; so that, coming in at
the door E, and going either to the right or left till you come back to
the door again, you see all the cells under one roof and in one high
room. Imagine them in number 400, and in every one a man locked up; this
one with his hands through the bars of his grate, this one in bed (in
the middle of the day, remember), and this one flung down in a heap upon
the ground with his head against the bars like a wild beast. Make the
rain pour down in torrents outside. Put the everlasting stove in the
midst; hot, suffocating, and vaporous, as a witch's cauldron. Add a
smell like that of a thousand old mildewed umbrellas wet through, and a
thousand dirty-clothes-bags musty, moist, and fusty, and you will have
some idea--a very feeble one, my dear friend, on my word--of this place
yesterday week. You know of course that we adopted our improvements in
prison-discipline from the American pattern; but I am confident that the
writers who have the most lustily lauded the American prisons have never
seen Chesterton's domain or Tracey's.[53] There is no more comparison
between these two prisons of ours, and any I have seen here YET, than
there is between the keepers here, and those two gentlemen. Putting out
of sight the difficulty we have in England of finding _useful_ labor for
the prisoners (which of course arises from our being an older country
and having vast numbers of artisans unemployed), our system is more
complete, more impressive, and more satisfactory in every respect. It is
very possible that I have not come to the best, not having yet seen
Mount Aub