ABSTRACT
The Political Science student has no difficulty in seeing that the appalling condition of the prisons in the eighteenth century, and the long drawn-out tragedy of prison life is to be ascribed less to any culpable neglect of the sheriffs. The Justices, in the discharge of duties which had never been precisely defined or even explicitly imposed on them, than to the amazing administrative device, at that time almost universally adopted, of converting the keeping of a prison into a profit-making private business. “A prison,” said a writer in 1726, “is a place fitter to make a rogue than reform him. Bolts and chains are used as bugbears to extort money from those who are supposed to have it, while such as pay readily are indulged in the greatest freedom and excesses, be their crimes of what nature so ever.”
