extra work, earn money wherewith to purchase better food, and articles of luxury, even daily papers. Many save considerable sums.
The upper floor of one of the buildings forms the chapel, where sabbath service is conducted by clergymen volunteers to audiences of 300 to 500 men, who eagerly welcome any change in the monotony of their routine. Among the attractions are a fair choir, and an organ purchased by contributions from the prisoners.
After service a few of the talented convicts instruct some 250 companions in rudimentary branches, an educational process which is fostered by a library of several thousand well-thumbed volumes, and by the fees of visitors. Literary entertainments are arranged among them, and, at times, lectures are delivered by visitors.
This is not a very repulsive picture of a prison, somewhat different from the Labyrinth of Cnosus with its monster and starvation, or the dreary eryastula, and the Jullianum with its deadly fumes, or the loathsome dungeons of the middle ages. Yet the ancients regarded prisons merely as places of detention, and, although Plato advocated penal and penitentiary establishments, the second phase developed very slowly, and was accepted in France only after the revolution. The more recent knowledge of the necessity to counteract the tending of prisons to become schools for crime, and the introduction of reformatory systems, must be traced to the noble efforts of Howard, and the humane crusades of Fry, while the idea of making prisons self-supporting finds its origin in the political economy problems of our era.
California has not yet had time or means to develop a very perfect system. The one great evil is promiscuous intercourse, whereby the young and less corrupt are exposed to the contagious influence of the hardened criminal, and the want of an efficient check on gambling and other vices, as may be learned from the reports of the committees.
