potentialities for organization given by the Act are almost unlimited. Any existing prison may be closed by order of the Lord-Lieutenant, new prisons may be built, and all prisoners, irrespective of their place of sentence, may be confined in any prison the government may select. The Act very seriously contemplates the organizing of prison labour, for the 16th section, reciting that with the view of defraying prison maintenance—
"and also of teaching prisoners modes of gaining honest livelihoods means should be taken for promoting in prison the exercise of and instruction in useful trades and manufactures, so far as may be consistent with due regard to the penal character of prison discipline, and to the avoidance of undue pressure on or competition with any particular trade or industry,"
enacts, that the annual reports of the Prisons Board to be laid before Parliament, should state with precise particularity the various trades and manufacturing processes carried on in each prison.
Much good has been effected by the Board already. The thirty-eight county prisons have been reduced to twenty-seven, and the ninety-five bridewells to thirty-five; large reconstructive prison works have been completed; the new wings at Maryborough and Naas carried out by convicts transferred from Spike and Mountjoy, and a very considerable labour organization worked out as directed by the statute. But no substitute has yet been found for Spike; and the annual protests of the Board continue, whilst the various industries practised in the still too numerous prisons scattered over the country must necessarily be often represented by hands so few and fluctuating as to forbid an adequate training staff or regular instruction. Thus we still find in the annual reports too much survival of the useless treadwheel and shotdrill, the almost valueless oakum and hair picking, and the matmaking so questionable in view of employment on discharge.
In furtherance of a more perfect labour organization, I venture to throw out for consideration these proposals:—
1. To the Irish Prisons Board, as now constituted, should be added an eminent engineer, royal or civil, with the special duty of industrial organizer, under whom should be a superintendent of works in each prison.
2. Allocation of specific industries to specific prisons, and concentration in each of all prisoners, for whom its specific training is deemed suitable. (See Q. 8,963).
Note—By this division of labour, the other prisons or selected government departments would be supplied by the specific industries of each, as we have seen done in many instances in England.
3. General employment of trade warders, with instructions as far as possible to secure to each prisoner a competent knowledge of his work.
Note—The evidence at the Commission discloses an absence of any uniform principle in the selection of warders. In some places trade warders supervise the labour, in others the warders must not interfere; many are old soldiers, many are country lads; some take deep interest in the works, others none or little, but
