THE NEW CRIMINOLOGY 853 



and Sir Walter Crofton, director of Irish convict prisons, had made 

 it the cornerstone of his remarkably original and successful adminis- 

 tration of the trust committed to his hands. But it was not until 

 it had crossed the sea and been applied in practice at Elmira, in the 

 State of New York, that it became the theme of a special literature, 

 of vast extent, in all languages, and began powerfully to influence the 

 governmental action of Continental Europe. 



As to probation and the juvenile court, they are both American 

 innovations in criminal jurisprudence and practice, for which we are 

 indebted respectively to the state of Massachusetts and the city of 

 Chicago. 



I beg you to believe that these observations are not prompted by 

 national vanity, which is a pseudo-patriotic sentiment, but by regard 

 for the truth of history and in the hope of giving greater definiteness 

 and stronger emphasis to \vhat is to follow. 



In the development of prison reform this country has enjoyed the 

 advantage, in the first place, of being a new country. It imported 

 its institutions and its laws from the Old World, but it was not 

 wedded to them. These laws and these institutions had a tinge or 

 cast due to their having originated under purely monarchical forms of 

 government, while democratic ideals were here all but universally 

 prevalent. The alteration in our laws and the change of form in our 

 institutions took on a general direction which may be traced to this 

 political impulse as its source. The one conspicuous exception is the 

 county jail, the worst and most discreditable feature of the American 

 prison system. English, not Roman law was the foundation upon 

 which we builded; and we transplanted to our own shores the 

 English shire, which was and still is, everywhere but in the New 

 England States, the political unit; and even in New England the 

 distribution of courts and their adjuncts, the houses of detention for 

 prisoners awaiting trial, conforms to the politico-geographical 

 organization of the state by counties. The population of the original 

 colonies was sparse and widely scattered ; there were few towns of any 

 considerable size; roads were bad and travel difficult, locomotion by 

 steam power not having yet been invented; and there was very little 

 crime, and only an occasional criminal. The early jails were very 

 primitive in design, being for the most part nothing more than log 

 huts with a single room (rarely two), into which the suspected and 

 the convicted were thrust, pending the disposition of their cases and 

 while undergoing sentence. This mode of incarceration has survived 

 the original necessity for its adoption, partly because of the large 

 investment of capital which has been made by the public in county 

 prisons, and partly for political and other reasons. The county jail 

 is acknowledged to be, in this country and at the present time, an 

 anachronism; but many years may elapse before we are ready, as 

 a people, to abandon it. It cannot permanently endure. 



