Ré 
1884.] 653 (Vaux. 
severe without discrimination, the prison treatment of convicts was irra- 
tional, disgraceful, and produced those results both were intended to 
prevent. 
The evil was at the root of convict treatment, atthe foundation on which 
the plan rested. Incarceration at hard labor was the only specific for all 
felonies or crimes of aggravation. 
The public mind considered public safety secured if violators of Jaw 
were imprisoned, and there it ceased to regard the crime or the criminal. 
This actual condition of the law and its administration convinced the 
able men interesting themselves in the question, that in the incarceration 
of criminals a thorough change of method must be established by law. 
The associating or congregating convicts at work or otherwise while in 
prison was deemed so unwise, degrading, and irrational, if any benefit to 
the prisoner or advantage to society was expected from imprisonment, that 
this form of treatment must primarily be abolished. This was the initial 
step in prison reform, The leading minds investigating this subject reached 
this conclusion so early as 1787. 
A memorial from the Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public 
Prisons was addressed to the representatives of the freemen of the Com- 
monwealth of Pennsylvania in General Assembly met, on the shocking 
treatment of prisoners then existing, in which it is stated ‘‘that punish - 
ment by more private or even solitary labor would more successfully tend 
to redeem the unhappy objects.’’ The memorialist recommended for the 
consideration of the General Assembly “the very great importance of a 
separation of the sexes in public prisons.’’ Legislation to this end was 
asked. In this memorial is to be found the first suggestion of two prin- 
ciples, which either in their assertion or presentation, gave no promise of 
the signal importance they were to exercise over the subject of prison 
reform, or that they were to become the basis of the Pennsylvania prison 
system. They were.the origin of the system of separation of prisoners 
during their incarceration, and that labor was an element in their pun- 
ishment, 
To this memorial the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, on 
the 20th of November, 1788, replied by the adoption of a resolution ask- 
ing information as to its subject-matter, 
The society made a full statement to this resolution of inquiry, and it 
was presented to the Council in 1788. 
In the following year the society presented a plan for the positive im- 
provement of the prison discipline of the State. 
The propositions contained in this plan were enacted into the law of 1790. 
In 1778 the erection of a State prison was begun, located at the south- 
east corner of Sixth and Walnut streets, in Philadelphia, and on its com- 
pletion the test was applied of the reforms suggested. 
The Legislature, by the act of April 8th, 1790, to reform the penal laws 
of this State and try the separate confinement principle of imprisonment, 
declared its purpose in this act as follows: * * * 
