About the year 1776, the prisons in America were in a situation very similar to that of the generality of English prisons at the present moment. There was no such thing as classification, employment, instruction or cleanliness: arbitrary rule and brutality, fetters put on, or withdrawn according to wanton caprice, oaths and invectives indiscriminately dealt out, were the only methods of discipline; but these severities “were in some sense amply compensated to the prisoners, by the permission of debauchery and excess; by the liquors they were allowed to purchase, and the indolence in which they were indulged.” Filth, drunkenness, irregularity, and promiscuous intercourse, produced the same effects in American, as they now produce in English jails. Disease was very prevalent; crime increased, and “scarcely one was dismissed from prison with the same stock of morality he carried in with him.”

A few benevolent persons in Pennsylvania, deeply deploring these evils, formed themselves into “a society for alleviating the miseries of public prisons.” After fourteen years of labour and disappointment, they succeeded in obtaining liberty from the legislature to introduce by way of experiment, an arrangement, in which the classification of crime, and the employment of the criminal, were the most important features.