Dr. J. F. Gilmore, Warden Central Prison, Toronto, Canada, invited the Congress to a meeting to be held Thursday, Sept. 27th, at Toronto in behalf of the Charities and Correction of Canada.
W. E. Shefton, Supt. of the Ohio Reformatory, at Mansfield, invited the Congress to visit that institution before they returned home.
JOSÉ F. GODOY, FIRST SECRETARY OF THE MEXICAN EMBASSY, WASHINGTON, D. C.,
Spoke of its prisons; they were partially after our cellular plan, partly under the State government, and partly by private enterprise in the lesser misdemeanors. That the prison officials were required to keep a very minute description of every man, and that they were treated morally and physically according as the several cases required, that there was no absolute settled plan, that every man should be treated alike, as in most of the United States, but that there was a tendency in that direction.
ADDRESS, HON. EUGENE SMITH, NEW YORK CITY.
It was very comprehensive, and the figures quoted giving the estimates and cost of crime, especially in large cities were astonishing. Mr. Smith held that municipal and county taxation was very largely due to crime; that there was hardly any taxation, federal, State, county or municipal, but what could be greatly reduced except for the existence of crime.
In order to come to some definite conclusion as to the cost, Mr. Smith quoted statistics from representative cities, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans.
New York, during the year 1899, paid from the public treasury for items wholly due to crime the sum of $12,988,804. Then he mentioned many other expenditures which were partly chargeable to crime aggregating $7,889,259, making a total of $20,778,083. In comparing these figures with the population of New York, Mr. Smith concluded that crime in the American metropolis cost the people about $6 per capita annually. In San Francisco it ran about $5 per capita, and in other cities mentioned from $3 to $3.50 per capita. The excess in New York and San Francisco, was partly explained from the fact, that the figures quoted included county taxation.
The speaker then gave comprehensive statements, from which he gathered conclusions as to the cost of crime in the rural districts, adding that a very conservative estimate would be $1.00 per capita per year. Estimating that the present population of the country was 75,000,000 and that 40 per cent. lived in cities of above 8,000 inhabitants, he placed the total cost of crime at $150,000,000 per year. To this he added $50,000,000 from federal and State taxes, making the total $200,000,000 per year.