The prices allowed for good work are as follows:
For sewed boots, 45 cents per pair. For pegged boots, 30 cents per pair. For rogans sewed, 35 cents per pair. For rogans pegged, 28 cents per pair.
To those who purchase these articles, the price seems low; yet the average clear profit to each prisoner is about ten dollars a month,—a sum which, under ordinary circumstances, he would scarcely exceed, if at full liberty, with some of those habits that attend the man who is the candidate for, or the graduate of, a prison. Some prisoners considerably exceed ten dollars a month: they are usually not only faster but better workmen.
But, as many of the prisoners are without any trade, (and perhaps they owe their imprisonment in part to a neglect of some one to give to them a means of acquiring an honest living,) it follows that some time is necessarily consumed in acquiring such a skill in shoemaking as may be turned to their profit in prison, especially when the sentence is not for a long time. But many, it is believed, have made such advance in the art, under personal instructions, as to place them in a position to do some part of the work of their trade, and thus by practice to perfect themselves in a respectable occupation. Too much importance can scarcely be attached to this result, even of a short imprisonment.
Attempts have been made to introduce some kinds of labor for the benefit of prisoners who had short terms of incarceration, or who seemed destitute of abilities to acquire a trade; but these efforts have not been so successful, and, in the present absence of cotton weaving, some of the convicts remain wholly or nearly unemployed.
In the Female Department there is no regular employment by which labor is compensated in money. The tedium of the cell is relieved by ordinary female work, such as making and mending the clothes of other convicts, and providing clothes for those who seem to require some addition to their clothing, when they leave at certain seasons. There is a considerable demand upon the peculiar talents of these prisoners, and it would seem that if only half the industry (with economy and temperance) were practised out of the prison which they manifest willingly in the cell, they would have no temptation to steal, or to covet their neighbor’s goods, “nor anything that is their neighbor’s.” These females are, however, not dismissed from the prison without some consideration for their industry. They usually come in with very few clothes. They are dismissed with at least comfortable garments; and if their home is at a distance, means are supplied to reach it. In this matter, also, this Society assigns special duty to its Agent; and in many cases the poor creature who having tasted the pleasures of sound resolutions for the future, begins to feel the terrors of inability, on her departure from the prison, to escape the associations that led her there, is suddenly surprised with the gratifying information that she will be aided by the Society to leave the city, when she leaves the prison, and may abide in the cell, or in some institution or family, till she can be safely “sent _home_” at the Society’s expense.