The immense _expense_ with which the maintenance of such prodigious numbers of prisoners in jail is attended, is another most serious evil, especially in these days of retrenchment, diminished profits, and economy. From the last Report of the Jail Commissioners for Scotland--that for 1848--it appears that the average cost of each prisoner over the whole country for a year, after deducting his earnings in confinement, is £16, 7s. 6d. As this is the cost after labour has been generally introduced into prisons, and the greatest efforts to reduce expense have been made, it may fairly be presumed that it cannot be reduced lower. The average number of prisoners constantly in jail in Scotland is now about 3500, which, at £16, 7s. 6d. a-head, will come to about £53,000 a-year.[1] Applying this proportion to the 60,000 criminals, now on an average constantly in confinement in the two islands,[2] the annual expense of their maintenance cannot be under a million sterling. The prison and county rates of England alone, which include the cost of prosecutions, are £1,300,000 a-year. But that result, enormous as it is in a country in which poor-rates and all local burdens are so rapidly augmenting, is but a part of the evil. Under the present system a thief is seldom transported, at least in Scotland, till he has been three or four years plying his trade; during which period his gains by depredations, and expenses of maintenance, cannot have averaged less than £25 yearly. Thus it may with safety be affirmed, that every thief transported from Scotland _has cost the country, before he goes, at least £100_; and that has been expended in training him up to such habits of hardened depravity, that he is probably as great a curse to the colony to which he is sent, as he had proved a burden to that from which he was conveyed. _Sixteen pounds_ would have been the cost of his transportation in the outset of his career, when, from his habits of crime not being matured, he had a fair chance of proving an acquisition, instead of a curse, to the place of his destination.