The county jail may be described as the public school of crime. There are some county jails in which a thorough classification of the inmates is secured, but there is a very small number of these jails compared with the hundreds in which young and old, first offenders and habitual criminals, are all jumbled together. I can write from a full experience in regard to our county jails, because I have not only had to visit them as a police officer, but I have also had to "serve time" in them as a tramp, and I know whereof I speak. Practically any boy, no matter what his training has been, can be made a criminal if handed over to skilled jail instructors, and every day in the year some lad, who, after all is said, is really only mischievous, is committed by a magistrate or justice of the peace to a county prison. There is no other place for the magistrate to send the boy, if his parents demand his incarceration, and the sheriff is not prepared to take him to the reform school immediately, and so he is tossed into the general rag-bag of offenders to take his chances. He is eventually sent to the reform school or house of correction, where it is theoretically supposed that he is going to be reformed; but it is a fact that the majority of professional offenders in this country have generally spent a part of their youth in just such institutions, where they were no more reformed than is a confirmed jailbird on his release from a penitentiary. It is an extremely difficult task to change any boy who goes to a reform school after a long sitting in a county jail, and the wonder to me is that our reformatories accomplish what they do. The superintendent of a reformatory school in Colorado took me to task some years ago for making the statement in public, in regard to tramps, that I have just made about professional criminals,--that the majority of them have experienced reform-school discipline,--and he said that it was a thoroughly established fact that tramps keep out of such places. Of course they keep out of them as full-grown men, as do also grown-up thieves, but they are sent to them as youngsters, if apprehended for some offence, whether they like it or not, and any one who is acquainted with tramps and criminal life knows this to be true. I make so much mention of boys in this paper because they are to be the next generation of offenders, unless we succeed in rescuing them from a criminal life while they are still susceptible to good influences; and we are not doing this, or even seriously thinking about it, when we give them professional thieves and convicted murderers as associates in jails.