After a most arduous session of eleven days we, the Grand Jury of the First District of Hinds County for this the June term of the court, having completed our labors, beg to submit our final report. We have examined 220 witnesses and have found and returned into court thirty-eight true bills, of which six have been for murder, eight for grand larceny, and the remainder for minor offenses. We find, with the exception of murder, there is very little crime in this district; but we are compelled to deplore the fact that homicide seems to be on the increase. We feel we have discharged our duty toward the suppression of this crime as best we were able, leaving the court to carry on the work. We have examined the public officers’ accounts and settlements and find everything in good shape. We have examined the jail, and find the roof and floors in bad condition and the bedding and covering of the prisoners insufficient and in a bad condition. We recommend that proper and clean bedding be furnished the prisoners and that the roof be repaired or replaced by a new one. We felt it our duty to inspect the penitentiary, and we report the result of our inspection as follows: We find comparatively few prisoners in the walls of the penitentiary, most of them being out on the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad and elsewhere. We found nothing to complain of in the walls. The yard seemed to be clean, and the building, so far as we could judge, in a safe and cleanly condition, and those immediately in charge polite and accommodating in showing us around. But we feel constrained by a sense of public duty to call attention to the hospital there, the manner in which it is kept and the condition of its occupants. _We found twenty-six inmates, all of whom have been lately brought there off_ the farms and railroads, many of them with _consumption and other incurable diseases_, and _all bearing on their persons marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment_; most of them have their backs _cut in great wales, scars and blisters_, some _with the skin peeling off in pieces as the result of severe beatings_. _Their feet and hands in some instances show signs of frost-bite_, and _all of them with_ the _stamp of manhood almost blotted out of their faces, which show that they have been treated more cruelly and brutally than a nation of savages ought to permit inflicted upon its convicts. They are lying there dying, some of them on bare boards, so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through their skin, many complaining for the want of food._