“Even worse is the indiscriminate association of all sorts of criminals in the county prisons. Beginners in crime are forced into close contact with hardened criminals. Men who are committed for being too poor to pay their fines for petty offenses, are compelled to associate with men who have spent their lives in crime. The county prison is, inevitably a school of crime.”[9] The Prison Association in New York State is scarcely more complimentary concerning the prison conditions in that state. According to Mr. O. F. Lewis,[10], its secretary, the requirements of the statutes respecting the classification of prisoners appear to be systematically violated. Jails are frightfully overcrowded. The buildings are faultily constructed and unsanitary. For a prisoner to make a six-months’ stay in one of them is to undergo “the most serious possible contamination.” The condition of the jails in Illinois is apparently no better, for the State Charities Commission reported recently,[11], there had been little improvement since the first examination of the former State Charities Board in 1870. A large majority of the jails were reported to be old and unsanitary. In seventy-two of one hundred and two counties, the law requiring the segregation of minors from adults was violated and in eleven counties there was no provision for women. And so it goes. The county as a truly humanitarian agency has most lamentably failed. As to the underlying cause of the failure, this is suggested in a remark of the state prison inspector of Alabama in his report for 1914: “Publicity is not only a political antiseptic, but is the sure antidote for most, if not all, our governmental ills.” A justifiable inference from this declaration would be that counties are suffering from the lack of publicity. In the immunity from the restraint which such a purifying influence would supply the elementary human instincts of county officials has full sway--such instincts as the inspector had in mind when he said: “The vile, pernicious, perverting, fee system beggars description, and my vocabulary is inadequate to describe its deleterious and baneful effects. It inculcates into the management of our jails greed for the Almighty Dollar; persons are arrested because of the dollar and shame to say, are frequently kept in captivity for months, in steel cages, for no other reason than the Almighty Dollar.”