The Commission desires to express its sense of deep obligation to the officials and inspectors of prisons in this Commonwealth for the courtesy and hospitality extended to its members in the course of their investigations. It also acknowledges its indebtedness to the Secretary and members of the Board of Public Charities and to the Secretary of the Public Charities Association for their helpful co-operation. The Commission has heretofore submitted to the Governor two preliminary reports, one a Special Emergency Report on Prison Labor, bearing date September 1, 1918, and a special report on the State Industrial Home for Women, under date of September 15, 1918, both of which are hereto appended. While both these reports were called out by war emergencies, the former by the dearth of labor power to man the war industries of the Commonwealth, the latter by the need of providing a place for the detention and treatment of the large number of dissolute women convicted of offenses against Federal and State laws enacted for the protection of the soldiers in the training camps--the Commission believes that they are still pertinent and that the recommendations which they contain should form a part of any constructive scheme for the improvement of the penal system of the Commonwealth. II. DEVELOPMENT OF PENAL SYSTEM OF PENNSYLVANIA. The most inspiring and significant chapter in the history of penology is not the achievement of John Howard in redeeming the common gaols of England from the degradation into which they had fallen, nor of Lord Romilly in his lifelong struggle against the barbarities of the English penal laws, but the leadership which for more than a century the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania gave to the world both in prison reform and in the amelioration of the penal code. The two former were the revolt of sensitive and humane natures against hoary abuses; but the latter was all this and something more. It was a bold and imaginative reconstruction of the whole basis of penal discipline. As far back as the last quarter of the seventeenth century the Quaker colonists of Pennsylvania introduced for the first time the practice of employing imprisonment at hard labor as the ordinary method of punishing anti-social action. After the reversion of the American colonies for fifty years to the barbarous criminal jurisprudence of the mother country, Pennsylvania was the first State, the first community in the world, to break with this system and to substitute imprisonment for the various brutal and degrading types of corporal punishment. The Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, in 1790, was the earliest institution in America in which these more enlightened principles were put into practice. From this second beginning, for a period of forty years, Pennsylvania was elaborating and perfecting the first of the two great systems of penal administration which were destined to dominate the penology of the civilized world during the nineteenth century--the