In Pennsylvania, as in most, if not all, of the other States of the Union, the county jail is the despair of those who look for a better day in the treatment of the wrong-doer. The admiration which our experiments in the reformatory treatment of the young have excited in eminent foreign penologists has turned to loathing when their attention was directed to the county jails. Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, the distinguished head of the English prison system, in an article published a few months after his visit to this country in 1910, described them in the following terms: “In these gaols it is hardly too much to say that many of the features linger which called forth the wrath and indignation of the great Howard at the end of the eighteenth century. Promiscuity, unsanitary conditions, absence of supervision, idleness and corruption--these remain the features in many places. Even the ‘fee’ system is still in vogue. The gaolers are still paid by fees for the support of prisoners, and commitments to gaol are common when some other disposition of the case would have been imposed had not the commitment yielded a fee to the sheriff, who is usually in charge of the gaol. In many gaols there are not facilities for medical examination on reception, for ventilation, for exercise, or for bathing.... The foreign delegates were amazed at this startling inconsistency between the management of the common gaols and that of the State prisons and State reformatories. The evils to which I refer are well known and deplored by that body of earnest and devoted men and women in all sections of American society with whose lofty ideals on the subject of prison reform and generous aspirations for the humane treatment of the prisoner, the Washington Congress made us every day familiar, but they seem helpless and almost hopeless.... I was appealed to by leading men in more than one State, as British representative, to publicly condemn the system, and this I did, at a risk of giving considerable offense. Until the abuses of the gaol system are removed, it is impossible for America to have assigned to her by general consent a place in the vanguard of progress in the domain of ‘_la science penitentiaire_.’” Your Commission desires to submit as its considered judgment that the foregoing statement does no injustice to many of the county prisons of this Commonwealth, and that the Legislature can do no greater service, nor one that will reflect more credit on the Commonwealth, than to sweep away the entire county jail system without delay.