_What the Pennsylvania System is._—The basis of our system is, AN INDIVIDUAL CELL FOR EVERY PRISONER, AND THAT EACH PRISONER SHALL BE KEPT WHOLLY SEPARATE FROM EVERY OTHER PRISONER, DAY AND NIGHT, DURING THE ENTIRE TERM OF CONFINEMENT. The thorough separation here spoken of, must not be misunderstood, however, to mean, or to be, as has been charged, “perpetual solitude,” or “total isolation from the whole world.” The law never designed that it should be so, and its actual character in its practical working is very different from this. It is not society in itself, or intercourse with his fellow-men (excepting, so far as its privation might be salutary as a punishment,) that is denounced by the system, but it is association and companionship with criminals,—with the depraved and wicked,—which it is believed, the good, both of the criminal and of the community into which he is to return upon the termination of his sentence, requires, should be utterly prohibited. The social intercourse under this system, is, in point of fact, abundantly sufficient for the health, both of body and mind. Beside that which takes place between the prisoners and the resident Officers and the Inspectors of the prison, by which means each convict receives several visits every day. The following are named by law as “official visitors,” who have a full legal right to visit the penitentiary and enter the cells of the prisoners whenever they shall think proper, to wit: “the Governor, Speaker and members of the Senate, the Speaker and members of the House of Representatives, the Secretary of the Commonwealth, the Judges of the Supreme Court, the Attorney General and his deputies, the President and Associate Judges of all the Courts of the State, the Mayor and Recorder of the cities of Philadelphia, Lancaster and Pittsburg, Commissioners and Sheriffs of the several counties, and the Acting committee of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons.” The last of these, as we shall see in the progress of this report, availing themselves of this authority, are untiring in their efforts to promote the social, moral and religious welfare of those confined in our penitentiaries and jails. Thus, by our system, instead of the society of the ignorant, the degraded and the criminal, whose efforts would be directed to dragging them down to still lower depths of vice and infamy, than they might yet have reached; we give them that of the virtuous, the intelligent and the good, who not only make it their business to see that they have the bodily comforts to which they are entitled; but who are desirous of promoting their reformation with a view to their own real good through the remaining term of their lives, and to securing society against renewed depredations from them after their discharge; and above all, that they may be instrumental, under the divine blessing, in bringing these poor wanderers and outcasts,