William Crawford, who visited this country in 1833 and 1834, under appointment by the British Government, to inspect the several penitentiaries in the United States, with a view to applying at home, any parts of the systems on which they were governed, which might appear desirable, in the report of his labors and inquiries, which he published after his return, makes the following statement: “In America, the opponents of this (the Separate) System, have produced very erroneous impressions by the publication of certain experiments made a few years since, of solitude without labor; statements which have also been widely circulated in England, to the great prejudice of solitary imprisonment of every description. Having carefully inspected the prisons in question, I feel bound to state my conviction, that the fatal effects which have been described, were not the result of solitude, but of the contracted dimensions and unhealthy condition of the cells in which the experiments were conducted. A trial of solitary confinement day and night, without labor, was made at Auburn in the year 1822 for ten months, upon eighty of the most hardened convicts. They were each confined in a cell only seven feet long, three feet and a half wide, and seven feet high.[1] They were on no account permitted to leave the cell during that long period, on any occasion, not even for the purposes of nature. They had no means of obtaining any change of air, nor opportunities of taking exercise. The most disastrous consequences were the natural result. Several persons became insane, health was impaired and life endangered. The discipline of the prison at that period was one of unmixed severity. There was no moral nor religious instruction of any kind communicated within its walls, nor any consolation administered by which the convict was enabled to bear up against the cruelty of this treatment. Nor was a trial of the same description, which took place in the State of Maine, conducted under more advantageous circumstances. The night rooms or cells at this prison are literally pits, entered from the top by a ladder, through an aperture about two feet square. The opening is secured by an iron grate used as a trap-door; the only other orifice is one at the bottom, about an inch and a half in diameter, for the admission of warm air from underneath. The cells are eight feet nine inches long, four feet six inches wide, and nine feet eight inches high. The gloom is indescribable. The diet during confinement was bread and water only. Thus immured, and without any occupation, it will excite no surprise to learn that a man who had been sentenced to pass seventy days in one of these miserable pits, hung himself after four days’ imprisonment. Another condemned to sixty days, also committed suicide on the twenty-fourth day.” Our author goes on to speak of similar experiments having been made in Virginia, where the cells were in fact