The importance of more perfect classification and separation, especially among the female inmates, is urged. “Contact with the older and more depraved of their sex, is, for obvious reasons, far more destructive to young and comparatively innocent females than to males.”[2] In confirmation of the views we have presented in a former part of this article, we cite the following passage from the report now before us. “This is the proper place to allude to a practice of which we have already complained more than once--that of sending to the Refuge, from mistaken ideas of humanity, subjects so far advanced in years and in crime as to give but faint hopes of their own reformation, while by example and influence they are calculated to do infinite harm to others. Those who have travelled long and far on the downward road of vice, are most unfit companions for such as have been arrested at the outset of their guilty career. It is to guide and to reclaim the latter, that houses of refuge are established; the reformation of the former must be attempted in other places and by other means. To this practice of sending to the refuge hardened offenders, whose proper place is a State prison, the managers ascribe the frequency of attempts to escape. Many sent to us as boys, are men in size and strength, impatient of restraint, reckless of consequences, hardened, daring and ingenious in all mischief. While such subjects are sent us, to corrupt, to organize, and to lead the younger and more orderly, attempts at escape will continue to be made, and in spite of all the vigilance of the officers, will occasionally be successful. “The rapid increase of crime in our city, and the constantly augmenting numbers of vicious and vagrant youth, is a subject of serious contemplation. It would be serious enough, if it only kept pace with the astonishing increase of our population, but it even outstrips it. There is no way of getting at complete statistics in this matter, but all the details that can be obtained confirm this view. Thus there were committed to prison in the city, including those sent before trial, and after sentence, and excluding summary convictions, in 1835, 2387 persons, in 1844, 9153 persons.