“Penitentiary officials are facing a critical situation, resulting from the constantly increasing number of prisoners they are compelled to confine in the idle house. More discouraging than the existing conditions is the prospect that, in six months at the outside, practically all the prisoners will be idle. Conditions cannot improve; they will become graver and graver unless relief is given during the present session of the legislature. “In the meantime, on an average 300 men spend twelve hours each day on the benches in the idle house. This number is augmented on days when the weather does not permit working the prisoners about the yard. In one month, when the last contract expires, another hundred will join these ranks. In six months at the most, when all the contracts will have been cleaned up, all save the men employed in the administration of the big prison, which means about 1,000, will be idling. All the contracts but one have expired; yet most of the men employed in most of the old shops are still at work. This comes about only through sufferance; the companies holding contracts are being allowed to work up the raw material they had on hand at the expiration of their contracts. This keeps a few men going, but at best is only putting further away the problem that must be faced. “Since Dec. 1, more prisoners have become insane than during any average eight months before the condition arose. In a little over one month, eight men have been taken to the prison asylum. When all were working, there was seldom more than an average of one a month who became insane, and usually it averaged less. This prison officials attribute directly to increased idleness. Moreover, discipline is more or less ruined. The men, sitting day after day, with nothing to do but to stare at the ceiling and turn over in their minds their misfortunes, are gradually becoming more and more morose, sullen and ugly. Not a day passes but that prisoners approach the guards and beg to be set at work. Guards, their hands tied by the legislature, are powerless to help. Nothing awaits the prisoner but a refusal. “The air in the room is necessarily foul from the exhalations of these 400 men. Blazing coal stoves at frequent intervals keep the room at a temperature which, to one going in from the outside, is nothing short of sickening. The benches themselves are rather narrow, with twelve or fourteen-inch backs, which, from all appearances, would become very hard and uncomfortable in little or no time. The floor is sprinkled with lime at intervals, but after the men have marched in in the morning presents a dirty gray appearance—that of a thick coat of dirt covered over with whitewash, mud from innumerable pairs of boots tracked into it. Wooden boxes, filled with shavings, do duty as cuspidors. The men, fortunately, are allowed the consolation of a chew, and to chew one must, in plain English, spit. Yet the possibilities of acquiring disease are fearful to contemplate.