Library Collections: Document: Full Text

"In the Ontario County poorhouse, a married woman twentysix years of age, frequently in jail for intoxication, two years an inmate, with a male child three years old and an infant girl aged two months; led a vagrant life in childhood, the father, mother, and four sisters being paupers; is debased and thoroughly degraded by sensual and immoral practices and gives but little hope of reformation; the husband said to be able, but declines to provide for her support. A girl eighteen years of age, unmarried, and only three months in the house; is well connected, prepossessing in appearance, but shameless in conduct; was early orphaned, and has led a roving, vagrant life; is soon to become a mother, and offers no hope of reformation."

"In the Orange County poorhouse, a woman, widowed, eighty years old, educated and temperate; admitted twenty years ago, with her husband, since deceased, and three female children, two of whom are dead; her daughter forty-four years old, ignorant and depraved, married at nineteen, now widowed; the latter had three children by her husband, one only being living, and subsequently four illegitimate children, all of whom are dead; two of her granddaughters, one twenty-four and the other thirteen years of age, the former single, uneducated, ignorant, and debased, and the latter an idiot; and her great-grand-daughter, three years old, illegitimate, also an idiot, and blind."

"In the Oyster Bay and North Hempstead town poorhouse, a man seventy-two years of age, and his second wife, forty-nine years old, the former an inmate sixteen, and the latter twenty-eight years; the woman has borne four illegitimate children, one of whom, an idiot girl fifteen years old, is now in this house; the man and woman both ignorant, shiftless, and depraved, and classed as permanent burdens."

"In the Rockland County poorhouse, an unmarried woman, aged forty-two years, eleven years an inmate; has had four illegitimate children, two of whom are dead, and two provided for in families; is educated, but intemperate and vagrant and gives no promise of reformation. A single woman, nineteen years of age, first admitted to the poorhouse when twelve years old, and for some time past has led a vagrant, tramping life; is ignorant, shiftless, and degraded, and looked upon as incorrigible."

"In the Rensselaer County poorhouse, a married woman thirty-one years of age, separated from her husband nearly twelve years, since which time she has borne three illegitimate children, one of whom is dead, and two are now with her, the youngest being four months old; is ignorant, vagrant, and depraved, and gives little promise of future self-support."

"In the St. Lawrence County poorhouse, a single woman, twenty-six years old, an inmate only a few months; has two illegitimate children with her, the younger born in the house, and has also another illegitimate child, provided for by friends; is educated and temperate, but confirmed in habits of vagrancy, and likely hereafter to burden the public."

"In the Suffolk County poorhouse, an ignorant, intemperate, unmarried woman aged sixty-one years, eighteen of which have been passed in poorhouses, giving birth during the time to three children, -- one being a pauper, and two self-supporting."

"In the Westchester County poorhouse, an ignorant, vagrant, unmarried colored woman, thirty-two years of age, an inmate six years, having two illegitimate children provided for in families, and two (twins) one year old, with her, born in the institution."

These women and their children, and hundreds more like them, costing the hard-working inhabitants of the State annually thousands of dollars for their maintenance, corrupting those who are thrown into companionship with them, and sowing disease and death among the people, are the direct outcome of our system. The community itself is responsible for the existence of such miserable, wrecked specimens of humanity. These mothers are women who began life as their own children have begun it, inheriting strong passions and weak wills, born and bred in a poorhouse, taught to be wicked before they could speak plain, all the strong evil in their nature strengthened by their surroundings and the weak good crushed and trampled out of life. Hunted and hounded, perhaps committed to jail while their tender youth had yet some germs of virtue remaining, dragged through the mire, exposed to the wickedness of wicked men and women whose pleasure it is to sully and drag down whatever is more innocent than themselves, (1) in the power of brutal officials, (2) -- what hope could there be for them? and how shall we cast a stone at them, whom we ourselves have, by the strong arm of the law, thrust into the direst temptation?

(2) Extract from a letter from Dr. Elisha Harris, Corresponding Secretary of the New York Prison Association: "In one county I saw three girls, who had been tramping all summer as leaders of a band of tramping boys... When they wept, as though penitent, and asked who cared for them, the sheriff and his assistants seemed to regard them as objects of derision and sport.... In another jail, I found that a sheriff... had wantonly assaulted and degraded numerous young women prisoners; and, when sheriff in 1871 and 1872, had utterly brutalized three young girls."