D—No. 2a

REPORTS AND MEMORANDA OF associating, as far as the gaol regulations may admit, with the male criminals in the airing yard, or by pacing the confined area of the dank debtors' yard and there conversing with female felons or misdemeanants, prostitutes, vagrants, and incorrigible female drunkards. I confess to your Excellency that, when I lately visited a young man just started into life, who is by birth, education, and habits, a gentleman, but, having failed in his first enterprise, had been, under an order of the Supreme Court, made a prisoner for debt, I felt ashamed and grieved at the spectacle. Females. It is in this yard that accommodation is provided for female debtors. It consists of three cells. One, the area of which measures eleven feet nine inches by ten feet ten inches, and which is the principal resort for the female prisoners of every class, is a ricketty lean-to, built on to the main pile, and is numbered 23 on the plan. At its highest elevation it rises about six feet ten inches to the ceiling. The ventilation is varied through a grated window, the glazing of which is destroyed, and which opens directly over a filthy ditch. Into this ditch are poured the drainings from two privies in the debtor's yard, and from a third (a few yards higher up) in the hard labor yard, of which the contents are conducted by square wooden trough-drains into the ditch in question, and there left to ooze into or over the bottom of the ditch, past this female apartment, unless a favorable fall of rain should flush the ditch, and sweep along this portion of the prison drainage, blended with the accumulated offal and sewage of the surrounding neighbourhood. During nine months of the past year, from lack of rain, this foul corruption accumulated, and saturated the soil around the gaol. In this cell I have seen five, six and seven women squat on the flooring by day, and am informed that as many as six and eight have at times slept therein at night, with a child or two, as it may happen, at the breast. There are, however, two other cells in the " Debtor's Yard," under the flooring of the Supreme Court, Nos. 24 and 25, which are expressly complimented as the " Female Debtors' Cells." They measure each eleven feet nine inches by five feet two inches, and are six feet from floor to ceiling. Sometimes three, but not unfrequently two women sleep in one of these dank dens, with sometimes a child. I yesterday found three women and one child sleeping in each of them. There have been, lam informed, seventeen women at a time, accommodated in this prison. But no general statement can convey to the mind of your Excellency a clear comprehension of the degrading tendency of the present system. I will therefore select three instances which came lately within my own experience, as illustrative of it. One female I found privileged to occupy one of the last-mentioned cells alone. She was in a sad state of disease, arising partly from an imprudent life, and it became absolutely necessary that she should sleep alone. She was imprisoned for debt, and lay in gaol about four months. Being wholly destitute of means, she wrote me a letter explaining her distress, and I must have held a Court in the gaol for the purpose of liberating her, had not a gentleman kindly consented to act as her solicitor, and bring her before the Supreme Court. Another example was that of a married woman, far advanced in pregnancy, and committed in respect of a debt incurred by her before her marriage. This woman I found herded with the characters above described, and, having obtained the certificate of the Provincial Surgeon, I felt justified in causing her to be removed to the Provincial Hospital. The third instance is that of the woman " F.," now undergoing her sentence of two years' imprisonment with hard labour (so expressed) for a wholesale larceny. When committed she had an infant at the breast, and this infant she was allowed to retain with her in prison, until the child languished, and was (with the consent, reluctantly yielded, of the mother) at length removed to save its life. The larceny in which " F." participated was committed at the time of the great fire in Auckland in 1858, but she was not brought to trial till March, 1860. During the intervening two years she had continued to cohabit with one "M.,"the father of her child, and who doubtless was the principal actor in the crime. They were esteemed man and wife, and it appeared to me that " F." had so behaved as to be respected by reputable women, at whose houses she had lodged. Her case was precisely one of those in which a reformatory discipline, with some little moral and religious training, might renew the character. But this woman has completed little more than one half of her sentence, and for more than twelve months she has been left either to pine in speechless idleness, or to cheer her imprisonment by watching the loose gestures, and listening to the obscene jests, and studying the profligate lives of the lowest, but doubtless not the least communicative, of her sex. And such studies are furnished to her by the authorities fresh and fresh, for she shares the only prison and the only cells which Auckland provides for female convicts; and, considering that women are committed to this gaol from the Resident Magistrate's Court from time to time, it may be anticipated that "F.," by the time she has completed her sentence, will have gained the combined experience of all the worst women in this Province. If she could have retained her child, the developement of the maternal instinct might have tended to solace and improve her, and the criminal might have been saved in the mother ; but the unwholesomeness of the prison has defeated this only attempt at reformation, and it has become a necessity, in the Province of Auckland, to hasten the ruin of a mother in order to save a child. The same law, which is thus promiscuous of bad women, steadily refuses to admit the influence or even the assistance of a good one, and accordingly your Excellency should be informed that no matron or female attendant is allowed to enter this gaol. Visitors indeed of every shade and character may enter, and bring with them spirits or other articles, despite the gaoler, turnkeys and the " Regulations." For these men very properly shrink from examining the clothes of females, and their number is too small to leave it possible for them to watch visitors after they are admitted. Lastly, if any female prisoner should, from any cause, require the aid of one of her own sex, whether by night or by day, there is neither an