dollars to be given him to start anew with. "To starve or to steal is too often the only alternative," wrote John W. Edmonds, president of the New York board of prison inspectors in 1844.21 If the released convict did steal he was nearly always sent back to prison for life.
Equally severe in their way were the laws applying to mendicants and vagrants. Six months or a year in the penitentiary or workhouse was the usual sentence. After the panic of 1837, crime, mendicancy, vagrancy and prostitution tremendously increased, as they always do increase after two events: war, which, when over, turns into civil life a large number of men who cannot get work; and panics which chaotically uproot industrial conditions and bring about widespread destitution. Although undeniably great frauds had been committed by the banking class, not a single one of that class went to jail. But large numbers of persons convicted of crimes against property, and great batches of vagrants were dispatched there, and also many girls and women who had been hurled by the iron force of circumstances into the horrible business of prostitution.