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there may be for learning work, for the same reason it should be still more
difficult, in a prison appropriated to safe custody before conviction: at
least in cases where, as it will sometimes happen, the commitment
precedes the trial but a few days. If, on the ground of being particularly
likely to have it in his power to provide work, the Contracting Keeper
of a Penitentiary-house should be deemed the fittest person for the keeping
of such a safe-custody-house (for so I would wish to call it rather than
a prison) in other respects he might be thought less fit, rather than more so.
In a Penitentiary-house he is an extortioner by trade: a trade he must wholly
unlearn, every time he sets his foot in a Safe-custody-house, on pain of such
punishment as unlicenced extortioners may deserve. But it by no means
follows, because the Keeper of a Penitentiary-house has found one or
perhaps half a dozen sorts of work, any of which a person may make
himself tolerably master of in the course of a few months, that he should
be in possession of any that might be performed without learning, or
learnt in a few days. If therefore, for frugality's sake, or any other
convenience, any other establishments were taken to combine with that of a
Safe-custody-house, a House of Correction would seem better suited to such
purpose, than a Penitentiary House. But without considering it as
matter of necessity to have recourse to such shifts, the eligibility of
which might depend upon local and other particular considerations,
I should hope that employments would not be wanting,
and those capable of affording a moderately good subsistence, for which a
man of ordinary faculties would be as well qualified the first instant as at
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