It is true, as he says, that a number of offenders are committed to these institutions, who ought to have been sent to the penitentiary, and it is particularly disgusting to him to see educated men, with "pull" and friends, who have been convicted of crimes for which less favoured offenders would receive sentences to the State prison, relieved of the disgrace of going to prison by being sent to the "kids' pen," as the reformatory is also sometimes called; but, admitting all this, I believe that the modern reformatory, when well managed, represents the best Penological notions.
"Notes of an Itinerant Policeman"
Josiah Flynt
The inference, to the legal mind, not to speak of the Penological one, was plain: the convicts at the penitentiary fared as sumptuously as do the banqueters of the Four Hundred-at no cost, moreover, to themselves, not even waiters' tips.
"The Subterranean Brotherhood"
Julian Hawthorne