In compliance with the contract concluded between the Austrian government and the St. Vincent de Paul Commune of Nurses, which is in charge of the prison, Leocazia and other 24 nurses of this commune perform their duties on managing the prison, while the Commune takes full responsibility in running the prison. One governmental official is commissioned to help the senior nurse perform police duties. He does it under her strict supervision and besides, he is also responsible for supervising 20 male servicemen engaged by nurses to look after the prisoners while the latter are having baths and in any other cases when women's presence is regarded inconvenient.

The government pays 27 Kreutzer [one Kreutzer was a coin equal to 1/100 of one Gulden] per each of the prisoners, while the nurses take full responsibility for handling the budget, maintaining the prison and providing all the basics for prisoners. According to Duke Golukhovsky, Minister of Interior Affairs, Austrian government is quite satisfied with the success of the new system of maintaining prisons by nurses and it is quite possible that other prisons of the Austrian Empire might be transferred to the nurses' administration, provided the number of nurses increases.

Regrettably, this experience did not last long, though the idea of commissioning nurses for managing and administrating prisons was widely discussed. Later the prisons were governed by the state structures and special staff of prison wardens substituted nurses, while further development of nursing was much closer to the scientific medicine, hospital care, and charity made for the poor. Although this experiment of engaging nurses for keeping prisoners looks as an exceptional example of nurses' works, it demonstrates that as soon as European societies started changing their approach towards keeping prisoners, activity of nurses proved to be very useful.
 
The nurses' efforts were not forgotten. In the 20th century European societies started organizing systems of keeping juvenile delinquents in a way that looks very similar to the one Austrian nurses demonstrated in the middle of the 19th century and in some countries members of the religious communes of nurses still take part in rehabilitation of prisoners.

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1. Opisanie Nekotorykh Blagotvoritelnykh Obshchin Rimskoi Tserkvi (Description of Some Women’s Charitable Communes of the Roman Catholic Church), Tver 1861. 
2. Luisa Legra i Sestry Miloseridya (Luisa Le Gras and Sisters of Mercy), Tver 1861 

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Ed. Note: Yuri Bessonov is a Russian physician who works as a translator, independent researcher and a freelance journalist in the fields of nursing history and history of hospital care. He has carried out extensive research in the history of nursing in Russia and in some European countries.  

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