THE ABOLITION OF THE JAIL
Synopsis of Address by Frederick H. Wines, Statistician, State Board of Administration, Illinois.
The average county or municipal jail in this country is a school for crime, a cesspool of moral contagion, a propagating house of criminality, a feeder for the penitentiary, a public nuisance and a disgrace to modern civilization. The public indifference to the situation is attributed partly to ignorance. The county officials do not know what a jail should be and the people do not know what their jails really are. In plain Anglo-Saxon, the truth is that wherever there exists local graft and political dishonesty the county prison is its centre and its stronghold. The sheriff or the jailor makes a personal profit from crime by charging a per diem for board for prisoners and by the receipt of fees for locking and unlocking the jail doors. That profit is a live wire. No local politician, possibly no member of the Legislature or even of the State administration dares monkey with it.
We have substantially won the fight for the reformatory State prison and the indeterminate sentence because we concentrated our fire upon a vulnerable point and made every shot tell. In attacking the county jail system we have pursued the opposite policy. We have addressed our arguments and remonstrances to the county authorities, of whom there are in round numbers, 2,500 sets, instead of to the legislative bodies, of which there are less than fifty. We have pleaded for new jails, better jails, when we should have demanded their replacement by prisons owned and controlled by the State and their emancipation from local political control with its petty and selfish interests.
There was a time when local control was necessary and proper but that was long ago. Today the county prison is an anachronism. We imported it with other institutions from England, but conservative England has outgrown it and dates the dawn of its regenerate prison system from the year of its abolition. There is no good and sufficient reason why the State which enacts a criminal code with its definition of crime, its prohibitions and its penalties should assume the custody and care of the man committed to prison for three years and refuse to recognize its responsibility for the man sentenced for three months, abandoning him to the haphazard mercies of the inferior jurisdiction which is certainly ignorant, often brutal and sometimes dishonest. It is not the majesty of the county but that of the State which calls for vindication. The supervision of crime, let it take what form it may, is the business of the State. The State should name, and it should have exclusive authority over the executive agents to whom it entrusts the discharge of this supreme governmental function.
The one hope of enlightened progress in dealing with the problem of crime is the overthrow of the county jail system. To this end we must direct our energy. With the State once in command, there can be no question but it will find a way to right the wrong and remedy the evils which inhere in the present organization and management of minor prisons.