No race prejudice is noticeable among prisoners, and no racial clashes or unpleasant experiences have occurred in the institution.
Cook County Jail. The greatest discrimination noted in the course of the institution inquiry was at the Cook County Jail, where segregation has been carried out in nearly every department. The statements below are based on interviews with Chief Deputy Sheriff Laubenheimer and with Mr. King of the sheriff's office, who was chief clerk at the jail at the time of this study.
Negroes are completely segregated in cells on the first two floors in the new jail. Sometimes, when the jail is crowded, a few Negroes are put in among the whites, but whites are not often put in the part of the jail where Negroes are segregated. A condemned Negro murderer is placed with white condemned murderers in the section set apart for condemned murderers. Similarly Negro boys are placed with white boys in the boys' section of the jail.
Meals are served to all prisoners in their cells. The Negroes have a separate "bull pen" for exercise but are given the same facilities as the whites. They have separate church services. Negro guards have charge of the Negro prisoners. The conduct of Negroes, according to the observation of Mr. King, is practically the same as that of the whites.
Out of a total of 8,616 inmates in the county jail in 1919 there were 1,655 Negroes, or about 19 per cent. This is larger than the proportion of Negroes among all arrested or convicted. The report of the City Council Crime Committee showed that inmates of the county jail were confined there to a large extent on account of poverty.
V. NEGRO CRIME AND ENVIRONMENT
Housing.—Housing must be considered as an important element in the environmental causes of crime. Elsewhere this report presents a more detailed study of housing and it will suffice here to call attention to the prevalence of taking lodgers which is economically necessary in many Negro homes, and the consequent danger to the integrity of the family; to the laxity of law enforcement in certain sections; to the condition of streets and alleys; and to frequent instances of defective housing which have the effect of driving the children into the streets or to questionable places of amusement.
Recreation.—A comprehensive inquiry into the relations between recreation and delinquency, made by the Cleveland Foundation in 1917, showed that the use of leisure time had a relation to delinquency in 75 per cent of the cases observed, and that 51 per cent of the leisure time of the delinquent child was spent in ways that were aimless and undirected; while in the case of the "wholesome" child, only seven-tenths of 1 per cent of the spare time was thus spent. Local studies made by T. J. Szmergalski, of the West Chicago Park Commission, show that the establishment of a supervised park or playground tends to decrease complaints of delinquency from 30 to 40 per cent within the range of its usefulness—a radius of about three-quarters of a mile. With these facts as a background it is significant that there is no recreation center and only a few small playgrounds freely available for Negro children within the congested Negro district. In many of the crowded areas inhabited by foreign colonies are well-equipped recreation centers with model field houses, used by thousands of persons from these districts. The facilities available to Negro children and young people in this respect are much less adequate.[48]
Bathing-beaches, which are a summer-time boon to Chicago residents, foreign and native, are not freely accessible to Negroes. The tragic incidents in which the riot of 1919 began, illustrate the discriminatory attitude frequently observed when Negroes attempt to enjoy some of these recreational facilities.
The importance of these recreation opportunities is further emphasized in the Annual Report of the Crime Commission in its section on recreation.