Your vote and how to use it

by Gertrude Foster Brown

The Police: Much of the public welfare and safety of a city depends on its police force. A modern police is organized on a military basis. The men hold their positions for life or during good behavior. Promotions are based on merit, and pensions are paid men who have served a certain term of years. This plan has improved conditions by taking the police out of politics to a large degree. The policy of the head of the department is of the greatest importance to the public. The temptations for graft and corruption in a police department are enormous, but the assurance of a square deal all up and down the line, strict orders to uphold the law, and a well-defined policy against graft of every description, will do wonders to keep a department honest and efficient.

In recent years the plan has been developed of making the police helpful in many ways in the life of the city. The uniformed officer has many opportunities to help and direct children, especially the boys on the streets, to prevent violations of the city’s ordinances, the littering of the streets, and in many ways to prevent before the act, rather than to arrest after it has been committed.

This helpful spirit has been adopted by the police of New York City, to the great good of the city. It is exemplified in the Christmas trees in the station-houses for the poorer children of a neighborhood at Christmas-time.

Prison Reform: Modern government is learning not to avenge itself on a criminal, but to impose a sentence which will tend to reform him. Instead of sentencing a person to a definite term of imprisonment, an indeterminate sentence may be given him, the length of which will be determined by his behavior, and by the promise he may show of leading a better life if set free. If he is released he may be put on probation. This means that he is required to report at regular intervals to the court, or to a probation officer, to show that his conduct is law-abiding. If he goes wrong again, he is remanded to serve out his sentence.

Men and women, wherever confined, must be given employment. Idleness is bad for even an educated person. Imposed on one who has no resources within himself, it becomes a source of demoralization scarcely to be measured. The old custom was to hire prisoners out to contractors at low wages. This brought goods manufactured by prison labor into unfair competition with honest labor.

The modern idea is to teach the prisoner a useful occupation and to pay the wages to his family. It is not common-sense to support a man in prison at the expense of the State, and to allow his family to suffer from having his support taken away from them.

Probation: First offenders, or persons committing minor offenses, are often put at once on probation, with the sentence suspended during good behavior. This has proved of great value in saving many from a criminal career. It is far less costly to the State than keeping them in prison, and often leads to the establishment of an honest life.[4]

Jails and Prisons: Every community has some kind of jail for the detention of offenders. Those who come in contact with the law are often the poor and the friendless who cannot get bail. Even innocent persons may be held some time awaiting trial, or the action of the grand jury. Young girls are often detained, sometimes as witnesses, sometimes pending investigation of their own cases, sometimes as runaways from home. In such a case there is no place of detention but the local jail. These jails are often filthy and unsanitary, unfit for human habitation. Their surroundings, and the character of the sheriff or constable, and jail officials, must inevitably have an effect on the prisoners, especially on the younger women. It is most important to the community that a woman shall not be sent out from jail a more hardened criminal because of her confinement there. It is a wrong, the responsibility for which every woman in the neighborhood must share, that there is no better place of detention for young girls. Women matrons in all prisons where women are held and women probation officers are now recognized as essential.

It is unintelligent to allow a man to leave jail penniless far from his home and friends, to become a tramp or to be tempted to a new offense to get money. The modern ideal of criminology is that his stay in prison should teach a man an honest way of earning his living; also that he should be given some supervision after he has left the prison doors, to help him to lead an honest life.

City Farms for the detention of offenders are a great improvement on indoor prisons, and the open-air occupation both saves the State money and is beneficial to the prisoner.