"No, your Honor."
"Ten days."
"Officer says you were quarreling in a hallway with this woman. Say for yourself?"
"Well, your Honor, I was a little full and I got in the wrong hall and she tried to put me out and—"
"Ten dollars."
"Your Honor, I'll lose my place and I've got a wife and—" The officer led him away. Ten dollars meant ten days in prison to him and the loss of his situation. What it may have meant to his family did not transpire.
To the next "case" which was of a similar nature, the fine meant the going down into a well-filled pocket, a laugh with the clerk and the police officer who took the proffered cigar and touched his hat to the object of his arrest, who, having slept off his "plain drunk," was in a rather merry mood. Many of the accused did not hear the charges made against them by the officer; in but few cases were they told that they had a right to counsel; almost all were fined and at least two-thirds of the fines meant imprisonment. A little more care was taken, a little more time spent if the face or clothing of the accused indicated that he was of the well-to-do or educated class. Indeed I left this court feeling that the inequality of the administration of justice as applied by the system of fines was carried to its farthest limit, and that it would be perfectly possible—easy indeed—to find a man (if he chanced to be poor and somewhat common looking) behind prison walls without his knowing even upon what charge he had been put there and without having made the slightest defense. If he were frightened, or ill, or unused to courts, and through uncertainty or slowness of speech, or not knowing what the various steps meant, had suddenly heard the Judge say "Ten dollars," and had realized that so far as he was concerned it might as well have been ten thousand; it was quite possible, I say, for such a man to find himself a convict before he knew or realized what it meant or with what he was charged.
I wondered if all this was necessary, or if attention were called to it from the outside if it might not set people to thinking and if the thought might not result in action that would lead to better things.
I wondered if a rapid picture of a boy of sixteen arrested for fighting, shot through this court into association with criminals for ten days, being found in their company afterward and sent by the criminal court to prison for three months for larceny, and afterward appearing and re-appearing as a long or short term criminal, would suggest to others what the idea suggested to me? I wondered, in short, if there were less machinery for the production and punishment of crime and more for its prevention, if life might not be made less of a battlefield and hospital for the poor or unfortunate. I wondered if the farce of oaths, the flippancy of trials, the passion of the prosecutor for conviction and all the train of evils growing out of these were necessary; and if they were not, I wondered if the vast non-court-attending public might not suggest a remedy if its attention were called to certain of the many suggestive features of our courts that presented themselves to me during my first two days as an observer of the legal machinery that grinds out our criminal population.