We know that jails are the spoil of partisan politics. They are maintained largely on the fee basis. Most of them were built without any proper idea of the purpose they were intended to serve. As a rule they are insanitary, they lack proper provision for separating the sexes and there is no means of employment. Often they are crowded beyond their capacity. There is little attempt to classify the prisoners. They congregate in the corridors and the older and more experienced in criminal ways instruct the others in vice, immorality and crime. In how many such institutions are women not only waited upon but searched by men?
The late Samuel J. Barrows once remarked: “Back in 1876 a committee of the New York Legislature said: ‘There is no one source of crime more operative in the multiplication of thieves and burglars than the common jail’ and that statement still remains true of a large number of jails throughout the country.”
Many of you have heard Dr. F. H. Wines’ scathing denunciation of these institutions. Delegates to the International Prison Congress who visited this country in 1910 declared our local jail system as bad as it was centuries ago in Europe. “Every jail I saw ought to be wiped off the face of the earth,” said Thomas Holmes, secretary of the Howard Association of London, and this was the general verdict of these distinguished prison officials and penologists. It was the idleness of the prisoners, the lack of fresh air, the indiscriminate mingling, the long-delayed trials that impressed them so unfavorably. “I asked two colored men how long they would be in and they said they did not know; that they had waited eleven days for a trial,” said Dr. Eugene Borel, professor of law in the University of Geneva, Switzerland. “That is a shocking travesty of justice. In Europe a prisoner gets a hearing within twenty-four hours.”
Yet under such conditions as these we detain hundreds of thousands of persons:—The vagrant, the drunkard, the witness, the runaway boy, the first offender, the hardened criminal, the man awaiting trial, the convicted law-breaker. What can we expect but that they will degenerate in body, mind and morals? Even where work is provided, as is done in some larger jails and workhouses, it is under the old contract system, which we should like to see abolished. In some States misdemeanants are employed on the public highways. However successful this may be in some parts of the country, it would probably not be in conformity with the public sense in the more thickly settled communities, or practicable to any great extent in the more northern latitudes.
The whole question of the apprehension, treatment and release of the misdemeanant is of tremendous importance. While prison reforms are coming with surprising rapidity, they have been confined largely to the felon. The misdemeanant has been neglected.
In the first place, what are the qualifications of the average policeman? Ordinarily he is without training or experience. His politics have usually had more to do with his appointment than any other consideration. What part can such a policeman play in an enlightened system of penology?
In a number of States the constitution proclaims that the penal code shall be founded on principles of reformation and not of vindictive justice. How far has that been interpreted in the statute laws? The provision of most of our State constitutions that justice shall be administered “speedily and without delay” is wholly forgotten. We generally think that the day of imprisonment for debt is past. Yet many jail prisoners are held for debt—the fine assessed against them. The man of means pays his fine and goes free; the man without money suffers imprisonment under conditions which menace health and morals. It frequently becomes necessary for his family to ask for help; sometimes he loses his job. If he becomes embittered, or vindictive, need we wonder at it?
The picture is not all dark. Here and there light is breaking through. We are coming to understand that the policeman can be a social agent, a next friend, an instructor in obedience to the law. We are beginning to regard as the best officer the one who makes the fewest, not the most arrests. In some cities women are being added to the police force, and there are police matrons, and jail matrons, and even women judges.
“Humanizing the courts” is an expression coming more and more into use. Instead of sending to jail men who are unable to pay their fines, judges are releasing them conditionally and giving them a chance to earn the money. The plan works admirably. Judges are finding that their confidence is seldom misplaced. This principle has been enacted into law in Massachusetts and other States. Elsewhere it has been practiced without special authority of law. In New York State the probation law provides for the collection of fines on probation and also restitution on probation.
We are further coming to believe that too many persons are sent to prison. Some States have adopted a system of probation, under which many lawbreakers are reclaimed to society without the stigma of a prison sentence. Probation has been successfully tried in Massachusetts, New York and other States.