Secondly, in cases in which criminals are arrested and convicted the penalties imposed by courts have, as a rule, no remedial and no preventive effect. Drunkards, for example, brought frequently before courts for sentence, are sent over and over again to jails or houses of correction for terms too short for effectual cure, so that they soon relapse into drunkenness when discharged. Or again, a burglar is sentenced to a few years in prison, acquires while confined no better disposition and no new means of earning a livelihood, and so when freed naturally returns to his former criminal mode of life.
Thirdly, many researches into the history of criminal families have made it sure that the propensity to crime, be it moral, or physical, or both, is eminently transmissible; so that criminals, like imbeciles and other physical defectives, will surely breed their like, if left free to do so. To leave them free is to perpetuate and multiply by inheritance the evils and losses which criminality inflicts on the race. These comparisons suggest strongly that society needs to revise its methods of dealing with criminals. In this revision, what improvements should be aimed at? Better police protection, especially in the detective department, so that fewer crimes should be committed with impunity. This would correspond with the improving registration and responsible social treatment of diseases.
A lessened use of fines and an increased use of imprisonment for convicted criminals of all sorts, a fine being an almost useless penalty for crimes against the person, since it has no improving or instructive quality whatever, is for the well-to-do a matter of indifference and is often impossible to collect from the poor. The habitual use of longer terms of imprisonment, that is, terms of isolation and temporary exemption from temptation to crime. The conversion of houses of correction, jails and prisons into places of instruction and of instructive labor, with incidental confinement, from being places of confinement with incidental labor, which is often uninstructive or impossible of utilization by the individual on his return to the outer world. Through this transformation houses of correction and prisons would become agricultural or industrial colonies, in which most prisoners would acquire the habit of productive labor and some skill available towards livelihood when they should again enjoy freedom.
Every person, male or female, who has been convicted of crime, should be registered at many points with complete means of identification, and should be kept under supervision for a long period after discharge; and the new laws needed to secure such continuous supervision, if any, should be promptly adopted in all the States. With such systematic supervision should go assistance in the giving of employment.
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.