“Now you have a good chance of divorce; I arrested your wife last night, and she has got two months on the Island.”
She tried to write to her husband. But she had only two cents, and they would not give her a sheet of paper for less than five, nor would they send it out for less than fifty cents.
So the poor woman was taken to the Island, and kept there in prison for twenty-four days. At the end of that time her husband placed fifteen dollars in an envelope and handed it to Justice Hogan. His wife was released.
And that kind of infamy was going on all the time. The way in which the unfortunates were driven from pillar to post and treated as mere cattle, to be fleeced and plundered, provoked a very remarkable protest from a Police Captain who had sufficient humanity left in him to see the horror of the system which he had to administer. He was asked whose fault it was that the social evil flourished to such an extent. He said it was the fault of the law:—
Q. The law itself?
A. Yes, sir, if you give the women the same protection by law that you do a mule and a dog you will do away with two-thirds of the houses of prostitution and women of the street.—Vol. i., p. 5,198.
In reply to the Chairman he explained how it was that houses of ill-fame were so much more difficult to deal with than gaming houses. He said:—
Because, Senator, you take the women to court, they are fined a few dollars and turned out on the street again to go and get more money, be re-arrested and pay again; the trouble is that prostitutes are fined.
Q. Wasn’t that done with gamblers as well?
A. Well, you could get their paraphernalia and get them away, but you couldn’t with the women; a prostitute should never be fined and her money taken away from her; those women are not bad women until they are made so; they are dragged off the street and dragged before the court and their money taken away from them, and then drove out on the street again; they are not bad until they are drove to it; now, there were fully 30,000 arrests made from January 1st, 1876, to January 1st, 1878, in that little precinct alone, and I will venture to say there were not 1,500 women arrested, but arrested over and over again.—Vol. v., p. 5,213.