“City and County of New York, ss.
“By ——— ———, Esquire, one of the Police Justices in and for the City and County of New York.
“To the Constables and Policemen of the said City, and every of them, and to the Warden of the Penitentiary of the City and County of New York:
“THESE ARE IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, to command you, the said Constables and Policemen, to convey to the said Penitentiary the body of ——— ———, who stands charged before me with being a VAGRANT, viz., being without the means of supporting ——self, and having contracted an INFECTIOUS DISEASE IN THE PRACTICE OF DEBAUCHERY, viz., the venereal disease, requiring charitable aid to restore —— to health, whereof —he is convicted of record on confession, the record of which conviction has been made and filed in the office of the Clerk of the Court of Sessions of the City and County aforesaid, and it appearing to me that the said ——— ——— is an improper person to be sent to the Alms-house, you, the said Warden, are hereby commanded to receive into your custody, in the said Penitentiary, the body of the said ——— ———, and —— safely keep for the space of ——— month—, or until —he shall be thence delivered by due course of law.
“Given under my hand and seal, this —— day of ———, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty——.
“——— ———, Police Justice.”
This is technically called a commitment “on confession,” and its effects are precisely the same as they would be if the individual had been convicted of any tangible act of vagrancy. He is in law and in fact a prisoner for the space of time named in the commitment; he must wear the prison garb, and submit to the prison discipline, until the expiration of his sentence. It is well known to the justices that a penal commitment like the above will immediately secure the sufferer the medical attention his case requires, but they have no power to send any one direct to the Hospital.
And here an inquiry will naturally suggest itself, What does, or what should a magistrate know about committing a sick person, and how can he decide the time such invalid shall remain under treatment? A self-evident conclusion will be that the whole process is an absurd one at the best, and its requirements a hardship on magistrates already overburdened with legitimate duties.
The reader’s attention is requested to the pecuniary effects of this plan. To illustrate: Suppose the case of a man committed for six months. He is suffering from some form of venereal disease, and in this state is received at the Penitentiary or Work-house, where his clothes are taken from him, the institution costume supplied, and the particulars of his name, age, nativity, occupation, etc., are registered with an abstract of the commitment by virtue of which he is detained. He is then subjected to medical examination and transferred to the Hospital. In this institution he remains until cured, if that end is attained before the expiration of his sentence, and is then re-transferred to the Penitentiary or Work-house. The average time required for the successful treatment of the disease named, in the Blackwell’s Island Hospital, will not probably exceed two months, and often a much shorter period is sufficient. But the man has been committed for six months, and for the unexpired four months of his incarceration he has to be fed, clothed, and lodged at the expense of the Alms-house Department. The labor he can perform will never amount in value to the actual cost of his support, so that he is maintained four months in accordance with law at a positive cost to the tax-payers of the city, because they have already supported him for two months in the Hospital. In the aggregate of cases during a year these costs amount to a very large sum. Need any farther argument be adduced to show the palpable absurdity of the system?
A few words upon the moral effect of this local system upon prostitution in New York, premising that being a prostitute is acknowledged by all as a degradation; while a vagrancy commitment to the Work-house or Penitentiary is a positive disgrace. The system is a portion of the crushing-out plan already mentioned, and it says, in effect, “We (the people of New York City) will give you an opportunity to be cured of your loathsome and destructive malady, but only upon the condition that you become the inmate of a penal institution. We know that you can not be cured unless you accept our terms, and we will make those terms as hard and repulsive to human nature as ingenuity can devise.” It has been a medical axiom that no two poisons can exist in the system at one and the same time; but the citizens of New York have been experimenting for some years to ascertain whether two moral poisons can not be coexistent in the same person, by adding farther and unnecessary disgrace to the vice of prostitution—thus widening the gulf between the sinner and her possible return to virtue.