3. Continues to prostitute herself after being pronounced diseased.
4. Uses obscene language in public.
5. Appears naked at her window.
6. Assails men with violence, and endeavors to drag them to her home.
These offenses are punished by imprisonment for not less than three months, and not more than a year, rarely more than six months. The time is fixed in these cases with reference to the former character of the prostitute.
When a prostitute is arrested she is taken to the Prefecture of Police, where there is a room specially appropriated to her class. She is tried within forty-eight, usually within twenty-four hours of her arrival. When condemned, she is conveyed in a close carriage or van to the prison.
The prison at Paris usually contains from four hundred and fifty to six hundred inmates. They are all obliged to work. A few are generally found incapable, either from idiocy, blindness, or incorrigible obstinacy, of performing even the simplest work. These are lodged in a department called “the ward of the imbeciles.” The others are allowed to choose their work; the bulk naturally take to sewing. They are paid a small sum for what they do, partly as they proceed with the work, and the balance when they leave the prison. Industrious girls receive, from the money coming to them, from five to eight sous daily. That this, added to the ample food supplied by the prison, suffices for their wants, is proved by the frequent purchases they make of flowers and other superfluities. Formerly, prostitutes in prison were not expected to work, and at this period fights and disturbances were of constant occurrence. Now the discipline is excellent and the prisoners orderly. The only penalty for disobedience of rules or misconduct is close confinement in the cachot.
M. Parent-Duchatelet admits that the prison discipline is so gentle that the punishment has no terrors for prostitutes. It is quite common to find girls who have been thirty times condemned to imprisonment. He recommends the use of the tread-mill as a corrective.
His experience led him to question the utility of nuns and priests in the prostitutes’ prison. He does not think they do any good, and inclines to the belief that the counsels and visits of married women, who look rather to the moral than religious reform of the women, would be productive of more benefit.
The old practice in France was to admit visitors to the prostitutes’ prison at certain hours and in a certain room, but this was found to be productive of great evils. The scenes in the visitors’ room were outrageous, and a new system was accordingly adopted. No one was allowed to visit a prostitute but a bona fide relation, and even such a one was required to obtain a written permit from the Prefecture of Police.