The Man Behind the Bars

by Winifred Louise Taylor

To Wisconsin belongs the honor of taking the lead in this most important reform, since in 1913 Wisconsin passed a law insuring compensation in money from the State in every case where proof could be furnished that one was not guilty of the crime for which he had suffered imprisonment. A more just and righteous law was never passed. Money alone can never compensate for unjust imprisonment, but the only atonement possible is financial compensation and public vindication.

The measures so far considered are all remedial; but while we have recently made rapid progress in measures applied after men have been sent to prison we have thought little of preventive measures. And just here we face again the spirit of the times.

All along the latter half of the nineteenth century men of science—chemists, biologists, physicians—were studying preventive measures to stem the tide of evil in the form of disease. Previously medical science had been directed chiefly to battling with diseased conditions already developed; but under the leadership of Pasteur and Lord Lister the medical world was aroused to the fact that it was possible to avert the terrible ravages of many of the diseases which fifty years earlier had been accepted as visitations from Providence. Henceforth "preventive measures" became watchwords among men devoting themselves to the physical welfare of the race; and "preventive measures" have also a most important relation to the moral welfare of the community, and the way is opening for their application.

For instance, the imprisonment of innocent men would be largely prevented by the abolition of all fees in connection with arrests and convictions. The system of rewards for arrests and convictions is absolutely demoralizing to justice; for as long as the whole battalion of men employed to protect the public have a direct financial interest in the increase of crime it is unreasonable to expect decrease in the number of men confined in our jails and prisons. An official inspector of jails and police stations in my own State reports that she has frequently had police officers admit to her that it was a great temptation to arrest some poor devil, since the city paid fees for such arrests; and she further states that in Chicago the entire basis of the city penal administration is fees, and she adds: "What better inducement could be offered to officials to penalize some unoffending stranger looking for work?" All the evils arising from this abominable and indefensible arrangement would be in a measure decreased by the simple process of abolishing fees and increasing salaries. This has already been done in some localities; and doubtless the coming generation will wonder how the feeing system could ever have been adopted or tolerated.

The most impregnable stronghold of inhumanity in dealing with persons suspected of connection with crime is our police stations; especially is this so in our larger cities. The police station and the feeing system are the parent of one most barbarous custom; an evil most elusive, its roots, like the roots of the vicious bindweed, so far underground, with such complicated entanglement of relationships, as to be almost ineradicable, involving in some instances State attorneys of good standing, detectives, policemen, sheriffs—in fact, more or less involving the whole force of agents supposed to be protectors of the public. This abuse is called the third degree, or the sweat-box.

A man is arrested, accused of a crime or of knowledge of a crime. Before he is given any trial in any court unscrupulous means are resorted to in order to extort an admission of crime or complicity in crime—or even of knowledge connected with a crime.

A physician who knew all the circumstances recently called my attention to the case of a woman supposed to have some knowledge that might implicate her husband in a burglary. The woman was an invalid. After being kept for forty-eight hours without food or water, forced to walk when she seemed likely to fall asleep from exhaustion, she was told that her husband had deserted her, taken her child, and gone off with another woman. She was by this time in a frantic condition, and when told that her torture would cease with her admission of her husband's guilt, too distracted to question his desertion of her, she gave false evidence against her husband and was set free.

The husband was in no way implicated in the crime, but the consequences of the affair were disastrous to his business. He had never thought of deserting his wife, but it was part of the scheme of the third degree to keep the husband and the lawyer whom he had engaged from seeing the woman until the end sought was accomplished.

A young lawyer told me of a most revolting third degree scene witnessed by him, and he told me the story as an instance of the cleverness which devised a terrible nervous shock in order to throw a supposedly guilty woman off her guard; the shock was enough to have driven the woman raving insane.

Whenever I have spoken of this subject to those familiar with sweat-box methods, the evil has been frankly admitted and unhesitatingly condemned, but I hear always the same thing: "Yes, we know that it is a terrible abuse, but we have not been able to prevent it." It is simply a public crime that such a system should be tolerated for one day. Mr. W. D. Howells has well said: "The law and order which defy justice and humanity are merely organized anarchy."