The American Jail: Pages From the Diary of a Prison Inspector

I

ALTHOUGH there is a clean-cut difference between a jail and a prison or penitentiary, as institutions, it is true that the word prison has come to be used in a general sense, denoting any place where people are confined for punishment, or while awaiting trial. Penitentiaries and penitentiary inmates will be touched on in this paper as circumstances warrant, but I intend to deal mainly with the jails of the country, because every person charged with misdemeanors or crimes, whether man, woman, or child, goes to jail before he is sent to any other institution, be it a reform school, reformatory, house of correction, or penitentiary. It is, so to speak, the preparatory school of crime. Here it is that the more or less raw material is first moulded into shape. If you want to decrease the numbers of criminals and crimes the jails of the country must be altered. At present they are initial breeding-places of corruption. There are nine chances out of ten, that, when a prisoner leaves the jail for the reformatory or prison, the ‘job’ is done.

If in reading this paper you should be inclined to say that, after all, men and women should not get into jail and then they would not be compelled to undergo such treatment, it is well not to lose sight of the fact that many of them are innocent and are eventually legally declared so, while the guilty are guilty in widely varying degrees. All persons awaiting trial receive, in ninetyfive per cent of the jails of the country, exactly the same treatment.

The percentage of innocent persons is not negligible. Take a typical year in New York City. Of 3148 cases disposed of by the District Attorney’s office, in which the guilt or innocence of the defendant was directly in question, 332 were acquitted. In other words, one out of every ten persons was found to be innocent.

During the past sixteen years, I have visited approximately 1500 jails in the United States, — many of them over and over again, — from Boston to San Francisco, and from Brownsville, Texas, to Seattle, Washington, as well as in Porto Rico and Alaska, in addition to a very large number of prisons, reformatories, reform schools, houses of correction, and asylums for the criminal insane. I have, I suppose, talked to forty or fifty thousand prisoners of every age and description, and of every degree of criminality, degradation, and viciousness; listened to their stories; investigated every phase of the conditions under which they live; and employed them in various capacities.

I do not think convicted men and women are mistreated angels in disguise. On the contrary, I believe that fully sixty per cent of those convicted are confirmed criminals, who, when their criminal tendencies are definitely ascertained, should be kept in confinement during the rest of their lives. Nor do I believe that many of those convicted are in reality innocent. Under the law every presumption is in favor of those charged with crime, and it is only in exceptionally rare cases that the innocent are convicted, although of course thousands are charged with crime who are subsequently acquitted. However, I decidedly believe that even those convicted, to say nothing of the unconvicted, should be treated at least as well as the ordinary animals.

What the public does not know is that when the judge says, ‘Thirty days in jail,’ he is sentencing the prisoner to many more things than mere confinement in an institution. If the facts were known, in most instances the sentence would actually read: ‘I not only sentence you to confinement for thirty days in a bare, narrow cell in a gloomy building, during which time you will be deprived of your family, friends, occupation, earning power, and all other human liberties and privileges, but in addition, I sentence you to a putrid mire, demoralizing to body, mind, and soul, where every rule of civilization is violated, where you are given every opportunity to deteriorate, but none to improve, and where your tendency to wrong-doing cannot be corrected, but only aggravated.’

II

I will begin my examples with the capital of New York State. At Albany are two institutions, the Albany County Penitentiary and the Albany County Jail, housed in one building and administered by one set of officials. Though named differently, they can both be properly considered as jails. In the so-called penitentiary are confined men and women who have been sentenced for from three months to a year; in the jail, persons awaiting trial and persons sentenced for from five to fifteen days.

The institution was built in 1847, — seventy-five years ago,—and while progress has been made in many matters, the antiquated design is still retained.

The cells are without light, natural or artificial. They are exactly alike — eight feet long, four feet wide, and seven feet high, with a barred door two feet in width. Each contains a cot two feet wide, allowing a two-foot space for the prisoner to move in. They contain buckets for toilet purposes, not always emptied daily.

Each Saturday, at noon, the prisoners are locked in their cells, where they remain till Monday; and during the remainder of the week they are similarly confined about twelve hours out of each twenty-four. In the 103 hours spent in this fashion each week, a prisoner can do no reading, and engage in no occupation whatever.

The odor throughout the entire jail is nauseating; the bedding dirty beyond belief. As vermin are everywhere, the deputy cautioned me not to brush against walls or pipes. There are no ‘delousing’ facilities for newly arrived prisoners, and he frankly admitted his helplessness in combatting this plague.

How does the ‘ long-term ’ man in the so-called penitentiary spend the remaining 65 hours in the week when he is not locked in his cell? There is work enough for only half the men; the remainder, leaving their cells at 7.30 for breakfast, spend the rest of the day in a large room, under the eyes of a guard on an elevated platform. They sit in utter and complete idleness, or, if they so desire, play cards and other games of chance. There are no books or magazines for these prisoners, the ‘library’ — consisting of agricultural reports, sermons, and a few other volumes—being used by the hospital prisoners only.

If a man is serving a sentence of a year, he spends 5356 hours in the dark cell previously described, and 3380 hours sitting on a bench doing nothing, or playing cards and listening to stories of crime. He gets no fresh air, no exercise, no recreation.

The sure proof of the efficacy of this system of correction is that, as I was informed by the deputy, a number of the men have come back eight and ten times.

There is a hospital provided for sick prisoners; but even here the sheets are black with all kinds of grime, and liberally sprinkled with bread crumbs and other particles of food. If anything, the odor is worse than in the rest of the institution.

From Albany, the capital of New York State, let us jump to Cleveland, on the Great Lakes. Here, in the very heart of the city, near the square, and almost directly opposite the new and beautiful Cleveland Hotel, stands the jail. The place is so old and so saturated with the effluvia of foulness, so poorly lighted, and so frightfully ventilated, that it is a practical impossibility to keep it clean. One of the officials informed me that $1200 a year is spent for insecticides, to give the tormented prisoners some relief from the burden of vermin.

For many long years this unbelievably vile place has been complacently used by the authorities to house men and women, many of whom, after spending weeks there, were never even convicted of crime. And though the money for a new jail was appropriated several years since, not a stone had yet been laid toward its construction, when I last made inquiry, a few months ago.

Here too are illustrated some of the difficulties under which the Federal Government works in the effort to secure suitable quarters to accommodate its thousands of prisoners. The Federal Government has no jails of its own. Instead, it boards its prisoners at so much per day in the various city and county jails throughout the country. Where conditions are objectionable, the Government sometimes transfers its prisoners to other jails; but in the larger cities it must use the jails, be they good, bad, or indifferent, at least during the terms of the Federal Court, when prisoners awaiting trial must be immediately available.

The last investigation which I made of the Cleveland jail was at the suggestion of United States District Judge Westerhaver, at Cleveland. I reported the conditions to him. But, much as he and the Department of Justice would have liked to improve them, nothing could be done for the Federal prisoners, since it was impracticable to remove them to a greater distance.

In the great majority of jails throughout the United States, no effort whatever is made to separate the sick from the well. A very large percentage of prisoners suffer from venereal disease, and many of the cases are in an infectious stage. They drink from common drinking-cups; sleep on unwashed bedding used, possibly, by a hundred other prisoners, both sick and well; have common toilet facilities; lack the proper amount of cubic feet of air-space necessary to insure health; and are, by virtue of overcrowding, thrown into the closest possible contact. A considerable percentage of those in jail suffer with tuberculosis. But, as with other diseased prisoners, no attempt is made to segregate them from the healthy; and here, living in filth, with little fresh air and much overcrowding, they exist amid conditions which are ideal, not only for the quick progress of the disease in themselves, but also, for spreading it to others who have until then escaped it.

I have always regarded the county jail at Wichita, Kansas, as one of the worst three I have ever seen, the two others being in Charleston, South Carolina, and Grafton, West Virginia. The jail at Wichita is extremely old, and of a design which was obsolete twenty years ago. So far as I can recall at the moment, there are only two or three other jails of similar design in the United States. Each cell is practically triangular in shape; the cells are placed in a revolving cylinder, which is turned with a lever. When a prisoner is admitted, he goes up a runway into the cell. By revolving the entire cylinder, nearly all the cells are turned toward a wall, apparently in order to increase the difficulty of escape. A prisoner may go to bed at night with his cell door facing the east, and wake up with it facing the west, if the cylinder was turned during the night to admit a new prisoner. The human refuse was carried into a trough at the base of the cylinder, where it was sometimes allowed to remain as long as a week at a time. Protests of the prisoners became so bitter and insistent, that the jailers were forced to take cognizance of it; so they finally abandoned the use of these triangular horrors, and permitted the prisoners to occupy cots in every nook and corner of the jail where there was sufficient room to place one.

The jail accommodated about twelve prisoners; but there were thirty-one Federal prisoners in confinement there on my last visit to this institution,— twenty-eight of them being ‘wobblies,’ and the other three ‘bootleggers,’ — to say nothing of several state prisoners. These thirty-one men, crowded into a room designed to hold twelve, had for shelter a roof which leaked in a dozen places and supplied the floor with unhealthy little pools of water. The jail was inadequately heated, and the prisoners suffered frightfully when the weather was cold. The bedding was never washed. Some of the blankets were so black that it was impossible to tell what their original color had been.

In addition, the place swarmed with rats of the large sewer variety, which ran across the prisoners’ faces as they slept and generally tormented them almost beyond endurance. The floor was littered with filth and rubbish, with papers, remnants of decaying food, and every imaginable kind of trash, and from it all arose a nauseating stench. The bathtub was covered with a crust of dirt and filth a quarter of an inch thick. Both the sheriff and the jailer freely admitted that the jail was filthy from top to bottom, but made this statement in the same tone in which they would have commented upon the weather.

This ‘no-business-of-mine’ attitude on the part of jailers is often carried to an amusing length, and my mind goes back to an hilarious day that I spent in Jackson, Kentucky. Jackson is the county seat of ‘Bloody Breathitt,’ the darkest and bloodiest of all the dark and bloody feud counties of this State. It is in one of the most inaccessible parts of Kentucky, and the neighborhood is so hilly that I do not believe there is a single automobile in the entire county, the chief methods of locomotion being by mule or on horseback. The jailer at this place was called ‘Smoky’ by the prisoners. Smoky was so good-hearted and indifferent that he not only did not care what the prisoners did inside the jail, but had no concern whatever with what they did on the outside. Any man who wanted to get out for three or four days to visit his family was cheerfully granted that permission. If some of them failed to come back, as several did, why it was simply considered too bad that some men had such poor memories. If a prisoner wanted to cross the river, half a mile away, to get whiskey which had been shipped in to him, he was allowed to go. It actually happened that prisoners, who were supposed to be serving sentence, got full of liquor and irascibility, and were placed under arrest by the town police. So, technically speaking at least, they were placed in jail while they were still in jail.

I protested to Smoky about allowing the prisoners outside. He replied that there was a deputy with a gun, who watched them. Upon being asked where this deputy was, Smoky said that he was on the other side of the jail.

While we were talking, a ‘prisoner’ walked up to us and said, ‘Lemme have the key, Smoky’; which Smoky obligingly did. In a very matter-of-fact way the prisoner walked over to the jail, unlocked the door, let himself in, locked it after him, and in a few minutes appeared at the window and threw the key down to Smoky, who unconcernedly picked it up as if nothing unusual had happened.

A notable feature of Kentucky jails is the prevalence of ‘Kangaroo courts,’ an organization for maintaining discipline which some jailers permit the prisoners to form among themselves. They make the rules and enforce them, and it must be said that in the majority of cases they do not temper justice with mercy. It is one way which some of the more indolent jailers have of relieving themselves of all responsibility for discipline.

Where there is a fairly high class of prisoners in the jail, and the jailer is indifferent, a Kangaroo court may be a very distinct benefit, as the prisoners will make and enforce rules concerning cleanliness and sanitation, preventing the throwing of food on the floor, spitting, and other unclean habits. But in most cases the Kangaroo court itself is composed of prisoners of an unusually brutal type.

In such jails the life of anyone who is not himself a member of the court is one of misery and persecution. The court levies ridiculous fines for imaginary offenses, and carries out its edicts with cruelty and callous indifference.

III

Let us continue our random flight.

The jails of Pennsylvania, with few exceptions, are very old; and while perhaps a little better on the average than in many states, are still far from being suitable for habitation by human beings. They are dungeons almost without exception, with cages for cells. Nearly all have little if any work for the prisoners, and the majority give no fresh air whatsoever, and little, if any, exercise.

The jail at Philadelphia, known as the Moyamensing Prison, although very old, is well kept. The jail at Pittsburgh is exceptionally good, so far as its physical features are concerned; but both here and at Philadelphia there is the same idleness that prevails generally throughout the country. The warden at Pittsburgh is very competent. He understands his duties thoroughly, and personally sees to it that his orders are obeyed. He has been there over twenty years, which fact no doubt accounts in a measure for the efficient administration, since the institution reaps the benefit of his experience. Conditions are, as a rule, less satisfactory in cities where the jailer is changed with every change of administration.

But a very bad feature in Pennsylvania is the fee system of compensating jailers, which still exists in many counties in that state. Instead of being paid a salary, the jailer is given a certain sum a day to feed the prisoners in his charge, retaining, as part of his compensation, such portion of his allowance as is not paid out in food for the prisoners. For instance, if a jailer receives fifty cents per day per prisoner and has a daily average of fifty prisoners in his jail, he will get $25 to pay for food. Every cent that he does not pay out for food goes into his own pocket. A more vicious system it would be impossible to conceive — that of one man lining his own pockets in the same degree in which he withholds food from another.

Pennsylvania is not the only state in the Union which has the fee system of compensating jailers. There are many others, including Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Rhode Island, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Tennessee, Arkansas, Ohio, Indiana, and Florida. It is uniformly vicious wherever it is in vogue. I know of some places in the country where jailers or sheriffs have made as much as fifteen and twenty thousand dollars in a year from the feeding of prisoners — or the non-feeding of them.

But the climax of criminal indifference is reached in Indiana’s care of insane persons who become state charges. Of course, only an extremely small percentage of such persons is even charged with crime. Under the Indiana law insane persons must first be committed to the county jails, until the necessary legal steps can be taken for commitment to a hospital, and room made for them there. The Indiana State Board of Charities declares: —

Some states have made such provision for their insane that they can be admitted at once to a state hospital. Indiana has not done this. Necessary legal steps for commitment (to a hospital) are often a slow and tedious process, and all the time the patient’s chances of ultimate recovery lessen. Usually there are from fifty to seventy insane persons in the county jails at a time. In the last ten years the whole number admitted has averaged 935 annually. This year (1920) 892 insane were admitted. [The italics are mine.]

It says, further: —

Attention is again called [note the ‘again’] to the deplorable practice of caring for the insane in county jails. In several jails one or more insane were found. Seven insane men were found in the Madison County Jail. Several of them had been there for many months, and one for two years. These men were confined on the second floor, without supervision or special care. There was no provision for locking up any who become violent.

In other words, during ten years there have been 9350 insane persons confined in the county jails of Indiana, as the Board itself says, many of them for months and even years at a time, with no attempt whatever to treat them, and no adequate facilities even for restraining them. During this time ‘the patient’s chances of ultimate recovery lessen.’ And if an insane person should die under such treatment? Under the law every man is held responsible for the natural and probable consequences of his acts. Is a state then permitted to engage freely in the very same acts for which it so vigorously prosecutes the individuals composing it?

Let us jump to Missouri. From St. Louis on the east, to Kansas City on the west, I doubt if there are five county jails that could be described as being even in fairly decent condition. There are approximately 115 county jails in the state, and of these at least a hundred reek with the odors of leaky plumbing, or, what is far worse, with odors that result from having almost no plumbing. Almost without exception, from one end of the state to the other, they are unspeakably dirty and unsanitary, swarming with vermin, frightfully overcrowded, and generally so atrocious that it is hard to believe that they are meant to house human beings. Classification of any kind, except of the sexes and the negro and white races, is an unheard-of thing.

Cells are dark, unsanitary, and unfit for anyone to live in. Therefore, it is the rule to permit all prisoners to mingle freely in the open spaces between cells. Not long ago I visited a jail in one of the wealthiest counties of the state, where eighteen prisoners were occupying three cells; and near these, in a corner of the cell, was an insane prisoner who had been confined five days. Of the eighteen prisoners, six were boys under the age of eighteen. Black and white, sick and well, the prisoners awaiting trial were all crowded together. The cells were so dark that I stumbled over two boys lying on the floor. They were in the same cell with a sick man; and but a few days before a man had died there with pneumonia, presumably contracted in the jail. Under such conditions these prisoners had lived for weeks, with an air-space of 67 cubicfeet that should have been 500.

This is from a report of their own State Board of Charities and Corrections, made in the early part of 1914. 1914, you say! Yes, and the same conditions still exist in the vast majority of the jails of the state — the same conditions, with the further deterioration of eight years’ use.

On one occasion, the bills that the Government was receiving for medical attendance on Federal prisoners at Kansas City became so high that I was sent on to investigate. The physician employed to treat Federal prisoners told me he was having particular trouble in the treatment of morphine addicts. According to his own statement, ‘the jail was a sieve through which narcotics poured.’ Just a few days before, the friend of a prisoner brought him a box of ice cream. The jailer stuck a spoon in it and discovered a large package of morphine.

The narcotic addicts are known among the prisoners as ‘ hopheads ’ and ‘snowbirds,’ while the use of drugs is rather tersely described by them as ‘doing your bit on a pill.’ Their methods of obtaining narcotics while confined are as ingenious as they are surprising. One of the more common practices is to endeavor to have their friends or relatives hand the drug to them concealed in some article of food, on visiting day. I have on many occasions seen apples, oranges, and bananas loaded with morphine. They had been so cleverly hollowed out and put together again that it was well-nigh impossible to detect it. There is no question that the less experienced officials very often have these tricks ‘put over’ on them.

Of course, many articles which prisoners are allowed to receive are sent to them through the mail. These packages are supposed to be examined by the officials; but here, too, new tricks are tried, which very often succeed. Large quantities of cocaine have been discovered in the heels of slippers, which had been removed, hollowed out, and replaced. It is just as necessary to examine closely the envelope or wrapper as it is to examine the contents of a package. A small quantity of cocaine is often placed by a prisoner’s friend under the postage stamp of the letter which he sends him, or in a paper pocket made inside the envelope. ‘Trusties,’ too, whose duties take them outside the institution, must be watched. Every penitentiary has some of these ‘outside trusties.’ Frequent ‘fanning’ or ‘frisking’ (as the prisoner designates searching) of the trusties themselves is necessary if they are to be kept from bringing in narcotics. Very often prisoners obtain them through teamsters and other civilians, whose duties take them inside the institution. And I am sorry to say that it is even necessary, in a greater number of cases than one would think, to watch some of the guards as much as the prisoners. Frequently I have had to cause the dismissal of officers who had permitted themselves to be used as a channel between the prisoners and the outside world. This method of introducing contraband is, of course, the most difficult to detect. The foregoing, and other similarly secret channels, constitute the prison ‘underground.’

The lengths to which the drug addicts go to get some of their favorite ‘dope’ are not difficult to understand, when one has seen the heart-breaking condition in which some of them are received. I have seen men whose normal weight was 150 or 160 pounds weigh 85 or 90 when they were received in jail. When the drug is taken away, without any compensatory treatment, the torture the victims go through is indescribable; and even with treatment they suffer considerably. I have on many occasions seen them lying on the floor of their cells screaming in agony.

To take drugs suddenly and entirely away from such creatures without giving them some compensatory treatment is to plunge them into hell; yet in a great many institutions the drug is taken away immediately, and nothing whatever, except possibly some mild sedative, is given. This is because in many jails, particularly the smaller ones, the local physician has no knowledge whatever concerning the treatment of these unfortunates. Fully seventy-five per cent of them have never even heard of the Towne-Lambert or of other well-known treatments, the base of which is hyoscin. A prisoner placed under this drug for fortyeight hours or so loses his taste for narcotics entirely, and undergoes almost no suffering. I am very much in favor of taking the drug away absolutely, but of giving some treatment to relieve the intense suffering that follows.

Conditions in the jails of the larger towns and cities in West Virginia are disgraceful. To make the round of them is to go through a monotonous repetition of filthy pest holes and breeding places of crime and disease. From Wheeling to Welch, and from Martinsburg to Huntington, there is little if any choice.

The jail at Welch, West Virginia, I visited late at night, as I had a comparatively short time to stay. The prisoners were all asleep, and it was with a lantern that the jailer took me along the row of cells. In one into which he flashed his light I saw a prisoner about forty-five years of age, whose face indicated that he had run the gamut of dissipation, actually occupying the same bunk, or hammock, with a boy who was not over sixteen years of age. What can one expect of prisoner possibilities when conditions such as this are allowed to exist?

As compared with the jails, the penitentiaries of the country have made tremendous strides during the past fifteen years. There are some of them, it is true, which are so old that it is wellnigh impossible to use the modern and more advanced methods of administration. But even in most of those an honest effort is being made to keep them in as good condition as their age will permit, and to apply such modern methods as are possible, in spite of the handicaps.

Occasionally something occurs which shows that here and there one is still being conducted as most of them were some fifty or seventy-five years ago. Such an one I found the Maryland Penitentiary of Baltimore, when I made an investigation of that institution during the fall of 1920.

Among very many other things I discovered that assault and battery, such as would have brought long terms to offenders on the outside, was being practised daily on the prisoners. It was most often done by a former deputy warden, — a pacific weakling of some two hundred and twenty-five pounds, — and a guard sometimes called by the prisoners the ‘Blackjack King.¹

IV

One of the chief causes of the conditions existing in our jails and prisons to-day is that in so many cases the men selected to conduct the institutions, as well as their subordinates, are entirely untrained for their positions.

The heads of such institutions must be men of some education and understanding, and it is absolutely necessary that not only they, but also the rank and file, should be trained for their positions.

On the one hand, the new warden is surrounded by young persons just starting on the downward path, and in the formative stage of their career, to whom a little sympathetic understanding and kindly advice from those in authority may mean the beginning of an honest life. On the other hand, he has to deal with the most vicious, resourceful, and determined criminals, quick to take advantage of the slightest opportunity to ‘beat the game.’ Of the latter class many are abnormal or subnormal, and it includes every shade of degeneracy and vice.

Besides the better-known forms of crime and criminal temperaments, he has to contend with the whole tribe of sexual perverts, who constitute one of the real problems of every penal institution. Hero the new guard or warden, even though sophisticated and worldly wise in the ordinary acceptation of those terms, is confronted with a class concerning the existence of which he usually had only the slightest previous knowledge, if indeed he had any at all. Besides the various types of sexual pervert, there is the moron, high, low, and intermediate, the cretin, the mattoid, and, in fact, every conceivable variety of abnormality or subnormality. Added to these, of course, there are the plain dyed-in-the-wool criminals and scoundrels, who would rather go crooked than straight, and would kill their own mothers if it would redound in any way to their own advantage.

It is into this seething cauldron that the new warden is projected, and any new official is legitimate prey for every scheme and artifice, every deception and trick, which may have been old to the criminal classes for countless years, but which are always new to him. The inevitable reaction takes place. At the end of a year or two, after he has found that this vicious class has deceived and imposed upon him, has taken advantage of every trust reposed in it, has construed every privilege as a right and every liberty as license, the bewildered and disillusioned official entirely loses sight of the human element and looks upon every man or woman in his charge, whether young or old, convicted or unconvicted, as an utterly hopeless scoundrel, who is not entitled to any more consideration than a beast. He entirely loses sight of the other class — the smaller class it is true, but nevertheless sufficient in numbers many times over to justify efforts at reclamation. It follows, then, as a matter of course, that every rule of discipline and every method of administration are designed, not to help the smaller class, of whom something might possibly be made, but to hold in check, for the time being, the more vicious class. By slow evolution the new official comes to feel that his only duty is to see that prisoners do not escape.

The State of Michigan is an encouraging illustration of what a state can do toward remedying conditions in its penal institutions. Michigan, like a very few other states in the Union, has a law under which the State Board of Charities and Corrections can condemn and close institutions which are unfit, after first giving the offending county an opportunity to make necessary improvements. This Board can even institute mandamus proceedings to compel the county to take action. Michigan also makes a particular effort to separate the juveniles from the older offenders. It is instructive to note that community indifference is such that the Board has more than once been compelled to resort to the courts to force certain counties to remedy conditions which had been repeatedly brought to the attention of the county authorities.

This Board is doing a splendid work, and the law empowering it is a step in the right direction. But, even so, do not think that the jails of Michigan are all models, because, notwithstanding the fact that the Board has been in existence many years, many jails are still dirty, out of date, and unsanitary, with no proper facilities for the temporary detention of the insane. The jail at Detroit, for instance, because of the city’s phenomenal growth, has been greatly over-crowded for a long time. Several years ago it was condemned by the Michigan Board, but no new jail has as yet been built.²

Idleness is still the prevailing condition, both in Michigan jails, and in others that are well kept. The Cook County jail at Chicago, a very large jail, accommodating several hundred prisoners, is a striking illustration. During the day the prisoners are turned out in the corridors between the rows of cells. The jail is not clean, although it is considerably better kept than most of the jails in the country. But one look at these corridors during the daytime, when all the prisoners are out, will bring home to you with great force just what the idleness in our jails means. With the exception of a few who work in the kitchen and around the jail, no prisoner does any work, from the day he is received until he leaves. At a conservative estimate, the value of the labor here wasted is, perhaps, between a half million and a million dollars a year. But economic loss through the mental, moral, and physical stagnation of the prisoners cannot be counted in dollars. It is incalculable. To look into these corridors and see the hundreds of well-set-up and able-bodied men lolling around, doing nothing except exchanging stimulating tales of criminal adventures and becoming more proficient in crime, is enough to make one despair of any solution of the criminal problem while idleness continues.

All that has been said concerning jails here and there, in Louisiana, Arizona, and Illinois, in Indiana, Missouri, and Pennsylvania, and in Maryland and West Virginia and Kansas, may be said with slight variations concerning those in the great majority of the other states in the Union.

As they stand at present, the jails in the United States are melting-pots. Into them are thrown helter-skelter the old, the young, the guilty, the innocent, the diseased, and the healthy, there to be mixed with the further ingredients of filth, cold, stagnant air, and bad plumbing, and all brought to a boil by the fires of complete idleness. Only the strongest material can resist the fusion.

Less than ten per cent of the jails in the United States employ matrons to care for the female prisoners. In the remaining ninety per cent the male jailers have at all times free and unrestricted access to the women’s quarters; and I have, not once, nor a dozen times, but actually upon hundreds of occasions, seen jailers walk through the women’s quarters without even the formality of announcing their presence, taking it quite as a matter of course, whether the women were fully dressed, half dressed, or scarcely dressed at all.

Girls of twelve and fourteen years of age are confined in the same room with abandoned prostitutes, and with older women who have fallen into degradation. Some of the younger girls are by no means hardened or cursed with an incurable criminal propensity, but there are among them many who would be easily amenable to suggestion and discipline. Their minds are still in a formative state, and they listen, of course, to stories of crimes, related with all the embellishments with which typical criminals, the vainest class on earth, love to surround their anecdotes. They emerge mentally polluted and beyond redemption, firmly convinced that everyone is ‘crooked,’ and that those in jail are merely the few unfortunates who have been caught.

V

It seems to me very clear that, if we are to reduce danger to the community and check the tremendous social and economic loss due to crime, we must first reform the jails.

First of all, they should be kept clean. If there is any excuse for other existing evils, there cannot be a shadow of justification for filth and vermin. Every jail should have a sufficient number of shower-baths — not tubs — and a sufficient amount of hot water at all times. It is unjust to compel a large number of prisoners to use one tub both for washing clothes and for bathing purposes. It is equally unjust to expect them to use cold water for bathing purposes in the middle of winter. Many persons are physically unable to take a cold bath at any time. And the use of one tub is exceedingly bad, even if there is plenty of hot water, and if it is not used for laundry purposes.

Every prisoner should be compelled to take a bath immediately on his arrival, and at regular intervals of at least once a week thereafter. Not five per cent of the jails of the country have compulsory-bathing rules. If the prisoner is found to have vermin, he should be at once separated from the others. His clothes should be fumigated and, if in good condition, again given him to wear. If not, he should be furnished with an outfit.

Of course, it goes without saying that the overcrowding prevalent in so many jails should be immediately discontinued, and every prisoner allowed the amount of cubic space which physicians hold necessary to health. This is now the exception instead of the rule. And that the heating should be sufficient, and the plumbing modern and in good repair, is too obvious to require comment. Leaky plumbing and the foul odors which accompany it are certainly not conducive to health under the best circumstances; but when you couple these with improper ventilation, you provide indeed a good foothold for all kinds of disease.

The most elementary considerations of humanity seem to call for the complete segregation of all prisoners suffering with infectious and contagious diseases. Each prisoner, on arrival, should be thoroughly examined by a competent physician. If found to be suffering with a communicable disease, he should be kept away from the other prisoners until he is well, meanwhile being given proper treatment. Every jail should have a hospital room for this purpose. Not one in fifty has it now.

It is inexcusable to confine with others those who are suffering with communicable diseases. At a conservative estimate, I should say that in three thousand of the 3500 county jails in this country, no effort whatever is made to ascertain if a prisoner is diseased on his arrival, or to segregate him if it should be known that he is suffering with a contagious ailment.

Physicians who attend jail prisoners should make a study of the ailments usual among them. As I have heretofore stated, very few such physicians have even an elementary knowledge of the treatment of narcotic addicts. Their bungling causes an appalling amount of the most frightful torture, and torture, too, that is easily preventable. A large percentage of the men confined in jail are narcotic addicts.

Segregation, however, should not be confined to the sick. Juveniles of both sexes should be separated entirely from the older prisoners. It is not enough to confine them in separate cells. They should be in a separate section, or wing, entirely out of sight and hearing of the older prisoners. What is virtuously called segregation of juveniles in some jails is not segregation at all, but merely physical separation.

Every jail should have a matron to care for its women prisoners, and should, of course, have entire separation of the sexes. The male jailer should be admitted into the women’s quarters only in the presence and with the permission of the matron, after the latter has assured herself that the women are all fully dressed. It goes without saying that the younger girls should be segregated from the women, as the younger boys are from the men.

While an attempt is made occasionally, here and there, at one or more of the forms of segregation mentioned above, one whole important phase of the matter is entirely overlooked nearly everywhere. This is the segregation of the convicted from those awaiting trial. The gross injustice, to those subsequently proven innocent, of herding them in with the guilty is one of the outrages which the state perpetrates upon those of whom it expects at all times the most upright conduct.

Another unnecessary injury inflicted upon the untried is the practice of compelling them to remain in jail for a long period of time, awaiting trial. It is not at all unusual to allow them to remain in jail for one, two, three, or four months, and sometimes much longer. During the war, I came across several cases in which the prisoner had been in jail for more than one year awaiting trial.

The prisoners should be given some exercise daily, and some kind of recreation at least once a week. These are not luxuries: they are necessities, and provide a safety valve for animal spirits which everyone requires.

Do not think this is ‘pampering’ prisoners. Confinement in a penal institution— that is, deprivation of liberty — is sufficient punishment in itself. Neither the community nor the prisoner is helped by the addition of mental torpor and physical inertia, which cannot do other than undermine health and character.

At least, reading matter could be supplied. This would be a very good way to give the prisoner something to think about other than the vainglorious tales of criminal adventure related by his associates. The American Library Association would find a worth while field if they would turn their attention toward the jails of the country.

I have personally known Federal judges to be swept off their feet with astonishment when told of the conditions existing in jails to which for many years they had been sentencing prisoners. Every judge should visit, at least once a year, each institution to which he sends prisoners, and should make these visits at unexpected times, so that the officials will not have an opportunity to ‘set the stage.’

By all means abolish the fee system of feeding prisoners. Prisoners should be fed at actual cost, and no official should be allowed to receive one cent of profit from such feeding.

But far more disastrous to the prisoners and to society than all the evils discussed above, is the curse of idleness. There are at all times anywhere from two hundred to three hundred thousand persons confined in the jails of the United States. Whether confined for a day, a month, a year, or fifteen years, they are kept in utter and complete idleness.

The economic loss to the individual and to the state, the mental and physical stagnation, and the moral pollution which inevitably follow in the wale of the man who has nothing to do, daily take their relentless toll in the jails.

Work of any kind should naturally carry with it a system of reasonable compensation for the prisoners. It can scarcely be expected that this compensation would be as much as that paid to workers in similar occupations on the outside; but it should certainly be sufficient to permit the prisoner to accumulate in two or three months a sufficient amount of money to float himself when he gets out, until he is able to obtain some work to do. It is not sane to make work of any kind an unknown thing for months and even years; to take away entirely the habit of wageearning; to make it impossible to be accumulating a little fund against the day of release for continuing the broken thread of normal life; and then expect a man or woman, all lax and unaccustomed, to capture immediately an honest livelihood in the great struggle of economic competition. Such policy has as much sense as employing an incendiary in a powder-mill.

Determined though a man may be to lead a straight life, it takes but a day or two of hunger to bring him to a mental state of self-justification which is the first step to crime. To turn a man out in summer is bad enough; in winter, it is criminal.

Not the least of the just criticisms of our penal system is that the dependents of a prisoner suffer during his confinement more than he does himself. I believe some of this distress caused the innocent could be relieved, in a measure at least, by turning over to such dependents a portion, if not all, of the money which the prisoner earns, whether the prisoner himself is willing or unwilling. And unquestionably a prisoner who is subsequently acquitted should receive a greater compensation than one who is convicted. Certainly it is but a small recompense for the deprivation of liberty, and for the trouble, expense, inconvenience, and humiliation which his imprisonment has caused him. As the law stands at present, a man held in jail for months and then acquitted gets no compensation of any kind, although his imprisonment may have cost him many hundreds of dollars through unemployment.

One of the basic necessities for maintaining the jails in proper condition is their regular inspection by some competent authority, empowered either to make necessary changes, or to recommend such changes and have them acted on by an authoritative board.

Not only competence is essential, but also the legal power to make necessary changes. This power should be vested in the inspection authority itself, or in some body to which such inspecting authority makes its report. The Michigan Board not only has authority to inspect jails, but is empowered also to institute mandamus proceedings to compel the offending county to carry out its recommendations, even to the extent of building a new institution. Such a law as this should be enacted in every state.