326
The Green Bag
for the violation of some one of our Chicago laws last year and were unable to pay such fines were imprisoned in the workhouse for terms ranging from four teen days to six months. Eleven hun dred and seventy-three of these were too poor to raise the small sum of $1.00 and the court costs. Twenty-seven hun dred and fifty went to jail in default of $5.00, or less, and costs. Four thousand fifty-seven men and women found their resources unequal to the task of raising $10.00, or less, and costs, and were dumped into the "Black Maria," hauled across the city in com pany with burglars, pickpockets and "stick-up" men, stripped of their cloth ing and robed in prison garb, locked in cells with professional criminals, in structed in the ways of crime, turned out at the end of their term, in the heat of summer or cold of winter, without employment, broken in spirit, their repu tation damaged, their homes often broken up, compelled to bear through life the stamp of a jail-bird and the memories of a prison cell,—certainly a severe punishment for their inability to raise a few dollars. If the defendant is unfortunate enough to be fined $50.00 or more (which, with the consequent costs means not less than four months in jail), he is, under a police regulation, taken before imprisonment to the Bureau of Identification, where he is photographed and his picture placed in the "Rogues' Gallery." He is then measured by the Bertillon system, and these measurements, after being carefully indexed and filed, are open to the public. Should his friends succeed in raising the money and obtaining his release the next day, the record never theless remains for all time to come, a never-ending menace to his future wel fare, a ready weapon for his enemies, and, in the event of his subsequent
arrest, an effective aid to the prosecu tion. It must not be supposed that such conditions are peculiar to Chicago. They prevail generally, and even where modern laws have been enacted to remedy the situation, our natural and inherent sav agery has had a tendency to minimize their efficiency. In New York City, for example, where more than one hundred and four thousand cases were tried in one year, according to the last annual report, many of them at the rate of one per minute, and many thousands being certainly those of tender years, and trivial offenders, less than seventeen hundred were given the benefit of the probation law, which was passed for just such cases. Incredible as it may appear to some, the prison industry of our country has become a huge political asset, which demands its share of prosperity. Any considerable lessening of prison popula tion would necessarily reduce to the same extent the appropriation and ex penditure of public funds, which means fewer "jobs" for the faithful, and less commission and "rake-off" on contracts and supplies. To this same general cause is charge able the disgraceful convict-lease system, under which prisoners are sold into slavery to the highest bidder and taken in chain-gangs to work in mines and turpentine camps and other places where ordinary laborers will not work. The usual price received by the state was formerly about $7.00 per year for each convict, but this has been advanced to about $140.00, and it is frequently and openly charged by the opponents of this system in one of the Southern states where it is in operation that judges are able to materially strengthen their poli tical influence by imposing long sen tences upon convicted persons, thus re
