Los Angeles herald., 1909-09-13

ly police commissioner of New York
city and an excellent authority, has an
article in this September's Century
Magazine entitled, "The London Police
from New York Point of Yiew," in
which he says:
THE station houses are so much
better than those in New York that
comparison would be odious. The
worst station house in New York
would not be permitted for day, and
the best station houses are not equal
to the good ones in London. They
are very plainly, substantially, but
comfortably furnished, and the sani-
taIy conditions are excellent. The cells
have large, high ceilings, are we'll
ventilated and lighted and the walls
are tiled. They are never crowded with
prisoners. Drunken men and women
are well taken care of. They are
never placed in berths for fear they
may roll out, but are carefully placed
on the floor. AS the station houses,
like the other buildings, are not high,
there is plenty of direct fresh air
coming in at the top. Indeed, the
cells are much more comfortable than
many rooms at English hotels where
1 have stopped, and they actually have
a push button to summon assistance.
The cell is furnished with running
water and the corridor is well lighted
from the outside. The waiting rooms
are clean and sanitary and with plenty
of seating capacity. Indeed, all un-
fortunateS are handled with humanity
and charity. The women's prison in
the station house in London is thor
oughly separated from those of the
men,"
Worse Than Any SIum
Compare these conditions with those
in any ordinary American city Jail;
conditions exploited so thoroughly by
the daily press and so notorious that
a detailed account would be waste
of space. Consider, in the first place,
that city jail is solely place for
the detention Of those awaiting trial;
that every one of it's inmates is sup
posed to be innocent until the verdict
has been given against him: and that
into this mere house of detention are
flung promiscuously, and often with the
greatest brutality, persons of both
sexes and all ages, drunk and sober,
chaste and Wanton, presumably inno-
cent boys and girls and hardened Grim
inals. There they pass the night, and
often more than one night, under con-
ditions that beggar description; sit
ting on benches, frequently standing
UP for lack of room, in a reek of
physical and moral filth that the worst
slum can hardly match. And consider,
llI lIGIt lndl ali IIlS Is uOIG unuGE
the supposedly sheltering aegis of the
law, whose boast is that it metes out
justice and exists, at enormous cost,
for the protection of society.
For three years there has been
through the courts and the streets d
dreary procession of citizens with bro
ken heads and bruised bodies, against
few of whom was violence needed to
effect an arrest. Many of them had
done nothoing to deserve arrest" We
gave the quotation, at somewhat great
er length, in a previous letter 1t is
from the pen of another New York
police commissioner. Similarly we have
given the full and careful figures COM
piled by a former governor of Illinois,
showing that in the city Of Chicago
there were in one year 50,432 arrests
from which there came only 2192 COM
mitments. Think of the suffering such
figures express; of the indignity, al
ways ruinous to character, that they
imply; of the fact that the victims are
almost without exception from the
poorer classes, since the rich can fur
nish bail, and remember that it is pre-
cisely the poorer classes who, from
their pernicious environment, have
the least resistance power. And re-
fleet, further, that we have shown
England as the one country that re
ports a diminution of crime, while the
American record, and notably in the
matter of crimes of violence, grows
continually worse.
Why Not Summon Them?
AS has been pointed out by one well
known writer, Heman W. Chaplin we
arrest thousands of persons for minor
offenses who in England are merely
summoned to appear in court, and
thus are saved the ignominy of night
in Jail. He adds that in not one of
a hundred such cases would the ac-
cused fail to present himself, and that
in several states efforts have been
made to follow Englends pre-eminent-
ly sensible example, but that 'the in
terests of officers fees intrench strong
ly the present practice" Here once
more you have the real key to the
actual and inexpressibly repulsive sit
uation.
But the "boy' who as we have
shown, figures to such an alarming eX-
tent i'll criminal statistics, passes
through the Fagin schools of the city
and county jails, and presently we have
him in the penitentiary. There the
term of detention, and the consequent
separation of the sexes, is far longer;
and there the education in crime, and
in vices that are themselves the deadli-
est forms of crime, is completed. There
he rounds out the education that fits
him to become a chronic tramp and
hobo; man who never married, and
who floods the country with degenerate
vices that threaten the very existence
of the nation.
From the Bible our ministers-who
persistently fight shy of this prison
question, save so far as they engage in
the entirely useless pastime of singing
hymns to conVicts-cite us the story of
Sodom and Gomorrah; and it is worthy
of attention that the vice for which
those cities are said to have been pun
ished with destruction is the one crime
for which Enelish law provides the
minimum penalty of imprisonment for
life, Justly considering it fatal to the
nation. And while as we have shown,
torture is habitually inflicted for the
infraction of the most arbitrary and
trifing rules it is a most shameful
fact that in at least certain of our PEN
itentiaries this particular crime is fos-
tered by the authorities, and made a
condition from which many young
lad cannot escape This, which spells
moral and often physical ruin for life,
is the feature that directly concerns the
women, as mothers, wives and mem
bers of a sex that such conditions ul-
tinately will render superfiuous. From
our own iails and penitentiaries there
emerge annually thousands of young
men who never will, and as a matter
of fact never should, marry.
Here is a field of activity that woman
cannot afford any longer to neglect,
and she should start in by insisting
that the clergy. whom as a sex she so
faithfully supports, handle the matter