Los Angeles herald., 1909-08-01
EARN LIVING BY
MAKING ARRESTS
C0NSTABLES WHO WORK FOR
REVENUE ALONE
Fee System Criticised as Criminal
Incubator, Making Liberty
Subordinate to Financial
Interests

In the consultations preceding the
launching of the Prison Reform league
two fundamental principles were quick
ly agreed to: % That vindictiveness
ought to have no place in the admins
tration of the law; (2) that 1t ought not
to be to the financial interest of any
one man to put another in jail,
Both principles run directly counter
to the scheme of things as 1t exists
today AS regards the first 1t obvious
that, starting with capital punishment
and descending through the various
grades of torture and discipline to the
anxiety of the prosecuting attorney 10
obtain a conviction, VindictiVeness Is
the most marked characteristic of our
administration of criminal law. Here
however, a change is being gradually
wrought, the abolition of capital pun
ishment in certain states, the passage or
probation and indeterminate sentence
laws, provision for the care of dis
charged convicts and other reformatory
measures marking the transition from
the old to the new philosophy.
The second proposition sums Itself up
in an unqualified condemnation of the
fee system, under which the livelihood
of large classes of men is made direct
ly dependent on the number of persons
they can catch and run into Jail.
Wherever this fee system exists lts
necessary tendency Is to turn that dis
trict into a criminal incubator. To the
man, generally of a most inferior class,
who Is making his living out of arrest
fees and the highly lucrative mileage
charges that he pockets whenever ne
conveys a prisoner to the county Jail,
1t is useless to talk of discrimination
or leniency. His occupation makes him
of necessity a man-hunter, and he
quickly develops the mental habit of
gauging his worth as public servant
by the size of his daily catch.
The position is so obvious and the
scandals incident to paying officers by
results are so notorious that we think
1t useless to multiply quotations from
the numerous writers who have IN
vestigated this system and condemned
1t in unmeasured terms. We select one
passage, however, from most author
itative source, the report on county
jails made to the American Prison asso-
ciation congress of 1907 by a commit
tee specially appointed the year pre-
vious and composed of four noted
crlminologists. Touching on the fee
system it says: I'VE turned up plenty
of ugly testimony to the effect that
when a county sheriff is paid for his
services in fees, rather than by salary,
he must have the sturdy virtue of a
Cromwell or a Lincoln to preserve his
soul in a state of grace. The testimony
from all parts of the land demonstrates
that the Zee system IenuS TO iHJuSliCS,
70 false Imprisonment, to delay of trials,
TO plunder of the public treasury, COM
ing and going. in and out, to partisan
corruption, to official robbery, to the de-
Element of the character of the agents
of Justice"
Tried in the Balance
Is it possible to damn in stronger
terms? When you strip off the trim
mings and get down to essentials, what
Is a country really worth in which there
is injustice, in which there is false i'm
prisonment, in which trials are Will
fully delayed, in which the public treas
ury is plundered, in which there is par
tisan corruption, In which there is Off
cial robbery, and in which the charac-
ter of the agents of justice is defiledY
Yet every one of these unspeakably
serious charges could be amply proved
as existing under the fee system. One
need not go hundred miles from Los
Angeles to name men who have been
arrested lodged and kept in jail long
terms for no other reason than that
their evidence was stated to be neces-
sary in a certain prosecution, to say
nothing of the army of unfortunates
whose sole crime was that they were
out of work and had the enterprise to
pack their blankets and scour the coun-
try for a job. While as for partisan
corruption" 1t is common knowledge
that wherever the fee system prevails
the sheriff's office~is one of the fattest
political plums, though no one can say
what it is actually worth.
It is to the credit of the federal gov
ernment that although, as We have
shown in a previous letter, II lags far
behind In the matter of juvenile pro-
baton laws and other reforms, 1t has
abolished the fee system. Elsewhere
it generally has been possible to do so
only after conditions have reached
point at which the scandal has become
unbearable, for active financial inter-
ests are at stake and fight desperately
against change.
The processes by which men are