The Birmingham age-herald., 1909-08-09
)L|VING EARNED BY
 MAKING ARRESTS PerniciOuS Effect of Fee Sys-
 tenn Is Easily Seen INCUBATOR OF CRIMINALS Instances Are Cited In Which Con- stables Have Made UnseemIy
 Number of Arrests In
 Many Small Towns.
INCUBATOR OF CRIMINALS

Los Angeles. August s.-(Special. .)-In the consultations preceding the launching of the Prison Reform league, two funda- place in the administration for the law; CD That vindictiveness ought to have no place in the administration of the lay; @ 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 is obvious that, starting with capital punishment and de- scending through the various grades of torture and discipline to the anxiety of the prosecuting attorney to obtain a con- yiction, vindictiveness Is the most marked characteristic of our administration of criminal law. Here, however. a change is being gradually wrought, the abolition of capital punishment in certain states, the passage of probation and indeter- minate sentence laws, provision for the care of discharged convicts and other re- formatory measures marking the transi- tion from the old to the new philosophy.
 The second proposition sums itself up in an unqualified condemnation of the fee system upder which the livihood of the large classes of men Is made directly de- pendent on the number of persons they can catch and run into jail.
 Wherever this fee system exists It's nec essary tendency is to turn that district 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 he conveys prisoner to the county jail, it is useless to talk of discrimination or leniency. His occupation makes him of necessity man. hunter, and he quickly develops the men, tai habit of gauging his worth a pub lie 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 it useless to multiply quotations from the numerous writers who have investigated this system and condemned 1t in unmeas- ured terms. We select one passage, how ever, from a most authoritative source. the report on county jails made to the American Prison association congress in 1907 by committee specially appointed the year previous and composed of four noted criminologists. Touching on the fee system it says: We 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 Lincoln to preserve his soul in state of grace. The testimony from all parts of the land demonstrates that the fee system tends to injustice to false imprisonment, to delay of trials, to plunder of the pub lie treasury, coming and going, in and out to partisan corruption, to official robbery, to the defilement of the char acter 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, which is country really worth in which there is injustice, in which there is false imprisonment, In which trials are wilfully delayed in which the public treasury is plundered, in which there is partisan corruption, in which there Is official robbery, and in which the char acter of the agents of justice IS de-
 
 ably serious charges could be amply proved as existing under the fee sys- tenn, One need not go a 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 necessary in a certain prosecution, to say nothing of the army of unfor- tuates whose sole crime was that they were out of work and had the enter prise to pack their blankets and SCOUT the country for a job. While as for "partisan corruption" 1t is common knowledge that wherever the fee sys- tenn prevails the she eriff'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 previous letter. 1t lags far behind in the matter of Juvenile pro- bation laws and other reforms, it has. abolished the fee system. Elsewhere 1t generally has been possible to do so only after conditions have reached a 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 railroaded to jail will be seen most clearly if we take the case of the. county constable, and since it Is much the same wherever the fee system is in force. we select town in Los An re1es county, given in the constable's returns as 76 miles from Los Angeles. The record shows that the constable