Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/115

 CRIME IN STATE AND MUNICIPALITY 99

made the " spoils " of politics, and are exploited by each succeed- ing sheriff with the aim of extracting from their management for his own personal profit as large a pecuniary return as possible. The " plum " is too rich a one to be held by the same person longer than a single official term, and so the control is apt to be shifted to a newly elected sheriff at each successive election. Considerations wholly political control the selection of the suc- cessful candidate; uniformity, and even continuity, of adminis- tration and the establishment of reforms thus become practically impossible. Necessary appropriations for improving or rebuild- ing the jails are obtained with greater difficulty than appropria- tions for any other public purpose; the rottenness of the county jails seems to have spread a taint of demoralization throughout the whole community with reference to every measure affecting them. And so it is that the county jails in the United States, except in a very few isolated instances, remain in a condition as utterly reprehensible and abandoned now as prevailed a hundred years ago.

The worst features of the county jail, however, still remain to be stated. In all county jails, with a very few possible excep- tions, all the prisoners are herded together, during the daytime, in a common yard or room, with unrestrained freedom of inter- course and converse; in some of the jails there is even an imper- fect segregation between the male and female prisoners. Persons awaiting trial and persons convicted, the innocent and the guilty, the old and the young, the hardened criminal and the novice in crime, all are thrown together into enforced and promis- cuous association. There is no labor or industrial occupation; even in states where the laws require that the prisoners in the county jail shall be kept at work, the counties fail to make appro- priations for the introduction of labor; there is no instruction; there is no discipline, except rough, and sometimes brutal, meas- ures against insubordination and violence. The corrupting effect of these conditions upon the inmates is so inevitable and so blighting as to justify the estimate, which has often been expressed, that the county jails are a more productive cause of crime in the United States than is the use of intoxicating liquor.