Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/226

 212 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

From these figures we see that on the day the census for the Cook county jail was taken in 1890 one-ninth of the prisoners were negroes. On the days that the writer visited the jail in February and May of this year about one-ninth of the prisoners were negroes. These facts would seem to indicate that about one-ninth of the prisoners confined in the Cook county jail during the past eight years have been negroes.

The population of Cook county in 1890 was 1,191,222. The negro population of the county was 14,910. The ratio of negro population in the county to total population was I to 79. The ratio of negro prisoners in the jail to total prisoners was I to 9 in 1890 and 1898. Therefore we can conclude that the propor- tion of prisoners furnished to the county jail by the negro popu- lation of Cook county during the past eight years was from eight to nine times as great as it should have been according to the number of the negroes in the county.

Social relations. The writer was permitted to have access to the records of the police arrests of the city. From them he selected the records for the months of January and May, 1897. The reports of the second, third, and fourth police precincts were examined. These precincts are in the slum districts of the city, and within their boundaries the majority of negro arrests are made. The records for sixteen days in May and ten days in January were gone over, i. e., from May 1530 and January I 10. The negro arrests for these periods were picked out and classi- fied according to sex, age, occupation, conjugal relation, and the nature of the complaints lodged against them. Four hundred and twenty-seven negro arrests were thus examined; 272 from May 15-30, and 155 from January i-io.

The writer was also allowed to have access to the records of criminals as kept in the Bureau of Identification of Criminals. Here he was enabled to examine the records of negro persons who had been classed as criminals. The writer examined 217 identifications of negroes, and noted the age, sex, occupation, nativity, complexion, and crime of the persons thus recorded.

At the county jail he was unable to obtain anything except the number and sex of negro prisoners and the charges for