Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [107]
In the local jails, confusion was king, along with plain dirt and humiliation. These were the sewers and toilets of humanity. At best they were simply chaotic and neglected. In 1880, Enoch Wines described Michigan’s jails as follows: “no work, no instruction, no discipline, no uniformity of structure.” He pointed out, as so many had, that the innocent and the depraved were thrown together in “intimate and continuous association,” the “old offender” boasting of his exploits to the “wayward youth,” who drank in “the fatal poison, ... burning with desire for similar adventures.”89 In rural Iowa, the local lockup, or jail—called the “calaboose”—was a tiny, simple building used to store drunks and tramps; offenders waited here to be dragged off to county jails, in the days before paved roads, when snow or mud made the long trip a torture. In Grand Mound, Iowa, the lockup was even used as a makeshift hotel, rented out to travelers as “an occasional low cost bed.”90
In the cities, most people who were arrested never got further than a local jail; the “big house” was for serious crimes. If a person could not make bail, the first stop was a cell in a police station house. George Walling, writing in 1887 about New York, has vividly described the experience. Most of the men (and women) are hauled to the cells “in a state of beastly intoxication. They shout and scream and curse worse than any furies.” Dumped in a “loathsome” room, cramped, with foul air, the prisoner has to spend the night on a “hard board,” where “his limbs become lame and paralyzed” in a vain attempt to sleep. All around him, in other cells, are other objects of misery: a “howling Jezebel, ... mad with liquor”; a “tender, refined, intelligent woman” who sinned out of “weakness” and who “moans and groans in her grief”; a “sobbing boy” spending his first night in jail, thinking of his mother; an old man, “half maniacal through the constant habit of drinking,” tortured by “delirium tremens, and the strange creatures of his vision.”91
The next stop for a convicted criminal in New York City might be the Ludlow Street Jail. This lacked the stern uniformity of the great prisons. One class of inmates, the “aristocrats of the jail,” paid the warden fifteen dollars a week; this gave them a “respectable room” instead of a cell, and the privilege of sitting at the warden’s table, “eating the luxuries of the market.” A few rich prisoners paid between fifty and a hundred dollars a week; this bought a “nicely furnished room with all the luxuries”; their meals were served in their rooms and, in general, they lived “in royal style.”92
The “non-paying boarder” was locked in a cell from seven-thirty at night, to six-thirty in the morning, when he “takes up his slop-pail and carries it down to the sink.” Breakfast is brought to the cell: hunks of bread, which the prisoner grabs through the cell door as best he can, followed by coffee in a tin cup. Dinner is bread and a kind of soup, served at noon. Supper is tea and another hunk of bread.93
But the worst and most notorious of the jails in New York City was the prison usually known as “the Tombs.” This massive building was finished in 1838, in a crazy style of architecture that vaguely resembled someone’s idea of an Egyptian tomb. It had cells for both men and women. It, too, was divided into classes: there were five or six “comfortable cells,” rooms with a view (of the street) for “aristocratic rogues” who could afford to “live in style.”94 Most of the prisoners, however, were far from “aristocratic”; they were, instead, members of the “disorderly or vagrant class.” They appeared first in the police court, in the Tombs. Here they were, generally, found guilty and sentenced, in an “awful smelling court-room amid the dull and brutish stare of the assembled scum of the lower city wards.” The cell that received them was small and