Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [108]
The Tombs was four stories high, and each floor was specialized. On the ground floor were “lunatics, delirium tremens cases, and ... sentenced prisoners.” The second tier was “Murderers’ Row”; it also housed burglars, highway robbers, and “other desperate criminals.” The third tier was for “prisoners arrested for grand larceny”; the fourth for “minor misdemeanors.”95
The local jails in the South were scandalous in their own right. Here is the county “prison” of Cleveland County, North Carolina, as of 1870, as it appeared to a contemporary:
The county prison is built of brick, and is thirty by twenty-six feet in size. It is three stories high, and has four cells for prisoners, including debtor’s room; iron cage, etc. The iron cage is eight feet square and six feet high, the other part of the room twelve feet by fifteen. The other rooms for prisoners, fifteen by ten and fifteen by seven. There is one window in each room and cell, four and a half by three feet in size. There is no way of heating the prison except that of giving the prisoners in cold weather, a heated rock. There have been some of the prisoners frost-bitten during extremely cold weather. Each prisoner has allowed him, a straw bed and three blankets. The males and females are confined in different apartments. They have fresh water as often as they want it, and just as much food as they wish. The excrement is removed from the prison, and tar is often burned in the cells to take away the offensive smell.96
Even so, prisoners in such jails were lucky, compared to those in the work camps and chain gangs, where, as we have seen, the prisoners died like flies. In general, prison and jail conditions everywhere in the country were a scandal—hidden lesions and sores on society. They were also a lesson on the meaning of race, poverty, and lack of power—and the terrible indifference of respectable people to the miseries of life underneath their feet.
Capital Punishment in the Late Nineteenth Century
The formal use of the death penalty continued to decline in the late nineteenth century. Michigan had abolished it, as a territory, in 1847, except for treason (not a major offense in Michigan); Maine got rid of it in 1876, restored it in 1883, then got rid of it for good in 1887.97 Some states and localities continued to allow public executions, but a trend against it began in the 1830s, as we have noted. In California, public executions were banned in the 1850s; the hangman was supposed to do his dirty work discreetly, behind the sheltered walls of prisons and jails.
Executions still fascinated the public. Public executions, where they existed, were tremendous box-office hits. “Private” executions were also popular. The word private has to be taken with a grain of salt. These executions were, of course, not carried out in the public square, but neither were they well screened, at first, from the curious. The execution of Sam Steenburgh, on April 19, 1878, in the village of Fonda, New York, attracted about fifteen thousand visitors. “Two special trains from the east, aggregating 12 cars, and one of 7 cars, from the west” pulled in, jammed with “curiosity seekers” dressed in “holiday attire” whose ages ranged “from the ... bent old man or woman of 70 to the child in arms”; the “sexes were quite evenly divided.”98
Fonda had made elaborate preparations for this great event. The jail itself was a “small rectangular building of unhewn stone,” located between the railroad track and the river. A high board fence had been built, enclosing a plot of turf 138 by 108 feet, on the western side of the jail. Inside this enclosure was the gallows, “a plain, upright structure ... painted black.” The condemned man was to be “jerked into the air by the fall of an iron weight of 310 pounds.” The hanging “machine” had been built in 1871, and had been used in a number of New York executions. Near the river was a house with a peaked roof, and from here you could have “an excellent view of the scene.” The