Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [170]
It is still true today that the sum of the state systems completely dwarfs the federal system. Felony prosecutions in federal courts amount to less than 2 percent of the national total. In the 1980s, according to one estimate, there were about one million felony filings in state courts; if misdemeanors, traffic cases, and the like, are thrown in, the total goes over ten million.29 In 1990, there were said to be 1,790,428 criminal filings in Texas alone.30 Federal filings, quantitatively at least, are a spit in the ocean.
One other factor must be mentioned. In the twentieth century, the standards of criminal procedure have been nationalized to a considerable degree. This was most blatantly the work of the Supreme Court under Earl Warren, and it reached its climax in the fifties (see chapter 14.) States can no longer ignore what the federal courts say about the Bill of Rights. They must pay attention to federal standards.
Law Enforcement and Corrections
The federal government was such a bit player in criminal justice in the nineteenth century that it did not even have a prison it could call its own before 1891, except for soldiers and sailors.31 It boarded out its other prisoners in state and local jails. In January 1877, twenty-five of the fifty inmates in the Alameda County, California, jail were federal prisoners. Most of them were Chinese, sentenced for “peddling or selling unstamped matches or cigars,” a federal tax crime. In 1887, Congress made it illegal for states to “hire or contract out the labor” of federal criminals housed in their prisons and jails.32 Up to this point, the prisoners had cost the states little or nothing; now they began to charge by the head for putting up these prisoners.33 In 1905 in California, the federal government was paying forty cents per day per prisoner.34
In 1891, Congress authorized construction of three federal prisons. The first one open for business was Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas. It had originally been a military fort. The Department of Justice took it over in 1895. A second prison opened in Atlanta in 1902; the third prison was a converted territorial jail on McNeil Island in Puget Sound.35 These three were the only federal prisons until 1925. By 1930, there were five, one of them a women’s prison, the Federal Industrial Institution for Women, which opened in 1927 at Alderson, West Virginia (see chapter 18). In 1930, Congress passed an act creating a federal Bureau of Prisons within the Department of Justice. The attorney general under this act had power to “establish and conduct industries, farms, and other activities; to classify the inmates, and to provide for their proper treatment, care, rehabilitation, and reformation.”36
The federal prison system, like most state systems, came to consist of specialized institutions. They have ranged from the more relaxed, “country club” prisons, to the grim steel-and-concrete dungeons of ultra-maximum security, reserved for the most desperate or despised of prisoners. This was the role of “The Rock,” the notorious prison at Alcatraz Island, a wind-swept and jagged bit of land in San Francisco Bay, which began its career in 1934.
Alcatraz is on a hill, looking out deceptively at the lights and towers of San Francisco, shimmering across a narrow but treacherous body of water. No one, as far as is known, ever made good an escape from Alcatraz, except in the movies. Alcatraz housed Al Capone and dozens of other hardened criminals or plain lost souls. It shut its doors in 1963, rotted for a while, was occupied for a spell by a group of militant Native Americans,