Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [197]
Joseph F. Fishman, who visited (he said) 1,500 jails in the United States in the years before 1920, painted an appalling picture of disease, filth, muck, and neglect. The jails were “human dumping grounds”; a sentence of thirty days in jail was a sentence to “wallow in a putrid mire demoralizing to body, mind and soul.” In the jail in Phoenix, Arizona, up to a hundred prisoners were packed in a “foul cage” supposed to house forty people at most, and crawling with vermin. Men slept in hammocks, or “helter-skelter on the hard steel” in indescribable heat. In state after state, Fishman reported on unsanitary conditions, disease, and immorality. In Princeton, West Virginia, he “saw a prisoner with the worst case of syphilis that I have ever seen.... Part of his tongue was gone, and his mouth was literally half eaten away”; yet this man used the same drinking glass, tub, and toilet as the other prisoners. “Homo-sexuality,” he reported, was “the invariable concomitant” of the jails, both for men and women.56
Exposés of this sort occurred with monotonous regularity. In 1908, Kate Barnard, Oklahoma’s Commissioner of Charities and Corrections, visited the Kansas Penitentiary to explore the fate of prisoners from Oklahoma who were housed in the Kansas prison.57 Her investigations, and those of others, blew the lid off conditions of massive brutality—flog—gings, water torture, confinement in a chamber called the “crib.” “Sodomists and masturbators” were dealt with by “a minor surgical operation during which a brass ring was inserted through the foreskin of an offender’s penis.” There were sometimes short-term improvements after some particularly dramatic expose; or perhaps a head or two rolled. But, also with monotonous regularity, the situation soon returned to abnormal. 58
Southern prisons and jails were especially bad. Robert E. Bums, sent to prison in Georgia in 1922, expected to see a large stone building “surrounded by a huge wall.” What he found in Bellwood, Fulton County, Georgia, at the “so-called penitentiary” was a “few old dilapidated low wooden buildings.” He was put in “stripes” and sent to the blacksmith’s shop, where a “heavy steel shackle was riveted on each ankle, and a heavy chain . . . permanently fixed to connect the shackles.” On the chain gang, permanently chained, he worked long, brutal hours under subhuman conditions.59
In the winter and spring of 1910—11, Oscar Dowling, president of the Louisiana State Board of Health, inspected “every jail, lock-up and police station in Louisiana.” He described them, on the whole, as “relics of barbarism.” County jails were “ill-ventilated, foul-smelling structures with no room for exercise and scant, if any provision and no incentive to personal cleanliness.” One prisoner wrote: “the Bedding Hav not Ben changed nor aired” in his jail, and “the Bed Bugs is geting a Start”; the water closets did not work and “the odor is something Terible”; the flies by day and “the mosquoitos at night Dount allow no Sleeping”; the food was monotonous and made for a “volum of Gas in my Stomach tel it causes me to suffer most all the time.”60
Most southern prisoners were black; they had no power, no voice in the system. Uproar over chain gangs often occurred after exposés that featured white prisoners. But times were changing. In 1943, a black man named Leon Johnson escaped from a Georgia chain gang and fled to Pennsylvania. The governor of Georgia demanded extradition; and Pennsylvania complied. Johnson invoked the shelter of the federal courts. He asked for a writ of habeas corpus, claiming that the situation in Georgia was so intolerable that it deprived him of his constitutional rights. The third circuit court agreed. Life on a Georgia chain gang was so debased, said the court, that it amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment.”61
The Supreme Court, in a terse, technical decision, reversed this decision. 62 But Georgia, meanwhile, had been embarrassed by chain-gang horror stories. The state made changes in the system. A constitutional provision (Article