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By Root 1755 0

policemen were incredibly brutal and callous. Victims paraded before the committee: “The eye of one man, punched out by a patrolman’s club, hung on his cheek.” One journalist had been “assaulted ... with brass knuckles while he was a prisoner in the station-house.” The police, it seems, “formed a separate and highly privileged class, armed with the authority and the machinery for oppression,” and yet free themselves from any criminal responsibility. In some cases, the police combined extortion with brutality: there was the case, for example, of “Mrs. Urchittel, a humble Russian Jewess, ignorant of our tongue, an honest and impoverished widow with three small children.” A detective “falsely accused” her of keeping a disorderly house; she was arrested, and dragged through the streets; when she did not come up with enough money for the detective’s payoff, she was arrested again, and convicted on perjured testimony. She fell ill, her children were taken by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and she lost her home.25

Despite the scandals, the publicity, the headlines, the outrage, the exposes, police corruption and brutality had remarkable survival power. In city after city, the police were on the take. Saloonkeepers in Chicago and Boston were asked regularly for “contributions.”26 Everywhere, police were involved “in a systematic pattern of payoffs from drinking, gambling, and prostitution,” and (as in New York City) voting fraud. The system of corruption, as Samuel Walker puts it, “was inherent in the fact that the police were largely a political institution.”27 It was inherent, too, in the Victorian compromise itself; and perhaps even more so after the breakdown of that compromise—the stakes became higher, the payoffs greater. The basic problem was the demand for vice. Cities were nests of vice, because vice had a huge clientele. Enough people lusted after gambling, hard liquor, and prostitution to support the cost of buying off the law.

The Decline of the Classic Penitentiary

Ultimately, the police were a success story of sorts; police departments probably played a role in reducing serious crime and disorder in the country, despite politics, oppression, incompetence, and corruption. The penitentiary system was another story.

The idea of the penitentiary—grim, total, silent; a monastery for criminals—gained many new converts; the idea spread from city to city, state to state. By the time of the Civil War, the newfangled penitentiary system was in place throughout the North and Midwest; the whipping post was only a memory, except in a few places (tiny Delaware was one holdout). The gallows remained, of course, but was used only for the most serious crimes. The convicted felon was simply thrown into prison; that was his fate. And the prison was modeled after the great eastern penitentiaries. Michigan Territory, for example, built a prison at Jackson in 1839, copied from the paragons in New York.ah Even in the South, some states fell into line and built penitentiaries.29

But decay set in almost immediately in most prisons—almost as soon as the last brick was laid and the prison opened for business. The silent system, for example, had little staying power. Silence meant one-man one-cell; but solitary confinement was an expensive luxury. Men were sentenced to prison faster than the state built new cells and cellblocks. In the Massachusetts State Prison, the silent system, in its extreme form, was gone by the 1850s.30 In Missouri, a prison opened in Jefferson City in 1836 with forty cells, which seemed enough at the time. By 1847, there were two and three men to a cell, and the governor was arguing that this posed no difficulty.31 The silent system lingered in theory in many prisons; but its classic purity—and its effectiveness—was long since gone. When Hutchins Hapgood arrived in Sing Sing, late in the nineteenth century, prisoners still ate dinner “in dead silence. Silence, indeed, except on the sly, was the general rule of our day, until work was over, when we could whisper together until five o