Crime in Chicago 
 
 Reprinted from 
 The New Republic 
 
 ISSUED BY 
 
 THE JUVENILE PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION 
 OF CHICAGO 
 
 1915 
 
CRIME IN CHICAGO 
 
 (Reprinted frotn The New R<?piil)lic) 
 
 The appointment of a new "Crime Commission" in Chicago 
 while the findings of the recent aklermanic "Committee on 
 Crime" are still, as it were, warm from the press, seems to 
 indicate an increased public concern over a neglected subject. 
 The report of the City Council Committee on Crime, of which 
 Professor Charles E. Merriam was chairman, brought out clearly 
 two different aspects of the problem: (1), in the words of the 
 report, "that professional criminals escape the penalties of the 
 law and prey at will upon society"; (2), that the jails and prison 
 houses of Chicago, designed for the persons who elude or escape 
 the police, are filled with "poor and petty criminals" or persons 
 who are not guilty of any crime at all. The chairman of the 
 Committee laid most stress upon Chicago's failure to apprehend 
 and to deal with the habitual criminal, but the other aspect of 
 the crime problem — the wrongs of the poor who suffer from un- 
 just arrests and imprisonment — is perhaps of greater importance 
 to society in the long run. 
 
 To abolish or amend the iniquitous system by which men are 
 imprisoned not for their crimes but for their poverty has for 
 many generations been the cherished hope of a host of earnest 
 men and women seeking the ends of social justice. Sober re- 
 formers like John Howard, enthusiasts like Dickens, and cour- 
 ageous women like Elizabeth Fry gave blood and tears to this 
 cause. It is now nearly a hundred and fifty years since John 
 Howard made the English people understand the difference be- 
 tween the imprisonment of "felons" who had been found guilty 
 and sentenced, and the imprisonment in the same jails of persons 
 who were held in prison merely because they were too poor to 
 pay their fines and fees or to furnish the necessary bail for re- 
 lease pending trial. Indeed, the cause is older than John How- 
 ard, for one Thomas Eirmin, so long ago as 1678, in his pamphlet 
 dealing with ' ' Some Proposals for the Imploying of the Poor, ' ' 
 described the work of one man who "within little more than 
 two years with the charity of some worthy persons hath de- 
 livered out of Prison about five hundred poor people who lay 
 
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tliere either for their fees or for very small debts." But this 
 seventeenth century philanthropist found that he was engaged 
 in sweeping back the tides of the sea and could only reflect that 
 in s]3ite of his efforts the great gaols of seventeenth century 
 London were still "very full" of poor prisoners. There could 
 be no relief until the iniquitous system of imprisonment for 
 poverty should be abolished. 
 
 So the recent report of the Chicago Crime Committee 
 showed that today the jails are still "very full" of poor prison- 
 ers, and that many thousands of men and boys suffer the penal- 
 ties of unjust arrest and imprisonment every year. To put this 
 concretely: The report of the Crime Committee showed that 
 out of 109,764 persons arrested in a single year less than ten 
 per cent were arrested on felony charges. The great mass of 
 persons arrested^ — 90 out of every 100 — were arrested for trivial 
 offenses or for no oft" ense at all, as evidenced by their discharge 
 in court. That few arrests were for serious offenses is clear 
 from the disposition of the cases in court. Only 2,182 (2 per 
 cent) were held for the grand jury, only 141 (1/10 of one per 
 cent) were sentenced to the county jail, only 1,935 (1.8 per cent) 
 were sentenced to the House of Correction, only 40 per cent of the 
 total number were fined, and the others, more than half of all 
 the persons arrested, were discharged in the municipal court. 
 
 Surely these are small consequences as a result of all the 
 misery involved in nearly 110,000 arrests. Xo statistics are 
 kept showing how many of these men and boys spent one or 
 more nights in the police stations, or one or more weeks in the 
 county jail, but the number, judging from the information at 
 hand, must run well up to 50,000, if not beyond. And it must 
 be emphasized that the hardships involved in needless arrests 
 are hardships that fall almost exclusively upon the poor. The 
 well-to-do are not arrested for trivial offenses. The system that 
 involves the arrest of thousands of men and boys every year for 
 offenses so slight that no judge will even fine them is a system 
 of which the poor ma}^ be said to be the exclusive victims. In 
 the courts they have no one to speak for them; they do not 
 know how to speak for themselves; they are declared not guilty 
 
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and discliarged, but nothing is done to alter the system that 
 makes it possible for this misery to continue. 
 
 ]\loreoYer, a study of the report shows that even the prison- 
 ers who were sentenced were in the vast majority of cases sen- 
 tenced because of their poverty. Thus out of 14,709 prisoners 
 in the House of Correction, 12,124, or 82 per cent of the whole 
 number, were there only because they were too poor to pay the 
 small fines imposed upon them. An examination of the House 
 of Correction records for a period of four years showed that the 
 number of . persons imprisoned for the non-payment of fines 
 ranged from 82 to 87 per cent of all the persons imprisoned dur- 
 ing that time, and more than half of these persons were com- 
 mitted for fines of less than $20. According to the report of 
 the Committee, these fines are "laid out" in the Bridewell at the 
 rate of fifty cents a day, and tbe fines are therefore paid, in 
 reality, in two ways: (1), by the taxpayers, for the expense of 
 maintaining Bridewell prisoners is forty-six cents per man per day 
 and the total cost of maintenance in a year is nearly $300,000; 
 and (2), by the men and their families in the privation and deep 
 humiliation that they suffer; the re^aort notes that "this system 
 which virtually sends men to jail because of their poverty is not 
 only unjust but demoralizing to the individual and costly to 
 the state." 
 
 The other great harvest of Chicago's prisoners is stored in 
 the Cook county jail. Tlie Committee's report showed that out 
 of 8,593 persons who were held in this jail last year the vast 
 majority were prisoners only because they were too poor 
 to furnish bail pending trial ; only 621 of the whole number were, 
 when tried, found guilty and sentenced to the state reformatory 
 or penitentiary or county jail. Seven hundred and sixty-four 
 others were sent to the House of Correction, but the majority 
 of these were committed, as has been said, not because of their 
 crimes, unless poverty be a crime, but because they could not pay 
 the small fines imposed upon them. Thus something like 90 
 per cent of the prisoners in the steel cages of Cook county's 
 medieval jail are there only because they cannot furnish bail 
 during the period that the law is taking its slow and uncertain 
 
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course. The law of Illinois provides that any person awaiting 
 trial may be released on bail "except in capital offenses where 
 the proof is evident or the presumption great." The report of 
 the Committee showed only 219 persons who were held on non- 
 bailable offenses. The thousands of men and boys locked up 
 every year in the jail, then, are not imprisoned for any crime, 
 they are not found guilty when they are tried. Only a very small 
 percentage are given any kind of a jail sentence when they 
 finally come to trial, and the others, about seven thousand every 
 year, become ''jail-birds" and suffer the penalty of imprison- 
 ment only because they are too poor to provide the necessary 
 bonds. 
 
 It is important to note the data collected by the Crime Com- 
 mittee regarding the length of time these unfortunate men and 
 boys were held awaiting trial. The report showed that while 
 the majority of them were there for less than one month, 1,660 
 of them were kept in jail for periods varying from four weeks 
 to sixty-three weeks. There was not sufficient evidence against 
 some of these men even to secure an indictment by the Grand 
 Jury, and it appears that 251 of the men against whom "no bills" 
 were returned were held in jail for periods ranging from two to 
 sixteen weeks, which means that a terrible punishment was in- 
 flicted upon people whose offenses did not justify their being 
 held for trial. 
 
 In 1910, when the International Prison Congress met in 
 Washington, the foreign delegates were taken to various cities 
 in the country to examine their jails and prisons. Everywhere 
 the delegates expressed horror and surprise at the spectacle of 
 hundreds or thousands of presumably innocent persons locked 
 up in cells merely awaiting trial. Over and over again they ex- 
 claimed, "In Europe this condition would never be tolerated." 
 Only in the "land of freedom" could freemen be deprived of 
 their liberty in this way. 
 
 It is to be hoped that Chicago's new Commission will con- 
 cern itself not only with the escape of professional criminals but 
 with the arrest of innocent persons and the imprisonment of 
 men whose only crime is their poverty. 
 
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