I have written here about how awful Cook County Jail is and about how much I hate going there.

A couple of weeks ago, the Chicago Reader profiled Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle's efforts to shrink the population of the jail:

Toni Preckwinkle wants to get people out of Cook County jail.

She also wants to keep them from going there in the first place. And in the cases where people have to be locked up, Preckwinkle would prefer they limit their stay—and not return.

The Cook County board president says it’s a matter of both money and justice. She rattles off a series of numbers she’s grown used to wielding in the presence of skeptics: “We spend roughly half a billion dollars on the jail every year. Seventy percent of the people are awaiting trial for nonviolent offenses, and the recidivism rate is about 52 percent …”

It is important to look at the history of jail reform in Illinois in order to truly understand the intractability of the problems at Cook County. In 1916, Edith Abbott, Chair of the Committee on Crime of the Illinois State Conference of Charities, wrote a pamphlet titled “The One Hundred and One County Jails in Illinois and Why They Ought to be Abolished.”

She wrote:

The only way to solve the county jail problem is to abolish the county jails. It is folly to hope that any attempt to reform the county jails of Illinois or of any other state can be even measurably successful. One attempt after another has failed in the past, and similar efforts will fail in the future.

In the year 1870, the then newly created Illinois State Board of Charities made a survey of our county jails; and to improve the horrible conditions then found, a “new jail law” was passed in 1874. This law, which was passed forty-two years ago has not only never been amended but it has never been enforced. The very thorough survey that was made last year by the present State Charities Commission brought to light abuses as serious as those that were found in 1870. The provisions of the “new jail law of 1874,” which required that the jails be kept sanitary and clean and that different classes of prisoners should be separated (the men and the women kept apart and young prisoners separated “from notorious offenders and those convicted of a felony or other infamous crime”), these provisions are not enforced today in many of the counties of Illinois, they have never been enforced, and it is entirely safe to predict that they never will be enforced. The long and costly lesson of experience has taught us that any humanitarian legislation that is left to a hundred and one different local authorities to enforce will simply not be enforced.

[…]

It must not be forgotten that the Illinois State Legislature decided more than forty years ago that this was a matter which should not be left to the county authorities. The legislature when it passed the “new jail law of 1874” took the stand that every person deprived of his liberty in the state of Illinois must be humanely treated,—that he must not be confined in a place that would injure him either physically or morally. Having passed this law, however, the state legislature of 1874, and the score of legislatures that have met since, failed to do anything to secure the enforcement of the provisions that were designed to safeguard the health and morals of the helpless people who are confined in our county jails each year.

The following describes the conditions in Cook County jails in the early 20th century:

It is not the small towns and counties alone that neglect the prisoners.
The horrors of the Chicago police stations and the Cook County Jail are well known. As to conditions in this greatest of western cities, the State Inspector reports: In Chicago we find the worst jails in the State. There are forty-five precinct station jails, the jail in the detective bureau, the Cook County Jail and the Bridewell jails.

Of the forty-six city jails of Chicago, only about a dozen are fit for any use whatever. Nineteen are underground. Through eleven run open sewers. These sewers provide the toilet facilities. These sewers are small troughs in the back of the cells, flushed by running water. The contents of each cell pass through the outer cells. Whatever enters this sewer in one cell passes through the cells beyond it. In one of these jails the men, women, insane and the prisoners’ food are held in one row and the sewer runs the length of the row. When the sewers overflow the floors are flooded with the contents of the sewers. Rats and vermin are numerous. The walls are painted black. The men sleep on planks. If there are more than two men in a cell, they must lie on the floor beside the open sewer. Sometimes it is necessary to put eight or ten in one small cell.

There were 127,000 arrests made in the city of Chicago last year, and a large percent of this number passed through the city jails.

Chief Justice Olson, of the Chicago Municipal Court, told me recently that a former president of the International Prison Congress said, after an investigation of a typical Chicago police jail, that in all the prison history of the world he had found no prisons so vile with the exception of the jails of Turkey of the twelfth century.

The Cook County jail is one of the most insanitary in the State. It violates Chicago’s municipal ordinance that there shall not be a bakery underground. Separation of different classes of prisoners, especially of different classes of boys, is impossible. The cells are mere caves.

At the Bridewell there are two modern cell houses and two dark dungeons.

Except immediately after a court term, eighty per cent of the prisoners in the county jails of the State outside of Cook County and ninety per cent of the prisoners in the Cook County jail are awaiting trial.

All the prisoners in the Chicago police jails are waiting hearings. These persons are declared by the law to be presumably innocent, and they are herded together in vile cells, exposed to every kind of moral and physical contagion. They are held in idleness. The first offenders are in cells with hardened criminals. Boys are with old men. The girl witness may be in the same cell with the drunken women of the streets. The runaway boy may be imprisoned with the sexual pervert. The physically clean are compelled to use the same tubs, often the same towels and drinking cups, that are used by those suffering from the most loathsome communicable diseases. They may also use the same beds and bedding. Light and air are denied admission, but vermin, rats and seepage enter without difficulty.

What is the solution for reform proposed by Ms. Abbott? Since there were two classes of people held in illinois jails (those awaiting trial and those who had been tried and convicted), two ideas were suggested. For the second class of inmates who had been tried and convicted, Ms. Abbott suggests that they be sent to state work farms:

It is clear now that the only way out is to have the State take over the custody of the men and boys who have violated the laws of the State and that this should be done by establishing institutions similar to workhouse farms which will take the men who now serve their sentences and “lay out” their fines in idleness into the sunlight and open air where profitable work can be provided for them. In 1913 the National Prison
Association recommended the abolition of the county jail in favor of the state-farm system at the Indianapolis meeting of the National Conference of Charities and Correction. In Memphis, in 1912, the Committee on Corrections adopted the following among other recommendations:

1. State control of all minor prisons.
2. Establishment of industrial farms for convicted misdemeanants.
3. The prohibition of the use of the jail for any other purpose than
that of temporary detention.

A state farm colony system has, therefore, been accepted as a modern substitute for the old county jail system.

For the first class of inmates (those who were awaiting trial), she offers this solution:

The state farm will not take care of the other class of prisoners, the persons who are held awaiting trial. But these persons are merely under detention, since they have not been found guilty of any offense. If all convicted prisoners were removed, the jail would cease to be a jail ; it would be only a detention house. The problem will be greatly simplified when the convicted persons are removed. The cruelty of confining in
dark and loathsome cells untried persons who may be found to be entirely innocent will be apparent even to the most indifferent persons. Year after year, thousands of men and boys are imprisoned in our jails, lose their wages and finally their jobs, and suffer all that human beings can suffer through being deprived of their liberty and locked up in the foul, dark places we call jails; then these men are tried and the great majority of them are found “not guilty” — and discharged. The wrongs that are suffered by innocent persons during imprisonment in our county jails are incalculable. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that they suffer only because of their poverty. Well-to-do persons are released on bail, go on with their work and live at home with their families pending trial. It is hoped that the plan* of releasing under probationary supervision persons who cannot afford to give bail will be gradually adopted.

The first step to be taken, however, is to secure an appropriation for a state farm. When the sentenced prisoners are all removed from the county jail and only untried persons remain there, it should be easier to secure from the local authorities decent treatment for such persons. When people cease to think of the county jail as a place of confinement for those who have done wrong and are compelled to look at it as a place of detention for persons who are merely under suspicion of wrongdoing, then the real jail problem can be dealt with.

Read the entire pamphlet for yourselves. Perhaps I will write something in the near future about the idea of state farms for prisoners that were briefly popular as reformers sought ways to make jails more humane in the early 20th century. As you can imagine, these state farms were replete with their own problems.

In light of this article by Michael Ross about the current epidemic of police violence, I thought that it might be a good time for some historical context.

On April 14, 1957, near the intersection of 125th street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem, NY, there was a fight between two black men (in other accounts it was a black man and woman). A crowd had gathered to watch. Several police units arrived on the scene to end the fight. The police officers did what they always did in such circumstances: they began to club people without regard for whether they had been involved in the disturbance or not.

One young man, named Hinton Johnson, reportedly told an officer: “You are not in Alabama. This is New York.” The police officer then clubbed Hinton over the head and cracked his skull. He was knocked unconscious.

He was taken to the 28th police precinct and soon a crowd began to gather outside. It turned out that Hinton Johnson was a black Muslim known to his fellow congregants as Johnson X. He belonged to Mosque Number Seven, the largest mosque in the U.S. led at the time by a young preacher named Malcolm X. Upon hearing about what had happened to Johnson X, Malcolm arrived at the precinct to serve as a negotiator between the police and the community. The police wanted the crowd that had assembled in front of their precinct to disburse but the crowd refused and started chanting for justice.

In his book “The Savage City,” T.J. English writes about what ensued:

A member of the police negotiating team, Walter Arm, the NYPD’s public relations officer, opened the meeting by saying the presence of both the captain of the precinct and a deputy commissioner “indicates how much concern the police department has for this situation. However, I’d like to say that the police in the city of New York can handle any situation that arises in Harlem, and we’re not here to ask anybody’s help.”

The police spokespeople had never heard of Malcolm X. Thirty-one years old at the time, dressed in the Nation of Islam uniform of a bow tie, white shirt, and brown suit, the Muslim leader listened quietly as the police made their statement. Then he looked at the cops, stood up, and proceeded to leave the room.

When the cops realized that their hard-line tactic had failed, they immediately sent a reporter from the Amsterdam News, Harlem’s black newspaper, to find Malcolm X and bring him back to the negotiating table.

When Malcolm returned, he made his position clear. “I have no respect for you or your police department,” he told Walter Arm and the other police representatives. If the police wanted the crowd to disperse, he announced, they must transfer Johnson X to Harlem Hospital at once. The police agreed. After making a series of further demands, Malcolm filled out an incident report that noted that Johnson X had been an innocent bystander who was attacked on account of brute viciousness by city police officers.

Johnson X was escorted out of the station house by a phalanx of Muslims. Then, with a simple hand gesture, Malcolm X motioned the group of protesters to disperse, which they did in an orderly fashion.

“No man should have that much power over that many people,” one police captain reportedly said.

It was the beginning of a new kind of relationship between blacks and the police in the city of New York.

Manning Marable also recounts this story in his excellent biography of Malcolm X released last year titled: “Malcolm: A Life of Reinvention.” The Johnson X incident would help bring Malcolm X to national attention and most importantly to the attention of New York City law enforcement officials.

The episode is dramatized in Spike Lee’s biographical film “Malcolm X” (with some minor license taken for dramatic effect).

I think that it is important for us to find and to highlight these historical moments that underscore people of color’s resistance to police violence over the years. Stay tuned for some information about an exciting new project that I am working on!