Douglas Daily Dispatch

Police Court
Brings
Money
To
City
Treasury
As Jail
Hides Woes of Many People

One thousand one hundred and seven persons spent a portion of their time during the fiscal year 1926-27 behind the bars of the Douglas city jail. Of this number not more than one or two were there because they wanted to be there and not more than half a dozen were released without having paid tribute to the majesty of the law either in time spent behind the bars or in money paid over the desk of the police judge or other courts.

Between June 1, 1926 and May 31, 1927, a total of $4,254.30 in fines was collected in police court and turned over to the treasurer of the city of Douglas. Of this total, the records show that the largest number of fines for any one specific charge was collected on charges of intoxication.

The largest amount of money collected on any one charge, however, was not on the intoxication charge for the average fine on that charge is about five dollars whereas traffic violations are ordinarily assessed as much as $10 or $15, so that while there were fewer traffic violation cases the money taken in from them was greater in amount.

No totals of the various classes of cases are made in the books except by months but a check of these shows that a large amount has been assessed in fines for violation of the city ordinance against prostitution. This ordinance is known as ordinance number 177 and the customary fine for everyone found guilty of this charge is $25. As two persons are ordinarily prosecuted in connection with each raid of this nature each of these cases nets the city $50.

January Returns Largest

One would believe upon studying the record books of the police judge that the records kept there might indicate something of the time of year when the public is inclined to be most lax in its conduct. Some might be of the opinion that the book would more likely show what months in the year the court is in a bad humor.

At any rate the month of January brought in to the city treasury the greatest amount in fines during the past fiscal year. December was almost as good or as bad according to what angle the matter is viewed from. October was slightly under December.

There are epidemics in crime but the police court does not deal so much in crime as it does in misdemeanors. Crime, as theft, assault, murder and such things, is handled by the justice court and the higher courts of the county. The city court, or police court as it is called is concerned with violations of city ordinances. When these violations grow severe they are identified under state laws and immediately lose their municipal quality and are tried in justice court.

This means that the fines, if any are collected, go into the county treasury eventually instead of into the city treasury. What is the cause of the fluctuation of the amount in fines is a hard problem. One cause of changes in the amount collected from month to month is that the police, in cooperation with the court, at times, make organized efforts to put a stop to certain abuses and during these periods everyone arrested on charges connected with the certain reform being attempted is fined more heavily than usual and there are more arrests in that particular field until the situation within the city shows improvement. This system of clean up campaigns probably explains quite a bit of the variation in amounts collected.

Summer Lightens Business

Another thing noted by observance is that during the summer months there is less of certain forms of delinquency than at other periods of the year. There is more intoxication during the colder months and more petty thievery. There are practically no vagrants in the summer while there are just as many during the winter as the jail will hold or the police have time to arrest and investigate.

Vagrants add nothing to the finances of the city, however. They are a burden on the police, the jailors and the treasury for they must be fed while they are in jail and cannot be made to work to earn their keep. In times past regular chain gangs were organized during the winter months in many Arizona cities and the vagrant was arrested and jailed. If he would go out and work the streets all day he was given three meals and if he would not go out and work he was kept locked up and given two meals.

Police judges usually sentenced these men to from a week to six weeks and they were usually glad to work for the extra meal and the change of atmosphere and also glad to leave town at the end of their sentences. A state law now makes it impracticable to carry on this operation. Traveling vagrants have become so common throughout this district in winter that it does not constitute an offense in Douglas unless the vagrant commits some other overt act. The traveling vagrant is not even permitted to sleep in the Douglas jail this winter as it is reserved for pay customers.

Jail Census for Year

During the last fiscal year 746 city prisoners were locked in the city jail. During the same period there were 183 county prisoners and 173 federal prisoners. The Douglas city jail is no ordinary bastile housing only common criminals. This jail, owned and operated by the city of Douglas and under the direct management and authority of Chief of Police Percy Bowden, has housed criminals of a high type. Some of the best known bank robbers, post-office robbers, absconders, smugglers and dope runners in the world have been housed in its spacious halls and have shook the heavy steel of its gilded doors.

The jail is known as the Hotel Bowden after the man who has operated it for the city for the past eight years. The county places many prisoners in this jail and every arm of the federal government use it. The most frequent users of the federal variety are the customs and immigration services who carry on the most active branches of the federal law enforcement work in this section.

The city feeds all the prisoners. The federal government and the county pay a certain rate for food for their prisoners and the city pays a certain rate but all the meals are ordered from the same restaurant which is awarded a contract for feeding the prisoners.

Prisoners Require Food

There were 7,054 meals served in the city jail during the past fiscal year. While the records do not show what prisoners devoured these meals it is safe to say that city and federal prisoners ate the greater portion of the food as the policy of the city is to keep a prisoner no longer than is absolutely necessary to exact penalty and as this penalty usually takes the form of a fine for city offences the average city prisoner is likely to eat not more than two or three meals in the city jail. Each prisoner is allowed two meals a day.

The county prisoners stay in jail longer than the city prisoners do for many of them, after being tried in the justice court, must await trial in the superior court and failing to make bond are held. Sometimes they stay in the city jail for weeks but usually are taken to Tombstone very shortly to wait in the county jail there.

Federal prisoners differ according to the department that has arrested them in the length of time they visit at the Hotel Bowden. Custom law violators are given a hearing before the United States commissioner within a day or two of their incarceration and if held for trial are taken within a few days or a week to Tucson for holding to await the convening of the federal court.

Immigration prisoners are ordinarily held in the city jail here for as much as a month. Most of these are aliens and must await action on their cases which are handled through the local immigration authorities and the department in Washington. This is the one service using the jail that has about as many women prisoners as men prisoners. The majority of the immigration cases arrested here are of Mexican origin and many women and sometimes women with little children are jailed.

Children Not Held In Jail

In city cases, or county cases children are never put in jail but are provided for on the outside when their mothers must, according to law be placed behind the bars. In the case however of the immigration service the child is not considered under the rulings and must await the action of the authorities behind the bars with the parents.

Men and women, no matter what their relation, are never placed in the same cell. This is according to law. One instance of the overlooking of this law is noted and that was in a case recently in which a man and his wife were jailed and the wife was very sick and needed the care of someone constantly. In this case both were locked in the same cell marking the exception which proves the iron clad rule of all jails in this country.

There is little notice taken of race, color or creed in a jail. In one cell will be found well dressed, neat appearing white men, Mexican laborers in their working clothes, colored fellows and now and then a Chinaman. There are many types and all classes in a jail. Rather one might say, persons who have at some time represented all classes.

Jail Stay Means Misery

One sees misery and suffering in the jail. The cells are kept clean and they are steam heated. The beds are only iron strips but are not uncomfortable but aside from the suffering of being locked up and in many cases facing years behind the bars or the uncertainty of trials, the average person in jail brings in with him the trouble which caused his incarceration.

Probably the most dissolute and altogether revolting type which one sees in the Douglas city jail or in any other jail is the American drug addict. Usually the American who has become a drug user is not of an uneducated class. Many of them have possessed college educations. Some have been professional men. The women in many instances have been of good family and have drifted. They all alike claim that sickness and suffering drove them to use drugs and nearly all, when pinned down to it will admit that they were probably weak to begin with or they would not have succumbed to the terrible habit.

Serves As Hospital Use

The Douglas city jail is not only a place in which criminals are confined and in which persons are detained pending trial but it is, nearly all year round where drug addicts, suffering the tortures of the damned attempt with the aid of steel bars and rigid denial of all drugs, to cure themselves of the awful habit. Many succeed and men and women who have been half dragged to the cells, weak and apparently ready to die have walked forth after three or four months strong and fat and fit to face life anew.

Many of these remain away from the drugs for a long time but it is a sorry truth that most of them finally go back for no apparent reason to the use of the thing which damns them utterly in body, mind and soul for it is agreed among physicians and police officers that the real, confirmed, drug addict is a curse to himself and a burden to mankind.

To see these men and women when they have been in jail 24 hours and when they would barter away their very lives for a dose of the drug is pictured by some as looking straight into the depths of hell. An addict, unless he is peculiarly hardened will confess crime which will send him to the gallows if he be deprived of drugs for a long enough period and the confession will secure him just one little thimble full of narcotics, it is claimed by some.

No record of the number of drug addicts that are milled through the city jail is kept for they are jailed on all manner of charges but all are marked as addicts before they have been in the jail a day if it does not show in their manners when they are arrested. No addict has ever been known to stay in jail 24 hours without becoming sick and pleading for a stimulant.

Takes Work to Clean Cells

The jail is hard to keep clean. Supposing that one of the big cells that will hold 12 men is scrubbed and white washed from floor to ceiling. The place is saturated with insect killing spray and the blankets which are the only bedding are steam cleaned.

The cell is prepared for use and in the course of one night, five men intoxicated unto deathly sickness are locked in it. In addition to these, two Italian immigrants from the slums of Naples are deposited behind the bars.

The next customer will be a Mexican burro driver captured with a burro load of mescal. Toward morning a drug addict burglar who has not bathed since he acquired the habit, is added to the collection and just at dawn a colored boy is apprehended crawling through a window.

By the time the jailor comes to serve breakfast the white cell interior looks like a shambles. There is no one in the cell with pride or ability enough to clean it up.

Sanitation is maintained however. During the morning the prisoners are ordered to clean the cell and if they do not do so a kangaroo court is instituted in which the most able bodied of the lot takes charge and first cleans his part of the cell and then influences his cell mates to clean the rest. But the cell is never the same until it is emptied and re-whitewashed. There is a certain smell of steam heat, unwashed humanity, the fumes of drunkenness and insect spray that is not to be found in any perfumery shop.

Prisoners are only confined by themselves if they are unusually unruly or in cases where there are more than one in the same case and the officers do not want the different ones talking to each other. Now and then a juvenile is placed in the jail and in these cases he is always locked up by himself as the law again provides that no minor shall be placed in the same cell with adults.

How Prisoners Pass Time

Prisoners are very cheerful as a rule and laugh and sing and play cards and sometimes, if the combination of ability is right, they will organize bands with paper and combs and tin pans or whatever they can secure from the little allowed in a cell.

When prisoners sing too lustily, especially at night, the police have learned to hold suspicions and often a quiet patrol into the vicinity of the big cells will discover the entire collection of prisoners with the exception of one man, singing lustily, with their heads all together, near the door while the one silent prisoner will be found at some cell window tweaking steadily and rapidly with a steel saw or a broken knife blade or some other instrument.

The noise made by the saw or other instrument is effectually drowned by the singers so that if the officers do not walk carefully and look carefully they will never know that a jail break is attempted until they come out in the morning and find one cell empty with a ping hole in a two foot concrete wall or a window bar with one end dug out of the concrete and twisted half around to make a little hole, but big enough for a man to squeeze through.

A professional criminal will take the steel arch supports from his shoes and make tools out of them with which he will be able, if left alone a short time, to break from almost any jail. What few eating utensils are permitted the prisoners are often appropriated to these uses and now and then someone smuggles a real saw into a cell. However few escape in the long list of those placed behind the bars and most of them pay the penalty and march out through the doors by which they entered and the wheels of justice grind on, sometimes slowly, sometimes swiftly.

Sometimes it may seem that they grind coarse and sometimes very fine but in the end one is convinced that they do grind rather well and the majority of the inmates that tarry for a day or a month in the Douglas city jail will admit freely that they have committed offenses which entitle them to be where they are and all of them will freely state that they are well treated although some declare that they have been in far better jails and for far longer periods.