The Inhumanity of the City Jail
A plea for the humane treatment of women in Seattle's overcrowded, mixed-gender prison system.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Some provision should be made by the city authorities for the imprisonment of females. Sad as it is that such imprisonment is necessary, the fact remains that it is so and that frequently; and such fact should accordingly be recognized. It is shameful to imprison a female in the corridor of the jail common to both sexes, and yet this very practice is carried on in our city today. A prison should be to as great an extent as possible a reformatory institution, and not a place where the last vestige of morality remaining in an unfortunate and sinning creature is to be lost. It is worse, far worse, to confine women so than to let the most sinful and degraded of the sex remain at large and unpunished. There is now confined in the city jail a young girl of not more than eighteen who, while in an intoxicated condition, committed an offense against the laws, and who, being unable to pay the fine assessed, lies in prison until the anger of the outraged statutes shall be appeased. She sinned no more than thousands of her sisters in guilt, yet day after day she is forced to remain behind the prison bars in common confinement with the drunkards and vagabonds who are from time to time caught in the meshes of the law. To subject a young girl to the sights and sounds that make a prison the fittest type of hell is wrong.
“To subject a young girl, however degraded, to the sights and sounds that make a prison the fittest type of hell is wrong, and is the surest way to defeat the very end sought to be accomplished.”
This 1884 editorial highlights the chronic failure of Seattle's justice system to provide safe, separate facilities for women—a structural issue that echoes through Seattle's ongoing debate about the adequacy and humanity of local detention centers today.
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