The problem of the arrested woman is one of the baffling difficulties
which the police of our large cities face. How New York handles one
phase of it is noted in the recent annual report of the Women’s Prison
Association of this city. Matrons are assigned to nineteen of the police
stations in Manhattan and the Bronx. Women arrested in any of the
fifty-two precincts in these boroughs are transferred to one of these
station houses.
In Brooklyn, Queens and Richmond the same plan is followed, for but ten
of the fifty-three station houses have matrons. Women offenders, after
being taken from the station house of the precinct in which they are
arrested, to the nearest station having a matron must be again
transferred to court. Of this the report says: “This dragging of women
from station house to station house is most demoralizing to prisoners,
officers and the general public.”
Of the nineteen precinct station houses to which matrons are assigned
only five, says the report, have properly ventilated and sanitary
prisons for either sex. In five of the police stations the report goes
on, the prisons for both sexes are in the same corridor, and men and
women can converse freely. To quote again: “From the fact that thousands
of prisoners and officers have been lodged in them for many years, 70
per cent of our station houses are unsanitary and can never be made
otherwise. Over 130,000 men and women prisoners in all stages of disease
and dirt pass through them yearly. Many are lodged for hours in their
prisons and leave behind them disease germs of every kind. Thus the
prisoner becomes not only a danger to his successor but may become a
prey to the condition of his or her predecessor.”