For the graver things, the boy or man is taken to the police station.  There he is photographed and his name and family record taken down even before he has had a hearing or a trial.  He is handled by officers who may do the best they can, but who by training and experience and for lack of time and facilities are not fitted for their important positions.  I say this in spite of the fact that my experience has taught me that policemen, as a rule, are kindly and human.  From the police station the offender is lodged in jail.  Here is huddled together a great mass of human wreckage, a large part of it being the product of imperfect heredities acted upon by impossible environments.  However short the time he stays, and however wide his experience, the first offender learns things he never knew before, and takes another degree in the life that an evil destiny has prepared for him.  In the jail he is fed much like the animals in the zoo.  In many prisons the jailer is making what money he can by the amount he can save on each prisoner he feeds above the rate the law allows of twenty-five or fifty cents a day.  In a short time the prisoner’s misery and grief turn to bitterness and hate; hatred of jailer, of officers, of society, of existing things, of the fate that overshadows his life.  There is only one thing that offers him opportunity and that is a life of crime.  He is indicted and prosecuted.  The prosecuting attorney is equipped with money and provided with ample detectives and assistants to make it impossible for the prisoner to escape.  Everyone believes him guilty from the time of his arrest.  The black marks of his life have been recorded at schools, in police stations and examining courts.  The good marks are not there and would not be competent evidence if they were.  Theoretically the State’s Attorney is as much bound to protect him as to prosecute him, but the State’s Attorney has the psychology that leads to a belief of guilt, and when he forms that belief his duty follows, which is to land the victim in prison.  It is not only his duty to land him in jail, but the office of the State’s Attorney is usually a stepping-stone to something else, and he must make a record and be talked about.  The public is interested only in sending bad folks to jail.

No doubt there are very few State’s Attorneys who would knowingly prosecute unless they believed a man guilty of the offense, but it is easy for a State’s Attorney to believe in guilt.  Every man’s daily life is largely made up of acts from which a presumption of either guilt or innocence can be inferred, depending upon the attitude of the one who draws the inference.

To a State’s Attorney or his assistants the case is one that he should win.  All cases should be won.  Even though he means to be fair, his psychology is to win.  No lawyer interested in a result can be fair.  The lawyer is an advocate trying to show that his side is right and trying to win the case.  The fact that he represents the State makes no difference in his psychology.  In fact, he always tells the jury that he represents the State and is as much interested in protecting the defendant as in protecting society.  He does this so that the jury will give his statements more weight than the statements of the lawyer for the defense, and this very remark gives him an advantage that is neither fair nor right.