WOMAN POLICE COMMISSIONER.

White Ribbon, Volume 23, Issue 271, 18 January 1918, Page 10

WOMAN POLICE COMMISSIONER.

Dr. Katherine Davis, Chief of the Parole Commission of New York, also for 16 years of the Bedford Reformatory for women and Prisoner Commissioner, said at National Suffrage Convention: —“You cannot legislate righteousness into the human heart, hut you can reduce to a minimum the temptations that we offer to youth. To a large extent you can stop commercialized vice and th<* manufacture of criminals. Down all the ages women have paid the price of vice and crime. 1 not believe that at bottom a man is any worse than a woman; but all through the centuries he has been taught that he may do *ome thing* which a woman may not. Public morals are corrupted because woman's point of view has no representation. The doctors say that there is no more need for ama to go wrong than a woman. The laws are not equally enforced. In the night courts you will see woman after woman convicted on the word of a policeman only, while in order to convict a man you have to pile evidence on evidence. She gave one particularly bad case where the details were too bad to be told in public. The persons involved were a grown woman, feeble-minded girl of 14, and a married man of 33. Ihe woman was given a long term ; the girl was turned over to the Reformatory, and the man was sent to prison. But great pressure was brought to bear upon the Parole Commission to have him paroled out immediately. Some entirely respectable men could see no reason why he should not at once br turned loose again upon society. Dr. Davis refused to parole him. She said in her opinion he ought to stay in prison as long as the woman. Another time the officers of the law found four young women and four young men in a room used for immoral purposes. The young women were sent to prison, but the four >°ung men were only shooed into the street. It is against the law to carry on prostitution in a tenement house. The young men were breaking the law as well as the young women, but no attempt was made to punish them, although letters found in the rooms furnished ample proof.