Nineteenth-century county jails were filthier and more corrupting than state prisons

Evidence

In this case, he lived and ate “in a room the size of a small bathroom, with a noisome bucket for a toilet and a cot narrower than a bathtub.” To bathe “occasionally,” there was a “bathhouse in the yard, which was closed in bad weather.” In Illinois, the Cook County jail, inspected in 1869, was also “filthy and full of vermin.” The county jails were “moral plague spots”; they made “great criminals out of little ones.” — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3443