The Cook County Jail Survey Made on Request of the Board of County Commissioners Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Cook County Jail Survey: Made on Request of the Board of County Commissioners

For many years there has been agitation for a new jail in Cook County. The present new jail, built in 1895, was scarcely completed before it was condemned. By 1910, both the Old and the new jails, operated as one unit, had become as crowded as the Old one had been alone before the new one was built to relieve the overcrowding, and the International Prison Congress, meeting here in that year, with representatives of wide reputation from many countries, condemned the whole structure as one Of the worst jails to be found anywhere.

Since 1914, four different proposals for bond issues for a new jail have been submitted to the voters. Each proposal has been defeated - for the reason principally, it is believed, that in connection with these various proposals no definite plans were presented. There was a wide-spread feeling that a new deal was needed - that it would be useless waste of money and Of human material to go on indefinitely under the Old pol icy Oi building ever larger jails, to be promptly filled up as soon as the new space was available. Upon the failure of the fourth bond-issue-proposal in the Spring Of 1921, the demand for a careful survey Of the situation became insistent, and when the Site Committee, appointed to recommend a suit able site for a new jail, brought to the County Commissioners, in January, 1922, a recommendation that the Chicago Com munity Trust be first asked to make a survey, the County Commissioners promptly and unanimously accepted it.

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