Books: Jogging Prisoners’ Memories

THE THIRD DEGREE—Emanuel H. Lavine — Vanguard ($2).*

“Manny” Lavine, 25 years a police reporter, has seen many strange sights in station houses where he waited for a story to break. No reformer, he here reports what he has seen without indignation, seems to feel that, on the whole, criminals get what is coming to them.

Says he: 70% of all convictions are obtained by forced confessions. Mildest method: protracted questioning, sometimes going on continuously for over 24 hours, keeping the prisoner awake, thirsty, hungry. Usual method: beating the prisoner about the head and neck with lengths of rubber hose (which leave no bruises). If that fails to work, fists, boots, bats, lighted cigars may jog the suspect’s memory. Scars or bruises are explained by saying the prisoner “fell downstairs.” But Lavine tells of other refinements: “I have seen a man beaten on the Adam’s apple so that blood spurted from his mouth; I have seen another put in a dentist’s chair and held there while the dentist, who seemed to enjoy his job, ground down a sound molar with a rough burr.” Sometimes prisoners are threatened with death, shot at with blank cartridges.

Here is what one station house looked like after detectives had been “shellacking” some suspected Italian kidnappers: “An inch of blood covered the floors, walls and desks in the different rooms. Broken blackjacks, rubber hose and the parts of four broken chairs were scattered in the mess. The men ruined their clothes and looked more like workmen employed in an abattoir than detectives.” Third-degree methods, says Lavine, are sometimes applied to women. “He [the detective] merely shows what a big, strong guy he is by starting to lift her from the ground by her hair. That usually makes her feel more like talking. Or, especially if she isn’t young and attractive, he may expectorate in her face. Some detectives chew tobacco.”

The incidents Reporter Lavine describes are common, he says, are typical of police methods in all large U. S. cities. Says he: “I have written to little purpose if I have not demonstrated that the third degree is much more than merely an occasional or a secondary weapon in the hands of the police; it is actually the main reliance of the police in obtaining information from stubborn prisoners. . . . The only place where no protection can be guaranteed [to the freeborn U. S. citizen] is in the police station. Once you pass its green lights you are beyond the law.”

When newshawks showed Lavine’s book to New York’s Police Commissioner E. P. Mulrooney he smiled, shook his head. Said he: “I deny positively that anything like that goes on in the New York Police Department.”

*Published Oct. 16.