I was valuable to the judges because I relieved them from worry. Whenever anyone approached them on behalf of a prisoner, they shrugged their shoulders and referred the suppliant to me. Now-a-days we have a probation law and such work as I have been describing is legalized. But in the early days, when I had no official sanction I found my position very embarrassing. Without having been in any way elected to office I was actually exercising a power which is supposed to be the gift of the voters. However—like so many things in our haphazard government—my position, extra-legal as it was, grew out of the sheer necessity of the case. The theory is that our judges shall be jurists. And a knowledge of the law does not fit one for the responsibility of deciding how we shall treat our criminals. In the old days when the law frankly punished offenders it was a simple matter and perhaps not too much to ask of judges. But today when we are beginning the attempt to reform those individuals who endanger society, the business of imposing sentence requires not so much a knowledge of law as familiarity with psychology, medicine and sociology. Although an expert in none of these lines, I was accepted as a makeshift. The law did not provide for the employment of specially trained men to assist the judges. I was informally permitted to entirely neglect the ordinary work of a county detective and give all my time to the courts. The danger in such happy-go-lucky arrangements is that of graft. I could have doubled or quadrupled my salary with impunity. The "shyster" lawyers, who infest the Tombs tried for several years to buy my intercession for their clients. I had to be constantly on my guard to keep them from fooling me. And when they found that they could not reach me in this manner, they tried industriously to discredit me, to trick me into some suspicious conditions so they could intimidate me. More than once they set women on my trail. The politicians also tried to use me. I received a letter one day from the "Old Man" asking me to intercede for a friend of his. I wrote back that I would investigate carefully. A couple of days later I sent another letter containing the prisoner’s record, he had been twice in state prison and many times arrested. "Under the circumstances," I wrote "I cannot recommend mercy in this case."