Bootleggers Should Have to Pay, Says Judge Brooks, Jan. 12, 1922

Booze Criminals Made to Pay County Deputies. . . County Judge Brooks of Johnston Inaugurates Effective Working Scheme. . . Relieves the Taxpayers. . . Distillers and Bootleggers Have $40 Added to Cost for “Getting ‘Em”; Pay or Work It Out on Roads

Reading a dispatch from Smithfield a few days ago to the effect that Judge Brooks of the Johnston County Court has “established a still fund which will be used to help defray expenses in apprehending blockaders and bootleggers,” we were impressed with the practicability of the scheme he has set in motion, and therefore feel hopeful that it will yield more actual results toward suppressing the manufacture and sale of whiskey than any plan that has yet been adopted. The account states that Judge Brooks will give the convicted men the alternative of paying these items in the costs ($20 to $40 in each conviction) or having 30 to 60 days added to their sentence on the roads. By including this in the bill of costs, the money will not be counted as a fine, which would under the statute go into the school fund. By providing an alternative of an addition to the road sentence, Judge Brooks does not force the defendants to pay this cost. The plan suggested itself to Judge Brooks when he attended a meeting of the county commissioners and found a bill of $400 for one month that had been paid to deputies for enforcement of the prohibition law. Judge Brooks thinks the blockaders should help pay the freight and will in the future make them help in their own undoing.

It is hoped that other counties will adopt a similar plan, and they will if the county officers are in earnest and wish to enforce the law against the sale and manufacture of the stuff that is still doing more harm and causing more suffering and crime than any other evil in the world. Send the distillers to jail and the roads and the pen (in persistent cases where the distillers or bootleggers are pulled more than once) and better results will follow.

It is eminently proper that these violators of the law (exacting such enormous prices for the poison and near-poison) should be made to pay the expense of employing an increasing number of deputies to hunt them down, and Judge Brooks is to be congratulated for pioneering the way to the most effective and practical way yet evolved (if enforced) to reach and punish this class of criminals.

From The Union Herald, Raleigh, Thursday, January 12, 1922