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Title: The Subterranean Brotherhood

Author: Julian Hawthorne

Posting Date: October 8, 2012 [EBook #8406]
Release Date: July, 2005
First Posted: July 8, 2003

Language: English

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FOOTFALLS

  In the cell over mine at night
  A step goes to and fro
  From barred door to iron wall--
  From wall to door I hear it go,
  Four paces, heavy and slow,
  In the heart of the sleeping jail:
  And the goad that drives, I know!

    I never saw his face or heard him speak;
    He may be Dutchman, Dago, Yankee, Greek;
    But the language of that prisoned step
    Too well I know!

    Unknown brother of the remorseless bars,
    Pent in your cage from earth and sky and stars,
    The hunger for lost life that goads you so,
    I also know!

  Hour by hour, in the cell overhead,
  Four footfalls, to and fro
  'Twixt iron wall and barred door--
  Back and forth I hear them go--
  Four footfalls come and go!
  I wake and listen in the night:
  Brother, I know!

  _(Written in Atlanta Penitentiary,
  May, 1913.)_



THE SUBTERRANEAN BROTHERHOOD


By JULIAN HAWTHORNE


CONTENTS

CHAPTER

    I INTRODUCTORY
   II THE DEVIL'S ANTECHAMBER
  III THE ROAD TO OBLIVION
   IV INITIATION
    V ROUTINE
   VI SOME PRISON FRIENDS OF MINE
  VII THE MEN ABOVE
 VIII FOR LIFE
   IX THE TOIL OF SLAVERY
    X OUR BROTHER'S KEEPER
   XI THE GRASP OF THE TENTACLES
  XII THE PRISON SILENCE
 XIII THE BANQUETS OF THE DAMNED
  XIV THE POLICY OF FALSEHOOD
   XV THE FRUIT OF PRISONS
  XVI IF NOT PRISONS--WHAT?
 APPENDIX



PREFACE

These chapters were begun the day after I got back to New York from the
Atlanta penitentiary, and went on from day to day to the end. I did not
know, at the start, what the thing would be like at the finish, and I made
small effort to make it look shapely and smooth; but the inward impulse in
me to write it, somehow, was irresistible, in spite of the other impulse
to go off somewhere and rest and forget it all. But I felt that if it were
not done then it might never be done at all; and done it must be at any
cost. I had promised my mates in prison that I would do it, and I was
under no less an obligation, though an unspoken one, to give the public an
opportunity to learn at first hand what prison life is, and means. I had
myself had no conception of the facts and their significance until I
became myself a prisoner, though I had read as much in "prison literature"
as most people, perhaps, and had for many years thought on the subject of
penal imprisonment. Twenty odd years before, too, I had been struck by
William Stead's saying, "Until a man has been in jail, he doesn't know
what human life means." But one does not pay that price for knowledge
voluntarily, and I had not expected to have the payment forced upon me. I
imagined I could understand the feelings of a prisoner without being one.
I was to live to acknowledge myself mistaken. And I conceive that other
people are in the same deceived condition. So, with all the energy and
goodwill of which I am capable, I set myself to do what I could to make
them know the truth, and to ask themselves what should or could be done to
end a situation so degrading to every one concerned in it, from one end of
the line to the other. The situation, indeed, seems all but incredible.
Your first thought on being told of it is, It must be an exaggeration or a
fabrication. On the contrary, words cannot convey the whole horror and
shamefulness of it.

I am conscious of having left out a great deal of it. I found as I went on
with this writing that the things to be said were restricted to a few
categories. First, the physical prison itself and the routine of life in
it must be stated. That is the objective part. Then must be indicated the
subjective conditions, those of the prisoner, and of his keepers--what the
effect of prison was upon them. Next was to come a presentation of the
consequences, deductions and inferences suggested by these conditions.
Finally, we would be confronted with the question, What is to be done
about it? Such are the main heads of the theme.

But I was tempted to run into detail. Here I will make a pertinent
disclosure. During my imprisonment I was made the confidant of the life
stories of many of my brethren in the cells. I am receiving through the
mails, from day to day, up to the present time, other such tales from
released convicts. The aim of them is not to get their tellers before the
public and win personal sympathy, but to hold up my hands by supplying
data--chapter and verse--in support of the assertions I have made. They do
it abundantly; the stories bleed and groan before your eyes and ears, and
smell to heaven; the bluntest, simplest, most formless stuff imaginable,
but terrible in every fiber. Before I left prison I had accumulated a
considerable number of these narratives, and had made many notes of things
heard and seen--data and memoranda which I designed to use in the already
projected book which is now in your hands. Such material, however, would
have been confiscated by the Warden had its existence been known, and none
of it would have been permitted to get outside the walls openly. The only
thing to do, then, was to get it out secretly--by the "underground
railroad."

There is an underground railroad in every penal institution. There is one
at Atlanta. I attempted to use it, but my freight got in the wrong car. A
prisoner whom I knew well and trusted came to me, and said he had found a
man who would undertake to pass the packet through the barriers; he had
already served such a need, and was anxious to do it in my case. This man
was also a prisoner of several years' standing, and with several years
yet to serve; he had recently applied for parole, but had been refused.
I met and talked with him, found him intelligent and circumspect, and
professedly eager to do his share toward helping me get my facts before
the world. He intimated that he was on favorable terms with one of the
guards or overseers who was inclined to help the prisoners, and would
take the packet out in his pocket and mail it to its address. I addressed
it to a friend of mine living near New York and on a certain prearranged
day I handed it to my confederate. He hid it inside his shirt, and that
was the last I saw of it.

The packet never turned up at its address, and it was only long after that
I was told what had occurred. My confederate wanted his parole badly, and
made a bargain with the Warden, by the terms of which his parole should be
granted in return for his delivering to the Warden my bundle of memoranda.
The terms were fulfilled on both sides, and my data are at this moment in
the Warden's safe, I suppose, along with the letter that I wrote during my
confinement to the Editor of the New York _Journal_ (mentioned in the text
of this book).

The Warden thought, perhaps, that the lack of my accumulated data would
prevent or embarrass me in writing my book. I thought so myself at first,
but had not long been at work before I found that the essential book
needed no data other than those existing in my memory and supplied by the
general theme; my material was not scant, but excessive. My knowledge
of prison and my opinions and arguments based upon that knowledge were
not subject to the Warden's confiscation, and they were quite enough to
make a book of themselves, without need of dates, places, names and
illustrations. Indeed, even of such supplementary and confirmatory matter
I also found an adequate amount in my own unaided recollection--more
than I cared to give space to; for it was my belief that such things
were not required to secure confidence in the truth of what I had to say
in the minds of persons whose confidence was worth my winning. They would
believe me because they couldn't help it--because truth has a quality
which compels belief. Moreover, of illustrations of my statements the
public had of late had more than enough from other sources; what was now
wanted was not so much instances of the facts, as a general presentation
of the subject into which special and apposite cases could be fitted
by the reader according to his previously acquired information. Finally,
I reflected that the introduction of names, places and dates might injure
the men thus pointed out; secret service men, post-office inspectors and
other spies, and the prison authorities themselves, would be prompted
and helped to give them trouble. Accordingly, I was sparing even of such
data as I had; and I noticed, as the chapters appeared serially in the
newspaper syndicate which published them, that they were criticised in
certain quarters as of the "glittering generality" class of writings;
I made assertions, but adduced no specific proof of them. The source of
such criticisms was obvious enough, but they did no harm, and were not
accompanied by denials of my facts. The only other form of attack brought
against the book is comprised in the claim that I am a writer of fiction
and as such incapable of telling the truth, about anything; that I was the
dupe of designing persons who made me the mouthpiece for their factitious
grievances or spites; and that I was myself animated by a spirit of
revenge for the injury of my imprisonment, which must render anything I
might allege against prisons and their conduct worthless.

I have touched upon the two latter counts of the indictment in the text of
the book; of the assertion that fiction writers cannot stick to facts or
convey truth, I will say that it is unreasonable upon its face. Fiction
writers, in order to attain any measure of success in their calling, must
above all things base their structures upon facts, and to seek and
promulgate undeniable truth in their descriptions and analyses. The
"fiction" part of their stories is the merest outside part; all within
must be true, or it is nothing. A novelist or story writer, therefore, is
more likely to give a true version of any event or condition he may be
required to present, than a person trained in any other form of writing,
with the exception, perhaps, of journalism. And I have been a journalist,
as well as a story writer, for more than thirty years past, and what
success I attained was due to the accuracy and veracity of the reports I
sent to my papers. In short, I am a trained observer of facts if ever
there were one; and no facts in my experience have been so thoroughly
hammered into my mind, heart and soul, digested and appreciated, as were
the facts of my prison life. Whatever else that I have written might be
cavilled at on the plea of inaccuracy, certainly this book cannot be.
Whether the statements which it contains be feebly or strongly put may
properly be questioned, but none of them can be successfully denied.

But this aspect of the matter gives me small uneasiness. The important
consideration is, will the book, assuming that it is accepted as the
truth, do the work, or any large part of the work, which it was designed
to do? Will readers be influenced by it to practical action; will it be an
effective element in the forces that are now rising up to make wickedness
and corruption less than they are? The proposal toward which the book
points and in which it ultimates is so radical and astounding--nothing
less than that _Penal Imprisonment for Crime be Abolished_--that the
author can hardly escape the apprehension that the mass of the public will
dismiss it as preposterous and impossible. And yet nothing is more certain
in my opinion than that penal imprisonment for crime must cease, and if it
be not abolished by statute, it will be by force. It must be abolished
because, alarming or socially destructive though alternatives to it may
appear, it is worse than any alternative, being not only dangerous, but
wicked, and it breeds and multiplies the evils it pretends to heal or
diminish. It is far more wicked and dangerous than it was a thousand or a
hundred years ago, because society is more enlightened than it was then,
and the multitude now exercise power which was then confined to the few.
Whatever person or society knowingly and wilfully permits the existence
of a wickedness which it might extirpate, makes itself a party thereto,
and also inflames the wickedness itself. And the ignorance or the
impotence which we could plead heretofore in history, we cannot plead
to-day. We know, we have power, and we must act; if we shrink from
acting, action will be taken against us by powers which cannot be
estimated or controlled. This book is meant to confirm our knowledge and
to stimulate and direct, in a measure, our action; and to avert, if
possible, the consequences of not acting. Its individual power may be
slight; but it should be the resolve of every honest and courageous man
and woman to add to it the weight of their own power. Wonderful things
have been accomplished before now by means which seemed, in their
beginning, as inadequate and weak as this.

In the sixth chapter of the Book of Joshua you may read the great type and
example of such achievements, the symbol of every victory of good over
evil, the thing that could not be done by man's best power, skill and
foresight, accomplished, with God to aid, by a breath. The defensive
strength of Jericho was greater, compared with the means of attack then
known, than that of Sebastopol in the fifties of the last century, or of
Plevna in the seventies, or of Port Arthur a few years since. Those walls
were too high to be scaled, too massive to be beaten down, and they were
defended by a great king and his mighty men of valor. From any moral point
of view, the enterprise of destroying the city was hopeless. Nor did the
Lord add anything to such weapons of offense as Joshua already possessed.
Seven trumpets of rams' horns were the sole agents of the destruction
provided; and not the trumpets themselves, but the breath of the mouths of
the seven priests who should blow through them, should overthrow those
topless ramparts, and give the king and his army and his people into the
hand of the men of Israel. Were such a proposition presented to our
consideration to-day, we can imagine what would be the comments of the
Army and Navy departments, of Congress, of the editors of newspapers, of
witty paragraphers, and of the man on the street. Possibly the churches
themselves might hesitate before giving their support to such a plan of
war: "We must take the biblical stories in a figurative sense!" But stout
Joshua had seen the angel of the Lord, with his sword drawn, the night
before; and he knew nothing of figures of speech. He got the seven
trumpets of rams' horns, and put them in the hands of the seven priests,
and led the hosts of the Israelites round and round the walls of Jericho
day after day for six days, the trumpets blowing amain, and the hosts
silent. And on the seventh day, the hosts compassed the walls of the city
seven times; "And at the seventh time, when the priests blew with the
trumpets, Joshua said unto the people, Shout; for the Lord hath given you
the city.... So the people shouted when the priests blew with the
trumpets; and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the
trumpets, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the walls fell
down flat, so that every man went up into the city, every man straight
before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that
was within the city."

Yes, the biblical stories are to be taken in a figurative sense; they
stand as symbols for spiritual actions in the nature of man; though that
is not to say that the events narrated did not actually take place as
recorded. But Joshua had faith; and faith in the hearts of the champions
of right begets fear in the hearts of supporters of wrong, and the
defenses they have so laboriously built up tumble distractedly about their
ears when the trumpets of the Lord blow and the people who believe in Him
utter a mighty shout. Our jails are our Jericho; the evils which they
encompass and protect are greater than the sins of that strong city; but a
breath may shatter them into irretrievable ruin. Not compromises; not
gradual and circumspect approaches; not prudent considerations of
political economy, nor sound sociological principles; but simple faith in
God and a blast on the ram's horn.

My business in this book was to show that penal imprisonment is an evil,
and its perpetuation a crime; that it does not reform the criminal but
destroys him body and soul; that it does not protect the community but
exposes it to incalculable perils; and that the assumption that a
criminal class exists among us separate and distinct from any and
the best of the rest of us is Pharisaical, false and wicked. The
"Subterranean Brotherhood" are our brothers--they are ourselves, unjustly
and vainly condemned to serve as scapegoats for the rest. What the
criminal instinct or propensity in a man needs is not seclusion, misery,
pain and despotic control, but free air and sunlight, free and cheerful
human companionship, free opportunity to play his part in human service,
and the stimulus, on all sides of him, of the example of such service.
Men enfeebled by crime are not cured by punishment, or by homilies and
precepts, but by taking off our coats and showing them personally how
honest and useful things are done. And let every lapse and failure on
their part to follow the example, be counted not against them, but
against ourselves who failed to convince them of the truth, and hold them
up to the doing of good. Had we been sincere and hearty enough, we would
have prevailed.

I do not underrate the difficulties; they are immeasurable; the hope seems
as forlorn as that of the Israelites against the walls of Jericho. But
they are forlorn and immeasurable only because, and so long as, we let our
selfish personal interests govern and mold our public and social action.
Altruism will not heal the inward sore, but at best only put on its
surface a plausible plaster which leaves the inward still corrupt; for
altruism is a policy and not an impulse, proceeding not from the heart but
from the intelligence--the policy of enlightened selfishness. It has
already been tried thoroughly, and proved thoroughly inefficient; it is
the motive power behind charitable organization; it breeds a cold,
impersonal, economic spirit in charity workers, and coldness, ingratitude
and resentment in those who are worked upon. It will not do to speak of
Tom, Dick and Harry as cases Nos. 1, 2 and 3. You must call them by name
and think of them as flesh of your flesh and blood of your blood, to whom
you owe more than they owe you, or than you can repay. Put a heart into
them by giving them your own heart; do not look down on them and advise
them, but at and into them and take counsel with them; or even up to them,
and learn from them. They know and feel much that you have never felt or
known.

The book is full of shortcomings, imperfections, omissions, and
repetitions. But there is meaning and purpose in it, and I hope it may do
its work.

JULIAN HAWTHORNE




I


INTRODUCTORY

Conspiracies of silence--it is a common phrase; but it has never been
better illustrated than in regard to what goes on in prisons, here and in
other parts of the world. The conspiracy has been attacked sometimes, and
more of late than usual, and once in a while we have caught a glimpse of
what is occurring behind those smug, well-fitting doors. But they have
been mere glimpses, incoherent, obscure, often imaginative, or guesswork
based on scanty, incorrect, at any rate secondhand information; never yet
conclusive and complete. In England, Charles Dickens and Charles Reade
have personally visited prisons, talked with prisoners, written stories
that have stirred the world, and forced improvements. Great prisoners
like Kropotkin have related their experiences in Russia, and our own
George Kennan prompted us to congratulate ourselves, in our complacent
ignorance, that our methods of generating virtue out of crime were not
like those of the Russians. It was annoying, after this, to be assured by
writers in some of our magazines--called muckrakers by some, pioneers by
others--that after a sagacious, eager, well-equipped investigation into
our own prison conditions, peering into depths, interrogating convicts,
searching records, they had found little difference in principle between
our way of handling offenses against law, and that of our Cossack
neighbors. The latter are more sensational and red-blooded about it, that
is all. These revelations compelled some removals and a few reforms; but
they too failed to bring home livingly to public knowledge and
imagination the whole ugly, sluggish, vicious truth.

Then, only yesterday, an amiable, naive and impressionable young gentleman
underwent a week of amateur convictship in one of our jails, and came
forth tremulous with indignation and astonishment; though, obviously and
inevitably, he did not have to endure the one thing which, more than
hardship or torture, is the main evil of penal imprisonment--the feeling
of helplessness and outrage in the presence of a despotic and unrighteous
power, from which there is no appeal or escape. The convict has no rights,
no friends, and no future; the amateur may walk out whenever he pleases,
and will be received by an admiring family and friends, and extolled by
public opinion as a reformer who suffered martyrdom in the cause. Yet what
he has experienced and learned falls as far short of what convicts endure,
as the emotions of a theater-goer at a problem play (with a tango supper
awaiting him in a neighboring restaurant) fall short of the long-drawn
misery and humiliation of those who undergo in actuality what the play
pretended.

Meanwhile, scores of animated humanitarians, penologists, criminologists,
theorists and idealists have consulted, resolved, recommended, and
agitated, striking hard but in the dark, and most of their blows going
wide. Commissioners and inspectors have appeared menacingly at prison
gates, loudly heralded, equipped with plenipotentiary powers; and the
gates have been thrown wide by smiling wardens and sympathetic
guards--tender hearted, big brained, gentle mannered people, their
mouths overflowing with honeyed words and bland assurances, their clubs
and steel bracelets snugly stowed away in unobtrusive pockets--who
have personally and assiduously conducted their honored visitors
through marble corridors, clean swept cells, spacious dining saloons,
sanctimonious chapels, studious libraries and sunny yards; and have
stood helpfully by while happy felons told their tales of cheerful hours
of industry alternating with long periods of refreshing exercise and
peaceful repose; nay, these officials will sometimes quite turn their
backs upon the confidences between prisoner and investigator, lest there
should seem to be even a shadow of restraint in the outpourings. "Is all
well?"--"All is well!"--"No complaints?"--"No complaints!" What, then,
could inspectors and commissioners do except bid a friendly and
apologetic adieu to their ingenuous entertainers, and go forth bearing in
each hand a pail of freshest whitewash? And if, during the colloquies,
any malignant prisoner had happened, in a burst of reckless despair, to
venture on an indiscreet disclosure, the visitors were allowed to get
well out of earshot before the thud of clubs on heads was heard, and the
groans of victims chained to bars in dark cells of airless stench,
underneath the self same polished floors which had but an hour before
resounded to paeans of eulogy and contentment.

This is not a fancy picture--no, not even of what is known to judges and
attorneys (but not to prisoners) as "The model penitentiary of America,"
down in sunny Georgia. Fancy is not needed to round out the tale to be
told of conditions existing and of things done and suffered in this age
and country, behind walls which shut in fellow creatures of ours whom
facile jurors and autocratic courts have sent to living death and to
worse than death in accordance with laws passed by legislatures for
the benefit of--What, or Whom?--Of the community?--Of social order
and security?--Of outraged morality?--Of the reform of convicts
themselves?--These questions may be considered as we go along. Meanwhile
we may take notice that a number of persons, more or less deserving, gain
their livelihood by the detection, indictment, arrest, conviction and
imprisonment of other persons more or less undeserving; and whether or
not these proceedings or any of them are rash or prudent, straight or
crooked, just or tyrannous, lenient or cruel, honest or corrupt--is of
secondary importance. What is of first importance is to supply fuel for
the furnace of this unwieldy machine which operates our criminal system.
Our costly courts must have occupation, our expensive jails must be kept
full. We have succumbed to the disease which has been called legalism--the
persuasion that the craving for individual initiative born of the
unsettling of old faiths and the opening of new horizons, as well as
the consequences of poverty, misery, ignorance, and hereditary
incompetence--that this vast turning of the human tide, manifesting itself
in many forms, some benign, many evil--that this broad and profound
phenomenon can be met and controlled only by force, suppression,
punishment, the infliction of physical pain and moral humiliation.

This disease perverts that beautiful and ideal impulse toward mutual
order and self-restraint, which is Law, into lust for arbitrary and
impudent power to control the acts and even the thoughts of men down to
petty personal details; so that human life, at this very moment when it
most needs and aspires to enlightened liberty, is crushed back into
mechanical conformity with statutory regulations to which no common
assent has been or can be obtained, and the logical consequences of which
are as yet but obscurely recognized, even by the limited portion of the
community which has been active in establishing them. To give it its most
favorable interpretation, it is a sort of crazy counsel of perfection,
incompatible with the healthy tenor and contents of human nature, and
sure in the end to involve in its errant tentacles not only those who are
the avowed objects of its pursuit, but likewise the lawmakers and
enforcers themselves. Like all abuses, in its own entrails are the seeds
of its destruction. Laws now on our books, if radically applied, would
land almost every mother's son of us behind prison bars. And no doubt,
when the murderer, forger, swindler, or white slaver, in his cell, begins
to recognize in his new cell mate the judge who sentenced him, the
attorney who prosecuted him, the juryman who convicted him, or the
plaintiff who accused him, we shall find it expedient to subject our
legal nostrums to a system of purgation, and our fever of legalism will
abate. But if we will take thought betimes we may meet the trouble half
way, and thus avert, perhaps, the danger that the fever will be checked
only by the overturning of all law, sane or insane. The following
chapters are designed to help in defeating a catastrophe so unlovely.

Be it observed, first, that the only persons competent to reveal prison
life as it is are persons who have been sentenced to prisons and lived in
them as prisoners. Such showings might have been made long ago and often
but that those who knew the facts were afraid to speak, or could not win
belief, or had not education and capacity for expression requisite to get
their facts printed. Others, exhausted or unmanned by their sufferings,
wished only to hide themselves and forget and be forgotten; others have
indictments still hanging over them, to be pressed should they betray a
disposition to loquacity. Seldom, at any rate, has a man trained as a
writer lived out a prison sentence and emerged with the ability and
determination to throw the prison doors ajar and expose what has hitherto
been invisible, unknown, and unsuspected.

Such a story has importance, because there is no group of persons
anywhere but has some relation near or remote to what goes on in prisons.
And the constant output of new laws, creating new crimes (so that one
might say a man goes to bed innocent and wakes guilty)--this delirious
industry must goad us all into feeling a personal interest in the
administration of our penal machinery. You saw your friend tried and
sentenced yesterday; you may yourself stand in the dock to-morrow,
knowing yourself morally innocent, astounded at finding yourself
technically guilty. Yet you yourself by your civic neglect or ignorance
contributed to the enactment of the statute which now catches you
tripping. You had better search into these matters, and find out what the
authorities whom you helped to office are doing with their authority.

I have served my term in prison. The strain of that experience has not
sharpened my appetite to bear testimony; my desire, as evening falls, is
for rest and tranquillity. But I owe it to my American birth, parentage
and posterity, which connect me with what is honorable in my country, and
to my individual manhood, to do what I hold to be a duty. Especially am I
sensible of the claim upon me of those voiceless fellow men of mine still
behind the bars, who cannot help themselves, who have honored me with
their tragic confidences, who have believed that I would do my utmost to
let the truth be known and show the world what penal imprisonment really
means. I will keep faith with them.

I do not know that my attempt will succeed. Not every reader has
imagination or sympathy enough to step into another's shoes--especially
into the sorry shoes of a convict--and to realize facts which, even if we
credit them, are disquieting and unpleasant. They make us uncomfortable
and keep us awake at night. It is pleasanter to ignore or forget them, to
say that they must be exaggerated, or that their purveyor has some ax of
his own to grind; besides, do not abuses cure themselves in time?--and
there is always time enough!

Three or four men, while I was spending my months in jail, had time to
die of broken health and broken hearts, due to physical assaults or
neglect, combined with a system of mental torture yet more effective and
barbarous. Hundreds more are in similar plight, in Atlanta jail alone,
who might be saved by timely attention and common humanity. Of this, more
anon. I wish now to say that I undertake this work with a purpose as
serious as I am capable of; and that among the inducements that move me,
personal grudge and grievance are not included. Individual enmities are
foolish and sterile for the individuals, and a bore for everybody else.
Individuals are never so much to be hated as are the conditions which
prompt them to act hatefully. Improve the environment which produced the
murderer, robber, corrupt judge, rascally attorney, cruel warden, brutal
guard, and you are likely to get a creature quite humane and tolerable.
On the other hand, however, in the process of opposing evil conditions,
one cannot avoid contact with the human products of them--sometimes in a
stern and conclusive manner. Without going the length of the Spanish
Inquisition, which tortured the body on earth in order to save the soul
for heaven, it is not to be denied that punishment for evil deeds is
latent in the bowels of the evil doer and will make him suffer in one way
or another. We cannot strike a bad condition without hitting somebody who
is carrying it out; and I am in the position of the Quaker who went to
war: "Friend," he admonished his foe-man, "thee is standing just where I
am going to shoot!"

I am not disposed to present here, in the way of credentials, any account
of the circumstances that landed me in prison; still less to plead
anything in the way of extenuation. The District Attorney, in his
address, described me as a member of one of the most dangerous band of
crooks and swindlers that ever infested New York. The government of this
country authorized his statement; the news was bruited afar, wherever men
read and write and invest money on the planet, and it appealed to every
city editor and scandal-monger. Julian Hawthorne, son of the author of
"The Scarlet Letter," a pickpocket. Well, what next!

If ever I cherished the notion that the charge was too preposterous to be
believed, I was abundantly undeceived. To jail I went, and there served
out my time to the uttermost limit allowed by the law. But in this
connection I must touch on a matter which caused me some annoyance at the
time.

In June of 1913 an editorial appeared in a New York newspaper endorsing
some petitions which had been circulated asking the President of the
United States to pardon me, mainly on the ground that in my ignorance of
business I had been more of an innocent dupe than a deliberate
malefactor. I had known nothing of these petitions; had I known of them,
I would have omitted no effort to prevent them.

But I did get hold of the editorial; and found myself placed in the
position of admitting myself guilty of the crime charged against me, but
cowering under the pitiful excuse of having been bamboozled by others.
What was even less tolerable, it presented me as entreating pardon of a
government from which I would in fact have accepted nothing short of an
unconditional apology. The Government had done me an injury under forms
of law; I am only one man, and the Government stands for a hundred
millions; but justice has no concern with numbers. My mining company and
I were ruined; the iron and silver which we tried to put on the market
will enrich others after we are gone; but I knew that what I and my
partners had said of them was true. What had I to do with "pardons"?
Pardon for what?

I lost no time in writing a letter to the editor of the paper, defining
my attitude in the matter; but it never reached him. It is in the private
safe of Warden Moyer, of Atlanta--or so I was informed by the Deputy
Warden, when I was released in October--and for aught I know or care it
may remain there forevermore.

Whether my respect for Law is higher or lower than is that of those
persons who are responsible for my being sent to prison and kept there,
may appear hereafter. But if crime be the result of anti-social impulses,
then I hold that our present statutes fail to include under their
categories, numerous and inquisitive though they be, a class of criminals
who do, or intend, quite as much harm as was ever perpetrated by any man
now under lock and key. Many of these persons occupy high places; most of
them are respectable. We meet them and greet them in society. I know
them, and also the murderers, highwaymen and yeggs of the penitentiary;
and when I want sincere, charitable, generous human companionship, my
choice is for the latter.




II


THE DEVIL'S ANTECHAMBER

The judge pronounced our several prison sentences; that they were not also
sentences of death was due to circumstances which developed later. The
jury had previously dispersed, clothed in the sanctity of duties
discreetly performed, knowing why they did them, and enjoying whatever
consolation or advantage appertained thereto. Marshal Henkel cast upon us
the look of the turkey buzzard as he swoops upon his prey, and we found
ourselves being hustled down the familiar corridors, and into a room which
we had not visited before; a few assistant marshals were there, and ere
long a knot of newspaper men entered, observant and sympathetic, ready to
receive and record the last words of the condemned.

It was about six o'clock of a dark and rainy March evening. "Any statement
you would like to make?" One stands upon the brink of the living world,
facing the darkness and silence, and hears that question.

Here is an end of things, a nothing, a sort of death. The support and
countenance of one's fellow creatures are withdrawn; you are no longer a
part of organized social existence. The rights, privileges and courtesies
of manhood are stripped from you. You are adjudged unfit to touch the hand
of an honest man in greeting; you are made impotent, disgraced, consigned
to the refuse heap. The helpless shame put upon you is borne tenfold by
those who bear your name, those you love and who love you. All that
touches you henceforth shall be sordid, base and foul.

The prison officials who stand near you meet your eye with a leer of
familiarity; they have handled thousands of men in your situation; they
will have a grin or a growl for any remonstrance or protest you may make;
power over you has been given to them; in you there is no power. You
cannot blame them; their authority was deputed to them by men above them,
who in turn received it from others; they are parts of the great machine,
working irresistibly and automatically.

The judge is blameless; he had said, "The verdict of the jury makes it my
painful duty to sentence you!" The jury is not to blame; they had decided
upon the evidence, in accordance with their oath. The witnesses who bore
testimony against you--did they not testify upon a solemn adjuration to
utter nothing but the truth, at the peril of their immortal souls? The
indictments to whose truth they bore witness--were they not made and
brought by officers appointed by law to seek only impartial justice, and
sworn to seek it without fear or favor?

Go back yet another step if you will, and consider the inspectors and
detectives who gathered the complaints against you--is the beginning with
them? No: they did but act for the protection of the community against a
crime of which you were suspected, which was resolved to be a crime by the
representatives of the nation in Congress assembled--that is, by the
nation itself. You yourself, therefore, as part of the nation, share with
the rest the responsibility for your present predicament. Then, whether
the verdict against you were right or wrong--whether you be innocent or
guilty--the blame at last comes home to you.

Such is the _reductio ad absurdum_--the lawyers' argument, technically
flawless, though proceeding upon a transparent fallacy. That fallacy I
shall consider hereafter; the question of the moment is the
reporters'--"Have you any statement to make?"

Of what avail to answer? Has not enough been said during the trial of the
past four months, and in vain? The young fellow stands there, courteously
inquisitive, not unsympathetic perhaps, his pencil suspended. Have I any
last words for the world which I am leaving? Shall I declaim of injustice,
outrage, perjury? Shall I threaten revenge, or entreat mercy? Shall I
"break down," or shall I "maintain an appearance of bravado"--he is ready
to record either.

No, I will do none of these futile things. In such extremities, a man's
manhood and dignity come to his support. I am helpless, to be sure, but
only physically so. All this portentous paraphernalia of court and prison
can touch nothing more than my body--my spirit is unscathed. It is the
ancient consolation, coming down through poetry and history even to me.
The Government--the Nation--can destroy my life, separate me from my
people, throw mud on my name; but they cannot take away one atom of my
consciousness of the truth. And it is better to have that consciousness
than to retain all the rest without it. Blessed ethical truisms, which
come to our succor when all else falls away!

Accordingly, the reporters were supplied with a few grave, not sensational
words, suggested by the spur of the moment; they receded into the
background, and Marshal Henkel, zealous to do his whole duty, and prevent
the escape of an elderly gentleman through locked doors, echoing
corridors, and the resistance of half a dozen lusty guards, advanced to
the front of the stage and gave the order, "Handcuffs!" Knowing my marshal
as I did, I was prepared for him, and extended my arm, till I felt the
steel close round it with a solid snap. I was a manacled convict, and the
community was saved.

But no time was to be lost; it was already after hours for the city
prison; and the stout party of the other part of the handcuff and I passed
out through the opening door promptly. As we turned the corner of the
corridor, I suddenly saw the face of one of my sons-in-law, pale in the
electric light; he forced a smile to his lips, and threw up one hand in
greeting and farewell. Ah, those who are left behind! who can compensate
them, and how can the injury done them be forgiven? I smiled a moment to
myself as I thought of the ready answer of the august purveyor of the
law--"You should have thought of that when you committed your crime!"
That answer is also a part of the automatic machinery, and comes out, when
the button is pressed, as inevitably as the package of chewing-gum from
its receptacle--even more so!

I felt the rain on my face as we emerged from the old postoffice building,
and saw the slanting drops as we passed through the rays of the street
lamp on the corner. It was a memorable journey for me, short in its
material aspect, long otherwise; and I noticed the particulars. Newspaper
Row loomed on the right, strange in its familiarity, my work-place of many
years. Here was the Third Avenue terminal, whence, a few hours before, I
had confidently expected to take the train homeward, a free and vindicated
man. There were glimpses, in the wet glare, of black headlines of
newspapers, and the shrill professional cries of the gamins, "Hawthorne
convicted!" It was like living in a detective story--but this was real!

But then came the thought that had often visited me in the past months, as
I sat in the dingy courtroom, and listened perfunctorily to the legal
wrangle, the abuse and defense, the long-drawn testimony of witnesses, the
comment of the precise and genial judge, and contemplated idly the jaded,
uncomfortable jury, the covert whispering of Assistant District Attorneys
and postoffice inspectors, the dangling maps and the piles of
documents--when I had asked myself, "Is all this real, or are they
transient symbols importing a concealed significance?" Then, to my
imagination, the empty walls would seem to melt away, and I saw a great,
benign face and figure above the bench of the judge, holding a trial of
those who labored so busily--a trial not entered in the books, and alien
from that which occupied us; and recording judgments, unheard here, but
eternal.

Was that the reality? Then let come what might on this plane of foolish
contention, where we strive to cover the Immutable with the petty mask of
our mutabilities. We sweat and toil for ends which we know not, and our
paltry and blind decisions, our triumphs and failures, determine nothing
but the degree of our own ignorance and impotence. The Lord's aims and
issues are not ours, and ours do but measure our spiritual stature, and
direct our immortal destiny, in His sight.

Yes, but this palpable world has its place and function nevertheless, to
be accepted and used while time lasts. If those who tried me were on
trial, I had no personal concern in the matter. My business, now, was to
keep pace with my companion, who obligingly allowed his arm to swing with
mine, so that passers-by, even if they could afford to divert their
attention from their own footing on the muddy pavements, and from the
management of their umbrellas, would not have noticed the bond uniting him
and me. For this courtesy--the only possible one in the circumstances--I
took occasion to express my recognition, to which he responded with easy
friendliness. "We don't never make no trouble for them as don't go to hunt
none," was his remark.

We were now in Centre Street, and the Tombs was close at hand; and I drew
into my lungs full draughts of the open air, murky though it was,
reflecting that my opportunities of doing so in future would be limited.

Here were the steps supporting the tall steel gate, through which, in
former days, I had seen many a poor devil pass; it was now others' turn to
commiserate, or to jeer, the poor devil that was myself. There was no
delay--we seemed to be awaited; and in the next minute I had felt what it
is to be locked into a prison. I was behind bars, and could not get out at
my own will--nor at any one else's, for that matter; only at the
impersonal fiat of the machine.

My marshal chatted and laughed a moment with the keeper, then gave me his
buxom paw in farewell. I was led through stone passages, past rows of
barred cells from which peered visages of fellow prisoners, incurious and
preoccupied, or truculent and reckless--men under indictment and without
bail, convicts making appeal, and culprits jailed for minor offenses. Such
men were to be my comrades for the future. Some were out in the corridors,
pacing up and down or chatting with friends; for the laws of the Tombs are
unsearchable.

It is a unique place, a Devil's Antechamber, where almost anything except
what is decent and orderly may happen. It is not so much a prison or
penitentiary as a human pound, where every variety of waif and stray turns
up and sojourns for a while; murderers, pickpockets, political scapegoats,
confidence men, old professionals, first-time offenders, even suspects
afterwards to be proved innocent. There is nothing that I know of to
prevent thorough-going convicts from getting in here permanently; the
Tombs is of catholic hospitality. But they do not properly belong here; it
is but their halfway house--the antechamber.

And discrimination must be observed in classifying the inmates; no one
here likes to be regarded as beyond hope of bettering or escaping from his
restricted condition. He wears his own clothes, for one thing--and no
small thing; he is not known by a number; it is not, I believe, en regle
to club him into insensibility at will and with impunity, or to starve him
to death, or so much as to hang him up by the wrists in a dark cell. The
guards or keepers do not go about visibly armed with revolvers or rifles;
talking and smoking are not prohibited; the grotesque assemblage is let
out into the corridors occasionally, where they shamble up and down and
exchange observations and confidences; and they have an hour outdoors in
the stone paved, high-walled yard.

Moreover, extraordinary liberties can be obtained, if you know how to go
about it, and possess the means of bandaging inconvenient eyes. Not only
are we permitted to stampede our quotas of bedbugs, but leave may be had
to decorate our cells with souvenirs of art and domesticity, to soften our
sitting-down appliances with cushions, to drape the curtain of modesty
before the grating of restriction, to carpet our stone flooring, to supply
our leisure hours with literary nourishment, to secrete stealthy cakes and
apples for bodily solace, to enjoy surreptitious and not over-hazardous
corridor outings when others are locked up, to write and receive any sort
of letters at any times, without having them first read and stamped by
licensed letter-ghouls.

More, there was at least one man among my companions there who contrived,
by devices which I never sought to fathom, to pass the immitigable outer
gates themselves every day, attend to his business in the outer world for
as many hours as might serve, returning quietly in time for last
roll-call. He took a keeper with him, of course, but only in order to
assuage possible anxiety on the part of those responsible for his
security; and one cannot help suspecting that as soon as the two found
themselves under the free sky, the keeper betook himself to some friendly
saloon, moving-picture palace, or other inviting retreat, and only saw the
other again when they met by appointment in their trysting place.

It was safe enough no doubt; the prisoner would hardly think it worth his
while to attempt actual disimprisonment; he was content to sleep at night
in his cosy and comfortable cell. But the Moral Powers who live in white
waistcoats and saintly collars might have been restless in their innocent
sleep, had they known what things are practicable under the austere name
of incarceration in the City Prison.

Revolving these matters, I could only come to the conclusion that they
pointed in one direction, namely, toward the anachronism and absurdity of
our whole theory of punishment by imprisonment. As I shall have plenty of
cause to give full discussion to this subject later on, I will only touch
it here; but the fact is that we imprison malefactors or law-breakers (not
always synonymous by any means, since there are a score of artificial
crimes for one real one) not because we believe that to be the right thing
for them, but simply by reason of our inability to imagine anything more
suitable and sane. Moreover, there are the steel and stone jail buildings
themselves, which cost much in money and more in graft; what shall be done
with them? The wardens and guards, too--all the fantastic appanages of
these institutions--are they to be cast incontinently upon a frigid world?

The law, in short, lags leagues and ages behind the moral sense of the
community, so encumbered with its baggage train that it can never fetch up
lost ground. We know perfectly well that the only punishments that can
improve men are punishments of conscience from within, and of love from
without--which is practically the same thing; and that punishment by
imprisonment is punishment by hate in fact, whatever it may be in theory,
and therefore diabolical and destructive. It can only inflame and multiply
the evils it pretends to heal; and this is no theory, but a certified and
established truth. Everybody who has been through it, knows it, everybody
who dares to think may know it.

The whole thing is ridiculous, a huge and clumsy absurdity, stepping on
its own feet and smelling to heaven. And here in our America it is to-day
worse than in Italy or Russia, in some respects, because we know better
that it is wrong, and therefore try to hide its enormities from open
daylight. We lie and dissimulate about it, investigators whitewash it,
conservative citizens deprecate exaggeration about it, wardens and
guards--some of them, not all--are more wicked in their secret practises
with convicts than they would be if they did not know that they would be
stopped if the community knew of them. And it was inevitable that only a
low type of men would accept positions as guards and wardens, because no
honest man worth his salt could afford to work for the pay that these
officials get; and the latter themselves would not work for it, did they
not depend upon stealing twice as much, or more, by the graft.

But the system, inwardly rotten, crumbles; and in the interval remaining
before it falls, the devil is getting in some of his most strenuous work.
I know, and rejoice, that enlightened and magnanimous methods are
obtaining in some places; hearty and brave men, here and there, are making
themselves wardens of the good in men instead of exploiters of the evil.
But in most prisons--among them, in that one down in Atlanta, whence I
come--the devil is laboring overtime, conscious that his time is short.

The worst criminals there--as God sees criminals--are not the men in
branded attire who sit in their cells and slouch about their sterile
tasks, but men who walk the ranges in uniform, and who sit in the rooms of
managers; for the crimes of the former are crimes of poverty or of
passion, but those of the latter are voluntary, unforced, spontaneous
crimes against human nature itself. They are upheld in high places; they
are fortified by difficulty of "technical proof"; they are guarded by the
menace of the spy system, and of criminal libel; but there is some reason
to think that their term is near.

But let us return to that queer Antechamber of the Devil at the corner of
Centre and Franklin Streets.

There is a picture by that strange and unmatchable English artist of the
Eighteenth Century, William Hogarth, of the mad house in London know as
Bedlam. If he were here, he might draw a companion picture of the Tombs.
The one is as much as the other a crazy, incoherent, irrational, futile
place, yet embodying very accurately a certain aspect of the civic
attitude toward the insanity of vice and crime of the day. There is
nothing intelligent, purposeful, trenchant or radical about it; it is
planted in ignorance and grows by neglect.

The keepers of it are good natured people enough, with a sense of humor,
and free from trammels of principle, official or ethical. Their greatest
severity is exercised toward those who stand outside the gates and crave
permission to visit their friends within; these find the way arduous and
beset with pitfalls of "orders," hours, and other mystic rites, except
where they blow in miraculously, enforced by some breath from on high.

The inmates themselves, meantime, get on quite prosperously, so long at
least as their money or money's worth holds out. There is no license or
aptitude on their guardians' part to club them for relaxation's sake, or
to kick them into underground dungeons for "observation" (you will
understand that term by and by), or in any manner to hold a carnival of
wanton brutality with them. The general idea is merely to keep them
somewhere inside the building for the appointed or convenient time; beyond
that, a liberal view is adopted of the conditions of their sojourn. They
can buy eats to suit themselves, and have them served to them in their
cells; they can hold communication with one another and with the outer
world; I suppose they might wear evening dress after six o'clock if they
wanted to. They are not victims of despotic and irresponsible power, and
this is not only good for them, but also for the keepers, who are not led
into the degradation and monstrous inhumanities which the possession of
such power breeds in regular prisons.

Most of these prisoners expect to get out before long, either to go on to
more permanent quarters, or to be liberated altogether; many of them
emerge with comparatively small loss of social standing; for, indeed,
highly respectable persons occasionally stray in here. The Tombs is not
regarded as a final or fatal misfortune in a man's career. Yet it has its
drawbacks.

Dirt is one of the more obvious of these; I might call it filth, but it
depends on how one has been brought up. The impurity, at any rate, is not
confined to the surfaces of the cells, floors and walls, but it creeps
into the current language, and permeates the atmosphere. I am convinced
that there never has been or could be a houseful of people who hear or use
fouler and more unremitting obscenities than are those which flow
sewer-wise and unhindered from the lips of many of this population.

It dribbles and exgurgitates, black and noisome, at the slightest
provocation--nay, at none whatever, but with the delight of the past
master and artist in verbal nastiness, anxious to display his erudition.
It is a corruption of thought and expression so foul and concentrated, and
withal so limited in its vocabulary and scope, that it fastens itself in
the ear by a damnable iteration which no diverting of the attention can
overcome; and it announces a depth of moral and mental debasement which
seems as far from human as from merely animal possibilities; it is of the
uttermost soundings of Tophet, and would probably be modified by
fresh-heated gridirons even there.

This speech, or verbosity rather--for it has none of the logic or
continuity of mortal utterances--does not continue uninterruptedly during
the day, but observes special hours, when the guards are paying even less
than their usual attention to the vagaries of their charges. Of these
periods, the hours of early dawn are the most fertile.

When I dwelt in the environs of the city, it was my fortunate habit, in
summer, to awake at dawn, just before sunrise, when the wide pasture
outside my window was still obscure with the shadows of night, but the sky
had begun to kindle with the splendors of day. In a group of darksome
trees beside a little stream two hundred paces distant a song thrush was
wont to trill forth the holy soul of awakening nature in such a paean of
deathless Pan as inspired John Keats to utter the melodies of his magic
ode. It consecrated the footsteps of the approaching sun, and the hearer
was borne back on its swelling current to those pure early aeons of the
human race, when love was the lord of life and innocence went forth
crowned with rapture.

For this hymn of the primal gods was now substituted the hideous strophes
and antistrophes of the grimy spirits of darkest New York. As one
performer after another took up the strain, to and fro and from upper to
lower tiers of cells, one awaited some seismic cataclysm to put an end to
it and them; and the pauses of it were punctuated by bursts of dreary
laughter, applausive of the incredible gushings of blighting depravity.
They were the heralds of the prison day--the tune to which its steps were
set. After it was over--when the yawning keeper had rattled the bars and
threatened a twelve-hour close confinement to the perpetrators--one was
amazed to identify with the latter persons outwardly in human shape,
instead of malformed and sooty fiends from the bottomless abyss. I doubt
whether anything to range with this occurs in any other criminal cauldron
in the world; and therefore, with stopped nostrils, have I tried to give
some faint adumbration of its character.

The head keeper of the menagerie I saw but once or twice; he was of
Falstaffian proportions, with a clear and steady masculine eye and a
demeanor of genial and complacent authority. He knew what and when to see
and not to see, and had his own measure of the legalities and the
proprieties. Little gusts of investigations and reforms passed by him as
the eddying dust of the street sweeps by granite skyscrapers. "_J'y
suis--J'y reste!_" was his motto. The subordinates had a general Irish
complexion to my feeling; they were there to gather tips under the
humorous guise of marshals of order. They were affable and easy, going as
far as they could with only so much show of resistance as might lend more
value to their yielding.

The prisoners were as heterogeneous as the contents of a rag-picker's
auction. Yet they associated with little friction, herding uniformly kind
with kind, only rarely lending themselves to transient ructions. They
played little jokes on each other; a fat and serious captive was sitting
of an evening at his cell door, absorbed in the perusal of a wide-spread
newspaper; a gnome-like passerby in the corridor lit an unsuspected match,
and suddenly the newspaper was a sheet of flame.

There were uglier spectacles; we had among us a fresh murderer, who after
killing his wife had retained grudge enough against her to hack off her
head. He kept darkly to his cell, sitting hour after hour with his head
leaning on his hand, and eyes unswervingly downcast. His crime was not
popular in that company, and none sought his companionship. At the other
end of the scale were dazed, foreign creatures, guilty of they knew not
what, gropingly and vainly striving to understand and to make themselves
understood. There was the scum of the gutters; and there were men of
intellect and high breeding, arming their hearts to resist shame and
despair, and bending to soften the plight of children of misery below
them.

The soul of the new comer blenches and shivers occasionally as he
contemplates the grisly, crazy scene, and thinks of all that menaces the
women at home. And when, in the visiting hours, the women come and stare
palely at the faces of those they love between the bars, wishing to cheer
them, but appalled and made giddy by the abject and sordid horror of the
solid fact, those who stare back at them and try to smile feel the grating
of the wheels of life on the harsh bottom of things. But a man's manhood
must not give way; there must be no triumph over him of these assaults and
underminings of the enemy. Soul gazes at soul; but the talk is superficial
and trivial. He is drowning in the gulf, and she stands yearning on the
brink, but there shall be no vain outcries or outstretched arms. It is a
condition wrought by men, not countenanced by God, and the spirit must
command the flesh to endure.



Punch the button and listen once more to the refrain--"You should have
thought of that before!" But can our posterity ever be induced to believe
that such inhumanities could have been committed in the divine name of
Law!

I am not qualified to write the epic of the Devil's Antechamber; I abode
there but ten days, as we reckon time. On a cool and clear Easter Sunday
morning the summons came to go forth to further adventures. Accompanied by
three deputies, but free of the Henkel handcuffs, we passed the gates and
trod the sunny pavements. Not a cloud in the blue sky, nor a taint upon
the pure wings of the free air. None that saw us pass suspected our
invisible fetters. Yet to me at least the thought that had ministered to
me in the actual courtroom and prison, that the fetters were a dream and
freedom the reality, was not accessible then. The absence of physical
bonds seemed to render the imprisonment more, not less undeniable.

But we stepped out briskly, and breathed while we might.




III


THE ROAD TO OBLIVION

Five of us stood on the platform of the Pennsylvania station; one stayed
behind as the train moved out. He was the answer to the question, "_Quis
custodiet ipsos custodes?_"--"Who shall watch the watchman?" Our two
marshals were to see that we did not escape; he was to see that they saw.
But his function ended when the departing whistle blew. He was a lean,
pale, taciturn personage in black; Marshal Henkel had perhaps substituted
him for the handcuffs. There was nothing between us and freedom now but
our brace of tipstaves, the train crew, the public in and out of the
train, the train itself moving at a fifty mile an hour pace, the law, and
our own common sense. Moreover, we had decided to see the adventure
through. Something more than nine hundred miles, and twenty-six hours, lay
between us and Atlanta.

The elder of our two guardians was a short but wide gentleman of
forty-five, of respectable attire and aspect, as of one who had seen the
world and had formed no flattering opinion of its quality, yet had not
permitted its imperfections to overcome his native amiable tolerance. He
was prepared to take things and men easy while they came that way, but
could harden and insist upon due occasion. Human nature--those varieties
of it, at least, which are not incompatible with criminal tendencies--was
his "middle name" (as he might have phrased it), so that in his proper
social environment he was not apt to make social mistakes. This
environment, however, could not but be constituted, in the main, of
convicts either actual or potential; and there was probably no citizen,
however high his standing or spotless his ostensible record, who in this
official's estimate might not have prison gates either before him or
behind him, or both. To be able to maintain, under the shadow of
convictions so harsh, a disposition so sunny, was surely an admirable
trait of character.

His assistant in the present job was still in the morning stage of his
career; a big, red-headed, rosy-cheeked, and obtrusively brawny youth of
five and twenty. He might be regarded as the hand of steel in the glove of
velvet of the combination. He may have carried bracelets of steel in his
rear pockets; but his associate earnestly assured me that such was far
from being the case. "I don't mind telling you the truth, Mr. Hawthorne,"
he confided to me with a companionable twist of the near corner of his
mouth, "I'd as soon think of cuffs, for gentlemen like you two, as nothin'
in the world! Why, it's like this--as far as I'm concerned, I'd just put a
postage-stamp on you and ship you off by yourselves--I'd know you'd turn
up all right of yourselves at the other end! That's me; but of course, we
has to foller the regulations; so there you are!" And the ruddy youngster
stretched his herculean limbs and grinned, as who should say, "Cuffs!
Hell! What d'yer know about that? Ain't I good for ten of yer?"

As the comely Pennsylvania landscape slid by, my friend of a lifetime and
I looked out on it with eyes that felt good-by. For us, the broad earth,
bright sunshine and fresh air were a phantasmagoria--we had no further
part in them. From college days onward, through just fifty years of life,
we had traveled almost side by side, giving the world the best that was in
us, not without honor; and now our country had stamped us as felons and
was sending us to jail. It had suddenly discovered in us a social and
moral menace to its own integrity and order, and had put upon us the
stigma of rats who would gnaw the timbers of the ship of state and corrupt
its cargo. The end of it all was to be a penitentiary cell, and disgrace
forever, to us and to ours.

But was the disgrace ours and theirs? When you kick a mongrel cur it lies
down on its back and holds up its paws, whining. But the thoroughbred acts
quite otherwise; you may kill it, but you cannot conquer it. We would not
lie supine under the assault of the blundering bully. Disgrace cannot be
inflicted from without,--it can only come to a man from within. And the
disgrace which is attempted unjustly must sooner or later be turned back
on those who attempted it; the men whom our country had deputed to handle
the machinery of law had blundered, and had convicted and condemned those
who had done no wrong. I had never felt or expressed anything stronger
than contempt for any particular persons actively concerned in our
indictment and trial--the pack that had snapped and snarled so busily at
our heels. Till the last I had believed that their purpose could not be
accomplished,--that the nation would awake to what was being done in the
nation's court, under sanction of the nation's laws. The public must at
last realize the moral impossibility that men who had all that is dearest
to men to lose, should throw it away for such motives as were ascribed to
us--ascribed, but, as we felt, not established. And when the public
realized that, thought I, they would perceive that the shame which the
incompetent handling of the legal machinery aimed to fix on us must
finally root itself not in us but in the public; since the world and
posterity, which, more for our names' sake than for our own, would note
what was being done, would not distinguish between the employee and the
master--the country and the country's attorneys, and would hold the former
and not the latter accountant.

I was mistaken; the public took the thing resignedly to say the least. And
though I consented to no individual animosities--for individuals in such
transactions are but creatures of their trade, subdued to what they work
in, like the dyer's hand--I could not so easily absolve the impersonal
master. The fault inhered of course not in any grudge of the community
against us, but in the prevalent civic neglect (in which, in my time, I
had participated with the rest) of duties to the state, theoretically
impersonal, but which cannot proceed otherwise than on personal accounts.

Man is frail; but, next to sincere religious conviction, no principle
exists so strong to control him as _noblesse oblige_--the impulse to keep
faith and to deal honestly imposed not by his individual conscience alone,
but by the pure traditions of his inheritance. The man who has the honor
of his forefathers to preserve--an honor which may be a part of the
nation's honor--is a hundred-fold better fortified against base action
than is the son of thieves, or even of nobodies. The latter may find
heroism enough to resist temptation, but the former is not tempted; he
dismisses the thing at the start as preposterous. It is no credit to him
to put such temptation aside, but it is black infamy and treachery to make
terms with it. If he do make terms with it, no punishment can be too
severe--though I take leave to say that the external penalties which state
or nation can inflict are trivial compared with those deadly ones which
torture him from within; but before crediting him with having yielded, the
state or nation should not merely assume his innocence--a stipulation
which our law indeed makes, but which is notoriously disregarded by
prosecuting attorneys--but should weigh and sift with the most anxious and
jealous scrutiny anything and everything which might appear inconsistent
therewith. A son of a thief who steals does but follow his inborn
instinct; but a thief whose ancestors were gentlemen is a monster, and
monsters are rare.

In England and the other older countries, the principle of _noblesse
oblige_ still has weight with the public as well as with the individual;
here, the welter of democracy, which has not evolved into distinct human
form, uniformly ignores it; leveling down, not up, it is quick to see a
scoundrel in any man. Meanwhile, instead of taking thought to abate the
public mania for success in the form of concrete wealth which multiplies
inducements to crime, it creates shallow statutes to punish acceptance of
such inducements, with the result that while in its practical life it
rushes in one direction, it erects in its courts a fantastic counsel of
perfection which points in a direction precisely opposite. Our law tends
not merely to the penalizing of real crimes, but to the manufacture of
artificial ones; and the simple standard of natural or intuitive morals is
bewilderingly complicated with a regimen of patent nostrums, conceived in
error and administered in folly.

Sitting in the car window with my friend, I revolved these things, while
the sunny landscape wheeled past outside, and our guardians chewed gum in
the adjoining section. After all was said and done, amid whatever was
strange and improbable, he and I were going to the penitentiary in the
guise of common swindlers. A pioneer on the western plains, in the old
days, riding homeward after several hours' absence, found his cabin a
charred ruin, his property destroyed, his wife lying outraged with her
throat cut, his children huddled among the debris with their brains dashed
out. Sitting on his bronco, he contemplated the immeasurable horror of the
catastrophe, and finally muttered, "This is ridiculous!"

"This is ridiculous!" I remarked to my companion; and he consented with a
smile; when language goes bankrupt, the simple phrase is least inadequate.
"We may as well have lunch," he said; and we rose and journeyed to the
rear of the train, sedulously attended by our deputies. The spontaneous
routine of the physical life is often a valuable support to the spiritual,
reminding the latter that we exist from one moment to another, and do
wisely to be economical of forecasts or retrospects. We journeyed back,
through innocent scenes of traveling life, to the smoking compartment,
which happened to be vacant; and under the consoling influence of tobacco
our elder companion sought to lighten the shadows of destiny.

"You gentlemen," he said, uttering smoke enjoyingly through mouth and
nostrils, "don't need to worry none. It's like this: the judge figured to
let you off easy. He's bound, of course, to play up to the statute by
handin' you your bit, but, to start with, he cuts it down all he can, and
then what does he do but date you back four months to the openin' of the
trial! All right! After four months you're eligible for parole on a year
and a day's sentence, ain't yer? Your trial began on November 25th, and
to-day is the 24th of March. That means, don't it, that you make your
application the very next thing after they gets you on the penitentiary
register to-morrer! Why, look-a-here," he continued, warming to his theme,
and becoming, like Gladstone as depicted by Beaconsfield, intoxicated with
the exuberance of his own verbosity, "it wouldn't surprise me, not a bit,
sir, if you and your mate was to slip back with us on the train to-morrer
evenin', and the whole bunch of us be back in little old New York along
about Wednesday! That's right! An' what I says is, that ain't no
punishment--that's no more'n takin' a pleasure trip down South, at the
suitable time o' year! An' I guess I been on the job long enough to know
what I'm talkin' about!"

We guessed he knew that he was talking benevolent fictions; and yet there
was plausibility in his argument. The law did not allow parole on
sentences of a year or under, but on anything over one year, a convict was
eligible, and our sentence of twenty-four hours over the twelvemonth
therefore brought us within this provision. In imposing that extra day,
the judge could hardly have been motived by anything except the intention
to open this door to us; and although the regular meeting of the parole
board at the prison was not due just then, we were informed that an extra
meeting might be summoned at any time. The board consisted of the warden
of the prison, the doctor, and the official who presided at all parole
board meetings at the various federal penitentiaries throughout the
country,--Robert LaDow. The law declares that a majority of the board
decides the applications that come before it; and as two members of the
board make a quorum, it seemed obvious that the warden and the doctor of
Atlanta Penitentiary would serve our turn--if they wanted to. Mr. LaDow,
of course, might be appealed to by telegraph if expedient.

Turning the thing over, therefore, with the cozening rogue in front of us
drawing our attention to the buttered side as often as it appeared, we
could hardly avoid the conclusion that there was a possibility of his
being right. We might be required to remain in Atlanta barely long enough
to don a suit of prison clothing and to have our bertillons made, and
forthwith make a triumphal return home, with our scarlet sins washed white
as snow. Of such an imprisonment it might be said, as wrote the poet of
the baby that died at birth,

  "If it so soon was to be done for,
  One wonders what it was begun for,"

but it would not be the first thing that we had noticed in Federal
administration of justice which might have been similarly criticized.

My allusion to this subject here is only by way of leit-motif for a
thorough discussion hereafter. The juggling with the parole law, by the
Department of Justice and the parole boards, is one of the most
indefensible and cruel practical jokes that "the authorities" play upon
prisoners. It caused two deaths by slow torture while I was at Atlanta,
as shall be shown in the proper place; and there is no reason to suppose
that the percentage at other prisons was not as large or larger. The
sufferings short of death that are due to it cannot be calculated. A
practical joke?--yes; but there is a practical purpose back of it. The
miserable men who are practised upon by this means, helpless but hoping,
are led to believe that they may buy freedom at the price of treachery
to their fellows. Can it be credited that a convict in his cell, with
perhaps years of living death before him,--you do not yet know what that
means, but if I live to tell this story, you will be able to guess at
its significance before we part--will refuse the opportunity offered to
end it at once in return for merely speaking one or two names?--a
convict--a creature outlawed, crushed, damned, dehumanized,
despised,--can we look from him for a heroism, a martyrdom, which might
shed fresh honor on the highest name in the community? I confess that I
would not have looked for it a year ago, and I doubt whether you look
for it now. But, I have to report, with joy in the goodness and
selflessness in men whom you and I have presumed to look down upon, that
in very few instances that I have heard of, and in almost none that I
know, has a convict thus terribly tempted even hesitated to answer--NO!
But many an old and cherished prejudice will begin painfully to gnaw its
way out of your complacent mind before we are done.

The City of Brotherly Love flickered by and was left behind, like the
sentiment which it once stood for. We were headed for Washington, where
the will and conscience of the nation take form and pass into effect.
Government of the people by lawyers, for lawyers; did they know what
they were doing? The Constitution, bulwark of our liberties; the letter
of the law, technicalities, precedents, procedure, the right of the
individual merged in the public right, and lost there! The House--five
hundred turbulent broncos, each neighing for his own bin; the
Senate--four score portentous clubmen, adjusting the conservative
shirt-front of dignity and moderation over the license of privilege and
"the interests"; the Executive--dillydallying between nonentity and the
Big Stick; the Supreme Court--a handful of citizens and participators in
our common human nature, magically transmuted into omniscient and
omnipotent gods by certificates of appointment! And the rest of our
hundred millions, in this era of new discoveries and profound upheavals,
on this battlefield of Armageddon between Hell and Heaven, in this
crumbling of the old deities and the looming of the Unknown,--are we to
lie down content and docile and suffer this hybrid monster of
Frankenstein, under guise of governing, to squat on our necks, bind our
Titan limbs, bandage our awakening eyes, gag our free voices, sterilize
our civic manhood, and debase us from sons of divine liberty into the
underpinning of an oligarchy?

My friend and I--while our licensed proprietors napped with one eye
open--smiled to each other perhaps, recognizing how the prick of
personal injury and injustice will arouse far-reaching rebellion against
human wrongs and imperfections in general. But our famous American sense
of humor may be worked overtime, and, from a perception of the
incongruity and relative importance of things, be insensibly degraded
into pusillanimous indifference to everything, good or bad. The soberest
observer may concede that there is a spiritual energy and movement
behind visible phenomena, whose purport and aim it is the province of
the wise to understand. The peril of Armageddon lies in the fact that
evil never fights fair, but ever masks itself in the armor of good. Not
only so, but good may be changed into evil by hasty and misdirected
application, and do more harm--because unsuspected--than premeditated
evil itself. Public endowment of chosen persons with power is good and
necessary in our form of civilization, and the chosen ones may accept it
in good faith. But in a community where everybody has business of his
own to mind, and is put to it so to conduct it as to keep off the poor
rates, deputed powers, designed to be limited, always tend to become
absolute. It is heady wine, too, and intoxicates those who partake of
it. And it is only a seeming paradox that absolute and irresponsible
power is more apt to develop in a democracy than under any other form of
human association. Holders of it, moreover, instead of fighting for
supremacy among themselves, and thus annulling their own
mischievousness, as would at a first glance seem likely, soon learn the
expediency of agreeing together; each keeps to his own area of
despotism, cooperating, not interfering with the rest. But the system
inevitably takes the form of rings within rings, each interior one
possessing progressively superior dominion. At last we come to a central
and small group of men who are truly absolute, and are supported and
defended in their stronghold by the self-interested loyalty of the rest.
But they do not proclaim their supremacy; on the contrary, they hide it
under clever interpretations of law, and, at need, by securing the
enactment of other laws fitted to the exigency of the occasion. If there
is remonstrance or revolt among their subjects, they subdue it partly by
pointing out that it is the law, and not themselves, that is
responsible; and partly by employing other legal forms to put down the
resistance. You cannot catch them; they vanish under your grasp as
principles, not men. Their voice is never heard saying, "I will!" but
always, "The law requires." And these autocrats--this oligarchy--are
only men like ourselves, with like passions, limitations and sinful
inheritance. They were not born to the purple--they just happened to get
to it. But being possessed of it--and apart of course from any crude and
obvious malfeasance in office--they cannot be "legally" dislodged; and
if they step aside, it is only to let alter egos take their place. The
King of England--the Emperor of Germany--can be deposed by the people,
and his head cut off; but the free and independent--but
law-abiding--citizens of the United States cannot throw off this subtle
tyranny, because it is identified with legal provisions which we have
insensibly allowed to creep into the inmost and most personal fibers of
our lives. As for modifying or abolishing the law itself--that would be
anarchy!

It would be foolish to contend that our rulers are actuated by any
personal malevolence or even, at first, by unlawful personal ambition;
they are, as I have said, for the most part lawyers, and law is their
fetish--their magical cure-all and philosopher's stone. They almost
persuade themselves, perhaps, that we the people make the laws; whereas
not more than one man in ten thousand--even of lawyers--knows what the
law in any given case is, nor would the majority of us approve any
particular law, if we were afforded the chance. Any one of us will
support the law against his enemy, but not, in behalf of his enemy,
against himself. But our legalized sultans and satraps, Councils of Ten
and Grand Inquisitors, keep an easy conscience; the Law is King and can
do no wrong. A few centuries ago it was law in England to kill a man for
taking any personal liberties; there was not much harm in that, for most
of the persons that counted were above the law, being nobles or
gentlemen. But our way is far more injurious; if a man takes a personal
liberty, the cry is, Put him in jail! Death is a penalty which only
disposes of a man forever; but jail is poisonous; the man survives, but
he becomes criminal, and an enemy of society. And this cry for jail does
not appear to emanate from legal tribunals merely, but we the people
ourselves have caught it up, and invoke cells and chains for the
lightest infraction of public or personal convenience; nay, we clamor
for more laws to supplement our already overburdened statute-books. Thus
do we thoughtlessly strengthen the hands of our masters. The nostrum
which they manufactured to govern us withal, and which at first had to
be administered to us willy-nilly, has now become like that notorious
patent medicine for which the children cry. We kiss the rod--as long as
it is laid across our fellows' backs and not our own. And the rule of
Law, by lawyers, for lawyers, shows no signs of vanishing from our
earth. Only convicts and ex-convicts dissent; for they know what they
dissent from. As an unidentified friend wrote to me of late, "No thief
ere felt the halter draw, With good opinion of the law"; but the thief
had reason on his side. And it may yet come to pass that his reasons may
be listened to.

Darkness set in as we entered the sacred soil of Virginia; night lay
before us--our next night would be spent inside penitentiary walls. Was
it a dream, or would some cosmic cataclysm occur in season to prevent
it? No: the ancient routine of one fact after another, of cause and
effect, would keep on with no regard for our sensibilities; however
important we might appear to ourselves, we were but specks infinitesimal
in the vast scheme of things. Miracles and special providences are for
story books; if you are the victim of abuses, be sure that the remedy
will come not through averting them, but by carrying them out to the
finish. On the morning of his execution, it seemed incredible that
Charles I should be beheaded; but he mounted the scaffold, laid his head
upon the block, and the masked man lifted his sword and cut it off. All
that is left for you is not to falter--to keep down that tremor and
sickening of the heart; when Danton of the French Revolution reached the
guillotine, he was heard to mutter, "Danton, no weakness!" And many an
unrecorded Danton, on the night before his appointed death, has lain
down and slept soundly. It recurred to my memory that my father, shortly
before his death, had said to an old friend of his, "I trust in Julian."
On the day following his death, that friend had journeyed to Concord to
tell me those words--returning to Boston immediately. My father's son
had lived to be proclaimed a felon; but I slept sound that night.

All next day we were passing through the raw red soil of the South, with
its cotton plantations, forlorn at this season, its omnipresent idle
negroes, and its white folks, lean and solemn, standing guard over what
fate had left to them. At stopping places we would step out for a few
minutes on the platform of the observation-car, to breathe the air and
feel the sunshine,--the affectionate deputies close at our elbows. Some
of our fellow passengers were bound for Florida or Cuba, to escape the
crudity of the northern March; "May be we'll meet up again there!" some
of them said, innocently unsuspicious of what sort of characters they
were addressing. Paradise and the Pit travel side by side on this earth,
and find each other very tolerable company.

Into Atlanta station the train at last rolled; the journey to oblivion
was all but finished. The restless little city, turmoiling in its boom,
swarmed around us; we had to wait half an hour, our gripsacks in our
hands, for the surface-car to the prison, three miles or more beyond the
town. We awaited it with some impatience--such is the unreasonableness
of our mortal nature. At last we were rumbling off on our trip of twenty
minutes, sitting unnoticed in the midway seats, our considerate but
careful guardians on the watch at the front and rear platforms. The car
took its time; it stopped, started again, stopped, started, after the
manner of ordinary cars; oh, for a magic carpet or pneumatic tube, to
make an end of this! or for a thousand years! It was as if the headsman
were making preliminary flourishes with his sword, ere delivering his
blow. These were difficult minutes.

They ended; "Here we are!" We alighted, and advanced to the entrance of
an expanse of ornamental grounds, with a cement pathway leading up to an
extensive fortified structure--a wall thirty feet high sweeping to right
and left from the tall steel gateway, with the summits of stone towers
emerging beyond. I stepped out briskly, in advance of the others; I
noticed some bright-hued flowers in a bed on the right. In a few moments
I was ascending a wide flight of steps; as I did so, the gateway yawned,
and two men in uniform stepped out. There was a transient halt, a few
words were exchanged; we went forward, and the gate closed behind us.




IV


INITIATION

"Put the fear of God in his heart!"

This phrase, impious and ironic, is used by officials in prisons, and
repeated by prisoners. It has no religious import. The naming of God in
that connection reminds me of a remark I heard from a moonshiner--as the
distillers of illicit whiskey in the mountain regions of the South are
called--who had lately arrived at the penitentiary. He said, "I allus
thought this here Jesus Christ was a cuss-word; but these folks say he
was some religious guy!" His enlightenment was doubtless due to the
first aid to the unregenerate administered by our chaplain.

To "put the fear of God in a man's heart" means to break his spirit, to
cow him, to make him, from a man, a servile sneak; and this is effected
not by encouraging him to remember his Creator, but by instilling into
him dread of the club, the dungeon, and the bullet. He must learn to
fear not God, but the warden, the captain and the guard. He is to be
hustled about, cuffed, shoved, kicked, put in the hole, punished for not
comprehending surly and half inarticulate orders, or for not
understanding gestures without words; all of which encouragements to
obedience are, indeed, specifically forbidden by the rules which were
formulated in Washington and disseminated for the information of the
investigation committees and of the public, but which are disregarded
nevertheless by the prison authorities from the highest to the lowest.
For they risk nothing by disregarding them; there is no one except
prisoners to complain of illegal treatment, and there is no one for them
to complain to except the very persons who are guilty of the
illegalities; and the warden at Atlanta, at any rate, has repeatedly
stated that he would not accept the oaths of any number of prisoners
against the unsupported denial of a single guard. To do otherwise would
be to "destroy discipline." Moreover, these unverified complaints--such
is their inevitable category in the circumstances--are themselves fresh
causes of offense, and productive of the severest punishments--not only
clubbing and close confinement, often in the dark hole, but loss of good
time, which of course is more dreaded than anything else.

But may not the prisoners complain to the committees or inspectors,
appointed precisely to enquire into and relieve abuses of this sort?

I shall have a good deal to say about these agents of humanity
presently. I will only say here that no prisoner who cares whether he
lives or dies, or who possesses common sense or the smallest smattering
of experience of prison affairs, ever is so reckless as to impart any
facts to the persons in question. If he accuses any guard or other
official of cruelty, the entire force of prison keepers can and will be
at need marshaled to deny point-blank that any such thing occurred, or,
if any did, it was because the accused official was at the time quelling
a dangerous revolt, and deemed his own life in peril. If this evidence
be insufficient, it is a pathetic truth that some prisoners can always
be found so debased by terror and abject as to perjure themselves
against their comrades. It is among negro prisoners that such traitors
are commonly sought and found. White men uniformly have a sense of
honor--thieves' honor, if you please--which keeps them loyal. There are
exceptions to this rule, and there are also exceptions to the rule that
negroes betray. I have the pleasure and the honor of the acquaintance of
some negro prisoners at Atlanta who would sooner die than ingratiate
themselves with the officials by a falsehood.

Accordingly, complaints of brutal treatment at Atlanta are not frequent,
either to the officials or to investigators; otherwise, I need not tax
your imagination to picture what happens to the complainants after the
investigators have departed.

Order and discipline--as appertaining to prisoners, not to
officials--must be preserved; of course they must, if we are to have any
prisons at all. And since there is no way for the prisoners to compel
the guards to keep within the license accorded to them, we must compel
the prisoners to accept whatever injustice or outrage the unrestrained
despots of the ranges have the whim to inflict upon them. There are
desperate revolts at times--desperate in the literal sense, since they
have no hope of relief in them, but only the tragic rage against tyranny
which will sometimes blaze up in victims--and on the other hand there
are officials who will resign their positions rather than connive at
abuses. But every means is taken to avert this last; for guards know
things, and the System could be shaken by men who not only know, but,
unlike prisoners, have a chance to make what they know believed.

All this time we have been waiting just inside the prison gates. The
difference between just inside and just outside is important; for nine
convicted men out of ten, it would be punishment for their misdeeds more
than sufficient to be taken no further on the way to retribution than
that. Whatever humiliation and disgrace they are capable of feeling or
have cause to feel is at that first moment at its height; it strikes
upon them unaccustomed and defenseless--never so acutely sensitive as
then. Afterward, familiarity with misery and shame renders them
progressively more and more callous, without adding one jot to the
public odium of their position. They can never forget that first clang
of the closing gates in their ears; the whole significance of penal
imprisonment is in that. Many a man, the moment after that experience,
might turn round and go forth a free man, yet with a soul charged with
all the mortal burden that man-devised penalties can inflict upon him.
Moreover, not having been unmanned and his nature violated by physical
insults and outrages, he might find strength and spirit to begin and
pursue a better life thereafter. The "lesson" (word which our shallow
and officious moralists roll so sweetly under their tongues) would have
been taught him to the last tittle, and withal enough of the man remain
to profit by it. Whereas, under the existing conditions, no more than
four or five years in jail destroy any possibility of future usefulness
in most men; they have been hammered into something helpless, dazed, or
monstrous; and even if they have courage to attempt to take hold of life
again, they are defeated by the unremitting pursuit of our spy system,
which depends for the main part of its livelihood upon getting
ex-convicts back to jail--whether on sound or on perjured evidence is
all one to the spies. So, as I said some time ago, most prison sentences
are life sentences, to all practical intents. To the manhood of the man,
prison means death.

Do some of the above statements appear extreme? Read on, and decide.
Meanwhile I will observe that so long as prisons endure, such abuses as
have been hinted at must persist. Whatever reforms have in special
instances ameliorated them, have in so far only gone to show that the
whole system is vicious and irrational.

My friend and I looked at our new masters with curiosity; they looked at
us with what might be termed arch amusement. With such a look do small
boys regard the beetles, kittens, or other animals, power to torment
whom has been given them. It was after prison hours--the men had been
already locked in their cells, and the warden and deputy had gone home.
It was left to the subordinates to put the fear of God in our hearts; we
could only surmise how far they would go in that instruction. We did not
then know that their power was limited only by their good pleasure. But
it is an accepted and reasonable principle with them that the sooner one
begins to take the nonsense out a prisoner, the better. The strangeness
of his surroundings intimidates him at the start, and he more readily
realizes that he has no friends and that he is in prison--not (as one of
the guards afterward took occasion to remark) in a "sanitarium for
decayed crooks." A good scare thrown into him now will bring forth more
fruit than greater pains taken--and inflicted--hereafter.

Our anticipations, however, were the less formidable, because we had
been exhaustively assured during the past ten days that Atlanta
Penitentiary was not so much a penitentiary as a sort of gentlemen's
summer resort and club, where conditions were ideal and treatment almost
foolishly humane and tender. This information came not only from all
court officials with whom we had held communion on the subject, but from
our own counsel at the trial; the judge himself seemed to believe it,
and if you ask the prison authorities at Atlanta, they will earnestly
assure you that prisoners there are treated like gentlemen, are given
every material comfort consistent with their being prisoners at all, are
sumptuously fed and housed, and are helped in all ways to build up their
manhood, maintain their self-respect, and prepare themselves for a
career, after liberation, as valuable and industrious citizens. We were
naturally disposed to credit assertions so emphatically and variously
made,--some basis for them there must be. And it was obvious, at a
glance, that the corridor in which we stood was spacious and airy, with
a clean limestone pavement; that the disorder and shiftlessness of the
Tombs was absent here. The guards who attended us wore neat dark
uniforms of military cut; and if their caps were tilted back on their
heads, or cocked on the northeast corner, that was a pardonable
expression of their authority and importance. I saw no firearms and no
blood, nor were the groans of tortured convicts audible. I remembered
the flowers in the garden outside, and was prone to think that things
might have been very much worse; they were certainly better, at a first
glance, than at Sing Sing, which I had visited on a newspaper assignment
about fifteen years before. I had resolved beforehand to make the best
of everything, and it seemed already possible that I might not have to
make believe very much to do so.

No resolve, however, could overcome the influence of that locked and
barred gate, nor the realization that I was a convict, and that nobody
inside the penitentiary had any doubt that I was justly convicted.
Friends were remote and helpless; the support of former good repute was
annulled; I stood there impotent, one man against the Federal
Government, with nothing to aid me but the weight of my personal
equation (whatever that might be worth) and my private attitude on the
question of my guilt, which the trial had not modified, but which could
be of no practical benefit to me here. The sensation of confronting
everywhere a settled and hostile skepticism as to one's integrity was
novel, and hard to meet with a firm countenance. And I felt how easily
this sensation might crush the courage of one who was conscious of being
justly condemned. How many men must be sitting yonder in those cells who
lacked the moral consolations that I had! The thought sharpened my
perception of the horror of all imprisonment, but at the same time
stiffened my fortitude; for if these men could live through their
ordeal, how much more could I!

Meanwhile we were being hurried through the handsome corridor, and down
a flight of iron steps to a less presentable region. There was no
aggressive brutality, only a peremptory curtness, entirely proper in the
circumstances. Our only defense against physical severity was a bearing
of cheerful but not overdone courtesy, and we gave that what play we
might. I could not foretell how I might behave under a clubbing, and
would not bring the thing to a test, if I could decently avoid it. In a
long, low, shabby, ill-lighted room we were lined up against a counter,
on the other side of which were two or three of our fellow
prisoners--the first we had seen--whose function it was to fit us with
prison suits. They consisted of a sack coat and trousers of gray-blue
cloth--rather heavy goods, for the warm season had not yet begun--and
this was obviously far from being their first appearance on a convict;
suits are handed down from one generation of prisoners to another until
they are entirely worn out; my own was of an ancient vintage and a good
deal defaced, but I had no ambition to be a glass of fashion in jail. Of
course I could only conjecture what diseases previous wearers of it
might have suffered from; but I hoped for the best. Every new arrival at
the penitentiary is presumed to be dirty until he is proved clean, and
the only way for him to prove his bodily purity is to submit to a bath.
The regulation is commendable, and was welcome to us after our day and
night in the train; but a comrade of mine from the mountain wildernesses
of South Carolina, where bathing is still regarded as a degrading
innovation, described to me long afterward what a sturdy battle he had
put up against the disgrace, and being a lusty youth, it had taken the
best efforts of several guards to hold him under the spout long enough
to wet him--and themselves into the bargain. Though this was the first
time since infancy that I had bathed under compulsion, I complied very
readily, and even said to my friend, "This isn't so bad!" It is not
permitted, under the law, to give out any news about prisoners to the
world without, after they have once passed the portals; nevertheless,
this memorable remark of mine was printed next day in the New York
newspapers, together with the scarlet hue of my necktie, and some other
details,--my registered prison number among them, my own first knowledge
of which was derived from the published paragraph. It was my first
intimation of a fact which afterward exercised no small influence on my
destiny in the prison--that I was a "distinguished," or at least a
notorious prisoner. This influence had its good as well as its bad
aspect, in the long run, but the latter was in the beginning the more
conspicuous. The unidentified press-agent who disseminated to an eager
world the news about the bath and the necktie, continued to be active
during our stay in Atlanta, but his other communications were not even
approximately so accurate as the first one, and nearly all of them were
children of his imagination exclusively, and were more likely to be
gratifying to the officials than to my fellow prisoner and myself.

From the bath to the bedchamber. Up the darksome stairs again into the
stately corridor; through an inner gateway, and into a wide hall which
communicated to right and left, through small steel doors, with the west
and east ranges (dormitories). The west door was unlocked, and we were
pushed into a huge room, about two hundred feet by a hundred and twenty,
with tall barred windows along each side. Inside this space had been
constructed a sort of inner house of steel, seven or eight stories in
height, with zig-zag stairways at either end, leading to narrow
platforms that opened on the individual cell doors. These doors were
barred, and were locked by throwing a switch at the near end of the
ranges; but any particular door could also be opened by a key. The cell
doors of the inner structure were at a distance of some twenty feet from
the walls and windows of the outer shell, and got what light and air
they had from these--none too much of course. Also, the guard on duty in
the range, if the weather be chilly, will close the windows, against the
protests of the prisoners, and against the regulations too; but most of
the guards are thin-blooded Southerners, and diseased into the bargain,
and do not like cold air. The consequence is that the four hundred pairs
of lungs in each range soon vitiate the atmosphere; the prisoners turn
and toss in their cots, have bad dreams, and rise in the morning with a
headache.

We mounted three or four flights of iron steps, and were introduced into
a cell near the corner. It was, like all the others, a steel box about
eight feet long by five wide, and seven or eight high. On one side, two
cots two feet wide were hinged against the wall, one above another; they
reduced the living space to a breadth of three feet. The wall opposite
was made of plain plates of steel, and so was the inner end of the cell,
but in this, at a man's height from the floor, was a round hole an inch
in diameter. That was a part of the spy system; for between the two rows
of cells is a narrow passage, in which the guard can walk, and, himself
unseen and unheard, spy upon the prisoners and listen to their
conversation. All prisoners are at all times of the day and night under
observation. This seems a slight thing; but the cumulative effect of it
upon men's minds is disintegrating. At no moment of their lives can they
command the slightest privacy. And what right to privacy, you ask, has a
prisoner? Would he not use it to cut his way through the chilled steel
walls with his teeth and nails, or to plot revolt with his
cellmate?--Possibly; but even a beast seeks privacy at certain
junctures; and to deny all privacy tends to bestialize human beings. It
is a part of the "put-the-fear-of-God-in-his-heart" principle--to break,
humiliate, degrade the man, and render him unfit for human association.
There are a washbasin and a toilet seat at the foot of the cot, facing
the barred door. What difference can it make to a convict if the guard,
or any other passer-by, watches him while he uses them?

There had been issued to us sheets, a pillowcase, and a gray blanket of
the army sort; our first duty was to make our beds. Mattress and pillow
were stuffed stiff with what felt like wood chips, and was probably
straw and corn-husks; the pillow was cylindrical; the mattress was
hillocked and hollowed by the uneasy struggles with insomnia of
countless former users. There was a campstool whose luxuries we might
share. We had, each, a prison toothbrush, and a comb. In the ceiling of
the cell, beyond reach of an outstretched arm, was an electric bulb
which would be darkened at nine o'clock. But all this was welcome; I had
often roughed it in conditions quite as severe; my spirits could not be
dashed by mere hardships or inconveniences. We put our domestic menage
in order cheerfully, glad that we had been celled together, instead of
doubling up with strangers. Nor would it have discouraged us to know
that the west range was the one occupied by negroes and dangerous
characters. The place was silent; none of the demoniac chantings and
hyena laughter of the Tombs. We had our little jests and chucklings as
we made our arrangements; Courage, Comrade! the period of suspense and
anticipation is passed; we are at grips with the reality now!

Moreover--"Every prisoner, on installation in his cell, is supplied with
rolls and hot coffee, and with pipe and tobacco!" Thus would the
statement run in the report to the Department. What if the bread be
uneatable, the coffee undrinkable, and the tobacco unsmokable? The mere
idea of such things is something; besides, prisoners do contrive, being
hard put to it, to consume them. We ourselves at least tried all three;
if it proved easier to be abstinent than self-indulgent, that was our
own affair. Meanwhile, our mental appetites were appeased by a little
gray pamphlet, containing the rules governing the conduct of convicts in
the penitentiary. There were a great many of them, and not a few
required thought to penetrate their significance. Why, for instance,
should special emphasis be laid upon the injunction to rest one's shoes
against the bars of the door upon retiring? We were never informed; but
I presume it must have been to prevent a man being tempted to reach out
an arm a hundred feet long through his bars, throw the switch, steal
along the platform, open the steel door, unbar the two outer gates,
climb over the thirty-four foot wall, and escape--all the while avoiding
the notice of the range guard, of the guards in the corridors, and of
the watchman on the tower outside, all of whom were armed with magazine
rifles and were yearning for an opportunity to use them. Of course, he
would want to have on his shoes for such an enterprise, so that if the
shoes were visible inside his door, it was prima facie evidence that he
himself was also within. Another rule was italicized--"_Do not try to
escape--you might get hurt!_" I refrained from testing the validity of
either prohibition.

In the midst of our perusal, we were interrupted by the arrival of a
visitor. He was a slight-built, slope-shouldered young fellow, in prison
garb, with a meager visage heavily furrowed with sickness and
suffering--he had tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, and the indigestion
with which all prisoners who eat the regular prison fare are afflicted.
Not that Ned (as I will call him, since it was not his name) mentioned
his condition; it was determined long afterward by the diagnosis of my
friend; Ned's object in visiting us was not to air his own troubles, but
to assuage, so far as he might, the gloom and uneasiness of the new
arrivals. In his haggard face shone a pair of very intelligent and
kindly gray eyes, and above them rose a compact, well-filled forehead. I
was fortunate enough to keep in touch with this young man during my
stay, and I found no more lovable nature in the penitentiary. He made no
secret of the fact that he had been guilty of a Federal offense, and he
never expressed contrition for it; "I made a mistake in taking another
man in with me," he remarked; "you are never safe unless you go it
alone." He had not been systematically educated, but he had read widely
and judiciously, talked correctly, though with occasional colloquial
idioms thrown in, and he was a concentrated and original thinker. His
opinions were bold, independent, and sound, his insight was very
penetrating, and his knowledge of matters of criminal procedure and of
prison conditions was accurate and ample. Facts which I afterward
learned for myself were never out of accord with information he had
given me; and the sanity and clarity of his judgments were refreshing
and remarkable. His courage was undemonstrative but indomitable; he
never complained of his own condition and experiences, but was instant
in his sympathy with the misfortunes of others. No more welcome and
valuable counselor than he could have come to us in those first hours of
our durance.

That he was able to visit us was due to his being a "runner," as those
prisoners are termed who are assigned to carrying messages and doing odd
jobs in the ranges. He leaned against the bars and spoke manfully and
pungently, with touches of gay humor now and then; advised us to our
conduct--what to do and what to avoid; and when he noticed the little
gray pamphlet, said scornfully, "Don't muss up your ideas with that!
There's a hundred rules there, and every one of 'em is broken every day.
Those rules are for show; what happens to you depends on who the guard
is, and how he happens to be feeling. You can go as far as you like
sometimes, and other times you'll get hauled up if you turn your head
sideways. The screw" (guard) "on this range is decent; he won't crowd
you too much. Keep quiet, and do what they tell you, and the odds are
you'll get by all right. Of course, if some fellow gets a grudge against
you, he's liable to hammer you like hell; there are some prisoners here
that get on the wrong side of a screw, and--well, it goes hard with 'em!
But if you're a little careful, I guess you'll get through all right.

"I've read all about your case in the papers, and I know you oughtn't to
be here; and Bill" (the Warden) "likely knows it too, and as folks on
the outside are on the watch for what happens to you, he'll think twice
how he treats you. Bill is a cunning one; he keeps his ear to the
ground; when he sees that the reform people are going to put something
across, he backs it up, and gives out that he suggested it himself; but
up to a year or two ago, he did the worst sort of things to the men;
even in his early reports and addresses he advocated treatment that he'd
never dare stand for now--except on the quiet! He gets himself written
up in the local papers here as the model warden--warm-hearted and
broad-minded, and all that flap-doodle! But if he had his way, you'd
think you were back in the dark ages in this penitentiary. Wickersham
threw a bit of a scare into him a couple of years back; and there have
been others; but most of the inspectors that are sent here stand in with
him; he gives them good feeds in his house, and takes them out in his
auto, and fills 'em up with soft talk--about 'his boys,' and his
fatherly interest in 'em, and all that--but he keeps the dark cells and
the rest of the dirty work out of their sight, and of course none of the
men dares say anything to 'em--it would be all day with them if they
did--as soon as the inspector turned his back. That's what gets the
men's goat--that he puts up such a humane front, and all the while
hammers them on the sly. They'd prefer being told at the start they were
going to get hell, and then getting it; but it goes against their grain
to get it, and meantime have folks outside believe they're in a
gentlemen's country club!"

Ned imparted his information by fits and starts; ever and anon he would
break off abruptly and walk off down the range, to give the guard the
idea that he was about his ordinary business; then he would return,
squat down on his hams beside the door, and murmur along in his rapid,
distinct tones. All that he said was abundantly confirmed later.

Finally--"Good night--sleep well--they'll put you on some job in a few
days; it's the first days that go hardest with most men, but you'll get
used to it; you might get out on parole, too--but don't count on it; of
all the frauds in this prison, parole is the worst! And if they ever
pass that 'Indeterminate Sentence' law--good-by! Imagine Bill with that
thing to use as a club over us! He'd make every other man here a lifer!"

He laughed in the prison way--silently, in his throat--and went away,
after warning us that it was near nine o'clock. Our watches had been
taken away from us; no doubt, a prisoner might commit suicide by
sticking his watch in his windpipe, or he could bribe a guard with it to
bring him cigarette papers, or "dope." Besides, what has a man in jail
to do with time? Our warm-hearted and fatherly masters desire their
charges to exist so far as practical in a dead, unmeasured monotony,
where a minute may seem to prolong itself to the dimensions of an hour;
to feel themselves utterly severed from the world they have annoyed or
injured. That is the penitentiary ideal; but it has of late become
impossible fully to realize it. A prison will always be a prison; but at
any rate, light shall be let in on it.

Meanwhile, our cell light went out; and we waited for the dawn.




V


ROUTINE

I lay in the upper bunk. It was a six-foot drop to the cement floor
below. The mattress, though irregularly dented and bulged, was upon the
whole convex, and not over two feet wide. A vertical fence or bastion,
six or eight inches high, along the outer brink of this precipice would
have averted the danger of rolling off in the night; but nothing of the
sort had been provided. One must remember not to roll, even in the
nightmare. Convicts educate the subliminal self to a surprising degree,
and do not fall victims to this trap as often as one would expect; but
occasionally one of them forgets, and down he comes, sometimes getting
bruised only, but generally with a broken bone or so. I do not have
nightmares, and I lay prone, gripping the sides of the mattress with my
knees, as if it were a bucking broncho. So I journeyed, Mazeppa-wise,
through the abysses of that first night, and was not unhorsed.

Light glimmered obscurely through the bars of the cell from the
night-burner below. Odd sounds broke out at intervals. Half suppressed
coughs, sudden, brief cries, irregular wheezings and gurglings, due to
defective plumbing, occasionally a few muttered words; then a man in an
upper tier began to moan and groan dismally--a negro with a colic,
perhaps. Long, dead silences would be interrupted by inexplicable
noises. In the dead vast and middle of the night the prisoner in the
cell over mine began to pace up and down his floor, eighteen inches
above my head. Four paces one way, four back, over and over
interminably. Who was he? What was he thinking about? Something seemed
to goad him intolerably; that forging to and fro, like a tormented
pendulum with a soul in it, gave a stifling impression, as of one
tortured for air and space. How many years must he endure--how many
centuries? Was his wife dying, his children abandoned? Up and down he
padded; had he committed some ugly crime, for which he longed to
atone--but prison is not atonement! Had his conviction been unjust, and
was he raging impotently against injustice? Let him not rage too loudly,
for there was a guard yonder, indifferent to tortured souls, but
licensed to stop noises. A prison is a prison, not a sanitarium for
diseased crooks. But if the world could hear those footfalls, and
interpret their significance, how long would prisons last? A jail at
night is a strange place--eight hundred men packed in together, each
terrifyingly alone!

Some of the earlier workers had been roused at six or five o'clock or
earlier; but for the majority the six-thirty bell was the reveille. It
screeched violently and was silent. The watching devils or the guardian
angels of the night vanished, and up got the eight hundred members of
the Gentlemen's Country Club, to live as best they might through one day
more; coughing, hawking, spitting, murmuring--but all with a sense of
repression in it, the life-sapping drug of fear in its origin, but long
since become a mechanical habit with most of them. Eight hundred
criminals, herded beneath one roof to be cured of their crimes by
indifferent or threatening and hostile task-masters and irresponsible
discipline-mongers, and by association with one another--a regimen of
hell to extirpate deviltry! The twentieth century solution of the
problem of evil, unaltered in principle after thousands of years!

Civilization has progressed wonderfully, but always with this
death-house on its back. And the death-house gets bigger and more
populous every year. Reformers, exhorters, Christian Endeavorers,
humanitarians, Salvation Armies, social reformers, penologists,
scientific experimentalists with surgical apparatus, together with
parole laws, indeterminate sentences, commutations, pardons, not to
speak of a good warden here and there and a kind guard--all toiling and
tinkering to make prisons better, to sweep them, to air them, to instil
religion and education, to supply work and exercise and to pay
wages--and all the while the tide of criminals gets larger and the
accommodations for them less adequate. What can be the matter? Are we to
end by discovering that everybody is a criminal, and ripe for jail? or
shall we be driven to the realization that the fundamental idea of
imprisonment for crime is itself the most monstrous of crimes--and try
something else? What else is there to be tried? Are we to leave
criminals to their liberty among the community?

There will be time enough to discuss these riddles. It is time now to
get into your prison suit, with its "U.S.P." on the back of the coat,
and your number; its "U.S.P." on the back of the shirt, with your
number; its "U.S.P." on the front of your trousers-legs, and your
number; your canvas shoes and your vizored cap. But beware of putting on
the cap within prison walls, lest the guard report you to the captain,
the captain to the deputy, the deputy, if necessary, to the warden, and
ye be cast into the inner darkness. There shall there be thin slices of
bread, and water, and gnashing of teeth.

With a guard acting as cowboy, shepherd dog, or convict compeller, we
shuffled in a continuous line down the iron stairways and across the
hall into the dining room, a cement-floored barred-window desert sown
with tables in rows, seating eight men each; guards with clubs standing
at coigns of vantage or pacing up and down the aisles, and in one
window, commanding the whole room, a guard with a loaded rifle, licensed
to shoot down any misbehaver. At no time and in no part of this model
jail are you out of range of a loaded rifle, in the hands of men quick
and skilful in their use. They are the sauce for meals and the
encouragement to labor. But casualties seldom happen; when they do, they
are hushed up, and the body of the man is buried next day in the prison
graveyard.

I will postpone to a future chapter the subject of the dining room and
what is done there. As we filed out, I noticed "MERRY CHRISTMAS," and
"HAPPY NEW YEAR" emblazoned in green above the door. It was to remind
us, perhaps, of what we lost by being criminals. As we debouched into
the inner hall, separated from the corridor leading to the warden's
office, and to freedom, by a steel-barred gate, we saw a guard seated in
a chair with a rifle across his knees. Rats in a steel trap might have
mutinied with as much hope of success as we at that juncture; but the
guard had to be used for something, and convicts must not be allowed to
forget that they are in prison. At all events we forbore to mutiny, and
were rounded into our cells and locked up for half an hour, during which
we might smoke Golden Grain tobacco, fifty per cent, dirt, and the rest
the refuse of the weed, supplied to the prison by contract; or we might
read, or comb our hair, or do calisthenics, or invoke the Divine
blessing upon the labors of the coming day.

The interval is really provided as a measure of security; many of the
prisoners do their work outside the main buildings; but it is deemed
unsafe to unlock the outer gates while the whole body of prisoners is on
the move. They might make a concerted rush, and get out in the yard, to
be shot down in detail by the guards in the towers.

Mr. Sidney Ormund, to be sure, a special writer on the _Atlanta
Constitution_, makes the following statement in an issue of the paper
shortly after I had left the jail and recorded my opinion that "Warden
Moyer was unfit."--"It is safe to assume," Mr. Ormund affirms, "that if
all the prisoners at the Atlanta federal penitentiary were life-termers
and each had a voice in the selection of a warden to serve for a like
term, William Moyer, the present incumbent--a man who has done more to
make prison life bearable than any man in this country--would be
selected without a murmur of opposition."

That is a fine, explicit statement of Mr. Ormund's, such as any warden
in dire trouble and perplexity might be glad and proud to have a
faithful friend make concerning him. It has no strings to it, and is
followed up by similar sentiments throughout the article. But why, in
that case, are the gates into the yard locked, and the man with the
rifle provided? If Warden Moyer renders life at Atlanta prison more
bearable than at any other in the country, what conceivable grounds are
there that his affectionate inmates should wish to run away from him?
That warmhearted and big-brained gentleman would hardly put the
Government to the expense of supplying safeguards against a contingency
which his own tender and lovable nature renders unthinkable, even if the
thirty-four foot wall outside does not. There seems to be a non-sequitur
here, which Mr. Ormund, perhaps, may feel inspired to clear up. When he
has done that, it will be time to call his attention to a score or more
other incongruities which a residence of only six or seven months in
this humane institution has been sufficient to disclose.

At the expiration of the half hour, we laid aside our pipes, or our
prayer-books, and were ready for the activities of the day. The others
were detailed to their regular work; but my friend and I had our final
rites of initiation still to undergo. A young official, whose
countenance readily if not habitually assumed a sullen and menacing
expression, beckoned to us with his club, and we followed him downstairs
to an elevator, in which he ascended to the upper floor, while we
pursued him upward by way of the staircase. The cap of Mr. Ivy--such was
his poetic given name--was worn on the extreme rear projection of his
head, and he used his club in place of speech; not that he actually
pummeled us with it, but by wavings and pointings he made it indicate
his will, and kept us mindful how easily we might afford him a pretext
for putting it to its more normal use. Mr. Ivy, as I afterward learned,
was a Southerner by birth, as are the majority of the guards in the
penitentiary, and may have been, like most of them, a graduate from the
Army. In reporting the case of Private George, of the U.S. Army, now a
prisoner in stripes in the Leavenworth Penitentiary, it was stated by
Mr. Gilson Gardner that "The common soldier in the U.S. Army has no
rights. When he enlists, he gives up the guarantees of the Constitution,
the protection of jury trial, and even his right to petition for a
redress of grievances. He may be unjustly charged, secretly tried and
cruelly punished, and he has no remedy."

As regards unjust, cruel and despotic treatment, the status of the U.S.
soldier and of a penitentiary convict are on all fours, though of course
the former has the advantage of belonging to a service traditionally
honorable, of open air service and exercise in all parts of the country
or abroad, of reasonable freedom when off duty, and of whatever glory
and advancement campaigning against an enemy may bring him. But we may
readily perceive that a soldier who has felt the rough edge of
discipline and finds his health broken, perhaps, by indiscretions
incident to Army life, might say to himself, on receiving his discharge,
"I am bred to no trade, I am good for nothing, but I should like to get
back at somebody for the humiliations and hardships I have endured. Why
not take a job as a prison guard; the pay is only $70 a month, but
instead of being the under dog, I shall be on top, licensed to bully and
belabor to my heart's content, to insult, humiliate and berate, and to
get away with it unscathed!"

For my part, I can imagine no reason more plausible to explain the large
number of ex-soldiers among prison guards, and their conduct in that
position. With some shining exceptions, they are petty tyrants of the
worst type, sulky, sneering, malignant, brutal, and liars and
treacherous into the bargain. Their mode of life in a jail, immersed in
that sinister and unnatural atmosphere, hating and hated, with no sane
or absorbing occupation, encouraged by the jail customs to play the part
of spies and false witnesses, ignorant and demoralized,--tends to create
evil tendencies and to confirm such as exist. No worse originally than
the average of men, they are made baser and more savage by their
circumstances. And no man able to hold his own in the free life and
competition of the outside world, would stoop to accept a position as
guard in a jail.

I know nothing of the private biography of Mr. Ivy, and it is quite
possible that he may have possessed endearing traits which he had no
opportunity to manifest in our intercourse. It would be foolish and
futile for the ends I have in view in this writing to cite or comment on
individuals, save as they may illustrate the point under discussion. But
I am the less reluctant to animadvert upon this or that employee of the
penitentiary, because I feel satisfied that, so far from compromising
him with the higher prison authorities, abuse from me would only
recommend him to their favor.--Mr. Ivy, such as he was, conducted us to
a bench outside a closed door, already partly occupied by three or four
half naked convicts, white and black. We gathered from his gestures of
head and club that we were to remove our upper garments and our shoes
and stockings, and place them on the floor in front of us. It was a cold
morning, and the floor was of limestone. We obeyed instructions, and for
the next twenty minutes sat there, objects of pardonable curiosity or
amusement to our fellow benchers and to passers-by in the hall, and with
nothing to keep us warm but the genial influences of the occasion.
Finally, each in his turn, we were passed through the door into a sort
of office, with clerks and Dr. Weaver, the prison physician, at $1500 a
year,--a tall, wooden faced young medical school graduate, who
cultivated a skeptical expression and a jeering intonation of speech. He
and an assistant put us through a physical examination, and took a
series of measurements, all of which were entered by the clerks in
ledgers. Our photographs were then taken, and afterward (it was the next
day, but may as well be told here) we were further identified by taking
the impressions of our finger prints, and by a second photograph without
our mustaches--these having been removed in the meantime. We were now
convicts full-fledged and published, and our pictures were disseminated
to every prison and penitentiary in the country, to be enshrined in the
rogues' gallery and studied by all police officials.

This may sound silly, in the case of two men much nearer three score and
ten than three score, and untrained to gain a livelihood by crime.
Bertillon measurements were not needed to identify us, nor photographs
without mustaches. But, in the first place, prison rules apply to the
mass, not to individuals; and secondly, it has been resolved by the
wisdom of our rulers that a man who reverts to crime after one or more
convictions shall be more severely punished than a first offender.
Nobody stops to question the logic of this ostensibly prudent provision.
But the convict knows that his chances of making an honest livelihood
after a conviction are many times less than before. Spies are on his
trail at every turn, and if ever he succeed in securing legitimate
employment, an officer of the secret service presently informs his
employer that he has a jail-bird on his pay-roll. Naturally he is
promptly paid off and dismissed, and he may go through the same
experience as often as he is foolish enough to try it. But even if he be
inactive, he is not safe--far from it. He is known to the police and
liable to arrest at any moment as a vagrant, without visible means of
support. Nor is this all. Suppose him to be recorded in prison archives
as a safe-blower, and that a safe is blown somewhere and the culprits
escape. The credit of the police department demands that an arrest be
made, if not of the person or persons actually guilty of this particular
crime, then of some one who may be plausibly represented as guilty of
it. Accordingly, our friend is apprehended and charged with the crime;
there is his record, and it is easy to secure "evidence" that he was on
the spot at the time, though he may have been, in fact, a hundred or two
miles away from it. Detectives are experts at providing this sort of
evidence; and it frequently happens that they get the corroboration of
the victim himself by assuring him that, if he will confess, the judge
will let him off with a light sentence, whereas if he prove "stubborn,"
it will go hard with him--a matter of ten years or so. Ten years in jail
for something you did not do! Six months or a year if you confess!
Perjury is wrong no doubt; but, were you who read this placed in that
predicament, which horn of the dilemma would you select? If you have
never served an actual jail term, you might virtuously hesitate; but it
is the world against a mustard seed that you wouldn't hesitate if you
had. The crisp of the joke is, however,--and of course it serves you
right,--that the judge, after all, gives you the ten years, and that
means life, for you will never be long out of jail afterward. As I write
this, I have in mind several instances of it among my personal
acquaintances at Atlanta.

If then our convict, upon his release, cannot keep himself in any honest
employment, and cannot avoid arrest even when he is doing nothing at
all, good or bad, it seems plain that he must either hunt out a quiet
place where he may starve to death before the officer can arrest him for
starving, or commit suicide in some more sudden and active manner, or he
must accept the opportunity which is always at hand in "revert to a
career of crime," as the saying is. Ex-convicts are often still human
enough to be averse from starvation, and even from easier forms of
self-destruction; and they yield to the temptation to steal. Like the
idiots they are, they may hope to make a big strike and get away with
it, and in some remote or foreign place, under another name, live out an
unobserved and blameless existence.

Thereupon there is rejoicing in the ranks of the secret service; armed
with their bertillons, they swoop upon their quarry and bear him away.
"May it please the Court, this man is an incorrigible; not deterred by
previous punishment, immediately upon release he plunges again into
crime; he should receive the limit!" The Court thinks so too; the limit
is imposed, and the malefactor is led out to the living death which will
end with death in reality. And now will some righteous and competent
person arise and proclaim that this man's yielding to his first
temptation to crime did NOT involve greater moral turpitude than did his
yielding to the second temptation or to the third--greater or at least
as great--and that therefore the severer sentence is justified? His
first misdeed was prompted by hunger, ignorance, drunkenness, or
cupidity; the others were the fruit of desperation itself--and how many
of you have known what desperation means?

You perceive that this story proceeds by digressions; such value as it
may have it will owe mainly to such digressions, so I will not apologize
for them. My friend and I, our ordeal completed, were returned to our
cells to think it over. The walls and ceiling of the cells are painted a
light gray color; it is against the rules, except by special indulgence,
to affix pictures or other objects to them. The "coddling of criminals,"
so widely advertised, does not include permission to give a homelike
look to their perennial quarters; it is more conducive to moral reform
that they should contemplate painted steel. There was one camp-stool in
our cell; later, cells were supplied with two wooden chairs, the seats
sloping at such an angle with the backs as rendered sitting a penance;
cushions were not provided. I remember seeing similar contrivances in
old English cathedrals, relics of a day when monks had to be kept from
falling asleep during the religious rites. We might also sit upon the
lower bunk, bent forward in such an attitude as would avert bumping our
heads against the upper one. Each convict, early in his sojourn, has a
religious interview with the Chaplain, who presents him with a copy of
the New Testament--not also of the Old; you may remember that the latter
records certain regrettable incidents of a sinister and immoral sort,
calculated, I presume, to shock the tender budding impulses toward
regeneration of prison readers. One may get other books of a secular
kind from the library, upon written application; and prisoners of the
first grade may subscribe for newspapers that contain no objectionable
matter. But only a small proportion of the inmates is addicted to
reading, and the opportunities for doing so are limited. And as months
and years go by, the desolation and sterility of the place weigh heavier
upon the spirit, the mind reduces its radius and grows inert, and
stimulants stronger than current fiction are needed to rouse it. Prison,
prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate screechings
and clangings of whistles and gongs; the endless filings to and fro, in
and out; the stealthy insolence of guards, or their treacherous
good-fellowship; the abstracted or menacing gaze of the higher
officials; the dreariness, aimlessness, and sometimes the severity of
the daily labor; the sullen threat of the loaded rifles; the hollow,
echoing spaces that shut out hope; the thought of the stifling stench of
the dungeons beneath the pavements, hidden from all save the victims,
whose very existence is officially denied; the closing of all personal
communication with the outer world, except such as commends itself to
the whims of the official censors; this morgue of human beings still
alive--the impenetrable stupidity, futility and outrage of it
all--slowly or not so slowly unbalance the mind and corrupt the nature.
Meanwhile, newspapers clamor against the coddling of criminals, and the
too indulgent officials smile sadly and protest that they have not the
heart to be stern. "Coddling criminals"--the alliteration makes it roll
pleasantly off the tongue!

But do I forget the many indulgences given to prisoners--and so
profusely celebrated in every mention publicly made of Atlanta
Penitentiary? Let me name them once more. Saturday being a non-working
day, it used to be the custom to lock the prisoners in their cells from
Saturday morning till Monday morning--a custom still followed at many
penitentiaries; for how could they be controlled if not split up into
working gangs, and thus prevented from conspiring to mutiny? It is one
of the obsessions of prison authorities that the prisoners are severally
and collectively a sort of wild beast, always straining at the leash,
and ready at the least opportunity to break forth in wild and deadly
disorder. It is obviously expedient, too, to impress the public with
this conviction, and therefore, in part, we have the clubs, rifles, and
general parade of watchfulness. As a matter of fact, meanwhile, nothing
is more easy to handle than a prisonful of convicts, if the most
elementary tact be used; and they are eagerly grateful for the smallest
unforced and spontaneous act of kindness.

Until about eighteen months ago, however, severe restrictions were in
vogue, and the warden declared that it was his belief and policy that
men in prison should be taught by precept and illustration to regard
themselves as dead to the world; that they should be held practically
incommunicado, no visitors, letters at most but once a month, no
conversation between prisoners--silence, solitude, suffocation in this
terrible quicksand of jail for months, years, or a lifetime, at the
mercy of men to whom mercy is a jest. Such a regimen is still in force
at many jails, and when combined with contract labor, nothing in the
age-long history of penal imprisonment shows a blacker record. It is
advocated as the best way to induce men to reform, and become, after
release, useful and industrious members of the community.

A couple of years or so ago, Atlanta was visited by an Attorney-General,
who was not prepared for what he saw, nor had the things he should not
have seen been removed from sight before he saw them. He demanded some
improvements on the spot, and soon after a new deputy warden was
appointed--a young man, of kindly disposition, though weak, not inured
as yet to the conventional brutalities, and with a backing in Washington
which gave him unusual powers. Among good things which he instituted and
insisted on were--two and a half hours outdoors on Saturday afternoons,
for baseball and general relaxation; conversation at meals; music at
dinner by a band made up from convicts; regular bi-weekly letters, with
extra letters allowed between times by special request to orderly
convicts; concerts or vaudeville performances every month or so in the
chapel, by professionals.

Insanity became less frequent after this, and the general health of the
men improved. They had something to look forward to, and to look back
to, and the freedom of the baseball concession led to no disorders;
something like hope and cheerfulness began to appear, like green blades
of grass in spring. The warden cleverly seized the opportunity to take
credit to himself for all the improvements, and to circulate
industriously in the local papers the praise of the model penitentiary.
But neither did he fail to take advantage of the new situation to
tighten his grasp upon the reins of control. The majority of jails, in
addition to the ordinary spy system operated by officials, organize a
supplementary one composed of convicts themselves--stool
pigeons--certain carefully selected prisoners, who are rewarded for
treachery to their fellows by various indulgences and secret liberties.
The principle is detestable, and has evil effects. The stool pigeons
themselves are of course the basest members of the community, and the
other prisoners, soon learning to suspect them, come at last to a
miserable distrust of one another--for the comrade apparently most
sincere may be at heart only a more artful traitor. In this, they play
into the officials' hands, whose theory of government is fear, and who
find aid to themselves in the mutual misgivings and hatreds of their
charges.

Evidently, the relaxations of the baseball afternoons afforded a capital
opportunity to the stool pigeons, and the results were soon apparent.
The spies, in order to curry favor with their employers, reported not
actual infringements of discipline only, but guessed at what might be,
and even invented what was not, often by way of retaliation against
personal enemies. I shall return to this subject hereafter; enough, for
the present, that it counterbalanced in a degree the physical benefits
of the new concessions by engendering mental disquiets and animosities
among the entire population, and especially inflaming them against the
officials. I am not myself sure, for example, whether or not one or
another of my most intimate acquaintances among the prisoners may not
all the while have been on the watch to betray me behind my back. For
aught I know, it may have been to some such sordid treachery that I owe
the refusal of my parole, when it became due. And any respect for
constituted prison authorities, upheld by such means, was impossible.

When the coddling of prisoners involves feeding them on poison, they
would prefer Spartan severity and fair warning.




VI


SOME PRISON FRIENDS OF MINE

Vague noises are at all times audible in jail--stirrings, foot-falls, a
subdued voice now and then, the sharp orders of an official--"bawlings
out" as they are termed; the clanging of steel gates, the murmur of
machinery, the cacophany of musical instruments during practise hours in
the chapel; as well as the periodical screeches and ringings of whistles
and gongs. The general impression on ear and eye alike is of stealthy
repression, a checked unrest--a multifarious creature, uneasy but kept
down. The place is perhaps hardly less silent than a cloister; but the
peace of the cloister is utterly absent. An atmosphere of animosity and
contention pervades all--a constant apprehension of sinister things
liable to happen, a breathless struggle, the sullenness of hate, the
whispering of treachery. The eyes of officials peer, watch and threaten;
those of the convicts are downcast but privily rebellious, or
deprecatingly servile.

It is the everlasting pregnancy of war between slave and master, quite
different from submission to rightful authority. Whatever the law may
say, the rightfulness of prison authority is never admitted by
prisoners. Honest authority is tranquil and secure; prison authority
goes armed, conscious of its unrighteousness, and there is unremitting
nervous stress on both sides. Both sides seem secretly to await a signal
to sudden conflict.

At dinner, soon after my arrival, amid the omnipresent murmurous palaver
of conversation, there fell an unusual noise. The unusual is always
formidable in jail. The noise was nothing in itself, and would have
passed unheeded in a hotel dining-room. But over us, crowded together
there, spread an instant hush. All knew that men had been stabbed,
frenzied affrays had broken out in that room. What was it now? The guard
in the window stiffened and poised his rifle. The guards on the floor
caught their breath, but assumed a confident air. The men sat staring in
the direction of the noise, tense and waiting.

Nothing happened; somebody had dropped a plate and broken it, perhaps.
But had some natural leader of the enslaved leaped up and shouted at
that juncture, murder would have followed the next moment. Among every
hundred convicts there are eight or ten whom misery and wrong have made
reckless, whose morbid rebelliousness needs, to break forth, only the
shadow of opportunity to kill before being killed, and they accept it.
But it was not to be that day, and we relaxed, and grinned, nervously or
grimly, and resumed our meal.

Eight hundred men, clad in a shapeless monotony of dingy blue, labeled
on the back with their disgrace, stepping lightly or shuffling hastily
to and fro, heads bent and eyes downcast, performing various offices,
menial, clerical or industrial, with a certain obsequiousness and
ostensible zeal that was yet inwardly repulsion and protest--these were
men born under the great flag, Americans, my countrymen, and now my
companions! What a change, what a degradation from the free American
citizen of the streets and boundless expanses! Not men, now, but slaves,
condemned to penal servitude; not citizens, but a class apart and alien;
felons, criminals, no longer entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness, but existing in shame and on suffrance, ruined, nameless,
parted from friends and families, with present physical pain and mental
misery, and with a future of hounding and helplessness, of fear and
hiding, of uselessness and aimlessness, of insanity and base death!

Upon what plea are these conditions established? Because the slaves had
broken the law--been guilty of crimes. But what crimes? Some had done
murder, others committed rape, some had held up a train, another had
blown a safe, another was a pickpocket, another a white-slaver, this one
had stolen food to avert starvation, that was a confidence man or bank
embezzler, here was one snared in some technicality of new finance laws,
yonder an ignorant moonshiner from the hills, who had grown corn in his
back yard and thought he had a right to make whiskey out of it--he had
no other means of livelihood. Breakers of God's laws; of man's; victims
of tricks and legal technicalities, of torturing want and of headlong
passion, and of sheer court errors or of perjured testimony--here they
were, all on the same footing, no discriminations made! To what end? So
that they might be punished and repent and go forth better men and
useful workers, and so that society might be protected and its integrity
vindicated. That is the ostensible reason; no other is alleged.

It sounds like a jest; but the men are here, the thing is done. In some
moods I would say to myself, "It's too preposterous--it can't be--it's
an hallucination--a bad dream!" But there it was, visible and palpable.
Was it protection for society to shut up a man from ability to support
those dependent on him, who were thus themselves driven to want and
perhaps crime, multiplying the original criminality by three or four or
half a dozen? Could any injury which the culprit could do to the
community equal the injury thus done by the community to him and his,
and indirectly to itself, by such treatment? Or could the technical and
perhaps unconscious violator of an obscure and whimsical law be reformed
by putting him on an equality with a cold-blooded murderer, or with a
man who had grown rich by selling the shame of women? Was the punishment
equable which handled with equal severity a brutish negro from the
cotton fields, and a man brought up in refinement and gentleness?

But I would go further, and challenge the right of the community to
inflict penal imprisonment as we know it at all. Some criminals belong
in hospitals, others in insane asylums, for others the thoughtless
neglect and selfishness of society is responsible, and they should be
succored, not punished; and the remainder should be constrained, under
surveillance but not in confinement, to compensate for the harm they did
by labor or self-denial aimed directly at that result. But of this
hereafter.

Meanwhile, I paid attention to my companions themselves.

In their intercourse with one another there was a singular amenity or
pleasantness, and with some who had been prisoners for a long time, a
sort of childlikeness. But it was like the childlikeness of a person
partly dazed, or recovering from a severe illness or shock. They greeted
one another with a covert smile, an unobtrusive movement of head or
hand; only when under direct observation of an official would they pass
without a sign. The usual words were, "How're you feeling?" or, "How're
they comin'?" not in the perfunctory tone of greetings in the outer
world, but with an accent of real interest and solicitude. The answer
would be, "Good!" "Fine!" with as much heartiness as could be thrown
into it--though it might be obvious enough that the truth was far from
being that.

There was one dear old fellow who had a variation on these forms; he was
an alleged moonshiner, though, as he said, "Yes, I did make some
whiskey, but I never sold none!" "How're you feeling, Joe?" I would say;
and he would reply, with his pathetic smile, and his high, soft voice,
"Pretty well--pretty well, for 'n old man!" with a drawling emphasis on
the "old." He was about seventy, with the soft brown hair of youth, but
bent and stiff and wrinkled with hard years and rheumatics; and if I
questioned him more closely, he would confess that he suffered from
"lots o' misery here!"--passing his gnarled old hands over his digestive
tract. Indeed, four-fifths of the men had that trouble in more or less
acute form, owing to the atrocious food supplied as our regular diet.

Joe's face, though lined with the hardships and privations of a long
life, was beautifully formed, aristocratic in its delicate contours; and
he possessed, and constantly used, one of the most delectable,
contagious and genuine laughs that ever made music in my ears. The men
would ransack their humorous resources in conversation with Joe, merely
for the sake of making him laugh. He would fix his old eyes squarely on
yours, and laugh and laugh with infinite mirth and good nature. Such a
sound in such a place was rare and wonderful, and helped one like fresh
water in a desert.

The general friendliness among the men--so contrasted with their
demeanor toward the officials--was due to the identity of their common
interests; they were in the same boat, facing the same perils and
disasters, united in the same aims and hopes, and leagued against the
same oppressors. They lived in the constant dread of some calamity; and
if I met the same man three or four times in the same day, he would
never fail to make the same enquiry--"How're you feeling?" recognizing
that I might have received some ugly blow in the interval. There was a
spontaneous courtesy and a charitableness in it that touched the heart.

The same sentiment was manifested at meals; if anybody got hold of
anything that seemed to him a little better than usual, he could not
rest till he had offered some of it, or all of it, to his neighbors at
table. "Here, take this--take it--I got more'n I want!" Or, watching his
opportunity, Ned the runner, who had comforted us on our first night in
prison, would come to the door of my cell, with his Irish humor and
cordiality shining in his eyes. "Say, Mr. Hawthorne, there's a dividend
been declared!" and out of some surreptitious receptacle he would
produce three or four crumpled cigarette papers--of all contraband
articles in the prison the most prized. "No--take 'em--I got no end of
'em!"

A peculiar consideration was manifested by the men toward "the old man";
my hair was white enough, to be sure, but it had been so for nearly
twenty years, and I was in much better physical condition than most of
them. I accepted their kind offices with gratitude and emotion, and,
when I saw that to do otherwise would hurt their feelings, their
concrete gifts, too.

But there were many instances of self-sacrifice greater than these; men
would go to the hole sooner than betray a comrade; and you are fortunate
in being unable to comprehend what that means. If a comrade in his range
was sick and unable to come to meals, I have constantly seen a man
secrete half of his miserable breakfast or dinner in his pocket, to be
carried up to the invalid and smuggled into his cell. It was a matter of
course, nobody remarked it. Any mistake or indiscretion committed by a
prisoner would be instantly and almost mechanically covered by the man
nearest him, though at the risk of punishment--and the punishment for
betraying human sympathy in this way is--of course it is!--especially
severe; it is conspiracy to cheat the Government.

The traditional tale of a prisoner's devotion to animals is also true; a
man next me at table--a yegg--for two weeks poured half his allowance of
milk (he was on milk diet for acute indigestion) into a surreptitious
bottle, and bore it off for the sustenance of a couple of little forlorn
kittens that he was acting as special providence for. The meditative
smile with which he perpetrated this theft upon the prison authorities
was a wonderful sight. Another convict, a hardened old timer, for
several weeks lavished cargoes of tenderness upon a rat which he had
laboriously conciliated and tamed. "What makes you so fond of that
animal?" enquired one day a sentimental and statistical old lady visitor
to the prison. After struggling with his emotions for a minute, he burst
out, "Yah! he bit the guard!" This dialogue was overheard, and enchanted
the whole penitentiary for months.

But one reflects that, whatever humane or lovable traits prisoners may
exhibit, they are after all criminals! The existence in a lost soul of
good qualities or impulses side by side with evil ones has long been
recognized. Victor Hugo illustrated the discovery in his Jean Valjean,
it was a staple with Dickens, Bret Harte's heroes are all of that type,
it was the inspiration of much of Charles Reade's eloquence, Kipling has
more than a touch of it, our contemporary fiction-mongers sentimentalize
over it, and the train-robber in the movies usually has a full line of
sterling virtues up his sleeve. The lost soul, in short, brims over,
upon occasion, with the wine of regeneration. Therefore (so runs the
moral) let us of the elect furbish up our charity, and be as tolerant
toward this non-human class of people as may be consistent with our own
safety and respectability. Scraps of our own lustrous impeccability have
somehow found their way into them, and we cannot afford wholly to
disavow them, in spite of their wretched lodgings.

This phariseeism is so inveterate with us, that I may fairly say that
one has to be sentenced to jail as a criminal in order to correct it.
From that vantage ground or Mount of Vision it presently dawns upon us
that these men are no more lost souls than we are--are, in fact, woven
out of the same yarn and cut from the same cloth. And from this same
vantage ground it also gradually dawns upon us that, in one respect at
least, the aggregate in a jail is better than the same number of men
taken haphazard from the city streets. For the former have now laid
aside self-righteousness and dissimulation, which are of the essence of
our unrestrained civil life: "I killed a man, yes; I robbed a bank, I
picked a pocket, I lived off a woman, I swindled my stockholders, I
counterfeited a banknote." No disguise here--no evasion.

But when you go into the details of the transaction, weigh the causes
which led up to it, consider the conditions surrounding it, realize the
temptations or provocations that precipitated it, you step into your
confessional: "Lord, my nature and heart are not different from this
sinner's, and but for accidents and good fortune which were none of my
providing, I should stand accountant to-day as he does!" You bring the
whited sepulcher home to you, and find that you have been living in it
yourself. And if you have a little intelligence you will acknowledge in
your convict the scapegoat who--not more and perhaps less blameworthy
than you--is bearing your iniquities as well as his own.

So, instead of condescending, with supercilious eyebrows and spotless
broadcloth, to concede that these unfortunate members of a non-human
class sometimes betray traces of saving grace after all, it might better
become you to wish that some of their saving graces appertained to
yourself. At your best showing, you are a pharisee and a hypocrite, and
he is not; he stands confessed; your sin is still secret in your soul.
By what right do you look down upon him?

These things which I now say to you, I said first to myself, sitting in
my cell, or watching the endless gray-blue files shuffle past me on
their way to and from meals. It was of small help or significance that I
claimed innocence of the particular offense that happened to be charged
against me; I was as indistinguishable from these men in heart as I was
in outward garb and rating. And I had manhood enough to feel glad that,
since they had to be here, I was here with them. The burden of the
scapegoat has its compensations.

On my first Sunday in the chapel, there came an exhorter or revivalist,
accustomed to dealing with prisoners from the platform, and dubbed "The
Old War-horse of Salvation," or some such title. He had his white
waistcoat, his raucous, shouting voice, his phrases, his anecdotes, his
"my men," "my friends," "fellows"; his "I'm saved, I hope, and you can
be!" Oh, the phariseeism of that "I hope!" At the end of his uproar, he
called upon those of his hearers (we had all sat quite silent and
impassive during the performance) who were willing to be saved, to stand
up in their places. All the stool pigeons arose (poor devils), and a few
other bewildered persons who fancied it expedient to be on the side of
the angels, "Thank you--thank you--thank you!" hoarsely cried the
exhorter, naively accepting their response as a personal compliment to
himself.

But that great audience sat dark, silent and impassive, and it could
only have been the tough hide of the Old War-horse that made him immune
to their cold contempt. I said to myself, "What a terrible audience it
is! Who is fit to stand before it?" These men had seen, known and
suffered the terrible, nameless things; the Unknown God, perhaps, had
spoken to many of them in their solitude; and now this being of white
waistcoat and phrases must get up and urge them to wash their sins in
the blood of the Lamb! In their silence they were preaching to him a
sermon such as no mortal pulpiteer ever uttered; but his ears were deaf
to it. "One--three--six--nine souls saved to-night! Thank you--thank
you--thank you!" And he turns to receive the polite congratulations of
the distinguished guests who sat behind him on the stage.

In prison, and only in prison, the veil is lifted or rent in twain, and
men are revealed as they are. As they stand before their Creator, they
stand now before their fellows. They are helpless--so warden and guards
think--but they have gained a power beyond any physical might of man.
They are voiceless, but they challenge mankind. They endure every
indignity and outrage; but an account will be required of those
responsible for it.

I wish to emphasize this dropping of the mask--this stop put to
posturing and pretending--this going forth in rude nakedness before
one's fellows. The man in the church pew chants out with the rest of the
congregation, "We are sinners, desperately wicked, and there is no
health in us;" but he says it with his tongue in his cheek, and fitting
his mask on only the more tightly. Or the man "convinced of sin" on the
anxious seat at the revivalist meeting frenziedly accuses himself of all
the sins in the decalogue, but finds protection in the very generality
and promiscuity of his confession, which includes and at the same time
conceals the particular fact that he robbed the till and got away with
it. We seldom hear of a penitent of this kind being indicted by a Grand
Jury, tried, convicted and jailed on the basis of his salvation
outcries. He talks figuratively.

There is nothing dramatic or hysterical in the attitude of the felon in
his cell. He robbed the till, he admits to you; but he does not drag in
the rest of the decalogue to divert your attention. And his penitence,
when he feels any, is not, in nine cases out of ten, prompted by the
expectation of getting a clean bill of health on his entire life-account
(the empty till included) from a good natured Savior not too keen about
details. He tells you, as a rule, "I was foolish and took too many
chances!" or, "If I'd handled the thing by myself, instead of admitting
a partner, it would have been all right;" or, "Oh, of course, I was a
damned fool; what's the use of bucking up against the fly cops!" In the
case of a murder, it might be, "I'm sorry I killed him, but I guess any
fellow would have done the same in my case."

Duration of confinement does not modify this attitude; the man of ten
years says the same as the man of ten months, except--and the exception
is worth noting--that the former's moral sense, whatever he originally
had of it, has been blunted or discouraged, and he has conceived a
settled animosity against human authority, and disbelief in the justice
and sincerity of its administrators. He has been the subject, during his
incarceration, of such numberless acts of gratuitous tyranny, outrage
and cruelty, and has seen so much of "the way things go," in general,
that though he may concede that honesty is the best policy, he can find
no other recommendation for it, and is prone to the secret conviction
that honesty itself is somehow only a cleverer way of cheating.

Such a state of mind is bred by prison experience--not otherwise. Prison
obstructs or altogether closes every door to genuine moral reform in
prisoners.

A few larger souls overcome the obstructions; for example, our John
Ross, who more than thirty-three years ago, in the blindness of a
drunken spree in Yokahoma, killed a shipmate who angered him. He died in
jail last June (1913). He was sentenced to death, but got commutation to
life imprisonment. He was a fine type of man, physically and mentally.
His spirit was never broken by what he endured, and some years before
being transferred to Atlanta, he became, in a simple, non-sensational,
but profound way, religious. At Atlanta, in his cell, he was a center of
good influence on his fellow convicts; truthful, hearty, faithful,
manly, cheerful; his preaching was by personal example, and by support
and help given at need to the weak and despairing. He was promised
freedom on parole; the promise was not kept; but even this last betrayal
failed to break his staunch heart. He died like a man, with composure
and dignity.

With a few such exceptions, prisoners are unrepentant except for
business reasons--that is, either because they recognize that crime does
not pay, or in order to influence in their favor the pardoning power.
Many of them, of course, employ their prison opportunities to devise new
crimes and to train fresh recruits from the younger convicts. Men who
have been imprisoned more than once lose hope of anything better than
transient freedom; they know they will be prevented by the police from
earning an honest livelihood, and that they must either starve or steal.
They become in the end mere prison creatures, destitute of evil or of
good, active or passive.

I repeat that the experience of associating with men without disguises
is novel and refreshing. A tedious burden is lifted from the shoulders;
the bones in the sepulcher are less revolting than the whitewash
outside; it is pleasanter to know what a man is than to suspect him. It
is certainly much wholesomer, on the other hand, to uncover your own
deformity than to hide it, especially when you know, or fear, that the
hiding is unsuccessful.

There is a sense of brotherhood, long since unfamiliar to human
intercourse under usual conditions, but welcome even at the cost of
conditions such as these. The truth gradually emerges to our
consciousness--it is not the evil in us that kills brotherhood, but the
vain, unending effort to make the evil seem good. Now our eyes meet one
another's frankly; the skilfullest counterfeit was worse than the worst
reality. There is nothing in us to be proud of, but something to be
thankful for. Society has done its worst to us; but it could not take
away from us our mutual kindliness, or the qualities that justify it. We
are condemned as wicked, but we are comforted by one another's good.

Prison, in short, more convincingly than any abstract argument,
demonstrates its own futility as a means of either taking revenge upon
the prisoner, or of inducing him to hate crime and to turn to good.
Revenge, of course, is officially discredited nowadays, though it is
practised as actively as ever under guises more or less civilized; but
the pretense of moral reform by penal imprisonment is becoming too
preposterous to be tolerated much longer. On the contrary, prison
renders the great aggregate of prisoners collectively self-conscious;
the goats find themselves, and are forced into antagonism with the sheep
not only as individuals but as a body. They make common cause together,
and in obscure ways achieve a degree of organization. They learn to
regard the community not as better than themselves, but as more
successful pensioners of fortune; they fear them because the advantage
of numbers is on their side, but they hate them because they feel,
either justly or unjustly, that they have suffered injustice at their
hands, and they will prey upon them when opportunity serves not only
from the original motive of physical need, but from the additional and
more sinister one, bred in prison, of retaliation for the wrong done
them.

When you sap a man's faith in plain justice, and terrify him with the
threat of irresistible power, and torture him in mind and body through
the exercise of that power, you drive him to the support and society of
men similarly circumstanced, and thus create the precise analogue in the
body politic of a cancer in the individual body. Prison attempts to
segregate this cancer, but only promotes its increase. Its poison is in
the blood and circulates everywhere.

As I passed out of the dining-room after meals each day, I came to
notice a young man who sat at a table near the door. He sat with folded
arms, and with a set and gloomy countenance; his eyes were fixed on
vacancy, and he did not speak with his companions. A crutch leaned
against his shoulder; he had lost one leg.

I learned his story. In the settlement of a small estate of which he was
an heir, a sister of his had obtained money that belonged to him, and
when asked to restore it to him, had refused to do so. After some
fruitless negotiation, he got angry, and sent her through the mails a
message containing violent expressions of reproach and animosity. The
young woman took this paper to a United States marshal, who brought it
to the attention of the district attorney, with the result that the
brother was indicted under some law of libel or of obscene matter, was
arrested, tried, and convicted, and sentenced to Atlanta penitentiary
for five years. After he had been lodged in his cell, his sister
repented of her action, and sought to have him freed; but the law does
not recognize such changes of heart, and the brother must serve out his
time.

We all know how easily family quarrels arise, how bitter they may be
while they last, and how readily, withal, they may be accommodated by
tactful handling. The sister had done wrong; the brother had lost his
temper; in what family has not such an outbreak occurred? But because
the brother had happened to put his bad temper on paper, the law, being
rashly invoked, seizes him, takes five years out of his life, and brands
him with the shame of the jail bird. Upon what plea can such an act be
construed as justice? But the district attorney shows the court that the
statute has been violated; the judge charges the jury, the jury finds
its verdict in accordance with the legal evidence, and the thing is
done. It is a mechanical process--nothing human about it.

Review your own life, and discover whether you have ever stood in the
shadow of a similar catastrophe. Were you ever angry with a relative or
with any other person, and did you express your anger to him in words?
Then you are as guilty as this one-legged boy, sitting there at his
table with his life ruined. Only, he happened to write his anger, and
the sister happened to show it to a lawyer, and the machine was set in
motion which no repentance or forgiveness or remorse can stop. But the
machine does not increase the culprit's fault, and for such a fault the
legal penalty may be five years in jail. You are not so remote from the
subterranean brotherhood as you may have supposed.

Will prison reform him? Is society protected? Is faith in human justice
promoted by such things? His case is but one of scores in every jail
that are as bad and worse. But--"throw him to the lions--serves him
right!" is still the cry.




VII


THE MEN ABOVE

The men below would like to feel respect for the men above, even if it
be a respect married to fear. It is more humiliating to be dominated by
worthless creatures, of no character or genuine manhood, whose authority
is effective only because it happens to be the tool through which works
the irresistible power of a government, than to obey men of native
energy and force, captains as well of their own souls as of the bodies
of their subjects. The despotism of a cur is revolting, and rouses the
wild beast in the victims. Those responsible for its infliction insult
human nature.

As far as I have had opportunity to observe, or have been informed, the
despotism of the cur in our jails, and in those of other countries
perhaps (though not to nearly the same extent as in ours) is the rule;
and that of self-respecting and respected men is the rare exception.
Hate inflamed with contempt is a dangerous and evil passion to
stimulate. It awakens a thirst for savage retaliation which hate alone
does not produce. Moreover, weak and cowardly tyrants are always more
cruel than courageous and masculine ones, and they do not observe any
consistent line of conduct; in the intervals of their debauches of
brutality they are oily and ingratiating, make favorites, offer
pusillanimous apologies, protest humane intentions, and allege absurd
excuses for past outrages. A brute is bad enough, and we are all brutes
at bottom; but a brute who covers his hyena snarl with the smug mask of
a saint is monstrous and detestable.

The wardens of many of our jails are double men. Behind the imposing
facade of their physical aspect we detect an uneasy, hurried, shrewdly
contriving little creature, quite incommensurate with the material
bodily structure built up for his concealment and protection. He will
not come out in the open, but seeks some advantage, plans to get behind
us and execute some cunning coup-de-theater, while our suspicions are
lulled by the hospitable and comfortable glow of the exterior. In his
dealings with the convicts as a body, he is apt to imitate Macbeth's
witches, and keep the word of promise to the ear, but break it to the
hope; he has vanity without self confidence, lacks the truthfulness of
the strong, his voice does not resound and compel, he dances and
fidgets, grins and is grave in the same instant. If the men's attitude
be sullen, he tries to be bluff and hearty, "my-boys" them, claps them
heartily on the shoulder, or lapses into whining and gushing. It is all
of worse than no avail with these undeceivable readers of character. It
is a curious effect of the working of esprit de corps in jails that the
prisoners may feel ashamed of such unmanly antics in their warden,
especially should strangers be within eyeshot.

Of course, in his encounters with prisoners singly, a man of this type
may show more of his real nature, especially if the prisoner be one of
the inoffensive sort. He will be bland, insolent, indifferent or cruel,
as suits his mood of the moment. "For God's sake, won't you let me write
her just one letter?" implored a prisoner who had just got news of the
fatal illness of his wife. Picture the situation--two human beings face
to face, one helpless and in agony, the other with absolute power! The
official faced the man deliberately, with an amused smile. "I can," he
said, slowly, "but--I won't!" How would you have felt in such a case?
Could you ever forget it? and would you not be ready, for that
official's sake, to hate mankind, and to curse God and die? But you
perhaps believe that convicts have no human feelings, and that they are
cheerful under such treatment.

The value of these remarks lies, of course, in their general character;
the conduct of an individual, regarded by itself, would have small
importance. And if I do not instance the conduct of those honest and
manly officials who are to be found here and there, it is because the
public is already informed concerning them; their deeds do not seek
darkness, but are visible by their own light. It is the rascals that we
do not hear about, or if we do, it is through reports of press agents in
newspapers and otherwise, who are mere mouthpieces for the lying
self-praise of the rascals themselves.

While I was in jail, I had access, by a fortunate circumstance, to the
annual reports to the Department of several wardens of prisons in
various states, and was able to compare their stories of themselves with
the accounts given me by prisoners who had lived under them and with my
own first hand knowledge of prison conditions, which, with a few shining
exceptions, are so terribly and remorselessly alike the civilized world
over. After making every allowance for the different point of view of
master and slave, it was very plain that the author of the report was
not merely prevaricating, or coloring his facts to render them
acceptable to his superiors, but was lying outright often, both directly
and by omissions. He would pose as a broad-minded and compassionate
father to his inmates, when all the time he was subjecting them to cruel
and needless severities and tortures. There was one man, who has lately
resigned, I believe, full of years and honors, whose addresses at the
meetings of federal wardens were almost angelic in tone and tenor, who
was in fact notorious among persons who had actual knowledge of his
official conduct as one of the most remorseless tyrants toward the men
in contemporary prison annals. Many men of bad conduct may be excused on
the plea that they are ignorant--know no better; but this man was an
intelligent student of penology, and knew exactly how wicked and wanton
he was. He was an innocent baby once upon a time, and might have grown
up to be no worse a man than is the estimable person who now reads these
lines; but he took up prison work, and the atmosphere of crime, and
preoccupation with it, and the license to use arbitrary powers, made a
devil of him. It is a common story.

Another series of reports showed a man who, beginning as a reactionary
of an extreme type, advocating the most ruthless measures toward
convicts, finally felt the pressure of the wave of prison reform which
is gathering force just now, and adjusted his reports and addresses so
as to make himself appear as a leading apostle of the new ideas. But
though his public professions changed, the chief difference in his
practises was that, from having been undisguised, they became secret,
and so far as circumstances permitted, he acted, and permitted or
encouraged his subordinates to act as cruelly as before. However, a new
deputy warden was presently appointed, with more liberal ideas, and
endowed with large powers, and for a while the condition of the
prisoners improved; the warden, with his ear to the ground, and his eye
on the handwriting on the wall, deftly adjusting himself to the
situation, and industriously claiming for himself credit for all
betterments introduced by the deputy--who, having no press agent, was
forced to stand inactively by and see his honest credit filched away
from him--in public opinion, at least. Of course, the prisoners knew
perfectly well on which leg the boot was. But prisoners cannot make
themselves heard outside the jail.

Accordingly, this warden, whose methods I know well, is now quoted as a
signal champion of the new and more merciful dispensation, though only
two or three years ago, according to his own personally written and
signed reports, he was for keeping prisoners practically
incommunicado--dead to the world; writing and receiving letters to be
nearly or wholly done away with; newspapers withheld; visitors denied.
Prisoners, he urged, were sent to prison for punishment, and punished,
continually and thoroughly, let them be. Punish the man, kill his
health, his hope, his spirit, his soul, his body too at need, and thus,
and only thus, reform him. It was a simple plan, and likely to bring
results--of a kind. Shall we believe that this man's professions of a
change of heart are genuine? or feel surprise to discover that at the
very moment he is receiving visitors in his commodious office upstairs,
and purring out to them his fatherly affection for his prisoners, and
denying that the old, bad methods of repression any longer are
tolerated, there are miserable wretches being hung up by the wrists in
dark and noisome cells under his feet?

Regarding the personnel of the officials at Atlanta I can for obvious
reasons say little. They are a good deal like such officials anywhere.
The warden is a Pennsylvania Dutchman; the deputy a young Kentuckian,
gigantic and fresh faced; his first assistant is a stalwart man of
middle age, a good deal of a martinet, but the men are inclined to like
him because they see in him a solid, masculine creature, who stands pat,
says what he means, and does what he says. Then there are the prison
doctor, the steward of the commissary department, and the parole
officer, and under them are the guards and the "snitches"--the latter
not being officially recognized, although they wield an important
influence, their reports against their fellow prisoners being seriously
considered, and often made the basis of action by their superiors, which
has no small effect upon the welfare of the jail. Yet these poor
wretches--they are mostly negroes--sell their brethren for a mess of
pottage of secret favors and immunities; none save the most abject would
accept such employment. Could any inspiration or procedure be more
insecure? Yet it is an essential factor in the present principle of
prison management.

The guards are, with some exceptions, such a body of men as might be
expected from their salary--seventy dollars a month, with no raise for
length of service or meritorious conduct. They cannot be rated as high
as the average police officer, and the conditions amid which they live
are so unfavorable to manly development that it is small wonder they
grow worse as they grow older in service. They either dislike the men
and use them accordingly, or they make secret compacts with them for
surreptitious favors, which undermine discipline and corrupt such morals
as prisoners may be supposed to possess. Often, however, they will
solicit favors from prisoners, and, when the latter seek some
accommodation in return, grin in their face, or austerely threaten to
report them. Their brutality is sometimes quite whimsical and
unexpected,--the outcome of some personal dislike, without bearing on
the prisoner's conduct,--though they are voluble in assigning some
alleged infraction of the rules, should a superior happen to call them
to account. And the superior, I may almost say, never believes the
prisoner against a guard, or rather, never acts upon such belief. That
is the settled policy of the penitentiary; the warden himself has placed
himself on record numerous times to the effect that under no
circumstances would he take the word of a prisoner over that of a guard.
To be reported means to be punished, be the report baseless or not. It
follows naturally that guards never scruple to give full rein to any
animosity they may privately feel against a man, knowing that they will
be able to "put it across" with the higher official to whom complaint
may be made.

I happened to be in the corridor one day when one of the guards, a tall,
strapping fellow, was bringing downstairs a convict of stature much less
than his own, a poor half demented youth, whose dementia was
unfortunately wont to express itself in foul or abusive language, which
came from him almost involuntarily, without any particular personal
application. The two men were half way down the final flight of steps,
when, without any visible pretext, but, I presume, on account of some
unlucky epithet or utterance let fall by the convict, the guard suddenly
seized the youth violently by the throat, hammered his head against the
wall, and dragged him headlong down the rest of the descent. They were
now in the corridor; the man, bewildered and giddy, was whirled round
and shoved to the head of another short flight of steps leading out to
the yard; the door was open. The guard came behind him, caught him by
the collar, and exerting his strength, hurled him through the door; he
fell prone on the ground, and lay there.

Here, my own view of the incident was cut off; but ten minutes afterward
I met a comrade, who, bristling with wrath, described the continuation
of the affray, which he had just witnessed. He said that the guard,
following the man, grasped him by the coat and jerked him off the ground
and shoved him, staggering, toward the isolation building on the other
side of the yard. There happened to be two visitors, a man and a woman,
under convoy of another guard, passing at the moment; the first guard
was by this time too much blinded by his own passion to notice them; the
other laughed, and apparently reassured the visitors. Upon nearing the
isolation building, a third guard, who was on duty at the gate, ran up,
and struck the prisoner several times on the head with his club. The man
put up his arms in an effort to ward off the blows, or to beg for mercy,
but without effect; he was dragged between his two assailants to the
deputy's office, as if he were a dangerous giant struggling to get away,
though, in fact, he was quite helpless and partly insensible. From
there, as we learned later, he was taken to a dark cell, charged with I
know not what misdeeds, and nothing was ever done to either of the
licensed ruffians who had mistreated him.

I recall such scenes with reluctance; they are ugly things to think of;
but some illustrations are necessary in order to put in your mind some
notion of what jails mean. An episode which, as it turned out, had
elements of the ridiculous, but which came within a hair's breadth of
having very fatal consequences, occurred a short time before I became an
inmate; it is still spoken of with emotion by those who participated in
it.

A large number of prisoners, some twenty or more, I think, were
collected in one of the basement work-rooms, when a fire broke out
there. The smoke soon became suffocating, and crept up into the ranges
above, alarming the whole prison. But conditions in the room itself were
immediately intolerable; the door had been locked, and the men were
jammed together there, frantically shrieking for the door to be opened.
Death for all of them would be a matter of only a few minutes. The guard
in the corridor above, a huge, burly personage, with the brains, it
would be flattery to say, of a calf, and exceedingly punctilious in his
notions, came down the stairs to see what was the matter. One of the men
shouted out to him, forgetting decorum in the desperate hurry of the
moment, "Why don't you open the door, you ---- ---- ----?" Now, it was
not only against the rules that the door should be opened between
certain hours, but it was altogether irregular and intolerable to
miscall an official. The guard stopped short. "Who's that called me a
----?" he demanded indignantly. But there was none to answer him, for
the men were by that time strangling and fainting.

Down the stairs at this juncture came one of the higher officials,
choking and gasping. "Open that door, why don't you?" he managed to call
out, seeing the guard below him. "I'm trying to find out," replied the
latter, "who it was called me a ----." The higher official was
understood to say something which penetrated the hide of his
subordinate, and stirred him at last to action--not a moment too soon.
The door was unlocked, and the captives tumbled and crawled out. The
burly personage, who rated punctilio and seemly language above the lives
of men, still retains his position in the corridor; but the prisoner who
had insulted his dignity has never been identified.

But what can be expected of men in the position of guards of a prison?
The function is abnormal, and unless it be undertaken from high motives
and with an exceptional endowment of intelligence and humane feeling, it
will steadily deteriorate a man; from being at the start to all
practical purposes a social derelict, incompetent for productive
employment, and often suffering from an incurable disease, he will sink
lower and lower in the scale of manhood and morality. He has two chief
aims in life--to requite himself upon defenseless convicts for the
kicking-out bestowed upon himself by the community; and to get an
increase of pay.

I had not been three days in the prison, when one of them came to me in
my cell and asked me to write for him a letter to the Department urging
a raise of salary. So be it by all means, if higher pay will get better
men; but men who can command higher pay do not care to do such work.

Since my guard saw no impropriety in asking for it--though, of course,
it was against the rules--I wrote his petition for him. The rules
governing guards are explicit, but so far at least as they regard
treatment of prisoners they are freely disregarded. For example, guards
are forbidden by the rules to address prisoners insultingly, to apply
names or epithets to them, to lay hands upon them or to strike them
"upon whatever provocation" unless they believe their own lives are in
danger. A rabbit has as much chance of throttling a bulldog as the
ordinary prisoner of endangering the life of a guard; yet hardly a
prisoner in the penitentiary has not repeatedly either undergone or
witnessed, or both, insults and physical violence offered by guards to
the men. As to the impropriety of asking favors of the men, the guards
might plead distinguished precedent for it. One of the higher officials
of the penitentiary summoned me to his office one morning. He informed
me that he intended to devote his life to prison work, but that he was
still a young man, and that advancement was slow and difficult. "When
you were outside, you lived in society, and knew a lot of big men," he
was kind enough to say; "you will be going out of here again before
long. If you should find it in your way to speak a good word for me in
quarters where it would be likely to do me good, I should appreciate
it." I should perhaps have premised, lest he appear in the light of
asking something for nothing, that he had opened the conversation by
handing back to me the Ingersoll watch of which I had been deprived on
entering the institution. I knew that my young friend and benefactor was
deep in the darksome intricacies of prison politics, and was just then
getting rather the worst of it; but I was unable to give him any
positive assurance that my influence with the Department, or elsewhere,
would suffice to give him a lift.

Favoritism rules in all parts of the prison administration; it and
prison politics are, indeed, twin curses of our whole prison system. In
spite of all the specious official promises of reward for good conduct
in the form of parole and obedience to the rules, every prisoner knows
that they are apples of Sodom; the most correct conduct, maintained for
years, will gain a man nothing, while a worthless and heedless fellow,
if he has a friend among the men above, will have his way smoothed for
him. An official's pet snitch enjoys all manner of indulgences in the
way of food and freedoms, and if he be an intelligent fellow, he can
ride on his superior's neck and influence his conduct to a surprising
degree. Again, certain guards, in the eyes of their superiors, can do no
wrong whatever wrong they do; and others, who are apt to be men who
retain some conscientious notions as to their duties, find their path
difficult. Some guards, too, though they may be obnoxious to their
officers, are not dismissed because they know too much, and might reveal
uncomfortable facts were they cashiered. I could name an example of
this--a young guard who, a few years ago, committed a cold blooded crime
upon a convict, for which in the outside world he would have been liable
to a hanging. But the prison authorities did not find it expedient to
punish him, and he still saunters about the prison, with his cap tilted
on his head, and his rifle. He is a good shot, and is employed a good
deal on the towers, where quick marksmanship might be useful. He knows
too much.

Evil conditions breed evil deeds and dangerous secrets. Conditions have
improved somewhat during the last two or three years, but the
improvement has been more outward than inward. One day, two or three
years ago, suddenly appeared at the gates the Attorney-General from
Washington. He had not been looked for so early. He walked straight into
the dining-room, where he noticed a number of convicts standing up with
their noses against the wall. "What is this for?" he asked one of them.
The convict couldn't exactly tell; he was waiting to be had up for
examination. "How long are you kept there?" "From seven in the morning
till seven at night." "Have you had anything to eat?" The man had not,
nor any opportunity to discharge the functions of nature either.

This Attorney-General, in Washington, had never showed himself a friend
of convicts; but when he saw--and smelt!--this comparatively slight
instance of prison discipline, his gorge rose. He ordered all the
culprits to the kitchen for a meal, and issued an edict against this
punishment, and against some other things that he discovered. What he
would have done had he seen the dark cells, and the condition of the men
who had been kept there for a few months, may be conjectured. The public
is indeed assured that the use of these cells has long been
discontinued; but seven or eight hundred prisoners know that, as late as
last October, a certain convict commonly referred to as "the old
Englishman" was hung up by the wrists in one of them. And there were
others.

Prison officials are political appointees, whose controlling aim must
therefore be the security and prosperity of themselves, and only
afterward (if at all) the welfare and just and decent treatment of the
convicts. They have their salaries (niggardly enough if we regard the
work they are supposed to do, but affluent in view of what they actually
do), and they have the government appropriations for expenses and
supplies for the penitentiary, which they are expected to handle
economically. But economy, and decent and humane treatment of prisoners
in a jail, are incompatible, even were the men kept steadily and
productively at work under proper conditions, and paid for what they
produced. A jail properly administered would be one of the most
expensive investments in the world; but Congress, as at present advised,
thinks only of cutting down the already miserably insufficient stipend;
and that warden who can, at the end of his fiscal year, show a balance
in favor of the government, may depend upon holding his position, and
nobody considers the mortal tears, misery and outrage from which that
favorable balance is derived. For not only if it be wisely and honestly
expended is the supply of money insufficient, but much of it is wasted
by mere ignorance, negligence and incompetence, and much more of it--as
recent exposures in newspapers indicate--leaks away in the form of
graft. For all this waste the convict must pay in privations and
cruelties not authorized or contemplated by a government none too
considerate at best; and men above grow fat and rosy gilled.

But nothing is so difficult to prove or so easy to conceal as graft; all
the ingenuity and resources of the grafters are primarily and
undeviatingly devoted to covering their tracks. So much is allowed for
maintenance, subsistence, construction; the bills and receipts are
shown; all seems right. And yet, somehow, buildings remain unfinished,
grounds are a raw wilderness, men are clad in rags inherited from
previous generations, and are starved and abused. Meanwhile, a warden on
a four or five thousand dollar salary contrives to live at the rate of
ten or twelve, and may own valuable real estate in the city.

Do miracles occur in jails, after having been so long discontinued
elsewhere? Or must we at last realize that the comfort and soft living
of a handful of rascals is obtained at the cost of the flesh and blood
and despair of thousands of men--I believe there are five hundred
thousand convicts in this country annually--gagged and helpless, to whom
we give the name of convicts, but who, whatever their crimes, are still
our own flesh and blood, brothers of ours, our own very selves but for
special circumstances for which we can claim no merit; but for their
souls and lives we are responsible, and to strive to redeem and succor
them our own intelligent self-interest should prompt us to spend and
labor lavishly. Instead of that, our habitual attitude toward them is
that of indifference or even hostility. For why should we honest people
waste our good money and precious sympathy on a convict? Has he not
already robbed us enough?

It would be a shallow thing to hold up as monsters of hardheartedness
and depravity the officials who have been entrusted with the conduct of
our prisons. If they do wickedly and corruptly, it is not because they
are to begin with preterhuman sinners, but because we summoned them to
duties far above their capacity and training, which involve temptations
and provocations which they lack will and power to resist, which give
them power over fellow creatures which the most magnanimous and purest
men might hesitate to assume, and which inevitably plunge men who are
not magnanimous or pure into deeds of injustice, dishonor and
inhumanity. In a sense, the officials are no less victims of the
ignorance and frivolity of the community than are the prisoners
themselves.

But, at any rate, the officials are few and the prisoners are many. If
anything is to be done to make things better, there is more hope in
dealing with the officials first. After they have been driven out, and
their places filled with honorable and enlightened men, who will at
least administer the law as it stands with integrity and judgment, we
shall be in a better position to consider whether the law itself be
beyond criticism, and its penalties justly and prudently devised. Crime
as it exists is an enormous evil, and it costs us enormously; and cheap
and pinchbeck methods will never rid us of it.




VIII


FOR LIFE

When a man hears rumors that his application for parole is likely to be
acted upon favorably, a guard pauses at his cell door some morning, and
tells him to go to the clothing shop at a certain hour. The prisoner,
unless he has been forewarned, accepts this as proof positive that he
will really be set at liberty, and presents himself before the head
tailor with a smiling countenance. He is solemnly and specifically
measured for a suit, looks over the material out of which it is to be
made, perhaps ventures to mention some predilections as to the cut, and
takes his departure with a light heart. The fact that the cloth is
cheap, unshrunken goods, which will shrivel up at the first shower or
severe humidity, and will, at all events, get wrinkled out of shape in a
few days, does not dash the hopeful prisoner's jocundity; nor even the
consideration that the "prison cut" will be instantly recognized all
over the country, by every detective, private or federal, and acted upon
as circumstances may indicate. It is not the clothes, good or bad, that
makes his long-tried heart glad; it is the assurance of freedom. He
would be more than content with a simple loin-cloth, if only freedom
might go with it.

As a matter of fact, this measuring commonly means little, and
guarantees nothing at all. Indeed, it has rather the appearance of a
pleasant jest of the authorities--one of the cat-and-mouse plays with
prisoners with which every old timer is familiar. One would say the
authorities find amusement, amid the monotonous round of their
avocations, in thus stimulating hopes which they know are not likely to
be fulfilled. "Come, here is a heart not yet thoroughly broken; let us
try another blow at it!" Days, weeks, months, drag tediously by, and
nothing more is heard of the parole, or of the suit of new clothes. They
have never been made up, or if they by chance have been, they are put
away to gather dust on a shelf underground; they are old clothes
now--years old, sometimes. And when at last they are brought out again,
it is probable that they will be worn by some other, more fortunate man,
who ignored the misfit for the sake of getting past the prison doors.

When this little drama was acted for my benefit, I noticed a man sitting
in a certain chair amid the other tailor prisoners, stitching away
perfunctorily at a piece of goods. I call him a man, but he looked, to
my fancy, like an ancient frog, or the semblance of what had once been a
frog, from which, however, all the impulses and juices that had made him
alive had slowly leaked away, until nothing but the shell was left. He
was a pithless automaton, in whom mind and emotions had long since
become inert, and only enough sensibility was left to enable him to feel
dimly miserable. Who was he--or, better, who had he been? I learned that
for seven years he had sat in that same chair from morning till night,
doing the same job of sewing on one suit after another of prison
clothing. Seven years! But was he capable of no other employment? Might
he not have been given the relief of a change? Maybe; but what would be
the use? They couldn't be bothered finding him new stunts all the time,
since he had learned how to do that one thing satisfactorily. He was a
"lifer."

Life--your entire lifetime--means, perhaps, a good deal to you; even its
sorrows, in the retrospect, were good in their way; they meant
something. And you look forward to happier things in the future; it will
be a long and on the whole a successful future perhaps. Think of the
variety and the opportunity which this great, multiform, breathing world
holds forth to a man; the friends, the activities, the changes of scene,
the surprises, the conflicts, success and failure, hope and fear,
triumph, defeat--life, in a word. It is a divine thing, a glorious
thing, the God-given birthright of all men. It is the molding of
character, the endless, stimulating struggle, the growing sense of human
brotherhood, the faces and hands of our fellow creatures, the longer,
deeper thoughts aroused by the slow revelations of experience as to the
plan of human destiny,--and therefore are the words well chosen which
condemn a man like yourself to penal servitude "for life"?

But human language has no word to convey the significance of lifelong
imprisonment. It is surely not life: nor is it death--Oh, death would be
welcome! For death means either (as you may imagine you believe) total
extinction, or it means increased life, free from material trammels. But
death in life is a monstrous thing; life, for example, spent in a chair
in a squalid tailor's shop, doing over and over again the same piece of
squalid, meaningless work, with ever another squalid year stretching out
its length before you when the last one has been completed. Is life so
endured _life_--the sacred Creative gift, imparted to all things,
conscious or unconscious, without restriction? Life, the mystery, which
we are impotent to bestow, and which even death, self-inflicted or
inflicted by others, cannot take away; which one thing only can take
away--the death-in-life of penal imprisonment; is it not a formidable
thought that we have incurred the burden of this crime, which does not
transfer life from one phase to another, but seeks to annihilate it
absolutely?

Death would be welcome; the infliction of it can find forgiveness; but
how can we forgive the infliction of death-in-life? How can God forgive
it, this profane meddling with sacred and fathomless life? Will He
accept the plea that we did it "for the protection of society?--for the
man's own good?--or a warning to others?" In that day of questioning, I
would rather take my chances with the man sitting in the chair in the
prison tailor's shop for seven years, a "lifer"! Infinite mercy may find
means to compensate him for what we robbed him of; but what can it do
with us, the robbers?

In the Federal prison there were a score or more of lifers, with some of
whom it was my fortune to become acquainted. I stood in a sort of awe of
them; the thought of their fate was so overwhelming that my mind could
not compass it, though my heart might approach some conception of it
through obscure channels of intuition. Their treatment by the prison
officials was not ordinarily severe; even a warden or a guard could feel
that clubbing and dark-celling would be a kind of anticlimax for a man
sentenced for life. Some of them--usually negroes--would be given easy
jobs, and not held too strictly to the petty regulations whose special
object is to humiliate the ordinary prisoner, under guise of
disciplining and reforming him. Nothing was to be gained by disciplining
or reforming a "lifer." Others, however, in whom despair had taken the
expression of obstinacy or savagery, were savagely handled; one of them
bears terrible scars from a shooting by one of the guards, and he told
me that, out of the twenty-two years he had already served, eight had
been spent in the punishment cells. Others are maltreated for a while,
experimentally, or to "put the fear of God in their hearts," and
afterward let alone. But as a rule, there is not much fun to be got out
of a "lifer" by the prison keepers, and they prefer to ignore him.

The introduction of the law allowing the privilege of applying for
parole, did, to be sure, place in the hands of the authorities a weapon
with which they could "get beneath the hide" (as they might term it) of
these obdurate subjects. Needless to say, this measure, which provides
that "lifers" may be paroled (at the discretion of the parole board)
after having served fifteen years with a good prison record, did not
contemplate introducing thereby a new element of misery into their
lives. But the men to whose hands the "lifer" is entrusted found in it a
means of making him more readily amenable to discipline by holding over
him the threat of an adverse report should he prove intractable. They
could keep him indefinitely in that state of torturing suspense as to
his fate, which is perhaps the worst of all tortures, by withholding
from him all information as to whether or not his appeal was likely to
succeed.

Several cases of this kind came under my observation. In one, the
release came before the man had collapsed; in others, too late. In only
one or two that I know of was there any pretext that his conduct during
imprisonment had been unsatisfactory. The delay was never explained; it
was due to wilful or careless neglect. Two men were carried out feet
foremost in a deal box after they had endured suspense up to the extreme
limit of mortal capacity. They died of broken hearts--gradually broken
through long months of hope slowly fading into despair.

The warden sat serene in his office, attending to business as a good
official should, writing reports to the Department which testified to
his efficiency and economy, welcoming visitors with his genial smile,
occasionally reading encomiums upon himself in a local newspaper,
written and inserted there by somebody; the guards sauntered jauntily
about, cocking their caps and making their clubs dance at the end of the
cords; eight hundred unsightly felons, who had once been men like you
and me, filed drearily in to their meals, and out again, the worse for
the experience; and all the while, from morning till night, Dennis sat
on the corner of his cot in the hospital room, waiting for the news of
his release. He felt, and said, at first, that it was sure to come; it
would come in a day or two, or at the end of the week anyway; or at the
beginning of the week after. He knew his application had been accepted;
of course, those big officials had lots to do, and could not be expected
to attend to him at once; but they would not forget him.

For several weeks--a month or two--Dennis kept up his spirits well; he
had been in prison many years, more than the number required for parole,
and he had no bad marks against him. His wife and two daughters were
still living, however, and he was full of plans for his future life with
them; what he would do, where he would live, how happy they all would be
together, after that separation. But one day as he sat on his cot, or
paced slowly up and down the hospital chamber, news was brought to him,
bad news, news that his wife had died unexpectedly.

He survived it; some men survive miraculously in prison, and some die
easily. Dennis had his daughters left to him still; and the release was
sure to come now--they would not surely delay it any longer. He had been
a tall, powerful mulatto when he first came to prison; he was a gaunt,
bent skeleton of a man now, with great, bony, strengthless hands, that
closed round mine with a sort of appealing, lingering pressure when we
met, as if he feared to let go his hold upon a man who was sorry for
him. The doctor knew--any competent physician, at least, might have
known--that he could not last much longer; but the doctor said nothing
and did nothing. Then--for the stars in their courses seemed to fight
against Dennie--came another piece of news for him; not news of parole,
but news that his daughters, both of them, had followed their mother;
they too were dead. Dennis, who had begun to plan out a life with them,
to be father and mother both to them, to comfort them and work for them,
and to die at last with their love and companionship comforting him, was
now alone in the world, and still in prison.

Time had gone by; it was six months since he had begun to look for
freedom. What would freedom mean for him now, with no one in the world
to go to or to be with? Probably he gave up looking for it at this
point; at any rate, he spoke of it no more. He spoke very little after
that, and he very seldom rose from his seat on the corner of his cot, or
took notice of any one or of anything in the hospital room. He sat
there, day after day, all day long, with his eyes fixed upon a certain
point of vacancy; what he saw, what he thought, no one knew. His hands
lay before him on his bony knees, lax and inert. Half a lifetime in
prison, and now he was nearing the end, mute and motionless, making no
complaint or protest--the power for that had gone by. He no longer spoke
of parole; and no parole came. No doubt, the great officials were busy,
and what was Dennis that they should remember him, and draw out that
paper from its pigeonhole, and sign it, and send it to him? The world
could get along without Dennis.

So, one day, Dennis died; and after his body had been laid in its box,
the old market wagon, with the old mule between the shafts, was backed
up to the door, and the box with the gray old corpse in it was shoved in
and driven round to the prison burying ground and dumped into its red
clay hole. There it lies; but I am not sure that that is the end of
Dennis. A time may be coming, after this earthly show is over, when
persons who were so much pressed for time that they could find no moment
to sign a paper to save a fellow man's life, may see him again under
awkward circumstances, and be asked to explain. Justice, after all, is
an Immortal, and belongs to eternity. We should beware of measuring, by
the apparent slowness of her movements on this lower plane, the
likelihood of her final victory.

If you have some imagination to spare, put yourself in the place of a
convict who finds himself, to-day, facing a sentence of imprisonment for
life. The imagination of it, even, is so appalling that you will need
more than common courage to picture it to yourself. What, then, must the
reality of it be? It is hard to understand how any human heart and brain
can withstand the prospect of it. If it has not stopped your heart at
once--if your brain has not immediately collapsed under the shock--you
will think of suicide. But, perhaps, before you can find means or
resolution to seek that escape, you will become conscious, in the
background of your mind, of a stirring of that almost ineradicable thing
that we call hope. You cannot quite bring yourself to believe that your
entire earthly future is to be passed in a prison cell. Some event will
occur, some beneficent freak of destiny, some earthquake or lightning
bolt, some national revolution or catastrophe, some belated sense of
humanity in your brother man, some new law repealing the impious cruelty
of the old law, that will break your bars before the end can come. You
cannot believe that you will actually live and die in jail.

Thus you are tided over your first hours and days, and with each new day
that you survive the chances of your surviving altogether increase. By
and by, you fall into the prison routine, and your existence becomes
mechanical and automatic. There will be occasional flamings-out of rage
and despair, but they pass, and become progressively more infrequent.
You have slipped down into a merely animal stratum of existence; you
live to-day because you lived yesterday, and you do not forecast
to-morrow. Perhaps you learn to assuage and deceive the hunger of your
immortal soul by forcing your attention upon the petty ripple of daily
events and duties, until you present, to the outsider, the appearance of
a commonplace, non-tragic person, bearing no noticeable scars of the
crime which society perpetrated on you. You perhaps lose, at last, the
realization of your own inhuman plight, and are received, unawares, into
the gray prison protoplasm, no longer really sensitive to impressions,
though presenting the semblance of human reactions. You drift down the
stream, passive, in a sort of ghastly contentment. You have forgotten
that you ever were a man.

But I am merely speculating in the direction of truths that I do not
know and cannot reach. The lifers themselves whom I knew could tell me
nothing; they were less demonstrative than the men of five or ten years'
sentence. We can never fathom the dealings of the Almighty with His
creatures, and they, perhaps, can fathom them as little as we can. In
ways inconceivable to us, they are supported.

There was a little old man known as Uncle Billy. If the parole board has
kept faith with him, he should have been set free the 23rd of December.
Uncle Billy's right arm had been amputated at the shoulder, the result
of a shot through the arm from his own gun while he was getting out of a
buggy. He lived in Oklahoma, Indian Territory, at the time of his story.
Billy was married to a woman who must have had some attractiveness, for
a journeying pedler, who periodically passed through the region, formed
a liaison with her. There was at that time a daughter, who had just
reached marriageable age. The pedler was wont practically to put Billy
out of his own house during his sojourns, and usurped his place as
master of the household. At one time he secured Billy's conviction on
some minor offense, and had him jailed for six months. What Billy
thought of the situation I don't know; he was a small, slight man, under
five foot three, and of an intellectual cast. But he seems not to have
attempted active measures, until one day he discovered that the pedler,
not satisfied with the wife, was attempting the seduction of the
daughter likewise.

Then, one night, Billy came to his house, and found that going on which
his patience could not tolerate. He got hold of an ax, and, stealing
into the room, struck the pedler, as he lay in bed, with his one arm,
and split his head open. What passed then between him and his wife is
not known. Billy, I believe, was for giving himself up to the
authorities at once; but the woman prevailed upon him to conceal the
deed. She tied the body to the tail of the horse, and dragged it across
the fields to a ditch, where she covered it with dirt and rubbish. There
it lay for some weeks, until a couple of men out hunting saw an end of a
suspender sticking out of the ground, and pulling at it, discovered the
murdered corpse. Billy confessed, and he and his wife were lodged in
jail pending their trial. The woman died there; but Billy was tried and
convicted, and in consideration of the peculiar circumstances, was "let
off" with a life sentence. When I knew him, he had been in a cell nearly
fifteen years.

The weather was chilly; some of the prisoners were let out in the yard
every day at one o'clock, to pace round in a ring for forty minutes. I
saw the little, bent, thin old man, with one arm, hobbling round and
round with his cane. Conversation was not permitted under the rules, but
the rule was often overlooked. After I had gained an outline of his
story from some old timers, I spoke to him, and he looked up at me with
a pair of singularly intelligent brown eyes, and with a kindly
expression of his meager little face. We conversed a little on general
subjects, and I found him well educated, observant, thoughtful, with a
distinct vein of subdued humor. Afterward I saw him in his cell, though
there was a rule against that, too; but the guard was tolerant.

He had a violin there which he had made himself, his tools being a knife
made out of a nail hammered flat and the edge sharpened, and a piece of
broken glass. It was admirably fashioned, and except that it was not
varnished, would have been taken for such an instrument as you buy in a
shop; its tone, too, was pleasing, and Billy could discourse excellent
music on it. It was in the manufacture of these fiddles that his time
was passed; the fact that he had but one hand to work with did not
embarrass him. His contrivance for playing on the instrument was as
remarkable as the instrument itself; he had rigged up a sort of jury arm
of wood and metal, with an elbow to it, and a grip to lay hold of the
bow. Persons who play on violins will doubtless be more puzzled than I
was to conceive how he could do it; but he did it. And for aught I could
see, he was content with his singular industry; it gave him constant
occupation and enabled him, I suppose, to keep thoughts of other things
out of the way. Otherwise, he was utterly unobtrusive, almost invisible,
and the guards let him alone. But the government of the United States
had kept him there for fifteen years, as a menace to society. You can
see him in fancy, had he been set free for doing what most human beings
must have done, ranging up and down the country, dealing out terror and
slaughter. Such wild beasts must be restrained. They must be disciplined
and reformed, and jail is the way to do it.

Just before I left the jail, I spoke to Billy about his parole. "You and
I will get out almost together," I said. "No, no," he replied, with his
curious little humorous smile, "they can't get rid of me as easy as
that; I've got three months yet, and I'm going to stick it out to the
end." I have not heard the sequel; but I can hardly believe that the
authorities mean to play the cat-and-mouse game with him.

I have perhaps mentioned John Ross, who died, under promise of parole,
after thirty-three years behind the bars. And there was Thomas Bram, a
prisoner hardly less remarkable, freed on parole after seventeen years'
confinement. He had persistently asserted his innocence from the first,
and nobody so far as I know doubted his assertion. The evidence against
him was entirely circumstantial, and there was another man in the case
who seemed, to judge by the reports of the trial, to have been at least
as likely to be guilty. Bram's record in prison was wholly blameless,
and though there was some opposition to freeing him, it sufficed only to
obtain a delay of a few weeks beyond the date set for his release. But
during those few weeks, his sufferings were trying to witness, and he
was near collapse before the end came. He told me that the
Attorney-General had personally promised him freedom two years before,
but had done nothing toward keeping his promise. "It wasn't right, Mr.
Hawthorne," was all the comment he allowed himself to make. Bram's
self-control was great, and his manner always soft and ingratiating; he
was politic and prudent, and had probably resolved from the outset of
his prison career to obtain pardon or mitigation if good conduct and
unfaltering adherence to his plea of innocence could compass it. He was
given a job which procured him some indulgences, and was never punished.
But if a life sentence for a guilty man be intolerable, what shall be
said if he were guiltless? Think it over in your leisure moments.

I find my list is far too long to be dismissed in one chapter; and in
cases where the men are still in confinement, discussion of them might
prove injurious. There was a young fellow there who looked like a
slender boy of seventeen; he was really over thirty years of age. But he
had been imprisoned since his fifteenth year, and his face since then
had not developed or taken the contours of manhood; and his manner was
boyish. He was well educated in the grammar school sense, however,
though I believe he had picked up most of what he knew in prison. He had
a distinct, emphatic way of speaking, and believed, I fancy, that he was
quite a man of the world, though, of course, he was almost totally
devoid of other than prison experience. He would have been an
interesting study, had not the pathos of his condition, of which he was
himself unaware, made one shrink from probing it.

He had killed a man at the instigation of and under the influence of a
step-father, who wished the man removed for ends of his own, and forced
the child (he was nothing else) to take the job off his hands, and the
law of Indian Territory, which was the scene of the affair, condemned
him for life. After serving fifteen years, he applied for his parole
under the law; there appeared to be no grounds so far as his prison
record went for denying it; nevertheless, he was rejected. He asked the
reason, and was told that it was not considered safe to set him at
liberty; he had a "bad temper"--that was, I think, the explanation.

Psychological insight is a good thing in its way and place, but it may
be carried too far, or employed amiss; and this looks like an
illustration. The boy, in more than fifteen years, had never done
anything in prison that called for discipline; but because some
self-constituted and arbitrary psychologist chose to believe, or to say,
that his temper was not under full control, he was doomed to spend the
rest of his life in a cell. This prisoner knows, of course, that he has
been wronged, but he does not know how much; he does not know what life
in a world of free men is. But he, after being kept for half of his
lifetime under duress, must submit to the caprice of a man to whom the
country has entrusted absolute power. No man is qualified to exercise
absolute power; no man is justified in accepting it; but we bestow it
upon every chance political appointee, and what he does with it puts us
to shame, whether or not we can as yet realize it.

There was at least one life prisoner in Atlanta who merits a chapter to
himself; but I cannot speak of him now. He is one of the unreconciled,
and his horoscope is still too cloudy to make it safe to tell his story.
A desperate criminal, he would be termed by prison experts. In truth, he
is a warm-hearted, generous, high minded man, sentenced to death in his
boyhood for a deed which would have been properly punished by a few
months in a reformatory, afterward obtaining a commutation to life
imprisonment, and now a man of more than forty years, bearing upon his
body terrible scars of severities practised upon him for trying to
resist wrongs which no manly man could tamely endure. A Balzac might
find in him a more human and lovable _Vautrin_; a Victor Hugo could make
him the hero of another _Les Miserables_; a Charles Reade could win new
renown by summoning us to put ourselves in his place. But the best
service I can do him now is to give him silence. He is not quite
desperate yet; should he become so, the world will know his history.




IX


THE TOIL OF SLAVERY

Before the Civil War there were some millions of negro slaves in the
South, whom to set free we spent some billions of dollars and several
hundred thousand lives. It was held that the result was worth the cost.
But to-day we are creating some five hundred thousand slaves, white and
black, each year--or that is about the number of made slaves each year
in the United States; it costs us several millions to keep them in an
enslaved condition, and their depredations upon society, before and
after slavery, amount to several millions more. I have not the precise
data, but the figures hazarded are not excessive. A sound statistician
would make a more sensational showing; and when he proceeded to cast up
his account for the aggregate of the years since the war, and of the
estimated amounts for the coming fifty years, the bill would look large
even with a hundred million paymasters to foot it.

In that bill, probably the smallest item would be the cost of crime
itself--the actual loss caused to the community by the thieving of
thieves,--of the thieves, that is, who have been convicted and condemned
as such; for there is no way of figuring on how much the undetected
thieves steal. Every time we shake the social body, in this or that
spasm of probing and reform, hundreds drop out, like moths from an
unprotected garment; so that at last we are prone to suspect that the
thief, overt or covert, is more the rule than the exception, and that a
good part of the cash in circulation was more or less dishonestly come
by. But, leaving this aside, the money or values appropriated by thieves
accredited as such and sent to jail, is an amount relatively
inconsiderable, and by no means enough to pay the expenses of their
apprehension, trial, and prison sojourn. It is, then, politically
uneconomical to imprison them.

The reply to this is, of course, that penal slavery is preventive of
crime; that if we did not prosecute malefactors, crime would multiply
and abound, like weeds in a neglected garden. Perhaps it would; but the
point is, that it multiplies and abounds even in the teeth of
prosecutions; every year the number of convictions is greater, and the
jails are already cracking their seams to contain the convicts. One
might almost conclude that prisons, as now administered, stimulate crime
instead of preventing it, and that we are in the predicament of Hercules
in the fable, who, as fast as he cut off a head of the hydra, saw two
others sprout in its place. At which rate, we might be led on to the
surmise that it would be financially cheaper to let crime run on; the
cost of our futile efforts to stop it would be saved, and might be set
over against the loss from the increased annual depredations.

But finance is not the whole story; what about morality? and who can
forecast the ruin of anarchy? The problem cannot be so crudely solved.

Crime must be prevented; doubtless nine-tenths even of the men in jail
would agree to that proposition. The question is, can the jail system
prevent it? and the answer is that, judged by long experience--the
experience of thousands of years--it cannot. There are several reasons
why it cannot, into some of which we may enquire later; but the
objection to the jail system which I wish to emphasize just now is, that
it not only makes slaves of convicts, but, unlike the more reasonable
southern negro slavery, it makes them unproductive slaves. Either it
withholds this vast body of men from production altogether, or else it
forces them to toil under conditions which bring forth results the
smallest possible and the most unsatisfactory. The men are not paid for
what they do. Whatever profit (in "contract" prisons) accrues from their
toil goes into the pockets of the contractors, or, perhaps, is used to
defray the cost of their keep to the community. Or, again, if it is made
to appear to go into the prisoners' pockets, it is deftly taken out
again the next moment by an ingenious system of fines, which no prisoner
can escape.

In short, prison labor is slave labor, and slave labor of a worse kind
than was ever practised in negro slavery times. For on southern
plantations, though slaves were not paid wages, they got wages' worth in
good food and lodging, and (uniformly) in humane treatment, including,
above all, the companionship of their wives and families; and they were
able, in many instances, to buy themselves into freedom. Most of the
negroes, moreover, had never known what it was to be free; their race,
for generations unknown, had been slaves in their own country; they had
never been free citizens of the United States, never had education, were
unconscious of any disgrace in their condition, and were as happy as
ever in their lives they had been or were capable of being--happier,
indeed, than most negroes are in the community to-day. In all respects
their condition compares favorably with that of our half million annual
prison slaves, manufactured deliberately out of our own flesh and blood.

I used to contemplate the population in the Atlanta Penitentiary--the
eight hundred of us--and then look at the construction work, the
gardening, the tailoring, the carpentering, the product of the forge,
the farming in the prison grounds outside the walls, and the work of
clearing and grading on the area which the walls enclosed, and I
marveled at the disproportion. Eight hundred men, many of them skilled
in this or that industrial employment, most of them physically capable
of active labor, and almost all of them eager to work if given
intelligent and useful work to do; not a few, too, intellectually and
educationally equipped to plan and direct industrial operations; and
yet, with all this great potential force at command, all that was
actually accomplished might have been done as well or better by a
corporal's guard of willing and well managed men. The mere economic
waste of such material was criminal, without regard to the evil effect
of inadequate or misapplied labor upon the men's moral and mental state.
Can it be, I asked myself, that this extravagant idleness is forced upon
the prisoners as part, and not the least evil part of their punishment?
Or is it the result of ignorance, incompetence, or indifference on the
part of those appointed and paid to take care of men sentenced to "hard
labor"?

That the men suffer from it is beyond question. And I cannot find that
the law provides or intends that their suffering shall be of this kind.
Much of the insanity in the prison is due to the way they are made, or
made not, to work. There is a legend of a warden who, being unable to
keep his prisoners otherwise busy, set them to piling up paving stones
on one side of the yard, and then taking down the pile and repiling it
on the other side. After a week of this, most of them were maniacs. It
was not the severity of the labor that destroyed their minds, but the
uselessness and objectlessness of it. Sane men require reasonable
employment; idleness, or irrational work disintegrates their minds. They
want to see and to foresee intelligible results from their toil; mere
toil without such results is maddening, or it rots men's minds as scurvy
rots their bodies. The reason is, that the men are human; and if you
have hitherto supposed that convicts are not human, the insanity which
so constantly follows upon prison idleness or mis-employment should
correct you.

Others may describe the horrors, almost indescribable, of contract labor
in prisons; I saw nothing of that at Atlanta--type of another widespread
system of prison work--though I heard enough about it from men who had
undergone it in state prisons. But during the few first days of my
imprisonment, I saw a building gang at work (to call it work) upon a new
wing destined to contain dormitories for the inmates. It was to be a
seemly structure of granite, massive and well proportioned. But after
three days, work on it was stopped, and was not resumed until a week or
so before I left this prison, six months later. Meanwhile, I read in the
_Congressional Record_ the report of a debate in the House, in which, on
the authority of a Texas representative, charges of graft or waste were
laid against persons concerned in the erection of this building which
seemed incredible, but of which I was able to find no refutation. The
hospital building is open to the same criticism, and another, which I
believe is designed to be the laundry, had got no further, at the date
of my arrival, than a square hole in the ground, and when I left had
been furthered by a single course of stone or cement laid round the
hole. A New York contractor, graft or no graft, would have had all three
of them finished and in commission in the same time, and with no better
material in the way of laborers than our prison could supply.

The thirty-four foot wall surrounding the buildings, a mile in circuit,
built of cement, had been completed before my time. I read in a report
of the warden's that its existence was due to his enterprise, and that
he looked upon it as a worthy monument to his activity and intelligence.
At every hundred yards or so of its length it was strengthened by a
tower, containing accommodations for a guard, day and night, who watches
with his rifle in hand, ready to shoot down any prisoner who seems to be
acting suspiciously. No such shooting by a tower guard has as yet taken
place to my knowledge, and none ever will on the pretext suggested; for
the wall is absolutely unscalable; being five or six feet thick, it is
impenetrable, and its foundations going down six or eight feet below
ground, it cannot be beaten by tunneling; yet the towers and the guards
are there.

But the point is that the wall itself is quite preposterous and
unnecessary. Escape for prisoners was quite as difficult before it was
built as after. There are a hundred guards in the penitentiary--one for
every eight prisoners--all armed and eager for action; every article of
a prisoner's clothing bears the prison mark; and the population outside
the walls is penetrated with the idea that the apprehension of escaping
prisoners is morally as well as financially profitable. Every prisoner
knows that an attempt to escape would be suicide--"you might get hurt,"
as the prison rule book euphemistically phrases it--and they generally
prefer suicide in some other form.

The wall, then, is superfluous; a fence of electrified wire would have
served as good a purpose at about one-thousandth of one per cent. of the
cost. And what did the wall cost? Let the prison archives declare. And
then, perhaps, it would be interesting to investigate the discrepancy,
if any exist, between the price which the United States paid for the
work, and the actual cost of erecting it.

The wall was some time in the building, but it seems to have been the
only thing built in the prison, work upon which was continuous and
energetic. And it was a useless work, better left undone. The warden was
proud of it, however, and there it stands.

As for the twenty-seven acre enclosure, in which the prison buildings
are, which is--according to official prognostics--to be graded, leveled,
drained, cultivated and planted till it looks like a private
millionaire's park, it is a raw, rough unsightly waste of red clay and
weeds, gouged out here and there with random and meaningless
excavations, heaped up in other places with piles of earth; diversified
in one quarter with some forlorn chicken coops and fences, made by the
voluntary and unskilled labor of one of the convicts; and adjoining
these, with the Tuberculosis Camp, a row of a dozen or more tents
mounted on wooden platforms, with little flower beds in front and
behind, and a pigeon house at one end. The only part of these grounds on
which any visible thought and labor has been expended is the baseball
diamond, adjoining the northeast corner of the wall. Here, the ground
has been leveled and smoothed over a space sufficient to include the
diamond itself, and a few yards on its south and north sides; beyond
that is waste ground, and along the northern boundary is a parapet of
earth five or six feet high, presumably made of the material scraped off
the diamond. A ball vigorously struck by a batter either goes over this
parapet into the swamp ground beyond, or sails away toward the
Tuberculosis Camp, to be retrieved from the weeds and rubbish in that
vicinity.

There are some forty score men behind the bars who would rejoice to be
allowed to put these grounds in order, and who, under proper guidance,
could do the job in a month. It would be a useful work, it would benefit
the men both in the doing and in the accomplishment, and it would be an
excellent advertisement of the penitentiary for the visitors who daily
stroll about the enclosure; yet months and years go by and nothing
whatever is changed.

One day, in midsummer, I saw a gang of negroes digging a trench in front
of the southern gate, and cutting out a heavy growth of weeds and
underbrush on the slope above. Drain pipes were carted out and dumped in
the vicinity of the trench, and three or four of them were laid down in
it. This went on for three or four days, the whole gang of ten or a
dozen men not achieving in that period more than one or two capable
Irish or Italian navvies would have done in the same time. Then the gang
disappeared; the open trench and the pipes remained in statu quo, and
the weeds gradually resumed their ancient sway. So far as I know, work
has not been resumed there since.

It is a typical example; even such work as is done, is done in such a
discontinuous and futile way that it is impossible for any one doing it
to feel any interest in it, or stimulus to do it well. Time, toil and
money are frittered away, with nothing definite or substantial to show
for it. Intermittent and barren tasks are doubly onerous. The overseers
may not be to blame; they may be incompetent; they may be hampered by
the ignorance, incompetence or voluntary policy of the prison
authorities; the consequences, at all events, are disastrous. If a
handful of hearty, clever, driving men were given control of the various
industrial operations in the prison, the results would seem magical.

There is dry rot or something worse everywhere; and it is difficult to
believe that anything is gained by it either for the convict or for the
country. It is to be sure punishment for the former, and a bad form of
punishment, but it would be grotesque to assume that it is inflicted by
design of our lawmakers. It cannot be that the government deliberately
proposes to destroy convicts, mind and body; on the contrary, we must
suppose that it wishes to reform them and render them again useful
agents in the community. There is no way to do this better than to give
them honest and productive work while in jail, so that they may acquire
the habit of such work, and be encouraged to pursue it when they get
out.

But in order to induce them to work economically, it is indispensable to
give them continuous, intelligent, and manifestly useful work, and to
pay them for doing it. It can be and it is done in some jails even now.
Warden Fenton, of the Nebraska State Prison, has been putting his men on
the honor system, and sending squads of them out to work on farms or for
contractors, without guards or other precautions, sometimes for weeks at
a time; all he asks of them is their promise to return when the job is
done, which they uniformly do. And for this work, he causes them to be
regularly paid; he retains their wages for them until the term of their
imprisonment has expired, and then hands it back to them. The men are
encouraged and inspirited by this treatment, and the neighbors among
whom their work is done, seem disposed to take a helpful and cooperative
view of the enterprise. If the neighbors--the community--loses nothing
by this system, and if the convicts gain by it, why should it not be
made the general practise? Convicts in Nebraska are the same sort of
people as those in Atlanta.

Warden Fenton is progressive, but most other wardens are not, and there
is no certainty that future wardens of Nebraska prisons will be;
therefore he has not solved the problem for good and all; something more
than the benevolent or wise ideas of any individual is needed for that.
Mr. Fenton has absolute power--power, therefore, to give or withhold
favors as he may choose. Enlightened legislation would deprive him and
other wardens of absolute power, and make it mandatory to treat
prisoners as he is doing it voluntarily.

Moreover, if men will go off and work without guards for three weeks at
a stretch, and then return uncompelled to the prison, what is the use of
making them return to the prison at all, or of having any prison for
them to return to? Is not their conviction prison enough for most of
them? And for such as prove incorrigible, or are criminal degenerates,
ought not pathological care, instead of penal slavery, to be provided?
Professor Marchiafava, physician to the Pope, said recently, "Eighty per
cent of youthful criminals are children of drunkards." That is a serious
indictment of alcohol; but it indicts no less the policy which punishes
victims of disease as if they were deliberate and freely choosing
malefactors.

But leaving sick folk out of the argument, I say that, in view of Mr.
Fenton's experiment, and others like it, conviction is prison enough for
most persons who have slipped a cog in their moral machinery. Means
could readily be found to make such persons recognizable at need, and
they would have as great a stimulus to render themselves free from that
stigma as they have now, and far better opportunities for doing it. They
would have their families with them, or within touch, and they would no
longer be slaves; and if they had been slaves to their own passions and
propensities, the expediency of breaking such chains would become far
more obvious than it ever can be when a guard and a warden is always
round the corner waiting to club or dungeon them for infringement of a
whimsical prison rule. It does not help a man to his manhood to see his
keepers acting constantly the part of tyrants and torturers.

This is perhaps a novel doctrine, because, as the editorial writer in
the _Saturday Evening Post_ remarked the other day, "The truth is that,
at least two times out of three, we send a man to jail because we do not
know anything rational to do with him, and will not take the pains to
find out." We lack imagination to devise more effective treatment, and
we are wonderfully ignorant as to what prison treatment really means.
And this indictment lies not only against the public at large, but
against the Department of Justice and the Congress, who pass their
judgments and inflict their penalties without in the least understanding
what they are doing to human bodies and souls like their own.

Jail is the conventional and time-honored nostrum, which is administered
with a glow of moral self-esteem, and no more thought about it. When a
murderer is sent to jail for life, or a bank burglar or white slaver or
financial crook for his specified term, do we not sit back in our chairs
and clear our throats with a self-satisfied "hem!" and "There's one
scoundrel has got his deserts, anyway!" Had it been your brother,
father, son, or yourself, would you employ such language? Would you not
rather say, "If the whole truth were known, this could not have
happened?" But every case is a special case to the victim. And which of
us who has not been a convict in prison has the right to declare that
prison is the "desert" of any man? We do not know what we are talking
about.

I was looking out of the window of the Isolation Building one day, with
the runner, Ned, beside me; I did my writing there, and he was assigned
for duty to the same building. Ned, to whom I have already referred, was
a thoughtful young man, and often said a word that went to the center of
the subject. We had no business, of course, to be conversing together,
but the guard was absent for the moment. We were watching the convicts
form in the yard for the march to their several places of occupation;
there was a double row of them down there in front of us being marshaled
to go to the stone-shed, about fifty yards away. There they would remain
till evening, chipping away at blocks of granite, and breathing the dust
created by their labor.

The stone-shed men were mostly recruited from the so-called hard cases
among the convicts; the work was hard, and rapid-fire guards were
generally picked to take care of them. A man had been shot to death
there about five years before by a guard, on no better grounds than that
the man had not moved quickly enough in response to an order. No action
against the guard was taken, and he is still on duty in the prison;
perhaps he knows too much. The stone-shed men prepare the stone used in
the construction of the buildings already mentioned; and they are also
employed at times, by no regulation to be found in any of the books, to
do odd jobs for members of the prison force; as when, for example, they
were required to turn out a monument for the wife or other relative of a
guard who had died, and for whom he was unable to provide a suitable
memorial at his own expense. For whatever purpose the stone work is
done, legitimate or illegitimate, the workers are not enthusiastic about
it, and probably not many of them will live long enough, at least in
prison, to see their handiwork in practical use.

Arrayed near them was another file, destined to work on the grounds
belonging to the prison outside the warden's famous wall, where
turnips, potatoes, corn and other vegetables are grown. The
vegetables grow--it can hardly be said that they are cultivated; I
don't know what a New York market gardener would say to them. They
grow, and in due season some of them appear on the prison table;
others do not appear, but whether they are left to rot in the ground,
or are put to a more remunerative use, I do not personally know.
There is no great enthusiasm among the gardeners, either.

Suddenly, Ned groaned out, "Oh, the aimlessness of it! Why don't you
write a piece in our paper about the aimlessness of prison work?
Aimless--that's what it is! How can a fellow feel interested in what
he's doing, when he never knows what he's doing it for, or what
becomes of it when it's done--let alone that he isn't paid for it?
Aimlessness--that's what we get here in prison, and that's all we
learn here. Did you ever think what a prison would be if there was
any common sense aim in anything? Those fellows could make this place
the finest thing you could imagine, if they were taken hold of by
somebody with common sense, and put on jobs that had any sense in
them. But they are kept dawdling around, and never know where they're
at. It kills 'em--that's what it does! You'd think a criminal would
be taught anything but aimlessness; it was aimlessness that got him
here in the first place, nine times out of ten.

"Why, take what goes on in the printing office that you were assigned
to, for instance," he went on, with a sidelong grin at me. "You have a
month to get out the paper, four to six pages large quarto. How long
would it take to do that stunt in New York?"

"I suppose it could be done in twenty-four hours," I admitted.

"Yes, and there are six men down there, and they have thirty times
twenty-four hours. They are in a cellar underground, with the air that
hasn't been changed in years, and the heat-pipes making it worse. Their
health can't stand it--you know that--but there they've got to stay
every day from eight till half after four, pottering round with their
types and proofs and stuff, and trying to drag it along till time's
up--what's the good of it to anybody? It's the same everywhere; look at
the tailorshop! Those fellows sit and fool around there, with the guard
slinging language at 'em every few minutes, and taking an hour to sew a
hem six inches long; and all the time here's you and me wearing clothes
that were new maybe five or six years ago, as you may see by the numbers
that have been stamped on your back and then blotted out, and were worn,
since then, by some poor devil with tuberculous trouble or worse; but
they'll be worn out for fair before we get any others. Why, look at your
pants! They're split all down the leg, and there's your knee sticking
out of the hole! The prison authorities call that economy, may be; what
do you call it?"

I said that I was not competing for the glass of fashion just then. Ned
offered to sew up the rent for me, but I said that the safety-pin now on
duty would suffice. He still had some of his theme left in him, and he
went on:

"Look at that power house, that's kept going night and day, the year
round, with coal at government expense, running all sorts of machinery,
and what do they get out of it? I was in the carpenter's shop the other
day, and there was all kinds of machines going, lathes, and I don't know
what; you'd think by the noise of them they was building the Ark at
least. But I nosied round, and couldn't find anybody that seemed to be
working much. At last I came to one of the big steam lathes, and there
was a man that looked to be busy about something, so I went up to watch
him. Well, what do you think he was doing? He was making one of these
here little sticks that a fellow cleans his nails with! The power house
was burning tons of coal, and everything humming, and that was what came
out of it all. A nail stick! What do you think of that?"

No doubt there was rhetorical exaggeration about this; but Ned's
arraignment was on the whole not devoid of justification. There are
abundant means in the prison for carrying on useful and energetic work,
but they are not properly employed. Neither the convicts nor the
community benefits by it.

Not that it is wholly without benefit to anybody, either. Good clothes
are made in the tailor shop, but they are not worn by convicts. At least
one excellent dwelling house has been made by prisoners, but it is
occupied by a high prison official. Unexceptionable meals are cooked in
the convict kitchen, but convicts do not eat them. There is an admirable
and productive kitchen garden attached to the prison, but its contents
never appear on convict tables. There is a fine lawn, diversified with
brilliant flower-beds, in front of the main prison building, and it is
greatly admired by visitors and passers-by; but the convict sees it
twice only during his term--once when he is brought into the prison, and
again when he is led out. On neither occasion is he, perhaps, in the
best mood to profit by it. Perhaps the prison officials do profit by it;
but if so, the results are not seen in their intercourse with the
prisoners. There is nothing flower-like in that.

Idleness is an evil thing; purposeless work is idleness in another and
worse form. Aimlessness, as my friend Ned said, is a miserable state for
a man; it tortures him in prison, and the habit of it, acquired in
prison, cripples and degrades him after he gets out. Contract labor is a
crime which is getting recognized as such; it disgraces the nation or
the state which tolerates it, and the shame of it, if not its
immorality, may lead to its general suppression. Unpaid convict labor
for the state, as on roads and so forth, is better than private contract
labor, but is also a disgrace to the employer--a contemptible saving of
pennies at the cost of human souls. Honest work is a manly thing, and
those who do it should be treated like men, and as laborers worthy of
their hire. Because we have rendered them helpless to demand their
rights is no excuse for denying them. It is cheap, but shameful, and can
only teach them that the community can be as dishonest as the veriest
thief of them all.

But a system of work of which that at Atlanta is a type (and, alas! the
type is far too numerous) is anomalous and abominable; it is aimless,
and abhorrent to man, God and devil alike. It is difficult to absolve
such a prison from the charge of being run at the expense of prisoners,
for the benefit of its officials, since they alone appear to prosper by
it.




X


OUR BROTHER'S KEEPER

Tigers love their cubs, hens their chickens, dogs love their masters and
all these will fight and die in defense of what they love. Human mothers
generally love their offspring. Love in the common sense is common or
instinctive, and involves no moral quality. It is love of one's own, and
contains a better form of self love.

But mercy is of higher birth. Animals know nothing of it; savages and
the lower types of man ignore it. We ascribe a divine source to it when
we pray God to have mercy on us; we do not ask Him to love us. All
higher religions enjoin it. Mercy is love purified from self, or wholly
altruistic. It is a man loving another not because of blood
relationship, or because of expected benefits, or even because of
benefits bestowed, but on the simple ground that he is his human
brother, child of the same Divine Father. It is purer than the racial
feeling, and it includes the animal creation outside humanity in its
scope--as the Bible puts it, "the merciful man is merciful to his
beast."

It is the Golden Rule in manifestation; we see in the one to whom we are
merciful ourself in another form, under different conditions, and we do
to him as we would have him do to us. It seems to require a certain
maturity of mind, acquired or inherited; children below puberty seldom
have it. It is easily forfeited, and indifference to the suffering of
others is readily established. It is to be guarded and developed as a
sacred possession of man at his highest, and constantly nourished by
thought and deed. And no man is so high and strong but he may and does
need the mercy of some being loftier and more powerful than himself,
which he cannot claim if he have not himself done mercifully to those
below him.



I have remarked heretofore that officials of prisons should be men of
the highest character in the state--at least as high as what we would
wish to ascribe to our judges of the criminal bench. Judges send men to
prison; but prison guards and wardens have charge of them during their
imprisonment, with powers practically unlimited.

Unlimited power is a trust too arduous for any mortal, for it should
presuppose perfect knowledge, all-penetrating intelligence, boundless
experience, and the mercy which is born of these--for there is a bastard
brother of mercy which is of the parentage of ignorance and cowardice,
which shrinks from the sight of suffering from mere pusillanimity of the
nerves, and does not recognize that suffering may be mercifully
inflicted or permitted and beneficently endured.

But the community does not select its prison officials on the basis
above indicated; it is satisfied if they be competent to "handle men,"
have a sagacious familiarity with human depravity, will tolerate no
nonsense, can indict plausible reports for the Department, and show a
good balance at the end of the fiscal year, or, as guards and
under-strappers, keep the men submissive and orderly and allow no
outbreaks. As for knowledge, a public school education is ample, with
such intelligence as may be supposed to go with it; and the experience
of a ward heeler or a thug will ordinarily suffice to pass a candidate.
As a matter of fact, the community never knows anything about its prison
officials until some special scandal transpires under their
administration, or unless some heaven-sent phoenix of a warden
unaccountably manifests humane and enlightened tendencies. Their
appointment is left to the political machine, which hands it out on the
principle of what is he, or was he worth to us? As for justice and
mercy--my good sir, you seem to forget we are talking of convicted
criminals!

I affirm, however, that justice--which is intelligent mercy--is required
nowhere so urgently as with convicts; that any punishment which aims at
more than restraining convicts from practises calculated to injure their
own best interests, is a crime; and that cruelty to persons imprisoned
and helpless, be the plea in extenuation of it what it may, is damnable
and unpardonable wickedness. Meanwhile, there is not and has never been
in the United States a jail in which revengeful, malicious and
unjustifiable punishments have not been inflicted, and in which cruelty
does not stain the record of each year and day.

There have appeared lately in the newspapers stories of enormities
perpetrated in Russian prisons. Terrible barbarians, those Russians!
Yet, barring one feature of them only, they can be paralleled by what is
currently done in prisons here. This one feature, is the absence in the
Russian infernos of all hypocritical protestations to the public of
humane treatment and of aversion from severities. The Russian cannot do
more than beat, torture and kill his prisoners; but we do the same. It
is done at Blackwell's Island, at Sing Sing, at Auburn, at Jefferson
City, at Leavenworth (until the other day at least), in San Quentin, and
countless others, including my own Atlanta: only, there, the policy of
suppression of news and promulgation of falsehood is perhaps carried to
a more nearly perfect extreme than in most other prisons.

A few years ago, but under the present regimen at Atlanta, the workers in
the stone shed there were pursuing their occupation in the torrid heat
of a summer day, when one of them, a young man named Ed Richmond, asked
the guard on duty for leave to retire for a few moments. Such requests
must of course often be made. But Richmond was a man who had not been
lucky enough to win the favor of the higher officials in the prison, and
this was known to the guards, who felt that they might with impunity
treat him harshly. Richmond had been a good deal abused, and his mind
had become somewhat unbalanced; he would sometimes talk incoherently and
act oddly. It had been noticed that the stone shed guard "had it in for
Ed," as the prisoners say; but nothing very serious was looked for.

Be that as it may, something serious was about to occur. Five or six
years after this day, I was walking, under convoy of the Deputy Warden,
in the prison grounds that lie outside the walls, when we stumbled upon
the prison graveyard. It lay at the crest of some rising ground, partly
overshadowed by second growth timber, and was merely an unenclosed
clearing in the rough undergrowth with rows of headstones standing one
behind the other, each with a name and date on it. But under all of them
lay all that remained on earth of prison tragedies; for even if a
prisoner die a natural death in prison, he dies with a broken heart and
poisoned mind, abandoned, in gray despair, friendless, shut out from sky
and freedom, hearing with dulled ears the clanging of steel gates,
seeing the blank walls, deprived of the sympathetic words and glances of
friends--a miserable, unknown death. Silence and obliteration close over
him; and here he lies.

On one of the headstones I read the name of Ed Richmond, and the date of
his end. He had not died a natural death, but there was nothing on his
tombstone to show it. I already knew his story, having heard it from
several eyewitnesses.

On the day above mentioned, the guard had granted his request; but after
the man had been absent a few minutes, he called to him to come out.
Richmond did not at once respond. The guard called to him again, more
peremptorily, and advanced toward the place where he was, outside the
stone shed building. Richmond, as the guard came nearer, mumbled
something; the guard seemed angered, and stepped up to him, raising his
club to strike. Richmond instinctively put up an arm to ward the blow,
and as it descended he caught the end of the club in his hand. This was
the head and front of his offending, and for this he was to die.

The guard dropped the club, drew his revolver, and shot Richmond four
times in the body. He also fired another shot, the bullet going through
a wooden partition into a part of the shed where some prisoners were
working, barely missing one of them. Richmond slowly dropped where he
stood and lay huddled on the ground; the guard stood looking coolly at
him. One of the prisoners, a negro, ran up and took the dying man's head
on his knee; others looked on. After awhile an official came up and
ordered the man taken to the hospital. But his hurts were mortal, and in
a few minutes he was dead. The men in the stone shed continued their
work.

An investigation within the walls was held, the guard was exonerated,
and was still on duty when I was in the prison. The officials who had
disliked Richmond were relieved of the annoyance of his presence. There
were no inconvenient newspaper reporters about. If the dead man had
friends outside, they never were able to do anything. It seems unlikely
that the guard who killed him would have done it had he not felt
confident that the higher officials would condone the deed. Perhaps, had
he been arrested and indicted, he might have uttered some names; but he
was exonerated, and he has kept his mouth shut. This happened before the
date of Attorney-General Wickersham's visit to the prison, and therefore
before the change in Warden Moyer's ideas as to the expediency of severe
measures in the handling of convicts. Were the thing to be done again
to-day, it would probably not occur out in the open air and sunshine,
with persons looking on, but under circumstances of decent seclusion.
The outside public is becoming a little squeamish about prison killing.

But in Russia there is no public opinion, or none that is audible, and
the prison guards there are not hampered in their work by the necessity
of doing it under cover, as they are here. It is a question which method
is preferable. I believe some of our prisoners would vote for the open
way of killing and torturing. It is exasperating to be "done up" in
secret, in the dark, stifled and gagged, with no chance to die fighting.
I have no comparative statistics as between us and Russia, but it would
not be surprising if our record of men beaten, starved, poisoned, hung
up in chains in dark cells, and killed by neglect and cruelties, were to
size up fairly well against what Russia has to show. Considering the
restrictions put upon them, our prison autocrats certainly do well.

Some doubt has been created in the public mind as to whether there
really are dark cells in the Atlanta Penitentiary, or, if there be,
whether their use has not been long discontinued. I never heard any
categorical statement in denial of it from any of the officials, though
I have read something to that effect in local newspapers. Visitors never
see them, and I know of no prison inspectors who have done so; they are
shown instead the light cells on an upper floor, which are habitable
enough, with windows admitting daylight, and a cot bed. But the dark
cells are another story altogether, and their existence can no more be
denied successfully than that of the prison itself.

A man named H.B. Rich was employed in the prison for nine years as
foreman of the blacksmith's shop; he says that he helped build two dark
cells in the basement, and often riveted chains on convicts there. "They
were chained to the door," he goes on, "hanging by their hands,
sometimes for twenty-four hours. Often they were thus chained up during
the day, but at night the chain attached to the frame of the door was
loosened; the other chain was attached to a vertical rod, the ring
sliding up and down, so that the man was able to lie on the bare cement
floor. There were no cots. The food was generally one slice of bread and
a cup of water a day, sometimes two or three. Men were often kept thus
for weeks at a time, and would come out so pallid and weak that they
could scarcely walk, and blinded from long confinement in darkness. A
convict named S. was kept in the dark hole two weeks; I was often called
to chain him, as he was a powerful man; but when he would come out, he
was so weakened that he could scarcely move."

I may add here that I have often talked with the convict here mentioned,
and he told me details of his experiences. I would print his name and
story, but he is still in confinement--he has lived two and twenty
continuous years in prison--and he might be made to suffer for his
revelations. Among other things, he said that he had been in the
punishment cells, in the aggregate, eight years! If he were not a lion
of strength and courage, he would have been dead long since. The Atlanta
penitentiary claims to be the most humane in the world. But eight years
in chains and darkness seems a long time, even taken in instalments.

A man lately released has this to say: "The administration of the
penitentiary is a sham and pretense. 'Reform' is a show, for the benefit
of government inspectors and visitors, with, underneath, a callous and
brutal disregard for the welfare of the convicts moral and physical. No
tortures? I was trussed up, face to wall, with arms outstretched, for
ten hours. When loosed, I just dropped to the floor from exhaustion, and
did not rise till the next morning. That was during the present
administration. When visitors and newspaper reporters go through the
prison, 'there isn't any hole'; but the prisoner who thoughtlessly
infracts a rule knows that there is one!

"In the Isolation Building there is a number of three-cornered cells
where men are chained to the doors; they have little cots; these cells
are shown. But down beneath there is the real hole. These underground
cells have no cots; when a man drops, he drops on the cement floor. If
they wish severely to discipline a man, they can make these cells
practically airtight, and then turn on the steam through the pipes."

Let us have more testimony as to the dark hole. "The hole," writes
another inmate, "is not a hole in the wall or in the ground, but it is a
place to turn a man's cheeks white and to make his knees shake and his
lips tremble, when, for some infraction of very strict rules, he is
ordered to the hole. It is a row of holes; far down in the bottom of the
big bastile is a row of little cells, six feet wide, nine feet long, and
perhaps ten feet high. Solid concrete, with iron grating in the narrow
door. Absolutely dark. Furniture, one iron rod, one blanket. The man is
handcuffed between the rod and the wall, hands apart as far as he can
hold them; at night the wall fastening is loosed, and he can lie down
sliding the ring of his handcuff down the rod. No mattress or bed--just
floor. Food, three ounces of bread and a glass of water at noon. The
rules are said to be less severe than formerly; but two half-breed
Indians, former friends, recognizing each other in Sunday school,
ventured to whisper a greeting; they were put in the hole two days and
nights, and one of them, a stout hardy boy, came out trembling and
shaking as with mortal illness."

A man who served as guard in the prison under the present warden, but
left in 1907, affirms that barbarities were not the exception at that
time, but the "horrible custom. The dark hole is a reality; men were
kept there weeks at a time, to my certain knowledge, within stifling
walls, chained standing for intolerable periods, with great suffering.
The public understands 'solitary confinement' to mean a cell by one's
self; but this cell is a dark dungeon below earth level. One convict had
to be brought out on a litter, his legs swollen to a frightful size; he
could not stand erect. I was reprimanded for entering his cell and
helping him to sit up. A man named L. who had drawn back his hammer
threateningly when a guard advanced upon him armed with a 'square,' but
who ceased to resist when the guard drew his revolver, was sentenced to
one hundred and forty-five days in the dungeon, with three slices of
bread, with water, per day. Christian Endeavorers," this witness adds,
"never have an opportunity to observe the real conditions. No outsider
comes in contact with things as they are. No outsider in Atlanta has
ever seen the dungeons."

G.W., formerly employed in the prison, says that "the hole near the
plumber's shop was built while Morse, the banker, was in the prison, for
I helped build it, and the warden, with another official, was down to
see it at ten in the morning." Speaking of the statement that the dark
hole was no longer in use, he adds, in his letter to me, "You know of
the hanging up in the dark cell of the old Englishman, in October"--the
month I left the penitentiary. I do know of it; the fight of this
stubborn old fellow against the oppression of the prison authorities was
the talk of the ranges just before my departure; he had done nothing
worse than to use bad language; he would not give in; and I believe that
it was found advisable at last to release him.

The case of poor little B. had a less agreeable sequel. He was dying of
diabetes during the latter months of his confinement; he was an
incorrigible little thief, a man of extraordinarily acute mind, and a
sort of saturnine humorist withal. He had been repeatedly convicted and
imprisoned, but "I can't let it alone," he would say. He was plump and
flabby, ghastly pale, with protruding eyes, very clear and penetrating.
He was ridiculously impudent, but being so soon to die, as he himself
well knew, none of the prisoners bore him a grudge. The authorities,
however, thought it well to discipline him, and he was so repeatedly
maltreated by them, and put in the dark hole, that his disease was
greatly inflamed and the end hastened. I said something designed to be
encouraging to him shortly before I left; but he fixed me with those
singular eyes, and said, "I am doomed!"

The last I heard of B. was in a letter from a lady who has done much to
help and relieve the sufferings and wrongs of prisoners in the jail. "B.
is in a dying condition," she writes; "he was severely punished while
suffering from his disease. W.," she goes on, "died three days after a
ten-days' punishment. He had to be lifted from the dark cell and carried
to the hospital by attendants." Upon the whole, one has grounds for
believing that the dark hole is not a fairy tale, and that it still
exists and is at work in Atlanta Penitentiary, in spite of the
impression to the contrary of the humane warden and his officials.

The geography of the places is, however, obscure, and is known to the
elect only; it is said by inmates of old standing that underground
passages connect the prison buildings and lead from one dungeon to
another. This sounds romantic, but would be obviously useful in
practise. A map of the premises, surface and subterranean, would be
interesting, and may hereafter be achieved by some inspection which
really inspects. I have not spoken of some features of the dark cells,
as described by men who have experienced them, because they are so
revolting that editors of newspapers would decline to print them. Human
beings are compelled to endure many things which the fastidiousness of
other human beings cannot tolerate even the hearing of.

A prisoner named Keegan was killed at Atlanta not long before I was
released, not by a guard's bullet, but by means as sure though slower
and more cruel. We were all conversant with his case at the time, but I
will quote the man who knew him and his sufferings most intimately. Here
is his crude narrative written to me on prison paper.

"William Keegan died in August of this year (1913) at the Pen. He was
first taken sick with pains in the legs, hands and arms, and went to
morning sick call, but could never get anything done, because he was a
little deaf and could not hear what the doctor said, and so could
explain no further, and he was in a very bad fix. They did nothing for
him, and he was afraid to see the doctor, because he would have been
impatient, and would have sent him to the hole, and then he would lose
time. But he did go up to see him after the pains got into his back
also, and he told him he would like to get out of the stone shed; and
the doctor told him there was nothing the matter with him, but he was
only faking and trying to get out of work--which I know and can swear to
as being true.

"If ever there was a sick man, Keegan was him. He told M. the foreman
about it one day, who told him to have the doctor look him over, and
sent him up one afternoon; the doctor looked him over and told him he
was only a crank--nothing at all the matter with him. Soon after he was
taken very sick, and one night I called the prison nurse to his cell,
and he had him taken to the hospital, where he stayed some time, but it
did him no good, for he came back to the cell house in just as bad a fix
as before. Then they put him to work in the paint-house, and after he
had been there about a week, they said he was crazy, and put him in the
hole. He was treated shamefully in the hole, for the prison nurse even
told me so. Then he was taken again to the hospital, and he never came
out of it, for he died there, and the prison nurse told me he suffered
terribly before his death. This I will swear is true before God.

"Very near every man in the Pen had a bad stomach, and could get nothing
for it, for if you went to the doctor, he would tell you you ate too
much, and give you a big dose of salts, and if you did not take them, he
would put you in the hole, and then you would lose good time. But if a
man had a pull, he would get along right enough. There was A., a bank
wrecker, he was clerk in the stone shed, and I have seen him have eggs
right in the kitchen, when we had only rice to eat with cold water and
bread which was sour. If he didn't want to work he didn't have to, for
when I worked as runner for the plumber I have seen A. lying down and
smoking and reading or pretty near anything he wanted to do; but if
other men had done less than half the things he did, they would have
been put in the hole and lost good time also. Things should be looked
into, for it is sure run shamefully."

Readers would perhaps like to know more of the doctor, whose
professional activities are so engagingly described in the above
statement. He is a medical graduate of recent vintage, poor but
aristocratic, engaged to attend four hours a day at the penitentiary at
a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year. "I need the money," he once
admitted to a colleague in the prison. Keegan, as we have seen, was
under his penetrating eye for months, and he died a few days after the
young gentleman had assured him that there was nothing the matter with
him. The doctor dresses well, and has an air; he has the use of an
automobile, and sometimes escorts good looking young nurses, or other
young ladies, about the prison grounds. He has a knack at surgical
operations, and urges prisoners to be operated upon; they sometimes
recover, and sometimes do not. His use of drugs in his practise seems to
have been mainly restricted to prescribing salts, and the hole, both
effective in their way, but not always happy in their application to the
cases under consideration.

He was always civil to me, and put me under the obligation of saving my
life, for he ordered me a milk diet when I was succumbing to the
influences of prison hash and "hot dog." It was part of his duty to
visit the dining room every day--or was it every other day?--and inspect
the food served to the prisoners. During my six months' stay, he
appeared twice in the doorway, where he exchanged amenities with the
guard; and once he traversed the aisle between my row of tables and the
next, accompanied by some very nice looking girls. He had other duties,
which he discharged with similar punctuality and fervor. And all for
fifteen hundred a year.

There was a hearty, full-blooded, good natured young fellow, with red
hair, who worked in the blacksmith's shop, and worked well. His overseer
was a negro--this often happens in Atlanta Penitentiary. The heat in the
forge room during summer was intense, and the red haired boy used to get
rush of blood to the head, and finally asked a high official for leave
to step out in the open air occasionally and cool off. It was granted.
But on one of these outings his negro master ordered him to go back and
do a job of work for him; the other quoted his official permission;
there was a wrangle, ending in an appeal to a higher official still. The
latter, in the face of the lower official's testimony that he had
authorized the recess, supported the negro, and the young blacksmith was
sentenced to five days in the dark cell and thirty days' loss of good
time. Discipline must be preserved.

Are such conditions as I have described general? The newspapers during
my stay at Atlanta described a discussion in local prison circles as to
the propriety or expediency of whipping female prisoners in the Georgia
female prison (not connected with the federal penitentiary), and
confining them in the dark hole. The warden of the prison, a gentleman
named Mitchell, and his guards, said that women did not mind confinement
in the dark hole, and got no harm from it--though it was shown that
after being so confined for a day or two, they were scarce able to stand
and wholly unfit for work. The guards declared that the women could not
be effectively disciplined except by flogging, and threatened to quit in
a body if the practise were disallowed. Dr. MacDonald, of the prison,
testified that although some wardens might abuse the power of flogging,
and had lashed women on the bare back instead of over covering of one
garment, as prescribed by the rules, still he favored whipping for them;
he said the use of the "leather" was really more humane than the
dungeon. Secretary Yancey, of the Prison Commission, also favored the
lash.

On the other hand, State Representative Blackburn said that it was "a
dangerous policy to give such wide discretionary powers to wardens
scattered about the state. It would give rise to terrible abuses and
mistreatment. The sovereign power of the state should not be delegated
to individuals only remotely accountable. The punitive system should be
carefully guarded, and the line of punishment mapped out, otherwise
evils will creep in; no corrective measures that border upon cruelty
should be used." Representative Smith added that if we "put the power to
use the whip on women in the hands of brutal and incompetent wardens,
the same cruelties and atrocities which have shocked the civilized world
will be repeated. Wardens, drunk with power, abuse their positions; they
are appointees of a system, inexperienced and incompetent in many cases;
chosen, not because of their fitness, but more likely to repay some
political favor. When a good warden is found, it is more or less an
accident. Give permission to whip, and the public would be horrified at
the result, if ever they should learn the circumstances."

That is fine; but the concluding words mean more than they say. How is
the public to know? If you had a mother or a sister or daughter in that
jail, would you feel entirely reassured by the declamations in the
legislature of these kindly gentlemen? Would it not occur to you that,
when this little flurry had blown over, the warden and his guards might
possibly, and as quietly as might be, revert to what they held to be the
only effective means of keeping order? It is easy, in a prison, to gag a
woman so that she cannot scream, and to take her down to a secluded
place, and there to lay on the leather heartily, with or without first
removing the inner garment. Who is to know, or to tell? We are not
Russians, to boast of these things openly.

At the turpentine camp at Atmore, Alabama, thirty-five convicts whose
contract had been annulled by Governor O'Neal, were brought to Mobile
October 10th, 1913, and placed in the county jail. All but fourteen had
been whipped with heavy straps loaded with lead, and affidavits were
offered showing that two of them had been whipped to death. But
Superintendent of Prisons Riley of New York, in a letter to Warden
Rattigan of Auburn prison, writes: "I do not believe that any one was
ever reformed by physical torture." This was not the view taken,
apparently, in Jefferson City (Mo.) prison, for there, a few weeks ago,
a negro was given a very hard task each day (says the _Post-Dispatch_ of
St. Louis), more than he could perform. At evening he would be taken
out, strapped to a post and beaten with a heavy strap. There were cuts
and sores all over his body. Favored prisoners were allowed to break
rules, while others were severely punished for the same thing. The
penitentiary there is described as a "small hell entirely surrounded by
masonry and incompetent officials." Dozens of men were brutally whipped
for minor offenses.

We have all heard about Blackwell's Island, New York City, where
"beatings by officials, and much worse, resulted in the death of a man."
Trustee Hurd found two men in dark cells, one stupefied, the other
hysterical and sobbing. They had been punished for whispering. The dark
cells had been ordered discontinued some weeks before. Warden Hayes, on
being asked by the official why he had permitted them to be used,
replied, "Well, the fact is, I've been so busy I haven't had time to get
round to it!" What is his business?

In Atlanta we do not use the leather; we find the club handier, and some
guards are skilful in so applying it to the bodies of their patients
that, while the external evidences are negligible, it occasions internal
troubles which can be ascribed to "natural" causes. And there are
indications that we do use the dark cell, described by Dr. MacDonald,
above, as more inhumane than the lash. If this expert be correct, he
gives us a standard whereby to measure how inhumane they must be.

I cannot go on, though I have used only a fraction of my notebook.
Moreover, I am inclined to think that the physical punishments I have
instanced are not the worst that are administered in Atlanta and perhaps
in other prisons. Great ingenuity is shown in the application of mental
tortures, which have their outcome in insanity, but which never can be
investigated by commissions and inspectors. An insane man is as safe as
a dead man--if he tells tales, no one will pay attention to him. The
cat-and-mouse game is a favorite with the inhumane type of wardens. Give
your man alternations of hope and despair, and the results will soon
reward your pains. Then there are the insults, the gibes and threats,
the obscure forms of tyranny and outrage, the degradation of
manhood--there are a hundred subtle ways of destroying and corrupting
the spirit of a man. To be compelled to occupy the same cell with
certain types of criminals is a most successful form of inhumanity; and
when, as often happens, one of the two is a comparatively innocent boy,
the results are awful. "Insufficient number of cells" is the explanation
given; and at Atlanta at least there are the unfinished cell houses,
which might have been finished years ago, had the appropriations been
properly applied.

"Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner!" we pray in our churches. But He
says, "With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you again."
We do not set the Lord a good example of mercy in our prisons.



XI


THE GRASP OF THE TENTACLES

I have spoken of punishments inside the prison. When a man has served
his time and is set free (as it is called) another punishment begins,
which may be worse and more disheartening than the suffering endured
inside the walls.

As I listened, on Saturday afternoons, or at other times, to the stories
hurriedly and guardedly told me by my fellow convicts who had served
more terms than one, I said to myself, "The wrong of prison is bad
enough; but this of what happens to a man after prison is worse, and
monstrous." The endless tentacles follow him, reach out after him,
surround him, fasten upon him, and draw him back whence he came. And not
that only, but they mark him and isolate him, disable him from free
action, make honesty impossible for him. No citizen of whatever
integrity and standing, if so pursued, maligned and undermined, would
have any choice left him but either to perish or to break the laws. The
spies of the government, with the prestige and power of the government
behind them (however despicable and vicious they may be in themselves),
can ruin any man; but ex-convicts are their staple food.

In the latter part of June, 1913, a federal judge named Emory Speer was
accused of evil deeds on the bench, and a congressional investigation
was announced. The judge was taken ill, and at this writing the
investigation still hangs fire. Now, the evidence against him had been
collected, it would appear, by the agency of government spies, and this
fact caused great indignation in some quarters. Here was a man not
convicted of felony, but a pillar of the state, being pursued by
detectives just as if for all the world he were an ordinary person--an
obscure private citizen, say, or an ex-convict! The judge himself was
very indignant, and his friends on the local press were rasping in their
comments. In a long editorial entitled "The Shadow of the Spy," one
Atlanta paper denounced the proceedings root and branch. It affirmed
that the governmental spy system had assumed such proportions during the
past few years as to threaten one of the mainstays of free government.

All this interested my comrades, not because the spy system was news to
them, but because no public notice had been taken of it until it began
to wring the withers of persons who had hitherto supposed themselves to
be in the position of promoters instead of victims of the practise. A
federal judge had never protested against pursuing with spies men
suspected of crimes, or men who, having served time upon conviction, had
then gone out into the world and attempted to lead a new life. The spy
system, so conducted, seemed to such persons proper and normal. But the
moment they found their own acts investigated, their own footsteps
dogged, they became indignant, and denounced the whole principle of the
thing.

No man convicted in a federal or state court, or set free after having
done his time in prison, but is abundantly conversant with the methods
of the American spy.

As we all know, the first thing done with a new prisoner is to take his
bertillons, and the record of these measurements and observations,
together with two photographs of him, or with four, if he had a beard
when convicted, is sent to every police office in the country, and is
there studied by the detectives and police. The intention, of course, is
to render easier the recognition of "old offenders," and to curtail
their future industries. It is generally affirmed that bertillons cannot
be mistaken; but in a Detroit court, on January both, 1914, an expert
declared that "a difference of one-eighth of an inch in the laying on of
the fingers made an entirely different impression"; and "judgment was
awarded against the bank," which, relying upon the infallibility of the
finger record, had brought the action. At any rate, the bertillon is
still a potent weapon with the police, and when they want a man for a
crime committed, or when they desire to drive out of any given place on
the face of the earth a man who has been previously a convict, they have
but to point to his bertillons, and the thing is done.

Let us see how this may work out in practise. A convict, having served
his term, is presented by the United States (or a state, as the case may
be) with a suit of new clothes, and with a five dollar bill. He also
gets a ticket on the railway to the place of his destination, and,
though he is in theory a free man from the moment that he passes the
prison gates, as a matter of fact an official is assigned to take charge
of him and put him on his train; he cannot remain in Atlanta (supposing
for the once that Atlanta Penitentiary has been his abiding place during
his sentence) on penalty, if he do, of forfeiting his ticket and having
to pay his own way. This may be a provision of the law, or it may be
simply a measure to prevent ex-convicts from talking to newspaper
reporters or other enquiring persons. The thing is invariably done,
unless the man's residence happens to be Atlanta itself.

In my own case (to cite an instance) the regular procedure was observed,
with only one accidental modification. I received my suit of clothes, my
five dollars, and my railway ticket--at least, the latter was given to
the guard detailed to accompany me to the station, to be by him
delivered to the conductor of my train. But I had previously made up my
mind to say a few things to the reporter of a certain local newspaper,
and I was ready, in case of necessity, to abandon my eleemosynary ticket
and to pay my own way to New York on a later train. I had money of my
own to do this with; most ex-prisoners, of course, have not. But the
sacrifice was avoided by the circumstance that Mr. Moyer, the warden,
was absent at the moment in Indianapolis, and the deputy incautiously
let me out an hour or more before my train started. I lost no time in
meeting my reporter, and during the next forty minutes, in an automobile
provided for the occasion, we drove about the streets of Atlanta, while
I imparted to his astonished ears my reasons for thinking that the
penitentiary was not the paradise on earth that it had hitherto been
believed to be. He brought me to the railway station in season for my
train, and I got safely away, leaving mischief behind me.

That was my good luck. On the other hand, a friend of mine recently
released told me that the warden had called him into his office at the
last moment, and had extracted from him a promise not to talk to any
reporter in the town before leaving. That is the usual way; but it is
the exception, sometimes, that counts.

Let us return to our average convict, just out, and with the world
before him, where to choose to display his prison-made garments and to
spend his five dollars. It not seldom happens, to begin with, that he is
not so much out as he had imagined. Our present method with convicts has
peculiarities. Here is a common example.

A man was convicted and jailed for robbing a postoffice. The sentence
was five years. The specific charge was of stealing postage stamps.
Having done his bit in the federal penitentiary, he was given his outfit
and the gates were opened. He was proceeding joyfully on his way, when a
sheriff laid a hand on his shoulder, and informed him that he was his
prisoner. What for? The sheriff smilingly explained that the sentence he
had just served was for a federal offense; he was wanted now on a state
charge of breaking into the grocery store in which the postoffice was
housed. For this, the state prison accommodated him with lodging for
five years more. The man outlived that, and fatuously imagined that his
payment of that debt was fully discharged. He was awakened by the hand
on his shoulder again. What was the matter now? Why, he had, while in
the grocery store, and in addition to stealing the federal postage
stamps, possessed himself unlawfully of a box of matches, thereby
committing a second state crime, involving a further detention in the
state prison of five years more.

This is an example of our cat-and-mouse way with convicts, and is, of
course, much more destructive to the victim than an outright sentence of
the same length would have been. But in what manner it tends to reform a
man, or to protect a community, does not clearly appear.

Sometimes, the sheriff is dilatory in arriving to make the second or
third arrest, and it would seem that the prisoner might have a chance to
escape. But in such a case the warden himself would take a hand in the
game. In an instance of which I heard a good deal, the man's sentence
expired, we will say, on June 1st. The warden had been apprised that he
was to be re-arrested, but the sheriff was not on hand--could not get
there for two days. But the law, or prison regulations, or something,
enables a warden to detain a prisoner beyond his fixed time, in the
event of his committing some prison irregularity. The warden informed
the man that he was reported to have broken a plate in the dining room,
the penalty for which was three days more in his cell. Before the three
days were up, the sheriff had arrived, the man was re-arrested, and
justice was satisfied. We will suppose, however, that our man has no
second or third or other indictments hanging over him, and that he
really does get clean away. What will be his adventures?

If the weather be not rainy he reaches his train unscathed. But if that
new suit, with "jail-bird" written all over it in characters which all
detectives and police, at least, can read as they run, chance to get
wet, the raw shoddy forthwith shrivels miserably up, and the wearer's
ankles and wrists stick out so betrayingly that a mere child might
recognize the sinister source of the garments. But, anyhow, a few days'
wear will so wrinkle and crease and deform the suit that it becomes
unwearable, and the man might as conveniently and more prudently go
about in shirt and drawers. Should he present himself in it requesting a
job from some virtuous citizen, the latter is less likely to grant it
than to step to the 'phone and call up the police station. "There's a
suspicious character here--better look him over!" The officer looks him
over accordingly, and either advises him to betake himself promptly
elsewhere, or, if a crime happen to have been committed recently in that
neighborhood, the perpetrators of which are still at large, he takes the
man into custody on suspicion.

That the man is utterly innocent makes small difference; his status as
an old offender is readily established, and the rest follows almost
automatically. "You did the job all right; but, if you didn't, you're a
vagrant, without visible means of support, and they'll put you in the
lockup for six months or a year. And let me tell you, our lockup is no
joke! Likely you'll get on the chain gang, and then, God help you! If
they don't take a fancy to you, they're liable to croak you any time.
Now, I'd like to see you get out of this easy, and here's what you'd
better do. You own up to the crime, and I'll have a word with the judge,
so he'll let you off with a short sentence in a place where they treat
men right, and you'll get out in about three or four months. That's what
you'd best do; and if you don't, I wash my hands of you! What do you
say?"

What would you do? Stand on your rights, demand a full and fair trial,
prove your innocence, and be acquitted without a stain on your
character? That is the proper and righteous course for a free and
independent American citizen.

But you are not a citizen, in the first place; your civic rights are
gone for good, and instead of your innocence being assumed till your
guilt is proved, it is the other way about. Your friend the detective is
prepared, for one, to swear that to the "best of his knowledge and
belief," you are the culprit; and there is commonly a number of other
easy swearers hanging about the court room to support him. You have no
friends; on the contrary, every eye you meet is hostile. You have no
money to hire a lawyer, for that five dollars had gone before you had
mustered courage to ask for the job that got you into this trouble. And
above all, your spirit is cowed and prostrate from years in prison; you
have known the long, sterile bitterness of penal servitude, and you have
no stomach for a fight. No, you will not fight--you cannot. You will
stand up in the dock and confess to something you never did, and throw
yourself on the mercy of the court. Your friend the detective whispers
to the judge--"He's an incorrigible--he ought to get the limit!" And His
Honor gives you ten years. It is less than a week since you put off
stripes, and went out into the world resolved to make good. If you
outlive your undeserved sentence, will you ever resolve to make good
again?

Can such things be? Indeed they can, and they are. There is poor C. in
Atlanta now, the victim of such a deal; and S., and H., and many more.
C., indeed, told me, and I believe him, that he never committed any
crime at all, other than to get drunk and to sleep out on the road; he
was apprehended for vagrancy, then charged with a post-office robbery in
another state (which he had never visited), advised by the detective who
"took an interest" in him to confess, upon the promise of being let off
with a light sentence; he got the limit, and will wear out his youth in
jail, while the detective is complimented for his efficiency.

The Government is extravagant. What is the use of spending money on a
shoddy suit of clothes for each one of thousands of convicts every year,
and giving each of them a five dollar bill, with the certainty that, in
a large majority of cases, they will be back in their cells in a few
days or weeks, or months? Look up, if you please, the statistics as to
the number of convicts who are second or third offenders. Nay, the
Government is itself the prime and most effective cause of their getting
back, since it is government spies that provide the evidence that sends
them up.

But can we afford to trust ex-convicts? Must we not keep a strict eye on
them? If the strict eye were also a friendly one, it might be of some
avail. But our hand is against them, and we need not wonder that theirs
is against us. Not only are we their enemies when they emerge from jail,
but (as has been repeated interminably by every investigator who has
been qualified to speak on the subject) jails are the best and only
schools of crime. In other words, we first educate men to be criminals
by putting them in places where they can learn nothing else, and then we
keep them criminals by shutting against them, when freed, every
opportunity to earn food and lodging in legitimate ways. And then we
complain that they are not to be trusted.

Neither can men fed on poisons be trusted to be well. Jail life is
poisonous; I think it was Judge McLeland who said, last summer, "Our
million dollar reformatories offer university courses in bestiality and
crime; it is as logical to send a man to jail to make him better as to
shut him up in a garbage-can to improve his digestion. Forty per cent.
of those who go to jail, go back again," he added; "one man went back
one hundred and seventy-six times. Others are sent because they are poor
and cannot pay a fine, and they are there made real criminals."

An instance of this occurred in a Georgia chain-gang while I was in
Atlanta. A man was sentenced for playing cards for money. He could not
pay the $45 fine demanded, and in default, was sent to the chain-gang
for eight months. He wore stripes, night and day, and if contumacious,
was whipped by the guards. His work was in a stone quarry, a deep hole,
into which the summer sun poured an insufferable heat. He was forced to
do his work with a 49-pound hammer in that funnel-shaped pit, at a
hundred degrees in the shade--if he could find any shade. One day he
told the guard he was sick, and could not work any longer. The guard
shifted the quid in his mouth and remarked that he ought to have said so
that morning. But the man meant what he said, and proved it by dying a
day or two later. Probably you may have played cards for money at some
time in your life. Did it ever occur to you that you merited torture and
death for it?

Or do you think that, after such an experience (if you survived it), or
after being twice arrested for the same crime and kept in jail five
years three times over, or after doing time for a crime you never
committed--that you would come out at the end of it all, smiling, full
of energy and enterprise, loving your neighbor, eager for honest toil?
Would you embrace Mr. Moyer (or whomever your jailer was) and tell him,
with tears of gratitude, that you could never repay him for his
warm-hearted, big-brained care of you--the starving, the dungeoning, the
clubbing, and all the rest of the university course?

Would you feel like that? Or would you stare out upon the world into
which you were contemptuously tossed with dull, hating, revengeful eyes,
suspicious of all men, hopeless of good, but resolved to get even, so
far as you might, by plying the evil trades which your life of slavery
had taught you? Would you behave like Christ upon the Cross, or like an
ordinary man? Convicts are ordinary men, except that they are often, to
begin with, diseased men, or hemmed in by conditions so untoward as to
make an honest life ten or a hundred times harder than it ever was for
you.

But you did not scruple to put this diseased or unfortunate version of
yourself into the jail cauldron, to stew there with others like or worse
than himself, for doing what, in most cases, he actually could not help
doing; and when at last he was ejected like stale refuse, you were
indignant because his looks did not please you, because he bore upon him
the stains and the stench which the cauldron had fastened on him,
because he did not, in the teeth of the secret service, the postoffice
inspectors, the detective bureaus and the police, at once begin to lead
an honest life and support the commonwealth. Do you say that none of
this was your doing? But it is your doing, in just so far as you have
not striven in every way open to you to extirpate the doing of it by
this representative government.

The wonderful thing--the unexpected and pathetic thing--is, that so many
convicts come out of jail in a kindly and inoffensive state of mind.
They are men who were born weak, humble and yielding, never esteemed
themselves, were always ready to take a back seat and give precedence to
others. They do not understand the rights of the matter, but suppose it
must be all right, that penal servitude is the proper thing for them,
that laws were made by wise men and must be enforced. They admit their
stealings and their trickery, and blame themselves, observing
regretfully that they didn't seem able to help it. Next time--if they
get a next time--they will try very hard to be straight, and perhaps
they will succeed after all!

There was little J., in the barbers' gang, a cheerful, smiling, sweet
tempered fellow, who had served I know not how many terms for small
larcenies and turpitudes. "I've always been such a damned little fool,"
he would say to me, as he smoothed off my chin. "The boys would get
round me and rope me into some scheme, and I didn't seem able to keep
clear of 'em. But I'm goin' to be let out again next July, and I've made
up my mind I'll never be seen here again! No, sir! Oh, I've been talkin'
with the chaplain, too, and I've been reading the Bible, and all that,
and I'm going to be a good man. Yes, sir! I've had my fling, and I'm
through with it; when the boys get round me and tell me of some easy
job, I'll tell 'em, No! Not for J."

He was a man of forty, as naive and "innocent" (in the unmoral sense) as
a child; and he had been in jail off and on since he was ten years old.
I happened to be in the front office at the moment when J. was signing
receipts and receiving his property preparatory to leaving. He was
dressed in a neat business suit of his own--not a prison-made
monstrosity. He was clean and smooth and bright, and tremulous with
excitement. He signed his papers with a shaking hand, he took up and put
down again his well packed gripsack, he shook hands with a sort of
clinging, appealing grasp, as if he were afraid of being left alone, he
giggled and looked profoundly solemn by turns. The officials stood
about, indifferent and contemptuous, the men who had been hard and cruel
to him, and those who had not been so hard.

It was a bright, beautiful day, full of sunshine; J. picked up his grip
and marched down the corridor and out into the free air. He wore a brave
air of hope and determination, but one could detect underneath it
symptoms of misgiving. He had vowed to be good, but could he keep the
vow, when "the boys got round him"? I wished him good luck with all my
heart. Six months have passed, and J. is not back in jail yet, so far as
I have heard. But the spies are watching him, and he won't be safe till
he is dead.

A man with whom chance brought me frequently in contact was H., a yegg,
as the term is.

When a guard is escorting a batch of visitors about the prison, he
speaks of the yeggs in an ominous tone, as if they were some deadly
monster, hardly to be even looked at with impunity. But yeggs, as a
body, are the best men in the prison; they have a code of honor, and
strength of character. Outside, they blow open safes, and do other risky
jobs; and they will shoot to kill on the occasions when it is their life
or the other man's. They will do this, because they know what a prison
is, and also what spies outside prison are. But they will spare your
life, if possible; not because they care for you--they hate and despise
you, as being a man who would be and have in the past been merciless to
them, and as a hypocrite who is either a rascal on the sly or would be
if you possessed the courage or were subjected to the temptation--they
spare you not from mercy but a settled policy; killing is bad business,
and means sooner or later a violent end for the killer.

Most yeggs are men of more than average intelligence, and sometimes of
fair education; they were not born outlaws; but, if you can win them to
speak of themselves, you will generally find that they have undergone
things both in and out of prison enough to make an outlaw out of a
saint. Most men succumb under such things, and either die, or become
cowed in spirit; the yeggs have survived, and their spirit is unbroken.
They hold the highest place in the estimation of their fellow prisoners;
and the warden and the guards fear them. By that I mean that they fear
to inflict severities upon them except upon some pretext at least
plausible; for the yeggs know the rules, and though they will submit
without a whimper to the crudest punishments if cause can be alleged for
it, yet wanton liberties, such as prisoners less well informed or more
pusillanimous submit to, cannot safely be taken with them.

The yeggs stand together; they have esprit de corps, and if, as happened
last summer at Atlanta, the food supply drops actually to the starvation
point in both quantity and quality, they stand forward--as they did
then--as champions for the rest of the men; they protest openly, they
will not be wheedled or terrorized, and they go to the hole as one man.
Nor will they come out thence until the warden comes to them and
promises improvement. The warden promises, not because he desires
improvements, but because he fears the scandal of mutiny in the
prison--an inconvenient thing when one is supposed to be conducting a
model institution; and even an easy going public, which will tolerate
other forms of cruelty to convicts, feels compunction about starving
them, especially when it is taxed to provide them with wholesome and
sufficient food.

About my friend H.--I have no space here to tell his story, nor to
outline it even; it is a terrible one. I may be able, some time, in
another place, to present it in full. I will say now only that he was
once confined for three years in a contract labor jail which has the
worst features conceivable in any prison of to-day or of a hundred years
ago, and men are killed there by overwork and punishments as a matter of
routine; few survive the treatment so long as H. did. Once during his
three years he uttered three words aloud; for that he was punished so
long and so savagely that the horror of it yet remains with him.
Prisoners constantly maim their hands voluntarily in the machinery in
order to be quit of the torture of the work; the bleeding stumps of
their fingers or hands are roughly bound up, and they are driven back to
their machines. The warden is an oily, comfortable rogue, who beams upon
visitors and fools the prison commission to the top of its bent, and he
bears an excellent reputation for the large amount of work he gets out
of his prisoners; "They just love it, my boys do," he avers; "nothing
like work to keep men happy, you know." And then, when the coast is
clear, he turns upon his boys like a bloodthirsty tiger.

But what I wish to say here is, that when H. at last finished his term
and was thrust forth into the crowded street of the city, his legs
failed him, and he tottered along scared like a wild beast at the noise
and bustle. A man addressed him, and he stared at him blankly, and could
not command his tongue to speak words. He wandered on irregularly,
starting at imaginary dangers, unnerved at the height of the sky, the
noise, the movement. He sought the least frequented streets, but his
aspect and bearing made people look suspiciously at him, and he found
his way to the slums, where he got a room and shut himself in with a
feeling of relief. It was several days before he could school himself to
talk and act like an ordinary human being. His health was shattered,
though he was naturally a strong and hearty man; eating made him sick,
though he was faint for lack of right feeding.

He could find no steady employment, but helped himself along with odd
jobs here and there. He was resolute to keep straight, but an old pal of
his happened to meet him, did him some good turns, and finally proposed
his joining two or three men in a promising burglary. H. asked time to
think it over, and that night he left the city in a sort of panic, and
traveled to a large town a hundred miles away. Here he succeeded in
getting a good job; his spirits began to revive; he made some good
acquaintances, and prospered beyond all expectation for nearly a year.
One day he noticed a man in the street who stared hard at him; not long
after he saw the same man standing in front of the house in which he
lodged; the next morning his landlord came to him and, with some
embarrassment, said that he would have to ask him for his room; a
relative was about to visit him and he needed the accommodation.

It was as he had feared--the detectives had run him down. He put what he
possessed in a trunk and left town that evening for a place nearly a
thousand miles west. Here he was left undisturbed for fifteen months,
and made a new start in business. Then the chief of the local police
sent for him and said, "I don't want to be rough on you; but the best
thing you can do is to skip; we're on to you--understand?" "But I'm
doing a straight business," H. pleaded. "You may be; but you're a
crook," was the reply.

We need not follow him further; he was driven from one place to another.
At last he was caught with stolen goods on him, he having undertaken to
help an old friend of his out of a tight place by carrying his gripsack
from one place to another; it proved to contain some plunder from a
recent burglary. He got off with a two year sentence; but it was the end
of his attempt to reform. "Crooked or straight, I'll end in jail," he
said to me, with that strange convict smile which means such unspeakable
things. "I've got two years more here; if I last it out, they'll get me
again."

I firmly believe that he would have been an honest and successful man if
he had been let alone.

It sometimes happens that the manhood of a convict is so sapped by long
sufferings that even his desire for freedom is lost. He is afraid to be
free; he cannot live at ease outside of his cell walls. Perhaps you will
say that goes to prove the gentleness and humanity of prison discipline.
To me it seems a thing so appalling that I must be content with the bare
statement of the fact. A man is afraid to be free, afraid of the great
wonderful world, and of his fellow creatures, and can endure what he
supposes to be life only in his steel cell. What has put that fear in
him? But our laws provide no penalty for dehumanizing a fellow creature
under the forms of law. If it be legal, it must be right.

I knew a man in our prison who had been thirty-five years in
confinement, with short intervals of liberty. The best favor he could
ask was to be allowed to stay all day and all night in his cell, doing
nothing. Year after year, nothing else than this appeared to him worth
while. He was well educated, as prisoners go, quiet and inoffensive. "I
wish some doctor would examine me and tell me what is the matter with
me," he remarked to me once. "Maybe I'm crazy!"

After all, the world, in its way, is as hard a place for ex-convicts as
a jail; more cruel, perhaps, inasmuch as it seems to offer hopes that
jails deny. But can a world be called civilized that is satisfied with
that arraignment?




XII


THE PRISON SILENCE

How many convicts, during the past twenty years, have served their terms
and been released? and yet what does the public know of the real inside
of prisons? This used to perplex me at first. My fellow prisoners with
whom I talked were bitter and voluble enough in denouncing the
conditions; but no sooner had they passed the gates to freedom than they
became strangely silent. Some of them even were quoted in the local
papers as praising and upholding what they had just before condemned.

There was a Japanese prisoner, for example, the only man of his nation
there, I think, who gained attention by copies of well-known pictures
which he made, to be hung on the walls of the chapel, and by designing
back and side scenes for the stage. I never talked personally with him,
or saw him but at a distance, as he hastened along the corridor; but men
who knew him said that he was especially savage in his diatribes against
the prison and its keepers, and had promised, as soon as he was freed,
to make numerous ugly disclosures to the world. But when we searched the
local papers after his release, what we found was a hearty and explicit
laudation of the prison and its officials. Had it been written by the
warden himself, it could not have been more sunny and satisfied.

Again, there was a man with us who had been sentenced for life on a
murder charge of a singularly revolting kind; he had been in confinement
seventeen years when I first knew him, but had always consistently
protested his innocence. He applied for parole, and his application was
granted. At this time he occupied a large cell containing eleven other
prisoners, of whom I was one; and he attached himself very closely to
me, and upon coming in from his work each evening, would sit beside my
cot and hold my hand and pour out his heart to me in lamentations,
asseverations of his innocence, picturings of the horrors of his long
confinement, forecastings of what he meant to do when he was freed--to
address audiences from the pulpit and rostrum, and convince the world of
the horrors of penal imprisonment. He was deeply religious, and had the
moral courage to kneel down, before all the men in the cell, and spend
five minutes or more in prayer every evening before going to bed. Every
one believed that he had been wrongly convicted, if for no better
reason, because he had never once wavered from his claim of innocence
during those seventeen years, and because his conduct and bearing in the
prison had always been exemplary. He was a man of powerful body and
strong, impressive mind; his speech was simple and convincing, and I
told him that I thought he would succeed as an avatar of prison
iniquities. He professed an ardent affection for me, and expressed
enthusiastic anticipations as to the outcome of my own projects for
calling public attention to the evils in question.

This man was tortured for five or six weeks by unexplained delay in
fulfilling the promise of his parole, during which time it fell to my
daily lot to comfort and encourage him; and I suffered no little
emotional stress myself from this constant drain on my sympathies. Every
evening, sitting beside my cot, he would repeat over and over again the
same lamentations and speculations, interjecting at the end of each
apostrophe, "It's terrible--terrible!" until at last I felt that I would
gladly give up my own "good time" for the sake of seeing him freed
without further procrastination. I was convinced, and so told him, that
the delay could be due to nothing but neglect, inadvertent or criminal,
on the part of LaDow, the President of the Parole Board, or of the
Attorney-General himself; the papers had been thrust into a pigeonhole,
and been forgotten or ignored.

What were the tortures of a man imprisoned for seventeen years, and now
standing on the brink of salvation or despair, to a supercilious
official up in Washington?

Finally, without explanation or apology, the order for release came; and
for me and his other friends, as well as for him, it was a day of
rejoicing and thanksgiving. But, remembering that he was on parole, and
therefore liable, on the least infringement of discipline, to be thrust
back in his cell, none of us expected that he would venture to denounce
the wrongs and expose the miseries of the imprisoned; we were glad to
learn that he had secured a position paying him twenty or thirty dollars
a month, with a chance of better things later, and that he had announced
his purpose of running down the real perpetrator of the crime for which
he had suffered, and forcing him to confess. For a few days, one or two
local papers gave him half a column, and then there was silence.

I had been denied parole, and the restrictions thereof did not apply to
me when my own day of freedom arrived; and I gave a short interview to a
reporter, in which I said that the warden was unfit for his position,
that the food was abominable, and that punishment in dark cells and
otherwise was still practised, though under cover.

The next day the newspapers printed an interview with my late friend, in
which he was quoted as declaring that every statement I had made was a
malicious lie, that the warden was in all respects the best, kindest and
most lovable man he had ever met, and that the men in confinement had
all the food they asked for, of the best quality, and that all tales of
hardships and cruel punishments were false and wicked.

Is it conceivable that these statements were really given out by him? It
seemed more likely that the words had been put into his mouth, under a
threat, should he disavow them, of being sent back to prison. From such
a threat the bravest man might shrink. But that statement of his still
stands unmodified. And whether made spontaneously, or under the
compulsion of a threat, its motive seems to have been fear of punishment
for telling the truth. Such is the power of the System over its victims!

It is a state of things nothing less than nauseating. It is bad enough
that men should be held in prison and maltreated; but that the truth
should be imprisoned with them, gagged and terrified into silence, is a
grave matter indeed. New York is complaining just now of the strength in
corruption of its police system; but it seems almost trivial compared
with this, for while the police ring profits by cooperating with the
criminals they are paid to suppress, the prison ring profits by maiming
or destroying human lives entrusted to their care to be restrained for a
season from their own evil impulses, and thus if possible reformed; and,
when they are released, it guards itself against exposure by the menace
of revenge more formidable still. The parole and the indeterminate
sentence, framed to open the way to reform of prisoners, is used by
prison officials to intimidate and debase them; and if any ex-convict
ventures to defy this fortified despotism, the immediate rejoinder is,
"Who can believe a jail-bird? A man wicked enough to steal or murder is
wicked enough to lie, and is not the malicious motive of the lie
apparent?"

That rejoinder has been brought, and will continue to be brought against
me. Among those who protested against the statements in my interview
above mentioned was a lady whom I never spoke to--it is strictly against
rules for a prisoner to speak with a visitor--and never knowingly saw,
though I understand she was wont to sit on the stage during the Sunday
exercises. She is thus quoted: "Julian Hawthorne is nothing more than an
old grouch. A short time ago this old man told me himself that he was
getting plenty to eat and had no complaint to make of his own or anybody
else's treatment in the prison.... When he says such things as he is
reported to have said, he should be made to prove them, or keep his
mouth shut." Warden Moyer himself, less imaginative than this lady,
contented himself with denying all charges and courting investigation,
and added that he bore me no grudge, believed me to have been the dupe
of malignant guards (since dismissed) and considers my motive to have
been mainly the desire to make a little money. "The Department attaches
little importance to these outbreaks," he remarked, "and I consider it
unnecessary to place my word against that of convicts."

This may seem feeble; it is the mere instinctive stuttering of persons
in a disturbed frame of mind. But the System will not depend for its
defense upon persons of this kind. It has many strong forces at its
command, of which the Secret Service, and the favorable prejudgments of
the Government and of a large part of the public are but part. Any one
opposing it may expect to be kept under strict surveillance in all his
movements, his mail will be violated, his words, written or overheard,
will be scrutinized for material that can be used against him. Nor is
the line drawn there. While I was in prison, I received the confidences
of many prisoners as to their own experiences, among others that of a
Maine boy who had been convicted of robbing a postoffice. He had been
arrested in the first instance as a vagrant, and while in the local jail
had been approached by a postoffice inspector who charged him with the
post-office crime. The boy had never been in the state in which the
crime was committed; but he was told that, if he would plead guilty to
it, he would be sent to Atlanta for a short term, whereas, should he
refuse, he could be kept in jail awaiting trial for a year, and would
then receive at least six months on the vagrancy charge. "Do as I tell
you, and I will see that you get off easy," the inspector, who posed as
a friend, told him. When he finally acquiesced, however, the judge
imposed on him a sentence of five years, the inspector having testified
that he was an old offender, implicated in many other crimes. The fact
was, of course, that the real perpetrators of this postoffice robbery
had not been caught, but it was expedient for the reputation and welfare
of the detectives that a perpetrator should be produced--if not the real
one, then one manufactured for the purpose. I learned of many cases
similar to this--it is a common routine practise with the System.
Moreover, when this innocent youth has completed his term, he will be
thenceforth a marked man--"an habitual criminal," with a record against
him; and he can be rearrested on general principles at any time. He will
be given no opportunity to earn an honest livelihood, and it would be
surprising indeed if his wrongs, not to speak of his empty stomach and
hopeless circumstances did not make him a bona fide criminal ere long.
Obviously, meanwhile, such a man is effectively gagged; if he be asked
whether prison be a paradise, he will reply ardently in the affirmative,
though his whole body and soul know it as a hell. For if, having
blasphemed the Holy System, he is returned to the cell whence he came,
every word of his rash revelation will be avenged upon him in torture
and misery.

Am I attempting to retaliate upon the System for personal indignities
and mishandling; or am I the dupe and tool of designing
miscreants--convicts, guards or foremen--who plied me with false
statements to wreak revenges of their own? I have already said that I
was never harshly treated by any of the prison officials, and after the
two first months indulgences were allowed me beyond the customary prison
usage. During my two first months, to be sure, it seemed unlikely that I
could live out my term, because I was kept at work in an underground
place without ventilation or other than artificial light, and permeated
with the hot-water pipes which supplied the buildings with heat and
power. I was also unable to eat the prison fare, and was slowly
perishing for lack of food. I never complained of this treatment, for it
was in the ordinary prison course; but when the consequences of it
became visible in my physical appearance, I was put on a diet of oatmeal
and milk, morning and evening, and allowed to exercise in the open air.
I voluntarily, during this period, went without dinner, being unwilling
to poison myself with the rancid grease and garbage served under that
name; but I made the most of the simple but nourishing milk diet, though
it was insufficient in quantity; and I improved to the utmost the
outdoor privileges, besides adhering resolutely to a regimen of daily
calisthenic exercises; so that, when I was set at liberty at the end of
six or seven months, I was in physical condition quite as good as when I
went in. I was never denied leave to write "special letters," and my
intercourse with the warden and his deputies, though always as seldom
and brief as I could make it, was uniformly suave and smiling. The
reasons for all which I shall have occasion to discuss later.

So much for the "grouch." As for being made the dupe of designing
persons among the lower officials, and my fellow prisoners,--beyond
replying tersely to questions put to me, I never had any communication
with the former, and never heard or spoke a word with them reflecting
upon the prison management. But what of my fellow prisoners?

They looked me over keenly and thoroughly to begin with; and no
inquisitors have more sensitive intuitions or are quicker to suspect
double-dealing than they. My aspect, my bearing, my speech, my
affiliations, my treatment, all came under their scrutiny, and were
debated in that secret court which prisoners hold. Not at first, nor
lightly, did they give me the honor of their confidence. I might be a
spy sent in from without, or a stool pigeon made within, or I might be
indifferent or loose-mouthed. But when they did resolve to trust
me--when I was elected a member of the "inner circle," as one of them
phrased it,--they had no reservations. I was called on to make no
protestations, to register no oaths, nor did I solicit any
communications. They came to me freely, and either by laboriously penned
or penciled letters written on surreptitious scraps of paper in
ill-lighted cells, or by circumspect word of mouth mumbled into my ear
on the baseball ground of a Saturday afternoon, they would disclose
their long hoarded and grievous facts. "I wouldn't lie to you, Mr.
Hawthorne--what would be the use? it would come back on me!" But I was
listening to the break and tremor in their voices, the hurry and awkward
indignation, the eager marshaling of insignificant details, the dreary,
apathetic recital of sordid or callous outrages, the hopelessness
striving once more to hope. "If they'd only send us an inspector who
wouldn't be always dining with the warden, and junketting in his auto,
and taking the screws' word against ours--a fellow who'd peel off his
coat and size things up independent!" Their wish was not fulfilled in my
time; the inspections were a farce and a scandal. There was a tradition
of one inspector who had really effected something--who seemed to think
of his duty, as well as of good dinners and joy rides--but that was long
ago. That he never repeated his visit would seem to indicate that his
report was found inconvenient.

Meantime, I did not need their asseverations of veracity; the truth
shone through their uncouth stories. They were widely different from the
glib patter that runs out of a crook's mouth in the presence of an
official. Some of these men were seasoned criminals; often they did not
themselves understand how iniquitous was the "deal" that had been given
them, being too much inured to the tricks and treachery of the
detectives' practises to feel special animosity regarding them; but more
or less dimly they felt that wrong was being done them that was not
contemplated or recognized by the law. The last thing to die in a man is
his sense of justice; "I'm as bad a man as you like, and I'm willing to
take my proper medicine; but they ought to give a man a square deal!"
There was a young fellow there, well educated, with an intelligent,
agreeable face and gentlemanly bearing; I got his story, not from him,
but from the reminiscences of others. One time "Bob got nutty, and
wouldn't come out of his cell, and started setting fire to his bedding.
His cell got filled with the smoke and he was near choking to death, and
fell down on the floor. A bunch of screws stood in front of his door
making fun of him, and they held a blanket up so the smoke wouldn't get
out. At last they opened the door and pulled him out, and they clubbed
him good and plenty, and then they dragged him down the stairs--he was
in an upper tier, understand--with his head bumping against every step.
They threw him into a dark cell, and left him there." There he had
leisure to recover from his "nuttiness." It was nothing much out of the
usual, only the incident happened to offer spectacular features which
served to keep the memory of it fresh. But does the Department of
Justice countenance such diversions?

To return to my theme--I came to feel that whether or not I was handled
softly, others as deserving as I, or less deserving, or more deserving,
were not; and that if I had no personal grounds for complaint, they had.
I could not adopt the point of view of one of the "better" class of
convicts: "The warden has always treated me decently, and I don't mean
to bite the hand that caressed me." I need not affirm, either, that my
good fortune was due to an expectation that I would respond in kind;
that would be an unverifiable inference. But it was plain that the
officials took interest in the prison paper as a medium for advertising
and gaining credit for the penitentiary; and that when I began to write
for it, newspapers all over the country quoted the articles and
commented kindly on them. My name was given a prominence, unwelcome,
though well meant; accounts of my doings and condition, entirely
apocryphal (for I never saw a newspaper man during my stay, or gave out
any form of interview), were published and featured from time to time; I
was kept more or less in the public eye. If, now, I were to be starved
and clubbed, dungeoned and otherwise maltreated, not only would I be
incapacitated from contributing to the paper, but some hint of the facts
might leak out and impair the reputation of Atlanta Penitentiary as a
Gentleman's Club and Humane Paradise. Accordingly, if I were found
smoking out of hours, or were missing from count,--"Never mind--it's
only Hawthorne!" It may be, of course, that my personal charm was so
irresistible that every official from the warden down fell victim to it,
and would rather prove recreant to their oath of office than interfere
with me; my vanity craves to believe so, yet I hesitate. At any rate,
with whatever sugar the gag was sweetened, or whether the suggestion of
it was inadvertent, I did not feel justified in accepting it; and when I
got out, the waiting reporters at last obtained what they had so long
awaited. But though my eight hundred comrades seem to have been
gratified with my words, I cannot think that they were equally
satisfactory to the officials; for I am informed that Hawthorne's
writings are henceforth barred from the penitentiary. I must have hurt
their feelings in some way; no one can please everybody.

The naive surprise expressed in some local quarters outside the
penitentiary went to show how unexpected and almost incredible my
statements appeared to be--or, from another point of view, how
successfully hitherto the truth had been suppressed. The truth being
once unshackled, I was anxious to get the widest possible circulation
for it, and therefore arranged for its publication in various newspapers
distributed over the country; but I was not altogether sanguine that my
plan of public enlightenment would prove an unqualified success. The
System, as I have indicated, had several guns which it might bring to
bear, and it was conceivable that some of the editors who had subscribed
to the syndicate might find reason to regard the articles as not adapted
to the taste of their readers, and decline to risk offending them any
further. If other guns of the System should prove inadequate, there was
always the great gun to be depended upon, known as the Law for Libel. I
took what precautions I could with respect to this formidable and most
respectable weapon; I stipulated that a competent lawyer should read
each article before it was offered for publication, and inform me of any
passage in any of them which might be obnoxious to the provisions of
this law, in order that such passages might be modified or expunged. He
carefully discharged his function; and if any reader should detect a
lack of continuity or explicitness in any of my statements, he may
charitably ascribe it to the consequences of the lawyer's advice; since,
even in this free country, the proprieties must be observed. If I were
fortunate enough to escape the missiles of the Libel gun, I had still to
be on my guard against more obscure and personal weapons; I am an
ex-convict, and any lenity of treatment which I had hitherto enjoyed is
not to be looked for in the future. If I were sent back to prison, my
shrift was likely to be short; and I could only hope, in that event, to
have been able to say enough to afford my entertainers ample provocation
for giving me, as my comrades would say, the limit.

"You would have only yourself to blame!"--I hear that comment. If you
are kicked, be like the puppy--roll over on your back and hold up your
paws for mercy. But if canine models are in question, I feel more
inclination to the thoroughbred bulldog, who does what he can and would
do more if he could. I have undertaken a heavy responsibility, and must
make the best showing I may with it. I no longer have a lifetime before
me, but I have learned while I have been alive that the methods of the
puppy are not remunerative in the end. Every natural instinct in me
calls out for rest and peace, and to forget the valleys of grief and
humiliation; but there is another voice which summons me to other
issues. I am sensible of my lack of strength and fitness for the
enterprise; but I believe that it was no idle circumstance that called
me to it; I believe in a Divine government of the world, which chooses
sometimes to use unlikely instruments to accomplish its will. The little
I can do may inspire worthier deeds by more powerful hands. Emerson
found simple words for a mighty thought--

  "One accent of the Holy Ghost
  The heedless world hath never lost!"

The prophets of old had no dignity or weight in themselves, but they
delivered messages which changed the world. "What! that old numskull be
the mouthpiece of Jehovah?" his townsfolk might exclaim. But so it was.
What is any one of us in himself?

However, I don't wish to bear too hard on this pedal. It is easier to
look at things from the commonplace standpoint. One thing or another
prevented any of my companions in the jail from doing what it was
desirable to do, and circumstances quite unforeseen opened a way for me
to do it. What I have said above was with a view of showing how
difficult it may ordinarily be to bring prison facts to light; and if,
by chance, some individual should find means to his hand to open a
window, he would be a poltroon if he forbore to do it. I am under no
illusions as to the obstacles in my way, nor do I anticipate that what I
am trying to do will result in prompt or vital changes for the better in
prison management. The facts I adduce may be discredited, but if they
are true they will not be lost. My eight hundred inarticulate comrades
are always present in my thoughts. I have left them in the body, but I
see their faces wherever I turn. It is a crime that any human beings
should be arbitrarily kept in the conditions which surround them, and if
I can loosen one stone of the Bastile which, at Atlanta and elsewhere,
annually engulfs and destroys so many of them, I shall be content.




XIII


THE BANQUETS OF THE DAMNED

The walls of jails are good non-conductors of what goes on behind them,
and this applies to other prisons as well as to that at Atlanta. Yet
once in a while a groan or protest, or a partial account of some
outbreak, finds its way through; and in many cases the gist of the story
is to the effect that the food is bad or scanty. Other things the men
behind the bars suffer stoically, or not so stoically; but lack of food
arouses them to despair and frenzy. We have lately heard reports from
Sing Sing illustrative of this condition there; and many another jail
could echo the complaints of the unfortunates in that gloomy
hell-chamber.

Convicts know that they are to be punished, that the government has
sentenced them, that it is the law; and though they may find cause to
disagree with the decree that consigns them to hopeless and useless
servitude, they accept it as at least legal and incident to the game as
played. But they do not believe that the government has condemned them
to starvation, or to poisoning (and the condition in which food often
comes to the convicts' table is practically poisonous). They know that
no such punishment is included in the statutes; and they can only
conclude, therefore, that it is an arbitrary and illegal piece of
cruelty or neglect on the part of the warden or commissary officer. They
are prone to think that these persons profit financially by cutting down
their supplies; and that they are careful to conceal the fact in their
reports to the Department, or to disguise it as a meritorious economy.
At the same time, they are conscious that there is no regular channel
through which they can make their injury known to the authorities, and
that nothing is more readily denied, or more easily concealed from
inspectors, than is this very abuse.

But the suffering which it occasions is constant and cumulative. They
are still required to perform their labor, as if in full physical vigor.
They are punished if physical weakness causes them to fall short in
their tasks. They feel their vitality ebbing, they find themselves ever
less able to resist the inroads of disease, their appeals to the doctors
are often met with sneers and even animosity; and what marvel is it that
stoicism and patience at last give way, and they break out in some wild
and savage excess which justifies the resort by their masters to the
dungeon and the bullet? But death may well seem to the rebels preferable
to the lingering pains of the alternative fate.

The under nourishment and malnourishment of convicts is, in fact, one of
the worst crimes of the many which their despots perpetrate upon them.
From any point of view, it is barbarous and wicked--the crime of a
Weyler upon the defenseless Cuban revolutionists, which, as much as the
destruction of the Maine, impelled this country to declare war. Yet,
knowing as we do that it is perpetrated upon the human beings in our
prisons, we sit supine and acquiescent, and thereby make the crime our
own.

Have you not imagination enough to put yourself for a moment in the
predicament of the prisoner? There you sit in the narrow gloom of your
cell, or you toil in the stifling confinement of your work room, and
such is not only your state to-day, but for years to come it will be
unchanged. You are isolated from sight of and association with every man
and woman in the world who cares for you or thinks kindly of you;
silence and rigid obedience are imposed upon you; you meet no looks that
are not harsh, and hear no words but sharp commands or angry menaces.
Your very toil is idle and unpaid, and its diligent performance brings
you no credit or hope, except treacherous promises of a good constantly
delayed. And then picture yourself when, after wearisome hours, the
whistle blows that means intermission of labor and the renewal of
strength by food. Yet that summons, instead of cheering you, does but
make the burden of your misery heavier.

Sullenly and heavily, in the endless line, you tramp into the huge,
comfortless hall, with its hideous tables and benches, and as you pass
up the aisles you glance abhorrently at the dirty scraps and masses of
provender dumped carelessly out of noisome buckets by the filthy hands
of the servers upon plates still rough and foul with the hardened grease
of foregoing meals. You are faint for lack of nourishment, yet the sight
of what is provided, and the unclean smell of it, nauseate instead of
inviting you. Eat you must, if you would live and have strength to work,
yet if you eat you invite sickness and suffering, and if you could eat
all, and assimilate it, you would still leave the table but half fed.

Every tyro in physiology knows the effect upon the general organism of
dejection and resentment at meals. Prisoners more than men in any other
condition need abundance to eat and good cheer while eating; but the
food they get, and the circumstances in which they get it, causes them
to degenerate physically, and the body affects the mind. Physical
disease breeds the disease of evil thoughts and impulses. Criminals
might be generated by prison food alone, without taking account of their
previous records and future prospects.

We of Atlanta penitentiary used to hear occasionally of the
bills-of-fare of our repasts in the prison that were daily forwarded to
Washington, by way of reassuring the Department of Justice, and whom
else it might concern, as to the substance and excellence of our
nourishment. These alimentary documents might be compared with like
lists at Delmonico's and the Waldorf, and the names of the viands would
be found to be identical. The inference, to the legal mind, not to speak
of the penological one, was plain: the convicts at the penitentiary
fared as sumptuously as do the banqueters of the Four Hundred--at no
cost, moreover, to themselves, not even waiters' tips.

For here were rich soups and gravies, substantial roast beef, succulent
steaks and chops, the renowned baked beans of legend, comforting hashes,
pies and puddings, fresh vegetables, including the famous sweet potato
of the South in its pride; and long draughts of milk from the tranquil
cows of the pasture, together with tea and coffee from the Orient,
sugar, mustard, salt and pepper and vinegar, enough to beguile the most
squeamish appetite, and, to top off with, fruits in their season, led by
the incomparable Georgia watermelon. I may have inadvertently omitted
some items from this toothsome list, but it is enough as it stands to
make an epicure's mouth water. And if any skeptic were still
unconvinced, a photographer would be admitted with his undeniable camera
at certain seasons--Christmas and Fourth of July, for example--who would
place a picture of the revelry and the revelers on the everlasting
records, with garlands and festive decorations, and actual dishes of
some sort on the groaning boards, and serried rows of plump felons ready
to fall to.

The fame of all this went forth into the world, and Atlanta
Penitentiary, its warden, its guards, and its cooks shine in penal
annals as the acme and ideal of modern humanitarian ideas upon the
reclamation of convicts through gentleness and love, and a full stomach.

I found opportunity to study some of these historic scrolls, and was so
much impressed by them that I caused a suggestion to be conveyed to the
warden. Instead of sending all the menus to Washington, and to admiring
friends in the Atlanta neighborhood, let one or two of them be placed at
each meal upon the tables of the diners, to the end that they might be
stimulated, by the perusal of these literary masterpieces, to choke down
their gullets the actual garbage which was furnished in the name
thereof. But the warden's views seem not to have been in harmony with
mine on this occasion. I am glad to learn, however, from certain
graduates of the institution since my own departure from it, that the
food has greatly improved in quantity and somewhat even in quality,
since these chapters began to appear in newspapers.

I need not attempt to fathom the reason. If it were incomparable before,
why or how better it?

It could hardly have been done at the instance of the old and warm
personal friend of the warden and the Attorney-General who was sent to
Atlanta recently in the guise of a Spartan inspector of the alleged
abuses; because, for one thing, the improvement had set in long before
he made his investigation, and the investigator, in his report, appears
to have discovered no room for improvement anywhere. It must have just
happened--one of those miracles in the way of gilding refined gold and
painting the lily which are so common nowhere else as in our model penal
institutions.

I had ample opportunity to study the subject personally while a guest at
the prison table, and to compare my impressions with those of my fellow
prisoners, as well as to enlarge them by conferences with persons
employed in the kitchen and commissary department. Men who had served in
other prisons--and their combined experiences covered a great many--were
unanimous and emphatic in declaring that the table at Atlanta was the
worst they had ever known, not only as to scantness of supply, but as to
the unwholesomeness or positively poisonous quality of the food
furnished. But let me tell a little of what I saw and knew myself.

When the change was made from long tables and benches to tables seating
eight and chairs, it was announced that table cloths would also be
supplied, and napkins. That was two or three years ago, but table cloths
have not yet appeared, and the eaters still wipe their mouths on the
backs of their hands in the good old way. Pepper and salt were on the
table, and a bottle of something that looked like beer and was supposed
to be vinegar, but was sampled only by the more reckless or
inexperienced convicts. Sugar was not provided except on rare occasions,
and to "diet" prisoners--men who were restricted to bread and milk and
oatmeal. Some beverage that dishonored the name of tea was served about
once a fortnight; a brown, semi-transparent rinsing of dirty kettles,
sugarless, thin and bitter, called coffee, came every day; but if your
stomach rejected either of these, you could fill up on plain water.

The latter, however, like the "diet" milk and oatmeal and the drinkables
generally, had to be taken out of metal mugs covered with white enamel,
minute particles of which chipped off and mingled with what you drank.
These particles were hard and sharp, like pure glass, and they cut and
lodged in the intestines, causing, with other things, an excessive
predisposition to appendicitis--a frequent disease in the penitentiary.
This was also promoted by the bread, which was made of the poorest grade
of white flour, without nourishing quality, the value per loaf being
about two cents; the flour was ground in steel mills, and microscopic
particles of steel were rubbed off into it--this fact I had from a
physician who had examined it. The flour, when received at the prison,
was frequently full of weevils, most of which but not all were sifted
out before it was used. The bread was tasteless and light; it was baked
in large quantities, and what was not consumed by the prisoners was sold
outside.

It is not provided in the prison regulations that officials shall be fed
at the expense of the prisoners. Nevertheless, a separate and superior
grade of flour is purchased at government expense, and is used to make
bread which is given to the officials; the loaves are placed in the
outer corridor, and are taken away by guards and others every day.
Separate cooks are also assigned to prepare the officials' food on the
prison ranges; the meats and vegetables are of a grade much better than
is supplied to prisoners; but some favored prisoners participate in
their consumption. The higher officials have the best food the market
affords and in such ample abundance that certain prison pets, usually
negroes, get their main subsistence from the surplus.

The beef given to prisoners was of the third grade--the worst on the
market--it is cow or bull beef, never heifer or steer, and often it is
rotten, and must be treated chemically before being offered even to
prisoners. It used to come on the table in gristly and bony gobbets,
after having lain on the kitchen ranges for hours, until it was reduced
to a hardness which resisted all but the most efficient and vigorous
teeth (which, except with negroes, are rare in prison). I used to
compare these "steaks" and other pieces with old blackened boot heels;
they were hardly less eatable and nourishing. Often it smelt so that
nature rebelled against it; but complaints were liable to be met by
committal to the solitary cells.

But groups of visitors used to appear in the dining room occasionally;
they were lined up along the wall adjoining the door, and were not
allowed to walk between the tables, so that the only food they could see
was what was put on the tables nearest the door; and this was always of
a quality superior to the rest, and there was more of it per man. It was
one of the little tricks employed to maintain the entente cordiale, by
which the prisoners who sat at those tables benefited, and the visitors
went forth to sing the praises of our warm hearted warden. On the days
when the bread was sour or the meat stank, visitors were headed away
from the dining room, and their attention directed to more important
matters.

The hash, which often made the breakfast, was composed of fragments of
gristle and refuse left on the prisoners' plates after dinner, mixed
with potatoes and rancid grease; this, and the soups and gravies, which
had a similar origin, gave out a most nauseating smell. The men would
gulp it down--it was that, or starve--trying to help it on its way with
all the condiments they could lay hands on; but the effect of it, and of
the food generally, upon the digestive tract was so disastrous in most
cases that they might better have left it alone. I myself retired from
the enterprise in my second or third week, and would have literally died
of inanition had not the doctor, moved by I know not what suggestion
(not mine), put me on the milk and oatmeal diet during the remainder of
my sojourn. This applied for breakfast and supper; I sat at dinner, but
satisfied myself with nibbling bread crusts, and witnessing the forlorn
and perilous efforts of my friends to walk the line between starvation
and acute indigestion. Not many were successful.

For vegetables we had Irish and sweet potatoes, turnip tops (uneatable),
black-eyed beans, bitter and greasy, and once a month, perhaps, a
tomato. The butter was made of an inferior quality of lard, and
cottonseed oil--a substance which entered into many other of our viands,
and of which, with grease, it was calculated by an expert in the
kitchen, we were offered as much as one pound per man every day. It
produced a calamitous effect upon the digestive tract, inasmuch as there
was hardly a white man in the prison who did not suffer chronically from
stomach troubles--constant suffering, often becoming acute. The
strongest digestions would resist for a while, but finally succumb.

There was a poultry farm on the grounds, donated by outside benefactors
specifically and exclusively for the benefit of prisoners, beginning
with the tuberculous patients. After it got going, there may have been
an average of six hundred fowls on the place. Of these, not one ever
appeared on the prison tables. With the exception of a possible few that
were stolen by prisoners having access to the yard, all were
appropriated by higher officials, and the eggs as well.

One official gave frequent dinner parties to his friends, and was said
to use as many as five or six chickens a day, though I cannot vouch for
that--it seems excessive. He certainly, sometimes, commandeered as many
as fourteen or more at one time. There was a story of a great cake which
he had made for some festival, into the composition of which entered one
hundred and four eggs from our farm. To neither chickens nor eggs had
he, of course, any title more legitimate than have you who read these
lines. He had a large and hungry household, and many guests--among them,
commonly, such government inspectors as were sent down from Washington,
to see whether he and his fellow officials were honestly discharging
their functions.

As for the tuberculous patients, I was never able to find any of them
who had eaten chicken from the farm, or any part of one. Some chicken
soup was at one time ordered for a patient by the doctor; a prisoner (a
famous physician), a deputy of the doctor, happened to be at the
tuberculosis camp when the soup arrived from the kitchen. It consisted
of some warm water with the shank--not the drumstick, but the shank and
foot--of a fowl in it. This aroused his interest, and twice again he was
present when a chicken soup prescribed appeared at the camp. On both
occasions--he stands ready so to testify under oath--he found the same
foot and shank in it, but nothing else recalling chicken. The foot was
identified by an imperfection in one of its toes.

Eggs were indeed provided for the hospital prisoners (never for the
general mass), but they were cold storage eggs, the cheapest grade that
could be bought in the market, and that is saying much for this sort of
product nowadays. Out of one mess of eight that were served in the
hospital, and of which I gained authentic news from the prisoner
physician already referred to, six were bad. I am informed that these
notes and comments of mine are not permitted to be read by the
prisoners; but perhaps the original donors of the poultry farm may see
them, and be prompted to inquire into their accuracy. Let us return to
the dining room.

Sweet potatoes abound in the South, and subsistence upon them
exclusively would reduce the cost of living; the only trouble is that
the human stomach refuses to cooperate in this economy. Sweet potatoes
were served at Atlanta during the season three times a day, baked,
boiled and in pies; the men were hungry enough, and the supply of
potatoes was adequate; but had they been of the finest instead of the
worst quality in the market, the experiment would have failed;
starvation proved preferable; we could not get them down. That soft,
slimy sweetness, foul with dirt and often tainted with decay,
reappearing day after day at every meal for weeks on end, outdid
endurance, nor could we be stimulated by the argument that the
Government was saving money by it. Had the sweet potato season lasted
the year round, the warden would have lost his job from mere dearth of
prisoners to earn his salary on.

I do not forget the corn, either; it was of the brand fed to farm
animals; but this enumeration becomes monotonous. We had apple pies once
a week or so; and I was told by an employee in the kitchen, who had been
a farmer in his time, that the apples were such as could be bought at a
dollar a barrel, and that the charge appearing in bills submitted to the
Government was five dollars. The quality of the apples in the pies
supports my informant's contention. As for the watermelons--a benefactor
of the prisoners bought a consignment of them sufficient for the prison
population, to be eaten on the Fourth of July, 1913. The contract was
for the best melons obtainable; and Georgia is famous for good melons. A
day or two before the Fourth, the benefactor called at the prison, and
asked to see the melons, which had been delivered some time before.
Examination showed them to be of an inferior grade, such as farmers used
for cattle and poultry. It was too late, however, to get a fresh supply,
and the benefactor had the mortification of seeing the kindly meant gift
dishonored. It is pertinent, here, that there is said to be an
individual in Atlanta not officially connected with the penitentiary who
is commissioned to make all purchases for the prison--food, tobacco, and
other supplies. He buys the stuff, and hands in his bills; but the bills
he pays are not submitted. It is conceivable that there may be a
discrepancy between the two amounts, and it might be interesting to
learn whether he alone benefits by it.

Guards walk up and down the aisles between the tables, during meals, to
keep order and also to attend to complaints or requests from prisoners.
There is also the man in the window with the loaded magazine rifle,
ready to settle any complaints that become too insistent. The common
protest is against the badness of a specific piece of food, or against
some example of dirt. The former seldom get relief; in the latter case,
the dish or cup is sometimes changed.

A prisoner at my table called the guard's attention to a quid of tobacco
which had got into his soup. The guard, who was of a humorous turn,
replied, smiling, "Well, you use tobacco, don't you?" and passed on.
This was the same guard who assaulted and clubbed a prisoner whom he was
taking downstairs, as described in a previous chapter. On another
occasion, a prisoner complained that there was a beetle in his hash. An
examination was made; but whether the beetle was alive and got away, or
whether the prisoner himself had "bugs," as the slang is, at any rate
the examiners reported no beetle. The matter was then brought before the
authorities, who ordered the complainant to the dark hole.

Another day, following some months of constant deterioration in the
food, and diminution in the quantity of it, a dinner of hash and bread
was served, and both bread and hash were sour. The air of the room was
full of the sour smell; the captain came down the aisle near mine, and a
prisoner had the boldness to stop him and hold up his plate. "It's sour,
Captain!" said he. The captain looked the man in the eye and replied
sternly, "It is not sour!" "But, Captain--" "I say it is not sour!" the
other repeated with a threatening look. It was either submit, or the
hole; the man sat down.

But a few minutes later, some one hissed; before he could be identified,
hisses came from every part of the room. It was a critical juncture. The
captain ordered the band to play, and play it did at the top of its
compass; but the hissing was audible and continued through the playing.
Presently the men got up and began to march out; it was then that a
group of guards from the smoking room below came running up the stairs
armed with clubs and revolvers and tried to get through the barred door
at the stair head, but were checked by the captain, who was a wise
tactician. The men went to their cells, and there began to howl and
screech like a crazy menagerie, and kept it up for hours. Twenty or
thirty of the supposed ringleaders were sent to the dark holes; but the
revolt was not checked until the warden personally promised reforms, and
gave his word that no further punishments should be inflicted--fair
promises, made to be broken.

The dining room windows were protected by wire netting; but there were
many holes in it, as large as a man's head, through which the flies, in
summer, entered in swarms; and there was no provision for keeping them
out of the kitchen, which opened into the dining room. Complaints were
constantly made, but the holes were never mended, and no means were
taken to kill the flies. Food sometimes was placed on the tables hours
before the men sat down to their meals, and the flies, not having the
same delicacy of appetite as the men, feasted freely in the meanwhile.
There was also frequent protest against the bits of loose enamel in the
bowls; many of these were made direct to the doctor; but he did nothing.
If a man whose digestion had given way called on him for help, a dose of
salts was the only reply, and several deaths, while I was there,
unquestionably had their beginning in this neglect. Upon the whole,
contentment with starvation was the most prudent policy in Atlanta
Penitentiary.

I am not a sybarite or an epicure. For fifteen years before I was sent
to prison I lived on the hardest and most Spartan diet, eating as little
food as possible and that of the simplest kind. Wheat, milk, a few green
vegetables, and fruit made my menus. I was therefore better fortified
against hardships than the majority of prisoners; I could hold out
against starvation longer; but against the poison of rotten or bad food
I had no protection.

The wardens and the chief clerks of prisons often wish, for motives of
their own, to make an economical showing, and perhaps do not much care
if it is made at the expense of the health or lives of prisoners. Some
friends of mine in Atlanta prison and myself made an attempt to
determine just what was paid out per man in the prison for subsistence;
we quietly obtained statements from men in the kitchen and commissary
departments, and made our calculations. After careful revision, the
figures showed that we were being fed at the rate of from eight to
eleven cents per head, a day.

About that time, a great scientific discovery was announced by the chief
steward. Food, he had been informed, contained a certain amount of heat
and power; and these heat units, called calories, could be estimated for
any given article of diet. (As I write this, an editorial on the subject
in a recent issue of a New York newspaper states the matter in terms
which I am happy to reproduce.) "Physiologists have determined by
repeated experiments that a definite quantity of certain foods furnishes
a definite number of calories or heat units, which produce a certain
quantity of energy in the animal or human body.... In twenty-four hours
a normal man of about one hundred and thirty pounds at rest, needs 1680
calories or heat units, while a man doing severe physical labor would
require sufficient food to produce 3000 calories.... Since the
efficiency of labor depends upon the energy of the body and this energy
or power is produced by the food, it is not difficult to calculate the
actual outlay required for this purpose.... The household requirements
of a family where two servants are kept would at this rate be from $1.00
to $1.40 a day, a sum sufficient to furnish all the energy for all
purposes of normal maintenance."

Such being the case, our steward figured that the convicts could be well
enough supported by about 2500 calories apiece; and upon making a
scientific estimate of the calories in our average bill-of-fare, he
found that we were being overfed rather than the contrary. Meat, so many
calories; soup, so many; sweet potatoes, so many; bread, so many; and so
on. It was found possible, on this basis, to retrench here and there;
the bills were reduced--it was hoped that we might ultimately beat even
eight cents. The sole difficulty appeared to be that the men, the
subjects of the experiment, began incomprehensibly and perhaps
maliciously to starve.

I was fortunate enough to have access to a physician (a fellow
prisoner), of forty years' eminence in his profession, who solved the
enigma for me. The sum of his comment was this: "Put a Delmonico dinner
in one bucket, and an equal bulk of swill or garbage in another; the
number of calories may be the same in both. The steward, in his
calculation, has forgotten to consider the condition in which the food
is served--its eatableness, in short. If men could devour swill, it
would be all right; but if they cannot, they will starve in spite of
calories."

So the steward's calories became a byword and a mockery in the prison
for many weeks afterward.

Similar conditions, perhaps due to the same cause, seem to have obtained
at Sing Sing and elsewhere. It is not enough that prison food should be
sufficient in amount; it must also be of a quality such that the men are
able to get it down their throats. Nor are the doctor's salts a remedy;
their violent and abnormal action finally paralyze the excretory and
digestive powers of the organism, and the man dies from poisons
generated by indigestible food in his own system. Even keeping him in
the dark hole fails to recuperate him, though it has been constantly
tried at Atlanta, and very likely in other reformatory institutions.

Plenty of vigorous and hearty outdoor exercise would help much; not the
exercise of prison toil, which but deepens the darkness of the heart;
but exercise for its own sake, for the cheer and excitement of it. Much
has been said of the baseball at Atlanta Penitentiary; and doubtless it
has been of benefit. But only a handful of the prisoners, and
nine-tenths of them negroes, play the game; the others can only stand
and look on. The games occur, weather permitting, once a week, on
Saturdays. From Saturday at half past three until Monday morning at half
past seven, the men are locked in their cells, absolutely inactive in
body, and abandoned to such mental activities as, for the most part,
breed no good either for themselves or others. The only outlet is the
Sunday church service hour--a crowded session in a blank hall, with
rifles ready to subdue any disorder. A very apostle might fail in his
efforts under such circumstances; and very apostles are few.

A man who is sick and sad day after day and year after year, and
conscious of his impotence to amend his state, is in no mood for moral
reform. Much of the sickness might be averted if the medical treatment
at the outset of disease were such as to encourage the patients to avail
themselves of advice. But each man, as he comes up in the sick line
every morning, is met with indifference or insults; he is presumed to be
a malingerer unless he can prove himself genuine on the instant; the
only other recourse is to become so sick as to be beyond help of
medicine, and then, taken belated to the hospital, to die outright. The
consequence is that the men will suffer silently in their cells rather
than appeal to the doctor; and many diseases become ineradicable from
this cause.

Even a convict, when he is miserable and weak from illness, shrinks from
facing rough and unsympathetic handling and words in the doctor's room,
with a good chance of being sent to the hole if he remonstrates. The
doctor of a prison could be its good angel, if he would.




XIV


THE POLICY OF FALSEHOOD

The subterranean brotherhood waxes curiously indignant over being lied
to by prison officials. For why should criminals, whose success in their
trade must depend largely on lies either spoken or acted, be resentful
when they are paid back in their own base coin? I am inclined to think
that the anomaly may be due to some survival in prisoners of the old
belief, that honor and fair play do, or should, exist in officers of
justice; although their own experience should admonish them that
officers of prisons, at least, cultivate the art and practise of
fighting the devil with fire (as we say), and so far from ever thinking
of keeping faith with a convict, study the art of deceiving and
hoodwinking him, and appear to derive no small amusement from their
results. Indeed, any tendency on the part of a guard or other official
in a prison to deal honestly and above board with their charges would at
once awaken suspicion of his loyalty to the "system," and his superiors
would be apt to improve the first opportunity of getting rid of him.

The lies told to prisoners are sometimes told for art's sake merely--for
the delight of the artist in his fabrication. There is fun in overcoming
the suspicions and skepticism of some old timer, and beguiling him into
the belief that for once, and at last, he really is getting trustworthy
information--that he has finally succeeded in touching the elusive hem
of the robe of Truth. But commonly the official liar has some practical
object in view. This object is usually the tightening of the prison's
grip upon the convict; not only to strengthen the bonds which confine
his body, but to bring his spirit or soul under more complete subjection
and to make him feel that so far from moral reform being the end sought
in his incarceration, he will best consult his private interests by
abandoning all thoughts of decency and honor, and acting, with the
officials, against the welfare and hopes of his own fellows.

The consequence of the falsehood policy in prisons is, for one thing,
that the men most worthless morally are uniformly those who get most
favors. Men of unbroken spirit are handled in a hostile manner, and are
subjected to a regimen calculated either to kill or cure their obstinacy
and themselves. "You have no right to do this--there is no law for it!"
the convict may protest. The reply is a sneer: "What are you going to do
about it?" What do you think you would do in such circumstances?--write
to the President, or to some Senator or Congressman? awaken the country
to these iniquities? The warden and the clerk will smile over your
letter, and drop it in the waste-basket, or will make it the basis of an
adverse report against you to the Department,--insubordination,
incorrigibility, insanity perhaps.

Or, if you reserve your protest till after you get out, and can then
find any medium for ventilating it, the prison authorities will promptly
and smilingly "welcome an investigation"; and the Department will
eagerly send down some old friend and boon companion of the officials,
to make a "strict investigation," "without fear or favor." Now, at last,
the truth shall be known, let it hurt whom it may! So the severe and
incorruptible inspector comes down; and after snubbing and insulting a
few prisoners, and taking notes of the information of a few snitches,
and dining and wining with the officials, and inspecting the country in
the government automobile, he goes back to Washington with the
reassuring news that the reports of abuses, where they were not absolute
fabrications, were gross exaggerations.

Is this an imaginative sketch--or colored a little--or a good deal? How
shall it be determined?--for I am only an ex-convict, and we all know
what an ex-convict's word is worth. I can only suggest that, for your
own individual satisfaction at any rate, you commit a bona fide crime
and get sentenced to prison for it. If you survive, we can converse
further on the subject. Or--to offer a bolder suggestion yet--perhaps
the head of the Department himself might take a hand; perhaps he would
oblige us by breaking a law. Let him be handcuffed and brought to
Atlanta or elsewhere--we are not particular--and there be numbered and
U.S.P.'d and set to work. After a ten years' experience, or, if his time
be valuable, a year and a day might do, let him write his report, and I
for one will abide by it.

The prison policy of falsehood may be illustrated by the uses to which
the parole law is put. This unfortunate measure was no doubt conceived
by its parents in love and charity, to supply prisoners with a stimulus
to reform by rewarding them for it with early release from imprisonment.
If a man's conduct while serving his sentence had been orderly and
obedient to rules, he was to be freed after serving about one-third of
his appointed time; but he was required, for a reasonable period
thereafter, to make monthly reports to the prison, and to show that he
was usefully employed and was not frequenting drinking saloons or
otherwise going astray. A parole board was appointed to carry out the
law and to look after the paroled prisoner, helping him if necessary to
get employment. Meetings of the board were to be held at stated times,
to pass upon applications for parole; it was to consist of the warden
and the doctor of the prison, together with the president of the parole
board, who officiated at all Federal prisons, and who would, naturally,
be the superior official of the three. But two members of the board
would form a quorum; and meetings of the board at times other than those
regularly required could be held if thought desirable.

This looked humane and innocent, and raised great hopes in prisoners;
and an improvement in their general demeanor was soon observable.
Question soon arising as to whether life prisoners could be brought
under the new law, it was decided that lifers who had served fifteen
years were eligible, if of good record,--not an extravagant act of
mercy,--and in obtaining this concession it was made known that the
warden of Atlanta Penitentiary was instrumental. Of course the
reputation of Atlanta as a model and humane prison was greatly enhanced
thereby.

But the prisoners, and perhaps the framers of the law also, had
overlooked one little word in the language of the law, which grew to
have a large significance afterward. The language is, that if the
prisoner's conduct has been correct, etc., he may be granted parole. If,
for that harmless looking "may," had been substituted "shall," or
"must," the secret annals of federal prisons since then would have been
spared much rascality, corruption, cruelty, torture and death; and
prisoners would not have hated and distrusted their keepers as they do
now, and subordination on one side and humanity on the other would have
received an impetus.

That "may" rendered it optional with the board to grant or to refuse
parole in any given case; they might not only determine whether or not
the conduct of the applicant had been, while serving his sentence, good
enough to justify clemency; but also whether, even then, it were
expedient to exercise it. No matter how unexceptionable the behavior of
a prisoner were shown to be, it was open to the board to say to him, "We
hold that your liberation would be inimical to the welfare of society,
and we cannot therefore recommend it to the Department."

The prisoner, going before the board unsupported by the advice of
counsel, had no further recourse; he must go back to his cell feeling
that all his efforts to be obedient (persisted in through what
discouragements only prisoners know) had been futile; that he was not a
whit better off than was a man who had defied every regulation, and was
worse off in so far as he had taken all his pains and indulged all his
hopes for nothing. He must serve out his time; for if he renewed his
application at the next meeting of the board, he was told that nothing
could be done in his case except upon the presentation of "new
evidence."

New evidence of what? The obstacle he had to meet was the arbitrary
opinion, or fiat, of the board that it would not be a good thing to set
him free; with what argument, except his good conduct, which had already
proved unavailing, could he hope to reverse it? The decision left him
helpless and hopeless, and with a sense of despotic injustice on the
part of the authorities which was anything but conducive to good
discipline in him or in his comrades who were conversant with his fate.

Obviously, however, there was a weak point in this kind of arbitrary
rulings of the board; it was conceivable that some enterprising
Attorney-General might want to know why the board had not held the good
conduct specified in the law to be sufficient ground for freeing the
man. To guard against this, the services of a subordinate called the
parole officer were called in. This person's normal functions as
indicated in the law were to help paroled men to procure employment, to
aid them in general in their efforts toward a better life, and to stand
by them as an authoritative and kindly friend. But he was now required
to play a very different part.

As soon as a man applied for parole, the parole officer betook himself
to the place where the applicant had formerly lived or been known, and
there busied himself in unearthing whatever gossip and scandal of a
hostile nature any enemy might be willing to supply. There was no time
limit on these revelations, nor were any apparent precautions taken to
determine whether the evil reports were founded in fact; the tale bearer
was not compelled to testify under oath, and his story might refer to
incidents which had happened years before, and which had nothing to do
with the crime for which the prisoner was now undergoing sentence. With
this budget of information the parole officer returned to his superiors,
who were now prepared for any contingency.

When the prisoner comes up for examination, and has handed in his report
of good conduct while incarcerated, the president of the board fixes a
distrustful eye upon him, and says in effect, "Your behavior here seems
to have been unobjectionable; but the board cannot take the
responsibility of granting parole on that ground alone. It desires to be
informed what you were doing in such and such a place, in such and such
a year? Is it not true that you were arrested in this or that year for
this or that offense? Has your career, in short, been absolutely
blameless during the whole course of your life? Because, unless you can
prove such to be the case, it will indicate a predisposition to
law-breaking on your part which will render it imprudent for the board
to recommend you for parole to the Department."

The president has a sheaf of papers in his hand, which he glances over
significantly while the mind of the prisoner goes groping back over the
past, asking himself what he has done amiss in forgotten years, and who
can be his accusers. He has no counsel beside him to tell him that he is
being tried before an unauthorized tribunal, on unsupported testimony,
on charges irrelevant to that for which he is now undergoing punishment;
or to remind him that the judge who passed sentence on him had specified
that if his behavior were good while serving that sentence, he would be
eligible for parole--that he had, perhaps, given him a longer sentence
than he would otherwise have done, upon this very understanding; and
that, consequently, the parole board was now arrogating the power to
override the purpose of the federal court, and to inflict additional and
unwarranted punishment upon him for something which he may or may not
have done in the past, or for which, if he had done it and been
convicted, he may already have served sentence. He has no one to argue
thus for him; he feels that he is alone and among enemies; and he can
make no effective defense. And the parole officer stands by with a sad
countenance, as of one who had done the best he could for a protege, but
was powerless to stem the tide of justice.

It can't be done, legally or justly; but it is done; that is the gist of
the matter. There is no one to know the wrong and to insist upon the
right; and the wrong is perpetrated. Unnumbered victims of it, in every
federal prison of the country, substantiate this fact. The parole
board--which means, in practise, its president--exercises more power
than the federal court, and there is no appeal from his decision. At his
will, a man may be tried twice for the same offense, behind closed
doors, without aid of counsel. He may be condemned, though the offense
was never committed except in the imagination of an enemy. We tell our
convicts that they have no civic rights; but it is not generally
understood, I think, that the Spanish Inquisition of the Middle Ages can
properly be reproduced in Twentieth Century America even with men behind
the bars.

But let that pass. Things are done under the parole law worse than this.
If it were used merely as a means to induce unruly men to be docile, no
one could complain; if men thus induced should after all be deprived of
the reward they had earned, we might condone it. But what if we find the
parole board turned into an accessory of the secret service or spy
system, and learn that an applicant for parole, whether or not he have
maintained good conduct during his term, may yet hope for a favorable
report on his case if he will consent to betray some man on whom the
police have not yet been able to lay their hand?

Here comes a postoffice thief, for example. He was known to have had
confederates, but they escaped. He is up for parole, with only an
indifferent prison record to plead for him. "We do not find your case
meritorious," says the president to him (in substance), "but there were
two or three others concerned in your crime. If you are able to furnish
their names to the board, with such other information as may lead to
their arrest and conviction, we might see our way to recommend leniency
in your matter." I will not guarantee that the president expresses
himself in terms quite so explicit, but he makes himself perfectly
understood, and the prisoner perfectly understands that his liberty is
purchasable at the price of treachery.

I don't know what percentage of the miserable creatures accept the
ignoble offer; but I know personally of many who refused it. And I do
not need to ask what are the prospects of an honest and worthy career
for those who chose to be traitors. If they go to ruin, is not the
parole board responsible? On the other hand, who shall blame the convict
if he accedes to the bargain? The alternative presented to him is one
which might cause even virtue to waver, and convicts are not supposed to
be virtuous, especially when such an example as this action of the board
is set them. The alternative is liberty, or continued incarceration with
the strong probability of increased severity of treatment, and always
the off chance of death.

Meanwhile, is there not something humiliating in the reflection that a
tribunal authorized and appointed by the Government of the United States
should descend to such practises? Or are we content to accept the spy
system in toto, cost what it may? Perhaps, however, the president of the
parole board is prepared to deny that he ever entered into any such
compact with a prisoner; and perhaps the Department of Justice will be
astonished to hear that he ever did. Is the thing true, or not true? I
think men exist who have excellent reasons to believe, and who may be
willing to testify, that it is.

But take the case of a prisoner who had no confederates--how does the
board deal with him? According to my information, which includes my
personal experience, question is put to the applicant whether or not he
admits himself guilty of the crime for which he is undergoing sentence?
My own reply was, "Not guilty"; and though the president was very
courteous to me, and gave me every assurance that I might expect
favorable action on my application, as a matter of fact and of record
the recommendation made to the Attorney-General was that my application
be denied, and denied it accordingly was. But in other cases nearly
contemporary with mine, which came to my knowledge, the reply of "not
guilty" called forth the rejoinder that in that case the matter was not
one for the board to pass on, but should be referred to executive
action--that is, that the President of the United States should be
petitioned for a pardon. Some men are so persistent or so infatuated as
to take the suggestion seriously; but their petition does not bear
fruit; probably its path to the President is by way of the Department of
Justice, where it is either pigeonholed, or reaches him with an
endorsement to the effect that it is not a case for clemency. But in
such cases as came to my knowledge, the President never saw the petition
at all.

And what happens if our man pleads guilty? Why, in that event he is told
that such a person as he should not have made application for
parole--that he has not been sufficiently punished--that the best he
should hope for is to serve out his sentence, less the regular allowance
for good time. It is a case, in short, of heads the board wins, tails
the convict loses; and he withdraws, wondering, perhaps, what the board
is for. But let him beware of becoming restive under his disappointment,
or he may forfeit his good time too.

That the parole law is interpreted, under all conditions, as being a
favor or privilege and not a right earned by good conduct, is perhaps no
more than one might expect; but no prisoner who lacks powerful friends,
or whose parole does not in some way inure to the advantage of the
prison quite as much as to his own, can make his application with
assured hope of success. Upon the whole, prisoners feel that parole will
not be granted if any means can be found or devised to prevent it; the
good report of an entire county where a man formerly lived will not
prevail against the adverse report of some inspector--one enemy of a
prisoner outweighs, in the board's estimation, the favorable words of
many friends.

Moreover, men released on parole live in constant dread of the secret
service, for they know that unjust and trivial pretexts are often made
the occasion of their re-arrest; and a paroled man re-arrested must
serve out his whole time without rebate, and not including the period
during which he was at liberty. Some supervision by the Government is of
course proper; but the men feel it to be hostile, not friendly or
helpful; that any error they fall into or mishap they meet with will be
construed against them, not in their favor. In short, under the outward
forms of liberty, they are still in prison, and are often discouraged
from doing their best by this sleepless fear of the prowling spy.

Atlanta prison records show that out of one thousand prisoners who
applied for parole up to June 30th, 1913, two hundred and seventy were
successful. These applicants were serving terms of from one year and a
day to twenty-one years. The two hundred and seventy who were paroled
had served an aggregate of eighty-three years beyond the period when
they were eligible for parole (that is, after one-third of their
original sentence), or an average of about 112 days each, and with an
average of from twenty-five to forty per cent, of the time contemplated
for them to reestablish and rehabilitate themselves.

The one-year-one-day men lost about thirty-three per cent. of their time
during which they might have labored to reform themselves; and there
were about one hundred of the two hundred and seventy whose sentences
ran for a year and a day. Some sixty-five of the two hundred and seventy
had sentences of more than a year and a day and less than two years;
about thirty-five had over two years and under three years; from which
it would appear that short term men, convicted of minor offenses, were
given preference for parole over long term men. Yet it would seem to the
ordinary intelligence that it should be the long term men who most
needed parole and, if their conduct had been good, best deserved it. It
often happened that men would be paroled when they had but a few weeks
or even days yet to serve of their full sentence. In such cases, the
prison got whatever credit may belong to granting parole, but the men
got rather less than nothing, for they stood the risk of re-arrest and
further confinement.

When an applicant goes before the board for examination, he is sometimes
turned down summarily; but more often he goes out ignorant whether or
not he will succeed, and, as I have already shown, he is not seldom kept
in this torturing uncertainty until the day when he is either turned
loose or told that he has been rejected. This seems unnecessary, and
often appears to be due to sheer carelessness; the papers are not
promptly submitted to the Attorney-General, or they are pigeonholed and
forgotten. It may be true that the law does not categorically demand
that a prisoner shall be released immediately upon a favorable report;
but there is no obvious reason why he should not be, and it is cruel to
keep him in suspense.

There was a young fellow while I was there, a well educated and
agreeable man, whose conduct had always been unexceptionable; he applied
when eligible for parole, and was informed that he would be released.
Every morning thereafter for three weeks he arose with the hope that the
release would come that day; every night he went to bed with a heart
heavy with disappointment. He could not eat or sleep, he could not talk
connectedly, he trembled and turned pale, and was on the way to becoming
a nervous wreck; but no explanation was vouchsafed him. At last he was
suddenly told that he might go. The sole reason that I ever heard for
the delay was that the papers had been overlooked. There are a great
many government employees at Washington; it might be worth while to
appoint one more, charged with the duty of seeing that the overlooking
of parole papers be henceforth avoided. This was a very mild instance; I
have related how poor Dennis lingered for six months and finally died
from the same inattention or indifference.

There was a friend of mine, M., a highly intelligent, good natured
fellow, active and efficient in his prison duties, always courteous and
obliging; he was serving a sentence of five years, I think, for some
theft or confidence game. He had "done time" some six or seven years
previously, but during the interval had lived straight. At the time of
his last arrest he had been kept in the local jail, somewhere in New
England, after conviction, for four months before being transferred to
Atlanta. Time spent in a local jail before conviction is not counted in
the prisoner's favor; for example, I was arrested several months before
my conviction, and the trial itself lasted four months, and after the
trial I spent ten days in the Tombs.

With the exception of the last ten days, however, I was lucky enough to
be out on bail; but none of this time was applied to the lessening of my
sojourn in Atlanta, although the judge specified in his sentence that my
imprisonment there was to count from the time when the trial began; an
injunction which, had it been observed, would have caused my release on
parole a few days after my arrival at the penitentiary. But it appears
that such rulings by a trial judge have no weight with the Department of
Justice; and I am willing to admit that the judge's ruling in my case
seemed rather like whipping the devil round the stump--an evasion of the
manifest intent of the law, which, if I were guilty, I had no right to
expect. At all events, the Attorney-General made a decision, based upon
my case, that hereafter no such evasions were to be allowed; and I
presume his authority must be superior to that of any federal judge.

But my friend's case did not come under this category. His four months
in jail came after, not before, his conviction; and yet, when he arrived
at Atlanta, he was told that this four months would not be deducted from
his penitentiary time. Turn this which way you will, you cannot escape
the conclusion that this man is getting four months more than the
sentence of the judge required. Well, M. applied for parole on the plea
of perfect conduct during his imprisonment; no denial of that was
offered; but he was informed that his conviction seven years before, for
which he had been duly punished at that time, prevented the board from
giving favorable attention to his application.

This looks to me like trying a man twice for the same offense, and twice
condemning him; and I can find nothing to warrant it in the wording of
the parole law. If every actual or alleged mis-step of a man's whole
life can be quoted against him as ground for refusing parole, it would
seem tantamount to stultifying the law for parole.

This is not done in every case; but the point is that it may be done in
any case, and thus the fate of the applicant is at the arbitrary and
absolute disposal of the board, whether or not he have complied with the
stated provisions of the law.

The president of the parole board, in my time, was a Mr. Robert LaDow. A
former deputy warden of the Leavenworth Penitentiary, one W.H. Mackay,
wrote a letter to the Attorney-General on the 6th of November, 1913,
parts of which were published in newspapers about that time. In this
letter he said that Mr. LaDow was egotistical, arrogant, negligent,
extravagant, visionary and impractical, showed favoritism to prisoners,
and was totally unfit for the position he held. He goes on as follows:

"Personally, he knows nothing of Leavenworth Federal Prison; he is too
cowardly to go among the prisoners in the yards to make a personal
investigation of conditions; he has dealt unfairly and hastily with so
many at the parole meetings that he is afraid to meet prisoners face to
face.... Prisoners will stand punishment without a murmur if there is a
just reason for it, and they will permit you to be the judge; but when
men under the law are entitled to parole, and the flimsy excuse to hold
them in confinement is made that they will be a menace to society, they
cannot see it in that way. The parole board at this time is arrogantly
dominated by LaDow; it is practically a one-man board....

"When the board meets here, the men do not know sometimes for weeks and
months afterwards what their fate is.... Instances occur here where the
board acts unanimously upon a parole. Mr. LaDow takes these cases to
Washington and holds them thirty, sixty, and even ninety days on some
flimsy pretext or other. He often claims press of business, until
finally some senator or congressman or influential politician calls on
him, and then he gets busy very suddenly....

"When he comes to a parole meeting he begins work generally with a rush
and a flurry.... Usually has about 180 cases; he rushes them at the rate
of 60 to 80 a day, without getting at the merits or giving them serious
deliberation. He brings a stenographer, his private secretary, from
Washington at a heavy expense.... Then, when they return to Washington,
the stenographer writes up the result of the meeting, while LaDow will
take a junketing trip at Government expense ... as a sort of recreation
from his arduous duties."

I had not been long in Atlanta before a guard informed me that LaDow was
the best hated man in the prison, by officials and convicts alike. Nor
did I find any prisoner there, afterward, who did not speak to the same
tune. If he be really an efficient and trustworthy official, this is
singular and unfortunate. Mr. Mackay's charges against him at
Leavenworth are almost identically the same as what may be heard against
him any day in Atlanta. If there be any basis for them, perhaps it would
be expedient for the Government to supersede him. The parole law, at its
best, seems to be rather a weak-kneed and perverse institution, and it
would be a pity to deprive it of what value it may have by committing
its dispensation to the hands of a man not peculiarly fitted by nature
and temperament to carry out its provisions. It was Napoleon's opinion
that a blunder is worse than a crime.




XV


THE FRUIT OF PRISONS

After weathering Cape Parole, I laid my course for the Port of Good
Time. Men whose prison records are clear are liberated after serving
two-thirds of their original sentences. This new posture of my mind
invited a review of the experience through which I had been passing, and
of the conditions with which I had become conversant, and their
significance in connection with the policy of penal imprisonment in
general. I will introduce some of these reflections in this place.

As I have just said, men whose prison records are clear are liberated
after serving two-thirds of their original sentences. But part or all of
this abridgment may be lost by imperfect conduct. One man, at least,
within my knowledge, was punished by the dark hole several months before
the expiration of his original sentence, and was kept there until that
sentence had expired. Then, out of that filthy dungeon he was thrust
abruptly forth into broad daylight and the crowded world. It was a
miracle if he survived. What have most convicts to live for? Perhaps
those who have most to live for are unlikeliest to survive--their
anxiety is greater.

On the other hand, severity itself may stimulate a convict. His human
mind cannot comprehend despair. Instinct forces him to hope. So weeks,
months, years go by, and hope seems to him more instead of less
justifiable, till at last, perhaps, he dies with the illusion still
strong in him. Real despair is un-human and possibly rare. Otherwise
prison mutinies and killings would be more frequent. The argument of
despair is, "Since I must die here anyway, I'll take two or three of
those devils with me!" But few men believe they will die in jail,
therefore the guard or other official escapes.

Not ten percent of men in jail would regard such a killing as
unjustifiable. We were taught in school that resistance to tyrants is
obedience to God, and many who had disobeyed God in other ways would
gladly obey Him in this. I speak not merely of "ignorant and brutal"
convicts, but of educated and intelligent men like you and me. Even a
sensitive conscience may condone the killing of a tyrant who is slowly
and surely destroying you, body and soul, under sanction of law. But we
punish convicts who fight for revenge or liberty, and protect the
officials who taunt and torture them into doing it.

What a hideous and almost unbelievable situation! Historians wonder that
the Aztecs of Cortez' time, with their comparatively high civilization,
tolerated human sacrifices. But their human sacrifices were merciful
compared with ours. What is cutting out a man's heart on an altar to
propitiate a god, to hounding him to death through miserable years in a
prison to placate the spite of an accuser, the justice of a court, or
the grudge of a warden or guard?

And what is the fruit of it? For pure, carefree, smiling, remorseless
wickedness nothing in human annals surpasses the young
criminals--black-mailers, bomb-throwers, gunmen--now infesting our
cities. "I think no more of killing a houseful of human beings, men,
women and children," one of them was quoted as saying the other day,
"than of crushing so many beetles." How came such a monster to exist?
Why, we bred him, supplied him with the poisonous conditions that
generate such beings and can generate nothing else. He had intelligence
enough to understand that the established order made earning an honest
living hard work; saw thousands living well without labor apparently,
other thousands robbing under cover of legal technicalities; a legal
profession living by devising statutes to punish crimes and prosecuting
the criminals thus manufactured; often living better yet by teaching
criminals to escape the penalties which their law imposed. He saw reform
schools which instructed such children as he had been to become such men
as he was; prisons and penitentiaries which graduated such as he in the
latest devices of crime--and he made up his mind that goodness was at
bottom humbug, that only a fool would be honest or merciful when money
could be got by theft and murder.

We breed poisonous snakes and scorpions, give them no chance to be
anything but that, and then wonder they are not doves and butterflies.
Things like this gangster are infernal spirits, irreclaimable; but we
gain nothing by extirpating the individuals; the black stream which
carries them must be dammed at its source. Of the conditions which
generate them, a part is the prisons and their keepers. But we are not
yet at the root of the matter--the keepers are not primarily to blame.
It is the principle which prisons illustrate which attracts and molds
keepers till they become often as bad as the men they have charge of,
and often much worse.

Prisons mean social selfishness, the disowning of our own flesh and
blood. They segregate visible consequences of social disease; but the
disease is invisibly present in all parts of the body corporate, and
can no more be healed by cutting off the visible part than we can
heal small pox by cutting out the pustules. Prisons are not the right
remedy; they inflame and disseminate the poison we would be rid of
and prevent any chance of cure. The soul of all crime is self-seeking
in place of neighborly good will; we send men to prison to get them
out of our way, and that is criminal self seeking and ill will to the
neighbor--delegating to hirelings our own proper business.

In attempting thus selfishly to extirpate crime, we commit the crime
least of all forgivable--the denial of human brotherhood and
responsibility. For that crime, no law sends us to prison; yet it is no
sentimental notion, but the truth, that it is a crime worse than those
for which we imprison men. Prisons are brimful of men less guilty before
God than is the society that condemned them. You and I are not excused
because we are not society--we are society. Society is not numbers but
an idea--a mutual relation; we cannot shift our blame to people in the
next street. "Am I my brother's keeper?" was an argument used long ago,
and its reception was not encouraging.

Thoughts like these pass through a convict's mind when he discovers that
he is on the last leg of his disastrous voyage. He then begins to see
the whole matter in its general relations; what use was served? who is
the better for it? "Prisons make a good man bad and a bad man worse," is
the way I often heard the men at Atlanta put it. The situation, entire
and in detail, is preposterous and futile. Grown men, from all ranks of
life, or all degrees of intelligence and education, are herded
promiscuously, and treated now like wild beasts, now like children.
Discipline, in any condition of life, is a good thing, and no people
need discipline more than we do; but in prison, discipline means
punishment, and there is no discipline in the right sense of the word. A
man is "disciplined" when he is starved, or clubbed, or put in the hole,
or deprived of his good time.

Military discipline might be beneficial; it implies respect for rightful
authority, and orderly conduct of one's own life. Officials in a
penitentiary wear uniforms; prisoners wear prison clothes; but, in warm
weather, officials go about, indoors and out, in their shirts and with
the bearing of loafers; they have no official salutes, and the men are
not allowed to salute them--to do so would expose them to "discipline."
There is no drill in the prison, no soldierly bearing, no physical
control of movement. The men are "lined up" to go to work, but it is a
line of slouchers and derelicts; no spirit in it, no respect for
themselves or one another, no decent example set by the guards. And yet
armies in all ages and in all parts of the world have proved the value
of discipline--its necessity, indeed--in all proper and intelligent
handling and control of bodies of men; and it is as important for
convicts as for soldiers. It would promote cheerfulness, smartness,
efficiency; half an hour's lively drill of all the men in prison every
morning and evening would do them good, improve relations between guards
and prisoners, and lessen the danger of revolts. Why refuse it then? Is
it because it would imply something human still lingering in convicts?
or because it is feared that convicts taught to act in unison by
military drill would combine more readily for mutiny? But order does not
naturally lead to disorder but away from it, and mutinies are mostly
impromptu affairs, contemplating revenge rather than escape. As for the
other argument, a lie is not a sound basis to build on, and it is a lie
that convicts are not human. To admit this would facilitate their
management.

Physical exercise twice a day in the open air would diminish the sick
line, produce better work, and help to put a soul in any prison.
Desultory exercise--say two or three hours of baseball on
Saturdays--does not meet the need--it emphasizes it rather. But at
present the well-nigh universal aim seems to be to render the gray
monotony of prison slavery as monotonous and as gray as possible. Any
relief from it is opposed or made difficult. It is true that at Atlanta
and elsewhere we have music (that is what it is called, and I have no
wish to criticize the hardworking and zealous young fellows who produce
it in and out of season; and some of the men may like it for aught I
know); and that a vaudeville company performs for us occasionally. But I
must look these gift horses in the mouth, and say that often we have
them less for our own advantage than as an advertisement to the public
of the liberality of prison authorities. And there to be sure at my
prison, is Uncle Billy, who makes fiddles out of shingles, with nails,
and plays on them, all with one hand. But he is--I hope I may now say,
he was; for he was to have been paroled the other day; he was a lifer,
and a picturesque and wholly innocuous figure--he was, then, permitted
to pursue this industry, and visitors used to come and watch him do it;
but he, too, was most useful to the prison press agent, and owed the
indulgence to that functionary. On the other hand, there is a convict,
also a lifer, who cultivated a most remarkable skill in inlaid woodwork,
producing really beautiful and artistic boxes and other articles, and
found some consolation for his awful fate in making them. But one day
while I was there his cell was entered by the guard, his boxes and plant
taken away and broken, and he was forbidden to do that work any more.
Visitors did not know about him.

This was malicious. But some of the things done by prison authorities
are apparently due to sheer stupidity and ignorance. For example, there
were some cows belonging to Atlanta prison, and some of them calved. So
there were half a dozen calves more or less, with prospects of more to
come. The authorities decided that the expense of rearing these
innocents was not justifiable; there was nothing in the rule book about
it; besides, the jail was not designed to harbor innocent creatures. The
minutes of the conference were not given out, and we can judge of what
passed only by the results. The order went forth that the calves be
killed; and the killing was actually perpetrated, and the bodies were
buried somewhere in the prison grounds. The story seems incredible, but
it was corroborated by several men cognizant of the facts. Why not, at
least, have turned them into veal?

I was speaking just now of the promiscuous herding together of prisoners
in prisons generally. No effort is made to separate the old from the
young, the educated from the ignorant; the hardened sinners from the
impressionable youths or newcomers; or (at Atlanta, except in the
cells), the negroes from the whites. Association of negroes with whites,
on a footing of enforced outward equality, is bad for both; not because
a bad white man is worse than a bad negro, but because the physical,
mental and moral qualities of either react unfavorably upon the other.
The negro, being the more ignorant as a rule, falls more readily into
degraded vices; the white man, being as a rule the dominant element in
the situation, masters the will of the negro, but cannot or at least
does not erect barriers against the latter's subtle corruption.

We must always bear in mind the abnormal conditions in a prison--the
misery of it, the dearth of variety and relaxation, the terrible
yearning for some form, any form, of distraction and amusement. The male
is parted from the female, and from the resource of children; his nerves
are on edge, his natural propensities starved, his thoughts wandering
and embittered; he finds no good anywhere, nor any hope of it. He will
seize upon any means of abating or dulling his cravings. The negro is
pliant, unmoral, free from the restraints of white civilization. In the
South especially, his subordination to the white is almost a second
nature; but he involuntarily avenges himself (as all lower races do upon
the stronger) by that readiness to comply which flatters the sense of
power and superiority in the other, and leads to evil.

I wish to say, in passing, that my allusion to negroes in this
connection is by no means to be taken as reflecting upon them all; some
of the men in Atlanta for whom I had the highest respect were negroes;
and I am inclined to think that the negro in his right place and
function is a desirable element in civilization, and, if we would treat
him aright, would do us as much good as we can do him. But the negro in
jail is at his worst, just as white men are, and he is made worse by
white companionship. There are more than two hundred of them in Atlanta
jail, and some of them are the worst of their kind.

What is true of the association of negroes with whites is not less true
of the association of what are called professional criminals with the
young and unhardened. Various prison authorities claim that they have
made some effort to prevent this contamination; but the only sign of it
that I could ever discover at Atlanta was that the old and the young are
not commonly assigned to the same cells. Obviously, however, a man young
in years may be old in crime; there can be no security in the age test
taken by itself; and no pretense of adopting any other test in a jail is
made.

A young fellow, without inherited or acquired criminal tendencies, is
sent to jail for some inadvertent and insignificant infraction of law.
He had always meant to live straight; he had no enmity against society;
he had always thought of himself as well intentioned and law abiding.
But here he is; and he is shocked, shamed and appalled at the sudden
grip and horror of the jail. Upon a mind thus astounded and distraught
the professional criminal seizes and works.

The man of the world--of the criminal world--befriends him, chats with
him, heartens him, and soon begins to fascinate him with ideas which had
never till now occurred to him. He preaches the injustice and hostility
of all mankind, and the hopelessness of the convict once in jail ever
again reestablishing himself in the world. He tells his pupil that he is
damned forever by his fellow men outside, and that unless he be prepared
to lie down and starve, he must fight for life in the only way open to
him--the way of crime. Then he proceeds to show him, progressively, the
profits and advantages of criminal practises. It is only too easy for
the trained crook to overcome the resistance of the unhardened youth;
his arguments seem unanswerable; and the wholly justifiable feeling that
prison is wrong and an outrage aids the corruptor at every turn. A few
months is often enough to turn an innocent boy into a malefactor; a year
or more of such instruction leaves him no chance of escape; and many an
innocent boy finds himself in a cell for what seems to him a lifetime.

Last July, a justice of a State Supreme Court sentenced Thomas Baker,
little more than a child, to fifteen years in jail for--what? If your
mother was blind and helpless, and your stepfather came in and abused
her and beat her, in your presence,--a big brute with whom you could not
hope to contend physically,--what would be your feelings, and what would
you be prompted to do? Thomas Baker, trembling and sobbing with rage and
anguish, ran out of the house to a neighbor's, borrowed a shotgun, and
ran back and emptied it into the brute's body, killing him on the spot.
Fifteen years in prison for that! Shall we rejoice and say that justice,
at last, is satisfied?--But that is a digression.

No doubt, meanwhile, Thomas Baker's one consolation in life is the
reflection that he did succeed in killing his stepfather; and he will be
very ready to give ear to an older and more experienced man who tells
him that the only difference between good and bad in the world is that
those are called good who have power over those who are called bad; and
that the only way for him to get even for his wrongs is to become a
crook--and not be a fool!

The wardens and guards do not prevent these companionships; whether or
not they try to prevent them cannot be affirmed; but to my mind it is
plain that they could not prevent it, try as they might. It is an evil
inherent in prisons and ineradicable. As long as we have prisons, we
shall see judges like Thomas Baker's sending boys to jail for such
"crimes" as his, there to stay for fifteen years, more or less, and
there to be changed from innocence into diabolism. But Thomas was not
innocent, you say, but guilty. What is guilt? I find him innocent of the
guilt of standing inactive by and seeing that cruel fist strike his
blind mother's beloved face.

Anything unnatural seems unreal. I remarked some time ago that when I
was sitting in the court room being tried on charges sworn to by certain
postoffice officials, the dull and sordid scenes would sometimes vanish
before me, and I would say to myself, "It is an illusion--what is really
taking place is very different from this appearance."

This thought often recurred while I was in prison.

At meal times, the men would file in and take their places at the
tables; anon, the meal over, they would rise and file out--men whom I
knew, creatures like myself, slaves of an arbitrary power acting in
accordance with principles long since known to be false and mischievous.
And I would see men whom I knew, men like myself, jeered, insulted,
clubbed, dragged to the hole. I would see the dead bodies of men whom I
knew, men like myself, rattled out of the gate to the dumping ground and
dropped there and forgotten--men with wives and children still living or
dead in poverty and shame, their pleas unheard and their wrongs
unrighted. I would contemplate the long rows of steel cells, cages for
me and men like myself, locking us in for months and years and
lifetimes, for an example to others and for the protection of society
against our menace. I would glance, as I passed, at the aimless toilers
in the workshops, standing or squatting in the foul atmosphere under the
eye and rifle of the guard.

I would consider that this dismal and inhuman pageant was going on age
after age as a cure for crime--while crime, all the while, was
increasing by percentages so astounding that we seek through immigration
statistics and records of increase of population to account for it--and
in vain. And I would tell myself, once more, that the thing must be an
illusion; it was inconceivable that an intelligent nation should
tolerate it.

If you found that you were taking bichlorid of mercury by mistake for a
sleeping draught, would you go on taking it? or would you clamor for an
antidote, waylay doctors for help, and disturb the discreet serenity of
hospitals for succor? But the nation, made up of such as you, continues
its prison nostrum, which slays a million for bichlorid of mercury's
one.

A tragic farce--that is what prisons are. Enclosures of stone and steel
are built, and a handful of armed men are given absolute control over
several hundred beings like themselves. We, as a community, have erected
a system of laws which places us, as a community, in the attitude of
penalizing practises which we, as individuals, do not severely condemn.
Our morality, as publicly professed, is in advance of our morals as
privately exercised. When our neighbor steals or murders, we give him
the jail or the chair; but when you and I are charged with such deeds
and see the prison or the chair in our near foreground, we discover
ourselves to be less convinced than we had imagined of the rectitude of
our penal system. Of course, then, the faster we make laws to punish
crime, and the more we punish criminals, the more criminals are there to
punish. Our hypocrisy gradually is revenged upon us, one after another;
one by one we fall into the pit so virtuously digged for others.

And criminal law, meanwhile, becomes constantly more searching and
severe in its provisions, seeking to prevent crime by the singular
device of employing the best methods for multiplying it. The victims of
its activities are miserable enough in jail, and languish and die there,
and, if they were not very wicked before, are furnished with every
facility to become so; but they have not the consolation of feeling that
their being thus immolated on the altar of an outraged but non-existent
morality is doing them or anybody else any good. A prominent business
man was put in a cell yesterday; a political boss arrives to-day; a
college graduate, a judge, and a religious fanatic are expected next
week. But business, politics, the Four Hundred, the Law and religion are
no better than they were before.

The procession becomes ever more crowded; when is it to stop? Shall we
build more prisons, enact more laws? A leading counsel said the other
day, "Commercial crime is an effect and not a cause. The existing system
is responsible. We should prevent conditions that lead to crime and
resort to criminal courts as little as possible." And an
ex-Attorney-General observed, about the same time, "I sometimes think
that if we could repeal all the laws on our statute books and then write
two laws--'Fear God' and 'Love your neighbor'--we would get along
better"--but he added, "If we could get the people to live up to them!"
Yes, that is a prudent stipulation; and it applies just as well to the
myriad "laws on our statute books" as to these two.

I call prisons a tragic farce, and am sensible of an unreality in them;
but they are fortunately unreal only in the sense that they stand for
nothing rational or in line with the proper and natural processes of
human life. They are false, and the mind spontaneously reacts against
falsity and denies it. But here are half a million (or some say, a
million) men every year who suffer actual and real misery from this
falsity, and many of whom die of it; that is the tragedy of the farce.
And the fact that this falsity, prison, exists among us and has legal
standing and warrant, tends to demoralize every one connected with it,
and, more or less, the entire community. If its misery and evil were
confined within the circuit of its walls we might endure it; but it
spreads outward like a pestilence. It creates little jails in our minds
and hearts, though we never beheld the substantial walls nor heard the
steel gates clang together. We become jailers to one another, and to
ourselves.

There was a woman, the wife of a jailer, with a son four years old. At
first, her husband had lived in a house outside the jail, but latterly
he had been obliged to dwell within the jail walls.

His wife had seen and known too much of jails to be happy in such a
residence. She thought of her son, growing up inside prison walls, and
seeing the squalor and daily misery of convicts, and witnessing the
cruelties of the guards--mere matters of routine, but horrible
nevertheless. Her husband had come up from the ranks in prison life, and
was an efficient officer. He had no thought of ever changing his
occupation.

One day he left the jail on business, and did not return till one
o'clock the next morning. Two keepers who had been left in charge heard
four sounds like pistol shots about ten o'clock that night, but supposed
them to be torpedoes exploding on the railroad that passed the rear of
the jail. There was an interval of an hour or so, and then came two more
shots. This time they made a search of the jail, but it did not occur to
them to examine the quarters of the warden, where his wife and his
little son were.

When the husband and father reached home, he went to his rooms; and
there he learned the extent of the misery and loathing which his
profession and his dwelling had created in the heart of the woman who
had loved him. She lay dead, with a bullet hole in her temple. The
little boy was also dead, shot through the heart by his mother's hand.
On the floor was the pistol, and four empty shells were scattered about.
Those first bullets she must have aimed at her son, but the horror of
the situation had shaken her hand, and she had missed him. Then had come
that interval, which the two keepers had noticed. What had been in her
mind and heart during those endless, brief minutes--her terrors, her
memories, her desperate resolve, now failing, now again renewed? If you
who read this are a mother, you may perhaps imagine the unspeakable
drama of that hour. At last, murder and suicide were better than the
jail, and she fired twice again, and this time did not miss.

"Insane" was the verdict. But it is perhaps reasonable to ascribe the
insanity to the conditions which found their black fruition in the
woman's act, rather than to the despairing creature herself. She had all
that most women would ask for happiness--a good husband, a darling
little son, an assured support. But there was ever before her eyes the
ghastly, inhuman spectacle and burden of the jail; she knew it through
and through, and she could endure it no longer. She pictured her
innocent boy growing up and following his father's trade. The idea
tortured her beyond the limits of her strength, and she accepted the
only alternative--death. She was not a prisoner--she was only a looker
on; but that is what prison did for her. And our press, echoing our own
will, and our courts, voicing our own laws, keeps on shouting, "Put the
crooks in stripes; show them no mercy!"

Shall we not pause a moment over the bodies of this mother and her son,
over this frenzied murder and suicide? They constitute an arraignment of
the prison principle not to be lightly passed over, or commented on with
rasping irony by witty editorial writers. That tragedy means something.
We cannot lease the community's real estate to hell, for building hell
houses and carrying on hell business, supported by our taxes and
advocated by our courts and praised (or "reformed") by our
penologists--we cannot do that without meeting the consequences. We see
how the consequences affected Mrs. Schleth in the Queens County, New
York, jail, last summer. It will affect other persons in other ways. But
it will affect us all before we are done with it. Hell on earth is a
tenant which no community can suffer with impunity.

If prisons are a good thing, it is full time they made good. If they are
a bad thing, it is full time they were abolished. The middle courses now
being tried in some places cannot succeed; no compromise with hell ever
succeeds, however kindly intentioned. But the devil rejoices in them,
recognizing his subtlest work done to his hand.

What shall happen if prisons are done away with? That question will
doubtless puzzle us for a long time to come. I have no infallible
remedy; but I shall touch upon the subject in my next and last chapter.




XVI


IF NOT PRISONS--WHAT?

What would you advise to check law breaking? A good practical answer to
that question would save civilized humanity a great many millions of
dollars every year.

The old answer was "jail" for minor cases and death for the others.
There was much to be urged in favor of the latter. Dead men not only
tell no tales, but they commit no crimes. Kill all criminals and crime
would cease. The device has been tried--it was tried in England for a
while--but the result was disappointing. It threatened to decimate the
population; and in spite of logic, it failed to discourage law breakers.
Criminals seemed to get used to being hanged, and drawn and
quartered--they no longer minded it. There is a psychological reason for
that, no doubt; though it is not so sure that psychology as understood
and practised to-day can find out what it is.

Moreover, the spy system, which always accompanies and thrives upon
severe legislation, became so productive of informations that it was
soon clear that the end would be the indictment not so much of a tenth
part of the population as of all but a tenth--or even more. So a
compromise was made; only murderers should be killed. That did not
lessen the number of murders, and seems rather to have increased them;
for the impulse to murder is commonly a very strong impulse, producing a
brain condition in which consequences are not weighed. Also, when the
community takes life for life, it appears to weaken the general respect
for life, and men can be hired to do a killing job for small sums.
Sentimental persons, too, insist on making heroes of convicted
murderers, which in a degree, perhaps, counteracts the depressing
conditions surrounding them. So we made another compromise.

This is not on the statute books, but it operates actively,
nevertheless. It is the development of the appeal industry among lawyers
for the defense.

"I will teach you to respect human life," says the judge, "by depriving
you of your own."

"Don't worry, my boy," says the culprit's counsel, patting him on the
back; "you'll die sometime, I suppose; but nothing is more certain than
that it won't be on the day set for your execution by his honor. And
I'll risk my reputation on your death being no less in the ordinary
course of nature than his honor's, and very likely--for he looks like a
diabetes patient--not so soon."

These anticipations often prove well grounded.

No one in the court room, therefore, is often more cheerful and
confident than is the prisoner doomed to the noose or the chair.
Besides, if all else fails, he may petition for pardon or for life
imprisonment.

In short, the death penalty stays on the statute books, but the
community does not want it, though it has not the courage to demand its
abolition outright. It forfeits its self-respect, and the murderer draws
the inference that it is safer to murder than to steal. A thoroughbred
man does not compromise; he does one thing or he does the other, retains
his self-respect, and commands that of his fellows, whether or not he be
"successful." This nation is not thoroughbred as regards its laws, and
is neither self-respecting nor respected.

However, there is agitation for the abolition of the death penalty; and
possibly the futility and absurdity of such a punishment may finally
strike the persons whom we have picked out as the wisest and ablest
among us, and have put in our legislatures to tell us what to do and not
to do. Absurd though legal killings may be, they are not so absurd as
the persuasion that death is the worst thing that can happen to a man.
It involves little or no suffering, and is over in a moment.
Imprisonment involves much suffering, and lasts long, not to speak of
the disgrace of it, to those who can feel disgrace. The serious feature
about killing is, that it is final for this state of being, and when we
do it we do we know not what. But that is for the community to consider,
not the victim.

We cannot know what death means, but we can and do know what
imprisonment means, and so far as our mortal senses can tell us, it is
worse than death. But while we may abolish the death penalty easily, the
suggestion to abolish imprisonment staggers us like an earthquake. Every
moral instinct in our little souls leaps up and shrieks in protest; and
if that be not enough, we fall back with full conviction upon the
consideration of security of property. It is impossible to consider a
measure which would leave crimes against property unpunished. And what
other punishment for them than imprisonment is there or can there be?

Argument upon this matter evidently bids fair to drag in pretty nearly
everything else--sociology, political economy, religion, politics, law,
medicine, psychology,--the whole conduct of our life and history of our
opinions. But I must content myself here with a few words, and leave
volumes to others. That personal property has value is undeniable;
whether it be worth what it costs us, in the long run, and from all
points of view, may be left to the judgment of generations to come. Law
in its origins is Divine; whether our human derivations from it partake
of its high nature is debatable. Medicine and psychology, professing
much, have not explained to us what or why we are, or what is our degree
of responsibility for what we are and do. Politics sits on the bench and
argues through the mouth of the public prosecutor; is justice safe in
their keeping?

This age did not invent prisons, but inherited them from an unmeasured
past. It is a primitive device. The mother locks up her naughty child in
the closet or ties its leg to the bed-post. Society does the same with
its naughty children, though with one difference--the mother still loves
her child. She, following the example of God, chastens in love; but what
do we chasten in? If not in love, then in hate or indifference, or to
get troublesome persons out of our way without regard to harm or benefit
to them. And that is not Godlike but diabolical, being based upon
selfishness. The community being stronger than the individual, its
selfishness is tyranny or despotism. Many of us indeed may be willing to
admit that prisons are perhaps objectionable or altogether wrong in
theory; but surely something must be done with malefactors, and if not
prison, what?

The only answer hitherto is compromise--the old answer, fresh once more
from the devil's inexhaustible repertoire. We are willing to abolish the
death penalty, which is more merciful than imprisonment; but we are
unwilling to abolish the latter, because in spite of its inhumanity, it
seems to protect our property. In other words, we consider our own
interests exclusively, and the culprit's not at all--though we still
protest that our object in imprisoning is as much the individual's
reformation, as our own security. The fact, however, that imprisonment
brutifies and destroys instead of reforming is beginning to glare at us
in a manner so disconcerting and undeniable, that we feel something has
to be done; and in accordance with our ancient habit and constitutional
predisposition, that something turns out to be compromise. We sentenced
for murder, but put obstacles in the way of carrying the sentence out.
On the same principle, we will now retain prisons, but make them so
agreeable that convicts will not mind being committed to them.

That is the compromise; and it is already in operation here and there.
In the first place, numbers of good men and women, with motives either
religious or humanitarian or both, obtained leave to visit prisons, talk
with the inmates, give them religious exhortations, supply them with
some forms of entertainment, and in other ways try to lighten the burden
of their penal slavery. These persons deserve great credit. It was not
so much the exhortations or entertainments that did good, as the idea
thereby aroused in convicts that somebody cared for them. Between, them
and the community there was still war to the knife; but certain
individuals, separate from the community, were not hostile but well
disposed toward them.

A man fallen into evil may sometimes be redeemed by coming to feel this;
he will try to be good for the sake of the person who was kind to him in
his misery. I once asked a comrade in Atlanta whether if the warden were
to give him twenty dollars and tell him to go to the town, make a
purchase for him, and return, he would do so? He said, "No," and when I
asked him why, replied that he would know the warden had something up
his sleeve, and was not on the square in his proposition. I then named a
certain benefactor of the prisoners outside the prison, and asked if he
would do it for that person? After some consideration, he said that he
would, because he "would hate to disappoint" that person, and would
believe in the bona fides of that person's request. This man was held to
be rather a bad case; but he was still capable of acting honorably, if
the right motives were supplied.

But this is not enough. The great mass of convicts could not be reformed
by "hating to disappoint" any particular person who had been kind to
them or trusted them. Their personal gratitude to the individual would
not stem the tide of their well grounded conviction that people in
general were neither trustful nor kind; and the numberless and constant
temptations of their life after liberation would prove too strong for
them. There have been instances to the contrary; touching and beautiful
instances, some of them; but they are far from establishing the
principle that Christian Endeavorers, or Salvation Armies, or prison
angels, or angelic wardens can effect the reform of men in prison. Some
stimulus much more powerful is required.

The next step in compromise was to improve the physical conditions in
the prison; to give more light and air and exercise, better food; to
mitigate or do away with dark holes, assaults and tortures. There were
many zealous critics of these leniencies; they said we were making
prisons so attractive that criminals, so far from being deterred from
crime by fear of punishment, would commit crimes in order to be sent to
prison. And they could quote in confirmation cases of men who had
accepted liberation at the end of their terms reluctantly, or had
actually refused it, or of men who had voluntarily returned to prison
after having been discharged.

There have been such cases; but they prove, not the attractiveness of
prisons, but their power to kill the manhood in a man. What does it not
suggest of outrage and degradation perpetrated upon a human soul, that
he should come to prefer a cell and a master to freedom! There may be
slaveries so soft as to invite the base and pusillanimous, but they are
more rather than less depraving than cruelties to all that makes
honorable and useful manhood. The deepest and essential evil of prisons
is not hardship and torture, but imprisonment. If choice could be made
between the two, every manly man would choose the former. No disgrace is
inherent in hardship and torture; but imprisonment brands a man as unfit
to associate with his kind. No mortal creature has or can have the right
to inflict it, nor any aggregation of mortals.

This is a hard saying, but I will stand by it. There were criminals of
all kinds in Atlanta with whom I was brought into contact. One had grown
rich by organizing a system of "white slavery" on a large scale. He
dealt in woman's dishonor and turned it into cash, and he saw nothing
wrong in it. This man was advanced in years, he was incapable of
regarding women in any other light than as merchandise, he was
insensible to their misery, and laughed at their degradation. He was
physically repulsive; his face and swollen body suggested a huge toad.
It would be foolish to associate the idea of reform with such a
creature. I felt a nauseous disgust of him; he seemed on the lowest
level of human nature.

But, contemplating him during some months, I saw little touches of
kindliness and good humor in him; he did not hate his fellows, nor wish
them to hate him. If the other prisoners ostracized him or cursed him,
he was painfully sensible of it, and even perplexed, and would try to
win their favor. I perceived that he had always lived in a world of
filth and sin, and knew no other. In that world, he had doubtless not
done the best he might, but which of us can say he himself has done
that? Had I been born and bred as he was, what would I be? What right
had I to call him unfit for my companionship? I had no right to do it,
nor had any other man. At last I shook him by the hand and wished him
well.

There were men there who had committed merciless robberies, cruel
murders, heartless swindles, abominable depravities. I have felt greater
temperamental aversion from many highly respectable persons than I did
from them. Their crimes were one thing, they were another. Not that
crime does not corrupt a man--stain him of its color. But there is
always another side to him, a place in him which it has not dominated.
Given his conditions, we cannot affirm that he is not as good as we
are--that he is unfit to associate with us. And it behooves us always to
bear it in mind that to affirm the contrary is an unpardonable sin
against him of whom we affirm it; it works more evil in him than
anything else we can do, and places us who repudiate him in a truly
hideous posture. Shall we be more fastidious than God?

All crime is hateful; but I came to the conclusion that there is only
one crime which prompts us to hate the criminal as well as his crime
itself. For this crime is one which originates in our heart; it is not
forced upon us by need or passion or heredity. Therefore, it permeates
every fiber of our being, every thought of our mind, every impulse of
our soul; and we cannot say of it, this is one thing and we are another.
It is an unhuman crime; and yet there is no punishment for it among
human laws; rather, it is regarded as a mark of superiority. The most
respectable persons in the community are most apt to commit it. And it
was upon the suggestion and initiative of this crime that penal
imprisonment was invented, and is perpetrated to this day.

Christ condemned it; Christianity is based upon its repudiation; we call
ourselves Christians; and yet it is the characteristic crime of our
civilization. The Law and the Prophets are against it; it defies every
injunction of the Decalogue, for it takes the name of God in vain, it
steals, murders, commits adultery, covets and bears false witness; but
we clasp it to our bosoms, and actually persuade ourselves that it is
the master key to the gates of Heaven. What is it? It is the thought in
a man's heart that he is better, more meritorious, than his fellow.

It is engendered, most often, by a successful outward
morality--conformity to the letter of the Commandments--the whitening of
the outside of the sepulcher. But the stench of the interior
loathsomeness oozes through. The only person unaware of that stench is
the man himself. There is but one cure for it--what we call
Regeneration; which makes us sensible of that deadly odor, and drives us
freely and sincerely to detest ourselves in dust and ashes and bitter
humiliation, to pity, succor and love our brethren, and to wrestle with
the angel of the Lord for mercy. But we prefer to seek salvation from
evil in the building of prisons.

Now, this crime may survive even in prisons; but it is rarer there than
in any other aggregation of human beings. Therefore, there is a
wonderful sweetness in the prison atmosphere. It is a sweetness which is
perceived amid all the dreariness, stagnation and outrage, and it rises
above the vapors of physical crime, for it is a spiritual sweetness.
There men are locked in their cells, but the whited sepulcher is
shattered, and its sorry contents are purified by the pure light of
humiliation, confession and helplessness; there are no hypocrites there,
no masks, no holier-than-thou paraders. Their crimes have been
proclaimed, and branded upon their backs; pretenses are at an end for
them. It was wonderful to look into a man's face and see no disguise
there. "I am guilty--here I am!" This experience took the savor out of
ordinary worldly society for me. I go here and there, and everywhere
there is masquerading--the weaving of a thin deception which does not
deceive. We were sincere and humble in prison; but that is a result
which the builders of prisons hardly foresaw.

There was one more step toward compromise--to take the prisoner out of
his cell and send him outdoors without guards or precautions, nothing
but his promise that he would return when the work to which he was
assigned was done.

I read the other day an agreeable account of this "honor system." The
men were employed on road making chiefly, enjoyed the benefit of free
air and the outdoor scene, and kept order and faith among themselves.
But the prison walls were still around them, though unseen. They were
told that any attempt to escape would be punished by deprivation
thenceforth of all liberties--any attempt! and if the escape were
successful, the fugitive would know that the chances of recapture were a
thousand against one. Moreover, it was laid down that the escape or
attempt of any member of the gang would react upon the liberties of all.

This made the men guards over one another; it was not honor but
self-preservation that was relied on. And in any event, there was the
prison at last; the chain might be lengthened to hundreds of miles, but
it held them still. They were convicts; when their terms were up, they
would be jail birds. Society had set them apart from itself; they were a
contamination. "You are not fit to mingle with us on an equal footing."
Society might condescend to them, be friendly and helpful to them,
but--admit them of its own flesh and blood?--well, not quite that! "We
forgive you, but on sufferance; it is really a great concession; you
must show your gratitude by good works."

Oh, the Pharisees! the taint of it will not come out so easily; and
until it does come out, to the last filthy trace of it, prisons will
continue to be prisons, and compromises will be vain.

I repeat--the evil of prisons is the imprisonment. You must not deprive
a man of his liberty. His liberty is his life. He may, and probably he
will, use his liberty to the endangering of your property or comfort;
but has your own career been wholly free from infringement upon the
rights of your neighbor? If you send him to prison, you ought to link
arms with him and go there, too. You have not been convicted by a court,
but your own secret self-knowledge convicts you. When the prison doors
close upon you, you will discover that you have suffered an
injustice--that you are the victim of a blind stupidity. Not in this way
can you be reformed. All genuine reformation must proceed from within
you--it cannot be compelled by locks and bars; freedom is essential to
it. Locks and bars arouse only the impulse to break through them, and
this primal and righteous impulse leaves you no leisure to think of
relieving your soul from stains of guilt.

The only imprisonment to which a man can properly be subjected is that
imprisonment of good in him which evil-doing operates automatically and
spontaneously; any outside meddling with that operation hinders,
confuses, or defeats it. Crime weakens and shackles you; to put shackles
on the body is no way to remove shackles from the spirit. It is the
gross blunder of a brutal and immature era, but we have continued it
down to the present day. Jail is still the remedy.

The newspapers the other day told of a man who had been sentenced to
forty years in jail for an assault. A woman, hearing the verdict, said,
"Well, that's better than nothing; but he ought to have got life!" We
are told in the Bible that we must not let the sun go down upon our
wrath. The wrath of this lady could not be appeased with forty years.
Think of what that culprit will be after forty years in jail. Assuming
for the sake of argument the extreme absurdity that he is alive by that
time, picture to yourself a fellow creature of his--and a woman--saying,
"I won't forgive you yet." I pity her more than I do him, whose troubles
in this world will probably soon be over. But when her time comes, with
what face, on what plea, shall she ask forgiveness?

But if there are to be no prisons, what shall we do to be saved from
crime?

I cannot for my part imagine any hard and fast plan being laid down in
advance. But it would seem reasonable, to begin with, to free ourselves
from the social crime of claiming superiority to our brethren. Having
removed that beam from our eyes, we may see more clearly how to abate
the motes in the criminal's. If we can bring ourselves to regard
prisoners and jail birds as inferior to ourselves only in good fortune,
which has kept us out of jail and put them in, we may find ourselves on
the road to remedying their lapses from moral virtues.

The majority of prison crimes are against property, and are motived by
want and poverty. If the man had opportunity to work for his living, he
would as a rule abstain from stealing. Other crimes are committed in
passion; but such criminals need education and training in self-control,
and (often) removal of the provocations which set their passions afire.
Many other crimes, and almost all vices, are due to physical or mental
disease, or to actual insanity. It is the doctor and not the jailer who
should seek the cure of these.

But there are also some persons, chiefly brought up or brought down in
our cities, who practise crimes, apparently, for sheer love of evil.
These gunmen gangs are the most depraved and malignant members of the
community; they will not work, and they rob and murder not from want or
passion, but because the suffering of their victims gives them pleasure
and ministers to their pride and self-esteem. Most of these gangs, as we
have too much reason to believe, stand in with the police, giving them a
percentage of their plunder, and getting protection from them for their
misdeeds.

These creatures, as I have already suggested, are the distillation of
the various evils in our cities which society has failed frankly to
face, or genuinely to attempt to lessen. They are not responsible for
their existence, and, as they indicate a general condition, it can do no
good to kill them or otherwise put them out of the way; others would
take their place. They are not insane in the common sense, but they are
the product of insane social circumstances, responsibility for which
rests on us. They must be taken in hand individually, by workers
self-consecrated to that duty, and deterred from doing evil, and showed
the value of doing good. One might work a lifetime with some of them,
and have little to show for it in the end; but it took a long time to
build the pyramids and the Panama Canal, and to advance from the dugout
of the savage to the _Mauretania_. It is work better worth doing than
any of these.

Taking the situation by long and large, society must cease to be a sham
and become truly social. The thing seems inconceivable, and still less
practicable; but it is not. Nor has history failed to admonish us that
it has sometimes been the most difficult and improbable things which
have been nevertheless accomplished; as if their very difficulty, and
the labor and self-sacrifice involved in doing them, were themselves a
stimulus.

Europe, a handful of centuries ago, at the behest of a fanatical priest
or two, forsook all else and spent a generation in journeying to
Palestine and trying to get a certain city from the Turks.

The city was worth nothing to Europe; it was an idea that set them
crusading. Nothing else seemed so unpractical and feeble as the gospel
of Christ; but it crumbled the Roman Empire into dust, and has kept the
world guessing and maneuvering ever since--never more than to-day. On
the other hand, if you propose an easy job, something that can be done
with one hand tied behind you, and your attention is diverted, it is apt
to remain undone. Nobody can get up an interest in it. But talk of an
expedition to the South Pole, or a flight round the earth in a biplane,
with certainty of appalling hardships and all the odds in favor of
death, and you are mobbed with volunteers. Human nature likes to test
its thews and sinews.

Perhaps, however, nothing else was ever so difficult as to turn from our
flesh pots, our dinners and tangos, our summer resorts and winter
resorts, our business and idleness, and undertake to substitute for
prisons our personal care and help for criminals--to remove the causes
which led them to crime, to convince them of our good faith and good
will, and to disabuse them of their suspicion that we distrust them,
condescend to them, and despise them. For this prodigal brother of ours
has become a very unsightly and unattractive object during these
thousands of years of his sojourn among the pigsties and corn husks. He
does not speak in our language or observe our manners or contemplate our
ideals, or care for our refinements. We shall have to read again the
fairy stories where the prince has been changed by evil enchantment into
some uncouth and repulsive monster, but was redeemed to human form by
sympathy. The evil spell was of our working, and it behooves us to
overcome it. No one else can.

We must abolish the title of criminal as applied to any class or
individuals of our race in distinction from others, and use those of
unfortunates or scapegoats instead. They are our victims, and our
salvation depends upon our making good to them the evil we have done
them. It will not suffice to delegate the job to money, or to persons
chosen for that purpose; we must do it ourselves--make it one of the
main occupations of our lives. Riches and culture are fine things, but
making good out of evil is better. Its rewards may not be so immediate
or so visible, but they are real and permanent.

But I do not think morality will be enough to energize the effort;
morality should always be the incident and consequence of religious
feeling, not an aim in itself. As soon as it becomes an aim in itself,
it leads to self-righteousness, and paralyzes human love in its marrow.
And it is love, far more than wisdom, that is needed here. Love God and
keep His commandments; unless you first love Him, His commandments will
be left undone, or done only in the letter, which is the worst form of
not doing. But the way to love God is to love the neighbor, and the
neighbor is the criminal.

Who shall have the immortal credit of abolishing prisons--ourselves, or
our posterity? It will surely be done by our posterity if not by
ourselves.




APPENDIX

Bubonic plague cannot be reformed; it is bad intrinsically and must be
extirpated. Born in Asiatic filth, ignorance and barbarism, it now
menaces modern civilization. While it killed millions in India or China
only, we endured it, but when we hear it at our own door we turn and
listen. The instinct of self-preservation, older and often more urgent
than Christianity, says, "Destroy it or it will destroy you!"

We send our scientific martyrs to the front, who perish in the effort to
solve the deadly riddle. We would pour out billions of money in the
fight if need come. Rich men will spend all they possess rather than
die, and see those they love die of it. Nations will do the same.
Compromises are not considered; no one talks of reforming the Black
Death. Unless it be jettisoned from the Ship of Civilization, progress
and enlightenment go by the board.

And yet the disease is but physical--attacks the body only. It does not
touch the immortal spirit. It has not rooted itself in the entrails of
our social economy and order. It does not undermine our common humanity,
or bankrupt human charity and infect it with indifference, suspicion or
mutual hostility. It does not prompt law and justice to play the roles
of persecution and oppression. It does not arrogate to itself the right
to judge between man and his brother man, protecting the one and damning
the other. It does not authorize us to say of the victim of sickness or
circumstance, "Throw him to the lions!" and to affirm of his torture and
death, "Serves him right!" Compared with such a plague as that, the
Black Death would appear benign.

Penal imprisonment is an institution of old date, born of barbarism and
ignorance, nurtured in filth and darkness, and cruelly administered. It
began with the dominion of the strong over the weak, and when the former
was recognized as the community, it was called the authority of good
over evil. Man took the reins of government from the hands of the
Almighty, and amended the Ten Commandments with statute law.

Evil is--to prefer the good of self before good of the neighbor; crime
is to act in accordance with that preference. Every son of Adam is born
to evil, and society is but his multiplication; but society could exist
only by the compromise that the hostility of man against neighbor should
mask itself as mutual forbearance. Impossible that every one should
possess every thing; therefore dissimulate your greed and divide. But
certain persons, missing their share either through non-conformity with
the doctrine, or by force of circumstances, stuck to the old principle
of each man for himself, and became "criminals." Their hand was against
society, and society's against them.

In eras before society became integrated, some of these non-conformists
prevailed over such strength as could be mustered against them, and by
hearty and forthright robberies and murders came to be leaders and
rulers of men--earls, barons, kings. The aristocracy of modern Europe is
descended from such stout rebels. They became reconciled with, and
organized, society, and aided it in war against the weaker of their own
sort; and it was they who devised prisons for such captives as it might
be inexpedient to kill outright.

All this did not alter the truth that all men are alike evil, and that
such as are not also criminals, forbear--at the outset at least--from
motives of enlightened selfishness. But in course of time, even enforced
good behavior breeds good intent, and "good" people. For God rules us
through our very sins, and will lead us, (with our passive cooperation)
to religion and regeneration in the end.

But the segregation of a criminal class is manifestly human, not Divine;
economic, not moral; illusory, not real. Consequently, pains and
penalties inflicted by men upon other men, by society upon individuals,
by the community upon "criminals," have no warrant of Divine authority,
but only of superior numbers or physical strength. The only proper
punishment for crime is the criminal's conscience, and if he have none
available, he is liable to the natural contingency that violence breeds
violence, and may get him in the long run--though it often happens that,
measured by mortal standards, the run is not long enough for us to see
the finish. We may console ourselves with the reflection that a finish,
somewhere, there will be.

Meanwhile, it is for persons of intelligence and good will to consider
whether, aside from physical penalties or jailing, we possess means for
inducing criminals to abstain from crime. Let us leave abstract
arguments and come to facts.

My license to speak in the premises is due to my being an ex-convict,
sentenced to Atlanta Penitentiary for a year and a day, but recently
released on "good time." I shall first give you a notion of what jail
is, and of what is done and suffered there; then consider what has
hitherto been done to alleviate prison conditions and abuses; and end
with inquiring whether these measures, actively prosecuted, will prove
adequate to the need, or whether something else and more is demanded. If
so--_what_?

Purgatory is usually understood to be--as its etymology indicates--a
place where persons encumbered with evil accretions may have them purged
out of them, or stripped off from them, and so be fitted for the purity
and innocence of Heaven. It is therefore a beneficent institution. Hell,
on the other hand, was the inheritance of those whose evil is ingrowing
and cannot be removed--a place where they may live out their diabolical
or satanic natures and be punished and tortured by those of like nature
with themselves.

Our prisons were, in the beginning, frankly hellish in their object; men
who had incurred personal or society hostility were put in them to be
tormented from motives of hate and revenge. But during the last few
generations the humanitarian idea has come into being and has not only
ameliorated prison conditions in some prisons and to some extent, but
has caused prisons in general to cease being frank and to become
hypocritical--to pretend that they are purgatories, aiming not at
revenge but at reform. This pretense has been so industriously and
sagaciously put forward that ninety-nine outsiders out of a hundred are
misled by it, and believe that prisons are not, still, administered for
the destruction of their inmates, physical, mental and moral, with such
circumstances of cruelty and brutality as happen to suit the humor of
the arbitrary and irresponsible guards and wardens; but that they are
uniformly conducted with an eye to wooing away prisoners from sin and
crime, and persuading them of the beauty and policy of honesty,
gentleness and goodness. In fact it is probable that almost everybody
believes this, except the wardens and guards, and the prisoners
themselves--and a few Thomas Mott Osbornes and other prison workers who
have had an amateur peep inside the walls and caught a fleeting glimpse
of a horror or two before the discreet managers could get the door shut.

Not only so, but we read indignant articles in our morning paper about
the coddling of criminals; and witty writers will have it that prisons
are gentlemen's clubs where all the comforts of refined life are
combined with a voluptuous idleness, or with only work enough to avert
ennui. Criminals are depicted as waiting in cues at the gates of prisons
for admission, like the public at the doors of a popular theater; though
at the same time in another column, you may find the statement that, in
view of modern legal technicalities, it has become almost impossible to
get a man into jail. According to the logic of the witty writers, this
near-impossibility should be more deplored by the technicality-inhibited
criminals than by anybody else.

Prisons are not purgatories, nor gentlemen's clubs; they are just as
much hell as they ever were, and as their managers can make them. Apart
from any special leniency of local conditions, prisons are hell because
they are prisons--because you are confined there and cannot get out;
because you are a slave and have no redress; because your manhood is
degraded; because despotic power is entrusted to the men who handle you,
though they are never any better than you are, and are usually much
worse, and regard you as an asset to make profit from, a thing to be
driven and insulted to the last extremity and beyond it, and not as a
human being. Prisons are hell because convicts are punished for trivial
and whimsical reasons as much as for serious ones; and whether or not
the punishment involve actual physical torture, the insolence, disgrace
and injustice of it remain. Prisons are hell intrinsically, and always
will be; and whoever doubts it has only to commit a crime and be sent to
prison; that is the end of doubts.

Let every judge, attorney general, district attorney, and juryman at a
trial spend a bona fide term in jail, and there would be no more
convictions--prisons would end. Every convict and ex-convict knows that,
and eternity will be too short to obliterate the knowledge in him.

The unctuous plausibility of the pretense that prisons are beneficent
purgatories and not hells renders it the more sickening. Life is a
God-given discipline for men, and at best a severe one; but if we
believe in God, we know it is given in love, for loving ends. All mortal
life is an imprisonment; the laws of it are essential and natural, and
breaking them involves essential and natural penalties. God deputed this
regimen of love to parents, and to those who deal with their fellow
creatures from impulses of parental or brotherly love; but He never
licensed any man to punish another from revenge or hate, or in mere
indifference. He licensed no man to do it, nor any community or nation.
And whoever does it, serves not God but the devil; and if any crime be
unpardonable, it is that, because it is not essential or natural, but an
usurpation against nature, and breeds not reform but more evil.

Prison officials, in their treatment of prisoners, are not actuated by
love, but by indifference to suffering, or by animosity and brutality,
or by desire of profit, and therefore their work is impious and wicked.
And the longer they hold their office, the more hardened do they become
to the spectacle of suffering and outrage; the more heedless of justice
and mercy do they grow. They grow to disbelieve in any human truth and
goodness; all men are to them criminals actual or potential; breathing
and dwelling amidst crime, it enters into their own blood and temper.
They will have their debt to pay; but neither may those escape who
ignorantly or carelessly appointed them to office and hold them
there--the Government, and the nation which creates Government as its
representative. Ignorance does not excuse; knowledge on these subjects
is a sacred duty. Man cannot break the bonds of his brotherhood with
man; the blood shed will be required of him, and the usury of misery and
tears.

"Throw him to the lions!--serve him right!" Most of us have joined in
that barbarous cry upon occasion. But some of us have sickened at the
slaughter, and are for paring the lions' claws, or at least exhorting
them to roar less savagely, and to devour their prey in secret. But the
lions, with their attendant hyenas and jackals, have so long been
accepted as indispensable to the order and majesty of the State, that no
one likes to stand up to his God-given intuitions, and demand the
abolition of the whole prison circus. We hardly realize that the harm
criminals do society cannot equal the harm that society does to itself
by its handling of them and attitude toward them. The circus must go on,
of course; but--let us ameliorate its coarser features!

Let us make our prisons hygienic--larger cells, drainage, air, exercise;
let us select nice, kindly persons for guards and wardens; let us give
the convicts useful industrial occupation, which will not only keep them
happy and sane, but pay the cost of their keep to a tender-hearted but
economic state; let us even be very venturesome, and--with reasonable
precautions--put the men on their honor, suffer them to run out a little
way and labor in the free sunshine, upon their promising to remember
that they are not really free, and to return at night to their cages.
And after they have served their terms, and the souls within them are
moribund or dead, let us get or solicit jobs for them, and at all events
keep a sentimental eye on them for a while. All this--only let us keep
our prisons! For think what would happen if those terrible creatures
were let loose upon us, to keep on murdering and robbing us with
impunity! Remember that they are a class apart, unlike ourselves, whose
perverted nature, though it may be lulled by gentleness and tact, can
never become truly human.

No: the Laodicean spirit will not serve! I do not ridicule or belittle
the efforts of generous and genial men and women who give their spare
time, or their whole time, to bettering the plight of convicts. But the
diabolical spirit of the prisons sneers at them, and sits undisturbed.
Let air and sunshine come to outer courts and clean-swept cells; the
star-chambers and the secret dungeons remain. Let the outraged creatures
out, to stray to the extent of their honor-tether; they are slaves and
prisoners still. There were compassionate reformers in Ancient Egypt,
who tried to make the lot of the captive Israelites easier; but the
heart of Pharaoh was hardened, and God Himself must intervene before he
would let the people go. Nor does it help that the slaves themselves are
grateful for hard-won privileges, and that we read urbane descriptions
of smiling and rosy felons working on state roads in "Don't Worry"
camps. Is it ground for congratulation that the very victims of the
specious pretense of the eternal right and necessity of prisons should
have succumbed to that delusion? Does it not prove a need yet more
urgent to be up and at them? Is it not humiliating to know that men, our
brothers, partakers of our common nature, can be so abased as to kiss
the rod, and joke about their fetters, and accept as favor what none is
entitled to deny them?

Prisons are hell--we come back to that; and they are not and cannot be
made purgatories. Men competent to make them purgatories are not to be
had at Government prices; no duties more onerous than those of a fit
conscientious warden exist under the state; and how can we look for such
a man at a four or five thousand dollar salary? Twenty-five or even
fifty thousand would be moderate, and the men who are worth that are in
some other business. The foremost citizens of the nation would not be
too good for the job, and we content ourselves with ward heelers and
rough-necks, who undertake it not for the salary, but for the graft that
goes with it and exceeds it. Politics and graft sit in the warden's
office, and walk the ranges in guards' uniform, and crush the manhood
out of our brothers for money, and out of sheer wanton inhumanity. Of
all the inmates of the jail, these men are the veritable and
incorrigible and unpardonable criminals; for they were not driven to
crime by passion, hunger, drink or ignorance, they have not been reduced
to the state of desperate pariahs, outcasts and scapegoats of the race,
but they willingly embrace the function entrusted to them--the
Government license to steal, bully, torture and murder--with a grotesque
sanctimonious leer for the public, and for the convicts--what! The
regimen of hell!

This writer's statements seem a trifle emphatic, do they not? May we not
surmise that they are motived by some personal grudge? have we not heard
an old adage--"No thief e'er felt the halter draw with good opinion of
the law?" Would it not be prudent to take all this with a grain of salt?
Shall we be driven to rash measures by the objurgations of an
ex-convict?

Of the right or wrong of my conviction and sentence I am not to speak
here, nor do they specially interest me now, except as illustrations of
the working of the machine. But personal grudge against officials of my
prison I have none. I was treated with consideration and lenity. I came
out in better condition upon the whole than I went in, both of body and
spirit, though nothing would have been easier than to murder me under
the forms of routine prison discipline. What was the reason of this? I
was never informed; I might guess at it, but I don't know. Nevertheless,
the sweetness and light of the prison dispensation as regarded myself
did not blind my eyes or stop my ears to what was being done to others,
not elected to dreams thus beautiful. I saw men beside whom I sat at
meat or labored in the vineyard, fading and failing day by day; I saw
some of them die of broken hearts or broken bodies; I heard their
stories and was certified of their truth; I saw the cart rattle out of
the gate with the pine box containing the body of the man who could only
thus find freedom; I visited the graves of those who had been needlessly
and sometimes wantonly slain. I could not ignore these things because I
myself escaped them. After a few months of durance, I went forth free,
leaving behind me men as good as I or better, sentenced to serve years,
lifetimes, under treatment which I cannot imagine myself as surviving at
all. My grudge is deep, but no personal one.

I shall not at present discuss Government measures of so-called
mitigation--suspended sentence, parole, indeterminate sentence. In the
intention of their originators they may have appeared beneficent; in
practise, they proved sinister and abominable means to cruelty and
despotism. There can be no compromises with hell.

But can I pretend to solve the age-long problem of the right handling of
crime in the community? I am not wiser than my fellows, but I have felt
and known at first hand more of certain grievous wrongs than most of
them have, and even those who have known and felt may not possess the
opportunity or facility to speak that I have. I must say what is in me,
and leave to the collective judgment of the nation, and to the further
teaching of time, what shall be changed, abolished, and done.

One thing seems plain--there must be an act of faith. Worldly wisdom and
enlightened selfishness have been tried out thoroughly and are
thoroughly discredited. Their proposal was first to cure crime, and only
after that was done, to abolish prisons. But it turns out that prisons
generate, teach, perpetuate and inflame crime; never extirpate it,
though they often deter specific persons from continuing a criminal
career by either killing them outright, or destroying in them their
effective spiritual manhood. Therefore the selfishly enlightened and
worldly-wise shake their heads and declare that crime in criminals is
ineradicable. If medicine for crime be futile, save as a temporary
physical preventive, all that is left to us is to continue it as a
preventive, while admitting its impotence as a cure. Protection of
society is the paramount consideration.

Yes: but is society protected by prisons? John Jones has been jailed for
burglary, it is true; but straightway Tom Brown, Jem Smith and Reginald
Montmorency start in as train-robber, murderer and confidence man. We
have sown the dragon's tooth, and reap three for one. Lynch your negro,
and before the smell of roast flesh is out of the air, several fresh
cases of rape are reported.--But there is no visible connection between
alleged cause and effect--it just happens so.--Yes, but if it does
happen almost invariably, we cannot avoid the suspicion that a
connection, even though invisible to the outward eye, there must be.

Moreover, on what grounds does society claim protection against evils
for which its own constitution and administration are responsible? The
greatest happiness of the greatest number?--Are we so happy, then? The
happy man has been sought for long, but the seekers still delay to
return. To what end shall we cut the cancer out of the body politic, if
it sprout again in a more vital spot? If we could only reach the cancer
germ!--But the germ is not found by the knife. There are more criminals
than there ever have been heretofore. The jails are over-crowded; we
must either build new ones, or transform those we have into castles of
refuge to which good people may fly to escape the criminal nations
outside; there will be no over-crowding then!

Let worldly wisdom and enlightened selfishness retire, and listen for a
while to believers--fanatics even. An act of faith: that is to say,
first abolish jails, and then see what can be done with criminals! It is
vain to beat about the bush; we must face the alternative. The syllogism
runs thus: criminality is incompatible with true civilization--with a
normal and secure society. Jails are a crime; society makes and warrants
jails; therefore society is criminal. And the abolition of
jails--repudiation both of the principle and of the concrete fact--is
the only way to social redemption.

The one escape from this conclusion is, of course, denial that jails are
a crime. I will not further contest that point, but only repeat: Let the
deniers and doubters try a year behind the bars, themselves, and then
register their revised opinion.

But, obviously, though jails are a crime, they are not the only crime;
there are also the specific crimes of individual malefactors; and it
seems inevitable that by relieving these of prison restraints, we must
increase the prevalence of crime in the community, however much we might
be absolving the community itself from its characteristic crime of
jails. Is there any answer to that?

I am not logically constrained to make any, because if jails are a crime
they should be abolished, let the consequences be what they may. But I
will suggest two considerations. Individual crimes are the outcome
either of a pathological condition in the agent, or of conditions in his
nurture and environment which are due to social negligence or hardness
of heart. These conditions tempted him beyond his power of resistance,
or reduced him to desperation; in other words, no sane and normal man
commits crimes for the fun of it, and as not he but society created the
conditions, the latter must shoulder its part, at least, of the blame.
And this implies that it should devote itself to so improving these evil
conditions as to give the criminal a fair chance.

That is easily written, but it involves nothing less than a radical
readjustment of our whole attitude toward life. It also brings me to my
second suggestion--that this should be accomplished. We must embark upon
a great adventure--the greatest, so far as I know, ever undertaken in
this world. We must overcome the anti-human prejudice that there is a
distinct criminal class; we must recognize the latent criminality in us
all, and regard those in whom from latent it has become active as such
men as we, but for fortunate circumstances, would have been. There is no
other distinction between them and us.

Can brotherly companionship and trust reform them? If all of us
sincerely and practically united in trusting and companioning them,--so
sincerely as to convince them of the fact--I would have small
misgivings. But we can expect no universal revolution to kindness. Many
of us, probably the vast majority, would fail to rise to the height of
the occasion. Yet I can believe that many would achieve that faith and
stanchness; enough to make a beginning of success. And I have no doubt
whatever that, so far as the kindness was credited by its objects, they
would do their part. Few men that I or any one have known in jail have
been incorrigibly wicked at heart. There are indeed incorrigibly wicked
men, but they are at least as frequent outside as inside jails, because
the crime of wanton hatred and cruelty to others which is theirs, comes
only accidentally if at all under the cognizance of our law.

When jails are razed and their inmates let forth, they are not to be
left to shift for themselves. They are to be taken heartily and
unreservedly into the community, made a part of us, protected against
want and against their sinister propensities, given work to do, taught
how to work, compensated for it, and shown by constant example the
wholesomeness and beauty of good and decent living. Will they rob and
murder their hosts? Such calamities will no doubt occur here and there;
there have been martyrs in all great causes, and will be in this. But
blood so shed will not be wasted. And if the nation, or a considerable
part of it, turns resolutely and persistently to its mighty task, it
will not fail in the end.

There is nothing original or startling about the Golden Rule as a
proposition; but it will seem to tear us to pieces when it is put in
practise. But that will do us no harm; we have been long enough
compacted together in error and selfishness. The revolution will come;
it is still for us to say whether it shall be outward and terrible, or
spiritual and benign. Penal imprisonment and all that it implies is not
sane nor safe; and the cry, To the lions--serves him right!--belongs to
the dark ages, and not to the future.--_Reprinted by kind permission
from Hearst's Magazine for February, 1914_.


  THE WALL

  The long, high wall that shuts out life--
  That death-in-life holds in its coil--
  Its height and reach cannot prevent
  The sky, nor check the immortal strife
  We wage with hungry Fate, nor spoil
  Our desperate hope, nor circumvent
  Dreams, that redeem our aimless toil!

  What Fear and Ignorance have built
  Shall pass, with Ignorance and Fear,
  Before the breath of Love; and men,
  Casting aside the mask of guilt
  That baffled, mocked and cursed them here,
  Shall know each other once again!
  --And must we die, release so near!

  _Written in Atlanta Penitentiary,
  October, 1913_.)









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