FOOTFALLS

In the cell over mine at nightA step goes to and froFrom 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 ABOVEVIII FOR LIFE IX THE TOIL OF SLAVERY X OUR BROTHER'S KEEPER XI THE GRASP OF THE TENTACLES XII THE PRISON SILENCEXIII 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 theAtlanta penitentiary, and went on from day to day to the end. I did notknow, at the start, what the thing would be like at the finish, and I madesmall effort to make it look shapely and smooth; but the inward impulse inme to write it, somehow, was irresistible, in spite of the other impulseto go off somewhere and rest and forget it all. But I felt that if it werenot done then it might never be done at all; and done it must be at anycost. I had promised my mates in prison that I would do it, and I wasunder no less an obligation, though an unspoken one, to give the public anopportunity to learn at first hand what prison life is, and means. I hadmyself had no conception of the facts and their significance until Ibecame 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 ofpenal imprisonment. Twenty odd years before, too, I had been struck byWilliam Stead's saying, "Until a man has been in jail, he doesn't knowwhat human life means. " But one does not pay that price for knowledgevoluntarily, and I had not expected to have the payment forced upon me. Iimagined I could understand the feelings of a prisoner without being one. I was to live to acknowledge myself mistaken. And I conceive that otherpeople are in the same deceived condition. So, with all the energy andgoodwill of which I am capable, I set myself to do what I could to makethem know the truth, and to ask themselves what should or could be done toend a situation so degrading to every one concerned in it, from one end ofthe 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 afabrication. On the contrary, words cannot convey the whole horror andshamefulness of it. 

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

But I was tempted to run into detail. Here I will make a pertinentdisclosure. During my imprisonment I was made the confidant of the lifestories of many of my brethren in the cells. I am receiving through themails, from day to day, up to the present time, other such tales fromreleased convicts. The aim of them is not to get their tellers before thepublic and win personal sympathy, but to hold up my hands by supplyingdata--chapter and verse--in support of the assertions I have made. They doit abundantly; the stories bleed and groan before your eyes and ears, andsmell to heaven; the bluntest, simplest, most formless stuff imaginable, but terrible in every fiber. Before I left prison I had accumulated aconsiderable number of these narratives, and had made many notes of thingsheard and seen--data and memoranda which I designed to use in the alreadyprojected book which is now in your hands. Such material, however, wouldhave been confiscated by the Warden had its existence been known, and noneof it would have been permitted to get outside the walls openly. The onlything to do, then, was to get it out secretly--by the "undergroundrailroad. "

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

The packet never turned up at its address, and it was only long after thatI was told what had occurred. My confederate wanted his parole badly, andmade a bargain with the Warden, by the terms of which his parole should begranted 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 inthe Warden's safe, I suppose, along with the letter that I wrote during myconfinement to the Editor of the New York _Journal_ (mentioned in the textof this book). 

The Warden thought, perhaps, that the lack of my accumulated data wouldprevent 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 bookneeded no data other than those existing in my memory and supplied by thegeneral theme; my material was not scant, but excessive. My knowledgeof prison and my opinions and arguments based upon that knowledge werenot subject to the Warden's confiscation, and they were quite enough tomake a book of themselves, without need of dates, places, names andillustrations. Indeed, even of such supplementary and confirmatory matterI also found an adequate amount in my own unaided recollection--morethan I cared to give space to; for it was my belief that such thingswere not required to secure confidence in the truth of what I had to sayin the minds of persons whose confidence was worth my winning. They wouldbelieve me because they couldn't help it--because truth has a qualitywhich compels belief. Moreover, of illustrations of my statements thepublic had of late had more than enough from other sources; what was nowwanted was not so much instances of the facts, as a general presentationof the subject into which special and apposite cases could be fittedby the reader according to his previously acquired information. Finally, I reflected that the introduction of names, places and dates might injurethe men thus pointed out; secret service men, post-office inspectors andother spies, and the prison authorities themselves, would be promptedand helped to give them trouble. Accordingly, I was sparing even of suchdata as I had; and I noticed, as the chapters appeared serially in thenewspaper syndicate which published them, that they were criticised incertain quarters as of the "glittering generality" class of writings;I made assertions, but adduced no specific proof of them. The source ofsuch criticisms was obvious enough, but they did no harm, and were notaccompanied by denials of my facts. The only other form of attack broughtagainst the book is comprised in the claim that I am a writer of fictionand as such incapable of telling the truth, about anything; that I was thedupe of designing persons who made me the mouthpiece for their factitiousgrievances or spites; and that I was myself animated by a spirit ofrevenge for the injury of my imprisonment, which must render anything Imight allege against prisons and their conduct worthless. 

I have touched upon the two latter counts of the indictment in the text ofthe book; of the assertion that fiction writers cannot stick to facts orconvey truth, I will say that it is unreasonable upon its face. Fictionwriters, in order to attain any measure of success in their calling, mustabove all things base their structures upon facts, and to seek andpromulgate undeniable truth in their descriptions and analyses. The"fiction" part of their stories is the merest outside part; all withinmust be true, or it is nothing. A novelist or story writer, therefore, ismore likely to give a true version of any event or condition he may berequired 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 whatsuccess I attained was due to the accuracy and veracity of the reports Isent to my papers. In short, I am a trained observer of facts if everthere were one; and no facts in my experience have been so thoroughlyhammered into my mind, heart and soul, digested and appreciated, as werethe facts of my prison life. Whatever else that I have written might becavilled at on the plea of inaccuracy, certainly this book cannot be. Whether the statements which it contains be feebly or strongly put mayproperly be questioned, but none of them can be successfully denied. 

But this aspect of the matter gives me small uneasiness. The importantconsideration is, will the book, assuming that it is accepted as thetruth, do the work, or any large part of the work, which it was designedto do? Will readers be influenced by it to practical action; will it be aneffective element in the forces that are now rising up to make wickednessand corruption less than they are? The proposal toward which the bookpoints and in which it ultimates is so radical and astounding--nothingless than that _Penal Imprisonment for Crime be Abolished_--that theauthor can hardly escape the apprehension that the mass of the public willdismiss it as preposterous and impossible. And yet nothing is more certainin my opinion than that penal imprisonment for crime must cease, and if itbe not abolished by statute, it will be by force. It must be abolishedbecause, alarming or socially destructive though alternatives to it mayappear, it is worse than any alternative, being not only dangerous, butwicked, and it breeds and multiplies the evils it pretends to heal ordiminish. It is far more wicked and dangerous than it was a thousand or ahundred 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 existenceof a wickedness which it might extirpate, makes itself a party thereto, and also inflames the wickedness itself. And the ignorance or theimpotence which we could plead heretofore in history, we cannot pleadto-day. We know, we have power, and we must act; if we shrink fromacting, action will be taken against us by powers which cannot beestimated or controlled. This book is meant to confirm our knowledge andto stimulate and direct, in a measure, our action; and to avert, ifpossible, the consequences of not acting. Its individual power may beslight; but it should be the resolve of every honest and courageous manand woman to add to it the weight of their own power. Wonderful thingshave been accomplished before now by means which seemed, in theirbeginning, as inadequate and weak as this. 

In the sixth chapter of the Book of Joshua you may read the great type andexample of such achievements, the symbol of every victory of good overevil, the thing that could not be done by man's best power, skill andforesight, accomplished, with God to aid, by a breath. The defensivestrength of Jericho was greater, compared with the means of attack thenknown, than that of Sebastopol in the fifties of the last century, or ofPlevna in the seventies, or of Port Arthur a few years since. Those wallswere too high to be scaled, too massive to be beaten down, and they weredefended by a great king and his mighty men of valor. From any moral pointof view, the enterprise of destroying the city was hopeless. Nor did theLord add anything to such weapons of offense as Joshua already possessed. Seven trumpets of rams' horns were the sole agents of the destructionprovided; and not the trumpets themselves, but the breath of the mouths ofthe seven priests who should blow through them, should overthrow thosetopless ramparts, and give the king and his army and his people into thehand of the men of Israel. Were such a proposition presented to ourconsideration to-day, we can imagine what would be the comments of theArmy and Navy departments, of Congress, of the editors of newspapers, ofwitty paragraphers, and of the man on the street. Possibly the churchesthemselves might hesitate before giving their support to such a plan ofwar: "We must take the biblical stories in a figurative sense!" But stoutJoshua had seen the angel of the Lord, with his sword drawn, the nightbefore; and he knew nothing of figures of speech. He got the seventrumpets 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 Jerichoday after day for six days, the trumpets blowing amain, and the hostssilent. And on the seventh day, the hosts compassed the walls of the cityseven times; "And at the seventh time, when the priests blew with thetrumpets, Joshua said unto the people, Shout; for the Lord hath given youthe city. .. . So the people shouted when the priests blew with thetrumpets; and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of thetrumpets, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the walls felldown flat, so that every man went up into the city, every man straightbefore him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all thatwas within the city. "

Yes, the biblical stories are to be taken in a figurative sense; theystand as symbols for spiritual actions in the nature of man; though thatis not to say that the events narrated did not actually take place asrecorded. But Joshua had faith; and faith in the hearts of the championsof right begets fear in the hearts of supporters of wrong, and thedefenses they have so laboriously built up tumble distractedly about theirears when the trumpets of the Lord blow and the people who believe in Himutter a mighty shout. Our jails are our Jericho; the evils which theyencompass and protect are greater than the sins of that strong city; but abreath may shatter them into irretrievable ruin. Not compromises; notgradual and circumspect approaches; not prudent considerations ofpolitical economy, nor sound sociological principles; but simple faith inGod 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 butdestroys him body and soul; that it does not protect the community butexposes it to incalculable perils; and that the assumption that acriminal class exists among us separate and distinct from any andthe best of the rest of us is Pharisaical, false and wicked. The"Subterranean Brotherhood" are our brothers--they are ourselves, unjustlyand vainly condemned to serve as scapegoats for the rest. What thecriminal instinct or propensity in a man needs is not seclusion, misery, pain and despotic control, but free air and sunlight, free and cheerfulhuman 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 andprecepts, but by taking off our coats and showing them personally howhonest and useful things are done. And let every lapse and failure ontheir part to follow the example, be counted not against them, butagainst ourselves who failed to convince them of the truth, and hold themup to the doing of good. Had we been sincere and hearty enough, we wouldhave prevailed. 

I do not underrate the difficulties; they are immeasurable; the hope seemsas forlorn as that of the Israelites against the walls of Jericho. Butthey are forlorn and immeasurable only because, and so long as, we let ourselfish personal interests govern and mold our public and social action. Altruism will not heal the inward sore, but at best only put on itssurface a plausible plaster which leaves the inward still corrupt; foraltruism is a policy and not an impulse, proceeding not from the heart butfrom the intelligence--the policy of enlightened selfishness. It hasalready been tried thoroughly, and proved thoroughly inefficient; it isthe motive power behind charitable organization; it breeds a cold, impersonal, economic spirit in charity workers, and coldness, ingratitudeand resentment in those who are worked upon. It will not do to speak ofTom, Dick and Harry as cases Nos. 1, 2 and 3. You must call them by nameand think of them as flesh of your flesh and blood of your blood, to whomyou owe more than they owe you, or than you can repay. Put a heart intothem by giving them your own heart; do not look down on them and advisethem, 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 orknown. 

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

JULIAN HAWTHORNE

I

INTRODUCTORY

Conspiracies of silence--it is a common phrase; but it has never beenbetter illustrated than in regard to what goes on in prisons, here and inother parts of the world. The conspiracy has been attacked sometimes, andmore of late than usual, and once in a while we have caught a glimpse ofwhat is occurring behind those smug, well-fitting doors. But they havebeen mere glimpses, incoherent, obscure, often imaginative, or guessworkbased on scanty, incorrect, at any rate secondhand information; never yetconclusive and complete. In England, Charles Dickens and Charles Readehave personally visited prisons, talked with prisoners, written storiesthat have stirred the world, and forced improvements. Great prisonerslike Kropotkin have related their experiences in Russia, and our ownGeorge Kennan prompted us to congratulate ourselves, in our complacentignorance, that our methods of generating virtue out of crime were notlike those of the Russians. It was annoying, after this, to be assured bywriters in some of our magazines--called muckrakers by some, pioneers byothers--that after a sagacious, eager, well-equipped investigation intoour own prison conditions, peering into depths, interrogating convicts, searching records, they had found little difference in principle betweenour way of handling offenses against law, and that of our Cossackneighbors. The latter are more sensational and red-blooded about it, thatis all. These revelations compelled some removals and a few reforms; butthey too failed to bring home livingly to public knowledge andimagination the whole ugly, sluggish, vicious truth. 

Then, only yesterday, an amiable, naive and impressionable young gentlemanunderwent a week of amateur convictship in one of our jails, and cameforth tremulous with indignation and astonishment; though, obviously andinevitably, he did not have to endure the one thing which, more thanhardship or torture, is the main evil of penal imprisonment--the feelingof helplessness and outrage in the presence of a despotic and unrighteouspower, 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 bypublic opinion as a reformer who suffered martyrdom in the cause. Yet whathe 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 supperawaiting him in a neighboring restaurant) fall short of the long-drawnmisery and humiliation of those who undergo in actuality what the playpretended. 

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

This is not a fancy picture--no, not even of what is known to judges andattorneys (but not to prisoners) as "The model penitentiary of America, "down in sunny Georgia. Fancy is not needed to round out the tale to betold of conditions existing and of things done and suffered in this ageand country, behind walls which shut in fellow creatures of ours whomfacile jurors and autocratic courts have sent to living death and toworse than death in accordance with laws passed by legislatures forthe benefit of--What, or Whom?--Of the community?--Of social orderand security?--Of outraged morality?--Of the reform of convictsthemselves?--These questions may be considered as we go along. Meanwhilewe may take notice that a number of persons, more or less deserving, gaintheir livelihood by the detection, indictment, arrest, conviction andimprisonment of other persons more or less undeserving; and whether ornot these proceedings or any of them are rash or prudent, straight orcrooked, just or tyrannous, lenient or cruel, honest or corrupt--is ofsecondary importance. What is of first importance is to supply fuel forthe furnace of this unwieldy machine which operates our criminal system. Our costly courts must have occupation, our expensive jails must be keptfull. We have succumbed to the disease which has been called legalism--thepersuasion that the craving for individual initiative born of theunsettling of old faiths and the opening of new horizons, as well asthe consequences of poverty, misery, ignorance, and hereditaryincompetence--that this vast turning of the human tide, manifesting itselfin many forms, some benign, many evil--that this broad and profoundphenomenon 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 mutualorder and self-restraint, which is Law, into lust for arbitrary andimpudent power to control the acts and even the thoughts of men down topetty personal details; so that human life, at this very moment when itmost needs and aspires to enlightened liberty, is crushed back intomechanical conformity with statutory regulations to which no commonassent has been or can be obtained, and the logical consequences of whichare as yet but obscurely recognized, even by the limited portion of thecommunity which has been active in establishing them. To give it its mostfavorable interpretation, it is a sort of crazy counsel of perfection, incompatible with the healthy tenor and contents of human nature, andsure in the end to involve in its errant tentacles not only those who arethe avowed objects of its pursuit, but likewise the lawmakers andenforcers themselves. Like all abuses, in its own entrails are the seedsof its destruction. Laws now on our books, if radically applied, wouldland almost every mother's son of us behind prison bars. And no doubt, when the murderer, forger, swindler, or white slaver, in his cell, beginsto recognize in his new cell mate the judge who sentenced him, theattorney who prosecuted him, the juryman who convicted him, or theplaintiff who accused him, we shall find it expedient to subject ourlegal nostrums to a system of purgation, and our fever of legalism willabate. But if we will take thought betimes we may meet the trouble halfway, and thus avert, perhaps, the danger that the fever will be checkedonly by the overturning of all law, sane or insane. The followingchapters are designed to help in defeating a catastrophe so unlovely. 

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

Such a story has importance, because there is no group of personsanywhere 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 onemight say a man goes to bed innocent and wakes guilty)--this deliriousindustry must goad us all into feeling a personal interest in theadministration of our penal machinery. You saw your friend tried andsentenced yesterday; you may yourself stand in the dock to-morrow, knowing yourself morally innocent, astounded at finding yourselftechnically guilty. Yet you yourself by your civic neglect or ignorancecontributed to the enactment of the statute which now catches youtripping. You had better search into these matters, and find out what theauthorities whom you helped to office are doing with their authority. 

I have served my term in prison. The strain of that experience has notsharpened my appetite to bear testimony; my desire, as evening falls, isfor rest and tranquillity. But I owe it to my American birth, parentageand posterity, which connect me with what is honorable in my country, andto my individual manhood, to do what I hold to be a duty. Especially am Isensible of the claim upon me of those voiceless fellow men of mine stillbehind the bars, who cannot help themselves, who have honored me withtheir tragic confidences, who have believed that I would do my utmost tolet the truth be known and show the world what penal imprisonment reallymeans. I will keep faith with them. 

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

Three or four men, while I was spending my months in jail, had time todie of broken health and broken hearts, due to physical assaults orneglect, combined with a system of mental torture yet more effective andbarbarous. Hundreds more are in similar plight, in Atlanta jail alone, who might be saved by timely attention and common humanity. Of this, moreanon. I wish now to say that I undertake this work with a purpose asserious as I am capable of; and that among the inducements that move me, personal grudge and grievance are not included. Individual enmities arefoolish and sterile for the individuals, and a bore for everybody else. Individuals are never so much to be hated as are the conditions whichprompt them to act hatefully. Improve the environment which produced themurderer, robber, corrupt judge, rascally attorney, cruel warden, brutalguard, 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 astern and conclusive manner. Without going the length of the SpanishInquisition, which tortured the body on earth in order to save the soulfor heaven, it is not to be denied that punishment for evil deeds islatent in the bowels of the evil doer and will make him suffer in one wayor another. We cannot strike a bad condition without hitting somebody whois carrying it out; and I am in the position of the Quaker who went towar: "Friend, " he admonished his foe-man, "thee is standing just where Iam going to shoot!"

I am not disposed to present here, in the way of credentials, any accountof the circumstances that landed me in prison; still less to pleadanything in the way of extenuation. The District Attorney, in hisaddress, described me as a member of one of the most dangerous band ofcrooks and swindlers that ever infested New York. The government of thiscountry authorized his statement; the news was bruited afar, wherever menread and write and invest money on the planet, and it appealed to everycity 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 bebelieved, I was abundantly undeceived. To jail I went, and there servedout my time to the uttermost limit allowed by the law. But in thisconnection I must touch on a matter which caused me some annoyance at thetime. 

In June of 1913 an editorial appeared in a New York newspaper endorsingsome petitions which had been circulated asking the President of theUnited States to pardon me, mainly on the ground that in my ignorance ofbusiness I had been more of an innocent dupe than a deliberatemalefactor. 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 theposition of admitting myself guilty of the crime charged against me, butcowering under the pitiful excuse of having been bamboozled by others. What was even less tolerable, it presented me as entreating pardon of agovernment from which I would in fact have accepted nothing short of anunconditional apology. The Government had done me an injury under formsof law; I am only one man, and the Government stands for a hundredmillions; but justice has no concern with numbers. My mining company andI were ruined; the iron and silver which we tried to put on the marketwill enrich others after we are gone; but I knew that what I and mypartners 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, definingmy attitude in the matter; but it never reached him. It is in the privatesafe of Warden Moyer, of Atlanta--or so I was informed by the DeputyWarden, when I was released in October--and for aught I know or care itmay remain there forevermore. 

Whether my respect for Law is higher or lower than is that of thosepersons 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 theircategories, numerous and inquisitive though they be, a class of criminalswho do, or intend, quite as much harm as was ever perpetrated by any mannow under lock and key. Many of these persons occupy high places; most ofthem are respectable. We meet them and greet them in society. I knowthem, and also the murderers, highwaymen and yeggs of the penitentiary;and when I want sincere, charitable, generous human companionship, mychoice is for the latter. 

II

THE DEVIL'S ANTECHAMBER

The judge pronounced our several prison sentences; that they were not alsosentences of death was due to circumstances which developed later. Thejury had previously dispersed, clothed in the sanctity of dutiesdiscreetly performed, knowing why they did them, and enjoying whateverconsolation or advantage appertained thereto. Marshal Henkel cast upon usthe look of the turkey buzzard as he swoops upon his prey, and we foundourselves being hustled down the familiar corridors, and into a room whichwe had not visited before; a few assistant marshals were there, and erelong a knot of newspaper men entered, observant and sympathetic, ready toreceive and record the last words of the condemned. 

It was about six o'clock of a dark and rainy March evening. "Any statementyou 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 andcountenance of one's fellow creatures are withdrawn; you are no longer apart of organized social existence. The rights, privileges and courtesiesof manhood are stripped from you. You are adjudged unfit to touch the handof an honest man in greeting; you are made impotent, disgraced, consignedto the refuse heap. The helpless shame put upon you is borne tenfold bythose who bear your name, those you love and who love you. All thattouches you henceforth shall be sordid, base and foul. 

The prison officials who stand near you meet your eye with a leer offamiliarity; they have handled thousands of men in your situation; theywill 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. Youcannot 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 mypainful duty to sentence you!" The jury is not to blame; they had decidedupon the evidence, in accordance with their oath. The witnesses who boretestimony against you--did they not testify upon a solemn adjuration toutter nothing but the truth, at the peril of their immortal souls? Theindictments to whose truth they bore witness--were they not made andbrought by officers appointed by law to seek only impartial justice, andsworn to seek it without fear or favor?

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

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

Of what avail to answer? Has not enough been said during the trial of thepast four months, and in vain? The young fellow stands there, courteouslyinquisitive, not unsympathetic perhaps, his pencil suspended. Have I anylast 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 readyto record either. 

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

Accordingly, the reporters were supplied with a few grave, not sensationalwords, suggested by the spur of the moment; they receded into thebackground, and Marshal Henkel, zealous to do his whole duty, and preventthe escape of an elderly gentleman through locked doors, echoingcorridors, and the resistance of half a dozen lusty guards, advanced tothe front of the stage and gave the order, "Handcuffs!" Knowing my marshalas I did, I was prepared for him, and extended my arm, till I felt thesteel close round it with a solid snap. I was a manacled convict, and thecommunity was saved. 

But no time was to be lost; it was already after hours for the cityprison; and the stout party of the other part of the handcuff and I passedout through the opening door promptly. As we turned the corner of thecorridor, I suddenly saw the face of one of my sons-in-law, pale in theelectric light; he forced a smile to his lips, and threw up one hand ingreeting and farewell. Ah, those who are left behind! who can compensatethem, and how can the injury done them be forgiven? I smiled a moment tomyself as I thought of the ready answer of the august purveyor of thelaw--"You should have thought of that when you committed your crime!"That answer is also a part of the automatic machinery, and comes out, whenthe button is pressed, as inevitably as the package of chewing-gum fromits 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 streetlamp on the corner. It was a memorable journey for me, short in itsmaterial aspect, long otherwise; and I noticed the particulars. NewspaperRow loomed on the right, strange in its familiarity, my work-place of manyyears. Here was the Third Avenue terminal, whence, a few hours before, Ihad confidently expected to take the train homeward, a free and vindicatedman. There were glimpses, in the wet glare, of black headlines ofnewspapers, and the shrill professional cries of the gamins, "Hawthorneconvicted!" 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, asI sat in the dingy courtroom, and listened perfunctorily to the legalwrangle, the abuse and defense, the long-drawn testimony of witnesses, thecomment of the precise and genial judge, and contemplated idly the jaded, uncomfortable jury, the covert whispering of Assistant District Attorneysand postoffice inspectors, the dangling maps and the piles ofdocuments--when I had asked myself, "Is all this real, or are theytransient symbols importing a concealed significance?" Then, to myimagination, 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 ofthose who labored so busily--a trial not entered in the books, and alienfrom that which occupied us; and recording judgments, unheard here, buteternal. 

Was that the reality? Then let come what might on this plane of foolishcontention, where we strive to cover the Immutable with the petty mask ofour mutabilities. We sweat and toil for ends which we know not, and ourpaltry and blind decisions, our triumphs and failures, determine nothingbut the degree of our own ignorance and impotence. The Lord's aims andissues are not ours, and ours do but measure our spiritual stature, anddirect our immortal destiny, in His sight. 

Yes, but this palpable world has its place and function nevertheless, tobe accepted and used while time lasts. If those who tried me were ontrial, I had no personal concern in the matter. My business, now, was tokeep pace with my companion, who obligingly allowed his arm to swing withmine, so that passers-by, even if they could afford to divert theirattention from their own footing on the muddy pavements, and from themanagement of their umbrellas, would not have noticed the bond uniting himand me. For this courtesy--the only possible one in the circumstances--Itook occasion to express my recognition, to which he responded with easyfriendliness. "We don't never make no trouble for them as don't go to huntnone, " was his remark. 

We were now in Centre Street, and the Tombs was close at hand; and I drewinto 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, informer days, I had seen many a poor devil pass; it was now others' turn tocommiserate, or to jeer, the poor devil that was myself. There was nodelay--we seemed to be awaited; and in the next minute I had felt what itis to be locked into a prison. I was behind bars, and could not get out atmy own will--nor at any one else's, for that matter; only at theimpersonal fiat of the machine. 

My marshal chatted and laughed a moment with the keeper, then gave me hisbuxom paw in farewell. I was led through stone passages, past rows ofbarred cells from which peered visages of fellow prisoners, incurious andpreoccupied, or truculent and reckless--men under indictment and withoutbail, convicts making appeal, and culprits jailed for minor offenses. Suchmen 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 areunsearchable. 

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

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

Moreover, extraordinary liberties can be obtained, if you know how to goabout it, and possess the means of bandaging inconvenient eyes. Not onlyare we permitted to stampede our quotas of bedbugs, but leave may be hadto decorate our cells with souvenirs of art and domesticity, to soften oursitting-down appliances with cushions, to drape the curtain of modestybefore the grating of restriction, to carpet our stone flooring, to supplyour leisure hours with literary nourishment, to secrete stealthy cakes andapples for bodily solace, to enjoy surreptitious and not over-hazardouscorridor outings when others are locked up, to write and receive any sortof letters at any times, without having them first read and stamped bylicensed 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 outergates themselves every day, attend to his business in the outer world foras many hours as might serve, returning quietly in time for lastroll-call. He took a keeper with him, of course, but only in order toassuage possible anxiety on the part of those responsible for hissecurity; and one cannot help suspecting that as soon as the two foundthemselves under the free sky, the keeper betook himself to some friendlysaloon, moving-picture palace, or other inviting retreat, and only saw theother again when they met by appointment in their trysting place. 

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

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

The law, in short, lags leagues and ages behind the moral sense of thecommunity, so encumbered with its baggage train that it can never fetch uplost ground. We know perfectly well that the only punishments that canimprove men are punishments of conscience from within, and of love fromwithout--which is practically the same thing; and that punishment byimprisonment is punishment by hate in fact, whatever it may be in theory, and therefore diabolical and destructive. It can only inflame and multiplythe evils it pretends to heal; and this is no theory, but a certified andestablished truth. Everybody who has been through it, knows it, everybodywho dares to think may know it. 

The whole thing is ridiculous, a huge and clumsy absurdity, stepping onits own feet and smelling to heaven. And here in our America it is to-dayworse than in Italy or Russia, in some respects, because we know betterthat it is wrong, and therefore try to hide its enormities from opendaylight. We lie and dissimulate about it, investigators whitewash it, conservative citizens deprecate exaggeration about it, wardens andguards--some of them, not all--are more wicked in their secret practiseswith convicts than they would be if they did not know that they would bestopped if the community knew of them. And it was inevitable that only alow type of men would accept positions as guards and wardens, because nohonest man worth his salt could afford to work for the pay that theseofficials get; and the latter themselves would not work for it, did theynot depend upon stealing twice as much, or more, by the graft. 

But the system, inwardly rotten, crumbles; and in the interval remainingbefore it falls, the devil is getting in some of his most strenuous work. I know, and rejoice, that enlightened and magnanimous methods areobtaining in some places; hearty and brave men, here and there, are makingthemselves 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 Icome--the devil is laboring overtime, conscious that his time is short. 

The worst criminals there--as God sees criminals--are not the men inbranded attire who sit in their cells and slouch about their steriletasks, but men who walk the ranges in uniform, and who sit in the rooms ofmanagers; for the crimes of the former are crimes of poverty or ofpassion, but those of the latter are voluntary, unforced, spontaneouscrimes against human nature itself. They are upheld in high places; theyare fortified by difficulty of "technical proof"; they are guarded by themenace of the spy system, and of criminal libel; but there is some reasonto think that their term is near. 

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

There is a picture by that strange and unmatchable English artist of theEighteenth Century, William Hogarth, of the mad house in London know asBedlam. 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, futileplace, yet embodying very accurately a certain aspect of the civicattitude toward the insanity of vice and crime of the day. There isnothing intelligent, purposeful, trenchant or radical about it; it isplanted 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 greatestseverity is exercised toward those who stand outside the gates and cravepermission to visit their friends within; these find the way arduous andbeset with pitfalls of "orders, " hours, and other mystic rites, exceptwhere they blow in miraculously, enforced by some breath from on high. 

The inmates themselves, meantime, get on quite prosperously, so long atleast as their money or money's worth holds out. There is no license oraptitude on their guardians' part to club them for relaxation's sake, orto kick them into underground dungeons for "observation" (you willunderstand that term by and by), or in any manner to hold a carnival ofwanton brutality with them. The general idea is merely to keep themsomewhere inside the building for the appointed or convenient time; beyondthat, a liberal view is adopted of the conditions of their sojourn. Theycan buy eats to suit themselves, and have them served to them in theircells; they can hold communication with one another and with the outerworld; I suppose they might wear evening dress after six o'clock if theywanted to. They are not victims of despotic and irresponsible power, andthis is not only good for them, but also for the keepers, who are not ledinto the degradation and monstrous inhumanities which the possession ofsuch power breeds in regular prisons. 

Most of these prisoners expect to get out before long, either to go on tomore permanent quarters, or to be liberated altogether; many of thememerge with comparatively small loss of social standing; for, indeed, highly respectable persons occasionally stray in here. The Tombs is notregarded as a final or fatal misfortune in a man's career. Yet it has itsdrawbacks. 

Dirt is one of the more obvious of these; I might call it filth, but itdepends on how one has been brought up. The impurity, at any rate, is notconfined to the surfaces of the cells, floors and walls, but it creepsinto the current language, and permeates the atmosphere. I am convincedthat there never has been or could be a houseful of people who hear or usefouler and more unremitting obscenities than are those which flowsewer-wise and unhindered from the lips of many of this population. 

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

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

When I dwelt in the environs of the city, it was my fortunate habit, insummer, to awake at dawn, just before sunrise, when the wide pastureoutside my window was still obscure with the shadows of night, but the skyhad begun to kindle with the splendors of day. In a group of darksometrees beside a little stream two hundred paces distant a song thrush waswont to trill forth the holy soul of awakening nature in such a paean ofdeathless Pan as inspired John Keats to utter the melodies of his magicode. It consecrated the footsteps of the approaching sun, and the hearerwas borne back on its swelling current to those pure early aeons of thehuman race, when love was the lord of life and innocence went forthcrowned with rapture. 

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

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

The prisoners were as heterogeneous as the contents of a rag-picker'sauction. Yet they associated with little friction, herding uniformly kindwith kind, only rarely lending themselves to transient ructions. Theyplayed little jokes on each other; a fat and serious captive was sittingof an evening at his cell door, absorbed in the perusal of a wide-spreadnewspaper; 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 afterkilling his wife had retained grudge enough against her to hack off herhead. He kept darkly to his cell, sitting hour after hour with his headleaning on his hand, and eyes unswervingly downcast. His crime was notpopular in that company, and none sought his companionship. At the otherend of the scale were dazed, foreign creatures, guilty of they knew notwhat, gropingly and vainly striving to understand and to make themselvesunderstood. There was the scum of the gutters; and there were men ofintellect and high breeding, arming their hearts to resist shame anddespair, and bending to soften the plight of children of misery belowthem. 

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

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

I am not qualified to write the epic of the Devil's Antechamber; I abodethere but ten days, as we reckon time. On a cool and clear Easter Sundaymorning the summons came to go forth to further adventures. Accompanied bythree deputies, but free of the Henkel handcuffs, we passed the gates andtrod the sunny pavements. Not a cloud in the blue sky, nor a taint uponthe pure wings of the free air. None that saw us pass suspected ourinvisible fetters. Yet to me at least the thought that had ministered tome in the actual courtroom and prison, that the fetters were a dream andfreedom the reality, was not accessible then. The absence of physicalbonds 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 stayedbehind as the train moved out. He was the answer to the question, "_Quiscustodiet ipsos custodes?_"--"Who shall watch the watchman?" Our twomarshals 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 substitutedhim for the handcuffs. There was nothing between us and freedom now butour brace of tipstaves, the train crew, the public in and out of thetrain, the train itself moving at a fifty mile an hour pace, the law, andour own common sense. Moreover, we had decided to see the adventurethrough. Something more than nine hundred miles, and twenty-six hours, laybetween us and Atlanta. 

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

His assistant in the present job was still in the morning stage of hiscareer; a big, red-headed, rosy-cheeked, and obtrusively brawny youth offive and twenty. He might be regarded as the hand of steel in the glove ofvelvet of the combination. He may have carried bracelets of steel in hisrear pockets; but his associate earnestly assured me that such was farfrom 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 hismouth, "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 apostage-stamp on you and ship you off by yourselves--I'd know you'd turnup all right of yourselves at the other end! That's me; but of course, wehas to foller the regulations; so there you are!" And the ruddy youngsterstretched 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 andI 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 furtherpart 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 inus, not without honor; and now our country had stamped us as felons andwas sending us to jail. It had suddenly discovered in us a social andmoral menace to its own integrity and order, and had put upon us thestigma of rats who would gnaw the timbers of the ship of state and corruptits cargo. The end of it all was to be a penitentiary cell, and disgraceforever, to us and to ours. 

But was the disgrace ours and theirs? When you kick a mongrel cur it liesdown on its back and holds up its paws, whining. But the thoroughbred actsquite otherwise; you may kill it, but you cannot conquer it. We would notlie supine under the assault of the blundering bully. Disgrace cannot beinflicted from without, --it can only come to a man from within. And thedisgrace which is attempted unjustly must sooner or later be turned backon those who attempted it; the men whom our country had deputed to handlethe machinery of law had blundered, and had convicted and condemned thosewho had done no wrong. I had never felt or expressed anything strongerthan contempt for any particular persons actively concerned in ourindictment and trial--the pack that had snapped and snarled so busily atour heels. Till the last I had believed that their purpose could not beaccomplished, --that the nation would awake to what was being done in thenation's court, under sanction of the nation's laws. The public must atlast realize the moral impossibility that men who had all that is dearestto men to lose, should throw it away for such motives as were ascribed tous--ascribed, but, as we felt, not established. And when the publicrealized that, thought I, they would perceive that the shame which theincompetent handling of the legal machinery aimed to fix on us mustfinally root itself not in us but in the public; since the world andposterity, which, more for our names' sake than for our own, would notewhat was being done, would not distinguish between the employee and themaster--the country and the country's attorneys, and would hold the formerand not the latter accountant. 

I was mistaken; the public took the thing resignedly to say the least. Andthough I consented to no individual animosities--for individuals in suchtransactions are but creatures of their trade, subdued to what they workin, like the dyer's hand--I could not so easily absolve the impersonalmaster. The fault inhered of course not in any grudge of the communityagainst us, but in the prevalent civic neglect (in which, in my time, Ihad participated with the rest) of duties to the state, theoreticallyimpersonal, but which cannot proceed otherwise than on personal accounts. 

Man is frail; but, next to sincere religious conviction, no principleexists so strong to control him as _noblesse oblige_--the impulse to keepfaith and to deal honestly imposed not by his individual conscience alone, but by the pure traditions of his inheritance. The man who has the honorof his forefathers to preserve--an honor which may be a part of thenation's honor--is a hundred-fold better fortified against base actionthan is the son of thieves, or even of nobodies. The latter may findheroism enough to resist temptation, but the former is not tempted; hedismisses the thing at the start as preposterous. It is no credit to himto put such temptation aside, but it is black infamy and treachery to maketerms with it. If he do make terms with it, no punishment can be toosevere--though I take leave to say that the external penalties which stateor nation can inflict are trivial compared with those deadly ones whichtorture him from within; but before crediting him with having yielded, thestate or nation should not merely assume his innocence--a stipulationwhich our law indeed makes, but which is notoriously disregarded byprosecuting attorneys--but should weigh and sift with the most anxious andjealous scrutiny anything and everything which might appear inconsistenttherewith. A son of a thief who steals does but follow his inborninstinct; but a thief whose ancestors were gentlemen is a monster, andmonsters are rare. 

In England and the other older countries, the principle of _noblesseoblige_ still has weight with the public as well as with the individual;here, the welter of democracy, which has not evolved into distinct humanform, uniformly ignores it; leveling down, not up, it is quick to see ascoundrel in any man. Meanwhile, instead of taking thought to abate thepublic mania for success in the form of concrete wealth which multipliesinducements to crime, it creates shallow statutes to punish acceptance ofsuch inducements, with the result that while in its practical life itrushes in one direction, it erects in its courts a fantastic counsel ofperfection which points in a direction precisely opposite. Our law tendsnot merely to the penalizing of real crimes, but to the manufacture ofartificial ones; and the simple standard of natural or intuitive morals isbewilderingly complicated with a régimen of patent nostrums, conceived inerror and administered in folly. 

Sitting in the car window with my friend, I revolved these things, whilethe sunny landscape wheeled past outside, and our guardians chewed gum inthe adjoining section. After all was said and done, amid whatever wasstrange and improbable, he and I were going to the penitentiary in theguise of common swindlers. A pioneer on the western plains, in the olddays, riding homeward after several hours' absence, found his cabin acharred ruin, his property destroyed, his wife lying outraged with herthroat cut, his children huddled among the débris with their brains dashedout. Sitting on his bronco, he contemplated the immeasurable horror of thecatastrophe, and finally muttered, "This is ridiculous!"

"This is ridiculous!" I remarked to my companion; and he consented with asmile; when language goes bankrupt, the simple phrase is least inadequate. "We may as well have lunch, " he said; and we rose and journeyed to therear of the train, sedulously attended by our deputies. The spontaneousroutine of the physical life is often a valuable support to the spiritual, reminding the latter that we exist from one moment to another, and dowisely 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 tobaccoour elder companion sought to lighten the shadows of destiny. 

"You gentlemen, " he said, uttering smoke enjoyingly through mouth andnostrils, "don't need to worry none. It's like this: the judge figured tolet you off easy. He's bound, of course, to play up to the statute byhandin' you your bit, but, to start with, he cuts it down all he can, andthen what does he do but date you back four months to the openin' of thetrial! All right! After four months you're eligible for parole on a yearand a day's sentence, ain't yer? Your trial began on November 25th, andto-day is the 24th of March. That means, don't it, that you make yourapplication the very next thing after they gets you on the penitentiaryregister to-morrer! Why, look-a-here, " he continued, warming to his theme, and becoming, like Gladstone as depicted by Beaconsfield, intoxicated withthe 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-morrerevenin', and the whole bunch of us be back in little old New York alongabout Wednesday! That's right! An' what I says is, that ain't nopunishment--that's no more'n takin' a pleasure trip down South, at thesuitable time o' year! An' I guess I been on the job long enough to knowwhat I'm talkin' about!"

We guessed he knew that he was talking benevolent fictions; and yet therewas plausibility in his argument. The law did not allow parole onsentences of a year or under, but on anything over one year, a convict waseligible, and our sentence of twenty-four hours over the twelvemonththerefore brought us within this provision. In imposing that extra day, the judge could hardly have been motived by anything except the intentionto open this door to us; and although the regular meeting of the paroleboard at the prison was not due just then, we were informed that an extrameeting might be summoned at any time. The board consisted of the wardenof the prison, the doctor, and the official who presided at all paroleboard meetings at the various federal penitentiaries throughout thecountry, --Robert LaDow. The law declares that a majority of the boarddecides the applications that come before it; and as two members of theboard make a quorum, it seemed obvious that the warden and the doctor ofAtlanta 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 usdrawing our attention to the buttered side as often as it appeared, wecould hardly avoid the conclusion that there was a possibility of hisbeing right. We might be required to remain in Atlanta barely long enoughto don a suit of prison clothing and to have our bertillons made, andforthwith make a triumphal return home, with our scarlet sins washed whiteas snow. Of such an imprisonment it might be said, as wrote the poet ofthe 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 Federaladministration of justice which might have been similarly criticized. 

My allusion to this subject here is only by way of leit-motif for athorough discussion hereafter. The juggling with the parole law, by theDepartment of Justice and the parole boards, is one of the mostindefensible and cruel practical jokes that "the authorities" play uponprisoners. 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 supposethat the percentage at other prisons was not as large or larger. Thesufferings short of death that are due to it cannot be calculated. Apractical joke?--yes; but there is a practical purpose back of it. Themiserable men who are practised upon by this means, helpless but hoping, are led to believe that they may buy freedom at the price of treacheryto their fellows. Can it be credited that a convict in his cell, withperhaps years of living death before him, --you do not yet know what thatmeans, but if I live to tell this story, you will be able to guess atits significance before we part--will refuse the opportunity offered toend it at once in return for merely speaking one or two names?--aconvict--a creature outlawed, crushed, damned, dehumanized, despised, --can we look from him for a heroism, a martyrdom, which mightshed fresh honor on the highest name in the community? I confess that Iwould not have looked for it a year ago, and I doubt whether you lookfor it now. But, I have to report, with joy in the goodness andselflessness in men whom you and I have presumed to look down upon, thatin very few instances that I have heard of, and in almost none that Iknow, has a convict thus terribly tempted even hesitated to answer--NO!But many an old and cherished prejudice will begin painfully to gnaw itsway out of your complacent mind before we are done. 

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

My friend and I--while our licensed proprietors napped with one eyeopen--smiled to each other perhaps, recognizing how the prick ofpersonal injury and injustice will arouse far-reaching rebellion againsthuman wrongs and imperfections in general. But our famous American senseof humor may be worked overtime, and, from a perception of theincongruity and relative importance of things, be insensibly degradedinto pusillanimous indifference to everything, good or bad. The soberestobserver may concede that there is a spiritual energy and movementbehind visible phenomena, whose purport and aim it is the province ofthe wise to understand. The peril of Armageddon lies in the fact thatevil never fights fair, but ever masks itself in the armor of good. Notonly so, but good may be changed into evil by hasty and misdirectedapplication, and do more harm--because unsuspected--than premeditatedevil itself. Public endowment of chosen persons with power is good andnecessary in our form of civilization, and the chosen ones may accept itin good faith. But in a community where everybody has business of hisown to mind, and is put to it so to conduct it as to keep off the poorrates, deputed powers, designed to be limited, always tend to becomeabsolute. It is heady wine, too, and intoxicates those who partake ofit. And it is only a seeming paradox that absolute and irresponsiblepower is more apt to develop in a democracy than under any other form ofhuman association. Holders of it, moreover, instead of fighting forsupremacy among themselves, and thus annulling their ownmischievousness, as would at a first glance seem likely, soon learn theexpediency of agreeing together; each keeps to his own area ofdespotism, cooperating, not interfering with the rest. But the systeminevitably takes the form of rings within rings, each interior onepossessing progressively superior dominion. At last we come to a centraland small group of men who are truly absolute, and are supported anddefended in their stronghold by the self-interested loyalty of the rest. But they do not proclaim their supremacy; on the contrary, they hide itunder clever interpretations of law, and, at need, by securing theenactment of other laws fitted to the exigency of the occasion. If thereis remonstrance or revolt among their subjects, they subdue it partly bypointing out that it is the law, and not themselves, that isresponsible; and partly by employing other legal forms to put down theresistance. You cannot catch them; they vanish under your grasp asprinciples, not men. Their voice is never heard saying, "I will!" butalways, "The law requires. " And these autocrats--this oligarchy--areonly men like ourselves, with like passions, limitations and sinfulinheritance. They were not born to the purple--they just happened to getto it. But being possessed of it--and apart of course from any crude andobvious malfeasance in office--they cannot be "legally" dislodged; andif they step aside, it is only to let alter egos take their place. TheKing of England--the Emperor of Germany--can be deposed by the people, and his head cut off; but the free and independent--butlaw-abiding--citizens of the United States cannot throw off this subtletyranny, because it is identified with legal provisions which we haveinsensibly allowed to creep into the inmost and most personal fibers ofour lives. As for modifying or abolishing the law itself--that would beanarchy!

It would be foolish to contend that our rulers are actuated by anypersonal malevolence or even, at first, by unlawful personal ambition;they are, as I have said, for the most part lawyers, and law is theirfetish--their magical cure-all and philosopher's stone. They almostpersuade themselves, perhaps, that we the people make the laws; whereasnot more than one man in ten thousand--even of lawyers--knows what thelaw in any given case is, nor would the majority of us approve anyparticular law, if we were afforded the chance. Any one of us willsupport the law against his enemy, but not, in behalf of his enemy, against himself. But our legalized sultans and satraps, Councils of Tenand Grand Inquisitors, keep an easy conscience; the Law is King and cando no wrong. A few centuries ago it was law in England to kill a man fortaking any personal liberties; there was not much harm in that, for mostof the persons that counted were above the law, being nobles orgentlemen. But our way is far more injurious; if a man takes a personalliberty, the cry is, Put him in jail! Death is a penalty which onlydisposes of a man forever; but jail is poisonous; the man survives, buthe becomes criminal, and an enemy of society. And this cry for jail doesnot appear to emanate from legal tribunals merely, but we the peopleourselves have caught it up, and invoke cells and chains for thelightest infraction of public or personal convenience; nay, we clamorfor more laws to supplement our already overburdened statute-books. Thusdo we thoughtlessly strengthen the hands of our masters. The nostrumwhich they manufactured to govern us withal, and which at first had tobe administered to us willy-nilly, has now become like that notoriouspatent medicine for which the children cry. We kiss the rod--as long asit is laid across our fellows' backs and not our own. And the rule ofLaw, by lawyers, for lawyers, shows no signs of vanishing from ourearth. Only convicts and ex-convicts dissent; for they know what theydissent from. As an unidentified friend wrote to me of late, "No thiefere felt the halter draw, With good opinion of the law"; but the thiefhad reason on his side. And it may yet come to pass that his reasons maybe listened to. 

Darkness set in as we entered the sacred soil of Virginia; night laybefore us--our next night would be spent inside penitentiary walls. Wasit a dream, or would some cosmic cataclysm occur in season to preventit? No: the ancient routine of one fact after another, of cause andeffect, would keep on with no regard for our sensibilities; howeverimportant we might appear to ourselves, we were but specks infinitesimalin the vast scheme of things. Miracles and special providences are forstory books; if you are the victim of abuses, be sure that the remedywill come not through averting them, but by carrying them out to thefinish. On the morning of his execution, it seemed incredible thatCharles I should be beheaded; but he mounted the scaffold, laid his headupon the block, and the masked man lifted his sword and cut it off. Allthat is left for you is not to falter--to keep down that tremor andsickening of the heart; when Danton of the French Revolution reached theguillotine, he was heard to mutter, "Danton, no weakness!" And many anunrecorded Danton, on the night before his appointed death, has laindown and slept soundly. It recurred to my memory that my father, shortlybefore 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 totell me those words--returning to Boston immediately. My father's sonhad 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, withits cotton plantations, forlorn at this season, its omnipresent idlenegroes, and its white folks, lean and solemn, standing guard over whatfate had left to them. At stopping places we would step out for a fewminutes on the platform of the observation-car, to breathe the air andfeel the sunshine, --the affectionate deputies close at our elbows. Someof our fellow passengers were bound for Florida or Cuba, to escape thecrudity of the northern March; "May be we'll meet up again there!" someof them said, innocently unsuspicious of what sort of characters theywere 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 oblivionwas all but finished. The restless little city, turmoiling in its boom, swarmed around us; we had to wait half an hour, our gripsacks in ourhands, for the surface-car to the prison, three miles or more beyond thetown. We awaited it with some impatience--such is the unreasonablenessof our mortal nature. At last we were rumbling off on our trip of twentyminutes, sitting unnoticed in the midway seats, our considerate butcareful guardians on the watch at the front and rear platforms. The cartook its time; it stopped, started again, stopped, started, after themanner of ordinary cars; oh, for a magic carpet or pneumatic tube, tomake an end of this! or for a thousand years! It was as if the headsmanwere making preliminary flourishes with his sword, ere delivering hisblow. These were difficult minutes. 

They ended; "Here we are!" We alighted, and advanced to the entrance ofan expanse of ornamental grounds, with a cement pathway leading up to anextensive fortified structure--a wall thirty feet high sweeping to rightand left from the tall steel gateway, with the summits of stone towersemerging beyond. I stepped out briskly, in advance of the others; Inoticed some bright-hued flowers in a bed on the right. In a few momentsI 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 fewwords 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, andrepeated by prisoners. It has no religious import. The naming of God inthat connection reminds me of a remark I heard from a moonshiner--as thedistillers of illicit whiskey in the mountain regions of the South arecalled--who had lately arrived at the penitentiary. He said, "I allusthought this here Jesus Christ was a cuss-word; but these folks say hewas some religious guy!" His enlightenment was doubtless due to thefirst aid to the unregenerate administered by our chaplain. 

To "put the fear of God in a man's heart" means to break his spirit, tocow him, to make him, from a man, a servile sneak; and this is effectednot by encouraging him to remember his Creator, but by instilling intohim dread of the club, the dungeon, and the bullet. He must learn tofear not God, but the warden, the captain and the guard. He is to behustled about, cuffed, shoved, kicked, put in the hole, punished for notcomprehending surly and half inarticulate orders, or for notunderstanding gestures without words; all of which encouragements toobedience are, indeed, specifically forbidden by the rules which wereformulated in Washington and disseminated for the information of theinvestigation committees and of the public, but which are disregardednevertheless by the prison authorities from the highest to the lowest. For they risk nothing by disregarding them; there is no one exceptprisoners to complain of illegal treatment, and there is no one for themto complain to except the very persons who are guilty of theillegalities; and the warden at Atlanta, at any rate, has repeatedlystated that he would not accept the oaths of any number of prisonersagainst the unsupported denial of a single guard. To do otherwise wouldbe to "destroy discipline. " Moreover, these unverified complaints--suchis their inevitable category in the circumstances--are themselves freshcauses of offense, and productive of the severest punishments--not onlyclubbing and close confinement, often in the dark hole, but loss of goodtime, 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 humanitypresently. I will only say here that no prisoner who cares whether helives or dies, or who possesses common sense or the smallest smatteringof experience of prison affairs, ever is so reckless as to impart anyfacts to the persons in question. If he accuses any guard or otherofficial of cruelty, the entire force of prison keepers can and will beat 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 quellinga dangerous revolt, and deemed his own life in peril. If this evidencebe insufficient, it is a pathetic truth that some prisoners can alwaysbe found so debased by terror and abject as to perjure themselvesagainst their comrades. It is among negro prisoners that such traitorsare commonly sought and found. White men uniformly have a sense ofhonor--thieves' honor, if you please--which keeps them loyal. There areexceptions to this rule, and there are also exceptions to the rule thatnegroes betray. I have the pleasure and the honor of the acquaintance ofsome negro prisoners at Atlanta who would sooner die than ingratiatethemselves 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 taxyour imagination to picture what happens to the complainants after theinvestigators have departed. 

Order and discipline--as appertaining to prisoners, not toofficials--must be preserved; of course they must, if we are to have anyprisons at all. And since there is no way for the prisoners to compelthe guards to keep within the license accorded to them, we must compelthe prisoners to accept whatever injustice or outrage the unrestraineddespots of the ranges have the whim to inflict upon them. There aredesperate revolts at times--desperate in the literal sense, since theyhave no hope of relief in them, but only the tragic rage against tyrannywhich will sometimes blaze up in victims--and on the other hand thereare officials who will resign their positions rather than connive atabuses. But every means is taken to avert this last; for guards knowthings, 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. Thedifference between just inside and just outside is important; for nineconvicted men out of ten, it would be punishment for their misdeeds morethan sufficient to be taken no further on the way to retribution thanthat. Whatever humiliation and disgrace they are capable of feeling orhave cause to feel is at that first moment at its height; it strikesupon them unaccustomed and defenseless--never so acutely sensitive asthen. Afterward, familiarity with misery and shame renders themprogressively more and more callous, without adding one jot to thepublic odium of their position. They can never forget that first clangof the closing gates in their ears; the whole significance of penalimprisonment 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 withall the mortal burden that man-devised penalties can inflict upon him. Moreover, not having been unmanned and his nature violated by physicalinsults and outrages, he might find strength and spirit to begin andpursue a better life thereafter. The "lesson" (word which our shallowand officious moralists roll so sweetly under their tongues) would havebeen taught him to the last tittle, and withal enough of the man remainto profit by it. Whereas, under the existing conditions, no more thanfour or five years in jail destroy any possibility of future usefulnessin most men; they have been hammered into something helpless, dazed, ormonstrous; and even if they have courage to attempt to take hold of lifeagain, they are defeated by the unremitting pursuit of our spy system, which depends for the main part of its livelihood upon gettingex-convicts back to jail--whether on sound or on perjured evidence isall one to the spies. So, as I said some time ago, most prison sentencesare 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 ashave been hinted at must persist. Whatever reforms have in specialinstances ameliorated them, have in so far only gone to show that thewhole system is vicious and irrational. 

My friend and I looked at our new masters with curiosity; they looked atus with what might be termed arch amusement. With such a look do smallboys regard the beetles, kittens, or other animals, power to tormentwhom has been given them. It was after prison hours--the men had beenalready 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; wecould only surmise how far they would go in that instruction. We did notthen know that their power was limited only by their good pleasure. Butit is an accepted and reasonable principle with them that the sooner onebegins to take the nonsense out a prisoner, the better. The strangenessof his surroundings intimidates him at the start, and he more readilyrealizes that he has no friends and that he is in prison--not (as one ofthe guards afterward took occasion to remark) in a "sanitarium fordecayed crooks. " A good scare thrown into him now will bring forth morefruit than greater pains taken--and inflicted--hereafter. 

Our anticipations, however, were the less formidable, because we hadbeen exhaustively assured during the past ten days that AtlantaPenitentiary was not so much a penitentiary as a sort of gentlemen'ssummer resort and club, where conditions were ideal and treatment almostfoolishly humane and tender. This information came not only from allcourt officials with whom we had held communion on the subject, but fromour own counsel at the trial; the judge himself seemed to believe it, and if you ask the prison authorities at Atlanta, they will earnestlyassure you that prisoners there are treated like gentlemen, are givenevery material comfort consistent with their being prisoners at all, aresumptuously fed and housed, and are helped in all ways to build up theirmanhood, maintain their self-respect, and prepare themselves for acareer, after liberation, as valuable and industrious citizens. We werenaturally disposed to credit assertions so emphatically and variouslymade, --some basis for them there must be. And it was obvious, at aglance, that the corridor in which we stood was spacious and airy, witha clean limestone pavement; that the disorder and shiftlessness of theTombs was absent here. The guards who attended us wore neat darkuniforms of military cut; and if their caps were tilted back on theirheads, or cocked on the northeast corner, that was a pardonableexpression of their authority and importance. I saw no firearms and noblood, nor were the groans of tortured convicts audible. I rememberedthe flowers in the garden outside, and was prone to think that thingsmight have been very much worse; they were certainly better, at a firstglance, than at Sing Sing, which I had visited on a newspaper assignmentabout fifteen years before. I had resolved beforehand to make the bestof everything, and it seemed already possible that I might not have tomake believe very much to do so. 

No resolve, however, could overcome the influence of that locked andbarred gate, nor the realization that I was a convict, and that nobodyinside the penitentiary had any doubt that I was justly convicted. Friends were remote and helpless; the support of former good repute wasannulled; I stood there impotent, one man against the FederalGovernment, with nothing to aid me but the weight of my personalequation (whatever that might be worth) and my private attitude on thequestion of my guilt, which the trial had not modified, but which couldbe of no practical benefit to me here. The sensation of confrontingeverywhere a settled and hostile skepticism as to one's integrity wasnovel, and hard to meet with a firm countenance. And I felt how easilythis sensation might crush the courage of one who was conscious of beingjustly condemned. How many men must be sitting yonder in those cells wholacked the moral consolations that I had! The thought sharpened myperception of the horror of all imprisonment, but at the same timestiffened my fortitude; for if these men could live through theirordeal, how much more could I!

Meanwhile we were being hurried through the handsome corridor, and downa flight of iron steps to a less presentable region. There was noaggressive brutality, only a peremptory curtness, entirely proper in thecircumstances. Our only defense against physical severity was a bearingof cheerful but not overdone courtesy, and we gave that what play wemight. I could not foretell how I might behave under a clubbing, andwould not bring the thing to a test, if I could decently avoid it. In along, low, shabby, ill-lighted room we were lined up against a counter, on the other side of which were two or three of our fellowprisoners--the first we had seen--whose function it was to fit us withprison suits. They consisted of a sack coat and trousers of gray-bluecloth--rather heavy goods, for the warm season had not yet begun--andthis was obviously far from being their first appearance on a convict;suits are handed down from one generation of prisoners to another untilthey are entirely worn out; my own was of an ancient vintage and a gooddeal defaced, but I had no ambition to be a glass of fashion in jail. Ofcourse I could only conjecture what diseases previous wearers of itmight have suffered from; but I hoped for the best. Every new arrival atthe penitentiary is presumed to be dirty until he is proved clean, andthe 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 andnight in the train; but a comrade of mine from the mountain wildernessesof South Carolina, where bathing is still regarded as a degradinginnovation, described to me long afterward what a sturdy battle he hadput up against the disgrace, and being a lusty youth, it had taken thebest efforts of several guards to hold him under the spout long enoughto wet him--and themselves into the bargain. Though this was the firsttime since infancy that I had bathed under compulsion, I complied veryreadily, and even said to my friend, "This isn't so bad!" It is notpermitted, under the law, to give out any news about prisoners to theworld without, after they have once passed the portals; nevertheless, this memorable remark of mine was printed next day in the New Yorknewspapers, together with the scarlet hue of my necktie, and some otherdetails, --my registered prison number among them, my own first knowledgeof which was derived from the published paragraph. It was my firstintimation of a fact which afterward exercised no small influence on mydestiny in the prison--that I was a "distinguished, " or at least anotorious prisoner. This influence had its good as well as its badaspect, in the long run, but the latter was in the beginning the moreconspicuous. The unidentified press-agent who disseminated to an eagerworld the news about the bath and the necktie, continued to be activeduring our stay in Atlanta, but his other communications were not evenapproximately so accurate as the first one, and nearly all of them werechildren of his imagination exclusively, and were more likely to begratifying to the officials than to my fellow prisoner and myself. 

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

We mounted three or four flights of iron steps, and were introduced intoa cell near the corner. It was, like all the others, a steel box abouteight feet long by five wide, and seven or eight high. On one side, twocots two feet wide were hinged against the wall, one above another; theyreduced the living space to a breadth of three feet. The wall oppositewas 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 inchin diameter. That was a part of the spy system; for between the two rowsof cells is a narrow passage, in which the guard can walk, and, himselfunseen and unheard, spy upon the prisoners and listen to theirconversation. All prisoners are at all times of the day and night underobservation. This seems a slight thing; but the cumulative effect of itupon men's minds is disintegrating. At no moment of their lives can theycommand the slightest privacy. And what right to privacy, you ask, has aprisoner? Would he not use it to cut his way through the chilled steelwalls with his teeth and nails, or to plot revolt with hiscellmate?--Possibly; but even a beast seeks privacy at certainjunctures; and to deny all privacy tends to bestialize human beings. Itis 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, facingthe 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 ofthe army sort; our first duty was to make our beds. Mattress and pillowwere stuffed stiff with what felt like wood chips, and was probablystraw and corn-husks; the pillow was cylindrical; the mattress washillocked and hollowed by the uneasy struggles with insomnia ofcountless former users. There was a campstool whose luxuries we mightshare. We had, each, a prison toothbrush, and a comb. In the ceiling ofthe cell, beyond reach of an outstretched arm, was an electric bulbwhich would be darkened at nine o'clock. But all this was welcome; I hadoften roughed it in conditions quite as severe; my spirits could not bedashed by mere hardships or inconveniences. We put our domestic menagein order cheerfully, glad that we had been celled together, instead ofdoubling up with strangers. Nor would it have discouraged us to knowthat the west range was the one occupied by negroes and dangerouscharacters. The place was silent; none of the demoniac chantings andhyena laughter of the Tombs. We had our little jests and chucklings aswe made our arrangements; Courage, Comrade! the period of suspense andanticipation is passed; we are at grips with the reality now!

Moreover--"Every prisoner, on installation in his cell, is supplied withrolls and hot coffee, and with pipe and tobacco!" Thus would thestatement run in the report to the Department. What if the bread beuneatable, the coffee undrinkable, and the tobacco unsmokable? The mereidea of such things is something; besides, prisoners do contrive, beinghard 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 ourown affair. Meanwhile, our mental appetites were appeased by a littlegray pamphlet, containing the rules governing the conduct of convicts inthe penitentiary. There were a great many of them, and not a fewrequired thought to penetrate their significance. Why, for instance, should special emphasis be laid upon the injunction to rest one's shoesagainst the bars of the door upon retiring? We were never informed; butI presume it must have been to prevent a man being tempted to reach outan arm a hundred feet long through his bars, throw the switch, stealalong the platform, open the steel door, unbar the two outer gates, climb over the thirty-four foot wall, and escape--all the while avoidingthe notice of the range guard, of the guards in the corridors, and ofthe watchman on the tower outside, all of whom were armed with magazinerifles and were yearning for an opportunity to use them. Of course, hewould want to have on his shoes for such an enterprise, so that if theshoes were visible inside his door, it was prima facie evidence that hehimself was also within. Another rule was italicized--"_Do not try toescape--you might get hurt!_" I refrained from testing the validity ofeither prohibition. 

In the midst of our perusal, we were interrupted by the arrival of avisitor. He was a slight-built, slope-shouldered young fellow, in prisongarb, with a meager visage heavily furrowed with sickness andsuffering--he had tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, and the indigestionwith 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) mentionedhis condition; it was determined long afterward by the diagnosis of myfriend; Ned's object in visiting us was not to air his own troubles, butto assuage, so far as he might, the gloom and uneasiness of the newarrivals. In his haggard face shone a pair of very intelligent andkindly gray eyes, and above them rose a compact, well-filled forehead. Iwas fortunate enough to keep in touch with this young man during mystay, and I found no more lovable nature in the penitentiary. He made nosecret of the fact that he had been guilty of a Federal offense, and henever expressed contrition for it; "I made a mistake in taking anotherman in with me, " he remarked; "you are never safe unless you go italone. " He had not been systematically educated, but he had read widelyand judiciously, talked correctly, though with occasional colloquialidioms thrown in, and he was a concentrated and original thinker. Hisopinions were bold, independent, and sound, his insight was verypenetrating, and his knowledge of matters of criminal procedure and ofprison conditions was accurate and ample. Facts which I afterwardlearned for myself were never out of accord with information he hadgiven me; and the sanity and clarity of his judgments were refreshingand remarkable. His courage was undemonstrative but indomitable; henever complained of his own condition and experiences, but was instantin his sympathy with the misfortunes of others. No more welcome andvaluable counselor than he could have come to us in those first hours ofour durance. 

That he was able to visit us was due to his being a "runner, " as thoseprisoners are termed who are assigned to carrying messages and doing oddjobs in the ranges. He leaned against the bars and spoke manfully andpungently, with touches of gay humor now and then; advised us to ourconduct--what to do and what to avoid; and when he noticed the littlegray 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 guardis, and how he happens to be feeling. You can go as far as you likesometimes, and other times you'll get hauled up if you turn your headsideways. The screw" (guard) "on this range is decent; he won't crowdyou too much. Keep quiet, and do what they tell you, and the odds areyou'll get by all right. Of course, if some fellow gets a grudge againstyou, he's liable to hammer you like hell; there are some prisoners herethat 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 tobe here; and Bill" (the Warden) "likely knows it too, and as folks onthe outside are on the watch for what happens to you, he'll think twicehow he treats you. Bill is a cunning one; he keeps his ear to theground; when he sees that the reform people are going to put somethingacross, he backs it up, and gives out that he suggested it himself; butup 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'dnever dare stand for now--except on the quiet! He gets himself writtenup in the local papers here as the model warden--warm-hearted andbroad-minded, and all that flap-doodle! But if he had his way, you'dthink you were back in the dark ages in this penitentiary. Wickershamthrew a bit of a scare into him a couple of years back; and there havebeen others; but most of the inspectors that are sent here stand in withhim; he gives them good feeds in his house, and takes them out in hisauto, and fills 'em up with soft talk--about 'his boys, ' and hisfatherly interest in 'em, and all that--but he keeps the dark cells andthe rest of the dirty work out of their sight, and of course none of themen dares say anything to 'em--it would be all day with them if theydid--as soon as the inspector turned his back. That's what gets themen's goat--that he puts up such a humane front, and all the whilehammers them on the sly. They'd prefer being told at the start they weregoing to get hell, and then getting it; but it goes against their grainto get it, and meantime have folks outside believe they're in agentlemen's country club!"

Ned imparted his information by fits and starts; ever and anon he wouldbreak off abruptly and walk off down the range, to give the guard theidea 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 fewdays; it's the first days that go hardest with most men, but you'll getused to it; you might get out on parole, too--but don't count on it; ofall the frauds in this prison, parole is the worst! And if they everpass that 'Indeterminate Sentence' law--good-by! Imagine Bill with thatthing 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 beentaken away from us; no doubt, a prisoner might commit suicide bysticking his watch in his windpipe, or he could bribe a guard with it tobring him cigarette papers, or "dope. " Besides, what has a man in jailto do with time? Our warm-hearted and fatherly masters desire theircharges 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 orinjured. That is the penitentiary ideal; but it has of late becomeimpossible fully to realize it. A prison will always be a prison; but atany 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 floorbelow. The mattress, though irregularly dented and bulged, was upon thewhole convex, and not over two feet wide. A vertical fence or bastion, six or eight inches high, along the outer brink of this precipice wouldhave averted the danger of rolling off in the night; but nothing of thesort had been provided. One must remember not to roll, even in thenightmare. Convicts educate the subliminal self to a surprising degree, and do not fall victims to this trap as often as one would expect; butoccasionally one of them forgets, and down he comes, sometimes gettingbruised only, but generally with a broken bone or so. I do not havenightmares, and I lay prone, gripping the sides of the mattress with myknees, 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 thenight-burner below. Odd sounds broke out at intervals. Half suppressedcoughs, sudden, brief cries, irregular wheezings and gurglings, due todefective plumbing, occasionally a few muttered words; then a man in anupper tier began to moan and groan dismally--a negro with a colic, perhaps. Long, dead silences would be interrupted by inexplicablenoises. In the dead vast and middle of the night the prisoner in thecell over mine began to pace up and down his floor, eighteen inchesabove my head. Four paces one way, four back, over and overinterminably. Who was he? What was he thinking about? Something seemedto goad him intolerably; that forging to and fro, like a tormentedpendulum with a soul in it, gave a stifling impression, as of onetortured for air and space. How many years must he endure--how manycenturies? Was his wife dying, his children abandoned? Up and down hepadded; had he committed some ugly crime, for which he longed toatone--but prison is not atonement! Had his conviction been unjust, andwas he raging impotently against injustice? Let him not rage too loudly, for there was a guard yonder, indifferent to tortured souls, butlicensed to stop noises. A prison is a prison, not a sanitarium fordiseased crooks. But if the world could hear those footfalls, andinterpret their significance, how long would prisons last? A jail atnight is a strange place--eight hundred men packed in together, eachterrifyingly alone!

Some of the earlier workers had been roused at six or five o'clock orearlier; but for the majority the six-thirty bell was the reveille. Itscreeched violently and was silent. The watching devils or the guardianangels of the night vanished, and up got the eight hundred members ofthe Gentlemen's Country Club, to live as best they might through one daymore; coughing, hawking, spitting, murmuring--but all with a sense ofrepression in it, the life-sapping drug of fear in its origin, but longsince become a mechanical habit with most of them. Eight hundredcriminals, herded beneath one roof to be cured of their crimes byindifferent or threatening and hostile task-masters and irresponsiblediscipline-mongers, and by association with one another--a régimen ofhell to extirpate deviltry! The twentieth century solution of theproblem of evil, unaltered in principle after thousands of years!

Civilization has progressed wonderfully, but always with thisdeath-house on its back. And the death-house gets bigger and morepopulous every year. Reformers, exhorters, Christian Endeavorers, humanitarians, Salvation Armies, social reformers, penologists, scientific experimentalists with surgical apparatus, together withparole laws, indeterminate sentences, commutations, pardons, not tospeak of a good warden here and there and a kind guard--all toiling andtinkering to make prisons better, to sweep them, to air them, to instilreligion and education, to supply work and exercise and to paywages--and all the while the tide of criminals gets larger and theaccommodations for them less adequate. What can be the matter? Are we toend by discovering that everybody is a criminal, and ripe for jail? orshall we be driven to the realization that the fundamental idea ofimprisonment for crime is itself the most monstrous of crimes--and trysomething else? What else is there to be tried? Are we to leavecriminals to their liberty among the community?

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

With a guard acting as cowboy, shepherd dog, or convict compeller, weshuffled in a continuous line down the iron stairways and across thehall into the dining room, a cement-floored barred-window desert sownwith tables in rows, seating eight men each; guards with clubs standingat coigns of vantage or pacing up and down the aisles, and in onewindow, commanding the whole room, a guard with a loaded rifle, licensedto shoot down any misbehaver. At no time and in no part of this modeljail are you out of range of a loaded rifle, in the hands of men quickand skilful in their use. They are the sauce for meals and theencouragement to labor. But casualties seldom happen; when they do, theyare hushed up, and the body of the man is buried next day in the prisongraveyard. 

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

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

Mr. Sidney Ormund, to be sure, a special writer on the _AtlantaConstitution_, makes the following statement in an issue of the papershortly after I had left the jail and recorded my opinion that "WardenMoyer was unfit. "--"It is safe to assume, " Mr. Ormund affirms, "that ifall the prisoners at the Atlanta federal penitentiary were life-termersand each had a voice in the selection of a warden to serve for a liketerm, William Moyer, the present incumbent--a man who has done more tomake prison life bearable than any man in this country--would beselected without a murmur of opposition. "

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

At the expiration of the half hour, we laid aside our pipes, or ourprayer-books, and were ready for the activities of the day. The otherswere detailed to their regular work; but my friend and I had our finalrites of initiation still to undergo. A young official, whosecountenance readily if not habitually assumed a sullen and menacingexpression, beckoned to us with his club, and we followed him downstairsto an elevator, in which he ascended to the upper floor, while wepursued him upward by way of the staircase. The cap of Mr. Ivy--such washis poetic given name--was worn on the extreme rear projection of hishead, and he used his club in place of speech; not that he actuallypummeled us with it, but by wavings and pointings he made it indicatehis will, and kept us mindful how easily we might afford him a pretextfor 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 thepenitentiary, and may have been, like most of them, a graduate from theArmy. In reporting the case of Private George, of the U. S. Army, now aprisoner in stripes in the Leavenworth Penitentiary, it was stated byMr. Gilson Gardner that "The common soldier in the U. S. Army has norights. When he enlists, he gives up the guarantees of the Constitution, the protection of jury trial, and even his right to petition for aredress of grievances. He may be unjustly charged, secretly tried andcruelly 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 coursethe former has the advantage of belonging to a service traditionallyhonorable, of open air service and exercise in all parts of the countryor abroad, of reasonable freedom when off duty, and of whatever gloryand advancement campaigning against an enemy may bring him. But we mayreadily perceive that a soldier who has felt the rough edge ofdiscipline and finds his health broken, perhaps, by indiscretionsincident 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 getback at somebody for the humiliations and hardships I have endured. Whynot take a job as a prison guard; the pay is only $70 a month, butinstead of being the under dog, I shall be on top, licensed to bully andbelabor to my heart's content, to insult, humiliate and berate, and toget away with it unscathed!"

For my part, I can imagine no reason more plausible to explain the largenumber of ex-soldiers among prison guards, and their conduct in thatposition. With some shining exceptions, they are petty tyrants of theworst type, sulky, sneering, malignant, brutal, and liars andtreacherous into the bargain. Their mode of life in a jail, immersed inthat sinister and unnatural atmosphere, hating and hated, with no saneor absorbing occupation, encouraged by the jail customs to play the partof spies and false witnesses, ignorant and demoralized, --tends to createevil tendencies and to confirm such as exist. No worse originally thanthe average of men, they are made baser and more savage by theircircumstances. And no man able to hold his own in the free life andcompetition of the outside world, would stoop to accept a position asguard in a jail. 

I know nothing of the private biography of Mr. Ivy, and it is quitepossible that he may have possessed endearing traits which he had noopportunity to manifest in our intercourse. It would be foolish andfutile for the ends I have in view in this writing to cite or comment onindividuals, save as they may illustrate the point under discussion. ButI am the less reluctant to animadvert upon this or that employee of thepenitentiary, because I feel satisfied that, so far from compromisinghim with the higher prison authorities, abuse from me would onlyrecommend him to their favor. --Mr. Ivy, such as he was, conducted us toa bench outside a closed door, already partly occupied by three or fourhalf naked convicts, white and black. We gathered from his gestures ofhead and club that we were to remove our upper garments and our shoesand stockings, and place them on the floor in front of us. It was a coldmorning, and the floor was of limestone. We obeyed instructions, and forthe next twenty minutes sat there, objects of pardonable curiosity oramusement to our fellow benchers and to passers-by in the hall, and withnothing to keep us warm but the genial influences of the occasion. Finally, each in his turn, we were passed through the door into a sortof office, with clerks and Dr. Weaver, the prison physician, at $1500 ayear, --a tall, wooden faced young medical school graduate, whocultivated a skeptical expression and a jeering intonation of speech. Heand an assistant put us through a physical examination, and took aseries of measurements, all of which were entered by the clerks inledgers. Our photographs were then taken, and afterward (it was the nextday, but may as well be told here) we were further identified by takingthe impressions of our finger prints, and by a second photograph withoutour mustaches--these having been removed in the meantime. We were nowconvicts full-fledged and published, and our pictures were disseminatedto every prison and penitentiary in the country, to be enshrined in therogues' gallery and studied by all police officials. 

This may sound silly, in the case of two men much nearer three score andten than three score, and untrained to gain a livelihood by crime. Bertillon measurements were not needed to identify us, nor photographswithout mustaches. But, in the first place, prison rules apply to themass, not to individuals; and secondly, it has been resolved by thewisdom of our rulers that a man who reverts to crime after one or moreconvictions 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 livelihoodafter a conviction are many times less than before. Spies are on histrail at every turn, and if ever he succeed in securing legitimateemployment, an officer of the secret service presently informs hisemployer that he has a jail-bird on his pay-roll. Naturally he ispromptly paid off and dismissed, and he may go through the sameexperience as often as he is foolish enough to try it. But even if he beinactive, he is not safe--far from it. He is known to the police andliable to arrest at any moment as a vagrant, without visible means ofsupport. Nor is this all. Suppose him to be recorded in prison archivesas a safe-blower, and that a safe is blown somewhere and the culpritsescape. The credit of the police department demands that an arrest bemade, if not of the person or persons actually guilty of this particularcrime, then of some one who may be plausibly represented as guilty ofit. Accordingly, our friend is apprehended and charged with the crime;there is his record, and it is easy to secure "evidence" that he was onthe spot at the time, though he may have been, in fact, a hundred or twomiles away from it. Detectives are experts at providing this sort ofevidence; and it frequently happens that they get the corroboration ofthe victim himself by assuring him that, if he will confess, the judgewill 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 jailfor 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 thatpredicament, which horn of the dilemma would you select? If you havenever served an actual jail term, you might virtuously hesitate; but itis the world against a mustard seed that you wouldn't hesitate if youhad. The crisp of the joke is, however, --and of course it serves youright, --that the judge, after all, gives you the ten years, and thatmeans life, for you will never be long out of jail afterward. As I writethis, I have in mind several instances of it among my personalacquaintances at Atlanta. 

If then our convict, upon his release, cannot keep himself in any honestemployment, and cannot avoid arrest even when he is doing nothing atall, good or bad, it seems plain that he must either hunt out a quietplace where he may starve to death before the officer can arrest him forstarving, or commit suicide in some more sudden and active manner, or hemust accept the opportunity which is always at hand in "revert to acareer of crime, " as the saying is. Ex-convicts are often still humanenough to be averse from starvation, and even from easier forms ofself-destruction; and they yield to the temptation to steal. Like theidiots they are, they may hope to make a big strike and get away withit, and in some remote or foreign place, under another name, live out anunobserved and blameless existence. 

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

You perceive that this story proceeds by digressions; such value as itmay have it will owe mainly to such digressions, so I will not apologizefor them. My friend and I, our ordeal completed, were returned to ourcells to think it over. The walls and ceiling of the cells are painted alight 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 homelikelook to their perennial quarters; it is more conducive to moral reformthat they should contemplate painted steel. There was one camp-stool inour cell; later, cells were supplied with two wooden chairs, the seatssloping at such an angle with the backs as rendered sitting a penance;cushions were not provided. I remember seeing similar contrivances inold English cathedrals, relics of a day when monks had to be kept fromfalling asleep during the religious rites. We might also sit upon thelower bunk, bent forward in such an attitude as would avert bumping ourheads against the upper one. Each convict, early in his sojourn, has areligious interview with the Chaplain, who presents him with a copy ofthe New Testament--not also of the Old; you may remember that the latterrecords certain regrettable incidents of a sinister and immoral sort, calculated, I presume, to shock the tender budding impulses towardregeneration of prison readers. One may get other books of a secularkind from the library, upon written application; and prisoners of thefirst grade may subscribe for newspapers that contain no objectionablematter. But only a small proportion of the inmates is addicted toreading, and the opportunities for doing so are limited. And as monthsand years go by, the desolation and sterility of the place weigh heavierupon the spirit, the mind reduces its radius and grows inert, andstimulants stronger than current fiction are needed to rouse it. Prison, prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate screechingsand clangings of whistles and gongs; the endless filings to and fro, inand out; the stealthy insolence of guards, or their treacherousgood-fellowship; the abstracted or menacing gaze of the higherofficials; the dreariness, aimlessness, and sometimes the severity ofthe daily labor; the sullen threat of the loaded rifles; the hollow, echoing spaces that shut out hope; the thought of the stifling stench ofthe dungeons beneath the pavements, hidden from all save the victims, whose very existence is officially denied; the closing of all personalcommunication with the outer world, except such as commends itself tothe whims of the official censors; this morgue of human beings stillalive--the impenetrable stupidity, futility and outrage of itall--slowly or not so slowly unbalance the mind and corrupt the nature. Meanwhile, newspapers clamor against the coddling of criminals, and thetoo indulgent officials smile sadly and protest that they have not theheart to be stern. "Coddling criminals"--the alliteration makes it rollpleasantly off the tongue!

But do I forget the many indulgences given to prisoners--and soprofusely celebrated in every mention publicly made of AtlantaPenitentiary? Let me name them once more. Saturday being a non-workingday, it used to be the custom to lock the prisoners in their cells fromSaturday morning till Monday morning--a custom still followed at manypenitentiaries; for how could they be controlled if not split up intoworking gangs, and thus prevented from conspiring to mutiny? It is oneof the obsessions of prison authorities that the prisoners are severallyand collectively a sort of wild beast, always straining at the leash, and ready at the least opportunity to break forth in wild and deadlydisorder. It is obviously expedient, too, to impress the public withthis conviction, and therefore, in part, we have the clubs, rifles, andgeneral parade of watchfulness. As a matter of fact, meanwhile, nothingis more easy to handle than a prisonful of convicts, if the mostelementary tact be used; and they are eagerly grateful for the smallestunforced and spontaneous act of kindness. 

Until about eighteen months ago, however, severe restrictions were invogue, and the warden declared that it was his belief and policy thatmen in prison should be taught by precept and illustration to regardthemselves as dead to the world; that they should be held practicallyincommunicado, no visitors, letters at most but once a month, noconversation between prisoners--silence, solitude, suffocation in thisterrible quicksand of jail for months, years, or a lifetime, at themercy of men to whom mercy is a jest. Such a régimen is still in forceat many jails, and when combined with contract labor, nothing in theage-long history of penal imprisonment shows a blacker record. It isadvocated as the best way to induce men to reform, and become, afterrelease, 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 nothave seen been removed from sight before he saw them. He demanded someimprovements on the spot, and soon after a new deputy warden wasappointed--a young man, of kindly disposition, though weak, not inuredas yet to the conventional brutalities, and with a backing in Washingtonwhich gave him unusual powers. Among good things which he instituted andinsisted on were--two and a half hours outdoors on Saturday afternoons, for baseball and general relaxation; conversation at meals; music atdinner by a band made up from convicts; regular bi-weekly letters, withextra letters allowed between times by special request to orderlyconvicts; concerts or vaudeville performances every month or so in thechapel, by professionals. 

Insanity became less frequent after this, and the general health of themen improved. They had something to look forward to, and to look backto, and the freedom of the baseball concession led to no disorders;something like hope and cheerfulness began to appear, like green bladesof grass in spring. The warden cleverly seized the opportunity to takecredit to himself for all the improvements, and to circulateindustriously in the local papers the praise of the model penitentiary. But neither did he fail to take advantage of the new situation totighten his grasp upon the reins of control. The majority of jails, inaddition to the ordinary spy system operated by officials, organize asupplementary one composed of convicts themselves--stoolpigeons--certain carefully selected prisoners, who are rewarded fortreachery to their fellows by various indulgences and secret liberties. The principle is detestable, and has evil effects. The stool pigeonsthemselves are of course the basest members of the community, and theother prisoners, soon learning to suspect them, come at last to amiserable distrust of one another--for the comrade apparently mostsincere may be at heart only a more artful traitor. In this, they playinto the officials' hands, whose theory of government is fear, and whofind aid to themselves in the mutual misgivings and hatreds of theircharges. 

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

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

VI

SOME PRISON FRIENDS OF MINE

Vague noises are at all times audible in jail--stirrings, foot-falls, asubdued voice now and then, the sharp orders of an official--"bawlingsout" as they are termed; the clanging of steel gates, the murmur ofmachinery, the cacophany of musical instruments during practise hours inthe chapel; as well as the periodical screeches and ringings of whistlesand gongs. The general impression on ear and eye alike is of stealthyrepression, a checked unrest--a multifarious creature, uneasy but keptdown. The place is perhaps hardly less silent than a cloister; but thepeace of the cloister is utterly absent. An atmosphere of animosity andcontention pervades all--a constant apprehension of sinister thingsliable to happen, a breathless struggle, the sullenness of hate, thewhispering of treachery. The eyes of officials peer, watch and threaten;those of the convicts are downcast but privily rebellious, ordeprecatingly servile. 

It is the everlasting pregnancy of war between slave and master, quitedifferent from submission to rightful authority. Whatever the law maysay, the rightfulness of prison authority is never admitted byprisoners. Honest authority is tranquil and secure; prison authoritygoes armed, conscious of its unrighteousness, and there is unremittingnervous stress on both sides. Both sides seem secretly to await a signalto sudden conflict. 

At dinner, soon after my arrival, amid the omnipresent murmurous palaverof conversation, there fell an unusual noise. The unusual is alwaysformidable in jail. The noise was nothing in itself, and would havepassed unheeded in a hotel dining-room. But over us, crowded togetherthere, spread an instant hush. All knew that men had been stabbed, frenzied affrays had broken out in that room. What was it now? The guardin the window stiffened and poised his rifle. The guards on the floorcaught their breath, but assumed a confident air. The men sat staring inthe 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 atthat juncture, murder would have followed the next moment. Among everyhundred convicts there are eight or ten whom misery and wrong have madereckless, whose morbid rebelliousness needs, to break forth, only theshadow 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 orgrimly, and resumed our meal. 

Eight hundred men, clad in a shapeless monotony of dingy blue, labeledon the back with their disgrace, stepping lightly or shuffling hastilyto and fro, heads bent and eyes downcast, performing various offices, menial, clerical or industrial, with a certain obsequiousness andostensible zeal that was yet inwardly repulsion and protest--these weremen born under the great flag, Americans, my countrymen, and now mycompanions! What a change, what a degradation from the free Americancitizen 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 pursuitof happiness, but existing in shame and on suffrance, ruined, nameless, parted from friends and families, with present physical pain and mentalmisery, and with a future of hounding and helplessness, of fear andhiding, of uselessness and aimlessness, of insanity and base death!

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

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

But I would go further, and challenge the right of the community toinflict penal imprisonment as we know it at all. Some criminals belongin hospitals, others in insane asylums, for others the thoughtlessneglect and selfishness of society is responsible, and they should besuccored, not punished; and the remainder should be constrained, undersurveillance but not in confinement, to compensate for the harm they didby labor or self-denial aimed directly at that result. But of thishereafter. 

Meanwhile, I paid attention to my companions themselves. 

In their intercourse with one another there was a singular amenity orpleasantness, and with some who had been prisoners for a long time, asort of childlikeness. But it was like the childlikeness of a personpartly dazed, or recovering from a severe illness or shock. They greetedone another with a covert smile, an unobtrusive movement of head orhand; only when under direct observation of an official would they passwithout a sign. The usual words were, "How're you feeling?" or, "How'rethey comin'?" not in the perfunctory tone of greetings in the outerworld, but with an accent of real interest and solicitude. The answerwould be, "Good!" "Fine!" with as much heartiness as could be throwninto it--though it might be obvious enough that the truth was far frombeing that. 

There was one dear old fellow who had a variation on these forms; he wasan alleged moonshiner, though, as he said, "Yes, I did make somewhiskey, 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 onthe "old. " He was about seventy, with the soft brown hair of youth, butbent and stiff and wrinkled with hard years and rheumatics; and if Iquestioned him more closely, he would confess that he suffered from"lots o' misery here!"--passing his gnarled old hands over his digestivetract. Indeed, four-fifths of the men had that trouble in more or lessacute form, owing to the atrocious food supplied as our regular diet. 

Joe's face, though lined with the hardships and privations of a longlife, was beautifully formed, aristocratic in its delicate contours; andhe possessed, and constantly used, one of the most delectable, contagious and genuine laughs that ever made music in my ears. The menwould ransack their humorous resources in conversation with Joe, merelyfor the sake of making him laugh. He would fix his old eyes squarely onyours, and laugh and laugh with infinite mirth and good nature. Such asound in such a place was rare and wonderful, and helped one like freshwater in a desert. 

The general friendliness among the men--so contrasted with theirdemeanor toward the officials--was due to the identity of their commoninterests; they were in the same boat, facing the same perils anddisasters, united in the same aims and hopes, and leagued against thesame oppressors. They lived in the constant dread of some calamity; andif I met the same man three or four times in the same day, he wouldnever fail to make the same enquiry--"How're you feeling?" recognizingthat I might have received some ugly blow in the interval. There was aspontaneous courtesy and a charitableness in it that touched the heart. 

The same sentiment was manifested at meals; if anybody got hold ofanything that seemed to him a little better than usual, he could notrest till he had offered some of it, or all of it, to his neighbors attable. "Here, take this--take it--I got more'n I want!" Or, watching hisopportunity, Ned the runner, who had comforted us on our first night inprison, would come to the door of my cell, with his Irish humor andcordiality shining in his eyes. "Say, Mr. Hawthorne, there's a dividendbeen declared!" and out of some surreptitious receptacle he wouldproduce three or four crumpled cigarette papers--of all contrabandarticles 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 nearlytwenty years, and I was in much better physical condition than most ofthem. I accepted their kind offices with gratitude and emotion, and, when I saw that to do otherwise would hurt their feelings, theirconcrete gifts, too. 

But there were many instances of self-sacrifice greater than these; menwould go to the hole sooner than betray a comrade; and you are fortunatein being unable to comprehend what that means. If a comrade in his rangewas sick and unable to come to meals, I have constantly seen a mansecrete half of his miserable breakfast or dinner in his pocket, to becarried up to the invalid and smuggled into his cell. It was a matter ofcourse, nobody remarked it. Any mistake or indiscretion committed by aprisoner would be instantly and almost mechanically covered by the mannearest him, though at the risk of punishment--and the punishment forbetraying human sympathy in this way is--of course it is!--especiallysevere; it is conspiracy to cheat the Government. 

The traditional tale of a prisoner's devotion to animals is also true; aman next me at table--a yegg--for two weeks poured half his allowance ofmilk (he was on milk diet for acute indigestion) into a surreptitiousbottle, and bore it off for the sustenance of a couple of little forlornkittens that he was acting as special providence for. The meditativesmile with which he perpetrated this theft upon the prison authoritieswas a wonderful sight. Another convict, a hardened old timer, forseveral weeks lavished cargoes of tenderness upon a rat which he hadlaboriously conciliated and tamed. "What makes you so fond of thatanimal?" enquired one day a sentimental and statistical old lady visitorto the prison. After struggling with his emotions for a minute, he burstout, "Yah! he bit the guard!" This dialogue was overheard, and enchantedthe whole penitentiary for months. 

But one reflects that, whatever humane or lovable traits prisoners mayexhibit, they are after all criminals! The existence in a lost soul ofgood qualities or impulses side by side with evil ones has long beenrecognized. 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 hasmore than a touch of it, our contemporary fiction-mongers sentimentalizeover it, and the train-robber in the movies usually has a full line ofsterling virtues up his sleeve. The lost soul, in short, brims over, upon occasion, with the wine of regeneration. Therefore (so runs themoral) let us of the elect furbish up our charity, and be as toleranttoward this non-human class of people as may be consistent with our ownsafety and respectability. Scraps of our own lustrous impeccability havesomehow found their way into them, and we cannot afford wholly todisavow them, in spite of their wretched lodgings. 

This phariseeism is so inveterate with us, that I may fairly say thatone 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 usthat these men are no more lost souls than we are--are, in fact, wovenout of the same yarn and cut from the same cloth. And from this samevantage ground it also gradually dawns upon us that, in one respect atleast, the aggregate in a jail is better than the same number of mentaken haphazard from the city streets. For the former have now laidaside self-righteousness and dissimulation, which are of the essence ofour unrestrained civil life: "I killed a man, yes; I robbed a bank, Ipicked a pocket, I lived off a woman, I swindled my stockholders, Icounterfeited a banknote. " No disguise here--no evasion. 

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

So, instead of condescending, with supercilious eyebrows and spotlessbroadcloth, to concede that these unfortunate members of a non-humanclass sometimes betray traces of saving grace after all, it might betterbecome you to wish that some of their saving graces appertained toyourself. At your best showing, you are a pharisee and a hypocrite, andhe 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 inmy cell, or watching the endless gray-blue files shuffle past me ontheir way to and from meals. It was of small help or significance that Iclaimed innocence of the particular offense that happened to be chargedagainst me; I was as indistinguishable from these men in heart as I wasin 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 thescapegoat 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 "TheOld War-horse of Salvation, " or some such title. He had his whitewaistcoat, his raucous, shouting voice, his phrases, his anecdotes, his"my men, " "my friends, " "fellows"; his "I'm saved, I hope, and you canbe!" Oh, the phariseeism of that "I hope!" At the end of his uproar, hecalled upon those of his hearers (we had all sat quite silent andimpassive during the performance) who were willing to be saved, to standup in their places. All the stool pigeons arose (poor devils), and a fewother bewildered persons who fancied it expedient to be on the side ofthe angels, "Thank you--thank you--thank you!" hoarsely cried theexhorter, naively accepting their response as a personal compliment tohimself. 

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

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

I wish to emphasize this dropping of the mask--this stop put toposturing and pretending--this going forth in rude nakedness beforeone's fellows. The man in the church pew chants out with the rest of thecongregation, "We are sinners, desperately wicked, and there is nohealth in us;" but he says it with his tongue in his cheek, and fittinghis mask on only the more tightly. Or the man "convinced of sin" on theanxious seat at the revivalist meeting frenziedly accuses himself of allthe sins in the decalogue, but finds protection in the very generalityand promiscuity of his confession, which includes and at the same timeconceals the particular fact that he robbed the till and got away withit. We seldom hear of a penitent of this kind being indicted by a GrandJury, tried, convicted and jailed on the basis of his salvationoutcries. He talks figuratively. 

There is nothing dramatic or hysterical in the attitude of the felon inhis cell. He robbed the till, he admits to you; but he does not drag inthe 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 theexpectation of getting a clean bill of health on his entire life-account(the empty till included) from a good natured Savior not too keen aboutdetails. He tells you, as a rule, "I was foolish and took too manychances!" or, "If I'd handled the thing by myself, instead of admittinga partner, it would have been all right;" or, "Oh, of course, I was adamned fool; what's the use of bucking up against the fly cops!" In thecase of a murder, it might be, "I'm sorry I killed him, but I guess anyfellow would have done the same in my case. "

Duration of confinement does not modify this attitude; the man of tenyears says the same as the man of ten months, except--and the exceptionis worth noting--that the former's moral sense, whatever he originallyhad of it, has been blunted or discouraged, and he has conceived asettled animosity against human authority, and disbelief in the justiceand sincerity of its administrators. He has been the subject, during hisincarceration, of such numberless acts of gratuitous tyranny, outrageand 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 findno other recommendation for it, and is prone to the secret convictionthat honesty itself is somehow only a cleverer way of cheating. 

Such a state of mind is bred by prison experience--not otherwise. Prisonobstructs or altogether closes every door to genuine moral reform inprisoners. 

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

With a few such exceptions, prisoners are unrepentant except forbusiness reasons--that is, either because they recognize that crime doesnot pay, or in order to influence in their favor the pardoning power. Many of them, of course, employ their prison opportunities to devise newcrimes and to train fresh recruits from the younger convicts. Men whohave been imprisoned more than once lose hope of anything better thantransient freedom; they know they will be prevented by the police fromearning an honest livelihood, and that they must either starve or steal. They become in the end mere prison creatures, destitute of evil or ofgood, active or passive. 

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

There is a sense of brotherhood, long since unfamiliar to humanintercourse under usual conditions, but welcome even at the cost ofconditions such as these. The truth gradually emerges to ourconsciousness--it is not the evil in us that kills brotherhood, but thevain, unending effort to make the evil seem good. Now our eyes meet oneanother's frankly; the skilfullest counterfeit was worse than the worstreality. There is nothing in us to be proud of, but something to bethankful for. Society has done its worst to us; but it could not takeaway from us our mutual kindliness, or the qualities that justify it. Weare 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 uponthe prisoner, or of inducing him to hate crime and to turn to good. Revenge, of course, is officially discredited nowadays, though it ispractised as actively as ever under guises more or less civilized; butthe pretense of moral reform by penal imprisonment is becoming toopreposterous to be tolerated much longer. On the contrary, prisonrenders the great aggregate of prisoners collectively self-conscious;the goats find themselves, and are forced into antagonism with the sheepnot only as individuals but as a body. They make common cause together, and in obscure ways achieve a degree of organization. They learn toregard the community not as better than themselves, but as moresuccessful pensioners of fortune; they fear them because the advantageof numbers is on their side, but they hate them because they feel, either justly or unjustly, that they have suffered injustice at theirhands, and they will prey upon them when opportunity serves not onlyfrom the original motive of physical need, but from the additional andmore sinister one, bred in prison, of retaliation for the wrong donethem. 

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

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

I learned his story. In the settlement of a small estate of which he wasan heir, a sister of his had obtained money that belonged to him, andwhen asked to restore it to him, had refused to do so. After somefruitless negotiation, he got angry, and sent her through the mails amessage containing violent expressions of reproach and animosity. Theyoung woman took this paper to a United States marshal, who brought itto the attention of the district attorney, with the result that thebrother was indicted under some law of libel or of obscene matter, wasarrested, tried, and convicted, and sentenced to Atlanta penitentiaryfor five years. After he had been lodged in his cell, his sisterrepented of her action, and sought to have him freed; but the law doesnot recognize such changes of heart, and the brother must serve out histime. 

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

Review your own life, and discover whether you have ever stood in theshadow of a similar catastrophe. Were you ever angry with a relative orwith 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 histable with his life ruined. Only, he happened to write his anger, andthe sister happened to show it to a lawyer, and the machine was set inmotion which no repentance or forgiveness or remorse can stop. But themachine does not increase the culprit's fault, and for such a fault thelegal penalty may be five years in jail. You are not so remote from thesubterranean brotherhood as you may have supposed. 

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

VII

THE MEN ABOVE

The men below would like to feel respect for the men above, even if itbe a respect married to fear. It is more humiliating to be dominated byworthless creatures, of no character or genuine manhood, whose authorityis effective only because it happens to be the tool through which worksthe irresistible power of a government, than to obey men of nativeenergy and force, captains as well of their own souls as of the bodiesof their subjects. The despotism of a cur is revolting, and rouses thewild beast in the victims. Those responsible for its infliction insulthuman nature. 

As far as I have had opportunity to observe, or have been informed, thedespotism of the cur in our jails, and in those of other countriesperhaps (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 tostimulate. It awakens a thirst for savage retaliation which hate alonedoes not produce. Moreover, weak and cowardly tyrants are always morecruel than courageous and masculine ones, and they do not observe anyconsistent line of conduct; in the intervals of their debauches ofbrutality they are oily and ingratiating, make favorites, offerpusillanimous apologies, protest humane intentions, and allege absurdexcuses for past outrages. A brute is bad enough, and we are all brutesat bottom; but a brute who covers his hyena snarl with the smug mask ofa saint is monstrous and detestable. 

The wardens of many of our jails are double men. Behind the imposingfaçade of their physical aspect we detect an uneasy, hurried, shrewdlycontriving little creature, quite incommensurate with the materialbodily structure built up for his concealment and protection. He willnot come out in the open, but seeks some advantage, plans to get behindus and execute some cunning coup-de-theater, while our suspicions arelulled by the hospitable and comfortable glow of the exterior. In hisdealings with the convicts as a body, he is apt to imitate Macbeth'switches, and keep the word of promise to the ear, but break it to thehope; he has vanity without self confidence, lacks the truthfulness ofthe strong, his voice does not resound and compel, he dances andfidgets, grins and is grave in the same instant. If the men's attitudebe sullen, he tries to be bluff and hearty, "my-boys" them, claps themheartily on the shoulder, or lapses into whining and gushing. It is allof worse than no avail with these undeceivable readers of character. Itis a curious effect of the working of esprit de corps in jails that theprisoners 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 typemay show more of his real nature, especially if the prisoner be one ofthe 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 writeher just one letter?" implored a prisoner who had just got news of thefatal illness of his wife. Picture the situation--two human beings faceto face, one helpless and in agony, the other with absolute power! Theofficial faced the man deliberately, with an amused smile. "I can, " hesaid, 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 thatofficial's sake, to hate mankind, and to curse God and die? But youperhaps believe that convicts have no human feelings, and that they arecheerful 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 smallimportance. And if I do not instance the conduct of those honest andmanly officials who are to be found here and there, it is because thepublic is already informed concerning them; their deeds do not seekdarkness, but are visible by their own light. It is the rascals that wedo not hear about, or if we do, it is through reports of press agents innewspapers and otherwise, who are mere mouthpieces for the lyingself-praise of the rascals themselves. 

While I was in jail, I had access, by a fortunate circumstance, to theannual reports to the Department of several wardens of prisons invarious states, and was able to compare their stories of themselves withthe accounts given me by prisoners who had lived under them and with myown first hand knowledge of prison conditions, which, with a few shiningexceptions, are so terribly and remorselessly alike the civilized worldover. After making every allowance for the different point of view ofmaster and slave, it was very plain that the author of the report wasnot merely prevaricating, or coloring his facts to render themacceptable to his superiors, but was lying outright often, both directlyand by omissions. He would pose as a broad-minded and compassionatefather to his inmates, when all the time he was subjecting them to crueland needless severities and tortures. There was one man, who has latelyresigned, I believe, full of years and honors, whose addresses at themeetings of federal wardens were almost angelic in tone and tenor, whowas in fact notorious among persons who had actual knowledge of hisofficial conduct as one of the most remorseless tyrants toward the menin contemporary prison annals. Many men of bad conduct may be excused onthe plea that they are ignorant--know no better; but this man was anintelligent student of penology, and knew exactly how wicked and wantonhe was. He was an innocent baby once upon a time, and might have grownup to be no worse a man than is the estimable person who now reads theselines; but he took up prison work, and the atmosphere of crime, andpreoccupation with it, and the license to use arbitrary powers, made adevil of him. It is a common story. 

Another series of reports showed a man who, beginning as a reactionaryof an extreme type, advocating the most ruthless measures towardconvicts, finally felt the pressure of the wave of prison reform whichis gathering force just now, and adjusted his reports and addresses soas to make himself appear as a leading apostle of the new ideas. Butthough his public professions changed, the chief difference in hispractises was that, from having been undisguised, they became secret, and so far as circumstances permitted, he acted, and permitted orencouraged his subordinates to act as cruelly as before. However, a newdeputy warden was presently appointed, with more liberal ideas, andendowed with large powers, and for a while the condition of theprisoners improved; the warden, with his ear to the ground, and his eyeon the handwriting on the wall, deftly adjusting himself to thesituation, and industriously claiming for himself credit for allbetterments introduced by the deputy--who, having no press agent, wasforced to stand inactively by and see his honest credit filched awayfrom him--in public opinion, at least. Of course, the prisoners knewperfectly well on which leg the boot was. But prisoners cannot makethemselves heard outside the jail. 

Accordingly, this warden, whose methods I know well, is now quoted as asignal champion of the new and more merciful dispensation, though onlytwo or three years ago, according to his own personally written andsigned reports, he was for keeping prisoners practicallyincommunicado--dead to the world; writing and receiving letters to benearly 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 hishealth, 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 bringresults--of a kind. Shall we believe that this man's professions of achange of heart are genuine? or feel surprise to discover that at thevery moment he is receiving visitors in his commodious office upstairs, and purring out to them his fatherly affection for his prisoners, anddenying that the old, bad methods of repression any longer aretolerated, there are miserable wretches being hung up by the wrists indark and noisome cells under his feet?

Regarding the personnel of the officials at Atlanta I can for obviousreasons 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 ofmiddle age, a good deal of a martinet, but the men are inclined to likehim 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 prisondoctor, the steward of the commissary department, and the paroleofficer, and under them are the guards and the "snitches"--the latternot being officially recognized, although they wield an importantinfluence, their reports against their fellow prisoners being seriouslyconsidered, and often made the basis of action by their superiors, whichhas no small effect upon the welfare of the jail. Yet these poorwretches--they are mostly negroes--sell their brethren for a mess ofpottage of secret favors and immunities; none save the most abject wouldaccept such employment. Could any inspiration or procedure be moreinsecure? Yet it is an essential factor in the present principle ofprison management. 

The guards are, with some exceptions, such a body of men as might beexpected from their salary--seventy dollars a month, with no raise forlength of service or meritorious conduct. They cannot be rated as highas the average police officer, and the conditions amid which they liveare so unfavorable to manly development that it is small wonder theygrow worse as they grow older in service. They either dislike the menand use them accordingly, or they make secret compacts with them forsurreptitious favors, which undermine discipline and corrupt such moralsas prisoners may be supposed to possess. Often, however, they willsolicit favors from prisoners, and, when the latter seek someaccommodation in return, grin in their face, or austerely threaten toreport them. Their brutality is sometimes quite whimsical andunexpected, --the outcome of some personal dislike, without bearing onthe prisoner's conduct, --though they are voluble in assigning somealleged infraction of the rules, should a superior happen to call themto account. And the superior, I may almost say, never believes theprisoner against a guard, or rather, never acts upon such belief. Thatis the settled policy of the penitentiary; the warden himself has placedhimself on record numerous times to the effect that under nocircumstances 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. Itfollows naturally that guards never scruple to give full rein to anyanimosity they may privately feel against a man, knowing that they willbe able to "put it across" with the higher official to whom complaintmay 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 lessthan his own, a poor half demented youth, whose dementia wasunfortunately wont to express itself in foul or abusive language, whichcame from him almost involuntarily, without any particular personalapplication. The two men were half way down the final flight of steps, when, without any visible pretext, but, I presume, on account of someunlucky epithet or utterance let fall by the convict, the guard suddenlyseized the youth violently by the throat, hammered his head against thewall, and dragged him headlong down the rest of the descent. They werenow in the corridor; the man, bewildered and giddy, was whirled roundand shoved to the head of another short flight of steps leading out tothe yard; the door was open. The guard came behind him, caught him bythe collar, and exerting his strength, hurled him through the door; hefell prone on the ground, and lay there. 

Here, my own view of the incident was cut off; but ten minutes afterwardI met a comrade, who, bristling with wrath, described the continuationof 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 groundand shoved him, staggering, toward the isolation building on the otherside 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 guardwas by this time too much blinded by his own passion to notice them; theother laughed, and apparently reassured the visitors. Upon nearing theisolation 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 manput 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 thedeputy's office, as if he were a dangerous giant struggling to get away, though, in fact, he was quite helpless and partly insensible. Fromthere, as we learned later, he was taken to a dark cell, charged with Iknow not what misdeeds, and nothing was ever done to either of thelicensed 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 somenotion of what jails mean. An episode which, as it turned out, hadelements of the ridiculous, but which came within a hair's breadth ofhaving very fatal consequences, occurred a short time before I became aninmate; it is still spoken of with emotion by those who participated init. 

A large number of prisoners, some twenty or more, I think, werecollected in one of the basement work-rooms, when a fire broke outthere. The smoke soon became suffocating, and crept up into the rangesabove, alarming the whole prison. But conditions in the room itself wereimmediately intolerable; the door had been locked, and the men werejammed 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 guardin the corridor above, a huge, burly personage, with the brains, itwould be flattery to say, of a calf, and exceedingly punctilious in hisnotions, came down the stairs to see what was the matter. One of the menshouted out to him, forgetting decorum in the desperate hurry of themoment, "Why don't you open the door, you ---- ---- ----?" Now, it wasnot only against the rules that the door should be opened betweencertain hours, but it was altogether irregular and intolerable tomiscall an official. The guard stopped short. "Who's that called me a----?" he demanded indignantly. But there was none to answer him, forthe 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 callout, seeing the guard below him. "I'm trying to find out, " replied thelatter, "who it was called me a ----. " The higher official wasunderstood to say something which penetrated the hide of hissubordinate, and stirred him at last to action--not a moment too soon. The door was unlocked, and the captives tumbled and crawled out. Theburly personage, who rated punctilio and seemly language above the livesof men, still retains his position in the corridor; but the prisoner whohad 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 motivesand with an exceptional endowment of intelligence and humane feeling, itwill steadily deteriorate a man; from being at the start to allpractical purposes a social derelict, incompetent for productiveemployment, and often suffering from an incurable disease, he will sinklower and lower in the scale of manhood and morality. He has two chiefaims in life--to requite himself upon defenseless convicts for thekicking-out bestowed upon himself by the community; and to get anincrease of pay. 

I had not been three days in the prison, when one of them came to me inmy cell and asked me to write for him a letter to the Department urginga raise of salary. So be it by all means, if higher pay will get bettermen; 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 rulesgoverning guards are explicit, but so far at least as they regardtreatment of prisoners they are freely disregarded. For example, guardsare forbidden by the rules to address prisoners insultingly, to applynames or epithets to them, to lay hands upon them or to strike them"upon whatever provocation" unless they believe their own lives are indanger. A rabbit has as much chance of throttling a bulldog as theordinary prisoner of endangering the life of a guard; yet hardly aprisoner in the penitentiary has not repeatedly either undergone orwitnessed, or both, insults and physical violence offered by guards tothe men. As to the impropriety of asking favors of the men, the guardsmight plead distinguished precedent for it. One of the higher officialsof the penitentiary summoned me to his office one morning. He informedme that he intended to devote his life to prison work, but that he wasstill a young man, and that advancement was slow and difficult. "Whenyou were outside, you lived in society, and knew a lot of big men, " hewas kind enough to say; "you will be going out of here again beforelong. If you should find it in your way to speak a good word for me inquarters where it would be likely to do me good, I should appreciateit. " I should perhaps have premised, lest he appear in the light ofasking something for nothing, that he had opened the conversation byhanding back to me the Ingersoll watch of which I had been deprived onentering the institution. I knew that my young friend and benefactor wasdeep in the darksome intricacies of prison politics, and was just thengetting rather the worst of it; but I was unable to give him anypositive 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 andprison politics are, indeed, twin curses of our whole prison system. Inspite of all the specious official promises of reward for good conductin the form of parole and obedience to the rules, every prisoner knowsthat they are apples of Sodom; the most correct conduct, maintained foryears, 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 forhim. An official's pet snitch enjoys all manner of indulgences in theway of food and freedoms, and if he be an intelligent fellow, he canride on his superior's neck and influence his conduct to a surprisingdegree. Again, certain guards, in the eyes of their superiors, can do nowrong whatever wrong they do; and others, who are apt to be men whoretain some conscientious notions as to their duties, find their pathdifficult. Some guards, too, though they may be obnoxious to theirofficers, are not dismissed because they know too much, and might revealuncomfortable facts were they cashiered. I could name an example ofthis--a young guard who, a few years ago, committed a cold blooded crimeupon a convict, for which in the outside world he would have been liableto a hanging. But the prison authorities did not find it expedient topunish him, and he still saunters about the prison, with his cap tiltedon his head, and his rifle. He is a good shot, and is employed a gooddeal on the towers, where quick marksmanship might be useful. He knowstoo much. 

Evil conditions breed evil deeds and dangerous secrets. Conditions haveimproved somewhat during the last two or three years, but theimprovement has been more outward than inward. One day, two or threeyears ago, suddenly appeared at the gates the Attorney-General fromWashington. He had not been looked for so early. He walked straight intothe dining-room, where he noticed a number of convicts standing up withtheir 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 forexamination. "How long are you kept there?" "From seven in the morningtill 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 friendof convicts; but when he saw--and smelt!--this comparatively slightinstance of prison discipline, his gorge rose. He ordered all theculprits to the kitchen for a meal, and issued an edict against thispunishment, and against some other things that he discovered. What hewould have done had he seen the dark cells, and the condition of the menwho had been kept there for a few months, may be conjectured. The publicis indeed assured that the use of these cells has long beendiscontinued; but seven or eight hundred prisoners know that, as late aslast October, a certain convict commonly referred to as "the oldEnglishman" was hung up by the wrists in one of them. And there wereothers. 

Prison officials are political appointees, whose controlling aim musttherefore be the security and prosperity of themselves, and onlyafterward (if at all) the welfare and just and decent treatment of theconvicts. They have their salaries (niggardly enough if we regard thework they are supposed to do, but affluent in view of what they actuallydo), and they have the government appropriations for expenses andsupplies for the penitentiary, which they are expected to handleeconomically. But economy, and decent and humane treatment of prisonersin a jail, are incompatible, even were the men kept steadily andproductively at work under proper conditions, and paid for what theyproduced. A jail properly administered would be one of the mostexpensive 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 balancein favor of the government, may depend upon holding his position, andnobody considers the mortal tears, misery and outrage from which thatfavorable balance is derived. For not only if it be wisely and honestlyexpended is the supply of money insufficient, but much of it is wastedby mere ignorance, negligence and incompetence, and much more of it--asrecent exposures in newspapers indicate--leaks away in the form ofgraft. For all this waste the convict must pay in privations andcruelties not authorized or contemplated by a government none tooconsiderate at best; and men above grow fat and rosy gilled. 

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

Do miracles occur in jails, after having been so long discontinuedelsewhere? Or must we at last realize that the comfort and soft livingof a handful of rascals is obtained at the cost of the flesh and bloodand despair of thousands of men--I believe there are five hundredthousand convicts in this country annually--gagged and helpless, to whomwe give the name of convicts, but who, whatever their crimes, are stillour own flesh and blood, brothers of ours, our own very selves but forspecial circumstances for which we can claim no merit; but for theirsouls and lives we are responsible, and to strive to redeem and succorthem our own intelligent self-interest should prompt us to spend andlabor lavishly. Instead of that, our habitual attitude toward them isthat of indifference or even hostility. For why should we honest peoplewaste our good money and precious sympathy on a convict? Has he notalready robbed us enough?

It would be a shallow thing to hold up as monsters of hardheartednessand depravity the officials who have been entrusted with the conduct ofour prisons. If they do wickedly and corruptly, it is not because theyare to begin with preterhuman sinners, but because we summoned them toduties far above their capacity and training, which involve temptationsand provocations which they lack will and power to resist, which givethem power over fellow creatures which the most magnanimous and purestmen might hesitate to assume, and which inevitably plunge men who arenot magnanimous or pure into deeds of injustice, dishonor andinhumanity. In a sense, the officials are no less victims of theignorance and frivolity of the community than are the prisonersthemselves. 

But, at any rate, the officials are few and the prisoners are many. Ifanything is to be done to make things better, there is more hope indealing with the officials first. After they have been driven out, andtheir places filled with honorable and enlightened men, who will atleast administer the law as it stands with integrity and judgment, weshall be in a better position to consider whether the law itself bebeyond criticism, and its penalties justly and prudently devised. Crimeas it exists is an enormous evil, and it costs us enormously; and cheapand pinchbeck methods will never rid us of it. 

VIII

FOR LIFE

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

As a matter of fact, this measuring commonly means little, andguarantees nothing at all. Indeed, it has rather the appearance of apleasant jest of the authorities--one of the cat-and-mouse plays withprisoners with which every old timer is familiar. One would say theauthorities find amusement, amid the monotonous round of theiravocations, in thus stimulating hopes which they know are not likely tobe fulfilled. "Come, here is a heart not yet thoroughly broken; let ustry another blow at it!" Days, weeks, months, drag tediously by, andnothing more is heard of the parole, or of the suit of new clothes. Theyhave never been made up, or if they by chance have been, they are putaway to gather dust on a shelf underground; they are old clothesnow--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 sittingin a certain chair amid the other tailor prisoners, stitching awayperfunctorily at a piece of goods. I call him a man, but he looked, tomy fancy, like an ancient frog, or the semblance of what had once been afrog, from which, however, all the impulses and juices that had made himalive had slowly leaked away, until nothing but the shell was left. Hewas a pithless automaton, in whom mind and emotions had long sincebecome inert, and only enough sensibility was left to enable him to feeldimly miserable. Who was he--or, better, who had he been? I learned thatfor 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 prisonclothing. Seven years! But was he capable of no other employment? Mighthe not have been given the relief of a change? Maybe; but what would bethe 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 itssorrows, in the retrospect, were good in their way; they meantsomething. And you look forward to happier things in the future; it willbe a long and on the whole a successful future perhaps. Think of thevariety and the opportunity which this great, multiform, breathing worldholds 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 gloriousthing, the God-given birthright of all men. It is the molding ofcharacter, the endless, stimulating struggle, the growing sense of humanbrotherhood, the faces and hands of our fellow creatures, the longer, deeper thoughts aroused by the slow revelations of experience as to theplan of human destiny, --and therefore are the words well chosen whichcondemn a man like yourself to penal servitude "for life"?

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

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

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

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

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

The warden sat serene in his office, attending to business as a goodofficial should, writing reports to the Department which testified tohis 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 jauntilyabout, cocking their caps and making their clubs dance at the end of thecords; eight hundred unsightly felons, who had once been men like youand me, filed drearily in to their meals, and out again, the worse forthe experience; and all the while, from morning till night, Dennis saton the corner of his cot in the hospital room, waiting for the news ofhis release. He felt, and said, at first, that it was sure to come; itwould come in a day or two, or at the end of the week anyway; or at thebeginning of the week after. He knew his application had been accepted;of course, those big officials had lots to do, and could not be expectedto attend to him at once; but they would not forget him. 

For several weeks--a month or two--Dennis kept up his spirits well; hehad 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 werestill living, however, and he was full of plans for his future life withthem; what he would do, where he would live, how happy they all would betogether, after that separation. But one day as he sat on his cot, orpaced 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 dieeasily. Dennis had his daughters left to him still; and the release wassure to come now--they would not surely delay it any longer. He had beena tall, powerful mulatto when he first came to prison; he was a gaunt, bent skeleton of a man now, with great, bony, strengthless hands, thatclosed round mine with a sort of appealing, lingering pressure when wemet, as if he feared to let go his hold upon a man who was sorry forhim. The doctor knew--any competent physician, at least, might haveknown--that he could not last much longer; but the doctor said nothingand did nothing. Then--for the stars in their courses seemed to fightagainst 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, wasnow alone in the world, and still in prison. 

Time had gone by; it was six months since he had begun to look forfreedom. What would freedom mean for him now, with no one in the worldto go to or to be with? Probably he gave up looking for it at thispoint; at any rate, he spoke of it no more. He spoke very little afterthat, and he very seldom rose from his seat on the corner of his cot, ortook notice of any one or of anything in the hospital room. He satthere, day after day, all day long, with his eyes fixed upon a certainpoint of vacancy; what he saw, what he thought, no one knew. His handslay before him on his bony knees, lax and inert. Half a lifetime inprison, and now he was nearing the end, mute and motionless, making nocomplaint or protest--the power for that had gone by. He no longer spokeof parole; and no parole came. No doubt, the great officials were busy, and what was Dennis that they should remember him, and draw out thatpaper from its pigeonhole, and sign it, and send it to him? The worldcould 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 backedup to the door, and the box with the gray old corpse in it was shoved inand driven round to the prison burying ground and dumped into its redclay hole. There it lies; but I am not sure that that is the end ofDennis. A time may be coming, after this earthly show is over, whenpersons who were so much pressed for time that they could find no momentto sign a paper to save a fellow man's life, may see him again underawkward circumstances, and be asked to explain. Justice, after all, isan Immortal, and belongs to eternity. We should beware of measuring, bythe apparent slowness of her movements on this lower plane, thelikelihood of her final victory. 

If you have some imagination to spare, put yourself in the place of aconvict who finds himself, to-day, facing a sentence of imprisonment forlife. The imagination of it, even, is so appalling that you will needmore than common courage to picture it to yourself. What, then, must thereality of it be? It is hard to understand how any human heart and braincan withstand the prospect of it. If it has not stopped your heart atonce--if your brain has not immediately collapsed under the shock--youwill think of suicide. But, perhaps, before you can find means orresolution to seek that escape, you will become conscious, in thebackground of your mind, of a stirring of that almost ineradicable thingthat we call hope. You cannot quite bring yourself to believe that yourentire earthly future is to be passed in a prison cell. Some event willoccur, some beneficent freak of destiny, some earthquake or lightningbolt, some national revolution or catastrophe, some belated sense ofhumanity in your brother man, some new law repealing the impious crueltyof the old law, that will break your bars before the end can come. Youcannot believe that you will actually live and die in jail. 

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

But I am merely speculating in the direction of truths that I do notknow and cannot reach. The lifers themselves whom I knew could tell menothing; they were less demonstrative than the men of five or ten years'sentence. We can never fathom the dealings of the Almighty with Hiscreatures, and they, perhaps, can fathom them as little as we can. Inways inconceivable to us, they are supported. 

There was a little old man known as Uncle Billy. If the parole board haskept 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 resultof a shot through the arm from his own gun while he was getting out of abuggy. He lived in Oklahoma, Indian Territory, at the time of his story. Billy was married to a woman who must have had some attractiveness, fora journeying pedler, who periodically passed through the region, formeda liaison with her. There was at that time a daughter, who had justreached marriageable age. The pedler was wont practically to put Billyout of his own house during his sojourns, and usurped his place asmaster of the household. At one time he secured Billy's conviction onsome minor offense, and had him jailed for six months. What Billythought of the situation I don't know; he was a small, slight man, underfive foot three, and of an intellectual cast. But he seems not to haveattempted active measures, until one day he discovered that the pedler, not satisfied with the wife, was attempting the seduction of thedaughter likewise. 

Then, one night, Billy came to his house, and found that going on whichhis patience could not tolerate. He got hold of an ax, and, stealinginto 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 isnot known. Billy, I believe, was for giving himself up to theauthorities at once; but the woman prevailed upon him to conceal thedeed. She tied the body to the tail of the horse, and dragged it acrossthe fields to a ditch, where she covered it with dirt and rubbish. Thereit lay for some weeks, until a couple of men out hunting saw an end of asuspender sticking out of the ground, and pulling at it, discovered themurdered corpse. Billy confessed, and he and his wife were lodged injail pending their trial. The woman died there; but Billy was tried andconvicted, and in consideration of the peculiar circumstances, was "letoff" with a life sentence. When I knew him, he had been in a cell nearlyfifteen years. 

The weather was chilly; some of the prisoners were let out in the yardevery day at one o'clock, to pace round in a ring for forty minutes. Isaw the little, bent, thin old man, with one arm, hobbling round andround with his cane. Conversation was not permitted under the rules, butthe rule was often overlooked. After I had gained an outline of hisstory from some old timers, I spoke to him, and he looked up at me witha pair of singularly intelligent brown eyes, and with a kindlyexpression of his meager little face. We conversed a little on generalsubjects, and I found him well educated, observant, thoughtful, with adistinct vein of subdued humor. Afterward I saw him in his cell, thoughthere 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 knifemade out of a nail hammered flat and the edge sharpened, and a piece ofbroken glass. It was admirably fashioned, and except that it was notvarnished, would have been taken for such an instrument as you buy in ashop; its tone, too, was pleasing, and Billy could discourse excellentmusic on it. It was in the manufacture of these fiddles that his timewas passed; the fact that he had but one hand to work with did notembarrass him. His contrivance for playing on the instrument was asremarkable as the instrument itself; he had rigged up a sort of jury armof wood and metal, with an elbow to it, and a grip to lay hold of thebow. Persons who play on violins will doubtless be more puzzled than Iwas to conceive how he could do it; but he did it. And for aught I couldsee, he was content with his singular industry; it gave him constantoccupation and enabled him, I suppose, to keep thoughts of other thingsout of the way. Otherwise, he was utterly unobtrusive, almost invisible, and the guards let him alone. But the government of the United Stateshad kept him there for fifteen years, as a menace to society. You cansee him in fancy, had he been set free for doing what most human beingsmust have done, ranging up and down the country, dealing out terror andslaughter. Such wild beasts must be restrained. They must be disciplinedand reformed, and jail is the way to do it. 

Just before I left the jail, I spoke to Billy about his parole. "You andI will get out almost together, " I said. "No, no, " he replied, with hiscurious little humorous smile, "they can't get rid of me as easy asthat; I've got three months yet, and I'm going to stick it out to theend. " I have not heard the sequel; but I can hardly believe that theauthorities 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, aprisoner 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 againsthim was entirely circumstantial, and there was another man in the casewho seemed, to judge by the reports of the trial, to have been at leastas likely to be guilty. Bram's record in prison was wholly blameless, and though there was some opposition to freeing him, it sufficed only toobtain a delay of a few weeks beyond the date set for his release. Butduring those few weeks, his sufferings were trying to witness, and hewas near collapse before the end came. He told me that theAttorney-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'sself-control was great, and his manner always soft and ingratiating; hewas politic and prudent, and had probably resolved from the outset ofhis prison career to obtain pardon or mitigation if good conduct andunfaltering adherence to his plea of innocence could compass it. He wasgiven a job which procured him some indulgences, and was never punished. But if a life sentence for a guilty man be intolerable, what shall besaid 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 incases where the men are still in confinement, discussion of them mightprove injurious. There was a young fellow there who looked like aslender boy of seventeen; he was really over thirty years of age. But hehad been imprisoned since his fifteenth year, and his face since thenhad not developed or taken the contours of manhood; and his manner wasboyish. 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 hada distinct, emphatic way of speaking, and believed, I fancy, that he wasquite a man of the world, though, of course, he was almost totallydevoid of other than prison experience. He would have been aninteresting study, had not the pathos of his condition, of which he washimself unaware, made one shrink from probing it. 

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

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

There was at least one life prisoner in Atlanta who merits a chapter tohimself; 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, heis a warm-hearted, generous, high minded man, sentenced to death in hisboyhood for a deed which would have been properly punished by a fewmonths in a reformatory, afterward obtaining a commutation to lifeimprisonment, and now a man of more than forty years, bearing upon hisbody terrible scars of severities practised upon him for trying toresist wrongs which no manly man could tamely endure. A Balzac mightfind in him a more human and lovable _Vautrin_; a Victor Hugo could makehim the hero of another _Les Miserables_; a Charles Reade could win newrenown by summoning us to put ourselves in his place. But the bestservice I can do him now is to give him silence. He is not quitedesperate 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 theSouth, whom to set free we spent some billions of dollars and severalhundred thousand lives. It was held that the result was worth the cost. But to-day we are creating some five hundred thousand slaves, white andblack, each year--or that is about the number of made slaves each yearin the United States; it costs us several millions to keep them in anenslaved condition, and their depredations upon society, before andafter slavery, amount to several millions more. I have not the precisedata, but the figures hazarded are not excessive. A sound statisticianwould make a more sensational showing; and when he proceeded to cast uphis account for the aggregate of the years since the war, and of theestimated amounts for the coming fifty years, the bill would look largeeven with a hundred million paymasters to foot it. 

In that bill, probably the smallest item would be the cost of crimeitself--the actual loss caused to the community by the thieving ofthieves, --of the thieves, that is, who have been convicted and condemnedas such; for there is no way of figuring on how much the undetectedthieves steal. Every time we shake the social body, in this or thatspasm of probing and reform, hundreds drop out, like moths from anunprotected garment; so that at last we are prone to suspect that thethief, overt or covert, is more the rule than the exception, and that agood part of the cash in circulation was more or less dishonestly comeby. But, leaving this aside, the money or values appropriated by thievesaccredited as such and sent to jail, is an amount relativelyinconsiderable, and by no means enough to pay the expenses of theirapprehension, trial, and prison sojourn. It is, then, politicallyuneconomical to imprison them. 

The reply to this is, of course, that penal slavery is preventive ofcrime; that if we did not prosecute malefactors, crime would multiplyand abound, like weeds in a neglected garden. Perhaps it would; but thepoint is, that it multiplies and abounds even in the teeth ofprosecutions; every year the number of convictions is greater, and thejails are already cracking their seams to contain the convicts. Onemight almost conclude that prisons, as now administered, stimulate crimeinstead of preventing it, and that we are in the predicament of Herculesin the fable, who, as fast as he cut off a head of the hydra, saw twoothers sprout in its place. At which rate, we might be led on to thesurmise that it would be financially cheaper to let crime run on; thecost of our futile efforts to stop it would be saved, and might be setover against the loss from the increased annual depredations. 

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

Crime must be prevented; doubtless nine-tenths even of the men in jailwould agree to that proposition. The question is, can the jail systemprevent it? and the answer is that, judged by long experience--theexperience of thousands of years--it cannot. There are several reasonswhy it cannot, into some of which we may enquire later; but theobjection to the jail system which I wish to emphasize just now is, thatit not only makes slaves of convicts, but, unlike the more reasonablesouthern negro slavery, it makes them unproductive slaves. Either itwithholds this vast body of men from production altogether, or else itforces them to toil under conditions which bring forth results thesmallest possible and the most unsatisfactory. The men are not paid forwhat they do. Whatever profit (in "contract" prisons) accrues from theirtoil goes into the pockets of the contractors, or, perhaps, is used todefray the cost of their keep to the community. Or, again, if it is madeto appear to go into the prisoners' pockets, it is deftly taken outagain the next moment by an ingenious system of fines, which no prisonercan escape. 

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

I used to contemplate the population in the Atlanta Penitentiary--theeight hundred of us--and then look at the construction work, thegardening, the tailoring, the carpentering, the product of the forge, the farming in the prison grounds outside the walls, and the work ofclearing and grading on the area which the walls enclosed, and Imarveled at the disproportion. Eight hundred men, many of them skilledin this or that industrial employment, most of them physically capableof active labor, and almost all of them eager to work if givenintelligent and useful work to do; not a few, too, intellectually andeducationally equipped to plan and direct industrial operations; andyet, with all this great potential force at command, all that wasactually accomplished might have been done as well or better by acorporal's guard of willing and well managed men. The mere economicwaste of such material was criminal, without regard to the evil effectof inadequate or misapplied labor upon the men's moral and mental state. Can it be, I asked myself, that this extravagant idleness is forced uponthe prisoners as part, and not the least evil part of their punishment?Or is it the result of ignorance, incompetence, or indifference on thepart of those appointed and paid to take care of men sentenced to "hardlabor"?

That the men suffer from it is beyond question. And I cannot find thatthe 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, ormade not, to work. There is a legend of a warden who, being unable tokeep his prisoners otherwise busy, set them to piling up paving stoneson one side of the yard, and then taking down the pile and repiling iton the other side. After a week of this, most of them were maniacs. Itwas not the severity of the labor that destroyed their minds, but theuselessness and objectlessness of it. Sane men require reasonableemployment; idleness, or irrational work disintegrates their minds. Theywant to see and to foresee intelligible results from their toil; meretoil without such results is maddening, or it rots men's minds as scurvyrots their bodies. The reason is, that the men are human; and if youhave hitherto supposed that convicts are not human, the insanity whichso constantly follows upon prison idleness or mis-employment shouldcorrect you. 

Others may describe the horrors, almost indescribable, of contract laborin prisons; I saw nothing of that at Atlanta--type of another widespreadsystem of prison work--though I heard enough about it from men who hadundergone it in state prisons. But during the few first days of myimprisonment, I saw a building gang at work (to call it work) upon a newwing destined to contain dormitories for the inmates. It was to be aseemly structure of granite, massive and well proportioned. But afterthree days, work on it was stopped, and was not resumed until a week orso 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, onthe authority of a Texas representative, charges of graft or waste werelaid against persons concerned in the erection of this building whichseemed incredible, but of which I was able to find no refutation. Thehospital building is open to the same criticism, and another, which Ibelieve is designed to be the laundry, had got no further, at the dateof my arrival, than a square hole in the ground, and when I left hadbeen furthered by a single course of stone or cement laid round thehole. A New York contractor, graft or no graft, would have had all threeof them finished and in commission in the same time, and with no bettermaterial 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 reportof the warden's that its existence was due to his enterprise, and thathe 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 atower, containing accommodations for a guard, day and night, who watcheswith his rifle in hand, ready to shoot down any prisoner who seems to beacting suspiciously. No such shooting by a tower guard has as yet takenplace to my knowledge, and none ever will on the pretext suggested; forthe wall is absolutely unscalable; being five or six feet thick, it isimpenetrable, and its foundations going down six or eight feet belowground, it cannot be beaten by tunneling; yet the towers and the guardsare there. 

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

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

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

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

There are some forty score men behind the bars who would rejoice to beallowed 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 benefitthe men both in the doing and in the accomplishment, and it would be anexcellent advertisement of the penitentiary for the visitors who dailystroll about the enclosure; yet months and years go by and nothingwhatever is changed. 

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

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

There is dry rot or something worse everywhere; and it is difficult tobelieve that anything is gained by it either for the convict or for thecountry. It is to be sure punishment for the former, and a bad form ofpunishment, but it would be grotesque to assume that it is inflicted bydesign of our lawmakers. It cannot be that the government deliberatelyproposes to destroy convicts, mind and body; on the contrary, we mustsuppose that it wishes to reform them and render them again usefulagents in the community. There is no way to do this better than to givethem honest and productive work while in jail, so that they may acquirethe habit of such work, and be encouraged to pursue it when they getout. 

But in order to induce them to work economically, it is indispensable togive them continuous, intelligent, and manifestly useful work, and topay 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 onthe honor system, and sending squads of them out to work on farms or forcontractors, without guards or other precautions, sometimes for weeks ata time; all he asks of them is their promise to return when the job isdone, which they uniformly do. And for this work, he causes them to beregularly paid; he retains their wages for them until the term of theirimprisonment has expired, and then hands it back to them. The men areencouraged and inspirited by this treatment, and the neighbors amongwhom their work is done, seem disposed to take a helpful and cooperativeview of the enterprise. If the neighbors--the community--loses nothingby this system, and if the convicts gain by it, why should it not bemade the general practise? Convicts in Nebraska are the same sort ofpeople as those in Atlanta. 

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

Moreover, if men will go off and work without guards for three weeks ata stretch, and then return uncompelled to the prison, what is the use ofmaking them return to the prison at all, or of having any prison forthem to return to? Is not their conviction prison enough for most ofthem? 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 percent of youthful criminals are children of drunkards. " That is a seriousindictment of alcohol; but it indicts no less the policy which punishesvictims of disease as if they were deliberate and freely choosingmalefactors. 

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 formost persons who have slipped a cog in their moral machinery. Meanscould readily be found to make such persons recognizable at need, andthey would have as great a stimulus to render themselves free from thatstigma as they have now, and far better opportunities for doing it. Theywould have their families with them, or within touch, and they would nolonger be slaves; and if they had been slaves to their own passions andpropensities, the expediency of breaking such chains would become farmore obvious than it ever can be when a guard and a warden is alwaysround the corner waiting to club or dungeon them for infringement of awhimsical prison rule. It does not help a man to his manhood to see hiskeepers acting constantly the part of tyrants and torturers. 

This is perhaps a novel doctrine, because, as the editorial writer inthe _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 notknow anything rational to do with him, and will not take the pains tofind out. " We lack imagination to devise more effective treatment, andwe are wonderfully ignorant as to what prison treatment really means. And this indictment lies not only against the public at large, butagainst the Department of Justice and the Congress, who pass theirjudgments and inflict their penalties without in the least understandingwhat they are doing to human bodies and souls like their own. 

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

I was looking out of the window of the Isolation Building one day, withthe runner, Ned, beside me; I did my writing there, and he was assignedfor duty to the same building. Ned, to whom I have already referred, wasa thoughtful young man, and often said a word that went to the center ofthe subject. We had no business, of course, to be conversing together, but the guard was absent for the moment. We were watching the convictsform 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 marshaledto go to the stone-shed, about fifty yards away. There they would remaintill evening, chipping away at blocks of granite, and breathing the dustcreated by their labor. 

The stone-shed men were mostly recruited from the so-called hard casesamong the convicts; the work was hard, and rapid-fire guards weregenerally picked to take care of them. A man had been shot to deaththere about five years before by a guard, on no better grounds than thatthe man had not moved quickly enough in response to an order. No actionagainst 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 inthe construction of the buildings already mentioned; and they are alsoemployed at times, by no regulation to be found in any of the books, todo odd jobs for members of the prison force; as when, for example, theywere required to turn out a monument for the wife or other relative of aguard who had died, and for whom he was unable to provide a suitablememorial at his own expense. For whatever purpose the stone work isdone, legitimate or illegitimate, the workers are not enthusiastic aboutit, and probably not many of them will live long enough, at least inprison, to see their handiwork in practical use. 

Arrayed near them was another file, destined to work on the groundsbelonging to the prison outside the warden's famous wall, whereturnips, potatoes, corn and other vegetables are grown. Thevegetables grow--it can hardly be said that they are cultivated; Idon't know what a New York market gardener would say to them. Theygrow, 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 youwrite a piece in our paper about the aimlessness of prison work?Aimless--that's what it is! How can a fellow feel interested in whathe's doing, when he never knows what he's doing it for, or whatbecomes 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 welearn here. Did you ever think what a prison would be if there wasany common sense aim in anything? Those fellows could make this placethe finest thing you could imagine, if they were taken hold of bysomebody with common sense, and put on jobs that had any sense inthem. But they are kept dawdling around, and never know where they'reat. It kills 'em--that's what it does! You'd think a criminal wouldbe taught anything but aimlessness; it was aimlessness that got himhere in the first place, nine times out of ten. 

"Why, take what goes on in the printing office that you were assignedto, for instance, " he went on, with a sidelong grin at me. "You have amonth to get out the paper, four to six pages large quarto. How longwould 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 timestwenty-four hours. They are in a cellar underground, with the air thathasn't been changed in years, and the heat-pipes making it worse. Theirhealth can't stand it--you know that--but there they've got to stayevery day from eight till half after four, pottering round with theirtypes and proofs and stuff, and trying to drag it along till time'sup--what's the good of it to anybody? It's the same everywhere; look atthe tailorshop! Those fellows sit and fool around there, with the guardslinging language at 'em every few minutes, and taking an hour to sew ahem six inches long; and all the time here's you and me wearing clothesthat were new maybe five or six years ago, as you may see by the numbersthat have been stamped on your back and then blotted out, and were worn, since then, by some poor devil with tuberculous trouble or worse; butthey'll be worn out for fair before we get any others. Why, look at yourpants! They're split all down the leg, and there's your knee stickingout of the hole! The prison authorities call that economy, may be; whatdo you call it?"

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

"Look at that power house, that's kept going night and day, the yearround, 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 otherday, and there was all kinds of machines going, lathes, and I don't knowwhat; you'd think by the noise of them they was building the Ark atleast. But I nosied round, and couldn't find anybody that seemed to beworking much. At last I came to one of the big steam lathes, and therewas a man that looked to be busy about something, so I went up to watchhim. Well, what do you think he was doing? He was making one of thesehere little sticks that a fellow cleans his nails with! The power housewas burning tons of coal, and everything humming, and that was what cameout of it all. A nail stick! What do you think of that?"

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

Not that it is wholly without benefit to anybody, either. Good clothesare made in the tailor shop, but they are not worn by convicts. At leastone excellent dwelling house has been made by prisoners, but it isoccupied by a high prison official. Unexceptionable meals are cooked inthe convict kitchen, but convicts do not eat them. There is an admirableand productive kitchen garden attached to the prison, but its contentsnever appear on convict tables. There is a fine lawn, diversified withbrilliant flower-beds, in front of the main prison building, and it isgreatly admired by visitors and passers-by; but the convict sees ittwice only during his term--once when he is brought into the prison, andagain when he is led out. On neither occasion is he, perhaps, in thebest 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 theprisoners. There is nothing flower-like in that. 

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

But a system of work of which that at Atlanta is a type (and, alas! thetype is far too numerous) is anomalous and abominable; it is aimless, and abhorrent to man, God and devil alike. It is difficult to absolvesuch 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 byit. 

X

OUR BROTHER'S KEEPER

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

But mercy is of higher birth. Animals know nothing of it; savages andthe lower types of man ignore it. We ascribe a divine source to it whenwe pray God to have mercy on us; we do not ask Him to love us. Allhigher religions enjoin it. Mercy is love purified from self, or whollyaltruistic. It is a man loving another not because of bloodrelationship, or because of expected benefits, or even because ofbenefits bestowed, but on the simple ground that he is his humanbrother, child of the same Divine Father. It is purer than the racialfeeling, and it includes the animal creation outside humanity in itsscope--as the Bible puts it, "the merciful man is merciful to hisbeast. "

It is the Golden Rule in manifestation; we see in the one to whom we aremerciful ourself in another form, under different conditions, and we doto him as we would have him do to us. It seems to require a certainmaturity of mind, acquired or inherited; children below puberty seldomhave it. It is easily forfeited, and indifference to the suffering ofothers is readily established. It is to be guarded and developed as asacred possession of man at his highest, and constantly nourished bythought and deed. And no man is so high and strong but he may and doesneed the mercy of some being loftier and more powerful than himself, which he cannot claim if he have not himself done mercifully to thosebelow him. 

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

Unlimited power is a trust too arduous for any mortal, for it shouldpresuppose perfect knowledge, all-penetrating intelligence, boundlessexperience, and the mercy which is born of these--for there is a bastardbrother of mercy which is of the parentage of ignorance and cowardice, which shrinks from the sight of suffering from mere pusillanimity of thenerves, and does not recognize that suffering may be mercifullyinflicted or permitted and beneficently endured. 

But the community does not select its prison officials on the basisabove indicated; it is satisfied if they be competent to "handle men, "have a sagacious familiarity with human depravity, will tolerate nononsense, can indict plausible reports for the Department, and show agood balance at the end of the fiscal year, or, as guards andunder-strappers, keep the men submissive and orderly and allow nooutbreaks. As for knowledge, a public school education is ample, withsuch intelligence as may be supposed to go with it; and the experienceof 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 prisonofficials until some special scandal transpires under theiradministration, or unless some heaven-sent phoenix of a wardenunaccountably manifests humane and enlightened tendencies. Theirappointment is left to the political machine, which hands it out on theprinciple of what is he, or was he worth to us? As for justice andmercy--my good sir, you seem to forget we are talking of convictedcriminals!

I affirm, however, that justice--which is intelligent mercy--is requirednowhere so urgently as with convicts; that any punishment which aims atmore than restraining convicts from practises calculated to injure theirown best interests, is a crime; and that cruelty to persons imprisonedand helpless, be the plea in extenuation of it what it may, is damnableand unpardonable wickedness. Meanwhile, there is not and has never beenin the United States a jail in which revengeful, malicious andunjustifiable punishments have not been inflicted, and in which crueltydoes not stain the record of each year and day. 

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

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

Be that as it may, something serious was about to occur. Five or sixyears after this day, I was walking, under convoy of the Deputy Warden, in the prison grounds that lie outside the walls, when we stumbled uponthe prison graveyard. It lay at the crest of some rising ground, partlyovershadowed by second growth timber, and was merely an unenclosedclearing in the rough undergrowth with rows of headstones standing onebehind the other, each with a name and date on it. But under all of themlay all that remained on earth of prison tragedies; for even if aprisoner die a natural death in prison, he dies with a broken heart andpoisoned mind, abandoned, in gray despair, friendless, shut out from skyand freedom, hearing with dulled ears the clanging of steel gates, seeing the blank walls, deprived of the sympathetic words and glances offriends--a miserable, unknown death. Silence and obliteration close overhim; and here he lies. 

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

On the day above mentioned, the guard had granted his request; but afterthe 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, moreperemptorily, and advanced toward the place where he was, outside thestone shed building. Richmond, as the guard came nearer, mumbledsomething; the guard seemed angered, and stepped up to him, raising hisclub 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 wasthe head and front of his offending, and for this he was to die. 

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

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 haddisliked Richmond were relieved of the annoyance of his presence. Therewere no inconvenient newspaper reporters about. If the dead man hadfriends outside, they never were able to do anything. It seems unlikelythat the guard who killed him would have done it had he not feltconfident that the higher officials would condone the deed. Perhaps, hadhe been arrested and indicted, he might have uttered some names; but hewas exonerated, and he has kept his mouth shut. This happened before thedate of Attorney-General Wickersham's visit to the prison, and thereforebefore the change in Warden Moyer's ideas as to the expediency of severemeasures in the handling of convicts. Were the thing to be done againto-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, andthe prison guards there are not hampered in their work by the necessityof doing it under cover, as they are here. It is a question which methodis preferable. I believe some of our prisoners would vote for the openway of killing and torturing. It is exasperating to be "done up" insecret, in the dark, stifled and gagged, with no chance to die fighting. I have no comparative statistics as between us and Russia, but it wouldnot be surprising if our record of men beaten, starved, poisoned, hungup in chains in dark cells, and killed by neglect and cruelties, were tosize up fairly well against what Russia has to show. Considering therestrictions put upon them, our prison autocrats certainly do well. 

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

A man named H. B. Rich was employed in the prison for nine years asforeman of the blacksmith's shop; he says that he helped build two darkcells in the basement, and often riveted chains on convicts there. "Theywere chained to the door, " he goes on, "hanging by their hands, sometimes for twenty-four hours. Often they were thus chained up duringthe day, but at night the chain attached to the frame of the door wasloosened; the other chain was attached to a vertical rod, the ringsliding up and down, so that the man was able to lie on the bare cementfloor. There were no cots. The food was generally one slice of bread anda cup of water a day, sometimes two or three. Men were often kept thusfor weeks at a time, and would come out so pallid and weak that theycould scarcely walk, and blinded from long confinement in darkness. Aconvict named S. Was kept in the dark hole two weeks; I was often calledto chain him, as he was a powerful man; but when he would come out, hewas 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 andstory, but he is still in confinement--he has lived two and twentycontinuous years in prison--and he might be made to suffer for hisrevelations. Among other things, he said that he had been in thepunishment cells, in the aggregate, eight years! If he were not a lionof strength and courage, he would have been dead long since. The Atlantapenitentiary claims to be the most humane in the world. But eight yearsin chains and darkness seems a long time, even taken in instalments. 

A man lately released has this to say: "The administration of thepenitentiary is a sham and pretense. 'Reform' is a show, for the benefitof government inspectors and visitors, with, underneath, a callous andbrutal disregard for the welfare of the convicts moral and physical. Notortures? I was trussed up, face to wall, with arms outstretched, forten hours. When loosed, I just dropped to the floor from exhaustion, anddid not rise till the next morning. That was during the presentadministration. When visitors and newspaper reporters go through theprison, 'there isn't any hole'; but the prisoner who thoughtlesslyinfracts a rule knows that there is one!

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

Let us have more testimony as to the dark hole. "The hole, " writesanother inmate, "is not a hole in the wall or in the ground, but it is aplace to turn a man's cheeks white and to make his knees shake and hislips tremble, when, for some infraction of very strict rules, he isordered to the hole. It is a row of holes; far down in the bottom of thebig bastile is a row of little cells, six feet wide, nine feet long, andperhaps ten feet high. Solid concrete, with iron grating in the narrowdoor. Absolutely dark. Furniture, one iron rod, one blanket. The man ishandcuffed between the rod and the wall, hands apart as far as he canhold them; at night the wall fastening is loosed, and he can lie downsliding the ring of his handcuff down the rod. No mattress or bed--justfloor. Food, three ounces of bread and a glass of water at noon. Therules are said to be less severe than formerly; but two half-breedIndians, former friends, recognizing each other in Sunday school, ventured to whisper a greeting; they were put in the hole two days andnights, and one of them, a stout hardy boy, came out trembling andshaking as with mortal illness. "

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

G. W. , formerly employed in the prison, says that "the hole near theplumber's shop was built while Morse, the banker, was in the prison, forI helped build it, and the warden, with another official, was down tosee it at ten in the morning. " Speaking of the statement that the darkhole was no longer in use, he adds, in his letter to me, "You know ofthe hanging up in the dark cell of the old Englishman, in October"--themonth I left the penitentiary. I do know of it; the fight of thisstubborn old fellow against the oppression of the prison authorities wasthe talk of the ranges just before my departure; he had done nothingworse than to use bad language; he would not give in; and I believe thatit was found advisable at last to release him. 

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

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

The geography of the places is, however, obscure, and is known to theelect only; it is said by inmates of old standing that undergroundpassages connect the prison buildings and lead from one dungeon toanother. This sounds romantic, but would be obviously useful inpractise. A map of the premises, surface and subterranean, would beinteresting, and may hereafter be achieved by some inspection whichreally inspects. I have not spoken of some features of the dark cells, as described by men who have experienced them, because they are sorevolting that editors of newspapers would decline to print them. Humanbeings are compelled to endure many things which the fastidiousness ofother human beings cannot tolerate even the hearing of. 

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

"William Keegan died in August of this year (1913) at the Pen. He wasfirst taken sick with pains in the legs, hands and arms, and went tomorning sick call, but could never get anything done, because he was alittle deaf and could not hear what the doctor said, and so couldexplain no further, and he was in a very bad fix. They did nothing forhim, and he was afraid to see the doctor, because he would have beenimpatient, and would have sent him to the hole, and then he would losetime. But he did go up to see him after the pains got into his backalso, and he told him he would like to get out of the stone shed; andthe doctor told him there was nothing the matter with him, but he wasonly faking and trying to get out of work--which I know and can swear toas being true. 

"If ever there was a sick man, Keegan was him. He told M. The foremanabout it one day, who told him to have the doctor look him over, andsent him up one afternoon; the doctor looked him over and told him hewas only a crank--nothing at all the matter with him. Soon after he wastaken 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 itdid him no good, for he came back to the cell house in just as bad a fixas before. Then they put him to work in the paint-house, and after hehad been there about a week, they said he was crazy, and put him in thehole. He was treated shamefully in the hole, for the prison nurse eventold me so. Then he was taken again to the hospital, and he never cameout of it, for he died there, and the prison nurse told me he sufferedterribly 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 nothingfor it, for if you went to the doctor, he would tell you you ate toomuch, and give you a big dose of salts, and if you did not take them, hewould put you in the hole, and then you would lose good time. But if aman had a pull, he would get along right enough. There was A. , a bankwrecker, he was clerk in the stone shed, and I have seen him have eggsright in the kitchen, when we had only rice to eat with cold water andbread which was sour. If he didn't want to work he didn't have to, forwhen I worked as runner for the plumber I have seen A. Lying down andsmoking and reading or pretty near anything he wanted to do; but ifother men had done less than half the things he did, they would havebeen put in the hole and lost good time also. Things should be lookedinto, for it is sure run shamefully. "

Readers would perhaps like to know more of the doctor, whoseprofessional activities are so engagingly described in the abovestatement. He is a medical graduate of recent vintage, poor butaristocratic, engaged to attend four hours a day at the penitentiary ata salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year. "I need the money, " he onceadmitted to a colleague in the prison. Keegan, as we have seen, wasunder his penetrating eye for months, and he died a few days after theyoung gentleman had assured him that there was nothing the matter withhim. The doctor dresses well, and has an air; he has the use of anautomobile, and sometimes escorts good looking young nurses, or otheryoung ladies, about the prison grounds. He has a knack at surgicaloperations, and urges prisoners to be operated upon; they sometimesrecover, and sometimes do not. His use of drugs in his practise seems tohave been mainly restricted to prescribing salts, and the hole, botheffective in their way, but not always happy in their application to thecases under consideration. 

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

There was a hearty, full-blooded, good natured young fellow, with redhair, who worked in the blacksmith's shop, and worked well. His overseerwas a negro--this often happens in Atlanta Penitentiary. The heat in theforge room during summer was intense, and the red haired boy used to getrush of blood to the head, and finally asked a high official for leaveto 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 anddo 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. Thelatter, in the face of the lower official's testimony that he hadauthorized the recess, supported the negro, and the young blacksmith wassentenced to five days in the dark cell and thirty days' loss of goodtime. Discipline must be preserved. 

Are such conditions as I have described general? The newspapers duringmy stay at Atlanta described a discussion in local prison circles as tothe propriety or expediency of whipping female prisoners in the Georgiafemale prison (not connected with the federal penitentiary), andconfining them in the dark hole. The warden of the prison, a gentlemannamed Mitchell, and his guards, said that women did not mind confinementin the dark hole, and got no harm from it--though it was shown thatafter being so confined for a day or two, they were scarce able to standand wholly unfit for work. The guards declared that the women could notbe effectively disciplined except by flogging, and threatened to quit ina 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 onegarment, as prescribed by the rules, still he favored whipping for them;he said the use of the "leather" was really more humane than thedungeon. Secretary Yancey, of the Prison Commission, also favored thelash. 

On the other hand, State Representative Blackburn said that it was "adangerous policy to give such wide discretionary powers to wardensscattered about the state. It would give rise to terrible abuses andmistreatment. The sovereign power of the state should not be delegatedto individuals only remotely accountable. The punitive system should becarefully guarded, and the line of punishment mapped out, otherwiseevils will creep in; no corrective measures that border upon crueltyshould be used. " Representative Smith added that if we "put the power touse the whip on women in the hands of brutal and incompetent wardens, the same cruelties and atrocities which have shocked the civilized worldwill be repeated. Wardens, drunk with power, abuse their positions; theyare appointees of a system, inexperienced and incompetent in many cases;chosen, not because of their fitness, but more likely to repay somepolitical favor. When a good warden is found, it is more or less anaccident. Give permission to whip, and the public would be horrified atthe result, if ever they should learn the circumstances. "

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

At the turpentine camp at Atmore, Alabama, thirty-five convicts whosecontract had been annulled by Governor O'Neal, were brought to MobileOctober 10th, 1913, and placed in the county jail. All but fourteen hadbeen whipped with heavy straps loaded with lead, and affidavits wereoffered showing that two of them had been whipped to death. ButSuperintendent of Prisons Riley of New York, in a letter to WardenRattigan of Auburn prison, writes: "I do not believe that any one wasever 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_ ofSt. Louis), more than he could perform. At evening he would be takenout, strapped to a post and beaten with a heavy strap. There were cutsand sores all over his body. Favored prisoners were allowed to breakrules, while others were severely punished for the same thing. Thepenitentiary there is described as a "small hell entirely surrounded bymasonry and incompetent officials. " Dozens of men were brutally whippedfor 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 otherhysterical and sobbing. They had been punished for whispering. The darkcells had been ordered discontinued some weeks before. Warden Hayes, onbeing 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 getround to it!" What is his business?

In Atlanta we do not use the leather; we find the club handier, and someguards are skilful in so applying it to the bodies of their patientsthat, while the external evidences are negligible, it occasions internaltroubles which can be ascribed to "natural" causes. And there areindications that we do use the dark cell, described by Dr. MacDonald, above, as more inhumane than the lash. If this expert be correct, hegives 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 haveinstanced are not the worst that are administered in Atlanta and perhapsin other prisons. Great ingenuity is shown in the application of mentaltortures, which have their outcome in insanity, but which never can beinvestigated by commissions and inspectors. An insane man is as safe asa dead man--if he tells tales, no one will pay attention to him. Thecat-and-mouse game is a favorite with the inhumane type of wardens. Giveyour man alternations of hope and despair, and the results will soonreward your pains. Then there are the insults, the gibes and threats, the obscure forms of tyranny and outrage, the degradation ofmanhood--there are a hundred subtle ways of destroying and corruptingthe spirit of a man. To be compelled to occupy the same cell withcertain types of criminals is a most successful form of inhumanity; andwhen, as often happens, one of the two is a comparatively innocent boy, the results are awful. "Insufficient number of cells" is the explanationgiven; and at Atlanta at least there are the unfinished cell houses, which might have been finished years ago, had the appropriations beenproperly applied. 

"Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner!" we pray in our churches. But Hesays, "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 servedhis time and is set free (as it is called) another punishment begins, which may be worse and more disheartening than the suffering enduredinside the walls. 

As I listened, on Saturday afternoons, or at other times, to the storieshurriedly and guardedly told me by my fellow convicts who had servedmore terms than one, I said to myself, "The wrong of prison is badenough; but this of what happens to a man after prison is worse, andmonstrous. " The endless tentacles follow him, reach out after him, surround him, fasten upon him, and draw him back whence he came. And notthat only, but they mark him and isolate him, disable him from freeaction, make honesty impossible for him. No citizen of whateverintegrity and standing, if so pursued, maligned and undermined, wouldhave any choice left him but either to perish or to break the laws. Thespies of the government, with the prestige and power of the governmentbehind 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 wasaccused of evil deeds on the bench, and a congressional investigationwas announced. The judge was taken ill, and at this writing theinvestigation still hangs fire. Now, the evidence against him had beencollected, it would appear, by the agency of government spies, and thisfact caused great indignation in some quarters. Here was a man notconvicted of felony, but a pillar of the state, being pursued bydetectives just as if for all the world he were an ordinary person--anobscure private citizen, say, or an ex-convict! The judge himself wasvery indignant, and his friends on the local press were rasping in theircomments. In a long editorial entitled "The Shadow of the Spy, " oneAtlanta paper denounced the proceedings root and branch. It affirmedthat the governmental spy system had assumed such proportions during thepast few years as to threaten one of the mainstays of free government. 

All this interested my comrades, not because the spy system was news tothem, but because no public notice had been taken of it until it beganto wring the withers of persons who had hitherto supposed themselves tobe in the position of promoters instead of victims of the practise. Afederal judge had never protested against pursuing with spies mensuspected of crimes, or men who, having served time upon conviction, hadthen gone out into the world and attempted to lead a new life. The spysystem, so conducted, seemed to such persons proper and normal. But themoment they found their own acts investigated, their own footstepsdogged, they became indignant, and denounced the whole principle of thething. 

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

As we all know, the first thing done with a new prisoner is to take hisbertillons, and the record of these measurements and observations, together with two photographs of him, or with four, if he had a beardwhen convicted, is sent to every police office in the country, and isthere studied by the detectives and police. The intention, of course, isto render easier the recognition of "old offenders, " and to curtailtheir future industries. It is generally affirmed that bertillons cannotbe mistaken; but in a Detroit court, on January both, 1914, an expertdeclared that "a difference of one-eighth of an inch in the laying on ofthe fingers made an entirely different impression"; and "judgment wasawarded against the bank, " which, relying upon the infallibility of thefinger record, had brought the action. At any rate, the bertillon isstill a potent weapon with the police, and when they want a man for acrime committed, or when they desire to drive out of any given place onthe face of the earth a man who has been previously a convict, they havebut to point to his bertillons, and the thing is done. 

Let us see how this may work out in practise. A convict, having servedhis term, is presented by the United States (or a state, as the case maybe) with a suit of new clothes, and with a five dollar bill. He alsogets 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 theprison gates, as a matter of fact an official is assigned to take chargeof him and put him on his train; he cannot remain in Atlanta (supposingfor the once that Atlanta Penitentiary has been his abiding place duringhis sentence) on penalty, if he do, of forfeiting his ticket and havingto pay his own way. This may be a provision of the law, or it may besimply a measure to prevent ex-convicts from talking to newspaperreporters 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, myfive dollars, and my railway ticket--at least, the latter was given tothe guard detailed to accompany me to the station, to be by himdelivered to the conductor of my train. But I had previously made up mymind 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 ticketand to pay my own way to New York on a later train. I had money of myown to do this with; most ex-prisoners, of course, have not. But thesacrifice was avoided by the circumstance that Mr. Moyer, the warden, was absent at the moment in Indianapolis, and the deputy incautiouslylet me out an hour or more before my train started. I lost no time inmeeting my reporter, and during the next forty minutes, in an automobileprovided for the occasion, we drove about the streets of Atlanta, whileI imparted to his astonished ears my reasons for thinking that thepenitentiary was not the paradise on earth that it had hitherto beenbelieved to be. He brought me to the railway station in season for mytrain, and I got safely away, leaving mischief behind me. 

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, the sheriff is dilatory in arriving to make the second orthird arrest, and it would seem that the prisoner might have a chance toescape. But in such a case the warden himself would take a hand in thegame. In an instance of which I heard a good deal, the man's sentenceexpired, we will say, on June 1st. The warden had been apprised that hewas to be re-arrested, but the sheriff was not on hand--could not getthere for two days. But the law, or prison regulations, or something, enables a warden to detain a prisoner beyond his fixed time, in theevent of his committing some prison irregularity. The warden informedthe 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 threedays were up, the sheriff had arrived, the man was re-arrested, andjustice was satisfied. We will suppose, however, that our man has nosecond or third or other indictments hanging over him, and that hereally does get clean away. What will be his adventures?

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

That the man is utterly innocent makes small difference; his status asan old offender is readily established, and the rest follows almostautomatically. "You did the job all right; but, if you didn't, you're avagrant, without visible means of support, and they'll put you in thelockup for six months or a year. And let me tell you, our lockup is nojoke! Likely you'll get on the chain gang, and then, God help you! Ifthey 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'dbetter 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 treatmen right, and you'll get out in about three or four months. That's whatyou'd best do; and if you don't, I wash my hands of you! What do yousay?"

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

But you are not a citizen, in the first place; your civic rights aregone for good, and instead of your innocence being assumed till yourguilt is proved, it is the other way about. Your friend the detective isprepared, for one, to swear that to the "best of his knowledge andbelief, " you are the culprit; and there is commonly a number of othereasy swearers hanging about the court room to support him. You have nofriends; on the contrary, every eye you meet is hostile. You have nomoney to hire a lawyer, for that five dollars had gone before you hadmustered courage to ask for the job that got you into this trouble. Andabove all, your spirit is cowed and prostrate from years in prison; youhave known the long, sterile bitterness of penal servitude, and you haveno stomach for a fight. No, you will not fight--you cannot. You willstand up in the dock and confess to something you never did, and throwyourself on the mercy of the court. Your friend the detective whispersto the judge--"He's an incorrigible--he ought to get the limit!" And HisHonor gives you ten years. It is less than a week since you put offstripes, and went out into the world resolved to make good. If yououtlive your undeserved sentence, will you ever resolve to make goodagain?

Can such things be? Indeed they can, and they are. There is poor C. InAtlanta 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 anycrime at all, other than to get drunk and to sleep out on the road; hewas apprehended for vagrancy, then charged with a post-office robbery inanother state (which he had never visited), advised by the detective who"took an interest" in him to confess, upon the promise of being let offwith a light sentence; he got the limit, and will wear out his youth injail, while the detective is complimented for his efficiency. 

The Government is extravagant. What is the use of spending money on ashoddy 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, ina large majority of cases, they will be back in their cells in a fewdays or weeks, or months? Look up, if you please, the statistics as tothe number of convicts who are second or third offenders. Nay, theGovernment is itself the prime and most effective cause of their gettingback, since it is government spies that provide the evidence that sendsthem up. 

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

Neither can men fed on poisons be trusted to be well. Jail life ispoisonous; I think it was Judge McLeland who said, last summer, "Ourmillion dollar reformatories offer university courses in bestiality andcrime; it is as logical to send a man to jail to make him better as toshut 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 backone hundred and seventy-six times. Others are sent because they are poorand cannot pay a fine, and they are there made real criminals. "

An instance of this occurred in a Georgia chain-gang while I was inAtlanta. A man was sentenced for playing cards for money. He could notpay the $45 fine demanded, and in default, was sent to the chain-gangfor 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 todo his work with a 49-pound hammer in that funnel-shaped pit, at ahundred degrees in the shade--if he could find any shade. One day hetold the guard he was sick, and could not work any longer. The guardshifted the quid in his mouth and remarked that he ought to have said sothat morning. But the man meant what he said, and proved it by dying aday or two later. Probably you may have played cards for money at sometime in your life. Did it ever occur to you that you merited torture anddeath for it?

Or do you think that, after such an experience (if you survived it), orafter being twice arrested for the same crime and kept in jail fiveyears three times over, or after doing time for a crime you nevercommitted--that you would come out at the end of it all, smiling, fullof 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 hiswarm-hearted, big-brained care of you--the starving, the dungeoning, theclubbing, and all the rest of the university course?

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

But you did not scruple to put this diseased or unfortunate version ofyourself into the jail cauldron, to stew there with others like or worsethan himself, for doing what, in most cases, he actually could not helpdoing; and when at last he was ejected like stale refuse, you wereindignant because his looks did not please you, because he bore upon himthe stains and the stench which the cauldron had fastened on him, because he did not, in the teeth of the secret service, the postofficeinspectors, the detective bureaus and the police, at once begin to leadan honest life and support the commonwealth. Do you say that none ofthis was your doing? But it is your doing, in just so far as you havenot striven in every way open to you to extirpate the doing of it bythis representative government. 

The wonderful thing--the unexpected and pathetic thing--is, that so manyconvicts come out of jail in a kindly and inoffensive state of mind. They are men who were born weak, humble and yielding, never esteemedthemselves, were always ready to take a back seat and give precedence toothers. They do not understand the rights of the matter, but suppose itmust 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 theirstealings and their trickery, and blame themselves, observingregretfully that they didn't seem able to help it. Next time--if theyget a next time--they will try very hard to be straight, and perhapsthey will succeed after all!

There was little J. , in the barbers' gang, a cheerful, smiling, sweettempered fellow, who had served I know not how many terms for smalllarcenies 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 getround me and rope me into some scheme, and I didn't seem able to keepclear of 'em. But I'm goin' to be let out again next July, and I've madeup 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'mthrough with it; when the boys get round me and tell me of some easyjob, I'll tell 'em, No! Not for J. "

He was a man of forty, as naive and "innocent" (in the unmoral sense) asa 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 signingreceipts and receiving his property preparatory to leaving. He wasdressed in a neat business suit of his own--not a prison-mademonstrosity. He was clean and smooth and bright, and tremulous withexcitement. He signed his papers with a shaking hand, he took up and putdown again his well packed gripsack, he shook hands with a sort ofclinging, appealing grasp, as if he were afraid of being left alone, hegiggled and looked profoundly solemn by turns. The officials stoodabout, indifferent and contemptuous, the men who had been hard and cruelto him, and those who had not been so hard. 

It was a bright, beautiful day, full of sunshine; J. Picked up his gripand marched down the corridor and out into the free air. He wore a braveair of hope and determination, but one could detect underneath itsymptoms of misgiving. He had vowed to be good, but could he keep thevow, when "the boys got round him"? I wished him good luck with all myheart. Six months have passed, and J. Is not back in jail yet, so far asI have heard. But the spies are watching him, and he won't be safe tillhe 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, hespeaks of the yeggs in an ominous tone, as if they were some deadlymonster, hardly to be even looked at with impunity. But yeggs, as abody, are the best men in the prison; they have a code of honor, andstrength of character. Outside, they blow open safes, and do other riskyjobs; and they will shoot to kill on the occasions when it is their lifeor the other man's. They will do this, because they know what a prisonis, and also what spies outside prison are. But they will spare yourlife, if possible; not because they care for you--they hate and despiseyou, as being a man who would be and have in the past been merciless tothem, and as a hypocrite who is either a rascal on the sly or would beif you possessed the courage or were subjected to the temptation--theyspare 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 offair education; they were not born outlaws; but, if you can win them tospeak of themselves, you will generally find that they have undergonethings both in and out of prison enough to make an outlaw out of asaint. Most men succumb under such things, and either die, or becomecowed 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 fearto inflict severities upon them except upon some pretext at leastplausible; for the yeggs know the rules, and though they will submitwithout a whimper to the crudest punishments if cause can be alleged forit, yet wanton liberties, such as prisoners less well informed or morepusillanimous submit to, cannot safely be taken with them. 

The yeggs stand together; they have esprit de corps, and if, as happenedlast summer at Atlanta, the food supply drops actually to the starvationpoint in both quantity and quality, they stand forward--as they didthen--as champions for the rest of the men; they protest openly, theywill 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 andpromises improvement. The warden promises, not because he desiresimprovements, but because he fears the scandal of mutiny in theprison--an inconvenient thing when one is supposed to be conducting amodel institution; and even an easy going public, which will tolerateother forms of cruelty to convicts, feels compunction about starvingthem, especially when it is taxed to provide them with wholesome andsufficient food. 

About my friend H. --I have no space here to tell his story, nor tooutline it even; it is a terrible one. I may be able, some time, inanother place, to present it in full. I will say now only that he wasonce confined for three years in a contract labor jail which has theworst features conceivable in any prison of to-day or of a hundred yearsago, and men are killed there by overwork and punishments as a matter ofroutine; few survive the treatment so long as H. Did. Once during histhree years he uttered three words aloud; for that he was punished solong and so savagely that the horror of it yet remains with him. Prisoners constantly maim their hands voluntarily in the machinery inorder to be quit of the torture of the work; the bleeding stumps oftheir fingers or hands are roughly bound up, and they are driven back totheir machines. The warden is an oily, comfortable rogue, who beams uponvisitors and fools the prison commission to the top of its bent, and hebears an excellent reputation for the large amount of work he gets outof his prisoners; "They just love it, my boys do, " he avers; "nothinglike work to keep men happy, you know. " And then, when the coast isclear, he turns upon his boys like a bloodthirsty tiger. 

But what I wish to say here is, that when H. At last finished his termand was thrust forth into the crowded street of the city, his legsfailed him, and he tottered along scared like a wild beast at the noiseand bustle. A man addressed him, and he stared at him blankly, and couldnot command his tongue to speak words. He wandered on irregularly, starting at imaginary dangers, unnerved at the height of the sky, thenoise, the movement. He sought the least frequented streets, but hisaspect and bearing made people look suspiciously at him, and he foundhis way to the slums, where he got a room and shut himself in with afeeling of relief. It was several days before he could school himself totalk 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 oddjobs here and there. He was resolute to keep straight, but an old pal ofhis happened to meet him, did him some good turns, and finally proposedhis joining two or three men in a promising burglary. H. Asked time tothink it over, and that night he left the city in a sort of panic, andtraveled to a large town a hundred miles away. Here he succeeded ingetting a good job; his spirits began to revive; he made some goodacquaintances, and prospered beyond all expectation for nearly a year. One day he noticed a man in the street who stared hard at him; not longafter he saw the same man standing in front of the house in which helodged; the next morning his landlord came to him and, with someembarrassment, said that he would have to ask him for his room; arelative 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 hepossessed in a trunk and left town that evening for a place nearly athousand miles west. Here he was left undisturbed for fifteen months, and made a new start in business. Then the chief of the local policesent for him and said, "I don't want to be rough on you; but the bestthing you can do is to skip; we're on to you--understand?" "But I'mdoing a straight business, " H. Pleaded. "You may be; but you're acrook, " 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 tohelp an old friend of his out of a tight place by carrying his gripsackfrom one place to another; it proved to contain some plunder from arecent burglary. He got off with a two year sentence; but it was the endof his attempt to reform. "Crooked or straight, I'll end in jail, " hesaid to me, with that strange convict smile which means such unspeakablethings. "I've got two years more here; if I last it out, they'll get meagain. "

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

It sometimes happens that the manhood of a convict is so sapped by longsufferings that even his desire for freedom is lost. He is afraid to befree; he cannot live at ease outside of his cell walls. Perhaps you willsay 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 barestatement of the fact. A man is afraid to be free, afraid of the greatwonderful world, and of his fellow creatures, and can endure what hesupposes to be life only in his steel cell. What has put that fear inhim? But our laws provide no penalty for dehumanizing a fellow creatureunder 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 inconfinement, with short intervals of liberty. The best favor he couldask was to be allowed to stay all day and all night in his cell, doingnothing. Year after year, nothing else than this appeared to him worthwhile. He was well educated, as prisoners go, quiet and inoffensive. "Iwish some doctor would examine me and tell me what is the matter withme, " he remarked to me once. "Maybe I'm crazy!"

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

XII

THE PRISON SILENCE

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

There was a Japanese prisoner, for example, the only man of his nationthere, I think, who gained attention by copies of well-known pictureswhich he made, to be hung on the walls of the chapel, and by designingback 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 menwho knew him said that he was especially savage in his diatribes againstthe 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 thelocal papers after his release, what we found was a hearty and explicitlaudation of the prison and its officials. Had it been written by thewarden himself, it could not have been more sunny and satisfied. 

Again, there was a man with us who had been sentenced for life on amurder charge of a singularly revolting kind; he had been in confinementseventeen years when I first knew him, but had always consistentlyprotested his innocence. He applied for parole, and his application wasgranted. At this time he occupied a large cell containing eleven otherprisoners, of whom I was one; and he attached himself very closely tome, and upon coming in from his work each evening, would sit beside mycot and hold my hand and pour out his heart to me in lamentations, asseverations of his innocence, picturings of the horrors of his longconfinement, forecastings of what he meant to do when he was freed--toaddress audiences from the pulpit and rostrum, and convince the world ofthe horrors of penal imprisonment. He was deeply religious, and had themoral courage to kneel down, before all the men in the cell, and spendfive minutes or more in prayer every evening before going to bed. Everyone believed that he had been wrongly convicted, if for no betterreason, because he had never once wavered from his claim of innocenceduring those seventeen years, and because his conduct and bearing in theprison had always been exemplary. He was a man of powerful body andstrong, impressive mind; his speech was simple and convincing, and Itold him that I thought he would succeed as an avatar of prisoniniquities. He professed an ardent affection for me, and expressedenthusiastic anticipations as to the outcome of my own projects forcalling public attention to the evils in question. 

This man was tortured for five or six weeks by unexplained delay infulfilling the promise of his parole, during which time it fell to mydaily lot to comfort and encourage him; and I suffered no littleemotional stress myself from this constant drain on my sympathies. Everyevening, sitting beside my cot, he would repeat over and over again thesame lamentations and speculations, interjecting at the end of eachapostrophe, "It's terrible--terrible!" until at last I felt that I wouldgladly give up my own "good time" for the sake of seeing him freedwithout further procrastination. I was convinced, and so told him, thatthe delay could be due to nothing but neglect, inadvertent or criminal, on the part of LaDow, the President of the Parole Board, or of theAttorney-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 nowstanding on the brink of salvation or despair, to a superciliousofficial up in Washington?

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

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

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

Is it conceivable that these statements were really given out by him? Itseemed more likely that the words had been put into his mouth, under athreat, should he disavow them, of being sent back to prison. From sucha threat the bravest man might shrink. But that statement of his stillstands unmodified. And whether made spontaneously, or under thecompulsion of a threat, its motive seems to have been fear of punishmentfor 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 enoughthat men should be held in prison and maltreated; but that the truthshould be imprisoned with them, gagged and terrified into silence, is agrave matter indeed. New York is complaining just now of the strength incorruption of its police system; but it seems almost trivial comparedwith this, for while the police ring profits by cooperating with thecriminals they are paid to suppress, the prison ring profits by maimingor destroying human lives entrusted to their care to be restrained for aseason from their own evil impulses, and thus if possible reformed; and, when they are released, it guards itself against exposure by the menaceof revenge more formidable still. The parole and the indeterminatesentence, framed to open the way to reform of prisoners, is used byprison officials to intimidate and debase them; and if any ex-convictventures to defy this fortified despotism, the immediate rejoinder is, "Who can believe a jail-bird? A man wicked enough to steal or murder iswicked enough to lie, and is not the malicious motive of the lieapparent?"

That rejoinder has been brought, and will continue to be brought againstme. Among those who protested against the statements in my interviewabove mentioned was a lady whom I never spoke to--it is strictly againstrules 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 Sundayexercises. She is thus quoted: "Julian Hawthorne is nothing more than anold grouch. A short time ago this old man told me himself that he wasgetting plenty to eat and had no complaint to make of his own or anybodyelse's treatment in the prison. .. . When he says such things as he isreported to have said, he should be made to prove them, or keep hismouth 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 dupeof malignant guards (since dismissed) and considers my motive to havebeen mainly the desire to make a little money. "The Department attacheslittle importance to these outbreaks, " he remarked, "and I consider itunnecessary to place my word against that of convicts. "

This may seem feeble; it is the mere instinctive stuttering of personsin a disturbed frame of mind. But the System will not depend for itsdefense upon persons of this kind. It has many strong forces at itscommand, of which the Secret Service, and the favorable prejudgments ofthe Government and of a large part of the public are but part. Any oneopposing it may expect to be kept under strict surveillance in all hismovements, his mail will be violated, his words, written or overheard, will be scrutinized for material that can be used against him. Nor isthe line drawn there. While I was in prison, I received the confidencesof many prisoners as to their own experiences, among others that of aMaine boy who had been convicted of robbing a postoffice. He had beenarrested in the first instance as a vagrant, and while in the local jailhad been approached by a postoffice inspector who charged him with thepost-office crime. The boy had never been in the state in which thecrime was committed; but he was told that, if he would plead guilty toit, he would be sent to Atlanta for a short term, whereas, should herefuse, he could be kept in jail awaiting trial for a year, and wouldthen receive at least six months on the vagrancy charge. "Do as I tellyou, and I will see that you get off easy, " the inspector, who posed asa friend, told him. When he finally acquiesced, however, the judgeimposed on him a sentence of five years, the inspector having testifiedthat he was an old offender, implicated in many other crimes. The factwas, of course, that the real perpetrators of this postoffice robberyhad not been caught, but it was expedient for the reputation and welfareof the detectives that a perpetrator should be produced--if not the realone, then one manufactured for the purpose. I learned of many casessimilar to this--it is a common routine practise with the System. Moreover, when this innocent youth has completed his term, he will bethenceforth a marked man--"an habitual criminal, " with a record againsthim; and he can be rearrested on general principles at any time. He willbe given no opportunity to earn an honest livelihood, and it would besurprising indeed if his wrongs, not to speak of his empty stomach andhopeless circumstances did not make him a bona fide criminal ere long. Obviously, meanwhile, such a man is effectively gagged; if he be askedwhether prison be a paradise, he will reply ardently in the affirmative, though his whole body and soul know it as a hell. For if, havingblasphemed the Holy System, he is returned to the cell whence he came, every word of his rash revelation will be avenged upon him in tortureand misery. 

Am I attempting to retaliate upon the System for personal indignitiesand mishandling; or am I the dupe and tool of designingmiscreants--convicts, guards or foremen--who plied me with falsestatements to wreak revenges of their own? I have already said that Iwas never harshly treated by any of the prison officials, and after thetwo first months indulgences were allowed me beyond the customary prisonusage. During my two first months, to be sure, it seemed unlikely that Icould live out my term, because I was kept at work in an undergroundplace without ventilation or other than artificial light, and permeatedwith the hot-water pipes which supplied the buildings with heat andpower. I was also unable to eat the prison fare, and was slowlyperishing for lack of food. I never complained of this treatment, for itwas in the ordinary prison course; but when the consequences of itbecame visible in my physical appearance, I was put on a diet of oatmealand milk, morning and evening, and allowed to exercise in the open air. I voluntarily, during this period, went without dinner, being unwillingto poison myself with the rancid grease and garbage served under thatname; but I made the most of the simple but nourishing milk diet, thoughit was insufficient in quantity; and I improved to the utmost theoutdoor privileges, besides adhering resolutely to a régimen of dailycalisthenic exercises; so that, when I was set at liberty at the end ofsix or seven months, I was in physical condition quite as good as when Iwent in. I was never denied leave to write "special letters, " and myintercourse with the warden and his deputies, though always as seldomand brief as I could make it, was uniformly suave and smiling. Thereasons for all which I shall have occasion to discuss later. 

So much for the "grouch. " As for being made the dupe of designingpersons among the lower officials, and my fellow prisoners, --beyondreplying tersely to questions put to me, I never had any communicationwith the former, and never heard or spoke a word with them reflectingupon the prison management. But what of my fellow prisoners?

They looked me over keenly and thoroughly to begin with; and noinquisitors have more sensitive intuitions or are quicker to suspectdouble-dealing than they. My aspect, my bearing, my speech, myaffiliations, my treatment, all came under their scrutiny, and weredebated in that secret court which prisoners hold. Not at first, norlightly, did they give me the honor of their confidence. I might be aspy sent in from without, or a stool pigeon made within, or I might beindifferent or loose-mouthed. But when they did resolve to trustme--when I was elected a member of the "inner circle, " as one of themphrased it, --they had no reservations. I was called on to make noprotestations, to register no oaths, nor did I solicit anycommunications. They came to me freely, and either by laboriously pennedor penciled letters written on surreptitious scraps of paper inill-lighted cells, or by circumspect word of mouth mumbled into my earon the baseball ground of a Saturday afternoon, they would disclosetheir 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 waslistening to the break and tremor in their voices, the hurry and awkwardindignation, the eager marshaling of insignificant details, the dreary, apathetic recital of sordid or callous outrages, the hopelessnessstriving once more to hope. "If they'd only send us an inspector whowouldn'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 hiscoat and size things up independent!" Their wish was not fulfilled in mytime; the inspections were a farce and a scandal. There was a traditionof one inspector who had really effected something--who seemed to thinkof his duty, as well as of good dinners and joy rides--but that was longago. That he never repeated his visit would seem to indicate that hisreport was found inconvenient. 

Meantime, I did not need their asseverations of veracity; the truthshone through their uncouth stories. They were widely different from theglib patter that runs out of a crook's mouth in the presence of anofficial. Some of these men were seasoned criminals; often they did notthemselves understand how iniquitous was the "deal" that had been giventhem, being too much inured to the tricks and treachery of thedetectives' practises to feel special animosity regarding them; but moreor less dimly they felt that wrong was being done them that was notcontemplated or recognized by the law. The last thing to die in a man ishis sense of justice; "I'm as bad a man as you like, and I'm willing totake 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, andwouldn'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, andfell down on the floor. A bunch of screws stood in front of his doormaking fun of him, and they held a blanket up so the smoke wouldn't getout. At last they opened the door and pulled him out, and they clubbedhim good and plenty, and then they dragged him down the stairs--he wasin an upper tier, understand--with his head bumping against every step. They threw him into a dark cell, and left him there. " There he hadleisure to recover from his "nuttiness. " It was nothing much out of theusual, only the incident happened to offer spectacular features whichserved to keep the memory of it fresh. But does the Department ofJustice countenance such diversions?

To return to my theme--I came to feel that whether or not I was handledsoftly, 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 ofconvicts: "The warden has always treated me decently, and I don't meanto bite the hand that caressed me. " I need not affirm, either, that mygood fortune was due to an expectation that I would respond in kind;that would be an unverifiable inference. But it was plain that theofficials took interest in the prison paper as a medium for advertisingand gaining credit for the penitentiary; and that when I began to writefor it, newspapers all over the country quoted the articles andcommented kindly on them. My name was given a prominence, unwelcome, though well meant; accounts of my doings and condition, entirelyapocryphal (for I never saw a newspaper man during my stay, or gave outany form of interview), were published and featured from time to time; Iwas kept more or less in the public eye. If, now, I were to be starvedand clubbed, dungeoned and otherwise maltreated, not only would I beincapacitated from contributing to the paper, but some hint of the factsmight leak out and impair the reputation of Atlanta Penitentiary as aGentleman's Club and Humane Paradise. Accordingly, if I were foundsmoking out of hours, or were missing from count, --"Never mind--it'sonly Hawthorne!" It may be, of course, that my personal charm was soirresistible that every official from the warden down fell victim to it, and would rather prove recreant to their oath of office than interferewith me; my vanity craves to believe so, yet I hesitate. At any rate, with whatever sugar the gag was sweetened, or whether the suggestion ofit was inadvertent, I did not feel justified in accepting it; and when Igot out, the waiting reporters at last obtained what they had so longawaited. But though my eight hundred comrades seem to have beengratified with my words, I cannot think that they were equallysatisfactory to the officials; for I am informed that Hawthorne'swritings are henceforth barred from the penitentiary. I must have hurttheir feelings in some way; no one can please everybody. 

The naive surprise expressed in some local quarters outside thepenitentiary went to show how unexpected and almost incredible mystatements appeared to be--or, from another point of view, howsuccessfully hitherto the truth had been suppressed. The truth beingonce unshackled, I was anxious to get the widest possible circulationfor it, and therefore arranged for its publication in various newspapersdistributed over the country; but I was not altogether sanguine that myplan of public enlightenment would prove an unqualified success. TheSystem, as I have indicated, had several guns which it might bring tobear, and it was conceivable that some of the editors who had subscribedto the syndicate might find reason to regard the articles as not adaptedto the taste of their readers, and decline to risk offending them anyfurther. If other guns of the System should prove inadequate, there wasalways the great gun to be depended upon, known as the Law for Libel. Itook what precautions I could with respect to this formidable and mostrespectable weapon; I stipulated that a competent lawyer should readeach article before it was offered for publication, and inform me of anypassage in any of them which might be obnoxious to the provisions ofthis law, in order that such passages might be modified or expunged. Hecarefully discharged his function; and if any reader should detect alack of continuity or explicitness in any of my statements, he maycharitably ascribe it to the consequences of the lawyer's advice; since, even in this free country, the proprieties must be observed. If I werefortunate enough to escape the missiles of the Libel gun, I had still tobe on my guard against more obscure and personal weapons; I am anex-convict, and any lenity of treatment which I had hitherto enjoyed isnot to be looked for in the future. If I were sent back to prison, myshrift was likely to be short; and I could only hope, in that event, tohave been able to say enough to afford my entertainers ample provocationfor giving me, as my comrades would say, the limit. 

"You would have only yourself to blame!"--I hear that comment. If youare kicked, be like the puppy--roll over on your back and hold up yourpaws for mercy. But if canine models are in question, I feel moreinclination to the thoroughbred bulldog, who does what he can and woulddo more if he could. I have undertaken a heavy responsibility, and mustmake the best showing I may with it. I no longer have a lifetime beforeme, but I have learned while I have been alive that the methods of thepuppy are not remunerative in the end. Every natural instinct in mecalls out for rest and peace, and to forget the valleys of grief andhumiliation; but there is another voice which summons me to otherissues. I am sensible of my lack of strength and fitness for theenterprise; but I believe that it was no idle circumstance that calledme to it; I believe in a Divine government of the world, which choosessometimes to use unlikely instruments to accomplish its will. The littleI can do may inspire worthier deeds by more powerful hands. Emersonfound 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 theydelivered messages which changed the world. "What! that old numskull bethe 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 tolook at things from the commonplace standpoint. One thing or anotherprevented any of my companions in the jail from doing what it wasdesirable to do, and circumstances quite unforeseen opened a way for meto do it. What I have said above was with a view of showing howdifficult it may ordinarily be to bring prison facts to light; and if, by chance, some individual should find means to his hand to open awindow, he would be a poltroon if he forbore to do it. I am under noillusions as to the obstacles in my way, nor do I anticipate that what Iam trying to do will result in prompt or vital changes for the better inprison management. The facts I adduce may be discredited, but if theyare true they will not be lost. My eight hundred inarticulate comradesare always present in my thoughts. I have left them in the body, but Isee their faces wherever I turn. It is a crime that any human beingsshould be arbitrarily kept in the conditions which surround them, and ifI 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. Yetonce in a while a groan or protest, or a partial account of someoutbreak, finds its way through; and in many cases the gist of the storyis to the effect that the food is bad or scanty. Other things the menbehind the bars suffer stoically, or not so stoically; but lack of foodarouses them to despair and frenzy. We have lately heard reports fromSing Sing illustrative of this condition there; and many another jailcould echo the complaints of the unfortunates in that gloomyhell-chamber. 

Convicts know that they are to be punished, that the government hassentenced them, that it is the law; and though they may find cause todisagree with the decree that consigns them to hopeless and uselessservitude, they accept it as at least legal and incident to the game asplayed. But they do not believe that the government has condemned themto starvation, or to poisoning (and the condition in which food oftencomes to the convicts' table is practically poisonous). They know thatno such punishment is included in the statutes; and they can onlyconclude, therefore, that it is an arbitrary and illegal piece ofcruelty or neglect on the part of the warden or commissary officer. Theyare prone to think that these persons profit financially by cutting downtheir supplies; and that they are careful to conceal the fact in theirreports to the Department, or to disguise it as a meritorious economy. At the same time, they are conscious that there is no regular channelthrough which they can make their injury known to the authorities, andthat nothing is more readily denied, or more easily concealed frominspectors, than is this very abuse. 

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

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

Have you not imagination enough to put yourself for a moment in thepredicament of the prisoner? There you sit in the narrow gloom of yourcell, or you toil in the stifling confinement of your work room, andsuch is not only your state to-day, but for years to come it will beunchanged. You are isolated from sight of and association with every manand 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 thatare not harsh, and hear no words but sharp commands or angry menaces. Your very toil is idle and unpaid, and its diligent performance bringsyou no credit or hope, except treacherous promises of a good constantlydelayed. And then picture yourself when, after wearisome hours, thewhistle blows that means intermission of labor and the renewal ofstrength by food. Yet that summons, instead of cheering you, does butmake 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 passup the aisles you glance abhorrently at the dirty scraps and masses ofprovender dumped carelessly out of noisome buckets by the filthy handsof the servers upon plates still rough and foul with the hardened greaseof foregoing meals. You are faint for lack of nourishment, yet the sightof what is provided, and the unclean smell of it, nauseate instead ofinviting 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 eatall, and assimilate it, you would still leave the table but half fed. 

Every tyro in physiology knows the effect upon the general organism ofdejection and resentment at meals. Prisoners more than men in any othercondition need abundance to eat and good cheer while eating; but thefood they get, and the circumstances in which they get it, causes themto degenerate physically, and the body affects the mind. Physicaldisease breeds the disease of evil thoughts and impulses. Criminalsmight be generated by prison food alone, without taking account of theirprevious records and future prospects. 

We of Atlanta penitentiary used to hear occasionally of thebills-of-fare of our repasts in the prison that were daily forwarded toWashington, by way of reassuring the Department of Justice, and whomelse it might concern, as to the substance and excellence of ournourishment. These alimentary documents might be compared with likelists at Delmonico's and the Waldorf, and the names of the viands wouldbe found to be identical. The inference, to the legal mind, not to speakof the penological one, was plain: the convicts at the penitentiaryfared as sumptuously as do the banqueters of the Four Hundred--at nocost, moreover, to themselves, not even waiters' tips. 

For here were rich soups and gravies, substantial roast beef, succulentsteaks and chops, the renowned baked beans of legend, comforting hashes, pies and puddings, fresh vegetables, including the famous sweet potatoof the South in its pride; and long draughts of milk from the tranquilcows of the pasture, together with tea and coffee from the Orient, sugar, mustard, salt and pepper and vinegar, enough to beguile the mostsqueamish appetite, and, to top off with, fruits in their season, led bythe incomparable Georgia watermelon. I may have inadvertently omittedsome items from this toothsome list, but it is enough as it stands tomake an epicure's mouth water. And if any skeptic were stillunconvinced, a photographer would be admitted with his undeniable cameraat certain seasons--Christmas and Fourth of July, for example--who wouldplace a picture of the revelry and the revelers on the everlastingrecords, with garlands and festive decorations, and actual dishes ofsome sort on the groaning boards, and serried rows of plump felons readyto fall to. 

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

I found opportunity to study some of these historic scrolls, and was somuch impressed by them that I caused a suggestion to be conveyed to thewarden. Instead of sending all the menus to Washington, and to admiringfriends in the Atlanta neighborhood, let one or two of them be placed ateach meal upon the tables of the diners, to the end that they might bestimulated, by the perusal of these literary masterpieces, to choke downtheir gullets the actual garbage which was furnished in the namethereof. But the warden's views seem not to have been in harmony withmine on this occasion. I am glad to learn, however, from certaingraduates of the institution since my own departure from it, that thefood 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 warmpersonal friend of the warden and the Attorney-General who was sent toAtlanta recently in the guise of a Spartan inspector of the allegedabuses; because, for one thing, the improvement had set in long beforehe made his investigation, and the investigator, in his report, appearsto have discovered no room for improvement anywhere. It must have justhappened--one of those miracles in the way of gilding refined gold andpainting the lily which are so common nowhere else as in our model penalinstitutions. 

I had ample opportunity to study the subject personally while a guest atthe prison table, and to compare my impressions with those of my fellowprisoners, as well as to enlarge them by conferences with personsemployed in the kitchen and commissary department. Men who had served inother prisons--and their combined experiences covered a great many--wereunanimous and emphatic in declaring that the table at Atlanta was theworst they had ever known, not only as to scantness of supply, but as tothe unwholesomeness or positively poisonous quality of the foodfurnished. 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 seatingeight and chairs, it was announced that table cloths would also besupplied, and napkins. That was two or three years ago, but table clothshave not yet appeared, and the eaters still wipe their mouths on thebacks of their hands in the good old way. Pepper and salt were on thetable, and a bottle of something that looked like beer and was supposedto be vinegar, but was sampled only by the more reckless orinexperienced convicts. Sugar was not provided except on rare occasions, and to "diet" prisoners--men who were restricted to bread and milk andoatmeal. Some beverage that dishonored the name of tea was served aboutonce a fortnight; a brown, semi-transparent rinsing of dirty kettles, sugarless, thin and bitter, called coffee, came every day; but if yourstomach rejected either of these, you could fill up on plain water. 

The latter, however, like the "diet" milk and oatmeal and the drinkablesgenerally, 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 andlodged in the intestines, causing, with other things, an excessivepredisposition to appendicitis--a frequent disease in the penitentiary. This was also promoted by the bread, which was made of the poorest gradeof white flour, without nourishing quality, the value per loaf beingabout two cents; the flour was ground in steel mills, and microscopicparticles of steel were rubbed off into it--this fact I had from aphysician who had examined it. The flour, when received at the prison, was frequently full of weevils, most of which but not all were siftedout before it was used. The bread was tasteless and light; it was bakedin large quantities, and what was not consumed by the prisoners was soldoutside. 

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

The beef given to prisoners was of the third grade--the worst on themarket--it is cow or bull beef, never heifer or steer, and often it isrotten, and must be treated chemically before being offered even toprisoners. It used to come on the table in gristly and bony gobbets, after having lain on the kitchen ranges for hours, until it was reducedto a hardness which resisted all but the most efficient and vigorousteeth (which, except with negroes, are rare in prison). I used tocompare these "steaks" and other pieces with old blackened boot heels;they were hardly less eatable and nourishing. Often it smelt so thatnature rebelled against it; but complaints were liable to be met bycommittal 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 notallowed to walk between the tables, so that the only food they could seewas what was put on the tables nearest the door; and this was always ofa quality superior to the rest, and there was more of it per man. It wasone of the little tricks employed to maintain the entente cordiale, bywhich the prisoners who sat at those tables benefited, and the visitorswent forth to sing the praises of our warm hearted warden. On the dayswhen the bread was sour or the meat stank, visitors were headed awayfrom the dining room, and their attention directed to more importantmatters. 

The hash, which often made the breakfast, was composed of fragments ofgristle and refuse left on the prisoners' plates after dinner, mixedwith potatoes and rancid grease; this, and the soups and gravies, whichhad a similar origin, gave out a most nauseating smell. The men wouldgulp it down--it was that, or starve--trying to help it on its way withall the condiments they could lay hands on; but the effect of it, and ofthe food generally, upon the digestive tract was so disastrous in mostcases that they might better have left it alone. I myself retired fromthe enterprise in my second or third week, and would have literally diedof 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 ofmy sojourn. This applied for breakfast and supper; I sat at dinner, butsatisfied myself with nibbling bread crusts, and witnessing the forlornand perilous efforts of my friends to walk the line between starvationand 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, atomato. The butter was made of an inferior quality of lard, andcottonseed oil--a substance which entered into many other of our viands, and of which, with grease, it was calculated by an expert in thekitchen, we were offered as much as one pound per man every day. Itproduced a calamitous effect upon the digestive tract, inasmuch as therewas hardly a white man in the prison who did not suffer chronically fromstomach troubles--constant suffering, often becoming acute. Thestrongest digestions would resist for a while, but finally succumb. 

There was a poultry farm on the grounds, donated by outside benefactorsspecifically and exclusively for the benefit of prisoners, beginningwith the tuberculous patients. After it got going, there may have beenan average of six hundred fowls on the place. Of these, not one everappeared on the prison tables. With the exception of a possible few thatwere stolen by prisoners having access to the yard, all wereappropriated by higher officials, and the eggs as well. 

One official gave frequent dinner parties to his friends, and was saidto use as many as five or six chickens a day, though I cannot vouch forthat--it seems excessive. He certainly, sometimes, commandeered as manyas fourteen or more at one time. There was a story of a great cake whichhe had made for some festival, into the composition of which entered onehundred and four eggs from our farm. To neither chickens nor eggs hadhe, of course, any title more legitimate than have you who read theselines. 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 dischargingtheir functions. 

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

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

Sweet potatoes abound in the South, and subsistence upon themexclusively would reduce the cost of living; the only trouble is thatthe human stomach refuses to cooperate in this economy. Sweet potatoeswere served at Atlanta during the season three times a day, baked, boiled and in pies; the men were hungry enough, and the supply ofpotatoes was adequate; but had they been of the finest instead of theworst 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, outdidendurance, nor could we be stimulated by the argument that theGovernment was saving money by it. Had the sweet potato season lastedthe year round, the warden would have lost his job from mere dearth ofprisoners to earn his salary on. 

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

Guards walk up and down the aisles between the tables, during meals, tokeep 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 commonprotest is against the badness of a specific piece of food, or againstsome 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 tobaccowhich 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 wastaking downstairs, as described in a previous chapter. On anotheroccasion, a prisoner complained that there was a beetle in his hash. Anexamination was made; but whether the beetle was alive and got away, orwhether the prisoner himself had "bugs, " as the slang is, at any ratethe examiners reported no beetle. The matter was then brought before theauthorities, who ordered the complainant to the dark hole. 

Another day, following some months of constant deterioration in thefood, and diminution in the quantity of it, a dinner of hash and breadwas served, and both bread and hash were sour. The air of the room wasfull of the sour smell; the captain came down the aisle near mine, and aprisoner 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 repliedsternly, "It is not sour!" "But, Captain--" "I say it is not sour!" theother repeated with a threatening look. It was either submit, or thehole; 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. Thecaptain ordered the band to play, and play it did at the top of itscompass; but the hissing was audible and continued through the playing. Presently the men got up and began to march out; it was then that agroup of guards from the smoking room below came running up the stairsarmed with clubs and revolvers and tried to get through the barred doorat the stair head, but were checked by the captain, who was a wisetactician. The men went to their cells, and there began to howl andscreech like a crazy menagerie, and kept it up for hours. Twenty orthirty of the supposed ringleaders were sent to the dark holes; but therevolt was not checked until the warden personally promised reforms, andgave his word that no further punishments should be inflicted--fairpromises, made to be broken. 

The dining room windows were protected by wire netting; but there weremany holes in it, as large as a man's head, through which the flies, insummer, entered in swarms; and there was no provision for keeping themout of the kitchen, which opened into the dining room. Complaints wereconstantly made, but the holes were never mended, and no means weretaken to kill the flies. Food sometimes was placed on the tables hoursbefore the men sat down to their meals, and the flies, not having thesame delicacy of appetite as the men, feasted freely in the meanwhile. There was also frequent protest against the bits of loose enamel in thebowls; 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 ofsalts 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 AtlantaPenitentiary. 

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

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

About that time, a great scientific discovery was announced by the chiefsteward. Food, he had been informed, contained a certain amount of heatand power; and these heat units, called calories, could be estimated forany given article of diet. (As I write this, an editorial on the subjectin a recent issue of a New York newspaper states the matter in termswhich I am happy to reproduce. ) "Physiologists have determined byrepeated experiments that a definite quantity of certain foods furnishesa definite number of calories or heat units, which produce a certainquantity of energy in the animal or human body. .. . In twenty-four hoursa normal man of about one hundred and thirty pounds at rest, needs 1680calories or heat units, while a man doing severe physical labor wouldrequire sufficient food to produce 3000 calories. .. . Since theefficiency of labor depends upon the energy of the body and this energyor power is produced by the food, it is not difficult to calculate theactual outlay required for this purpose. .. . The household requirementsof a family where two servants are kept would at this rate be from $1. 00to $1. 40 a day, a sum sufficient to furnish all the energy for allpurposes of normal maintenance. "

Such being the case, our steward figured that the convicts could be wellenough supported by about 2500 calories apiece; and upon making ascientific estimate of the calories in our average bill-of-fare, hefound that we were being overfed rather than the contrary. Meat, so manycalories; soup, so many; sweet potatoes, so many; bread, so many; and soon. It was found possible, on this basis, to retrench here and there;the bills were reduced--it was hoped that we might ultimately beat eveneight cents. The sole difficulty appeared to be that the men, thesubjects of the experiment, began incomprehensibly and perhapsmaliciously to starve. 

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

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

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

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

A man who is sick and sad day after day and year after year, andconscious of his impotence to amend his state, is in no mood for moralreform. Much of the sickness might be averted if the medical treatmentat the outset of disease were such as to encourage the patients to availthemselves of advice. But each man, as he comes up in the sick lineevery morning, is met with indifference or insults; he is presumed to bea malingerer unless he can prove himself genuine on the instant; theonly other recourse is to become so sick as to be beyond help ofmedicine, and then, taken belated to the hospital, to die outright. Theconsequence is that the men will suffer silently in their cells ratherthan appeal to the doctor; and many diseases become ineradicable fromthis cause. 

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

XIV

THE POLICY OF FALSEHOOD

The subterranean brotherhood waxes curiously indignant over being liedto by prison officials. For why should criminals, whose success in theirtrade must depend largely on lies either spoken or acted, be resentfulwhen they are paid back in their own base coin? I am inclined to thinkthat the anomaly may be due to some survival in prisoners of the oldbelief, that honor and fair play do, or should, exist in officers ofjustice; although their own experience should admonish them thatofficers of prisons, at least, cultivate the art and practise offighting the devil with fire (as we say), and so far from ever thinkingof keeping faith with a convict, study the art of deceiving andhoodwinking him, and appear to derive no small amusement from theirresults. Indeed, any tendency on the part of a guard or other officialin a prison to deal honestly and above board with their charges would atonce awaken suspicion of his loyalty to the "system, " and his superiorswould 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--forthe delight of the artist in his fabrication. There is fun in overcomingthe suspicions and skepticism of some old timer, and beguiling him intothe belief that for once, and at last, he really is getting trustworthyinformation--that he has finally succeeded in touching the elusive hemof the robe of Truth. But commonly the official liar has some practicalobject in view. This object is usually the tightening of the prison'sgrip upon the convict; not only to strengthen the bonds which confinehis body, but to bring his spirit or soul under more complete subjectionand to make him feel that so far from moral reform being the end soughtin his incarceration, he will best consult his private interests byabandoning all thoughts of decency and honor, and acting, with theofficials, 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 mostfavors. Men of unbroken spirit are handled in a hostile manner, and aresubjected to a régimen calculated either to kill or cure their obstinacyand 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 doabout it?" What do you think you would do in such circumstances?--writeto the President, or to some Senator or Congressman? awaken the countryto these iniquities? The warden and the clerk will smile over yourletter, and drop it in the waste-basket, or will make it the basis of anadverse report against you to the Department, --insubordination, incorrigibility, insanity perhaps. 

Or, if you reserve your protest till after you get out, and can thenfind any medium for ventilating it, the prison authorities will promptlyand smilingly "welcome an investigation"; and the Department willeagerly 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 andincorruptible inspector comes down; and after snubbing and insulting afew prisoners, and taking notes of the information of a few snitches, and dining and wining with the officials, and inspecting the country inthe government automobile, he goes back to Washington with thereassuring news that the reports of abuses, where they were not absolutefabrications, were gross exaggerations. 

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

The prison policy of falsehood may be illustrated by the uses to whichthe parole law is put. This unfortunate measure was no doubt conceivedby its parents in love and charity, to supply prisoners with a stimulusto reform by rewarding them for it with early release from imprisonment. If a man's conduct while serving his sentence had been orderly andobedient to rules, he was to be freed after serving about one-third ofhis appointed time; but he was required, for a reasonable periodthereafter, to make monthly reports to the prison, and to show that hewas usefully employed and was not frequenting drinking saloons orotherwise going astray. A parole board was appointed to carry out thelaw and to look after the paroled prisoner, helping him if necessary toget employment. Meetings of the board were to be held at stated times, to pass upon applications for parole; it was to consist of the wardenand the doctor of the prison, together with the president of the paroleboard, who officiated at all Federal prisons, and who would, naturally, be the superior official of the three. But two members of the boardwould form a quorum; and meetings of the board at times other than thoseregularly 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 broughtunder the new law, it was decided that lifers who had served fifteenyears were eligible, if of good record, --not an extravagant act ofmercy, --and in obtaining this concession it was made known that thewarden of Atlanta Penitentiary was instrumental. Of course thereputation of Atlanta as a model and humane prison was greatly enhancedthereby. 

But the prisoners, and perhaps the framers of the law also, hadoverlooked one little word in the language of the law, which grew tohave a large significance afterward. The language is, that if theprisoner'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 beenspared much rascality, corruption, cruelty, torture and death; andprisoners would not have hated and distrusted their keepers as they donow, and subordination on one side and humanity on the other would havereceived an impetus. 

That "may" rendered it optional with the board to grant or to refuseparole in any given case; they might not only determine whether or notthe conduct of the applicant had been, while serving his sentence, goodenough to justify clemency; but also whether, even then, it wereexpedient to exercise it. No matter how unexceptionable the behavior ofa prisoner were shown to be, it was open to the board to say to him, "Wehold 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 ofcounsel, had no further recourse; he must go back to his cell feelingthat all his efforts to be obedient (persisted in through whatdiscouragements only prisoners know) had been futile; that he was not awhit better off than was a man who had defied every regulation, and wasworse off in so far as he had taken all his pains and indulged all hishopes for nothing. He must serve out his time; for if he renewed hisapplication at the next meeting of the board, he was told that nothingcould be done in his case except upon the presentation of "newevidence. "

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

Obviously, however, there was a weak point in this kind of arbitraryrulings of the board; it was conceivable that some enterprisingAttorney-General might want to know why the board had not held the goodconduct specified in the law to be sufficient ground for freeing theman. To guard against this, the services of a subordinate called theparole officer were called in. This person's normal functions asindicated in the law were to help paroled men to procure employment, toaid them in general in their efforts toward a better life, and to standby them as an authoritative and kindly friend. But he was now requiredto play a very different part. 

As soon as a man applied for parole, the parole officer betook himselfto the place where the applicant had formerly lived or been known, andthere busied himself in unearthing whatever gossip and scandal of ahostile nature any enemy might be willing to supply. There was no timelimit on these revelations, nor were any apparent precautions taken todetermine whether the evil reports were founded in fact; the tale bearerwas not compelled to testify under oath, and his story might refer toincidents which had happened years before, and which had nothing to dowith the crime for which the prisoner was now undergoing sentence. Withthis 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 reportof good conduct while incarcerated, the president of the board fixes adistrustful eye upon him, and says in effect, "Your behavior here seemsto have been unobjectionable; but the board cannot take theresponsibility of granting parole on that ground alone. It desires to beinformed what you were doing in such and such a place, in such and sucha year? Is it not true that you were arrested in this or that year forthis or that offense? Has your career, in short, been absolutelyblameless during the whole course of your life? Because, unless you canprove such to be the case, it will indicate a predisposition tolaw-breaking on your part which will render it imprudent for the boardto recommend you for parole to the Department. "

The president has a sheaf of papers in his hand, which he glances oversignificantly while the mind of the prisoner goes groping back over thepast, asking himself what he has done amiss in forgotten years, and whocan be his accusers. He has no counsel beside him to tell him that he isbeing 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 specifiedthat if his behavior were good while serving that sentence, he would beeligible for parole--that he had, perhaps, given him a longer sentencethan he would otherwise have done, upon this very understanding; andthat, consequently, the parole board was now arrogating the power tooverride the purpose of the federal court, and to inflict additional andunwarranted punishment upon him for something which he may or may nothave done in the past, or for which, if he had done it and beenconvicted, he may already have served sentence. He has no one to arguethus for him; he feels that he is alone and among enemies; and he canmake no effective defense. And the parole officer stands by with a sadcountenance, as of one who had done the best he could for a protégé, butwas powerless to stem the tide of justice. 

It can't be done, legally or justly; but it is done; that is the gist ofthe matter. There is no one to know the wrong and to insist upon theright; and the wrong is perpetrated. Unnumbered victims of it, in everyfederal prison of the country, substantiate this fact. The paroleboard--which means, in practise, its president--exercises more powerthan the federal court, and there is no appeal from his decision. At hiswill, a man may be tried twice for the same offense, behind closeddoors, without aid of counsel. He may be condemned, though the offensewas never committed except in the imagination of an enemy. We tell ourconvicts that they have no civic rights; but it is not generallyunderstood, I think, that the Spanish Inquisition of the Middle Ages canproperly be reproduced in Twentieth Century America even with men behindthe 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, noone could complain; if men thus induced should after all be deprived ofthe reward they had earned, we might condone it. But what if we find theparole board turned into an accessory of the secret service or spysystem, and learn that an applicant for parole, whether or not he havemaintained good conduct during his term, may yet hope for a favorablereport on his case if he will consent to betray some man on whom thepolice have not yet been able to lay their hand?

Here comes a postoffice thief, for example. He was known to have hadconfederates, but they escaped. He is up for parole, with only anindifferent prison record to plead for him. "We do not find your casemeritorious, " says the president to him (in substance), "but there weretwo or three others concerned in your crime. If you are able to furnishtheir names to the board, with such other information as may lead totheir arrest and conviction, we might see our way to recommend leniencyin your matter. " I will not guarantee that the president expresseshimself in terms quite so explicit, but he makes himself perfectlyunderstood, and the prisoner perfectly understands that his liberty ispurchasable at the price of treachery. 

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

Meanwhile, is there not something humiliating in the reflection that atribunal authorized and appointed by the Government of the United Statesshould descend to such practises? Or are we content to accept the spysystem in toto, cost what it may? Perhaps, however, the president of theparole board is prepared to deny that he ever entered into any suchcompact with a prisoner; and perhaps the Department of Justice will beastonished to hear that he ever did. Is the thing true, or not true? Ithink men exist who have excellent reasons to believe, and who may bewilling to testify, that it is. 

But take the case of a prisoner who had no confederates--how does theboard deal with him? According to my information, which includes mypersonal experience, question is put to the applicant whether or not headmits himself guilty of the crime for which he is undergoing sentence?My own reply was, "Not guilty"; and though the president was verycourteous to me, and gave me every assurance that I might expectfavorable action on my application, as a matter of fact and of recordthe recommendation made to the Attorney-General was that my applicationbe denied, and denied it accordingly was. But in other cases nearlycontemporary with mine, which came to my knowledge, the reply of "notguilty" called forth the rejoinder that in that case the matter was notone for the board to pass on, but should be referred to executiveaction--that is, that the President of the United States should bepetitioned for a pardon. Some men are so persistent or so infatuated asto take the suggestion seriously; but their petition does not bearfruit; probably its path to the President is by way of the Department ofJustice, where it is either pigeonholed, or reaches him with anendorsement to the effect that it is not a case for clemency. But insuch cases as came to my knowledge, the President never saw the petitionat all. 

And what happens if our man pleads guilty? Why, in that event he is toldthat such a person as he should not have made application forparole--that he has not been sufficiently punished--that the best heshould hope for is to serve out his sentence, less the regular allowancefor good time. It is a case, in short, of heads the board wins, tailsthe convict loses; and he withdraws, wondering, perhaps, what the boardis 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 afavor or privilege and not a right earned by good conduct, is perhaps nomore than one might expect; but no prisoner who lacks powerful friends, or whose parole does not in some way inure to the advantage of theprison quite as much as to his own, can make his application withassured hope of success. Upon the whole, prisoners feel that parole willnot be granted if any means can be found or devised to prevent it; thegood report of an entire county where a man formerly lived will notprevail against the adverse report of some inspector--one enemy of aprisoner outweighs, in the board's estimation, the favorable words ofmany friends. 

Moreover, men released on parole live in constant dread of the secretservice, for they know that unjust and trivial pretexts are often madethe occasion of their re-arrest; and a paroled man re-arrested mustserve out his whole time without rebate, and not including the periodduring which he was at liberty. Some supervision by the Government is ofcourse proper; but the men feel it to be hostile, not friendly orhelpful; that any error they fall into or mishap they meet with will beconstrued against them, not in their favor. In short, under the outwardforms of liberty, they are still in prison, and are often discouragedfrom doing their best by this sleepless fear of the prowling spy. 

Atlanta prison records show that out of one thousand prisoners whoapplied for parole up to June 30th, 1913, two hundred and seventy weresuccessful. These applicants were serving terms of from one year and aday to twenty-one years. The two hundred and seventy who were paroledhad served an aggregate of eighty-three years beyond the period whenthey were eligible for parole (that is, after one-third of theiroriginal sentence), or an average of about 112 days each, and with anaverage of from twenty-five to forty per cent, of the time contemplatedfor them to reestablish and rehabilitate themselves. 

The one-year-one-day men lost about thirty-three per cent. Of their timeduring which they might have labored to reform themselves; and therewere about one hundred of the two hundred and seventy whose sentencesran for a year and a day. Some sixty-five of the two hundred and seventyhad 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 whichit would appear that short term men, convicted of minor offenses, weregiven preference for parole over long term men. Yet it would seem to theordinary intelligence that it should be the long term men who mostneeded parole and, if their conduct had been good, best deserved it. Itoften happened that men would be paroled when they had but a few weeksor even days yet to serve of their full sentence. In such cases, theprison got whatever credit may belong to granting parole, but the mengot rather less than nothing, for they stood the risk of re-arrest andfurther confinement. 

When an applicant goes before the board for examination, he is sometimesturned down summarily; but more often he goes out ignorant whether ornot he will succeed, and, as I have already shown, he is not seldom keptin this torturing uncertainty until the day when he is either turnedloose or told that he has been rejected. This seems unnecessary, andoften appears to be due to sheer carelessness; the papers are notpromptly submitted to the Attorney-General, or they are pigeonholed andforgotten. It may be true that the law does not categorically demandthat 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 tokeep him in suspense. 

There was a young fellow while I was there, a well educated andagreeable man, whose conduct had always been unexceptionable; he appliedwhen eligible for parole, and was informed that he would be released. Every morning thereafter for three weeks he arose with the hope that therelease would come that day; every night he went to bed with a heartheavy with disappointment. He could not eat or sleep, he could not talkconnectedly, he trembled and turned pale, and was on the way to becominga nervous wreck; but no explanation was vouchsafed him. At last he wassuddenly told that he might go. The sole reason that I ever heard forthe delay was that the papers had been overlooked. There are a greatmany government employees at Washington; it might be worth while toappoint one more, charged with the duty of seeing that the overlookingof parole papers be henceforth avoided. This was a very mild instance; Ihave related how poor Dennis lingered for six months and finally diedfrom the same inattention or indifference. 

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

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

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

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

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

The president of the parole board, in my time, was a Mr. Robert LaDow. Aformer 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 thisletter 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 toocowardly to go among the prisoners in the yards to make a personalinvestigation of conditions; he has dealt unfairly and hastily with somany at the parole meetings that he is afraid to meet prisoners face toface. .. . Prisoners will stand punishment without a murmur if there is ajust reason for it, and they will permit you to be the judge; but whenmen under the law are entitled to parole, and the flimsy excuse to holdthem in confinement is made that they will be a menace to society, theycannot see it in that way. The parole board at this time is arrogantlydominated by LaDow; it is practically a one-man board. .. . 

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

"When he comes to a parole meeting he begins work generally with a rushand a flurry. .. . Usually has about 180 cases; he rushes them at the rateof 60 to 80 a day, without getting at the merits or giving them seriousdeliberation. He brings a stenographer, his private secretary, fromWashington at a heavy expense. .. . Then, when they return to Washington, the stenographer writes up the result of the meeting, while LaDow willtake a junketing trip at Government expense . .. As a sort of recreationfrom his arduous duties. "

I had not been long in Atlanta before a guard informed me that LaDow wasthe best hated man in the prison, by officials and convicts alike. Nordid I find any prisoner there, afterward, who did not speak to the sametune. If he be really an efficient and trustworthy official, this issingular and unfortunate. Mr. Mackay's charges against him atLeavenworth are almost identically the same as what may be heard againsthim any day in Atlanta. If there be any basis for them, perhaps it wouldbe expedient for the Government to supersede him. The parole law, at itsbest, seems to be rather a weak-kneed and perverse institution, and itwould be a pity to deprive it of what value it may have by committingits dispensation to the hands of a man not peculiarly fitted by natureand temperament to carry out its provisions. It was Napoleon's opinionthat a blunder is worse than a crime. 

XV

THE FRUIT OF PRISONS

After weathering Cape Parole, I laid my course for the Port of GoodTime. Men whose prison records are clear are liberated after servingtwo-thirds of their original sentences. This new posture of my mindinvited a review of the experience through which I had been passing, andof the conditions with which I had become conversant, and theirsignificance in connection with the policy of penal imprisonment ingeneral. I will introduce some of these reflections in this place. 

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

On the other hand, severity itself may stimulate a convict. His humanmind cannot comprehend despair. Instinct forces him to hope. So weeks, months, years go by, and hope seems to him more instead of lessjustifiable, till at last, perhaps, he dies with the illusion stillstrong in him. Real despair is un-human and possibly rare. Otherwiseprison mutinies and killings would be more frequent. The argument ofdespair is, "Since I must die here anyway, I'll take two or three ofthose 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 asunjustifiable. We were taught in school that resistance to tyrants isobedience to God, and many who had disobeyed God in other ways wouldgladly obey Him in this. I speak not merely of "ignorant and brutal"convicts, but of educated and intelligent men like you and me. Even asensitive conscience may condone the killing of a tyrant who is slowlyand surely destroying you, body and soul, under sanction of law. But wepunish convicts who fight for revenge or liberty, and protect theofficials who taunt and torture them into doing it. 

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

And what is the fruit of it? For pure, carefree, smiling, remorselesswickedness nothing in human annals surpasses the young criminals--black-mailers, bomb-throwers, gunmen--now infesting our cities. "I think nomore of killing a houseful of human beings, men, women and children, "one of them was quoted as saying the other day, "than of crushing somany beetles. " How came such a monster to exist? Why, we bred him, supplied him with the poisonous conditions that generate such beings andcan generate nothing else. He had intelligence enough to understand thatthe established order made earning an honest living hard work; sawthousands living well without labor apparently, other thousands robbingunder cover of legal technicalities; a legal profession living bydevising statutes to punish crimes and prosecuting the criminals thusmanufactured; often living better yet by teaching criminals to escapethe penalties which their law imposed. He saw reform schools whichinstructed such children as he had been to become such men as he was;prisons and penitentiaries which graduated such as he in the latestdevices of crime--and he made up his mind that goodness was at bottomhumbug, that only a fool would be honest or merciful when money could begot by theft and murder. 

We breed poisonous snakes and scorpions, give them no chance to beanything but that, and then wonder they are not doves and butterflies. Things like this gangster are infernal spirits, irreclaimable; but wegain nothing by extirpating the individuals; the black stream whichcarries them must be dammed at its source. Of the conditions whichgenerate them, a part is the prisons and their keepers. But we are notyet at the root of the matter--the keepers are not primarily to blame. It is the principle which prisons illustrate which attracts and moldskeepers 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 andblood. They segregate visible consequences of social disease; but thedisease is invisibly present in all parts of the body corporate, andcan no more be healed by cutting off the visible part than we canheal small pox by cutting out the pustules. Prisons are not the rightremedy; they inflame and disseminate the poison we would be rid ofand prevent any chance of cure. The soul of all crime is self-seekingin place of neighborly good will; we send men to prison to get themout of our way, and that is criminal self seeking and ill will to theneighbor--delegating to hirelings our own proper business. 

In attempting thus selfishly to extirpate crime, we commit the crimeleast of all forgivable--the denial of human brotherhood andresponsibility. For that crime, no law sends us to prison; yet it is nosentimental notion, but the truth, that it is a crime worse than thosefor which we imprison men. Prisons are brimful of men less guilty beforeGod than is the society that condemned them. You and I are not excusedbecause we are not society--we are society. Society is not numbers butan idea--a mutual relation; we cannot shift our blame to people in thenext 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 thathe is on the last leg of his disastrous voyage. He then begins to seethe whole matter in its general relations; what use was served? who isthe better for it? "Prisons make a good man bad and a bad man worse, " isthe way I often heard the men at Atlanta put it. The situation, entireand in detail, is preposterous and futile. Grown men, from all ranks oflife, or all degrees of intelligence and education, are herdedpromiscuously, and treated now like wild beasts, now like children. Discipline, in any condition of life, is a good thing, and no peopleneed discipline more than we do; but in prison, discipline meanspunishment, and there is no discipline in the right sense of the word. Aman 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 rightfulauthority, and orderly conduct of one's own life. Officials in apenitentiary wear uniforms; prisoners wear prison clothes; but, in warmweather, officials go about, indoors and out, in their shirts and withthe bearing of loafers; they have no official salutes, and the men arenot allowed to salute them--to do so would expose them to "discipline. "There is no drill in the prison, no soldierly bearing, no physicalcontrol of movement. The men are "lined up" to go to work, but it is aline of slouchers and derelicts; no spirit in it, no respect forthemselves or one another, no decent example set by the guards. And yetarmies in all ages and in all parts of the world have proved the valueof discipline--its necessity, indeed--in all proper and intelligenthandling and control of bodies of men; and it is as important forconvicts as for soldiers. It would promote cheerfulness, smartness, efficiency; half an hour's lively drill of all the men in prison everymorning and evening would do them good, improve relations between guardsand prisoners, and lessen the danger of revolts. Why refuse it then? Isit because it would imply something human still lingering in convicts?or because it is feared that convicts taught to act in unison bymilitary drill would combine more readily for mutiny? But order does notnaturally lead to disorder but away from it, and mutinies are mostlyimpromptu affairs, contemplating revenge rather than escape. As for theother argument, a lie is not a sound basis to build on, and it is a liethat convicts are not human. To admit this would facilitate theirmanagement. 

Physical exercise twice a day in the open air would diminish the sickline, produce better work, and help to put a soul in any prison. Desultory exercise--say two or three hours of baseball onSaturdays--does not meet the need--it emphasizes it rather. But atpresent the well-nigh universal aim seems to be to render the graymonotony of prison slavery as monotonous and as gray as possible. Anyrelief from it is opposed or made difficult. It is true that at Atlantaand elsewhere we have music (that is what it is called, and I have nowish to criticize the hardworking and zealous young fellows who produceit in and out of season; and some of the men may like it for aught Iknow); and that a vaudeville company performs for us occasionally. But Imust look these gift horses in the mouth, and say that often we havethem less for our own advantage than as an advertisement to the publicof the liberality of prison authorities. And there to be sure at myprison, 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, permittedto 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 theindulgence 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, andfound some consolation for his awful fate in making them. But one daywhile I was there his cell was entered by the guard, his boxes and planttaken 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 authoritiesare apparently due to sheer stupidity and ignorance. For example, therewere some cows belonging to Atlanta prison, and some of them calved. Sothere were half a dozen calves more or less, with prospects of more tocome. The authorities decided that the expense of rearing theseinnocents was not justifiable; there was nothing in the rule book aboutit; besides, the jail was not designed to harbor innocent creatures. Theminutes of the conference were not given out, and we can judge of whatpassed only by the results. The order went forth that the calves bekilled; and the killing was actually perpetrated, and the bodies wereburied somewhere in the prison grounds. The story seems incredible, butit was corroborated by several men cognizant of the facts. Why not, atleast, have turned them into veal?

I was speaking just now of the promiscuous herding together of prisonersin prisons generally. No effort is made to separate the old from theyoung, the educated from the ignorant; the hardened sinners from theimpressionable youths or newcomers; or (at Atlanta, except in thecells), the negroes from the whites. Association of negroes with whites, on a footing of enforced outward equality, is bad for both; not becausea 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 intodegraded vices; the white man, being as a rule the dominant element inthe situation, masters the will of the negro, but cannot or at leastdoes not erect barriers against the latter's subtle corruption. 

We must always bear in mind the abnormal conditions in a prison--themisery of it, the dearth of variety and relaxation, the terribleyearning for some form, any form, of distraction and amusement. The maleis parted from the female, and from the resource of children; his nervesare on edge, his natural propensities starved, his thoughts wanderingand embittered; he finds no good anywhere, nor any hope of it. He willseize upon any means of abating or dulling his cravings. The negro ispliant, unmoral, free from the restraints of white civilization. In theSouth especially, his subordination to the white is almost a secondnature; but he involuntarily avenges himself (as all lower races do uponthe stronger) by that readiness to comply which flatters the sense ofpower and superiority in the other, and leads to evil. 

I wish to say, in passing, that my allusion to negroes in thisconnection is by no means to be taken as reflecting upon them all; someof 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 andfunction is a desirable element in civilization, and, if we would treathim aright, would do us as much good as we can do him. But the negro injail is at his worst, just as white men are, and he is made worse bywhite companionship. There are more than two hundred of them in Atlantajail, and some of them are the worst of their kind. 

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

A young fellow, without inherited or acquired criminal tendencies, issent 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 suddengrip and horror of the jail. Upon a mind thus astounded and distraughtthe professional criminal seizes and works. 

The man of the world--of the criminal world--befriends him, chats withhim, heartens him, and soon begins to fascinate him with ideas which hadnever till now occurred to him. He preaches the injustice and hostilityof all mankind, and the hopelessness of the convict once in jail everagain reestablishing himself in the world. He tells his pupil that he isdamned forever by his fellow men outside, and that unless he be preparedto lie down and starve, he must fight for life in the only way open tohim--the way of crime. Then he proceeds to show him, progressively, theprofits and advantages of criminal practises. It is only too easy forthe trained crook to overcome the resistance of the unhardened youth;his arguments seem unanswerable; and the wholly justifiable feeling thatprison is wrong and an outrage aids the corruptor at every turn. A fewmonths is often enough to turn an innocent boy into a malefactor; a yearor more of such instruction leaves him no chance of escape; and many aninnocent 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 yourmother was blind and helpless, and your stepfather came in and abusedher and beat her, in your presence, --a big brute with whom you could nothope to contend physically, --what would be your feelings, and what wouldyou be prompted to do? Thomas Baker, trembling and sobbing with rage andanguish, ran out of the house to a neighbor's, borrowed a shotgun, andran 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 thereflection that he did succeed in killing his stepfather; and he will bevery ready to give ear to an older and more experienced man who tellshim that the only difference between good and bad in the world is thatthose are called good who have power over those who are called bad; andthat the only way for him to get even for his wrongs is to become acrook--and not be a fool!

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

Anything unnatural seems unreal. I remarked some time ago that when Iwas sitting in the court room being tried on charges sworn to by certainpostoffice officials, the dull and sordid scenes would sometimes vanishbefore me, and I would say to myself, "It is an illusion--what is reallytaking 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 thetables; anon, the meal over, they would rise and file out--men whom Iknew, creatures like myself, slaves of an arbitrary power acting inaccordance 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 Iknew, men like myself, rattled out of the gate to the dumping ground anddropped there and forgotten--men with wives and children still living ordead in poverty and shame, their pleas unheard and their wrongsunrighted. I would contemplate the long rows of steel cells, cages forme and men like myself, locking us in for months and years andlifetimes, for an example to others and for the protection of societyagainst our menace. I would glance, as I passed, at the aimless toilersin the workshops, standing or squatting in the foul atmosphere under theeye and rifle of the guard. 

I would consider that this dismal and inhuman pageant was going on ageafter age as a cure for crime--while crime, all the while, wasincreasing by percentages so astounding that we seek through immigrationstatistics and records of increase of population to account for it--andin vain. And I would tell myself, once more, that the thing must be anillusion; it was inconceivable that an intelligent nation shouldtolerate it. 

If you found that you were taking bichlorid of mercury by mistake for asleeping draught, would you go on taking it? or would you clamor for anantidote, waylay doctors for help, and disturb the discreet serenity ofhospitals for succor? But the nation, made up of such as you, continuesits prison nostrum, which slays a million for bichlorid of mercury'sone. 

A tragic farce--that is what prisons are. Enclosures of stone and steelare built, and a handful of armed men are given absolute control overseveral hundred beings like themselves. We, as a community, have erecteda system of laws which places us, as a community, in the attitude ofpenalizing practises which we, as individuals, do not severely condemn. Our morality, as publicly professed, is in advance of our morals asprivately exercised. When our neighbor steals or murders, we give himthe jail or the chair; but when you and I are charged with such deedsand see the prison or the chair in our near foreground, we discoverourselves to be less convinced than we had imagined of the rectitude ofour penal system. Of course, then, the faster we make laws to punishcrime, and the more we punish criminals, the more criminals are there topunish. 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 andsevere in its provisions, seeking to prevent crime by the singulardevice of employing the best methods for multiplying it. The victims ofits activities are miserable enough in jail, and languish and die there, and, if they were not very wicked before, are furnished with everyfacility to become so; but they have not the consolation of feeling thattheir being thus immolated on the altar of an outraged but non-existentmorality is doing them or anybody else any good. A prominent businessman was put in a cell yesterday; a political boss arrives to-day; acollege graduate, a judge, and a religious fanatic are expected nextweek. But business, politics, the Four Hundred, the Law and religion areno better than they were before. 

The procession becomes ever more crowded; when is it to stop? Shall webuild more prisons, enact more laws? A leading counsel said the otherday, "Commercial crime is an effect and not a cause. The existing systemis responsible. We should prevent conditions that lead to crime andresort to criminal courts as little as possible. " And anex-Attorney-General observed, about the same time, "I sometimes thinkthat if we could repeal all the laws on our statute books and then writetwo laws--'Fear God' and 'Love your neighbor'--we would get alongbetter"--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 themyriad "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 fornothing rational or in line with the proper and natural processes ofhuman life. They are false, and the mind spontaneously reacts againstfalsity and denies it. But here are half a million (or some say, amillion) men every year who suffer actual and real misery from thisfalsity, 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 legalstanding and warrant, tends to demoralize every one connected with it, and, more or less, the entire community. If its misery and evil wereconfined within the circuit of its walls we might endure it; but itspreads outward like a pestilence. It creates little jails in our mindsand hearts, though we never beheld the substantial walls nor heard thesteel gates clang together. We become jailers to one another, and toourselves. 

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

His wife had seen and known too much of jails to be happy in such aresidence. She thought of her son, growing up inside prison walls, andseeing the squalor and daily misery of convicts, and witnessing thecruelties of the guards--mere matters of routine, but horriblenevertheless. Her husband had come up from the ranks in prison life, andwas an efficient officer. He had no thought of ever changing hisoccupation. 

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

When the husband and father reached home, he went to his rooms; andthere he learned the extent of the misery and loathing which hisprofession and his dwelling had created in the heart of the woman whohad loved him. She lay dead, with a bullet hole in her temple. Thelittle 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 ofthe situation had shaken her hand, and she had missed him. Then had comethat interval, which the two keepers had noticed. What had been in hermind and heart during those endless, brief minutes--her terrors, hermemories, her desperate resolve, now failing, now again renewed? If youwho read this are a mother, you may perhaps imagine the unspeakabledrama of that hour. At last, murder and suicide were better than thejail, and she fired twice again, and this time did not miss. 

"Insane" was the verdict. But it is perhaps reasonable to ascribe theinsanity to the conditions which found their black fruition in thewoman's act, rather than to the despairing creature herself. She had allthat most women would ask for happiness--a good husband, a darlinglittle son, an assured support. But there was ever before her eyes theghastly, inhuman spectacle and burden of the jail; she knew it throughand through, and she could endure it no longer. She pictured herinnocent boy growing up and following his father's trade. The ideatortured her beyond the limits of her strength, and she accepted theonly alternative--death. She was not a prisoner--she was only a lookeron; but that is what prison did for her. And our press, echoing our ownwill, and our courts, voicing our own laws, keeps on shouting, "Put thecrooks 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 ofthe prison principle not to be lightly passed over, or commented on withrasping irony by witty editorial writers. That tragedy means something. We cannot lease the community's real estate to hell, for building hellhouses and carrying on hell business, supported by our taxes andadvocated by our courts and praised (or "reformed") by ourpenologists--we cannot do that without meeting the consequences. We seehow the consequences affected Mrs. Schleth in the Queens County, NewYork, jail, last summer. It will affect other persons in other ways. Butit will affect us all before we are done with it. Hell on earth is atenant which no community can suffer with impunity. 

If prisons are a good thing, it is full time they made good. If they area bad thing, it is full time they were abolished. The middle courses nowbeing tried in some places cannot succeed; no compromise with hell eversucceeds, 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 willdoubtless puzzle us for a long time to come. I have no infallibleremedy; 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 tothat question would save civilized humanity a great many millions ofdollars 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 onlytell no tales, but they commit no crimes. Kill all criminals and crimewould cease. The device has been tried--it was tried in England for awhile--but the result was disappointing. It threatened to decimate thepopulation; and in spite of logic, it failed to discourage law breakers. Criminals seemed to get used to being hanged, and drawn andquartered--they no longer minded it. There is a psychological reason forthat, no doubt; though it is not so sure that psychology as understoodand practised to-day can find out what it is. 

Moreover, the spy system, which always accompanies and thrives uponsevere legislation, became so productive of informations that it wassoon clear that the end would be the indictment not so much of a tenthpart of the population as of all but a tenth--or even more. So acompromise was made; only murderers should be killed. That did notlessen the number of murders, and seems rather to have increased them;for the impulse to murder is commonly a very strong impulse, producing abrain condition in which consequences are not weighed. Also, when thecommunity takes life for life, it appears to weaken the general respectfor life, and men can be hired to do a killing job for small sums. Sentimental persons, too, insist on making heroes of convictedmurderers, which in a degree, perhaps, counteracts the depressingconditions 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 lawyersfor the defense. 

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

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

These anticipations often prove well grounded. 

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

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

However, there is agitation for the abolition of the death penalty; andpossibly the futility and absurdity of such a punishment may finallystrike the persons whom we have picked out as the wisest and ablestamong us, and have put in our legislatures to tell us what to do and notto do. Absurd though legal killings may be, they are not so absurd asthe 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 ofthe disgrace of it, to those who can feel disgrace. The serious featureabout killing is, that it is final for this state of being, and when wedo 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 whatimprisonment means, and so far as our mortal senses can tell us, it isworse than death. But while we may abolish the death penalty easily, thesuggestion to abolish imprisonment staggers us like an earthquake. Everymoral instinct in our little souls leaps up and shrieks in protest; andif that be not enough, we fall back with full conviction upon theconsideration of security of property. It is impossible to consider ameasure which would leave crimes against property unpunished. And whatother punishment for them than imprisonment is there or can there be?

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

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

The only answer hitherto is compromise--the old answer, fresh once morefrom the devil's inexhaustible repertoire. We are willing to abolish thedeath penalty, which is more merciful than imprisonment; but we areunwilling to abolish the latter, because in spite of its inhumanity, itseems to protect our property. In other words, we consider our owninterests exclusively, and the culprit's not at all--though we stillprotest that our object in imprisoning is as much the individual'sreformation, as our own security. The fact, however, that imprisonmentbrutifies and destroys instead of reforming is beginning to glare at usin a manner so disconcerting and undeniable, that we feel something hasto be done; and in accordance with our ancient habit and constitutionalpredisposition, that something turns out to be compromise. We sentencedfor murder, but put obstacles in the way of carrying the sentence out. On the same principle, we will now retain prisons, but make them soagreeable 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 eitherreligious or humanitarian or both, obtained leave to visit prisons, talkwith the inmates, give them religious exhortations, supply them withsome forms of entertainment, and in other ways try to lighten the burdenof their penal slavery. These persons deserve great credit. It was notso much the exhortations or entertainments that did good, as the ideathereby aroused in convicts that somebody cared for them. Between, themand the community there was still war to the knife; but certainindividuals, separate from the community, were not hostile but welldisposed 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 inhis misery. I once asked a comrade in Atlanta whether if the warden wereto give him twenty dollars and tell him to go to the town, make apurchase for him, and return, he would do so? He said, "No, " and when Iasked him why, replied that he would know the warden had something uphis sleeve, and was not on the square in his proposition. I then named acertain benefactor of the prisoners outside the prison, and asked if hewould do it for that person? After some consideration, he said that hewould, because he "would hate to disappoint" that person, and wouldbelieve in the bona fides of that person's request. This man was held tobe rather a bad case; but he was still capable of acting honorably, ifthe right motives were supplied. 

But this is not enough. The great mass of convicts could not be reformedby "hating to disappoint" any particular person who had been kind tothem or trusted them. Their personal gratitude to the individual wouldnot stem the tide of their well grounded conviction that people ingeneral were neither trustful nor kind; and the numberless and constanttemptations of their life after liberation would prove too strong forthem. There have been instances to the contrary; touching and beautifulinstances, some of them; but they are far from establishing theprinciple that Christian Endeavorers, or Salvation Armies, or prisonangels, or angelic wardens can effect the reform of men in prison. Somestimulus much more powerful is required. 

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

There have been such cases; but they prove, not the attractiveness ofprisons, but their power to kill the manhood in a man. What does it notsuggest of outrage and degradation perpetrated upon a human soul, thathe should come to prefer a cell and a master to freedom! There may beslaveries so soft as to invite the base and pusillanimous, but they aremore rather than less depraving than cruelties to all that makeshonorable and useful manhood. The deepest and essential evil of prisonsis not hardship and torture, but imprisonment. If choice could be madebetween the two, every manly man would choose the former. No disgrace isinherent in hardship and torture; but imprisonment brands a man as unfitto associate with his kind. No mortal creature has or can have the rightto inflict it, nor any aggregation of mortals. 

This is a hard saying, but I will stand by it. There were criminals ofall kinds in Atlanta with whom I was brought into contact. One had grownrich by organizing a system of "white slavery" on a large scale. Hedealt in woman's dishonor and turned it into cash, and he saw nothingwrong in it. This man was advanced in years, he was incapable ofregarding women in any other light than as merchandise, he wasinsensible to their misery, and laughed at their degradation. He wasphysically repulsive; his face and swollen body suggested a huge toad. It would be foolish to associate the idea of reform with such acreature. I felt a nauseous disgust of him; he seemed on the lowestlevel of human nature. 

But, contemplating him during some months, I saw little touches ofkindliness and good humor in him; he did not hate his fellows, nor wishthem to hate him. If the other prisoners ostracized him or cursed him, he was painfully sensible of it, and even perplexed, and would try towin their favor. I perceived that he had always lived in a world offilth and sin, and knew no other. In that world, he had doubtless notdone the best he might, but which of us can say he himself has donethat? Had I been born and bred as he was, what would I be? What righthad 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 himwell. 

There were men there who had committed merciless robberies, cruelmurders, heartless swindles, abominable depravities. I have felt greatertemperamental aversion from many highly respectable persons than I didfrom them. Their crimes were one thing, they were another. Not thatcrime does not corrupt a man--stain him of its color. But there isalways 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 weare--that he is unfit to associate with us. And it behooves us always tobear it in mind that to affirm the contrary is an unpardonable sinagainst him of whom we affirm it; it works more evil in him thananything else we can do, and places us who repudiate him in a trulyhideous posture. Shall we be more fastidious than God?

All crime is hateful; but I came to the conclusion that there is onlyone crime which prompts us to hate the criminal as well as his crimeitself. For this crime is one which originates in our heart; it is notforced upon us by need or passion or heredity. Therefore, it permeatesevery fiber of our being, every thought of our mind, every impulse ofour 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 amonghuman laws; rather, it is regarded as a mark of superiority. The mostrespectable persons in the community are most apt to commit it. And itwas upon the suggestion and initiative of this crime that penalimprisonment was invented, and is perpetrated to this day. 

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

It is engendered, most often, by a successful outwardmorality--conformity to the letter of the Commandments--the whitening ofthe outside of the sepulcher. But the stench of the interiorloathsomeness oozes through. The only person unaware of that stench isthe man himself. There is but one cure for it--what we callRegeneration; which makes us sensible of that deadly odor, and drives usfreely and sincerely to detest ourselves in dust and ashes and bitterhumiliation, to pity, succor and love our brethren, and to wrestle withthe angel of the Lord for mercy. But we prefer to seek salvation fromevil in the building of prisons. 

Now, this crime may survive even in prisons; but it is rarer there thanin any other aggregation of human beings. Therefore, there is awonderful sweetness in the prison atmosphere. It is a sweetness which isperceived amid all the dreariness, stagnation and outrage, and it risesabove the vapors of physical crime, for it is a spiritual sweetness. There men are locked in their cells, but the whited sepulcher isshattered, and its sorry contents are purified by the pure light ofhumiliation, confession and helplessness; there are no hypocrites there, no masks, no holier-than-thou paraders. Their crimes have beenproclaimed, and branded upon their backs; pretenses are at an end forthem. It was wonderful to look into a man's face and see no disguisethere. "I am guilty--here I am!" This experience took the savor out ofordinary worldly society for me. I go here and there, and everywherethere is masquerading--the weaving of a thin deception which does notdeceive. We were sincere and humble in prison; but that is a resultwhich the builders of prisons hardly foresaw. 

There was one more step toward compromise--to take the prisoner out ofhis cell and send him outdoors without guards or precautions, nothingbut his promise that he would return when the work to which he wasassigned was done. 

I read the other day an agreeable account of this "honor system. " Themen were employed on road making chiefly, enjoyed the benefit of freeair and the outdoor scene, and kept order and faith among themselves. But the prison walls were still around them, though unseen. They weretold that any attempt to escape would be punished by deprivationthenceforth of all liberties--any attempt! and if the escape weresuccessful, the fugitive would know that the chances of recapture were athousand against one. Moreover, it was laid down that the escape orattempt 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 butself-preservation that was relied on. And in any event, there was theprison at last; the chain might be lengthened to hundreds of miles, butit held them still. They were convicts; when their terms were up, theywould be jail birds. Society had set them apart from itself; they were acontamination. "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! "Weforgive you, but on sufferance; it is really a great concession; youmust show your gratitude by good works. "

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

I repeat--the evil of prisons is the imprisonment. You must not deprivea man of his liberty. His liberty is his life. He may, and probably hewill, use his liberty to the endangering of your property or comfort;but has your own career been wholly free from infringement upon therights of your neighbor? If you send him to prison, you ought to linkarms 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 doorsclose upon you, you will discover that you have suffered aninjustice--that you are the victim of a blind stupidity. Not in this waycan you be reformed. All genuine reformation must proceed from withinyou--it cannot be compelled by locks and bars; freedom is essential toit. Locks and bars arouse only the impulse to break through them, andthis primal and righteous impulse leaves you no leisure to think ofrelieving your soul from stains of guilt. 

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

The newspapers the other day told of a man who had been sentenced toforty 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!" Weare told in the Bible that we must not let the sun go down upon ourwrath. The wrath of this lady could not be appeased with forty years. Think of what that culprit will be after forty years in jail. Assumingfor the sake of argument the extreme absurdity that he is alive by thattime, 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 troublesin this world will probably soon be over. But when her time comes, withwhat face, on what plea, shall she ask forgiveness?

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

I cannot for my part imagine any hard and fast plan being laid down inadvance. But it would seem reasonable, to begin with, to free ourselvesfrom the social crime of claiming superiority to our brethren. Havingremoved that beam from our eyes, we may see more clearly how to abatethe motes in the criminal's. If we can bring ourselves to regardprisoners 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 onthe road to remedying their lapses from moral virtues. 

The majority of prison crimes are against property, and are motived bywant and poverty. If the man had opportunity to work for his living, hewould as a rule abstain from stealing. Other crimes are committed inpassion; 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 mentaldisease, or to actual insanity. It is the doctor and not the jailer whoshould seek the cure of these. 

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

These creatures, as I have already suggested, are the distillation ofthe various evils in our cities which society has failed frankly toface, or genuinely to attempt to lessen. They are not responsible fortheir existence, and, as they indicate a general condition, it can do nogood to kill them or otherwise put them out of the way; others wouldtake their place. They are not insane in the common sense, but they arethe product of insane social circumstances, responsibility for whichrests on us. They must be taken in hand individually, by workersself-consecrated to that duty, and deterred from doing evil, and showedthe 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 tobuild the pyramids and the Panama Canal, and to advance from the dugoutof the savage to the _Mauretania_. It is work better worth doing thanany of these. 

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

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

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

Perhaps, however, nothing else was ever so difficult as to turn from ourflesh pots, our dinners and tangos, our summer resorts and winterresorts, our business and idleness, and undertake to substitute forprisons our personal care and help for criminals--to remove the causeswhich led them to crime, to convince them of our good faith and goodwill, and to disabuse them of their suspicion that we distrust them, condescend to them, and despise them. For this prodigal brother of ourshas become a very unsightly and unattractive object during thesethousands of years of his sojourn among the pigsties and corn husks. Hedoes not speak in our language or observe our manners or contemplate ourideals, or care for our refinements. We shall have to read again thefairy stories where the prince has been changed by evil enchantment intosome uncouth and repulsive monster, but was redeemed to human form bysympathy. The evil spell was of our working, and it behooves us toovercome it. No one else can. 

We must abolish the title of criminal as applied to any class orindividuals of our race in distinction from others, and use those ofunfortunates or scapegoats instead. They are our victims, and oursalvation depends upon our making good to them the evil we have donethem. It will not suffice to delegate the job to money, or to personschosen for that purpose; we must do it ourselves--make it one of themain occupations of our lives. Riches and culture are fine things, butmaking good out of evil is better. Its rewards may not be so immediateor 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 religiousfeeling, 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 andkeep His commandments; unless you first love Him, His commandments willbe left undone, or done only in the letter, which is the worst form ofnot doing. But the way to love God is to love the neighbor, and theneighbor is the criminal. 

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

APPENDIX

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

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

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

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

Evil is--to prefer the good of self before good of the neighbor; crimeis to act in accordance with that preference. Every son of Adam is bornto evil, and society is but his multiplication; but society could existonly by the compromise that the hostility of man against neighbor shouldmask itself as mutual forbearance. Impossible that every one shouldpossess every thing; therefore dissimulate your greed and divide. Butcertain persons, missing their share either through non-conformity withthe doctrine, or by force of circumstances, stuck to the old principleof each man for himself, and became "criminals. " Their hand was againstsociety, and society's against them. 

In eras before society became integrated, some of these non-conformistsprevailed over such strength as could be mustered against them, and byhearty and forthright robberies and murders came to be leaders andrulers of men--earls, barons, kings. The aristocracy of modern Europe isdescended from such stout rebels. They became reconciled with, andorganized, society, and aided it in war against the weaker of their ownsort; and it was they who devised prisons for such captives as it mightbe inexpedient to kill outright. 

All this did not alter the truth that all men are alike evil, and thatsuch as are not also criminals, forbear--at the outset at least--frommotives of enlightened selfishness. But in course of time, even enforcedgood behavior breeds good intent, and "good" people. For God rules usthrough 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 andpenalties 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 properpunishment for crime is the criminal's conscience, and if he have noneavailable, he is liable to the natural contingency that violence breedsviolence, 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 seethe 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 considerwhether, aside from physical penalties or jailing, we possess means forinducing criminals to abstain from crime. Let us leave abstractarguments 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 recentlyreleased on "good time. " I shall first give you a notion of what jailis, and of what is done and suffered there; then consider what hashitherto been done to alleviate prison conditions and abuses; and endwith inquiring whether these measures, actively prosecuted, will proveadequate to the need, or whether something else and more is demanded. Ifso--_what_?

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

Our prisons were, in the beginning, frankly hellish in their object; menwho had incurred personal or society hostility were put in them to betormented from motives of hate and revenge. But during the last fewgenerations the humanitarian idea has come into being and has not onlyameliorated prison conditions in some prisons and to some extent, buthas caused prisons in general to cease being frank and to becomehypocritical--to pretend that they are purgatories, aiming not atrevenge but at reform. This pretense has been so industriously andsagaciously put forward that ninety-nine outsiders out of a hundred aremisled by it, and believe that prisons are not, still, administered forthe destruction of their inmates, physical, mental and moral, with suchcircumstances of cruelty and brutality as happen to suit the humor ofthe arbitrary and irresponsible guards and wardens; but that they areuniformly conducted with an eye to wooing away prisoners from sin andcrime, and persuading them of the beauty and policy of honesty, gentleness and goodness. In fact it is probable that almost everybodybelieves this, except the wardens and guards, and the prisonersthemselves--and a few Thomas Mott Osbornes and other prison workers whohave had an amateur peep inside the walls and caught a fleeting glimpseof 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 aboutthe coddling of criminals; and witty writers will have it that prisonsare gentlemen's clubs where all the comforts of refined life arecombined with a voluptuous idleness, or with only work enough to avertennui. Criminals are depicted as waiting in cues at the gates of prisonsfor admission, like the public at the doors of a popular theater; thoughat the same time in another column, you may find the statement that, inview of modern legal technicalities, it has become almost impossible toget a man into jail. According to the logic of the witty writers, thisnear-impossibility should be more deplored by the technicality-inhibitedcriminals than by anybody else. 

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

Let every judge, attorney general, district attorney, and juryman at atrial spend a bona fide term in jail, and there would be no moreconvictions--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 beneficentpurgatories and not hells renders it the more sickening. Life is aGod-given discipline for men, and at best a severe one; but if webelieve in God, we know it is given in love, for loving ends. All mortallife is an imprisonment; the laws of it are essential and natural, andbreaking them involves essential and natural penalties. God deputed thisrégimen of love to parents, and to those who deal with their fellowcreatures from impulses of parental or brotherly love; but He neverlicensed any man to punish another from revenge or hate, or in mereindifference. 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 beunpardonable, it is that, because it is not essential or natural, but anusurpation against nature, and breeds not reform but more evil. 

Prison officials, in their treatment of prisoners, are not actuated bylove, 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 becometo the spectacle of suffering and outrage; the more heedless of justiceand mercy do they grow. They grow to disbelieve in any human truth andgoodness; all men are to them criminals actual or potential; breathingand dwelling amidst crime, it enters into their own blood and temper. They will have their debt to pay; but neither may those escape whoignorantly or carelessly appointed them to office and hold themthere--the Government, and the nation which creates Government as itsrepresentative. Ignorance does not excuse; knowledge on these subjectsis a sacred duty. Man cannot break the bonds of his brotherhood withman; the blood shed will be required of him, and the usury of misery andtears. 

"Throw him to the lions!--serve him right!" Most of us have joined inthat barbarous cry upon occasion. But some of us have sickened at theslaughter, and are for paring the lions' claws, or at least exhortingthem to roar less savagely, and to devour their prey in secret. But thelions, with their attendant hyenas and jackals, have so long beenaccepted as indispensable to the order and majesty of the State, that noone likes to stand up to his God-given intuitions, and demand theabolition of the whole prison circus. We hardly realize that the harmcriminals do society cannot equal the harm that society does to itselfby 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 givethe convicts useful industrial occupation, which will not only keep themhappy and sane, but pay the cost of their keep to a tender-hearted buteconomic state; let us even be very venturesome, and--with reasonableprecautions--put the men on their honor, suffer them to run out a littleway and labor in the free sunshine, upon their promising to rememberthat 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 aremoribund or dead, let us get or solicit jobs for them, and at all eventskeep a sentimental eye on them for a while. All this--only let us keepour prisons! For think what would happen if those terrible creatureswere let loose upon us, to keep on murdering and robbing us withimpunity! Remember that they are a class apart, unlike ourselves, whoseperverted nature, though it may be lulled by gentleness and tact, cannever become truly human. 

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

Prisons are hell--we come back to that; and they are not and cannot bemade purgatories. Men competent to make them purgatories are not to behad at Government prices; no duties more onerous than those of a fitconscientious warden exist under the state; and how can we look for sucha man at a four or five thousand dollar salary? Twenty-five or evenfifty thousand would be moderate, and the men who are worth that are insome other business. The foremost citizens of the nation would not betoo good for the job, and we content ourselves with ward heelers andrough-necks, who undertake it not for the salary, but for the graft thatgoes with it and exceeds it. Politics and graft sit in the warden'soffice, and walk the ranges in guards' uniform, and crush the manhoodout of our brothers for money, and out of sheer wanton inhumanity. Ofall the inmates of the jail, these men are the veritable andincorrigible and unpardonable criminals; for they were not driven tocrime by passion, hunger, drink or ignorance, they have not been reducedto the state of desperate pariahs, outcasts and scapegoats of the race, but they willingly embrace the function entrusted to them--theGovernment license to steal, bully, torture and murder--with a grotesquesanctimonious leer for the public, and for the convicts--what! Therégimen of hell!

This writer's statements seem a trifle emphatic, do they not? May we notsurmise that they are motived by some personal grudge? have we not heardan old adage--"No thief e'er felt the halter draw with good opinion ofthe 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 anex-convict?

Of the right or wrong of my conviction and sentence I am not to speakhere, nor do they specially interest me now, except as illustrations ofthe working of the machine. But personal grudge against officials of myprison I have none. I was treated with consideration and lenity. I cameout in better condition upon the whole than I went in, both of body andspirit, though nothing would have been easier than to murder me underthe forms of routine prison discipline. What was the reason of this? Iwas never informed; I might guess at it, but I don't know. Nevertheless, the sweetness and light of the prison dispensation as regarded myselfdid 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 atmeat or labored in the vineyard, fading and failing day by day; I sawsome of them die of broken hearts or broken bodies; I heard theirstories and was certified of their truth; I saw the cart rattle out ofthe gate with the pine box containing the body of the man who could onlythus find freedom; I visited the graves of those who had been needlesslyand sometimes wantonly slain. I could not ignore these things because Imyself 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 atall. My grudge is deep, but no personal one. 

I shall not at present discuss Government measures of so-calledmitigation--suspended sentence, parole, indeterminate sentence. In theintention of their originators they may have appeared beneficent; inpractise, they proved sinister and abominable means to cruelty anddespotism. There can be no compromises with hell. 

But can I pretend to solve the age-long problem of the right handling ofcrime in the community? I am not wiser than my fellows, but I have feltand known at first hand more of certain grievous wrongs than most ofthem have, and even those who have known and felt may not possess theopportunity 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 furtherteaching of time, what shall be changed, abolished, and done. 

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

Yes: but is society protected by prisons? John Jones has been jailed forburglary, it is true; but straightway Tom Brown, Jem Smith and ReginaldMontmorency start in as train-robber, murderer and confidence man. Wehave 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 freshcases of rape are reported. --But there is no visible connection betweenalleged cause and effect--it just happens so. --Yes, but if it doeshappen almost invariably, we cannot avoid the suspicion that aconnection, even though invisible to the outward eye, there must be. 

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

Let worldly wisdom and enlightened selfishness retire, and listen for awhile 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 isvain to beat about the bush; we must face the alternative. The syllogismruns thus: criminality is incompatible with true civilization--with anormal and secure society. Jails are a crime; society makes and warrantsjails; therefore society is criminal. And the abolition ofjails--repudiation both of the principle and of the concrete fact--isthe only way to social redemption. 

The one escape from this conclusion is, of course, denial that jails area crime. I will not further contest that point, but only repeat: Let thedeniers and doubters try a year behind the bars, themselves, and thenregister 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 itseems inevitable that by relieving these of prison restraints, we mustincrease the prevalence of crime in the community, however much we mightbe absolving the community itself from its characteristic crime ofjails. Is there any answer to that?

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

That is easily written, but it involves nothing less than a radicalreadjustment of our whole attitude toward life. It also brings me to mysecond suggestion--that this should be accomplished. We must embark upona great adventure--the greatest, so far as I know, ever undertaken inthis world. We must overcome the anti-human prejudice that there is adistinct criminal class; we must recognize the latent criminality in usall, and regard those in whom from latent it has become active as suchmen as we, but for fortunate circumstances, would have been. There is noother distinction between them and us. 

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

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

There is nothing original or startling about the Golden Rule as aproposition; but it will seem to tear us to pieces when it is put inpractise. But that will do us no harm; we have been long enoughcompacted together in error and selfishness. The revolution will come;it is still for us to say whether it shall be outward and terrible, orspiritual and benign. Penal imprisonment and all that it implies is notsane nor safe; and the cry, To the lions--serves him right!--belongs tothe dark ages, and not to the future. --_Reprinted by kind permissionfrom 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 preventThe sky, nor check the immortal strifeWe wage with hungry Fate, nor spoilOur desperate hope, nor circumventDreams, that redeem our aimless toil!

What Fear and Ignorance have builtShall pass, with Ignorance and Fear, Before the breath of Love; and men, Casting aside the mask of guiltThat 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_. )