The Subterranean Brotherhood Part 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XV

THE FRUIT OF PRISONS

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

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

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

Not ten percent of men in jail would regard such a killing as unjustifiable. We were taught in school that resistance to tyrants is obedience to G.o.d, and many who had disobeyed G.o.d in other ways would gladly obey Him in this. I speak not merely of "ignorant and brutal"

convicts, but of educated and intelligent men like you and me. Even a sensitive conscience may condone the killing of a tyrant who is slowly and surely destroying you, body and soul, under sanction of law. But we punish convicts who fight for revenge or liberty, and protect the officials who taunt and torture them into doing it.

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

And what is the fruit of it? For pure, carefree, smiling, remorseless wickedness nothing in human annals surpa.s.ses the young criminals--black-mailers, bomb-throwers, gunmen--now infesting our cities. "I think no more of killing a houseful of human beings, men, women and children," one of them was quoted as saying the other day, "than of crus.h.i.+ng so many beetles." How came such a monster to exist?

Why, we bred him, supplied him with the poisonous conditions that generate such beings and can generate nothing else. He had intelligence enough to understand that the established order made earning an honest living hard work; saw thousands living well without labor apparently, other thousands robbing under cover of legal technicalities; a legal profession living by devising statutes to punish crimes and prosecuting the criminals thus manufactured; often living better yet by teaching criminals to escape the penalties which their law imposed. He saw reform schools which instructed such children as he had been to become such men as he was; prisons and penitentiaries which graduated such as he in the latest devices of crime--and he made up his mind that goodness was at bottom humbug, that only a fool would be honest or merciful when money could be got by theft and murder.

We breed poisonous snakes and scorpions, give them no chance to be anything but that, and then wonder they are not doves and b.u.t.terflies.

Things like this gangster are infernal spirits, irreclaimable; but we gain nothing by extirpating the individuals; the black stream which carries them must be dammed at its source. Of the conditions which generate them, a part is the prisons and their keepers. But we are not yet at the root of the matter--the keepers are not primarily to blame.

It is the principle which prisons ill.u.s.trate which attracts and molds keepers till they become often as bad as the men they have charge of, and often much worse.

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

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

Thoughts like these pa.s.s through a convict's mind when he discovers that he is on the last leg of his disastrous voyage. He then begins to see the whole matter in its general relations; what use was served? who is the better for it? "Prisons make a good man bad and a bad man worse," is the way I often heard the men at Atlanta put it. The situation, entire and in detail, is preposterous and futile. Grown men, from all ranks of life, or all degrees of intelligence and education, are herded promiscuously, and treated now like wild beasts, now like children.

Discipline, in any condition of life, is a good thing, and no people need discipline more than we do; but in prison, discipline means punishment, and there is no discipline in the right sense of the word. A man is "disciplined" when he is starved, or clubbed, or put in the hole, or deprived of his good time.

Military discipline might be beneficial; it implies respect for rightful authority, and orderly conduct of one's own life. Officials in a penitentiary wear uniforms; prisoners wear prison clothes; but, in warm weather, officials go about, indoors and out, in their s.h.i.+rts and with the bearing of loafers; they have no official salutes, and the men are not allowed to salute them--to do so would expose them to "discipline."

There is no drill in the prison, no soldierly bearing, no physical control of movement. The men are "lined up" to go to work, but it is a line of slouchers and derelicts; no spirit in it, no respect for themselves or one another, no decent example set by the guards. And yet armies in all ages and in all parts of the world have proved the value of discipline--its necessity, indeed--in all proper and intelligent handling and control of bodies of men; and it is as important for convicts as for soldiers. It would promote cheerfulness, smartness, efficiency; half an hour's lively drill of all the men in prison every morning and evening would do them good, improve relations between guards and prisoners, and lessen the danger of revolts. Why refuse it then? Is it because it would imply something human still lingering in convicts?

or because it is feared that convicts taught to act in unison by military drill would combine more readily for mutiny? But order does not naturally lead to disorder but away from it, and mutinies are mostly impromptu affairs, contemplating revenge rather than escape. As for the other argument, a lie is not a sound basis to build on, and it is a lie that convicts are not human. To admit this would facilitate their management.

Physical exercise twice a day in the open air would diminish the sick line, produce better work, and help to put a soul in any prison.

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

Visitors did not know about him.

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

I was speaking just now of the promiscuous herding together of prisoners in prisons generally. No effort is made to separate the old from the young, the educated from the ignorant; the hardened sinners from the impressionable youths or newcomers; or (at Atlanta, except in the cells), the negroes from the whites. a.s.sociation of negroes with whites, on a footing of enforced outward equality, is bad for both; not because a bad white man is worse than a bad negro, but because the physical, mental and moral qualities of either react unfavorably upon the other.

The negro, being the more ignorant as a rule, falls more readily into degraded vices; the white man, being as a rule the dominant element in the situation, masters the will of the negro, but cannot or at least does not erect barriers against the latter's subtle corruption.

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

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

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

A young fellow, without inherited or acquired criminal tendencies, is sent to jail for some inadvertent and insignificant infraction of law.

He had always meant to live straight; he had no enmity against society; he had always thought of himself as well intentioned and law abiding.

But here he is; and he is shocked, shamed and appalled at the sudden grip and horror of the jail. Upon a mind thus astounded and distraught the professional criminal seizes and works.

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

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

Fifteen years in prison for that! Shall we rejoice and say that justice, at last, is satisfied?--But that is a digression.

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

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

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

This thought often recurred while I was in prison.

At meal times, the men would file in and take their places at the tables; anon, the meal over, they would rise and file out--men whom I knew, creatures like myself, slaves of an arbitrary power acting in accordance with principles long since known to be false and mischievous.

And I would see men whom I knew, men like myself, jeered, insulted, clubbed, dragged to the hole. I would see the dead bodies of men whom I knew, men like myself, rattled out of the gate to the dumping ground and dropped there and forgotten--men with wives and children still living or dead in poverty and shame, their pleas unheard and their wrongs unrighted. I would contemplate the long rows of steel cells, cages for me and men like myself, locking us in for months and years and lifetimes, for an example to others and for the protection of society against our menace. I would glance, as I pa.s.sed, at the aimless toilers in the workshops, standing or squatting in the foul atmosphere under the eye and rifle of the guard.

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

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

A tragic farce--that is what prisons are. Enclosures of stone and steel are built, and a handful of armed men are given absolute control over several hundred beings like themselves. We, as a community, have erected a system of laws which places us, as a community, in the att.i.tude of penalizing practises which we, as individuals, do not severely condemn.

Our morality, as publicly professed, is in advance of our morals as privately exercised. When our neighbor steals or murders, we give him the jail or the chair; but when you and I are charged with such deeds and see the prison or the chair in our near foreground, we discover ourselves to be less convinced than we had imagined of the rect.i.tude of our penal system. Of course, then, the faster we make laws to punish crime, and the more we punish criminals, the more criminals are there to punish. Our hypocrisy gradually is revenged upon us, one after another; one by one we fall into the pit so virtuously digged for others.

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

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

Yes, that is a prudent stipulation; and it applies just as well to the myriad "laws on our statute books" as to these two.