The Subterranean Brotherhood Part 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this implies that it should devote itself to so improving these evil conditions as to give the criminal a fair chance.

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

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

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

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

THE WALL

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

What Fear and Ignorance have built Shall pa.s.s, with Ignorance and Fear, Before the breath of Love; and men, Casting aside the mask of guilt That baffled, mocked and cursed them here, Shall know each other once again!

--And must we die, release so near!

_Written in Atlanta Penitentiary, October, 1913_.)