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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



VIII

FOR LIFE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



IX

THE TOIL OF SLAVERY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



X

OUR BROTHER'S KEEPER

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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