The Subterranean Brotherhood Part 13

I call prisons a tragic farce, and am sensible of an unreality in them; but they are fortunately unreal only in the sense that they stand for nothing rational or in line with the proper and natural processes of human life. They are false, and the mind spontaneously reacts against falsity and denies it. But here are half a million (or some say, a million) men every year who suffer actual and real misery from this falsity, and many of whom die of it; that is the tragedy of the farce.

And the fact that this falsity, prison, exists among us and has legal standing and warrant, tends to demoralize every one connected with it, and, more or less, the entire community. If its misery and evil were confined within the circuit of its walls we might endure it; but it spreads outward like a pestilence. It creates little jails in our minds and hearts, though we never beheld the substantial walls nor heard the steel gates clang together. We become jailers to one another, and to ourselves.

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

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

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

When the husband and father reached home, he went to his rooms; and there he learned the extent of the misery and loathing which his profession and his dwelling had created in the heart of the woman who had loved him. She lay dead, with a bullet hole in her temple. The little boy was also dead, shot through the heart by his mother's hand.

On the floor was the pistol, and four empty sh.e.l.ls were scattered about.

Those first bullets she must have aimed at her son, but the horror of the situation had shaken her hand, and she had missed him. Then had come that interval, which the two keepers had noticed. What had been in her mind and heart during those endless, brief minutes--her terrors, her memories, her desperate resolve, now failing, now again renewed? If you who read this are a mother, you may perhaps imagine the unspeakable drama of that hour. At last, murder and suicide were better than the jail, and she fired twice again, and this time did not miss.

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

Shall we not pause a moment over the bodies of this mother and her son, over this frenzied murder and suicide? They const.i.tute an arraignment of the prison principle not to be lightly pa.s.sed over, or commented on with rasping irony by witty editorial writers. That tragedy means something.

We cannot lease the community's real estate to h.e.l.l, for building h.e.l.l houses and carrying on h.e.l.l business, supported by our taxes and advocated by our courts and praised (or "reformed") by our penologists--we cannot do that without meeting the consequences. We see how the consequences affected Mrs. Schleth in the Queens County, New York, jail, last summer. It will affect other persons in other ways. But it will affect us all before we are done with it. h.e.l.l on earth is a tenant which no community can suffer with impunity.

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

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

XVI

IF NOT PRISONS--WHAT?

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

The old answer was "jail" for minor cases and death for the others.

There was much to be urged in favor of the latter. Dead men not only tell no tales, but they commit no crimes. Kill all criminals and crime would cease. The device has been tried--it was tried in England for a while--but the result was disappointing. It threatened to decimate the population; and in spite of logic, it failed to discourage law breakers.

Criminals seemed to get used to being hanged, and drawn and quartered--they no longer minded it. There is a psychological reason for that, no doubt; though it is not so sure that psychology as understood and practised to-day can find out what it is.

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

Sentimental persons, too, insist on making heroes of convicted murderers, which in a degree, perhaps, counteracts the depressing conditions surrounding them. So we made another compromise.

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

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

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

These antic.i.p.ations often prove well grounded.

No one in the court room, therefore, is often more cheerful and confident than is the prisoner doomed to the noose or the chair.

Besides, if all else fails, he may pet.i.tion for pardon or for life imprisonment.

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

However, there is agitation for the abolition of the death penalty; and possibly the futility and absurdity of such a punishment may finally strike the persons whom we have picked out as the wisest and ablest among us, and have put in our legislatures to tell us what to do and not to do. Absurd though legal killings may be, they are not so absurd as the persuasion that death is the worst thing that can happen to a man.

It involves little or no suffering, and is over in a moment.

Imprisonment involves much suffering, and lasts long, not to speak of the disgrace of it, to those who can feel disgrace. The serious feature about killing is, that it is final for this state of being, and when we do it we do we know not what. But that is for the community to consider, not the victim.

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

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

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

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

On the same principle, we will now retain prisons, but make them so agreeable that convicts will not mind being committed to them.

That is the compromise; and it is already in operation here and there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It would be foolish to a.s.sociate the idea of reform with such a creature. I felt a nauseous disgust of him; he seemed on the lowest level of human nature.

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

There were men there who had committed merciless robberies, cruel murders, heartless swindles, abominable depravities. I have felt greater temperamental aversion from many highly respectable persons than I did from them. Their crimes were one thing, they were another. Not that crime does not corrupt a man--stain him of its color. But there is always another side to him, a place in him which it has not dominated.

Given his conditions, we cannot affirm that he is not as good as we are--that he is unfit to a.s.sociate with us. And it behooves us always to bear it in mind that to affirm the contrary is an unpardonable sin against him of whom we affirm it; it works more evil in him than anything else we can do, and places us who repudiate him in a truly hideous posture. Shall we be more fastidious than G.o.d?

All crime is hateful; but I came to the conclusion that there is only one crime which prompts us to hate the criminal as well as his crime itself. For this crime is one which originates in our heart; it is not forced upon us by need or pa.s.sion or heredity. Therefore, it permeates every fiber of our being, every thought of our mind, every impulse of our soul; and we cannot say of it, this is one thing and we are another.

It is an unhuman crime; and yet there is no punishment for it among human laws; rather, it is regarded as a mark of superiority. The most respectable persons in the community are most apt to commit it. And it was upon the suggestion and initiative of this crime that penal imprisonment was invented, and is perpetrated to this day.

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

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

Now, this crime may survive even in prisons; but it is rarer there than in any other aggregation of human beings. Therefore, there is a wonderful sweetness in the prison atmosphere. It is a sweetness which is perceived amid all the dreariness, stagnation and outrage, and it rises above the vapors of physical crime, for it is a spiritual sweetness.

There men are locked in their cells, but the whited sepulcher is shattered, and its sorry contents are purified by the pure light of humiliation, confession and helplessness; there are no hypocrites there, no masks, no holier-than-thou paraders. Their crimes have been proclaimed, and branded upon their backs; pretenses are at an end for them. It was wonderful to look into a man's face and see no disguise there. "I am guilty--here I am!" This experience took the savor out of ordinary worldly society for me. I go here and there, and everywhere there is masquerading--the weaving of a thin deception which does not deceive. We were sincere and humble in prison; but that is a result which the builders of prisons hardly foresaw.

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

I read the other day an agreeable account of this "honor system." The men were employed on road making chiefly, enjoyed the benefit of free air and the outdoor scene, and kept order and faith among themselves.

But the prison walls were still around them, though unseen. They were told that any attempt to escape would be punished by deprivation thenceforth of all liberties--any attempt! and if the escape were successful, the fugitive would know that the chances of recapture were a thousand against one. Moreover, it was laid down that the escape or attempt of any member of the gang would react upon the liberties of all.