The Subterranean Brotherhood Part 14

This made the men guards over one another; it was not honor but self-preservation that was relied on. And in any event, there was the prison at last; the chain might be lengthened to hundreds of miles, but it held them still. They were convicts; when their terms were up, they would be jail birds. Society had set them apart from itself; they were a contamination. "You are not fit to mingle with us on an equal footing."

Society might condescend to them, be friendly and helpful to them, but--admit them of its own flesh and blood?--well, not quite that! "We forgive you, but on sufferance; it is really a great concession; you must show your grat.i.tude by good works."

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

I repeat--the evil of prisons is the imprisonment. You must not deprive a man of his liberty. His liberty is his life. He may, and probably he will, use his liberty to the endangering of your property or comfort; but has your own career been wholly free from infringement upon the rights of your neighbor? If you send him to prison, you ought to link arms with him and go there, too. You have not been convicted by a court, but your own secret self-knowledge convicts you. When the prison doors close upon you, you will discover that you have suffered an injustice--that you are the victim of a blind stupidity. Not in this way can you be reformed. All genuine reformation must proceed from within you--it cannot be compelled by locks and bars; freedom is essential to it. Locks and bars arouse only the impulse to break through them, and this primal and righteous impulse leaves you no leisure to think of relieving your soul from stains of guilt.

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

The newspapers the other day told of a man who had been sentenced to forty years in jail for an a.s.sault. A woman, hearing the verdict, said, "Well, that's better than nothing; but he ought to have got life!" We are told in the Bible that we must not let the sun go down upon our wrath. The wrath of this lady could not be appeased with forty years.

Think of what that culprit will be after forty years in jail. a.s.suming for the sake of argument the extreme absurdity that he is alive by that time, picture to yourself a fellow creature of his--and a woman--saying, "I won't forgive you yet." I pity her more than I do him, whose troubles in this world will probably soon be over. But when her time comes, with what face, on what plea, shall she ask forgiveness?

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

I cannot for my part imagine any hard and fast plan being laid down in advance. But it would seem reasonable, to begin with, to free ourselves from the social crime of claiming superiority to our brethren. Having removed that beam from our eyes, we may see more clearly how to abate the motes in the criminal's. If we can bring ourselves to regard prisoners and jail birds as inferior to ourselves only in good fortune, which has kept us out of jail and put them in, we may find ourselves on the road to remedying their lapses from moral virtues.

The majority of prison crimes are against property, and are motived by want and poverty. If the man had opportunity to work for his living, he would as a rule abstain from stealing. Other crimes are committed in pa.s.sion; but such criminals need education and training in self-control, and (often) removal of the provocations which set their pa.s.sions afire.

Many other crimes, and almost all vices, are due to physical or mental disease, or to actual insanity. It is the doctor and not the jailer who should seek the cure of these.

But there are also some persons, chiefly brought up or brought down in our cities, who practise crimes, apparently, for sheer love of evil.

These gunmen gangs are the most depraved and malignant members of the community; they will not work, and they rob and murder not from want or pa.s.sion, but because the suffering of their victims gives them pleasure and ministers to their pride and self-esteem. Most of these gangs, as we have too much reason to believe, stand in with the police, giving them a percentage of their plunder, and getting protection from them for their misdeeds.

These creatures, as I have already suggested, are the distillation of the various evils in our cities which society has failed frankly to face, or genuinely to attempt to lessen. They are not responsible for their existence, and, as they indicate a general condition, it can do no good to kill them or otherwise put them out of the way; others would take their place. They are not insane in the common sense, but they are the product of insane social circ.u.mstances, responsibility for which rests on us. They must be taken in hand individually, by workers self-consecrated to that duty, and deterred from doing evil, and showed the value of doing good. One might work a lifetime with some of them, and have little to show for it in the end; but it took a long time to build the pyramids and the Panama Ca.n.a.l, and to advance from the dugout of the savage to the _Mauretania_. It is work better worth doing than any of these.

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

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

The city was worth nothing to Europe; it was an idea that set them crusading. Nothing else seemed so unpractical and feeble as the gospel of Christ; but it crumbled the Roman Empire into dust, and has kept the world guessing and maneuvering ever since--never more than to-day. On the other hand, if you propose an easy job, something that can be done with one hand tied behind you, and your attention is diverted, it is apt to remain undone. n.o.body can get up an interest in it. But talk of an expedition to the South Pole, or a flight round the earth in a biplane, with certainty of appalling hardships and all the odds in favor of death, and you are mobbed with volunteers. Human nature likes to test its thews and sinews.

Perhaps, however, nothing else was ever so difficult as to turn from our flesh pots, our dinners and tangos, our summer resorts and winter resorts, our business and idleness, and undertake to subst.i.tute for prisons our personal care and help for criminals--to remove the causes which led them to crime, to convince them of our good faith and good will, and to disabuse them of their suspicion that we distrust them, condescend to them, and despise them. For this prodigal brother of ours has become a very unsightly and unattractive object during these thousands of years of his sojourn among the pigsties and corn husks. He does not speak in our language or observe our manners or contemplate our ideals, or care for our refinements. We shall have to read again the fairy stories where the prince has been changed by evil enchantment into some uncouth and repulsive monster, but was redeemed to human form by sympathy. The evil spell was of our working, and it behooves us to overcome it. No one else can.

We must abolish the t.i.tle of criminal as applied to any cla.s.s or individuals of our race in distinction from others, and use those of unfortunates or scapegoats instead. They are our victims, and our salvation depends upon our making good to them the evil we have done them. It will not suffice to delegate the job to money, or to persons chosen for that purpose; we must do it ourselves--make it one of the main occupations of our lives. Riches and culture are fine things, but making good out of evil is better. Its rewards may not be so immediate or so visible, but they are real and permanent.

But I do not think morality will be enough to energize the effort; morality should always be the incident and consequence of religious feeling, not an aim in itself. As soon as it becomes an aim in itself, it leads to self-righteousness, and paralyzes human love in its marrow.

And it is love, far more than wisdom, that is needed here. Love G.o.d and keep His commandments; unless you first love Him, His commandments will be left undone, or done only in the letter, which is the worst form of not doing. But the way to love G.o.d is to love the neighbor, and the neighbor is the criminal.

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

APPENDIX

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

We send our scientific martyrs to the front, who perish in the effort to solve the deadly riddle. We would pour out billions of money in the fight if need come. Rich men will spend all they possess rather than die, and see those they love die of it. Nations will do the same.

Compromises are not considered; no one talks of reforming the Black Death. Unless it be jettisoned from the Ship of Civilization, progress and enlightenment go by the board.

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

Penal imprisonment is an inst.i.tution of old date, born of barbarism and ignorance, nurtured in filth and darkness, and cruelly administered. It began with the dominion of the strong over the weak, and when the former was recognized as the community, it was called the authority of good over evil. Man took the reins of government from the hands of the Almighty, and amended the Ten Commandments with statute law.

Evil is--to prefer the good of self before good of the neighbor; crime is to act in accordance with that preference. Every son of Adam is born to evil, and society is but his multiplication; but society could exist only by the compromise that the hostility of man against neighbor should mask itself as mutual forbearance. Impossible that every one should possess every thing; therefore dissimulate your greed and divide. But certain persons, missing their share either through non-conformity with the doctrine, or by force of circ.u.mstances, stuck to the old principle of each man for himself, and became "criminals." Their hand was against society, and society's against them.

In eras before society became integrated, some of these non-conformists prevailed over such strength as could be mustered against them, and by hearty and forthright robberies and murders came to be leaders and rulers of men--earls, barons, kings. The aristocracy of modern Europe is descended from such stout rebels. They became reconciled with, and organized, society, and aided it in war against the weaker of their own sort; and it was they who devised prisons for such captives as it might be inexpedient to kill outright.

All this did not alter the truth that all men are alike evil, and that such as are not also criminals, forbear--at the outset at least--from motives of enlightened selfishness. But in course of time, even enforced good behavior breeds good intent, and "good" people. For G.o.d rules us through our very sins, and will lead us, (with our pa.s.sive cooperation) to religion and regeneration in the end.

But the segregation of a criminal cla.s.s is manifestly human, not Divine; economic, not moral; illusory, not real. Consequently, pains and penalties inflicted by men upon other men, by society upon individuals, by the community upon "criminals," have no warrant of Divine authority, but only of superior numbers or physical strength. The only proper punishment for crime is the criminal's conscience, and if he have none available, he is liable to the natural contingency that violence breeds violence, and may get him in the long run--though it often happens that, measured by mortal standards, the run is not long enough for us to see the finish. We may console ourselves with the reflection that a finish, somewhere, there will be.

Meanwhile, it is for persons of intelligence and good will to consider whether, aside from physical penalties or jailing, we possess means for inducing criminals to abstain from crime. Let us leave abstract arguments and come to facts.

My license to speak in the premises is due to my being an ex-convict, sentenced to Atlanta Penitentiary for a year and a day, but recently released on "good time." I shall first give you a notion of what jail is, and of what is done and suffered there; then consider what has. .h.i.therto been done to alleviate prison conditions and abuses; and end with inquiring whether these measures, actively prosecuted, will prove adequate to the need, or whether something else and more is demanded. If so--_what_?

Purgatory is usually understood to be--as its etymology indicates--a place where persons enc.u.mbered with evil accretions may have them purged out of them, or stripped off from them, and so be fitted for the purity and innocence of Heaven. It is therefore a beneficent inst.i.tution. h.e.l.l, on the other hand, was the inheritance of those whose evil is ingrowing and cannot be removed--a place where they may live out their diabolical or satanic natures and be punished and tortured by those of like nature with themselves.

Our prisons were, in the beginning, frankly h.e.l.lish in their object; men who had incurred personal or society hostility were put in them to be tormented from motives of hate and revenge. But during the last few generations the humanitarian idea has come into being and has not only ameliorated prison conditions in some prisons and to some extent, but has caused prisons in general to cease being frank and to become hypocritical--to pretend that they are purgatories, aiming not at revenge but at reform. This pretense has been so industriously and sagaciously put forward that ninety-nine outsiders out of a hundred are misled by it, and believe that prisons are not, still, administered for the destruction of their inmates, physical, mental and moral, with such circ.u.mstances of cruelty and brutality as happen to suit the humor of the arbitrary and irresponsible guards and wardens; but that they are uniformly conducted with an eye to wooing away prisoners from sin and crime, and persuading them of the beauty and policy of honesty, gentleness and goodness. In fact it is probable that almost everybody believes this, except the wardens and guards, and the prisoners themselves--and a few Thomas Mott Osbornes and other prison workers who have had an amateur peep inside the walls and caught a fleeting glimpse of a horror or two before the discreet managers could get the door shut.

Not only so, but we read indignant articles in our morning paper about the coddling of criminals; and witty writers will have it that prisons are gentlemen's clubs where all the comforts of refined life are combined with a voluptuous idleness, or with only work enough to avert ennui. Criminals are depicted as waiting in cues at the gates of prisons for admission, like the public at the doors of a popular theater; though at the same time in another column, you may find the statement that, in view of modern legal technicalities, it has become almost impossible to get a man into jail. According to the logic of the witty writers, this near-impossibility should be more deplored by the technicality-inhibited criminals than by anybody else.

Prisons are not purgatories, nor gentlemen's clubs; they are just as much h.e.l.l as they ever were, and as their managers can make them. Apart from any special leniency of local conditions, prisons are h.e.l.l because they are prisons--because you are confined there and cannot get out; because you are a slave and have no redress; because your manhood is degraded; because despotic power is entrusted to the men who handle you, though they are never any better than you are, and are usually much worse, and regard you as an a.s.set to make profit from, a thing to be driven and insulted to the last extremity and beyond it, and not as a human being. Prisons are h.e.l.l because convicts are punished for trivial and whimsical reasons as much as for serious ones; and whether or not the punishment involve actual physical torture, the insolence, disgrace and injustice of it remain. Prisons are h.e.l.l intrinsically, and always will be; and whoever doubts it has only to commit a crime and be sent to prison; that is the end of doubts.

Let every judge, attorney general, district attorney, and juryman at a trial spend a bona fide term in jail, and there would be no more convictions--prisons would end. Every convict and ex-convict knows that, and eternity will be too short to obliterate the knowledge in him.

The unctuous plausibility of the pretense that prisons are beneficent purgatories and not h.e.l.ls renders it the more sickening. Life is a G.o.d-given discipline for men, and at best a severe one; but if we believe in G.o.d, we know it is given in love, for loving ends. All mortal life is an imprisonment; the laws of it are essential and natural, and breaking them involves essential and natural penalties. G.o.d deputed this regimen of love to parents, and to those who deal with their fellow creatures from impulses of parental or brotherly love; but He never licensed any man to punish another from revenge or hate, or in mere indifference. He licensed no man to do it, nor any community or nation.

And whoever does it, serves not G.o.d but the devil; and if any crime be unpardonable, it is that, because it is not essential or natural, but an usurpation against nature, and breeds not reform but more evil.

Prison officials, in their treatment of prisoners, are not actuated by love, but by indifference to suffering, or by animosity and brutality, or by desire of profit, and therefore their work is impious and wicked.

And the longer they hold their office, the more hardened do they become to the spectacle of suffering and outrage; the more heedless of justice and mercy do they grow. They grow to disbelieve in any human truth and goodness; all men are to them criminals actual or potential; breathing and dwelling amidst crime, it enters into their own blood and temper.

They will have their debt to pay; but neither may those escape who ignorantly or carelessly appointed them to office and hold them there--the Government, and the nation which creates Government as its representative. Ignorance does not excuse; knowledge on these subjects is a sacred duty. Man cannot break the bonds of his brotherhood with man; the blood shed will be required of him, and the usury of misery and tears.

"Throw him to the lions!--serve him right!" Most of us have joined in that barbarous cry upon occasion. But some of us have sickened at the slaughter, and are for paring the lions' claws, or at least exhorting them to roar less savagely, and to devour their prey in secret. But the lions, with their attendant hyenas and jackals, have so long been accepted as indispensable to the order and majesty of the State, that no one likes to stand up to his G.o.d-given intuitions, and demand the abolition of the whole prison circus. We hardly realize that the harm criminals do society cannot equal the harm that society does to itself by its handling of them and att.i.tude toward them. The circus must go on, of course; but--let us ameliorate its coa.r.s.er features!

Let us make our prisons hygienic--larger cells, drainage, air, exercise; let us select nice, kindly persons for guards and wardens; let us give the convicts useful industrial occupation, which will not only keep them happy and sane, but pay the cost of their keep to a tender-hearted but economic state; let us even be very venturesome, and--with reasonable precautions--put the men on their honor, suffer them to run out a little way and labor in the free sunshine, upon their promising to remember that they are not really free, and to return at night to their cages.

And after they have served their terms, and the souls within them are moribund or dead, let us get or solicit jobs for them, and at all events keep a sentimental eye on them for a while. All this--only let us keep our prisons! For think what would happen if those terrible creatures were let loose upon us, to keep on murdering and robbing us with impunity! Remember that they are a cla.s.s apart, unlike ourselves, whose perverted nature, though it may be lulled by gentleness and tact, can never become truly human.

No: the Laodicean spirit will not serve! I do not ridicule or belittle the efforts of generous and genial men and women who give their spare time, or their whole time, to bettering the plight of convicts. But the diabolical spirit of the prisons sneers at them, and sits undisturbed.

Let air and sunshine come to outer courts and clean-swept cells; the star-chambers and the secret dungeons remain. Let the outraged creatures out, to stray to the extent of their honor-tether; they are slaves and prisoners still. There were compa.s.sionate reformers in Ancient Egypt, who tried to make the lot of the captive Israelites easier; but the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, and G.o.d Himself must intervene before he would let the people go. Nor does it help that the slaves themselves are grateful for hard-won privileges, and that we read urbane descriptions of smiling and rosy felons working on state roads in "Don't Worry"

camps. Is it ground for congratulation that the very victims of the specious pretense of the eternal right and necessity of prisons should have succ.u.mbed to that delusion? Does it not prove a need yet more urgent to be up and at them? Is it not humiliating to know that men, our brothers, partakers of our common nature, can be so abased as to kiss the rod, and joke about their fetters, and accept as favor what none is ent.i.tled to deny them?

Prisons are h.e.l.l--we come back to that; and they are not and cannot be made purgatories. Men competent to make them purgatories are not to be had at Government prices; no duties more onerous than those of a fit conscientious warden exist under the state; and how can we look for such a man at a four or five thousand dollar salary? Twenty-five or even fifty thousand would be moderate, and the men who are worth that are in some other business. The foremost citizens of the nation would not be too good for the job, and we content ourselves with ward heelers and rough-necks, who undertake it not for the salary, but for the graft that goes with it and exceeds it. Politics and graft sit in the warden's office, and walk the ranges in guards' uniform, and crush the manhood out of our brothers for money, and out of sheer wanton inhumanity. Of all the inmates of the jail, these men are the veritable and incorrigible and unpardonable criminals; for they were not driven to crime by pa.s.sion, hunger, drink or ignorance, they have not been reduced to the state of desperate pariahs, outcasts and scapegoats of the race, but they willingly embrace the function entrusted to them--the Government license to steal, bully, torture and murder--with a grotesque sanctimonious leer for the public, and for the convicts--what! The regimen of h.e.l.l!

This writer's statements seem a trifle emphatic, do they not? May we not surmise that they are motived by some personal grudge? have we not heard an old adage--"No thief e'er felt the halter draw with good opinion of the law?" Would it not be prudent to take all this with a grain of salt?

Shall we be driven to rash measures by the objurgations of an ex-convict?

Of the right or wrong of my conviction and sentence I am not to speak here, nor do they specially interest me now, except as ill.u.s.trations of the working of the machine. But personal grudge against officials of my prison I have none. I was treated with consideration and lenity. I came out in better condition upon the whole than I went in, both of body and spirit, though nothing would have been easier than to murder me under the forms of routine prison discipline. What was the reason of this? I was never informed; I might guess at it, but I don't know. Nevertheless, the sweetness and light of the prison dispensation as regarded myself did not blind my eyes or stop my ears to what was being done to others, not elected to dreams thus beautiful. I saw men beside whom I sat at meat or labored in the vineyard, fading and failing day by day; I saw some of them die of broken hearts or broken bodies; I heard their stories and was certified of their truth; I saw the cart rattle out of the gate with the pine box containing the body of the man who could only thus find freedom; I visited the graves of those who had been needlessly and sometimes wantonly slain. I could not ignore these things because I myself escaped them. After a few months of durance, I went forth free, leaving behind me men as good as I or better, sentenced to serve years, lifetimes, under treatment which I cannot imagine myself as surviving at all. My grudge is deep, but no personal one.

I shall not at present discuss Government measures of so-called mitigation--suspended sentence, parole, indeterminate sentence. In the intention of their originators they may have appeared beneficent; in practise, they proved sinister and abominable means to cruelty and despotism. There can be no compromises with h.e.l.l.