The Subterranean Brotherhood Part 7

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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.sions 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 _Sat.u.r.day 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.signed 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 a.s.signed 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sers-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, G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 p.u.b.erty 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 pa.s.s 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 d.a.m.nable 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 part.i.tion 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 circ.u.mstances 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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.