Part 4

With joyful emotion he confessed: “I have given my heart to Jesus since I saw you. He forgave my sins at the tent meeting Wednesday night. My mother wants me to join her church, and I told her I promised to meet you here this morning, and I must keep my promise.”

You may be sure the minister was almost as happy as the convert, and very heartily was the young man urged to join his mother’s church. He did so, and is now a circumspect Christian and a self-supporting member of the community.

Jesus in His day found the greatest faith in a Gentile, and, lo! in our day, I have found the finest flower of Christian charity and helpfulness in a Jew!

He promised garlands of joy. Reverting to the prophecy in Isaiah, we find the beautiful promise to captive Israel: “Garlands for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.” One day they shall arise from the ashes of humiliation and march forth with garlands of victory wreathing their brow. Their weeping may endure for the night, but joy cometh in the morning. Their broken spirits have humbled their frames, but they shall yet stand erect and beautiful in the garments of praise. The Gospel penetrated the prison walls with that joyous news. And every chaplain who ministers to those behind the bars may promise them a salvation as full and free as any bishop offers to his parishioners.

God is no respecter of persons. If He is on one side more than another, it is the side of the weak. And often we are reminded that the compensations of salvation more than balance the losses of sin. “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.”

Again, our prophecy says: “They shall be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He might be glorified.” The Gospel undertakes the task of cleansing the defiled and clothing him in robes of righteousness. It proposes to make possible the survival of the unfit. It goes to the prisoner with this message of cheer and confidence: “You have been weak and wicked. You may be strong and upright. You have been a brittle reed, bent and broken by the winds of temptation. You may become a stalwart oak, withstanding all storms.”

And this strength and goodness come through the abounding grace of God, which flows from Christ into the sinner’s heart through the channel of faith. It is sufficient for all spiritual needs and is able to save unto the uttermost. It not only changes the heart, but the life, and brings forth fruits of repentance and righteousness.

To deny such power in the Gospel is to manifest the deepest _unfaith_ and to doom to despair every repentant prisoner. And any man who does that is not worthy of a position in penal institutions. To believe it is to feel a solemn and binding obligation to commend that Gospel to the prisoner. Every prison official then seeks to better the moral and spiritual condition of the prisoners. He feels for them the unutterable compassion of Him who came to seek and to save that which was lost, and he sees underneath the prison garb the marred image of Deity, which may yet be restored and glow with the image of the heavenly.

The mission of the prison is for this more than for the protection of the innocent. It is for the reclamation and _restoration_ of the delinquent. Leaving such an institution, the ex-prisoner might truly say: “I came in a thief, I leave an honest man; I entered a murderer, I depart loving God and man. My conscience, which once made me a coward, now makes me a true man.”

The supreme hour of Christ’s passion was devoted to two convicts. Let us stand a moment around that cross and hear the message it speaks to us. Does it not say, “The law must be executed”? for Jesus refused to accept the challenge to come down from the cross, and one of the malefactors by His side said they were receiving a just penalty for their crimes.

Does it not also say, “There is redemption for the penitent thief”? for when one cried, “Lord, remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom,” the answer came swifter than light and sweeter than the murmur of the evening zephyrs, “To-day thou shalt be with Me in paradise.”

Christ gave them both the same chance. One died in stubborn rebellion and was lost. The other turned in humble supplication and was instantly transformed from a criminal to a Christian. When heaven lifted up her gates for the King of Glory to come in, and He swept through the celestial portals, He took with Him the penitent thief as a first sheaf of the harvest of prison redemption.

The great poets have as their theme the loss and redemption of the immortal soul. Homer sings the wrath of Peleus’ son in the “Iliad,” and shows how one sin destroyed a building that many virtues support. Virgil sings the wandering of Anchises in the “Æneid,” and describes how youth sails afar, while maturity seeks out ports of peace. Dante sings of the soul’s stain by sin in the “Divine Comedy,” and preaches its purification and perfection. Milton sings of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of the forbidden tree in the “Paradise Lost,” and “justifies the ways of God to man” in the victory of “Paradise Regained.” Tennyson sings of the error that ruins the soul in the “Idylls of the King” and beholds the Divine Friend, whose ceaseless efforts recover the undimmed glory.

Victor Hugo sings of the sin which defaces the divine image and which sears the conscience in “Les Miserables,” and exhibits the melting mercy and lasting love which recover the pristine splendor. That book is unique among the world’s literature in showing that in the heart of the meanest man is a nucleus of good around which a noble character may be grown.

Victor Hugo could never have written this immortal work had he not known Jesus Christ. Jean Valjean, the youthful criminal, after nineteen years, emerged from the prison with a heart as cold as marble and a will as hard as granite. Tides of revenge tossed through his soul like billows in a storm. Society has robbed him, and now he will rob society. The inhumanity of man has all but quenched the last spark of the divine within him.

In front of this convict, furious with the black wolves of hatred, Hugo, with the hand of a master, places the good bishop, sympathetic as divinity and patient as destiny. He speaks as an apostle of love, “We are ourselves ex-prisoners; let us be charitable.” As an apostle of justice, he declares, “The State that permits ignorance and darkness for the youth should now be sent to _jail with the thief_.”

Landlords close their doors to despised Jean Valjean. A woman casts her bread to dogs while he goes hungry. Coming to the bishop’s door, he is welcomed. “Sit down and be warmed, sir, and sleep and lodge with me. You are my brother. Take this money and never forget you have promised me to employ it in becoming an honest man.”

Conscience whispers, “Jean, you may go up by the bishop and be an angel, or stay below with the demons and be a devil.”

In that hour the sleeping virtues of his nature awoke, and he arose to return to God to sanctify his life. The thought of doing wrong went through him like a knife, and he became incapable of stealing. The bishop’s smiles filled his heart with unspeakable happiness, and the power of God transformed the sinner into the saint.

In the end, when emaciated by suffering, scarred by many battles with wrong, he lay down to die, he said: “My children, remember God is above. He sees all. He is Love.”

They saw him looking, like Stephen, into the open heavens, and heard him say, “I know not what is the matter with me, but _I see light_.”

And the waiting angels bore his spirit away to the land of eternal day.

EVENING

The evening session was held in Beth Ahabah Temple. Homer Folks, Secretary of the New York State Charities Aid Association, presented the following report of the Committee on Prevention and Probation:

“To the average person the word ‘crime’ suggests some isolated act of an individual, having as to its origin little relation presumably to his other acts, still less relation to other persons, and no relation whatever to the community at large, except in its unfortunate effects. The instinctive feeling of the average person to the criminal is that he is an irrational being, and our hope is that he may be put away, or at least kept a safe distance from us. The average person’s philosophy of crime is intensely individualistic.

“There are those, however, who challenge this view and deny it absolutely. Crime, they say, is not essentially individual; it is actually a social product, the result of a faulty social system. Adopt their plan of social reorganization and in their opinion crime will disappear. Without accepting the too easy optimism of the reconstructors of society, it is evident that their point of view is a valuable corrective of the extreme individuality of our earlier views. It must be evident to anyone who keeps his eyes open and tries to be honest with himself that crime is a joint product of the individual and his environment. A crime is not an isolated act; it is, as a rule, the last step in a long process. It is at once a symptom and a result; a symptom of instability, a result of deterioration. It is the appearance at the surface of a stream whose source is far back, but which is for the greater part of the distance entirely hidden or not easily observable. It is an unwelcome fruit, but it has slowly ripened, in our presence, and on a tree which we have permitted to grow. The process of deterioration ending in crime is the resultant of the reaction upon the individual of the sum total of influences, economic facts and associations constituting his environment.

“Seen from this point of view our subject becomes bewilderingly comprehensive. The prevention of crime is one of the important results hoped for from the long process of civilization. It is an end toward which many diverse influences are consciously or unconsciously directed. Many laborers in many fields, unknown to each other, are working for this result. Among them we may mention every church which is teaching the subordination of the present pleasure to the future greater good; every home circle in which dignity and strength of character are being built up; every health officer who is conscientiously laboring to restrict the ravages of preventable diseases; every teacher who inculcates self-mastery by precept and by example; every public official who is striving to make effective the public will for better things; every employer who seeks to soften the iron law of competition--in short, all those who, in individual effort or in organization, are trying to build up a saner, more wholesome, better-knit community.

“As many forces are working for the prevention of crime; so also many are working for its production. Wherever the illusory pleasure of the present is exalted above the ultimate good; wherever luxury is ostentatiously displayed; wherever human weakness is exploited for financial gain; wherever the public will is thwarted; wherever the heart becomes hard and the eye steely; wherever duty is evaded; wherever disease is unchecked--in all these ways crime is encouraged and promoted.

“The prevention of crime, therefore, is a topic not for a brief paper for a portion of one evening’s exercises, but for a constructive program for generations. We may, nevertheless, single out two or three factors in the production of crime, as to which the time seems peculiarly ripe for corrective action.

“We would mention first the frequency with which the very agencies established and slowly worked out by the community for the punishment of crime, or for its prevention, become agencies for precisely the opposite result; and by their action tend to increase and to propagate crime rather than to diminish it. I have in mind specifically our criminal courts and our penal and reformatory institutions. Who has had opportunity for close observation of our criminal courts without being impressed by the extraordinary element of chance that enters into all their operations! How many chances there are that the offender will not be arrested at all; and how many chances there are that if arrested the technical legal proof will be wanting; and how many chances there are that if the technical legal proof be forthcoming the resources of an ample purse will be sufficient to tie up the proceedings in an endless tangle of complications which an ordinary lifetime is too short to unravel. Under these circumstances the offender almost invariably feels himself the victim, not of his own wrongdoing, but of chance. He regards the operations of the law not as expressing slowly but surely the community’s sense of right and justice, but as the gambler watches the cards or the dice, and, with all the gambler’s belief in luck, is confident that the penalty will not finally be actually inflicted.

“And if we add to such a degree of chance as perhaps must of necessity exist, the belief spread abroad in the community, whether rightly founded or otherwise, that political, personal or other improper considerations reach out and influence the decisions which are supposed to take cognizance only of the law and the facts, we have gone a long way toward a state in which every man feels justified in being a law unto himself.

“But when the law grips and the culprit finds himself behind the bars of the jail or the reformatory, what processes have we set in motion? I suppose that of all the factors that have entered into the production and encouragement of crime, the consensus of opinion among those competent to judge would place the county jail foremost. With what inconceivable callousness we have thrown into promiscuous association those not yet determined to be guilty of an offense (and of whom a goodly number will finally be declared innocent) and those against whom the judgment of conviction has been entered! With what inconceivable shortsightedness we have mingled those guilty of the least offenses with those to whom vice and crime have become second nature, and under circumstances of enforced idleness and enforced association! Worst of all, children arrested for even the slightest offenses, and occasionally for no offense other than homelessness, have been unintentionally made the pupils of adepts in every form of vice and crime. I am painting no imaginary or fanciful picture; I am describing the thing that has existed, and still exists, throughout practically the entire United States. The county jail is the classic instance of an institution established to serve one purpose and actually serving exactly the opposite purpose, intended to promote the good order of the community, and actually a most potent factor in every form of demoralization, an agency by which the traditions of crime are handed on undiminished from one generation to another, by which the ranks are kept full and new recruits at least equal in numbers those who drop out.

“And as to our penal institutions for the care only of convicted offenders for considerable periods of time, what is the net effect of prison life upon the prisoner? We would like to think that the work of John Howard has been substantially completed. We gladly recognize the fact that a large and increasing number of prison officials, such as those present at this national congress, sincerely desire and earnestly labor for the good of their prisoners, but I suspect that they would agree with us that the inherent and almost unescapable tendency of prison life, even in the best institutions, is not to build up either the physical or moral stamina; and unfortunately not all officials of penal institutions are in attendance at this congress, and not all are represented by the spirit which is here present. The work of John Howard has to be done over again with each generation. There are only too many prisons to which the biting words of Oscar Wilde would apply:

“The vilest deeds like poison weeds Bloom well in prison-air: It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there: Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, And the Warder is Despair.

“For they starve the little frightened child Till it weeps both night and day: And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool And gibe the old and gray, And some grow mad, and all grow bad, And none a word may say.

“With midnight always in one’s heart, And twilight in one’s cell, We turn the crank, or tear the rope, Each in his separate Hell; And the silence is more awful far Than the sound of a brazen bell.

“And never a human voice comes near To speak a gentle word: And the eye that watches through the door Is pitiless and hard: And by all forgot, we rot and rot, With soul and body marred.

“The establishment of juvenile reformatories has always indicated a realization of the evils of leaving children uncared for and equally of the evil of committing those of tender years to penal institutions. Born of a benevolent purpose, to what extent have they in practice realized the intent of their founders? When we contemplate the extent to which prison methods have been reproduced in juvenile reformatories; the extent to which cells and bolts and bars have been deemed necessary; the severe and ofttimes brutal punishments inflicted; the mingling of those of tender years with those much farther along in the school of crime; the absence until recently, and in many instances at present even, of facilities for suitable industrial training; the woeful inadequacy of any system of care or oversight while on parole, we are obliged to admit that even the juvenile reformatory has not been an unmixed blessing; that many have learned within its walls far more about wrongdoing than they knew before; and that its _régime_ has been too often far removed from that which would develop strength of purpose and strength of character.

“The recent revolution in the methods of some reformatories which find its most complete expression in the New York State Agricultural and Industrial School of Industry, near Rochester, N. Y., is the strongest evidence of the weakness of the other plan. At this institution the boys are subdivided into groups of twenty-two each. These groups are not placed closely about a central “Village Green,” but are scattered as widely as possible over an area of fourteen hundred acres of fine farming land. Each group has not only its cottage, but its barn, its live stock, etc. The boys lead as nearly as possible the life of the ordinary farmer’s son. You might drive through the grounds of the institution without recognizing it as an institution. Its work is commended to the serious consideration of all those interested in juvenile reformatories.

“At the outset we indicated, however, that the great forces for the prevention of crime are to be found not in institutions, but in influences; not in repression, but in development; not so much in discipline as in affection; not in coercion, but in care. To provide these things, it is not always necessary to remove the juvenile offender, even though he be a real offender, from his home. We have in the past decade witnessed an extraordinary development in many States of the Union of a system which is in effect an effort to carry personal interest, care, affection, uplifting influence, inspiring personality, into the home. This is the probation system. The probation officer is simply a representative of the community striving to make up that which has been lacking; to counteract the slowly acting influences which have made for deterioration; to set in motion the recuperative factors in the individual and in his immediate environment.”

The subject of probation was further discussed by the Rev. Dr. A. J. McKelway, of Atlanta, who spoke on “The Need of Reformatories and the Juvenile Court System in the South”; and by Henry W. Thurston, Chief Probation Officer, Juvenile Court, Chicago. Dr. McKelway said in part:

“It is time that our Southern States awoke to the crying need for the humane and merciful treatment of the children who go astray; it has only to avail itself of the experience of other States to meet the need. If it be said that our poverty is yet too great to undertake the additional expense, be it said in reply that we are too poor not to save to the State the criminal expenses that inevitably follow the lack of such reformatory institutions, and that the restoration of one child to a useful life, from a life of crime and shame, is well worth the attention of any civilized State.

“And when we learn to treat the young criminal properly, to consider the unfortunate environment which breeds crime, we should be led to the consideration of the larger problems involved and the reformation of the adult criminal, that he also may be, wherever possible, transformed into a man, instead of being hardened in iniquity.

“In the State of Georgia, during the investigation of the convict lease system, a pitiful case was presented to the attention of the legislative committee of investigation. A white boy, sixteen years of age, was sentenced to the chain gang for stealing a pot of ham. While at work on the chain gang he resisted the too near approach of one of the warden’s hogs, and threw upon the hog some of the hot coffee with which he was supplied. For this crime Abe Winn was beaten until even, in the judgment of the camp physician, he was fit only for the hospital, and he entered the hospital, to be removed in a few weeks as a corpse.

“There are many such instances of cruelty to young convicts, white and black, for which the State has provided no better reformatory than the chain gang, and yet people of the South are a humane people, abhorring cruelty.

“The final argument for the extension and complete adjustment of the juvenile court system in the South and for the building and proper maintenance of model reformatories is the development of the factory villages of the South, with their system of family labor, including the labor of the child. There are now some seven hundred or eight hundred of these communities in the South, either entirely separate from other communities or forming a separate section of our municipalities.

“It has been amply proved that the ranks of our criminal population are not being recruited from the schools, but from the army of neglected children, especially the army of the toiling children. It is a matter of commonest complaint of the managers of our factories where children are employed that both the boys and the girls, especially the boys, so soon become unmanageable.

“Their arguments in opposition to child labor laws really amount to the plea that these children of the factory villages must be sentenced to labor in the mills, either by day or by night, in order that they be kept out of mischief.

“I hold that the child labor system or the family labor system--in the one case the mother being kept at work and away from the duties of the home; in the other case, the children early developing, as bread-winners, first the spirit of independence, then of irreverence, disobedience and finally hoodlumism--is responsible for this state of affairs.

“We are making progress in the South in the correction of this abuse. At the same time there is urgent need for the proper handling of these children of the factory districts, under authority of the law, when they manifest their disposition to recruit the criminal classes.”

On the question, “What Should the Probation Officer Do for the Child?” Mr. Thurston said: “Two theories are now in conflict in the United States, one that it is enough to look after the child thirty, sixty or ninety days, keep it out of court, and then discharge it; the other, that if something is wrong with the child’s intellectual, physical and moral adjustment, this must be found and, if possible, corrected.