The Man Behind the Bars

It all came about simply and naturally. I think it was W. F. Robertson who first made clear to me the truth that what we put into life is of far more importance than what we get...

Alfred Allen was one of my early acquaintances among prisoners, having had the good fortune to receive his sentence on a second conviction before the habitual-criminal act was i...

There is another chapter to my experience with prisoners; it is the story of what they have done for me, for they have kept the balance of give and take very even between us. I...

The psychological side of convict life is intensely interesting, but in studying brain processes, supposed to be mechanical, one's theories and one's logical conclusions are lik...

Mr. William Ordway Partridge, in "Art for America," says to us: "Let us learn to look upon every child face that comes before us as a possible Shakespeare or Michael Angelo or B...

On a lovely evening some thirty years ago there was a jolly wedding at the home of a young Irish girl in a Western city. Tom Evans, the groom, a big-hearted, jovial fellow, was...

The basic principle of reform in those who prey upon society is the changing of energies destructive into energies constructive. It is the opening of fresh channels for human fo...

In another instance, with quite different threads, the hand of fate seemed to have woven the destiny of the man, but I was slow in perceiving that it was not merely the tragedy...

At the time of my first visit to the penitentiary of my own State the warden surprised me by saying: "Among the very best men in the prison are the 'life' men, the men here for...

An habitual criminal of the pronounced type was my friend Dick Mallory. I have no remembrance of our first meeting, but he must have been thirty years old at the time, was in th...

Dick Mallory himself was given the maximum sentence of fourteen years for larceny under the habitual-criminal act; and he did not resent the sentence in his own case because he...

It was during the eighties and the nineties of the last century that I was most closely in touch with prison life; and it was at that time that the men whose stories I have told...

During the last twenty-five years there has been a general tendency to draw sharp hard-and-fast dividing lines between the "corrigible" and the "incorrigible" criminal. It has b...

Not only did the prisoners whom I knew never betray my confidence, but ex-convicts who knew of me through others sometimes came to me for advice or assistance in getting work; a...

And the time came, in 1913, when the wave of revolution in prison methods struck the penitentiary which formed the background of the lives pictured within these pages. Back of a...