Chapter 18
This was malicious. But some of the things done by prison authorities are apparently due to sheer stupidity and ignorance. For example, there were some cows belonging to Atlanta prison, and some of them calved. So there were half a dozen calves more or less, with prospects of more to come. The authorities decided that the expense of rearing these innocents was not justifiable; there was nothing in the rule book about it; besides, the jail was not designed to harbor innocent creatures. The minutes of the conference were not given out, and we can judge of what passed only by the results. The order went forth that the calves be killed; and the killing was actually perpetrated, and the bodies were buried somewhere in the prison grounds. The story seems incredible, but it was corroborated by several men cognizant of the facts. Why not, at least, have turned them into veal?
I was speaking just now of the promiscuous herding together of prisoners in prisons generally. No effort is made to separate the old from the young, the educated from the ignorant; the hardened sinners from the impressionable youths or newcomers; or (at Atlanta, except in the cells), the negroes from the whites. Association of negroes with whites, on a footing of enforced outward equality, is bad for both; not because a bad white man is worse than a bad negro, but because the physical, mental and moral qualities of either react unfavorably upon the other. The negro, being the more ignorant as a rule, falls more readily into degraded vices; the white man, being as a rule the dominant element in the situation, masters the will of the negro, but cannot or at least does not erect barriers against the latter's subtle corruption.
We must always bear in mind the abnormal conditions in a prison--the misery of it, the dearth of variety and relaxation, the terrible yearning for some form, any form, of distraction and amusement. The male is parted from the female, and from the resource of children; his nerves are on edge, his natural propensities starved, his thoughts wandering and embittered; he finds no good anywhere, nor any hope of it. He will seize upon any means of abating or dulling his cravings. The negro is pliant, unmoral, free from the restraints of white civilization. In the South especially, his subordination to the white is almost a second nature; but he involuntarily avenges himself (as all lower races do upon the stronger) by that readiness to comply which flatters the sense of power and superiority in the other, and leads to evil.
I wish to say, in passing, that my allusion to negroes in this connection is by no means to be taken as reflecting upon them all; some of the men in Atlanta for whom I had the highest respect were negroes; and I am inclined to think that the negro in his right place and function is a desirable element in civilization, and, if we would treat him aright, would do us as much good as we can do him. But the negro in jail is at his worst, just as white men are, and he is made worse by white companionship. There are more than two hundred of them in Atlanta jail, and some of them are the worst of their kind.
What is true of the association of negroes with whites is not less true of the association of what are called professional criminals with the young and unhardened. Various prison authorities claim that they have made some effort to prevent this contamination; but the only sign of it that I could ever discover at Atlanta was that the old and the young are not commonly assigned to the same cells. Obviously, however, a man young in years may be old in crime; there can be no security in the age test taken by itself; and no pretense of adopting any other test in a jail is made.
A young fellow, without inherited or acquired criminal tendencies, is sent to jail for some inadvertent and insignificant infraction of law. He had always meant to live straight; he had no enmity against society; he had always thought of himself as well intentioned and law abiding. But here he is; and he is shocked, shamed and appalled at the sudden grip and horror of the jail. Upon a mind thus astounded and distraught the professional criminal seizes and works.
The man of the world--of the criminal world--befriends him, chats with him, heartens him, and soon begins to fascinate him with ideas which had never till now occurred to him. He preaches the injustice and hostility of all mankind, and the hopelessness of the convict once in jail ever again reestablishing himself in the world. He tells his pupil that he is damned forever by his fellow men outside, and that unless he be prepared to lie down and starve, he must fight for life in the only way open to him--the way of crime. Then he proceeds to show him, progressively, the profits and advantages of criminal practises. It is only too easy for the trained crook to overcome the resistance of the unhardened youth; his arguments seem unanswerable; and the wholly justifiable feeling that prison is wrong and an outrage aids the corruptor at every turn. A few months is often enough to turn an innocent boy into a malefactor; a year or more of such instruction leaves him no chance of escape; and many an innocent boy finds himself in a cell for what seems to him a lifetime.
Last July, a justice of a State Supreme Court sentenced Thomas Baker, little more than a child, to fifteen years in jail for--what? If your mother was blind and helpless, and your stepfather came in and abused her and beat her, in your presence,--a big brute with whom you could not hope to contend physically,--what would be your feelings, and what would you be prompted to do? Thomas Baker, trembling and sobbing with rage and anguish, ran out of the house to a neighbor's, borrowed a shotgun, and ran back and emptied it into the brute's body, killing him on the spot. Fifteen years in prison for that! Shall we rejoice and say that justice, at last, is satisfied?--But that is a digression.
No doubt, meanwhile, Thomas Baker's one consolation in life is the reflection that he did succeed in killing his stepfather; and he will be very ready to give ear to an older and more experienced man who tells him that the only difference between good and bad in the world is that those are called good who have power over those who are called bad; and that the only way for him to get even for his wrongs is to become a crook--and not be a fool!
The wardens and guards do not prevent these companionships; whether or not they try to prevent them cannot be affirmed; but to my mind it is plain that they could not prevent it, try as they might. It is an evil inherent in prisons and ineradicable. As long as we have prisons, we shall see judges like Thomas Baker's sending boys to jail for such "crimes" as his, there to stay for fifteen years, more or less, and there to be changed from innocence into diabolism. But Thomas was not innocent, you say, but guilty. What is guilt? I find him innocent of the guilt of standing inactive by and seeing that cruel fist strike his blind mother's beloved face.
Anything unnatural seems unreal. I remarked some time ago that when I was sitting in the court room being tried on charges sworn to by certain postoffice officials, the dull and sordid scenes would sometimes vanish before me, and I would say to myself, "It is an illusion--what is really taking place is very different from this appearance."
This thought often recurred while I was in prison.
At meal times, the men would file in and take their places at the tables; anon, the meal over, they would rise and file out--men whom I knew, creatures like myself, slaves of an arbitrary power acting in accordance with principles long since known to be false and mischievous. And I would see men whom I knew, men like myself, jeered, insulted, clubbed, dragged to the hole. I would see the dead bodies of men whom I knew, men like myself, rattled out of the gate to the dumping ground and dropped there and forgotten--men with wives and children still living or dead in poverty and shame, their pleas unheard and their wrongs unrighted. I would contemplate the long rows of steel cells, cages for me and men like myself, locking us in for months and years and lifetimes, for an example to others and for the protection of society against our menace. I would glance, as I passed, at the aimless toilers in the workshops, standing or squatting in the foul atmosphere under the eye and rifle of the guard.
I would consider that this dismal and inhuman pageant was going on age after age as a cure for crime--while crime, all the while, was increasing by percentages so astounding that we seek through immigration statistics and records of increase of population to account for it--and in vain. And I would tell myself, once more, that the thing must be an illusion; it was inconceivable that an intelligent nation should tolerate it.
If you found that you were taking bichlorid of mercury by mistake for a sleeping draught, would you go on taking it? or would you clamor for an antidote, waylay doctors for help, and disturb the discreet serenity of hospitals for succor? But the nation, made up of such as you, continues its prison nostrum, which slays a million for bichlorid of mercury's one.
A tragic farce--that is what prisons are. Enclosures of stone and steel are built, and a handful of armed men are given absolute control over several hundred beings like themselves. We, as a community, have erected a system of laws which places us, as a community, in the attitude of penalizing practises which we, as individuals, do not severely condemn. Our morality, as publicly professed, is in advance of our morals as privately exercised. When our neighbor steals or murders, we give him the jail or the chair; but when you and I are charged with such deeds and see the prison or the chair in our near foreground, we discover ourselves to be less convinced than we had imagined of the rectitude of our penal system. Of course, then, the faster we make laws to punish crime, and the more we punish criminals, the more criminals are there to punish. Our hypocrisy gradually is revenged upon us, one after another; one by one we fall into the pit so virtuously digged for others.
And criminal law, meanwhile, becomes constantly more searching and severe in its provisions, seeking to prevent crime by the singular device of employing the best methods for multiplying it. The victims of its activities are miserable enough in jail, and languish and die there, and, if they were not very wicked before, are furnished with every facility to become so; but they have not the consolation of feeling that their being thus immolated on the altar of an outraged but non-existent morality is doing them or anybody else any good. A prominent business man was put in a cell yesterday; a political boss arrives to-day; a college graduate, a judge, and a religious fanatic are expected next week. But business, politics, the Four Hundred, the Law and religion are no better than they were before.
The procession becomes ever more crowded; when is it to stop? Shall we build more prisons, enact more laws? A leading counsel said the other day, "Commercial crime is an effect and not a cause. The existing system is responsible. We should prevent conditions that lead to crime and resort to criminal courts as little as possible." And an ex-Attorney-General observed, about the same time, "I sometimes think that if we could repeal all the laws on our statute books and then write two laws--'Fear God' and 'Love your neighbor'--we would get along better"--but he added, "If we could get the people to live up to them!" Yes, that is a prudent stipulation; and it applies just as well to the myriad "laws on our statute books" as to these two.
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 passed 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 shells 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 assured 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 constitute an arraignment of the prison principle not to be lightly passed over, or commented on with rasping irony by witty editorial writers. That tragedy means something. We cannot lease the community's real estate to hell, for building hell houses and carrying on hell 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. Hell 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 hell 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 anticipations 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 petition 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 God, 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 Godlike 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?