Chapter 4

"This is ridiculous!" I remarked to my companion; and he consented with a smile; when language goes bankrupt, the simple phrase is least inadequate. "We may as well have lunch," he said; and we rose and journeyed to the rear of the train, sedulously attended by our deputies. The spontaneous routine of the physical life is often a valuable support to the spiritual, reminding the latter that we exist from one moment to another, and do wisely to be economical of forecasts or retrospects. We journeyed back, through innocent scenes of traveling life, to the smoking compartment, which happened to be vacant; and under the consoling influence of tobacco our elder companion sought to lighten the shadows of destiny.

"You gentlemen," he said, uttering smoke enjoyingly through mouth and nostrils, "don't need to worry none. It's like this: the judge figured to let you off easy. He's bound, of course, to play up to the statute by handin' you your bit, but, to start with, he cuts it down all he can, and then what does he do but date you back four months to the openin' of the trial! All right! After four months you're eligible for parole on a year and a day's sentence, ain't yer? Your trial began on November 25th, and to-day is the 24th of March. That means, don't it, that you make your application the very next thing after they gets you on the penitentiary register to-morrer! Why, look-a-here," he continued, warming to his theme, and becoming, like Gladstone as depicted by Beaconsfield, intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, "it wouldn't surprise me, not a bit, sir, if you and your mate was to slip back with us on the train to-morrer evenin', and the whole bunch of us be back in little old New York along about Wednesday! That's right! An' what I says is, that ain't no punishment--that's no more'n takin' a pleasure trip down South, at the suitable time o' year! An' I guess I been on the job long enough to know what I'm talkin' about!"

We guessed he knew that he was talking benevolent fictions; and yet there was plausibility in his argument. The law did not allow parole on sentences of a year or under, but on anything over one year, a convict was eligible, and our sentence of twenty-four hours over the twelvemonth therefore brought us within this provision. In imposing that extra day, the judge could hardly have been motived by anything except the intention to open this door to us; and although the regular meeting of the parole board at the prison was not due just then, we were informed that an extra meeting might be summoned at any time. The board consisted of the warden of the prison, the doctor, and the official who presided at all parole board meetings at the various federal penitentiaries throughout the country,--Robert LaDow. The law declares that a majority of the board decides the applications that come before it; and as two members of the board make a quorum, it seemed obvious that the warden and the doctor of Atlanta Penitentiary would serve our turn--if they wanted to. Mr. LaDow, of course, might be appealed to by telegraph if expedient.

Turning the thing over, therefore, with the cozening rogue in front of us drawing our attention to the buttered side as often as it appeared, we could hardly avoid the conclusion that there was a possibility of his being right. We might be required to remain in Atlanta barely long enough to don a suit of prison clothing and to have our bertillons made, and forthwith make a triumphal return home, with our scarlet sins washed white as snow. Of such an imprisonment it might be said, as wrote the poet of the baby that died at birth,

"If it so soon was to be done for, One wonders what it was begun for,"

but it would not be the first thing that we had noticed in Federal administration of justice which might have been similarly criticized.

My allusion to this subject here is only by way of leit-motif for a thorough discussion hereafter. The juggling with the parole law, by the Department of Justice and the parole boards, is one of the most indefensible and cruel practical jokes that "the authorities" play upon prisoners. It caused two deaths by slow torture while I was at Atlanta, as shall be shown in the proper place; and there is no reason to suppose that the percentage at other prisons was not as large or larger. The sufferings short of death that are due to it cannot be calculated. A practical joke?--yes; but there is a practical purpose back of it. The miserable men who are practised upon by this means, helpless but hoping, are led to believe that they may buy freedom at the price of treachery to their fellows. Can it be credited that a convict in his cell, with perhaps years of living death before him,--you do not yet know what that means, but if I live to tell this story, you will be able to guess at its significance before we part--will refuse the opportunity offered to end it at once in return for merely speaking one or two names?--a convict--a creature outlawed, crushed, damned, dehumanized, despised,--can we look from him for a heroism, a martyrdom, which might shed fresh honor on the highest name in the community? I confess that I would not have looked for it a year ago, and I doubt whether you look for it now. But, I have to report, with joy in the goodness and selflessness in men whom you and I have presumed to look down upon, that in very few instances that I have heard of, and in almost none that I know, has a convict thus terribly tempted even hesitated to answer--NO! But many an old and cherished prejudice will begin painfully to gnaw its way out of your complacent mind before we are done.

The City of Brotherly Love flickered by and was left behind, like the sentiment which it once stood for. We were headed for Washington, where the will and conscience of the nation take form and pass into effect. Government of the people by lawyers, for lawyers; did they know what they were doing? The Constitution, bulwark of our liberties; the letter of the law, technicalities, precedents, procedure, the right of the individual merged in the public right, and lost there! The House--five hundred turbulent broncos, each neighing for his own bin; the Senate--four score portentous clubmen, adjusting the conservative shirt-front of dignity and moderation over the license of privilege and "the interests"; the Executive--dillydallying between nonentity and the Big Stick; the Supreme Court--a handful of citizens and participators in our common human nature, magically transmuted into omniscient and omnipotent gods by certificates of appointment! And the rest of our hundred millions, in this era of new discoveries and profound upheavals, on this battlefield of Armageddon between Hell and Heaven, in this crumbling of the old deities and the looming of the Unknown,--are we to lie down content and docile and suffer this hybrid monster of Frankenstein, under guise of governing, to squat on our necks, bind our Titan limbs, bandage our awakening eyes, gag our free voices, sterilize our civic manhood, and debase us from sons of divine liberty into the underpinning of an oligarchy?

My friend and I--while our licensed proprietors napped with one eye open--smiled to each other perhaps, recognizing how the prick of personal injury and injustice will arouse far-reaching rebellion against human wrongs and imperfections in general. But our famous American sense of humor may be worked overtime, and, from a perception of the incongruity and relative importance of things, be insensibly degraded into pusillanimous indifference to everything, good or bad. The soberest observer may concede that there is a spiritual energy and movement behind visible phenomena, whose purport and aim it is the province of the wise to understand. The peril of Armageddon lies in the fact that evil never fights fair, but ever masks itself in the armor of good. Not only so, but good may be changed into evil by hasty and misdirected application, and do more harm--because unsuspected--than premeditated evil itself. Public endowment of chosen persons with power is good and necessary in our form of civilization, and the chosen ones may accept it in good faith. But in a community where everybody has business of his own to mind, and is put to it so to conduct it as to keep off the poor rates, deputed powers, designed to be limited, always tend to become absolute. It is heady wine, too, and intoxicates those who partake of it. And it is only a seeming paradox that absolute and irresponsible power is more apt to develop in a democracy than under any other form of human association. Holders of it, moreover, instead of fighting for supremacy among themselves, and thus annulling their own mischievousness, as would at a first glance seem likely, soon learn the expediency of agreeing together; each keeps to his own area of despotism, cooperating, not interfering with the rest. But the system inevitably takes the form of rings within rings, each interior one possessing progressively superior dominion. At last we come to a central and small group of men who are truly absolute, and are supported and defended in their stronghold by the self-interested loyalty of the rest. But they do not proclaim their supremacy; on the contrary, they hide it under clever interpretations of law, and, at need, by securing the enactment of other laws fitted to the exigency of the occasion. If there is remonstrance or revolt among their subjects, they subdue it partly by pointing out that it is the law, and not themselves, that is responsible; and partly by employing other legal forms to put down the resistance. You cannot catch them; they vanish under your grasp as principles, not men. Their voice is never heard saying, "I will!" but always, "The law requires." And these autocrats--this oligarchy--are only men like ourselves, with like passions, limitations and sinful inheritance. They were not born to the purple--they just happened to get to it. But being possessed of it--and apart of course from any crude and obvious malfeasance in office--they cannot be "legally" dislodged; and if they step aside, it is only to let alter egos take their place. The King of England--the Emperor of Germany--can be deposed by the people, and his head cut off; but the free and independent--but law-abiding--citizens of the United States cannot throw off this subtle tyranny, because it is identified with legal provisions which we have insensibly allowed to creep into the inmost and most personal fibers of our lives. As for modifying or abolishing the law itself--that would be anarchy!

It would be foolish to contend that our rulers are actuated by any personal malevolence or even, at first, by unlawful personal ambition; they are, as I have said, for the most part lawyers, and law is their fetish--their magical cure-all and philosopher's stone. They almost persuade themselves, perhaps, that we the people make the laws; whereas not more than one man in ten thousand--even of lawyers--knows what the law in any given case is, nor would the majority of us approve any particular law, if we were afforded the chance. Any one of us will support the law against his enemy, but not, in behalf of his enemy, against himself. But our legalized sultans and satraps, Councils of Ten and Grand Inquisitors, keep an easy conscience; the Law is King and can do no wrong. A few centuries ago it was law in England to kill a man for taking any personal liberties; there was not much harm in that, for most of the persons that counted were above the law, being nobles or gentlemen. But our way is far more injurious; if a man takes a personal liberty, the cry is, Put him in jail! Death is a penalty which only disposes of a man forever; but jail is poisonous; the man survives, but he becomes criminal, and an enemy of society. And this cry for jail does not appear to emanate from legal tribunals merely, but we the people ourselves have caught it up, and invoke cells and chains for the lightest infraction of public or personal convenience; nay, we clamor for more laws to supplement our already overburdened statute-books. Thus do we thoughtlessly strengthen the hands of our masters. The nostrum which they manufactured to govern us withal, and which at first had to be administered to us willy-nilly, has now become like that notorious patent medicine for which the children cry. We kiss the rod--as long as it is laid across our fellows' backs and not our own. And the rule of Law, by lawyers, for lawyers, shows no signs of vanishing from our earth. Only convicts and ex-convicts dissent; for they know what they dissent from. As an unidentified friend wrote to me of late, "No thief ere felt the halter draw, With good opinion of the law"; but the thief had reason on his side. And it may yet come to pass that his reasons may be listened to.

Darkness set in as we entered the sacred soil of Virginia; night lay before us--our next night would be spent inside penitentiary walls. Was it a dream, or would some cosmic cataclysm occur in season to prevent it? No: the ancient routine of one fact after another, of cause and effect, would keep on with no regard for our sensibilities; however important we might appear to ourselves, we were but specks infinitesimal in the vast scheme of things. Miracles and special providences are for story books; if you are the victim of abuses, be sure that the remedy will come not through averting them, but by carrying them out to the finish. On the morning of his execution, it seemed incredible that Charles I should be beheaded; but he mounted the scaffold, laid his head upon the block, and the masked man lifted his sword and cut it off. All that is left for you is not to falter--to keep down that tremor and sickening of the heart; when Danton of the French Revolution reached the guillotine, he was heard to mutter, "Danton, no weakness!" And many an unrecorded Danton, on the night before his appointed death, has lain down and slept soundly. It recurred to my memory that my father, shortly before his death, had said to an old friend of his, "I trust in Julian." On the day following his death, that friend had journeyed to Concord to tell me those words--returning to Boston immediately. My father's son had lived to be proclaimed a felon; but I slept sound that night.

All next day we were passing through the raw red soil of the South, with its cotton plantations, forlorn at this season, its omnipresent idle negroes, and its white folks, lean and solemn, standing guard over what fate had left to them. At stopping places we would step out for a few minutes on the platform of the observation-car, to breathe the air and feel the sunshine,--the affectionate deputies close at our elbows. Some of our fellow passengers were bound for Florida or Cuba, to escape the crudity of the northern March; "May be we'll meet up again there!" some of them said, innocently unsuspicious of what sort of characters they were addressing. Paradise and the Pit travel side by side on this earth, and find each other very tolerable company.

Into Atlanta station the train at last rolled; the journey to oblivion was all but finished. The restless little city, turmoiling in its boom, swarmed around us; we had to wait half an hour, our gripsacks in our hands, for the surface-car to the prison, three miles or more beyond the town. We awaited it with some impatience--such is the unreasonableness of our mortal nature. At last we were rumbling off on our trip of twenty minutes, sitting unnoticed in the midway seats, our considerate but careful guardians on the watch at the front and rear platforms. The car took its time; it stopped, started again, stopped, started, after the manner of ordinary cars; oh, for a magic carpet or pneumatic tube, to make an end of this! or for a thousand years! It was as if the headsman were making preliminary flourishes with his sword, ere delivering his blow. These were difficult minutes.

They ended; "Here we are!" We alighted, and advanced to the entrance of an expanse of ornamental grounds, with a cement pathway leading up to an extensive fortified structure--a wall thirty feet high sweeping to right and left from the tall steel gateway, with the summits of stone towers emerging beyond. I stepped out briskly, in advance of the others; I noticed some bright-hued flowers in a bed on the right. In a few moments I was ascending a wide flight of steps; as I did so, the gateway yawned, and two men in uniform stepped out. There was a transient halt, a few words were exchanged; we went forward, and the gate closed behind us.

IV

INITIATION

"Put the fear of God in his heart!"

This phrase, impious and ironic, is used by officials in prisons, and repeated by prisoners. It has no religious import. The naming of God in that connection reminds me of a remark I heard from a moonshiner--as the distillers of illicit whiskey in the mountain regions of the South are called--who had lately arrived at the penitentiary. He said, "I allus thought this here Jesus Christ was a cuss-word; but these folks say he was some religious guy!" His enlightenment was doubtless due to the first aid to the unregenerate administered by our chaplain.

To "put the fear of God in a man's heart" means to break his spirit, to cow him, to make him, from a man, a servile sneak; and this is effected not by encouraging him to remember his Creator, but by instilling into him dread of the club, the dungeon, and the bullet. He must learn to fear not God, but the warden, the captain and the guard. He is to be hustled about, cuffed, shoved, kicked, put in the hole, punished for not comprehending surly and half inarticulate orders, or for not understanding gestures without words; all of which encouragements to obedience are, indeed, specifically forbidden by the rules which were formulated in Washington and disseminated for the information of the investigation committees and of the public, but which are disregarded nevertheless by the prison authorities from the highest to the lowest. For they risk nothing by disregarding them; there is no one except prisoners to complain of illegal treatment, and there is no one for them to complain to except the very persons who are guilty of the illegalities; and the warden at Atlanta, at any rate, has repeatedly stated that he would not accept the oaths of any number of prisoners against the unsupported denial of a single guard. To do otherwise would be to "destroy discipline." Moreover, these unverified complaints--such is their inevitable category in the circumstances--are themselves fresh causes of offense, and productive of the severest punishments--not only clubbing and close confinement, often in the dark hole, but loss of good time, which of course is more dreaded than anything else.

But may not the prisoners complain to the committees or inspectors, appointed precisely to enquire into and relieve abuses of this sort?

I shall have a good deal to say about these agents of humanity presently. I will only say here that no prisoner who cares whether he lives or dies, or who possesses common sense or the smallest smattering of experience of prison affairs, ever is so reckless as to impart any facts to the persons in question. If he accuses any guard or other official of cruelty, the entire force of prison keepers can and will be at need marshaled to deny point-blank that any such thing occurred, or, if any did, it was because the accused official was at the time quelling a dangerous revolt, and deemed his own life in peril. If this evidence be insufficient, it is a pathetic truth that some prisoners can always be found so debased by terror and abject as to perjure themselves against their comrades. It is among negro prisoners that such traitors are commonly sought and found. White men uniformly have a sense of honor--thieves' honor, if you please--which keeps them loyal. There are exceptions to this rule, and there are also exceptions to the rule that negroes betray. I have the pleasure and the honor of the acquaintance of some negro prisoners at Atlanta who would sooner die than ingratiate themselves with the officials by a falsehood.

Accordingly, complaints of brutal treatment at Atlanta are not frequent, either to the officials or to investigators; otherwise, I need not tax your imagination to picture what happens to the complainants after the investigators have departed.

Order and discipline--as appertaining to prisoners, not to officials--must be preserved; of course they must, if we are to have any prisons at all. And since there is no way for the prisoners to compel the guards to keep within the license accorded to them, we must compel the prisoners to accept whatever injustice or outrage the unrestrained despots of the ranges have the whim to inflict upon them. There are desperate revolts at times--desperate in the literal sense, since they have no hope of relief in them, but only the tragic rage against tyranny which will sometimes blaze up in victims--and on the other hand there are officials who will resign their positions rather than connive at abuses. But every means is taken to avert this last; for guards know things, and the System could be shaken by men who not only know, but, unlike prisoners, have a chance to make what they know believed.

All this time we have been waiting just inside the prison gates. The difference between just inside and just outside is important; for nine convicted men out of ten, it would be punishment for their misdeeds more than sufficient to be taken no further on the way to retribution than that. Whatever humiliation and disgrace they are capable of feeling or have cause to feel is at that first moment at its height; it strikes upon them unaccustomed and defenseless--never so acutely sensitive as then. Afterward, familiarity with misery and shame renders them progressively more and more callous, without adding one jot to the public odium of their position. They can never forget that first clang of the closing gates in their ears; the whole significance of penal imprisonment is in that. Many a man, the moment after that experience, might turn round and go forth a free man, yet with a soul charged with all the mortal burden that man-devised penalties can inflict upon him. Moreover, not having been unmanned and his nature violated by physical insults and outrages, he might find strength and spirit to begin and pursue a better life thereafter. The "lesson" (word which our shallow and officious moralists roll so sweetly under their tongues) would have been taught him to the last tittle, and withal enough of the man remain to profit by it. Whereas, under the existing conditions, no more than four or five years in jail destroy any possibility of future usefulness in most men; they have been hammered into something helpless, dazed, or monstrous; and even if they have courage to attempt to take hold of life again, they are defeated by the unremitting pursuit of our spy system, which depends for the main part of its livelihood upon getting ex-convicts back to jail--whether on sound or on perjured evidence is all one to the spies. So, as I said some time ago, most prison sentences are life sentences, to all practical intents. To the manhood of the man, prison means death.

Do some of the above statements appear extreme? Read on, and decide. Meanwhile I will observe that so long as prisons endure, such abuses as have been hinted at must persist. Whatever reforms have in special instances ameliorated them, have in so far only gone to show that the whole system is vicious and irrational.