Chapter 9

Evil conditions breed evil deeds and dangerous secrets. Conditions have improved somewhat during the last two or three years, but the improvement has been more outward than inward. One day, two or three years ago, suddenly appeared at the gates the Attorney-General from Washington. He had not been looked for so early. He walked straight into the dining-room, where he noticed a number of convicts standing up with their noses against the wall. "What is this for?" he asked one of them. The convict couldn't exactly tell; he was waiting to be had up for examination. "How long are you kept there?" "From seven in the morning till seven at night." "Have you had anything to eat?" The man had not, nor any opportunity to discharge the functions of nature either.

This Attorney-General, in Washington, had never showed himself a friend of convicts; but when he saw--and smelt!--this comparatively slight instance of prison discipline, his gorge rose. He ordered all the culprits to the kitchen for a meal, and issued an edict against this punishment, and against some other things that he discovered. What he would have done had he seen the dark cells, and the condition of the men who had been kept there for a few months, may be conjectured. The public is indeed assured that the use of these cells has long been discontinued; but seven or eight hundred prisoners know that, as late as last October, a certain convict commonly referred to as "the old Englishman" was hung up by the wrists in one of them. And there were others.

Prison officials are political appointees, whose controlling aim must therefore be the security and prosperity of themselves, and only afterward (if at all) the welfare and just and decent treatment of the convicts. They have their salaries (niggardly enough if we regard the work they are supposed to do, but affluent in view of what they actually do), and they have the government appropriations for expenses and supplies for the penitentiary, which they are expected to handle economically. But economy, and decent and humane treatment of prisoners in a jail, are incompatible, even were the men kept steadily and productively at work under proper conditions, and paid for what they produced. A jail properly administered would be one of the most expensive investments in the world; but Congress, as at present advised, thinks only of cutting down the already miserably insufficient stipend; and that warden who can, at the end of his fiscal year, show a balance in favor of the government, may depend upon holding his position, and nobody considers the mortal tears, misery and outrage from which that favorable balance is derived. For not only if it be wisely and honestly expended is the supply of money insufficient, but much of it is wasted by mere ignorance, negligence and incompetence, and much more of it--as recent exposures in newspapers indicate--leaks away in the form of graft. For all this waste the convict must pay in privations and cruelties not authorized or contemplated by a government none too considerate at best; and men above grow fat and rosy gilled.

But nothing is so difficult to prove or so easy to conceal as graft; all the ingenuity and resources of the grafters are primarily and undeviatingly devoted to covering their tracks. So much is allowed for maintenance, subsistence, construction; the bills and receipts are shown; all seems right. And yet, somehow, buildings remain unfinished, grounds are a raw wilderness, men are clad in rags inherited from previous generations, and are starved and abused. Meanwhile, a warden on a four or five thousand dollar salary contrives to live at the rate of ten or twelve, and may own valuable real estate in the city.

Do miracles occur in jails, after having been so long discontinued elsewhere? Or must we at last realize that the comfort and soft living of a handful of rascals is obtained at the cost of the flesh and blood and despair of thousands of men--I believe there are five hundred thousand convicts in this country annually--gagged and helpless, to whom we give the name of convicts, but who, whatever their crimes, are still our own flesh and blood, brothers of ours, our own very selves but for special circumstances for which we can claim no merit; but for their souls and lives we are responsible, and to strive to redeem and succor them our own intelligent self-interest should prompt us to spend and labor lavishly. Instead of that, our habitual attitude toward them is that of indifference or even hostility. For why should we honest people waste our good money and precious sympathy on a convict? Has he not already robbed us enough?

It would be a shallow thing to hold up as monsters of hardheartedness and depravity the officials who have been entrusted with the conduct of our prisons. If they do wickedly and corruptly, it is not because they are to begin with preterhuman sinners, but because we summoned them to duties far above their capacity and training, which involve temptations and provocations which they lack will and power to resist, which give them power over fellow creatures which the most magnanimous and purest men might hesitate to assume, and which inevitably plunge men who are not magnanimous or pure into deeds of injustice, dishonor and inhumanity. In a sense, the officials are no less victims of the ignorance and frivolity of the community than are the prisoners themselves.

But, at any rate, the officials are few and the prisoners are many. If anything is to be done to make things better, there is more hope in dealing with the officials first. After they have been driven out, and their places filled with honorable and enlightened men, who will at least administer the law as it stands with integrity and judgment, we shall be in a better position to consider whether the law itself be beyond criticism, and its penalties justly and prudently devised. Crime as it exists is an enormous evil, and it costs us enormously; and cheap and pinchbeck methods will never rid us of it.

VIII

FOR LIFE

When a man hears rumors that his application for parole is likely to be acted upon favorably, a guard pauses at his cell door some morning, and tells him to go to the clothing shop at a certain hour. The prisoner, unless he has been forewarned, accepts this as proof positive that he will really be set at liberty, and presents himself before the head tailor with a smiling countenance. He is solemnly and specifically measured for a suit, looks over the material out of which it is to be made, perhaps ventures to mention some predilections as to the cut, and takes his departure with a light heart. The fact that the cloth is cheap, unshrunken goods, which will shrivel up at the first shower or severe humidity, and will, at all events, get wrinkled out of shape in a few days, does not dash the hopeful prisoner's jocundity; nor even the consideration that the "prison cut" will be instantly recognized all over the country, by every detective, private or federal, and acted upon as circumstances may indicate. It is not the clothes, good or bad, that makes his long-tried heart glad; it is the assurance of freedom. He would be more than content with a simple loin-cloth, if only freedom might go with it.

As a matter of fact, this measuring commonly means little, and guarantees nothing at all. Indeed, it has rather the appearance of a pleasant jest of the authorities--one of the cat-and-mouse plays with prisoners with which every old timer is familiar. One would say the authorities find amusement, amid the monotonous round of their avocations, in thus stimulating hopes which they know are not likely to be fulfilled. "Come, here is a heart not yet thoroughly broken; let us try another blow at it!" Days, weeks, months, drag tediously by, and nothing more is heard of the parole, or of the suit of new clothes. They have never been made up, or if they by chance have been, they are put away to gather dust on a shelf underground; they are old clothes now--years old, sometimes. And when at last they are brought out again, it is probable that they will be worn by some other, more fortunate man, who ignored the misfit for the sake of getting past the prison doors.

When this little drama was acted for my benefit, I noticed a man sitting in a certain chair amid the other tailor prisoners, stitching away perfunctorily at a piece of goods. I call him a man, but he looked, to my fancy, like an ancient frog, or the semblance of what had once been a frog, from which, however, all the impulses and juices that had made him alive had slowly leaked away, until nothing but the shell was left. He was a pithless automaton, in whom mind and emotions had long since become inert, and only enough sensibility was left to enable him to feel dimly miserable. Who was he--or, better, who had he been? I learned that for seven years he had sat in that same chair from morning till night, doing the same job of sewing on one suit after another of prison clothing. Seven years! But was he capable of no other employment? Might he not have been given the relief of a change? Maybe; but what would be the use? They couldn't be bothered finding him new stunts all the time, since he had learned how to do that one thing satisfactorily. He was a "lifer."

Life--your entire lifetime--means, perhaps, a good deal to you; even its sorrows, in the retrospect, were good in their way; they meant something. And you look forward to happier things in the future; it will be a long and on the whole a successful future perhaps. Think of the variety and the opportunity which this great, multiform, breathing world holds forth to a man; the friends, the activities, the changes of scene, the surprises, the conflicts, success and failure, hope and fear, triumph, defeat--life, in a word. It is a divine thing, a glorious thing, the God-given birthright of all men. It is the molding of character, the endless, stimulating struggle, the growing sense of human brotherhood, the faces and hands of our fellow creatures, the longer, deeper thoughts aroused by the slow revelations of experience as to the plan of human destiny,--and therefore are the words well chosen which condemn a man like yourself to penal servitude "for life"?

But human language has no word to convey the significance of lifelong imprisonment. It is surely not life: nor is it death--Oh, death would be welcome! For death means either (as you may imagine you believe) total extinction, or it means increased life, free from material trammels. But death in life is a monstrous thing; life, for example, spent in a chair in a squalid tailor's shop, doing over and over again the same piece of squalid, meaningless work, with ever another squalid year stretching out its length before you when the last one has been completed. Is life so endured _life_--the sacred Creative gift, imparted to all things, conscious or unconscious, without restriction? Life, the mystery, which we are impotent to bestow, and which even death, self-inflicted or inflicted by others, cannot take away; which one thing only can take away--the death-in-life of penal imprisonment; is it not a formidable thought that we have incurred the burden of this crime, which does not transfer life from one phase to another, but seeks to annihilate it absolutely?

Death would be welcome; the infliction of it can find forgiveness; but how can we forgive the infliction of death-in-life? How can God forgive it, this profane meddling with sacred and fathomless life? Will He accept the plea that we did it "for the protection of society?--for the man's own good?--or a warning to others?" In that day of questioning, I would rather take my chances with the man sitting in the chair in the prison tailor's shop for seven years, a "lifer"! Infinite mercy may find means to compensate him for what we robbed him of; but what can it do with us, the robbers?

In the Federal prison there were a score or more of lifers, with some of whom it was my fortune to become acquainted. I stood in a sort of awe of them; the thought of their fate was so overwhelming that my mind could not compass it, though my heart might approach some conception of it through obscure channels of intuition. Their treatment by the prison officials was not ordinarily severe; even a warden or a guard could feel that clubbing and dark-celling would be a kind of anticlimax for a man sentenced for life. Some of them--usually negroes--would be given easy jobs, and not held too strictly to the petty regulations whose special object is to humiliate the ordinary prisoner, under guise of disciplining and reforming him. Nothing was to be gained by disciplining or reforming a "lifer." Others, however, in whom despair had taken the expression of obstinacy or savagery, were savagely handled; one of them bears terrible scars from a shooting by one of the guards, and he told me that, out of the twenty-two years he had already served, eight had been spent in the punishment cells. Others are maltreated for a while, experimentally, or to "put the fear of God in their hearts," and afterward let alone. But as a rule, there is not much fun to be got out of a "lifer" by the prison keepers, and they prefer to ignore him.

The introduction of the law allowing the privilege of applying for parole, did, to be sure, place in the hands of the authorities a weapon with which they could "get beneath the hide" (as they might term it) of these obdurate subjects. Needless to say, this measure, which provides that "lifers" may be paroled (at the discretion of the parole board) after having served fifteen years with a good prison record, did not contemplate introducing thereby a new element of misery into their lives. But the men to whose hands the "lifer" is entrusted found in it a means of making him more readily amenable to discipline by holding over him the threat of an adverse report should he prove intractable. They could keep him indefinitely in that state of torturing suspense as to his fate, which is perhaps the worst of all tortures, by withholding from him all information as to whether or not his appeal was likely to succeed.

Several cases of this kind came under my observation. In one, the release came before the man had collapsed; in others, too late. In only one or two that I know of was there any pretext that his conduct during imprisonment had been unsatisfactory. The delay was never explained; it was due to wilful or careless neglect. Two men were carried out feet foremost in a deal box after they had endured suspense up to the extreme limit of mortal capacity. They died of broken hearts--gradually broken through long months of hope slowly fading into despair.

The warden sat serene in his office, attending to business as a good official should, writing reports to the Department which testified to his efficiency and economy, welcoming visitors with his genial smile, occasionally reading encomiums upon himself in a local newspaper, written and inserted there by somebody; the guards sauntered jauntily about, cocking their caps and making their clubs dance at the end of the cords; eight hundred unsightly felons, who had once been men like you and me, filed drearily in to their meals, and out again, the worse for the experience; and all the while, from morning till night, Dennis sat on the corner of his cot in the hospital room, waiting for the news of his release. He felt, and said, at first, that it was sure to come; it would come in a day or two, or at the end of the week anyway; or at the beginning of the week after. He knew his application had been accepted; of course, those big officials had lots to do, and could not be expected to attend to him at once; but they would not forget him.

For several weeks--a month or two--Dennis kept up his spirits well; he had been in prison many years, more than the number required for parole, and he had no bad marks against him. His wife and two daughters were still living, however, and he was full of plans for his future life with them; what he would do, where he would live, how happy they all would be together, after that separation. But one day as he sat on his cot, or paced slowly up and down the hospital chamber, news was brought to him, bad news, news that his wife had died unexpectedly.

He survived it; some men survive miraculously in prison, and some die easily. Dennis had his daughters left to him still; and the release was sure to come now--they would not surely delay it any longer. He had been a tall, powerful mulatto when he first came to prison; he was a gaunt, bent skeleton of a man now, with great, bony, strengthless hands, that closed round mine with a sort of appealing, lingering pressure when we met, as if he feared to let go his hold upon a man who was sorry for him. The doctor knew--any competent physician, at least, might have known--that he could not last much longer; but the doctor said nothing and did nothing. Then--for the stars in their courses seemed to fight against Dennie--came another piece of news for him; not news of parole, but news that his daughters, both of them, had followed their mother; they too were dead. Dennis, who had begun to plan out a life with them, to be father and mother both to them, to comfort them and work for them, and to die at last with their love and companionship comforting him, was now alone in the world, and still in prison.

Time had gone by; it was six months since he had begun to look for freedom. What would freedom mean for him now, with no one in the world to go to or to be with? Probably he gave up looking for it at this point; at any rate, he spoke of it no more. He spoke very little after that, and he very seldom rose from his seat on the corner of his cot, or took notice of any one or of anything in the hospital room. He sat there, day after day, all day long, with his eyes fixed upon a certain point of vacancy; what he saw, what he thought, no one knew. His hands lay before him on his bony knees, lax and inert. Half a lifetime in prison, and now he was nearing the end, mute and motionless, making no complaint or protest--the power for that had gone by. He no longer spoke of parole; and no parole came. No doubt, the great officials were busy, and what was Dennis that they should remember him, and draw out that paper from its pigeonhole, and sign it, and send it to him? The world could get along without Dennis.

So, one day, Dennis died; and after his body had been laid in its box, the old market wagon, with the old mule between the shafts, was backed up to the door, and the box with the gray old corpse in it was shoved in and driven round to the prison burying ground and dumped into its red clay hole. There it lies; but I am not sure that that is the end of Dennis. A time may be coming, after this earthly show is over, when persons who were so much pressed for time that they could find no moment to sign a paper to save a fellow man's life, may see him again under awkward circumstances, and be asked to explain. Justice, after all, is an Immortal, and belongs to eternity. We should beware of measuring, by the apparent slowness of her movements on this lower plane, the likelihood of her final victory.

If you have some imagination to spare, put yourself in the place of a convict who finds himself, to-day, facing a sentence of imprisonment for life. The imagination of it, even, is so appalling that you will need more than common courage to picture it to yourself. What, then, must the reality of it be? It is hard to understand how any human heart and brain can withstand the prospect of it. If it has not stopped your heart at once--if your brain has not immediately collapsed under the shock--you will think of suicide. But, perhaps, before you can find means or resolution to seek that escape, you will become conscious, in the background of your mind, of a stirring of that almost ineradicable thing that we call hope. You cannot quite bring yourself to believe that your entire earthly future is to be passed in a prison cell. Some event will occur, some beneficent freak of destiny, some earthquake or lightning bolt, some national revolution or catastrophe, some belated sense of humanity in your brother man, some new law repealing the impious cruelty of the old law, that will break your bars before the end can come. You cannot believe that you will actually live and die in jail.

Thus you are tided over your first hours and days, and with each new day that you survive the chances of your surviving altogether increase. By and by, you fall into the prison routine, and your existence becomes mechanical and automatic. There will be occasional flamings-out of rage and despair, but they pass, and become progressively more infrequent. You have slipped down into a merely animal stratum of existence; you live to-day because you lived yesterday, and you do not forecast to-morrow. Perhaps you learn to assuage and deceive the hunger of your immortal soul by forcing your attention upon the petty ripple of daily events and duties, until you present, to the outsider, the appearance of a commonplace, non-tragic person, bearing no noticeable scars of the crime which society perpetrated on you. You perhaps lose, at last, the realization of your own inhuman plight, and are received, unawares, into the gray prison protoplasm, no longer really sensitive to impressions, though presenting the semblance of human reactions. You drift down the stream, passive, in a sort of ghastly contentment. You have forgotten that you ever were a man.

But I am merely speculating in the direction of truths that I do not know and cannot reach. The lifers themselves whom I knew could tell me nothing; they were less demonstrative than the men of five or ten years' sentence. We can never fathom the dealings of the Almighty with His creatures, and they, perhaps, can fathom them as little as we can. In ways inconceivable to us, they are supported.

There was a little old man known as Uncle Billy. If the parole board has kept faith with him, he should have been set free the 23rd of December. Uncle Billy's right arm had been amputated at the shoulder, the result of a shot through the arm from his own gun while he was getting out of a buggy. He lived in Oklahoma, Indian Territory, at the time of his story. Billy was married to a woman who must have had some attractiveness, for a journeying pedler, who periodically passed through the region, formed a liaison with her. There was at that time a daughter, who had just reached marriageable age. The pedler was wont practically to put Billy out of his own house during his sojourns, and usurped his place as master of the household. At one time he secured Billy's conviction on some minor offense, and had him jailed for six months. What Billy thought of the situation I don't know; he was a small, slight man, under five foot three, and of an intellectual cast. But he seems not to have attempted active measures, until one day he discovered that the pedler, not satisfied with the wife, was attempting the seduction of the daughter likewise.