The Subterranean Brotherhood Part 9

The Government is extravagant. What is the use of spending money on a shoddy suit of clothes for each one of thousands of convicts every year, and giving each of them a five dollar bill, with the certainty that, in a large majority of cases, they will be back in their cells in a few days or weeks, or months? Look up, if you please, the statistics as to the number of convicts who are second or third offenders. Nay, the Government is itself the prime and most effective cause of their getting back, since it is government spies that provide the evidence that sends them up.

But can we afford to trust ex-convicts? Must we not keep a strict eye on them? If the strict eye were also a friendly one, it might be of some avail. But our hand is against them, and we need not wonder that theirs is against us. Not only are we their enemies when they emerge from jail, but (as has been repeated interminably by every investigator who has been qualified to speak on the subject) jails are the best and only schools of crime. In other words, we first educate men to be criminals by putting them in places where they can learn nothing else, and then we keep them criminals by shutting against them, when freed, every opportunity to earn food and lodging in legitimate ways. And then we complain that they are not to be trusted.

Neither can men fed on poisons be trusted to be well. Jail life is poisonous; I think it was Judge McLeland who said, last summer, "Our million dollar reformatories offer university courses in b.e.s.t.i.a.lity and crime; it is as logical to send a man to jail to make him better as to shut him up in a garbage-can to improve his digestion. Forty per cent.

of those who go to jail, go back again," he added; "one man went back one hundred and seventy-six times. Others are sent because they are poor and cannot pay a fine, and they are there made real criminals."

An instance of this occurred in a Georgia chain-gang while I was in Atlanta. A man was sentenced for playing cards for money. He could not pay the $45 fine demanded, and in default, was sent to the chain-gang for eight months. He wore stripes, night and day, and if contumacious, was whipped by the guards. His work was in a stone quarry, a deep hole, into which the summer sun poured an insufferable heat. He was forced to do his work with a 49-pound hammer in that funnel-shaped pit, at a hundred degrees in the shade--if he could find any shade. One day he told the guard he was sick, and could not work any longer. The guard s.h.i.+fted the quid in his mouth and remarked that he ought to have said so that morning. But the man meant what he said, and proved it by dying a day or two later. Probably you may have played cards for money at some time in your life. Did it ever occur to you that you merited torture and death for it?

Or do you think that, after such an experience (if you survived it), or after being twice arrested for the same crime and kept in jail five years three times over, or after doing time for a crime you never committed--that you would come out at the end of it all, smiling, full of energy and enterprise, loving your neighbor, eager for honest toil?

Would you embrace Mr. Moyer (or whomever your jailer was) and tell him, with tears of grat.i.tude, that you could never repay him for his warm-hearted, big-brained care of you--the starving, the dungeoning, the clubbing, and all the rest of the university course?

Would you feel like that? Or would you stare out upon the world into which you were contemptuously tossed with dull, hating, revengeful eyes, suspicious of all men, hopeless of good, but resolved to get even, so far as you might, by plying the evil trades which your life of slavery had taught you? Would you behave like Christ upon the Cross, or like an ordinary man? Convicts are ordinary men, except that they are often, to begin with, diseased men, or hemmed in by conditions so untoward as to make an honest life ten or a hundred times harder than it ever was for you.

But you did not scruple to put this diseased or unfortunate version of yourself into the jail cauldron, to stew there with others like or worse than himself, for doing what, in most cases, he actually could not help doing; and when at last he was ejected like stale refuse, you were indignant because his looks did not please you, because he bore upon him the stains and the stench which the cauldron had fastened on him, because he did not, in the teeth of the secret service, the postoffice inspectors, the detective bureaus and the police, at once begin to lead an honest life and support the commonwealth. Do you say that none of this was your doing? But it is your doing, in just so far as you have not striven in every way open to you to extirpate the doing of it by this representative government.

The wonderful thing--the unexpected and pathetic thing--is, that so many convicts come out of jail in a kindly and inoffensive state of mind.

They are men who were born weak, humble and yielding, never esteemed themselves, were always ready to take a back seat and give precedence to others. They do not understand the rights of the matter, but suppose it must be all right, that penal servitude is the proper thing for them, that laws were made by wise men and must be enforced. They admit their stealings and their trickery, and blame themselves, observing regretfully that they didn't seem able to help it. Next time--if they get a next time--they will try very hard to be straight, and perhaps they will succeed after all!

There was little J., in the barbers' gang, a cheerful, smiling, sweet tempered fellow, who had served I know not how many terms for small larcenies and turpitudes. "I've always been such a d.a.m.ned little fool,"

he would say to me, as he smoothed off my chin. "The boys would get round me and rope me into some scheme, and I didn't seem able to keep clear of 'em. But I'm goin' to be let out again next July, and I've made up my mind I'll never be seen here again! No, sir! Oh, I've been talkin'

with the chaplain, too, and I've been reading the Bible, and all that, and I'm going to be a good man. Yes, sir! I've had my fling, and I'm through with it; when the boys get round me and tell me of some easy job, I'll tell 'em, No! Not for J."

He was a man of forty, as naive and "innocent" (in the unmoral sense) as a child; and he had been in jail off and on since he was ten years old.

I happened to be in the front office at the moment when J. was signing receipts and receiving his property preparatory to leaving. He was dressed in a neat business suit of his own--not a prison-made monstrosity. He was clean and smooth and bright, and tremulous with excitement. He signed his papers with a shaking hand, he took up and put down again his well packed gripsack, he shook hands with a sort of clinging, appealing grasp, as if he were afraid of being left alone, he giggled and looked profoundly solemn by turns. The officials stood about, indifferent and contemptuous, the men who had been hard and cruel to him, and those who had not been so hard.

It was a bright, beautiful day, full of suns.h.i.+ne; J. picked up his grip and marched down the corridor and out into the free air. He wore a brave air of hope and determination, but one could detect underneath it symptoms of misgiving. He had vowed to be good, but could he keep the vow, when "the boys got round him"? I wished him good luck with all my heart. Six months have pa.s.sed, and J. is not back in jail yet, so far as I have heard. But the spies are watching him, and he won't be safe till he is dead.

A man with whom chance brought me frequently in contact was H., a yegg, as the term is.

When a guard is escorting a batch of visitors about the prison, he speaks of the yeggs in an ominous tone, as if they were some deadly monster, hardly to be even looked at with impunity. But yeggs, as a body, are the best men in the prison; they have a code of honor, and strength of character. Outside, they blow open safes, and do other risky jobs; and they will shoot to kill on the occasions when it is their life or the other man's. They will do this, because they know what a prison is, and also what spies outside prison are. But they will spare your life, if possible; not because they care for you--they hate and despise you, as being a man who would be and have in the past been merciless to them, and as a hypocrite who is either a rascal on the sly or would be if you possessed the courage or were subjected to the temptation--they spare you not from mercy but a settled policy; killing is bad business, and means sooner or later a violent end for the killer.

Most yeggs are men of more than average intelligence, and sometimes of fair education; they were not born outlaws; but, if you can win them to speak of themselves, you will generally find that they have undergone things both in and out of prison enough to make an outlaw out of a saint. Most men succ.u.mb under such things, and either die, or become cowed in spirit; the yeggs have survived, and their spirit is unbroken.

They hold the highest place in the estimation of their fellow prisoners; and the warden and the guards fear them. By that I mean that they fear to inflict severities upon them except upon some pretext at least plausible; for the yeggs know the rules, and though they will submit without a whimper to the crudest punishments if cause can be alleged for it, yet wanton liberties, such as prisoners less well informed or more pusillanimous submit to, cannot safely be taken with them.

The yeggs stand together; they have esprit de corps, and if, as happened last summer at Atlanta, the food supply drops actually to the starvation point in both quant.i.ty and quality, they stand forward--as they did then--as champions for the rest of the men; they protest openly, they will not be wheedled or terrorized, and they go to the hole as one man.

Nor will they come out thence until the warden comes to them and promises improvement. The warden promises, not because he desires improvements, but because he fears the scandal of mutiny in the prison--an inconvenient thing when one is supposed to be conducting a model inst.i.tution; and even an easy going public, which will tolerate other forms of cruelty to convicts, feels compunction about starving them, especially when it is taxed to provide them with wholesome and sufficient food.

About my friend H.--I have no s.p.a.ce here to tell his story, nor to outline it even; it is a terrible one. I may be able, some time, in another place, to present it in full. I will say now only that he was once confined for three years in a contract labor jail which has the worst features conceivable in any prison of to-day or of a hundred years ago, and men are killed there by overwork and punishments as a matter of routine; few survive the treatment so long as H. did. Once during his three years he uttered three words aloud; for that he was punished so long and so savagely that the horror of it yet remains with him.

Prisoners constantly maim their hands voluntarily in the machinery in order to be quit of the torture of the work; the bleeding stumps of their fingers or hands are roughly bound up, and they are driven back to their machines. The warden is an oily, comfortable rogue, who beams upon visitors and fools the prison commission to the top of its bent, and he bears an excellent reputation for the large amount of work he gets out of his prisoners; "They just love it, my boys do," he avers; "nothing like work to keep men happy, you know." And then, when the coast is clear, he turns upon his boys like a bloodthirsty tiger.

But what I wish to say here is, that when H. at last finished his term and was thrust forth into the crowded street of the city, his legs failed him, and he tottered along scared like a wild beast at the noise and bustle. A man addressed him, and he stared at him blankly, and could not command his tongue to speak words. He wandered on irregularly, starting at imaginary dangers, unnerved at the height of the sky, the noise, the movement. He sought the least frequented streets, but his aspect and bearing made people look suspiciously at him, and he found his way to the slums, where he got a room and shut himself in with a feeling of relief. It was several days before he could school himself to talk and act like an ordinary human being. His health was shattered, though he was naturally a strong and hearty man; eating made him sick, though he was faint for lack of right feeding.

He could find no steady employment, but helped himself along with odd jobs here and there. He was resolute to keep straight, but an old pal of his happened to meet him, did him some good turns, and finally proposed his joining two or three men in a promising burglary. H. asked time to think it over, and that night he left the city in a sort of panic, and traveled to a large town a hundred miles away. Here he succeeded in getting a good job; his spirits began to revive; he made some good acquaintances, and prospered beyond all expectation for nearly a year.

One day he noticed a man in the street who stared hard at him; not long after he saw the same man standing in front of the house in which he lodged; the next morning his landlord came to him and, with some embarra.s.sment, said that he would have to ask him for his room; a relative was about to visit him and he needed the accommodation.

It was as he had feared--the detectives had run him down. He put what he possessed in a trunk and left town that evening for a place nearly a thousand miles west. Here he was left undisturbed for fifteen months, and made a new start in business. Then the chief of the local police sent for him and said, "I don't want to be rough on you; but the best thing you can do is to skip; we're on to you--understand?" "But I'm doing a straight business," H. pleaded. "You may be; but you're a crook," was the reply.

We need not follow him further; he was driven from one place to another.

At last he was caught with stolen goods on him, he having undertaken to help an old friend of his out of a tight place by carrying his gripsack from one place to another; it proved to contain some plunder from a recent burglary. He got off with a two year sentence; but it was the end of his attempt to reform. "Crooked or straight, I'll end in jail," he said to me, with that strange convict smile which means such unspeakable things. "I've got two years more here; if I last it out, they'll get me again."

I firmly believe that he would have been an honest and successful man if he had been let alone.

It sometimes happens that the manhood of a convict is so sapped by long sufferings that even his desire for freedom is lost. He is afraid to be free; he cannot live at ease outside of his cell walls. Perhaps you will say that goes to prove the gentleness and humanity of prison discipline.

To me it seems a thing so appalling that I must be content with the bare statement of the fact. A man is afraid to be free, afraid of the great wonderful world, and of his fellow creatures, and can endure what he supposes to be life only in his steel cell. What has put that fear in him? But our laws provide no penalty for dehumanizing a fellow creature under the forms of law. If it be legal, it must be right.

I knew a man in our prison who had been thirty-five years in confinement, with short intervals of liberty. The best favor he could ask was to be allowed to stay all day and all night in his cell, doing nothing. Year after year, nothing else than this appeared to him worth while. He was well educated, as prisoners go, quiet and inoffensive. "I wish some doctor would examine me and tell me what is the matter with me," he remarked to me once. "Maybe I'm crazy!"

After all, the world, in its way, is as hard a place for ex-convicts as a jail; more cruel, perhaps, inasmuch as it seems to offer hopes that jails deny. But can a world be called civilized that is satisfied with that arraignment?

XII

THE PRISON SILENCE

How many convicts, during the past twenty years, have served their terms and been released? and yet what does the public know of the real inside of prisons? This used to perplex me at first. My fellow prisoners with whom I talked were bitter and voluble enough in denouncing the conditions; but no sooner had they pa.s.sed the gates to freedom than they became strangely silent. Some of them even were quoted in the local papers as praising and upholding what they had just before condemned.

There was a j.a.panese prisoner, for example, the only man of his nation there, I think, who gained attention by copies of well-known pictures which he made, to be hung on the walls of the chapel, and by designing back and side scenes for the stage. I never talked personally with him, or saw him but at a distance, as he hastened along the corridor; but men who knew him said that he was especially savage in his diatribes against the prison and its keepers, and had promised, as soon as he was freed, to make numerous ugly disclosures to the world. But when we searched the local papers after his release, what we found was a hearty and explicit laudation of the prison and its officials. Had it been written by the warden himself, it could not have been more sunny and satisfied.

Again, there was a man with us who had been sentenced for life on a murder charge of a singularly revolting kind; he had been in confinement seventeen years when I first knew him, but had always consistently protested his innocence. He applied for parole, and his application was granted. At this time he occupied a large cell containing eleven other prisoners, of whom I was one; and he attached himself very closely to me, and upon coming in from his work each evening, would sit beside my cot and hold my hand and pour out his heart to me in lamentations, a.s.severations of his innocence, picturings of the horrors of his long confinement, forecastings of what he meant to do when he was freed--to address audiences from the pulpit and rostrum, and convince the world of the horrors of penal imprisonment. He was deeply religious, and had the moral courage to kneel down, before all the men in the cell, and spend five minutes or more in prayer every evening before going to bed. Every one believed that he had been wrongly convicted, if for no better reason, because he had never once wavered from his claim of innocence during those seventeen years, and because his conduct and bearing in the prison had always been exemplary. He was a man of powerful body and strong, impressive mind; his speech was simple and convincing, and I told him that I thought he would succeed as an avatar of prison iniquities. He professed an ardent affection for me, and expressed enthusiastic antic.i.p.ations as to the outcome of my own projects for calling public attention to the evils in question.

This man was tortured for five or six weeks by unexplained delay in fulfilling the promise of his parole, during which time it fell to my daily lot to comfort and encourage him; and I suffered no little emotional stress myself from this constant drain on my sympathies. Every evening, sitting beside my cot, he would repeat over and over again the same lamentations and speculations, interjecting at the end of each apostrophe, "It's terrible--terrible!" until at last I felt that I would gladly give up my own "good time" for the sake of seeing him freed without further procrastination. I was convinced, and so told him, that the delay could be due to nothing but neglect, inadvertent or criminal, on the part of LaDow, the President of the Parole Board, or of the Attorney-General himself; the papers had been thrust into a pigeonhole, and been forgotten or ignored.

What were the tortures of a man imprisoned for seventeen years, and now standing on the brink of salvation or despair, to a supercilious official up in Was.h.i.+ngton?

Finally, without explanation or apology, the order for release came; and for me and his other friends, as well as for him, it was a day of rejoicing and thanksgiving. But, remembering that he was on parole, and therefore liable, on the least infringement of discipline, to be thrust back in his cell, none of us expected that he would venture to denounce the wrongs and expose the miseries of the imprisoned; we were glad to learn that he had secured a position paying him twenty or thirty dollars a month, with a chance of better things later, and that he had announced his purpose of running down the real perpetrator of the crime for which he had suffered, and forcing him to confess. For a few days, one or two local papers gave him half a column, and then there was silence.

I had been denied parole, and the restrictions thereof did not apply to me when my own day of freedom arrived; and I gave a short interview to a reporter, in which I said that the warden was unfit for his position, that the food was abominable, and that punishment in dark cells and otherwise was still practised, though under cover.

The next day the newspapers printed an interview with my late friend, in which he was quoted as declaring that every statement I had made was a malicious lie, that the warden was in all respects the best, kindest and most lovable man he had ever met, and that the men in confinement had all the food they asked for, of the best quality, and that all tales of hards.h.i.+ps and cruel punishments were false and wicked.

Is it conceivable that these statements were really given out by him? It seemed more likely that the words had been put into his mouth, under a threat, should he disavow them, of being sent back to prison. From such a threat the bravest man might shrink. But that statement of his still stands unmodified. And whether made spontaneously, or under the compulsion of a threat, its motive seems to have been fear of punishment for telling the truth. Such is the power of the System over its victims!

It is a state of things nothing less than nauseating. It is bad enough that men should be held in prison and maltreated; but that the truth should be imprisoned with them, gagged and terrified into silence, is a grave matter indeed. New York is complaining just now of the strength in corruption of its police system; but it seems almost trivial compared with this, for while the police ring profits by cooperating with the criminals they are paid to suppress, the prison ring profits by maiming or destroying human lives entrusted to their care to be restrained for a season from their own evil impulses, and thus if possible reformed; and, when they are released, it guards itself against exposure by the menace of revenge more formidable still. The parole and the indeterminate sentence, framed to open the way to reform of prisoners, is used by prison officials to intimidate and debase them; and if any ex-convict ventures to defy this fortified despotism, the immediate rejoinder is, "Who can believe a jail-bird? A man wicked enough to steal or murder is wicked enough to lie, and is not the malicious motive of the lie apparent?"

That rejoinder has been brought, and will continue to be brought against me. Among those who protested against the statements in my interview above mentioned was a lady whom I never spoke to--it is strictly against rules for a prisoner to speak with a visitor--and never knowingly saw, though I understand she was wont to sit on the stage during the Sunday exercises. She is thus quoted: "Julian Hawthorne is nothing more than an old grouch. A short time ago this old man told me himself that he was getting plenty to eat and had no complaint to make of his own or anybody else's treatment in the prison.... When he says such things as he is reported to have said, he should be made to prove them, or keep his mouth shut." Warden Moyer himself, less imaginative than this lady, contented himself with denying all charges and courting investigation, and added that he bore me no grudge, believed me to have been the dupe of malignant guards (since dismissed) and considers my motive to have been mainly the desire to make a little money. "The Department attaches little importance to these outbreaks," he remarked, "and I consider it unnecessary to place my word against that of convicts."

This may seem feeble; it is the mere instinctive stuttering of persons in a disturbed frame of mind. But the System will not depend for its defense upon persons of this kind. It has many strong forces at its command, of which the Secret Service, and the favorable prejudgments of the Government and of a large part of the public are but part. Any one opposing it may expect to be kept under strict surveillance in all his movements, his mail will be violated, his words, written or overheard, will be scrutinized for material that can be used against him. Nor is the line drawn there. While I was in prison, I received the confidences of many prisoners as to their own experiences, among others that of a Maine boy who had been convicted of robbing a postoffice. He had been arrested in the first instance as a vagrant, and while in the local jail had been approached by a postoffice inspector who charged him with the post-office crime. The boy had never been in the state in which the crime was committed; but he was told that, if he would plead guilty to it, he would be sent to Atlanta for a short term, whereas, should he refuse, he could be kept in jail awaiting trial for a year, and would then receive at least six months on the vagrancy charge. "Do as I tell you, and I will see that you get off easy," the inspector, who posed as a friend, told him. When he finally acquiesced, however, the judge imposed on him a sentence of five years, the inspector having testified that he was an old offender, implicated in many other crimes. The fact was, of course, that the real perpetrators of this postoffice robbery had not been caught, but it was expedient for the reputation and welfare of the detectives that a perpetrator should be produced--if not the real one, then one manufactured for the purpose. I learned of many cases similar to this--it is a common routine practise with the System.

Moreover, when this innocent youth has completed his term, he will be thenceforth a marked man--"an habitual criminal," with a record against him; and he can be rearrested on general principles at any time. He will be given no opportunity to earn an honest livelihood, and it would be surprising indeed if his wrongs, not to speak of his empty stomach and hopeless circ.u.mstances did not make him a bona fide criminal ere long.

Obviously, meanwhile, such a man is effectively gagged; if he be asked whether prison be a paradise, he will reply ardently in the affirmative, though his whole body and soul know it as a h.e.l.l. For if, having blasphemed the Holy System, he is returned to the cell whence he came, every word of his rash revelation will be avenged upon him in torture and misery.

Am I attempting to retaliate upon the System for personal indignities and mishandling; or am I the dupe and tool of designing miscreants--convicts, guards or foremen--who plied me with false statements to wreak revenges of their own? I have already said that I was never harshly treated by any of the prison officials, and after the two first months indulgences were allowed me beyond the customary prison usage. During my two first months, to be sure, it seemed unlikely that I could live out my term, because I was kept at work in an underground place without ventilation or other than artificial light, and permeated with the hot-water pipes which supplied the buildings with heat and power. I was also unable to eat the prison fare, and was slowly peris.h.i.+ng for lack of food. I never complained of this treatment, for it was in the ordinary prison course; but when the consequences of it became visible in my physical appearance, I was put on a diet of oatmeal and milk, morning and evening, and allowed to exercise in the open air.

I voluntarily, during this period, went without dinner, being unwilling to poison myself with the rancid grease and garbage served under that name; but I made the most of the simple but nouris.h.i.+ng milk diet, though it was insufficient in quant.i.ty; and I improved to the utmost the outdoor privileges, besides adhering resolutely to a regimen of daily calisthenic exercises; so that, when I was set at liberty at the end of six or seven months, I was in physical condition quite as good as when I went in. I was never denied leave to write "special letters," and my intercourse with the warden and his deputies, though always as seldom and brief as I could make it, was uniformly suave and smiling. The reasons for all which I shall have occasion to discuss later.

So much for the "grouch." As for being made the dupe of designing persons among the lower officials, and my fellow prisoners,--beyond replying tersely to questions put to me, I never had any communication with the former, and never heard or spoke a word with them reflecting upon the prison management. But what of my fellow prisoners?