"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.
"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.
My friend and I looked at our new masters with curiosity; they looked at us with what might be termed arch amusement. With such a look do small boys regard the beetles, kittens, or other animals, power to torment whom has been given them. It was after prison hours—the men had been already locked in their cells, and the warden and deputy had gone home. It was left to the subordinates to put the fear of God in our hearts; we could only surmise how far they would go in that instruction. We did not then know that their power was limited only by their good pleasure. But it is an accepted and reasonable principle with them that the sooner one begins to take the nonsense out a prisoner, the better. The strangeness of his surroundings intimidates him at the start, and he more readily realizes that he has no friends and that he is in prison—not (as one of the guards afterward took occasion to remark) in a "sanitarium for decayed crooks." A good scare thrown into him now will bring forth more fruit than greater pains taken—and inflicted—hereafter.
Our anticipations, however, were the less formidable, because we had been exhaustively assured during the past ten days that Atlanta Penitentiary was not so much a penitentiary as a sort of gentlemen's summer resort and club, where conditions were ideal and treatment almost foolishly humane and tender. This information came not only from all court officials with whom we had held communion on the subject, but from our own counsel at the trial; the judge himself seemed to believe it, and if you ask the prison authorities at Atlanta, they will earnestly assure you that prisoners there are treated like gentlemen, are given every material comfort consistent with their being prisoners at all, are sumptuously fed and housed, and are helped in all ways to build up their manhood, maintain their self-respect, and prepare themselves for a career, after liberation, as valuable and industrious citizens. We were naturally disposed to credit assertions so emphatically and variously made,—some basis for them there must be. And it was obvious, at a glance, that the corridor in which we stood was spacious and airy, with a clean limestone pavement; that the disorder and shiftlessness of the Tombs was absent here. The guards who attended us wore neat dark uniforms of military cut; and if their caps were tilted back on their heads, or cocked on the northeast corner, that was a pardonable expression of their authority and importance. I saw no firearms and no blood, nor were the groans of tortured convicts audible. I remembered the flowers in the garden outside, and was prone to think that things might have been very much worse; they were certainly better, at a first glance, than at Sing Sing, which I had visited on a newspaper assignment about fifteen years before. I had resolved beforehand to make the best of everything, and it seemed already possible that I might not have to make believe very much to do so.
No resolve, however, could overcome the influence of that locked and barred gate, nor the realization that I was a convict, and that nobody inside the penitentiary had any doubt that I was justly convicted. Friends were remote and helpless; the support of former good repute was annulled; I stood there impotent, one man against the Federal Government, with nothing to aid me but the weight of my personal equation (whatever that might be worth) and my private attitude on the question of my guilt, which the trial had not modified, but which could be of no practical benefit to me here. The sensation of confronting everywhere a settled and hostile skepticism as to one's integrity was novel, and hard to meet with a firm countenance. And I felt how easily this sensation might crush the courage of one who was conscious of being justly condemned. How many men must be sitting yonder in those cells who lacked the moral consolations that I had! The thought sharpened my perception of the horror of all imprisonment, but at the same time stiffened my fortitude; for if these men could live through their ordeal, how much more could I!
Meanwhile we were being hurried through the handsome corridor, and down a flight of iron steps to a less presentable region. There was no aggressive brutality, only a peremptory curtness, entirely proper in the circumstances. Our only defense against physical severity was a bearing of cheerful but not overdone courtesy, and we gave that what play we might. I could not foretell how I might behave under a clubbing, and would not bring the thing to a test, if I could decently avoid it. In a long, low, shabby, ill-lighted room we were lined up against a counter, on the other side of which were two or three of our fellow prisoners—the first we had seen—whose function it was to fit us with prison suits. They consisted of a sack coat and trousers of gray-blue cloth—rather heavy goods, for the warm season had not yet begun—and this was obviously far from being their first appearance on a convict; suits are handed down from one generation of prisoners to another until they are entirely worn out; my own was of an ancient vintage and a good deal defaced, but I had no ambition to be a glass of fashion in jail. Of course I could only conjecture what diseases previous wearers of it might have suffered from; but I hoped for the best. Every new arrival at the penitentiary is presumed to be dirty until he is proved clean, and the only way for him to prove his bodily purity is to submit to a bath. The regulation is commendable, and was welcome to us after our day and night in the train; but a comrade of mine from the mountain wildernesses of South Carolina, where bathing is still regarded as a degrading innovation, described to me long afterward what a sturdy battle he had put up against the disgrace, and being a lusty youth, it had taken the best efforts of several guards to hold him under the spout long enough to wet him—and themselves into the bargain. Though this was the first time since infancy that I had bathed under compulsion, I complied very readily, and even said to my friend, "This isn't so bad!" It is not permitted, under the law, to give out any news about prisoners to the world without, after they have once passed the portals; nevertheless, this memorable remark of mine was printed next day in the New York newspapers, together with the scarlet hue of my necktie, and some other details,—my registered prison number among them, my own first knowledge of which was derived from the published paragraph. It was my first intimation of a fact which afterward exercised no small influence on my destiny in the prison—that I was a "distinguished," or at least a notorious prisoner. This influence had its good as well as its bad aspect, in the long run, but the latter was in the beginning the more conspicuous. The unidentified press-agent who disseminated to an eager world the news about the bath and the necktie, continued to be active during our stay in Atlanta, but his other communications were not even approximately so accurate as the first one, and nearly all of them were children of his imagination exclusively, and were more likely to be gratifying to the officials than to my fellow prisoner and myself.
From the bath to the bedchamber. Up the darksome stairs again into the stately corridor; through an inner gateway, and into a wide hall which communicated to right and left, through small steel doors, with the west and east ranges (dormitories). The west door was unlocked, and we were pushed into a huge room, about two hundred feet by a hundred and twenty, with tall barred windows along each side. Inside this space had been constructed a sort of inner house of steel, seven or eight stories in height, with zig-zag stairways at either end, leading to narrow platforms that opened on the individual cell doors. These doors were barred, and were locked by throwing a switch at the near end of the ranges; but any particular door could also be opened by a key. The cell doors of the inner structure were at a distance of some twenty feet from the walls and windows of the outer shell, and got what light and air they had from these—none too much of course. Also, the guard on duty in the range, if the weather be chilly, will close the windows, against the protests of the prisoners, and against the regulations too; but most of the guards are thin-blooded Southerners, and diseased into the bargain, and do not like cold air. The consequence is that the four hundred pairs of lungs in each range soon vitiate the atmosphere; the prisoners turn and toss in their cots, have bad dreams, and rise in the morning with a headache.
We mounted three or four flights of iron steps, and were introduced into a cell near the corner. It was, like all the others, a steel box about eight feet long by five wide, and seven or eight high. On one side, two cots two feet wide were hinged against the wall, one above another; they reduced the living space to a breadth of three feet. The wall opposite was made of plain plates of steel, and so was the inner end of the cell, but in this, at a man's height from the floor, was a round hole an inch in diameter. That was a part of the spy system; for between the two rows of cells is a narrow passage, in which the guard can walk, and, himself unseen and unheard, spy upon the prisoners and listen to their conversation. All prisoners are at all times of the day and night under observation. This seems a slight thing; but the cumulative effect of it upon men's minds is disintegrating. At no moment of their lives can they command the slightest privacy. And what right to privacy, you ask, has a prisoner? Would he not use it to cut his way through the chilled steel walls with his teeth and nails, or to plot revolt with his cellmate?—Possibly; but even a beast seeks privacy at certain junctures; and to deny all privacy tends to bestialize human beings. It is a part of the "put-the-fear-of-God-in-his-heart" principle—to break, humiliate, degrade the man, and render him unfit for human association. There are a washbasin and a toilet seat at the foot of the cot, facing the barred door. What difference can it make to a convict if the guard, or any other passer-by, watches him while he uses them?
There had been issued to us sheets, a pillowcase, and a gray blanket of the army sort; our first duty was to make our beds. Mattress and pillow were stuffed stiff with what felt like wood chips, and was probably straw and corn-husks; the pillow was cylindrical; the mattress was hillocked and hollowed by the uneasy struggles with insomnia of countless former users. There was a campstool whose luxuries we might share. We had, each, a prison toothbrush, and a comb. In the ceiling of the cell, beyond reach of an outstretched arm, was an electric bulb which would be darkened at nine o'clock. But all this was welcome; I had often roughed it in conditions quite as severe; my spirits could not be dashed by mere hardships or inconveniences. We put our domestic menage in order cheerfully, glad that we had been celled together, instead of doubling up with strangers. Nor would it have discouraged us to know that the west range was the one occupied by negroes and dangerous characters. The place was silent; none of the demoniac chantings and hyena laughter of the Tombs. We had our little jests and chucklings as we made our arrangements; Courage, Comrade! the period of suspense and anticipation is passed; we are at grips with the reality now!
Moreover—"Every prisoner, on installation in his cell, is supplied with rolls and hot coffee, and with pipe and tobacco!" Thus would the statement run in the report to the Department. What if the bread be uneatable, the coffee undrinkable, and the tobacco unsmokable? The mere idea of such things is something; besides, prisoners do contrive, being hard put to it, to consume them. We ourselves at least tried all three; if it proved easier to be abstinent than self-indulgent, that was our own affair. Meanwhile, our mental appetites were appeased by a little gray pamphlet, containing the rules governing the conduct of convicts in the penitentiary. There were a great many of them, and not a few required thought to penetrate their significance. Why, for instance, should special emphasis be laid upon the injunction to rest one's shoes against the bars of the door upon retiring? We were never informed; but I presume it must have been to prevent a man being tempted to reach out an arm a hundred feet long through his bars, throw the switch, steal along the platform, open the steel door, unbar the two outer gates, climb over the thirty-four foot wall, and escape—all the while avoiding the notice of the range guard, of the guards in the corridors, and of the watchman on the tower outside, all of whom were armed with magazine rifles and were yearning for an opportunity to use them. Of course, he would want to have on his shoes for such an enterprise, so that if the shoes were visible inside his door, it was prima facie evidence that he himself was also within. Another rule was italicized—"Do not try to escape—you might get hurt!" I refrained from testing the validity of either prohibition.
In the midst of our perusal, we were interrupted by the arrival of a visitor. He was a slight-built, slope-shouldered young fellow, in prison garb, with a meager visage heavily furrowed with sickness and suffering—he had tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, and the indigestion with which all prisoners who eat the regular prison fare are afflicted. Not that Ned (as I will call him, since it was not his name) mentioned his condition; it was determined long afterward by the diagnosis of my friend; Ned's object in visiting us was not to air his own troubles, but to assuage, so far as he might, the gloom and uneasiness of the new arrivals. In his haggard face shone a pair of very intelligent and kindly gray eyes, and above them rose a compact, well-filled forehead. I was fortunate enough to keep in touch with this young man during my stay, and I found no more lovable nature in the penitentiary. He made no secret of the fact that he had been guilty of a Federal offense, and he never expressed contrition for it; "I made a mistake in taking another man in with me," he remarked; "you are never safe unless you go it alone." He had not been systematically educated, but he had read widely and judiciously, talked correctly, though with occasional colloquial idioms thrown in, and he was a concentrated and original thinker. His opinions were bold, independent, and sound, his insight was very penetrating, and his knowledge of matters of criminal procedure and of prison conditions was accurate and ample. Facts which I afterward learned for myself were never out of accord with information he had given me; and the sanity and clarity of his judgments were refreshing and remarkable. His courage was undemonstrative but indomitable; he never complained of his own condition and experiences, but was instant in his sympathy with the misfortunes of others. No more welcome and valuable counselor than he could have come to us in those first hours of our durance.
That he was able to visit us was due to his being a "runner," as those prisoners are termed who are assigned to carrying messages and doing odd jobs in the ranges. He leaned against the bars and spoke manfully and pungently, with touches of gay humor now and then; advised us to our conduct—what to do and what to avoid; and when he noticed the little gray pamphlet, said scornfully, "Don't muss up your ideas with that! There's a hundred rules there, and every one of 'em is broken every day. Those rules are for show; what happens to you depends on who the guard is, and how he happens to be feeling. You can go as far as you like sometimes, and other times you'll get hauled up if you turn your head sideways. The screw" (guard) "on this range is decent; he won't crowd you too much. Keep quiet, and do what they tell you, and the odds are you'll get by all right. Of course, if some fellow gets a grudge against you, he's liable to hammer you like hell; there are some prisoners here that get on the wrong side of a screw, and—well, it goes hard with 'em! But if you're a little careful, I guess you'll get through all right.
"I've read all about your case in the papers, and I know you oughtn't to be here; and Bill" (the Warden) "likely knows it too, and as folks on the outside are on the watch for what happens to you, he'll think twice how he treats you. Bill is a cunning one; he keeps his ear to the ground; when he sees that the reform people are going to put something across, he backs it up, and gives out that he suggested it himself; but up to a year or two ago, he did the worst sort of things to the men; even in his early reports and addresses he advocated treatment that he'd never dare stand for now—except on the quiet! He gets himself written up in the local papers here as the model warden—warm-hearted and broad-minded, and all that flap-doodle! But if he had his way, you'd think you were back in the dark ages in this penitentiary. Wickersham threw a bit of a scare into him a couple of years back; and there have been others; but most of the inspectors that are sent here stand in with him; he gives them good feeds in his house, and takes them out in his auto, and fills 'em up with soft talk—about 'his boys,' and his fatherly interest in 'em, and all that—but he keeps the dark cells and the rest of the dirty work out of their sight, and of course none of the men dares say anything to 'em—it would be all day with them if they did—as soon as the inspector turned his back. That's what gets the men's goat—that he puts up such a humane front, and all the while hammers them on the sly. They'd prefer being told at the start they were going to get hell, and then getting it; but it goes against their grain to get it, and meantime have folks outside believe they're in a gentlemen's country club!"
Ned imparted his information by fits and starts; ever and anon he would break off abruptly and walk off down the range, to give the guard the idea that he was about his ordinary business; then he would return, squat down on his hams beside the door, and murmur along in his rapid, distinct tones. All that he said was abundantly confirmed later.
Finally—"Good night—sleep well—they'll put you on some job in a few days; it's the first days that go hardest with most men, but you'll get used to it; you might get out on parole, too—but don't count on it; of all the frauds in this prison, parole is the worst! And if they ever pass that 'Indeterminate Sentence' law—good-by! Imagine Bill with that thing to use as a club over us! He'd make every other man here a lifer!"
He laughed in the prison way—silently, in his throat—and went away, after warning us that it was near nine o'clock. Our watches had been taken away from us; no doubt, a prisoner might commit suicide by sticking his watch in his windpipe, or he could bribe a guard with it to bring him cigarette papers, or "dope." Besides, what has a man in jail to do with time? Our warm-hearted and fatherly masters desire their charges to exist so far as practical in a dead, unmeasured monotony, where a minute may seem to prolong itself to the dimensions of an hour; to feel themselves utterly severed from the world they have annoyed or injured. That is the penitentiary ideal; but it has of late become impossible fully to realize it. A prison will always be a prison; but at any rate, light shall be let in on it.
Meanwhile, our cell light went out; and we waited for the dawn.
I lay in the upper bunk. It was a six-foot drop to the cement floor below. The mattress, though irregularly dented and bulged, was upon the whole convex, and not over two feet wide. A vertical fence or bastion, six or eight inches high, along the outer brink of this precipice would have averted the danger of rolling off in the night; but nothing of the sort had been provided. One must remember not to roll, even in the nightmare. Convicts educate the subliminal self to a surprising degree, and do not fall victims to this trap as often as one would expect; but occasionally one of them forgets, and down he comes, sometimes getting bruised only, but generally with a broken bone or so. I do not have nightmares, and I lay prone, gripping the sides of the mattress with my knees, as if it were a bucking broncho. So I journeyed, Mazeppa-wise, through the abysses of that first night, and was not unhorsed.
Light glimmered obscurely through the bars of the cell from the night-burner below. Odd sounds broke out at intervals. Half suppressed coughs, sudden, brief cries, irregular wheezings and gurglings, due to defective plumbing, occasionally a few muttered words; then a man in an upper tier began to moan and groan dismally—a negro with a colic, perhaps. Long, dead silences would be interrupted by inexplicable noises. In the dead vast and middle of the night the prisoner in the cell over mine began to pace up and down his floor, eighteen inches above my head. Four paces one way, four back, over and over interminably. Who was he? What was he thinking about? Something seemed to goad him intolerably; that forging to and fro, like a tormented pendulum with a soul in it, gave a stifling impression, as of one tortured for air and space. How many years must he endure—how many centuries? Was his wife dying, his children abandoned? Up and down he padded; had he committed some ugly crime, for which he longed to atone—but prison is not atonement! Had his conviction been unjust, and was he raging impotently against injustice? Let him not rage too loudly, for there was a guard yonder, indifferent to tortured souls, but licensed to stop noises. A prison is a prison, not a sanitarium for diseased crooks. But if the world could hear those footfalls, and interpret their significance, how long would prisons last? A jail at night is a strange place—eight hundred men packed in together, each terrifyingly alone!
Some of the earlier workers had been roused at six or five o'clock or earlier; but for the majority the six-thirty bell was the reveille. It screeched violently and was silent. The watching devils or the guardian angels of the night vanished, and up got the eight hundred members of the Gentlemen's Country Club, to live as best they might through one day more; coughing, hawking, spitting, murmuring—but all with a sense of repression in it, the life-sapping drug of fear in its origin, but long since become a mechanical habit with most of them. Eight hundred criminals, herded beneath one roof to be cured of their crimes by indifferent or threatening and hostile task-masters and irresponsible discipline-mongers, and by association with one another—a régimen of hell to extirpate deviltry! The twentieth century solution of the problem of evil, unaltered in principle after thousands of years!
Civilization has progressed wonderfully, but always with this death-house on its back. And the death-house gets bigger and more populous every year. Reformers, exhorters, Christian Endeavorers, humanitarians, Salvation Armies, social reformers, penologists, scientific experimentalists with surgical apparatus, together with parole laws, indeterminate sentences, commutations, pardons, not to speak of a good warden here and there and a kind guard—all toiling and tinkering to make prisons better, to sweep them, to air them, to instil religion and education, to supply work and exercise and to pay wages—and all the while the tide of criminals gets larger and the accommodations for them less adequate. What can be the matter? Are we to end by discovering that everybody is a criminal, and ripe for jail? or shall we be driven to the realization that the fundamental idea of imprisonment for crime is itself the most monstrous of crimes—and try something else? What else is there to be tried? Are we to leave criminals to their liberty among the community?
There will be time enough to discuss these riddles. It is time now to get into your prison suit, with its "U.S.P." on the back of the coat, and your number; its "U.S.P." on the back of the shirt, with your number; its "U.S.P." on the front of your trousers-legs, and your number; your canvas shoes and your vizored cap. But beware of putting on the cap within prison walls, lest the guard report you to the captain, the captain to the deputy, the deputy, if necessary, to the warden, and ye be cast into the inner darkness. There shall there be thin slices of bread, and water, and gnashing of teeth.
With a guard acting as cowboy, shepherd dog, or convict compeller, we shuffled in a continuous line down the iron stairways and across the hall into the dining room, a cement-floored barred-window desert sown with tables in rows, seating eight men each; guards with clubs standing at coigns of vantage or pacing up and down the aisles, and in one window, commanding the whole room, a guard with a loaded rifle, licensed to shoot down any misbehaver. At no time and in no part of this model jail are you out of range of a loaded rifle, in the hands of men quick and skilful in their use. They are the sauce for meals and the encouragement to labor. But casualties seldom happen; when they do, they are hushed up, and the body of the man is buried next day in the prison graveyard.
I will postpone to a future chapter the subject of the dining room and what is done there. As we filed out, I noticed "MERRY CHRISTMAS," and "HAPPY NEW YEAR" emblazoned in green above the door. It was to remind us, perhaps, of what we lost by being criminals. As we debouched into the inner hall, separated from the corridor leading to the warden's office, and to freedom, by a steel-barred gate, we saw a guard seated in a chair with a rifle across his knees. Rats in a steel trap might have mutinied with as much hope of success as we at that juncture; but the guard had to be used for something, and convicts must not be allowed to forget that they are in prison. At all events we forbore to mutiny, and were rounded into our cells and locked up for half an hour, during which we might smoke Golden Grain tobacco, fifty per cent, dirt, and the rest the refuse of the weed, supplied to the prison by contract; or we might read, or comb our hair, or do calisthenics, or invoke the Divine blessing upon the labors of the coming day.
The interval is really provided as a measure of security; many of the prisoners do their work outside the main buildings; but it is deemed unsafe to unlock the outer gates while the whole body of prisoners is on the move. They might make a concerted rush, and get out in the yard, to be shot down in detail by the guards in the towers.
Mr. Sidney Ormund, to be sure, a special writer on theAtlanta Constitution, makes the following statement in an issue of the paper shortly after I had left the jail and recorded my opinion that "Warden Moyer was unfit."—"It is safe to assume," Mr. Ormund affirms, "that if all the prisoners at the Atlanta federal penitentiary were life-termers and each had a voice in the selection of a warden to serve for a like term, William Moyer, the present incumbent—a man who has done more to make prison life bearable than any man in this country—would be selected without a murmur of opposition."
That is a fine, explicit statement of Mr. Ormund's, such as any warden in dire trouble and perplexity might be glad and proud to have a faithful friend make concerning him. It has no strings to it, and is followed up by similar sentiments throughout the article. But why, in that case, are the gates into the yard locked, and the man with the rifle provided? If Warden Moyer renders life at Atlanta prison more bearable than at any other in the country, what conceivable grounds are there that his affectionate inmates should wish to run away from him? That warmhearted and big-brained gentleman would hardly put the Government to the expense of supplying safeguards against a contingency which his own tender and lovable nature renders unthinkable, even if the thirty-four foot wall outside does not. There seems to be a non-sequitur here, which Mr. Ormund, perhaps, may feel inspired to clear up. When he has done that, it will be time to call his attention to a score or more other incongruities which a residence of only six or seven months in this humane institution has been sufficient to disclose.
At the expiration of the half hour, we laid aside our pipes, or our prayer-books, and were ready for the activities of the day. The others were detailed to their regular work; but my friend and I had our final rites of initiation still to undergo. A young official, whose countenance readily if not habitually assumed a sullen and menacing expression, beckoned to us with his club, and we followed him downstairs to an elevator, in which he ascended to the upper floor, while we pursued him upward by way of the staircase. The cap of Mr. Ivy—such was his poetic given name—was worn on the extreme rear projection of his head, and he used his club in place of speech; not that he actually pummeled us with it, but by wavings and pointings he made it indicate his will, and kept us mindful how easily we might afford him a pretext for putting it to its more normal use. Mr. Ivy, as I afterward learned, was a Southerner by birth, as are the majority of the guards in the penitentiary, and may have been, like most of them, a graduate from the Army. In reporting the case of Private George, of the U.S. Army, now a prisoner in stripes in the Leavenworth Penitentiary, it was stated by Mr. Gilson Gardner that "The common soldier in the U.S. Army has no rights. When he enlists, he gives up the guarantees of the Constitution, the protection of jury trial, and even his right to petition for a redress of grievances. He may be unjustly charged, secretly tried and cruelly punished, and he has no remedy."
As regards unjust, cruel and despotic treatment, the status of the U.S. soldier and of a penitentiary convict are on all fours, though of course the former has the advantage of belonging to a service traditionally honorable, of open air service and exercise in all parts of the country or abroad, of reasonable freedom when off duty, and of whatever glory and advancement campaigning against an enemy may bring him. But we may readily perceive that a soldier who has felt the rough edge of discipline and finds his health broken, perhaps, by indiscretions incident to Army life, might say to himself, on receiving his discharge, "I am bred to no trade, I am good for nothing, but I should like to get back at somebody for the humiliations and hardships I have endured. Why not take a job as a prison guard; the pay is only $70 a month, but instead of being the under dog, I shall be on top, licensed to bully and belabor to my heart's content, to insult, humiliate and berate, and to get away with it unscathed!"
For my part, I can imagine no reason more plausible to explain the large number of ex-soldiers among prison guards, and their conduct in that position. With some shining exceptions, they are petty tyrants of the worst type, sulky, sneering, malignant, brutal, and liars and treacherous into the bargain. Their mode of life in a jail, immersed in that sinister and unnatural atmosphere, hating and hated, with no sane or absorbing occupation, encouraged by the jail customs to play the part of spies and false witnesses, ignorant and demoralized,—tends to create evil tendencies and to confirm such as exist. No worse originally than the average of men, they are made baser and more savage by their circumstances. And no man able to hold his own in the free life and competition of the outside world, would stoop to accept a position as guard in a jail.
I know nothing of the private biography of Mr. Ivy, and it is quite possible that he may have possessed endearing traits which he had no opportunity to manifest in our intercourse. It would be foolish and futile for the ends I have in view in this writing to cite or comment on individuals, save as they may illustrate the point under discussion. But I am the less reluctant to animadvert upon this or that employee of the penitentiary, because I feel satisfied that, so far from compromising him with the higher prison authorities, abuse from me would only recommend him to their favor.—Mr. Ivy, such as he was, conducted us to a bench outside a closed door, already partly occupied by three or four half naked convicts, white and black. We gathered from his gestures of head and club that we were to remove our upper garments and our shoes and stockings, and place them on the floor in front of us. It was a cold morning, and the floor was of limestone. We obeyed instructions, and for the next twenty minutes sat there, objects of pardonable curiosity or amusement to our fellow benchers and to passers-by in the hall, and with nothing to keep us warm but the genial influences of the occasion. Finally, each in his turn, we were passed through the door into a sort of office, with clerks and Dr. Weaver, the prison physician, at $1500 a year,—a tall, wooden faced young medical school graduate, who cultivated a skeptical expression and a jeering intonation of speech. He and an assistant put us through a physical examination, and took a series of measurements, all of which were entered by the clerks in ledgers. Our photographs were then taken, and afterward (it was the next day, but may as well be told here) we were further identified by taking the impressions of our finger prints, and by a second photograph without our mustaches—these having been removed in the meantime. We were now convicts full-fledged and published, and our pictures were disseminated to every prison and penitentiary in the country, to be enshrined in the rogues' gallery and studied by all police officials.
This may sound silly, in the case of two men much nearer three score and ten than three score, and untrained to gain a livelihood by crime. Bertillon measurements were not needed to identify us, nor photographs without mustaches. But, in the first place, prison rules apply to the mass, not to individuals; and secondly, it has been resolved by the wisdom of our rulers that a man who reverts to crime after one or more convictions shall be more severely punished than a first offender. Nobody stops to question the logic of this ostensibly prudent provision. But the convict knows that his chances of making an honest livelihood after a conviction are many times less than before. Spies are on his trail at every turn, and if ever he succeed in securing legitimate employment, an officer of the secret service presently informs his employer that he has a jail-bird on his pay-roll. Naturally he is promptly paid off and dismissed, and he may go through the same experience as often as he is foolish enough to try it. But even if he be inactive, he is not safe—far from it. He is known to the police and liable to arrest at any moment as a vagrant, without visible means of support. Nor is this all. Suppose him to be recorded in prison archives as a safe-blower, and that a safe is blown somewhere and the culprits escape. The credit of the police department demands that an arrest be made, if not of the person or persons actually guilty of this particular crime, then of some one who may be plausibly represented as guilty of it. Accordingly, our friend is apprehended and charged with the crime; there is his record, and it is easy to secure "evidence" that he was on the spot at the time, though he may have been, in fact, a hundred or two miles away from it. Detectives are experts at providing this sort of evidence; and it frequently happens that they get the corroboration of the victim himself by assuring him that, if he will confess, the judge will let him off with a light sentence, whereas if he prove "stubborn," it will go hard with him—a matter of ten years or so. Ten years in jail for something you did not do! Six months or a year if you confess! Perjury is wrong no doubt; but, were you who read this placed in that predicament, which horn of the dilemma would you select? If you have never served an actual jail term, you might virtuously hesitate; but it is the world against a mustard seed that you wouldn't hesitate if you had. The crisp of the joke is, however,—and of course it serves you right,—that the judge, after all, gives you the ten years, and that means life, for you will never be long out of jail afterward. As I write this, I have in mind several instances of it among my personal acquaintances at Atlanta.
If then our convict, upon his release, cannot keep himself in any honest employment, and cannot avoid arrest even when he is doing nothing at all, good or bad, it seems plain that he must either hunt out a quiet place where he may starve to death before the officer can arrest him for starving, or commit suicide in some more sudden and active manner, or he must accept the opportunity which is always at hand in "revert to a career of crime," as the saying is. Ex-convicts are often still human enough to be averse from starvation, and even from easier forms of self-destruction; and they yield to the temptation to steal. Like the idiots they are, they may hope to make a big strike and get away with it, and in some remote or foreign place, under another name, live out an unobserved and blameless existence.
Thereupon there is rejoicing in the ranks of the secret service; armed with their bertillons, they swoop upon their quarry and bear him away. "May it please the Court, this man is an incorrigible; not deterred by previous punishment, immediately upon release he plunges again into crime; he should receive the limit!" The Court thinks so too; the limit is imposed, and the malefactor is led out to the living death which will end with death in reality. And now will some righteous and competent person arise and proclaim that this man's yielding to his first temptation to crime did NOT involve greater moral turpitude than did his yielding to the second temptation or to the third—greater or at least as great—and that therefore the severer sentence is justified? His first misdeed was prompted by hunger, ignorance, drunkenness, or cupidity; the others were the fruit of desperation itself—and how many of you have known what desperation means?
You perceive that this story proceeds by digressions; such value as it may have it will owe mainly to such digressions, so I will not apologize for them. My friend and I, our ordeal completed, were returned to our cells to think it over. The walls and ceiling of the cells are painted a light gray color; it is against the rules, except by special indulgence, to affix pictures or other objects to them. The "coddling of criminals," so widely advertised, does not include permission to give a homelike look to their perennial quarters; it is more conducive to moral reform that they should contemplate painted steel. There was one camp-stool in our cell; later, cells were supplied with two wooden chairs, the seats sloping at such an angle with the backs as rendered sitting a penance; cushions were not provided. I remember seeing similar contrivances in old English cathedrals, relics of a day when monks had to be kept from falling asleep during the religious rites. We might also sit upon the lower bunk, bent forward in such an attitude as would avert bumping our heads against the upper one. Each convict, early in his sojourn, has a religious interview with the Chaplain, who presents him with a copy of the New Testament—not also of the Old; you may remember that the latter records certain regrettable incidents of a sinister and immoral sort, calculated, I presume, to shock the tender budding impulses toward regeneration of prison readers. One may get other books of a secular kind from the library, upon written application; and prisoners of the first grade may subscribe for newspapers that contain no objectionable matter. But only a small proportion of the inmates is addicted to reading, and the opportunities for doing so are limited. And as months and years go by, the desolation and sterility of the place weigh heavier upon the spirit, the mind reduces its radius and grows inert, and stimulants stronger than current fiction are needed to rouse it. Prison, prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate screechings and clangings of whistles and gongs; the endless filings to and fro, in and out; the stealthy insolence of guards, or their treacherous good-fellowship; the abstracted or menacing gaze of the higher officials; the dreariness, aimlessness, and sometimes the severity of the daily labor; the sullen threat of the loaded rifles; the hollow, echoing spaces that shut out hope; the thought of the stifling stench of the dungeons beneath the pavements, hidden from all save the victims, whose very existence is officially denied; the closing of all personal communication with the outer world, except such as commends itself to the whims of the official censors; this morgue of human beings still alive—the impenetrable stupidity, futility and outrage of it all—slowly or not so slowly unbalance the mind and corrupt the nature. Meanwhile, newspapers clamor against the coddling of criminals, and the too indulgent officials smile sadly and protest that they have not the heart to be stern. "Coddling criminals"—the alliteration makes it roll pleasantly off the tongue!
But do I forget the many indulgences given to prisoners—and so profusely celebrated in every mention publicly made of Atlanta Penitentiary? Let me name them once more. Saturday being a non-working day, it used to be the custom to lock the prisoners in their cells from Saturday morning till Monday morning—a custom still followed at many penitentiaries; for how could they be controlled if not split up into working gangs, and thus prevented from conspiring to mutiny? It is one of the obsessions of prison authorities that the prisoners are severally and collectively a sort of wild beast, always straining at the leash, and ready at the least opportunity to break forth in wild and deadly disorder. It is obviously expedient, too, to impress the public with this conviction, and therefore, in part, we have the clubs, rifles, and general parade of watchfulness. As a matter of fact, meanwhile, nothing is more easy to handle than a prisonful of convicts, if the most elementary tact be used; and they are eagerly grateful for the smallest unforced and spontaneous act of kindness.
Until about eighteen months ago, however, severe restrictions were in vogue, and the warden declared that it was his belief and policy that men in prison should be taught by precept and illustration to regard themselves as dead to the world; that they should be held practically incommunicado, no visitors, letters at most but once a month, no conversation between prisoners—silence, solitude, suffocation in this terrible quicksand of jail for months, years, or a lifetime, at the mercy of men to whom mercy is a jest. Such a régimen is still in force at many jails, and when combined with contract labor, nothing in the age-long history of penal imprisonment shows a blacker record. It is advocated as the best way to induce men to reform, and become, after release, useful and industrious members of the community.
A couple of years or so ago, Atlanta was visited by an Attorney-General, who was not prepared for what he saw, nor had the things he should not have seen been removed from sight before he saw them. He demanded some improvements on the spot, and soon after a new deputy warden was appointed—a young man, of kindly disposition, though weak, not inured as yet to the conventional brutalities, and with a backing in Washington which gave him unusual powers. Among good things which he instituted and insisted on were—two and a half hours outdoors on Saturday afternoons, for baseball and general relaxation; conversation at meals; music at dinner by a band made up from convicts; regular bi-weekly letters, with extra letters allowed between times by special request to orderly convicts; concerts or vaudeville performances every month or so in the chapel, by professionals.
Insanity became less frequent after this, and the general health of the men improved. They had something to look forward to, and to look back to, and the freedom of the baseball concession led to no disorders; something like hope and cheerfulness began to appear, like green blades of grass in spring. The warden cleverly seized the opportunity to take credit to himself for all the improvements, and to circulate industriously in the local papers the praise of the model penitentiary. But neither did he fail to take advantage of the new situation to tighten his grasp upon the reins of control. The majority of jails, in addition to the ordinary spy system operated by officials, organize a supplementary one composed of convicts themselves—stool pigeons—certain carefully selected prisoners, who are rewarded for treachery to their fellows by various indulgences and secret liberties. The principle is detestable, and has evil effects. The stool pigeons themselves are of course the basest members of the community, and the other prisoners, soon learning to suspect them, come at last to a miserable distrust of one another—for the comrade apparently most sincere may be at heart only a more artful traitor. In this, they play into the officials' hands, whose theory of government is fear, and who find aid to themselves in the mutual misgivings and hatreds of their charges.
Evidently, the relaxations of the baseball afternoons afforded a capital opportunity to the stool pigeons, and the results were soon apparent. The spies, in order to curry favor with their employers, reported not actual infringements of discipline only, but guessed at what might be, and even invented what was not, often by way of retaliation against personal enemies. I shall return to this subject hereafter; enough, for the present, that it counterbalanced in a degree the physical benefits of the new concessions by engendering mental disquiets and animosities among the entire population, and especially inflaming them against the officials. I am not myself sure, for example, whether or not one or another of my most intimate acquaintances among the prisoners may not all the while have been on the watch to betray me behind my back. For aught I know, it may have been to some such sordid treachery that I owe the refusal of my parole, when it became due. And any respect for constituted prison authorities, upheld by such means, was impossible.
When the coddling of prisoners involves feeding them on poison, they would prefer Spartan severity and fair warning.
Vague noises are at all times audible in jail—stirrings, foot-falls, a subdued voice now and then, the sharp orders of an official—"bawlings out" as they are termed; the clanging of steel gates, the murmur of machinery, the cacophany of musical instruments during practise hours in the chapel; as well as the periodical screeches and ringings of whistles and gongs. The general impression on ear and eye alike is of stealthy repression, a checked unrest—a multifarious creature, uneasy but kept down. The place is perhaps hardly less silent than a cloister; but the peace of the cloister is utterly absent. An atmosphere of animosity and contention pervades all—a constant apprehension of sinister things liable to happen, a breathless struggle, the sullenness of hate, the whispering of treachery. The eyes of officials peer, watch and threaten; those of the convicts are downcast but privily rebellious, or deprecatingly servile.
It is the everlasting pregnancy of war between slave and master, quite different from submission to rightful authority. Whatever the law may say, the rightfulness of prison authority is never admitted by prisoners. Honest authority is tranquil and secure; prison authority goes armed, conscious of its unrighteousness, and there is unremitting nervous stress on both sides. Both sides seem secretly to await a signal to sudden conflict.
At dinner, soon after my arrival, amid the omnipresent murmurous palaver of conversation, there fell an unusual noise. The unusual is always formidable in jail. The noise was nothing in itself, and would have passed unheeded in a hotel dining-room. But over us, crowded together there, spread an instant hush. All knew that men had been stabbed, frenzied affrays had broken out in that room. What was it now? The guard in the window stiffened and poised his rifle. The guards on the floor caught their breath, but assumed a confident air. The men sat staring in the direction of the noise, tense and waiting.
Nothing happened; somebody had dropped a plate and broken it, perhaps. But had some natural leader of the enslaved leaped up and shouted at that juncture, murder would have followed the next moment. Among every hundred convicts there are eight or ten whom misery and wrong have made reckless, whose morbid rebelliousness needs, to break forth, only the shadow of opportunity to kill before being killed, and they accept it. But it was not to be that day, and we relaxed, and grinned, nervously or grimly, and resumed our meal.
Eight hundred men, clad in a shapeless monotony of dingy blue, labeled on the back with their disgrace, stepping lightly or shuffling hastily to and fro, heads bent and eyes downcast, performing various offices, menial, clerical or industrial, with a certain obsequiousness and ostensible zeal that was yet inwardly repulsion and protest—these were men born under the great flag, Americans, my countrymen, and now my companions! What a change, what a degradation from the free American citizen of the streets and boundless expanses! Not men, now, but slaves, condemned to penal servitude; not citizens, but a class apart and alien; felons, criminals, no longer entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but existing in shame and on suffrance, ruined, nameless, parted from friends and families, with present physical pain and mental misery, and with a future of hounding and helplessness, of fear and hiding, of uselessness and aimlessness, of insanity and base death!
Upon what plea are these conditions established? Because the slaves had broken the law—been guilty of crimes. But what crimes? Some had done murder, others committed rape, some had held up a train, another had blown a safe, another was a pickpocket, another a white-slaver, this one had stolen food to avert starvation, that was a confidence man or bank embezzler, here was one snared in some technicality of new finance laws, yonder an ignorant moonshiner from the hills, who had grown corn in his back yard and thought he had a right to make whiskey out of it—he had no other means of livelihood. Breakers of God's laws; of man's; victims of tricks and legal technicalities, of torturing want and of headlong passion, and of sheer court errors or of perjured testimony—here they were, all on the same footing, no discriminations made! To what end? So that they might be punished and repent and go forth better men and useful workers, and so that society might be protected and its integrity vindicated. That is the ostensible reason; no other is alleged.
It sounds like a jest; but the men are here, the thing is done. In some moods I would say to myself, "It's too preposterous—it can't be—it's an hallucination—a bad dream!" But there it was, visible and palpable. Was it protection for society to shut up a man from ability to support those dependent on him, who were thus themselves driven to want and perhaps crime, multiplying the original criminality by three or four or half a dozen? Could any injury which the culprit could do to the community equal the injury thus done by the community to him and his, and indirectly to itself, by such treatment? Or could the technical and perhaps unconscious violator of an obscure and whimsical law be reformed by putting him on an equality with a cold-blooded murderer, or with a man who had grown rich by selling the shame of women? Was the punishment equable which handled with equal severity a brutish negro from the cotton fields, and a man brought up in refinement and gentleness?
But I would go further, and challenge the right of the community to inflict penal imprisonment as we know it at all. Some criminals belong in hospitals, others in insane asylums, for others the thoughtless neglect and selfishness of society is responsible, and they should be succored, not punished; and the remainder should be constrained, under surveillance but not in confinement, to compensate for the harm they did by labor or self-denial aimed directly at that result. But of this hereafter.
Meanwhile, I paid attention to my companions themselves.
In their intercourse with one another there was a singular amenity or pleasantness, and with some who had been prisoners for a long time, a sort of childlikeness. But it was like the childlikeness of a person partly dazed, or recovering from a severe illness or shock. They greeted one another with a covert smile, an unobtrusive movement of head or hand; only when under direct observation of an official would they pass without a sign. The usual words were, "How're you feeling?" or, "How're they comin'?" not in the perfunctory tone of greetings in the outer world, but with an accent of real interest and solicitude. The answer would be, "Good!" "Fine!" with as much heartiness as could be thrown into it—though it might be obvious enough that the truth was far from being that.
There was one dear old fellow who had a variation on these forms; he was an alleged moonshiner, though, as he said, "Yes, I did make some whiskey, but I never sold none!" "How're you feeling, Joe?" I would say; and he would reply, with his pathetic smile, and his high, soft voice, "Pretty well—pretty well, for 'n old man!" with a drawling emphasis on the "old." He was about seventy, with the soft brown hair of youth, but bent and stiff and wrinkled with hard years and rheumatics; and if I questioned him more closely, he would confess that he suffered from "lots o' misery here!"—passing his gnarled old hands over his digestive tract. Indeed, four-fifths of the men had that trouble in more or less acute form, owing to the atrocious food supplied as our regular diet.
Joe's face, though lined with the hardships and privations of a long life, was beautifully formed, aristocratic in its delicate contours; and he possessed, and constantly used, one of the most delectable, contagious and genuine laughs that ever made music in my ears. The men would ransack their humorous resources in conversation with Joe, merely for the sake of making him laugh. He would fix his old eyes squarely on yours, and laugh and laugh with infinite mirth and good nature. Such a sound in such a place was rare and wonderful, and helped one like fresh water in a desert.
The general friendliness among the men—so contrasted with their demeanor toward the officials—was due to the identity of their common interests; they were in the same boat, facing the same perils and disasters, united in the same aims and hopes, and leagued against the same oppressors. They lived in the constant dread of some calamity; and if I met the same man three or four times in the same day, he would never fail to make the same enquiry—"How're you feeling?" recognizing that I might have received some ugly blow in the interval. There was a spontaneous courtesy and a charitableness in it that touched the heart.
The same sentiment was manifested at meals; if anybody got hold of anything that seemed to him a little better than usual, he could not rest till he had offered some of it, or all of it, to his neighbors at table. "Here, take this—take it—I got more'n I want!" Or, watching his opportunity, Ned the runner, who had comforted us on our first night in prison, would come to the door of my cell, with his Irish humor and cordiality shining in his eyes. "Say, Mr. Hawthorne, there's a dividend been declared!" and out of some surreptitious receptacle he would produce three or four crumpled cigarette papers—of all contraband articles in the prison the most prized. "No—take 'em—I got no end of 'em!"
A peculiar consideration was manifested by the men toward "the old man"; my hair was white enough, to be sure, but it had been so for nearly twenty years, and I was in much better physical condition than most of them. I accepted their kind offices with gratitude and emotion, and, when I saw that to do otherwise would hurt their feelings, their concrete gifts, too.
But there were many instances of self-sacrifice greater than these; men would go to the hole sooner than betray a comrade; and you are fortunate in being unable to comprehend what that means. If a comrade in his range was sick and unable to come to meals, I have constantly seen a man secrete half of his miserable breakfast or dinner in his pocket, to be carried up to the invalid and smuggled into his cell. It was a matter of course, nobody remarked it. Any mistake or indiscretion committed by a prisoner would be instantly and almost mechanically covered by the man nearest him, though at the risk of punishment—and the punishment for betraying human sympathy in this way is—of course it is!—especially severe; it is conspiracy to cheat the Government.