CHAPTER XXIV
I hadmoney enough to last some little time, long enough to get my strength back, perhaps. I paid the landlady a month’s rent and told her I was a sick man and would be in my room all the time and not to disturb me.
In this way I hoped to account for never stirring out of doors, which I did not dare do. I certainly was a sick man, and looked it.
This landlady was very good-hearted, and, sympathizing with my illness, she did not leave me alone two hours in succession. She sent a Chinese boy every hour or two to see how I felt, and in the morning she would send in coffee and toast and come in herself to inquire how I was.
After the boy had made the bed in the morning, she must come in to see if he had turned the mattress and shaken up the pillows for me. She was so busy helping me out that she nearly landed me back in jail.
I came back to my room from the bathroom one morning, and there she stood staring at a gun I had been keeping under the mattress. She had insisted on turning the mattress herself and found it. She was standing there staring at it like she would at a rattlesnake, and asked me what I was doing with that “awful thing.”
I sat down and said to her: “Mrs. Alexander, I bought that pistol to kill myself with in case I get physically disabled. You see, I’m a sick man. I told you I was a sick man, and I have a suspicion I am a consumptive. I don’t want to go to doctors and I’m going to let this thing run its course, but if I find I am down and out and done for I’m going to shoot myself. That’s what I have it for.”
She was all upset with sympathy. She said: “You’re no consumptive. You are only run down. You’ll be all right in a few months, with good food and care. Let me keep this thing. I’ll take it and keep it. Don’t get downhearted, you’ll be all right.”
Of course I had to let her take it. That night I went out and bought another one. I also bought a bag and a few clothes, and I was careful after that to lock the new pistol up in the bag when she was around.
So I settled down to fight it out with my opium habit, at the same time keeping on the watch all the time for the police.
I had been using opium steadily for ten years. For ten years I had never gone to sleep without taking it. I owed to it all the sleep, all the rest and forgetfulness and contentment I had had in that time.
Now I made up my mind to quit. Right away I found I had to pay back every second of sleep, everyquiet, restful moment I had got from the opium in the whole ten years.
I was taking about five grains a day. I began to taper down slowly. I cut off a grain a week at the start, then for a couple of months I took only three grains a day.
It would have been a good deal harder to quit if I hadn’t had that fear of the jail always before me. That took my mind off the opium. The worst hold the drug gets on a man is the mental hold. It becomes a mental habit. A man has to keep a hard grip on his mind; he has to want to quit, first, and keep wanting to quit all the time, then he can do it.
I could stick the daytime out. I found something to do; I read, or ate, or walked around the room. I did not dare go out in the daytime, for fear I would be recognized by the police or by some stool pigeon. This worry was always on my mind, and in a way it helped, because while I was thinking of that I was not thinking about the opium.
It was the small, still hours of the night that got me. I had to get some sleep and strength for the next day. Every particle of opium I cut off my daily dose cut off just that much sleep. For years in the jail I had slept away all the time I could; I had slept ten or twelve or fourteen hours a day. Now I had to pay back all that sleep I had stolen from myself.
I put in twenty-three hours a day waiting for the twenty-fourth, when I could take my little jolt of hop. Every day when the hour arrived I was tempted to take one more good jolt, so that I could have a decent night’s sleep and forget everything for a few hours.
But the last words of my friend who had rescuedme were always in my ears. “Lay away from that stuff. It will make a bum of you.”
Hundreds of times it was just that memory that tipped the balance, and I would take only what I had allowed myself, no more. I believe now I quit because he said that to me. I felt that if I could not do that much, and it was the only thing he ever asked me to do, I wasn’t worthy of the friendship of such a man as he had shown himself to be.
Then I would go to bed and try to sleep. After several hours I would get up and go out for a walk, to get some exercise. I would walk as fast as I could for three or four hours in the darkness, always keeping watch for a policeman or for any one who knew me.
I would walk until I was tired out, because I was still pretty weak, and it did not take much to tire me. Then I would hope to sleep a little.
But in the long, still hours my nerves demanded opium. And I resisted and fought it out till my strength got down to the vanishing point.
Then I would get up and drench myself with whisky and wash it down with absinth. My room looked like a cross between a drug store and a distillery. I had bottles of tonics, invalid’s port wine, whisky and absinth.
I would take a drink out of every bottle in the room and fall down on the bed or on the floor in a stupor and sleep for a few hours.
In this manner I stuck it out. I took a small portion of hop each evening, reducing it daily according to the system I planned. Finally I got to the stage where I could skip one day’s portion and get two hours’ natural sleep.
Then I tried skipping two days and got by with it, but on the third day I was tied in a knot with cramps and aches and nothing but hop would put me on my feet.
All this time Mrs. Alexander, my kindly landlady, was urging me to go out in the sunshine during the day. She said it would do me good to get more air, and she could see no reason why I wouldn’t do it.
So at last I went out one afternoon.
I went to a little park where it was quiet and lay on the grass. It was so good to touch and smell the grass again that I couldn’t get enough of it. It seemed to me that grass was the most beautiful thing in the world. I felt as though I could eat it.
I lay there in the sunshine and ran my hands through it and pulled a blade or two and chewed it. I had not been in the sunshine nor been able to touch anything green and growing for over six years. I wouldn’t have spoiled that lawn, put a cigarette stub or an orange peel on it for anything in the world.
After that I went out three or four afternoons a week and lay on that grass in the park. I could feel that I was getting stronger, I could eat with good appetite, and every night I decreased the opium according to my schedule. I finally got the dose down to an eighth of a grain.
Even that amount, even the smallest particle that I could get on the end of a toothpick, would make the difference between sleeping all night or not.
I don’t believe in those radical cures. It stands to reason you can’t cure in three days a habit that it took you five or ten years to build up. I think any mancan cure himself. He must first be cured mentally, he mustwantto be cured. If he doesn’t want to be cured, all the treatments in the world aren’t going to do it. You can lock men in prisons and deprive them of hop, and they will come right back and get it again because they don’t want to be cured. But the man whowantsto quit can.
It took me six months to get the dose down to nothing. Even then for months more the thing might jump out at me at any minute, like a wild beast and tear me to pieces. I would go half crazy for the time, I would be mad to get hold of some hop. But that would last only a few hours, and every time I got through it safe I knew it would be easier next time.
Every minute I was out of the house in the daytime I kept watching for people who knew me. A good many men had been through Ingleside jail in the six years I was there and Vancouver was full of them. None of them ever saw me, because I saw them first. I tried to see every man in the block ahead of me the minute I stepped on the curb.
Cured of the habit now, I went back “on the road,” determined to stay in Canada, keep away from big cities and wise coppers, and try to do the twenty-five-year sentence outside instead of at Folsom. I traveled east over the Canadian Pacific Railway to the booming province of Alberta. One morning after an all-night ride, I crawled out of a box car in the town of Strathcona, tired, hungry, and dirty. I was not in distress for money, and looked around for a quiet place where I could lay off for a week and rest up. After a breakfast, a bath, and a shave, I walked around a while and located a quiet, respectable-looking placewith a “board and rooms” sign. It looked to be a half-private, out-of-the-way place, so I went in.
A Chinese boy was dusting up in the lounging room, and I asked him for the “boss man.” He disappeared out in the hall. In a few minutes I heard a heavy step and turned around to face Salt Chunk Mary, the friend of the bums and yeggs at Pocatello. More than fifteen years had passed since she disappeared, yet I knew her instantly. The same, level “right now” look from her cold blue eyes; the same severe parting of her brick-red hair; the same careful, clean, starched house dress, and the same few short, sharp, meaningful words told me it was she who had broken open the town jail and set me free when no man would turn a hand.
“Oh, Mary!” I cried, and my hand went out to her. I said something about Pocatello and the night I saw her last, and about Foot-’n’-a-half George, long dead, but she stopped me cold. Looking me straight in the eye, she said in a tone of finality that left no chance of an answer:
“You are mistaken; you don’t know me. My name’s not Mary, and I was never in Pocatello in my life.”
When Mary said no she meant it. I went out and away, envying that courageous woman who had the strength to leave Pocatello and her life there, and bury herself in a far corner of the North.
After much thought I decided that Salt Chunk Mary had washed her hands of the old life and old associates and was trying to spend her remaining days in peace. I saw her no more, and went my solitary way, pistoling people away from their money—the highwayman’s way.
A distinguished chief of police in one of our big cities gave this advice to the public:
“If a holdup man stops you, grab him and yell at the top of your voice.”
That was the advice of a policeman; more, the advice of a policeman who was never stuck up. I know something about the stick-up game. I’ve been stuck up myself. This is the first time I’ve told about it, and it will be the last. I’m not advising any reader what to do in case of a stick-up. I’m only telling what I did.
As I was walking home one mild midnight up Haight Street, a young man came down the street toward me. He was whistling a little tune, his hat was on the back of his head, and he walked briskly, swinging his arms.
“Ah, ha,” thinks I, “here’s a young fellow that’s just left his girl at her door. She gave him a kiss, and he’s happy. He’s hurrying home now, and—” my reflections ended. About ten feet away from me his arms swung together and his right hand pulled a long gun out of his left sleeve.
“The real thing,” I said to myself, stopping.
“Put up your hands.”
I did.
“Turn your face to that fence.”
I did.
He stepped up behind me and put something hard against my spine.
“All right, brother,” I said meekly. “It’s all yours. It’s in my left-hand pants pocket.”
He found it.
“I’ve got a watch, brother, that’s worth a lot tome; I wish you’d let me keep it. It would bring you four dollars, but it might bring you forty years.”
“Huh!” he grunted. He felt for the watch, took it out of its pocket, “hefted” it in his hand, and put it back. “You keep your face to that fence till I get out of the block or I’ll ‘spray’ you with this automatic.”
I did.
That’s the way I deal with a stick-up man.
There is no way I know of to protect yourself from the starving moron who pounces on you out of a dark doorway, knocks you on the head with a “blunt instrument,” and goes through your pockets after you are on the sidewalk. That kind of “work” is unprofessional, unnatural, and disgusting, and does not concern me. The psychiatrist might explain and classify it; I cannot.
After circulating around with my pistol for a few months I was arrested and, almost by chance, identified as a fugitive from California justice. In short order I was brought back to San Francisco.
The first man that came to see me in the city prison was Sam Newburgh, the attorney who had my case when I escaped from the jail.
Two days before I had escaped, the last fifty-dollar payment on his fee had come due. At that time I was almost sure I would escape and get away without any trouble, and I was tempted to defer this payment and put him off until later, because I saw I would have use for the fifty dollars myself.
But when he came out to the jail I paid it to him.
He remembered this, and when I was brought back he was the first man there to see me. To my surpriseand delight, he told me that my legal status was just about the same as when I left. My appeal was still pending.
I had some thoughts that Mr. Older might feel I had abused his confidence in leaving the jail, when he was trying to do something for me. But he knew at the time that I was turned down by every one and didn’t have a chance of getting my liberty, so I hoped he would understand.
He came immediately to see me, and I explained this to him. I said I never would have made a move of that kind if there had been a chance; that I had to do it in order to do myself justice. I said I knew I would not live another two years in that jail; they had all admitted they could do nothing for me, and I thought I had a right to do as I did.
He said, “I think you did the only thing. It was the only way out for you. I would probably have done the same thing myself.”
He remarked that I was looking stronger and healthier. I had gained about thirty pounds in weight. Mr. Older could see in a minute that I had quit the opium. He spoke of it at once.
He said he would see if something could be done for me. He thought it might be possible that the district attorney’s office, on account of all the complications of the case, would agree to ask for an amended sentence, a sentence of only a year or two, if I would stop fighting and plead guilty.
I said: “If I had thought such a thing possible, Mr. Older, I’d have paid my way back here and given myself up!”
I had little hope that any such thing would be done.I had never encountered anything like it. The next day Maxwell McNutt of the district attorney’s office came in to talk to me.
He spoke about my escape, and I told him the reasons for it as I had told the others. I explained that I would not have had to do it if my friends had been able to do something for me in the way of a lighter sentence.
He said that so far as the district attorney was concerned, he thought I had served almost enough time. I was astounded when I heard this. In all my experience I had never encountered a district attorney’s office that thought any criminal had served enough time.
This was a revelation to me in the ways of courts and police. It was the first time I ever got any better than the worst of it. I saw myself relieved of that burden of a twenty-five-year sentence. I saw myself coming out in a couple of years with the slate wiped clean.
I realized that Judge Dunne would be taking a chance in giving me a sentence that amounted practically to nothing. He had his place on the bench and his reputation with his fellow judges and the people to consider. If I came out of prison and got into trouble immediately after, I would be double-crossing him.
I saw it was up to me to square myself and go to work when I came out.
After some delay the district attorney and the trial judge agreed to amend the judgment, and a day was set for me to go into court. Mr. Older asked me to make a statement, hoping there might be something inmy experience that would throw some light on the criminal problem that might help people to help criminals.
When I got into court I decided not to make this statement until after I was sentenced, because I didn’t want any one to feel that what I said was said for selfish reasons, and if I said it before I was sentenced it might appear that I was talking for leniency.
I decided I had got all the leniency that was coming to me, and very much more than I ever expected.
The judge sentenced me to one year. That was better than I had hoped for. The district attorney had suggested it probably would not be more than two years, but here the judge had cut even that in two.
As near as I can recall them, my words were as follows:
“I would like to make a statement before it is too late. I feel that this will be my last appearance in any court as a defendant, and I want to make this statement in the hope that there may be something in my experience that will prove valuable to some one, perhaps some one in authority who has to do with the instruction and correction of offenders, particularly of the younger ones.
“I would not make this statement if I ever expected to appear in court again as a defendant. As criminal as it is, I will consider it as nothing if it prove of value to any one, if my failure would cause some young man to hesitate before it is too late, before he finds himself charged with crime.
“My prison experiences began with a sentence of two years and thirty lashes in a Canadian prison. Icould not see that I deserved this flogging, and it seemed when I got it that all the cruelty in the world was visited on me—all the brutality, all the violence. There was a lesson in cruelty I have never forgotten. Fortunately, I had a disposition that hardened with the flogging instead of breaking under it.
“I proved an incorrigible prisoner while there. I broke the rules many, many times in a small way—nothing violent, nothing desperate, but I would talk, laugh, whistle and sing, and that outraged the silence of the system then in vogue.
“I was punished repeatedly on bread and water, the dark cell. The warden was a hard, stern man. His motto was—‘break them first and make them after.’
“Then came the day for the second installment of my flogging and my discharge from prison. I went out with the skin on my back blistered and broken and my mind bent on revenge. I went out of there with a hatred for law and order, society and justice, discipline and restraint, and everything that was orderly and systematic. I had a hatred for courts, jailers, prison keepers, and wardens. I hated policemen, prosecutors, judges and jurors.
“If I had reasoned right, I might have made a better start than I did. But I had no experience to guide me. I planned for revenge and I turned on society to get it, because society furnishes the judges, the jurors, the policemen, the prosecutors. Before I got fairly started on my career of revenge I was back in prison.
“When I went back I learned more brutality andviolence. I knew the bread-and-water punishment, the dark cell, the strait-jacket and the water cure. I thought violent thoughts, I planned violent plans, and I executed those plans as best I could as soon as I got outside. I suppose a man’s actions are the creatures of his thought, and his thoughts are naturally the products of his environment and the conditions under which he is forced to live.
“If you put a boy in prison at the age I was, as prisons were then, he will become a criminal as sure as the day follows the night or the night follows the day. I imagine those conditions were responsible for many criminals of my age or thereabouts, who were considered incorrigible. I won’t say confirmed, because I believe there is no such thing as a confirmed criminal. I have seen many miraculous reformations. One man may be reformed through a woman, a woman’s plea, a mother’s love. Others might be reformed through the assistance and kindness of friends. But still another might be reformed by an act of kindness from some unexpected source. I believe that one who has been brutalized can be turned right by an act of kindness and be regenerated. It looks reasonable.
“When I stood up in this court to be sentenced for twenty-five years, I was a criminal, as I have described. I had learned the lesson of violence in prison, and I believed that I lived in a world of violence, had to use violence, and use it first. I had no more thought of right or wrong than a wolf that prowls the prairie. I hunted because I was hunted myself, and I showed no consideration for anybody or anything because I knew I would receive none.
“I was a habitual criminal. I had formed the criminal habit. Habit is the strongest thing in life, and criminals such as I have described obey the impulse to commit a crime almost subconsciously. So far as the right or wrong is concerned, he gives it no more thought than you would when you walk down the street and open the gate to enter your front door. It is a habit with you.
“The twenty-five-year sentence I received made no impression on me whatever. I expected it, and had expected it for years. It was simply an incident, an obstacle, another delay—a violent one, to be sure; but I had dealt the game of violence, and when forced to play at it I am not the one to complain.
“So I went back to the county jail and my lawyer went back to his law. Then came the fire that destroyed the records of my conviction and sentence, and put me in the perpetual criminal class at the county jail. I became more permanent than the sheriff. I saw them come and go, and after years of comparative peace and quiet and fair treatment in the county jail I began to change my views and think different thoughts, and I looked forward to a different sort of life.
“A few friends rallied around and began to plan ways and means to help me. They investigated, found it impossible, and told me.
“The future looked dark, and I was in despair. The day of my deliverance seemed to be receding instead of advancing. I planned to get my liberty in another way, and I did get it, but I got it under such circumstances as to make it impossible for me to lead the life I had planned.
“It was impossible for me to mix with men in the daytime. I was a fugitive. I was hunted again. I had to seek the back streets on the darkest nights.
“In a few months I found myself back in jail in San Francisco. Then something occurred that surprised me more than I can tell. I was told that there was a possibility of my getting credit for the time that I had served in the county jail, that I might get a sentence I would see the end of, instead of one that would see the end of me, and that it might be possible for me to get out and lead a different kind of life.
“This made a greater impression upon me than the twenty-five-year sentence, this offer of help from such a surprising source. At first I thought I was getting the double-cross, but I investigated and found it was true, and what little doubts I had were completely shattered. I did not admit the possibility of any kindness from judges, district attorneys, prosecutors, or anybody who represents the people.
“I now saw that I was wrong, and that it was up to me to build new rules to regulate my conduct in the future, that I would have to formulate a philosophy that would admit the possibility of kindness from such sources; from people who desired to help me if I would help myself.
“I have promised myself, and I promise the court, that when I finish this sentence I shall look for the best instead of the worst, that I shall look for kindness instead of cruelty, and that I shall look for the good instead of the bad, and when I find them I shall return them with interest.
“I am confident when I promise the court this that I will not fail. I imagine I have enough characterleft as a foundation on which to build a reformed life. If I had no character, no will power, no determination, I would have been broken long ago by the years of imprisonment and punishment; and I would have been useless and harmless and helpless, a force for neither good nor bad.”
Judge Dunne asked me if I had any choice of prisons, and I said I preferred San Quentin because I had already been in every other prison in the state, and I would like to go over there and see what that place was like.
I left the courtroom with that one-year sentence feeling as if I had received a Christmas gift; it was the twenty-fourth of December.
At San Quentin I had a hard time to convince friends that my sentence was cut to one year. The atmosphere there surprised me. There was none of that smoldering hatred of officers; no hopeless, despairing prisoners; no opium and no scheming to get it in. Everybody was looking forward to parole. There was no brutal punishment. A man’s credits were safe. All those changes worked for the best. Prisoners had a chance to shorten their time by good conduct, and their conduct was good.
One of the first “cons” to reach me was my friend, Soldier Johnnie, doing a short sentence.
I hadn’t seen him since leaving the Canadian prison, where I got the dark cell for speaking to him. We were comparing notes for a week. It was from him I learned that the Sanctimonious Kid had escaped from Canon City before finishing his fifteen years, and that he had gone to Australia, where he was hanged for killing a police constable. In turn, I told him ofFoot-’n’-a-half George’s death, and of Mary’s disappearance into the Far North.
Johnnie finished his time first, and went back to the road, where he probably will live out his life and die unwept, unhonored, and unhung.
I put in my sentence without any trouble and came out in ten months. That was thirteen years ago.
On the boat for San Francisco I saw the bar. At once I felt that I needed a jolt of booze. I got it.
Then I saw the lunch counter. I at once felt the need of a cup of real coffee. I got that. After that, I sat down on a bench and thought it over.
Here I was, physically fit and serviceably sound, walking up to that bar and buying a drink of whisky I didn’t need just because I happened to see the bar, and then a cup of coffee just because I saw the coffee urn.
I decided I would have to beware of the power of suggestion. The bar had suggested whisky and the lunch counter coffee, and I fell for them both.
Anyway, I made up my mind that I would close my eyes when I got to the ferry building for fear I might see a sack of registered mail lying around loose. It would suggest days of ease and nights of pleasure, and I might fall for that.
I got through the ferry building and walked up Market Street, as they all do. In time I found myself in Mr. Older’s anteroom. There were several men waiting to see him. I looked them over and said to myself, “There’s preachers, politicians, and pickpockets in that bunch. I’ll be lucky if I don’t have to wait an hour.”
The young lady took my name and I was the firstone in. Mr. Older was there with a suggestion, too; luncheon at the Palace Hotel.
I’m not strong for eating in swell places, but I do like quick contrasts. I had my breakfast in San Quentin, so why not lunch at the Palace?
We had a good meal. While we were eating, Mr. Older suggested that I come down to his ranch for a few days, till I got my bearings again in the outside world and was ready to begin work.
I was glad to do this. It helped get me over the hardest part of the life of the ex-prisoner who intends to go square; the first few weeks out of prison. I went down that night for a week and stayed six months.
I would have been content to stay there always. I was able to do enough on the ranch to pay for my board and shelter, and I liked it. But it was necessary after a while for me to come back to San Francisco and go to work. My room was wanted on the ranch by other men who needed it worse than I did.
Eddie Graney needs no introduction here. I only hope this story has as many readers as he has friends. While he is known and respected for his square decisions as a referee of big fights, I think his fame rests chiefly on the fact that while he has the finest billiard rooms west of—oh, well, west of anywhere—he has not yet learned how to play billiards.
Graney gave me my first job—cashier in his pool room—handling his money. After a few months a better job appeared. With a letter of introduction I saw Mr. B. F. Schlesinger of the Emporium.
“Where did you work last?” he asked.
“At Eddie Graney’s.”
“And before that?”
“At San Quentin, in the jute mill.”
He knew all about me and put me to work as salesman in the book department. I knew something about books—I had been librarian at the county jail. I was honest—hadn’t stolen any of Graney’s money. I felt perfectly at ease among the books, and made good. Book selling grew dull later, and I was slated for a transfer to another department. At the manager’s office I was told that the only vacancy was on the ribbon counter. I looked in a mirror on the wall and saw a face in it that didn’t seem to belong behind the ribbon counter.
I said: “Mr. Schlesinger, this is a great life if you know when to weaken. I think this is where I’ll weaken.”
At lunch time I saw Mr. Older and told him about it. Fortunately, there was a vacancy at theBulletinin the circulation department just then and I got the job. I left the Emporium with the best wishes and good will of everybody I met there. When Mr. Older became editor ofThe Callhe found a place there for me as librarian; I still have that job.
In thirteen years I have learned to work—some day I may learn to like it. Yet it is so easy and simple and safe and secure that I now wonder how any man coming out of prison could think of doing anything else. The pity of it is that so many ex-prisoners who do think of trying to work can’t get it. I take no credit whatever for going to work. I could have done that years before.
I quit stealing and learned working because I was in a hole where I could not do otherwise. I was in hock to friends who saved me from a heavy sentence,provided me with work, and expected only that I stay out of jail. That’s not asking much of a man—to keep out of jail. The judge who cut my sentence took a greater chance than I ever did. If I had gone back “sticking up” people, the judge’s critics could have said that he, and he alone, made it possible—and that’s precisely why I quit.
If I had stolen Graney’s, the Emporium’s, or theBulletin’smoney, they could have said that Older made it possible, and had I been tempted to steal that thought would have stopped me. I cannot say I quit stealing because I knew it was wrong. I quit because there was no other way for me to discharge the obligations I had accepted. Whatever measure of reformation I have won is directly due to Fremont Older and Judge Dunne of the Superior Court. They took a chance on me, a long chance, and it will be a long time before they regret it. Fremont Older has been a rock in a weary land to me, and Judge Dunne has been a shelter in the time of storm.
It has been easy for me. The noble woman who found me rotting in jail physically and mentally is still my friend, I am proud to say. The kindly Christian couple who gave me a home with them in San Francisco and treated me as a son are still my friends. Friends everywhere, to help and advise and encourage. Even friends from the road and the jungles drop into my office and shake hands and say: “More power to you, old-timer. You’re sure makin’ good. I’m goin’ to try it myself some day.”
My feuds with the police are dead and buried. No copper has bothered me or obstructed me. Many of them have offered in good faith to help me. And soI say it has been easy for me to go on the square. I speak only of my own experience; others may not have been so fortunate in finding friends.
I wish I could sift out a few grains of wisdom from my life that would help people to help prisoners, and help prisoners to help themselves, but I can’t find them. I don’t know. All I can say with certainty is that kindness begets kindness, and cruelty begets cruelty. You can make your choice and reap as you sow.
I am not worrying about prisons. If they improve as much in the coming twenty years as they have in the last twenty, they will have to be called something else. While the number of convicts is increasing, the percentage of second and third timers, habitual criminals, is decreasing. That’s hopeful, and it’s because of more humane treatment, more liberal parole laws, and the extension of road building and other work, that fits a prisoner for the outside, gives him the work habit.
Highway building by convicts is the sanest and most constructive step I have seen. Instead of appropriating money to build a third prison in California, the same money might be expended in road-building materials, and one of our two prisons emptied into the road camps, where the prisoner could be self-supporting and not a dead weight on the taxpayer while in prison, and worse after he gets out.
A certain number of prisoners, say ten per cent, always have and always will abuse probation and parole. The ninety per cent of prisoners who respect probation and parole more than justify the laws under which they are released. Probation to boys and young men should be extended. Paroles to first-time convictsshould be more liberal. Paroles to second-timers might well be closely scrutinized, and for third-timers—if the Prison Board “throws the key away” on them they will die off and settle their own problem. I am in the third or fourth-timer class myself, and if I got back into prison and the board sentenced me to life with the privilege of applying for parole after fifteen years, I wouldn’t have to look very far for the person responsible for it.
As I see it, the criminals of this generation should cause no concern. They will soon be out of the way. The problem wouldn’t be solved by shooting them all at sunrise, or by releasing them all at sunrise. Something might be done for the generation that is coming up. It seems to me there’s the place to start—but what to do, I don’t know.
I am sure of but one thing—I failed as a thief, and at that I am luckier than most of them. I quit with my health and liberty. What price larceny, burglary, and robbery? Half my thirty years in the underworld was spent in prison. Say I handled $50,000 in the fifteen years I was outside; that’s about nine dollars a day. How much of that went to lawyers, fixers, bondsmen, and other places? Then count in the years in prison—suffering, hardship, privation. This was years ago when there was much less police protection.
“What chance have you now?” I would ask any young man, “with shotgun squads, strong-arm squads, and crime crushers cruising the highways and byways; with the deadly fingerprinting, central identification bureau, and telephotȯing of pictures; and soon every police station broadcasting ahead of you your description and record? Then consider the accidents andsnitches—what chance have you? Figure it out yourself. I can’t.”
Had I spent that thirty years at any useful occupation and worked as hard at it and thought and planned and brought such ingenuity and concentration to bear on it, I would be independent to-day. I would have a home, a family perhaps, and a respected position in my community. I have none of those, but I have a job, I have two suits of clothes, I have two furnished rooms in a flat. I have as many friends as I can be loyal to. I am fifty years old, and so healthy that when I hear my friends holding forth about their ailments I feel ashamed of myself. I would not turn time backward and be young again, neither do I wish to reach the century mark and possible senility.
I have no money, no wife, no auto. I have no dog. I have neither a radio set nor a rubber plant—I have no troubles.
I borrow money from my friends in a pinch, ride in their machines, listen to their radios, make friends with their dogs, admire their flowers, and praise their wives’ cooking.
If I could wish for anything else it would be a little more moderation, a little more tolerance, and a little more of the trustful innocence of that boy who learned his prayers at the knee of the gentle, kindly old priest in the Sisters’ Convent School.