The Delinquent, Vol. IV, No. 8, August, 1914

Entered as second-class mail matter at New York.
By Hastings H Hart. Director Child Caring Work, Russell Sage Foundation.
In his book, “Within Prison Walls,” “Tom Brown,” (Hon. Thomas Mott Osborne) has given a remarkable study of the mind of the convict. This book should be read in connection with Donald Lowrie’s book, “My Life In Prison,” which portrays the prisoner from the vantage point of actual and prolonged experience but without the advantage of Mr. Osborne’s wider knowledge of human life and human philosophy.
Mr. Osborne’s study is an astonishing achievement for a single week. To break the crust of officialism and without legal authority to command the co-operation of unwilling prison officials; to overcome the suspicions and the reticence of the prisoners, to secure their general co-operation in his plan, and to gain admission to the inner circles of convict life; and then to really put himself in the place of a prisoner and to realize how he feels, how he thinks and to catch his viewpoint—to do all this in a week was an astonishing piece of work.
Of course, his work was fragmentary and incomplete, but the writer has known prison officers who have associated with prisoners for years without obtaining such a knowledge of their mental processes as Mr. Osborne gained in a week.
It is much to be regretted that Mr. Julian Hawthorne did not seize the opportunity of his experience at Atlanta and apply his literary genius to record and analyze the effects of prison life upon himself and his associates. He might have written a classic equal to De Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium Eater,” but he choose instead to retell the gossip and scandals of the State prisons, true and false, as given him by second and third-term convicts.
Mr. Osborne, having been appointed by Governor Sulzer as chairman of a commission to recommend improvements in the prison system of the State of New York, resolved to become a voluntary prisoner at Auburn and to put himself, as nearly as possible, in the place of the actual convict. He frankly declared his purpose in the prison chapel, asking the co-operation of the officers and prisoners to make his experience as realistic as possible; and they took him at his word.