THE NEW FREEDOM AT AUBURN PRISON
By O. F. Lewis,
General Secretary, Prison Association of New York.
[This article has been reprinted from The Outlook, by special permission of that periodical. The editor of The Delinquent begs to say, that although he himself is the author of this article, he believes the new development of self-government at Auburn, as described in the following article, is of sufficient importance to warrant being called earnestly to the attention of our readers.]
The afternoon of the Fourth of July was drawing to a close in the long building-inclosed yard of Auburn Prison, in the State of New York. Fourteen hundred gray-suited inmates were playing a score of different games. The afternoon’s track events had come to an end. The South Wing, with between four and five hundred prisoners, had won from the North Wing, with some nine hundred prisoners, in the varied contests. A silver cup, given by the president of a prominent mortgage company in New York, was the tangible goal of the exciting battle.
Suddenly the clear bugle notes of the “Retreat” sounded far down the yard, slowly and melodiously. Instantly the boys in gray began to fall into line at their appointed places. There was now silence where a moment before there had been bowling, baseball, running, dancing, piano, band, and the shouts of swarming inmates. Then came the first bars of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” played by the prison inmate band. Off came the caps, and down across the breast. The flag sank slowly, lowered from the tall pole by three inmates. The music ceased, the caps were again donned, and from the extreme end of the yard rose suddenly a cheer:
“Rah! Rah! Rah!
Rah! Rah! Rah!
South Wing! South Wing!
Rah! Rah! Rah!”
Then, preceded by the band and with banners flying, the victorious athletes of the South Wing marched up the center walk between the files of other prisoners, to receive the silver cup from the hands of the donor, Mr. Richard M. Hurd.
I wish I had the power to make the readers of The Outlook sense in full the enormous significance for both present and future of this recent Fourth of July in Auburn Prison. You have read in these recent months so often of the greatly increased liberties granted to prisoners that mere games or the unchecked intercourse of prisoners on holidays seems no epoch-making novelty.
But history was made at Auburn Prison on Independence Day. For the fourteen hundred men not only ran off their own sports during the afternoon, but they practically ran themselves, through their appointed “delegates,” chosen from among their own numbers by their own votes. And assuredly no more orderly group could have been found on that Fourth of July anywhere between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
A year ago Auburn Prison was austere indeed. The holidays and the Sundays were grievously dreaded by the inmates—dreaded as they had been for generations, because a Sunday or a holiday meant that the inmates had been locked into their miserable little cells at about five o’clock on the previous day, and that, except for a few brief hours for chapel or for an entertainment on holidays, they were locked in all through the holiday until the next morning, when work recommenced. Thirty-six hours, more or less, in a wretched little cell, hardly large enough to turn around in, with no modern conveniences of toilet or wash-basins—simply a hole in the solid masonry wall of a building ninety-eight years old, built at a time when prison meant physical torture and oblivion, and when prison architecture aided to the maximum that purpose.
Is it any wonder that a prisoner recently said to me, on a Sunday afternoon at Clinton Prison in New York State, where they still lock up their prisoners from Saturday until Monday, with the exceptions noted: “My God! It’s a wonder we don’t all go insane in here!” Is it any wonder that at Auburn Prison, according to the words of one of the leading prisoners, the inmates used to consider themselves supremely lucky if by some means they could get “dope” on Saturday, with which to “put a shot into themselves” on Sunday morning? Then they would lie befuddled and bevisioned during Sunday—the Lord’s Day! “And on Monday morning,” laconically said the prisoner, “we used to have the biggest number of fights in the shops of any day in the week. The effects of the drug were wearing off, you know.”
This summer the difference is enormous and fundamental. For an hour or a little more on each week-day, and for four full hours on Sunday, the prisoners are turned out to recreation according to their bent. And coincidentally with this all-important change in the prison’s policy toward the inmates has come an all-important reduction in the number of prison guards needed to supervise the prisoners at their play. On the morning of the Fourth, for instance, an entertainment was given in the auditorium by a local theatrical company. Practically all the inmates—fourteen hundred—were present. Many of the guards sat in one little corner of the room, in the extreme rear. They had been invited by the Mutual Welfare League, the prisoners’ organization, to attend if they desired!
In the afternoon there were four keepers in all in the yard, so I was informed. They were thoroughly inconspicuous. The “P. K.” (which is short for Principal Keeper) started the afternoon in uniform, but shortly changed to street clothes. “You’ll find him playing ball with the boys later today,” said one inmate to me. All the guarding at the several exits of the yard was done—apart from the few guards—by the “delegates” of the Mutual Welfare League.
The Mutual Welfare League! To many prison officials, long in the service, the name undoubtedly has a very sentimental sound. I frankly confess that several of us in the little party invited by Mr. Thomas Mott Osborne to attend the League’s celebration of the Fourth of July were skeptical. We were afraid it might prove to be amateurish and mushy, even though we knew of the signal value of Mr. Osborne’s self-imposed incarceration at Auburn Prison last fall, as shown by the Nation-wide attention given to his subsequent story of the fearful and unnecessary monotony and desperation of prison life. But, as one of our party said on Sunday morning, after we had sat for several hours with the Executive Committee of the League: “I didn’t exactly come to scoff and remain to pray; but I did come with doubt, and I go away converted.”
What is it, then, about this new freedom at Auburn Prison that has not only converted a cautious, conservative president of a board of reformatory managers in another State, but has led him within a week from his experience at Auburn to urge successfully the introduction of a similar league in his own institution? Two facts, principally, I think. In the first place, the Mutual Welfare League plan works. Secondly, there is a convincing air of sincerity, and even devotion, about it all.
May I repeat what seems to me the all-important fact about this development at Auburn? The prisoners, in their hours of recreation, in their attendance at chapel, in their attendance at Sunday afternoon concerts or entertainments, run themselves in large measure. They have not only given their promise to be good, but they have chosen their own inmate officers to see that they keep their promise. There is all the difference in the world between being run by a group of prison guards, even under the best of benevolent prison despotisms, and being run by prisoner guards of one’s own election.
If, then, the most sacred prerogative of the traditional prison official can thus be usurped by the prisoners themselves, and if, in their own expressive language, they can “get away with it,” in the sense of securing better order, more work in the shops, a marked reduction in the number of offences committed or reported, and a radical betterment in the always limited joy of life in a penal institution, what is the inference?
The organization and development of the Mutual Welfare League were simple enough. Last fall, when Mr. Osborne, as chairman of a prison reform commission that had been appointed by the Governor, sent himself to prison for a week, aided thereto by a friendly warden, he informed the prisoners at a previous chapel service that he was coming into prison to try to understand the prison life from the standpoint of the prisoner. He asked the inmates to regard him, “Tom Brown,” not as a stool-pigeon, nor as simply a foolish amateur, but as thoroughly in earnest in his desire to better prison conditions by experiencing them, even if only briefly and partially for a week.
That was point Number One in the development of what has happened at Auburn. Those who make light of Mr. Osborne’s brief career in prison may have a certain justification, in so far as the real prison life can be learned only slowly; but, after all, the results of that October week of Mr. Osborne’s, measured by general results both upon himself and upon the prison, have been perhaps the greatest in the history of the century-old prison.
Point Number Two in the development of the new freedom occurred in the basket shop, where Mr. Osborne was given as a teacher and side-partner for the week Jack Murphy, whom Mr. Osborne describes as a very fine and sincere man. From Murphy’s character came unconsciously to Mr. Osborne the suggestion that prisoners could be trusted far more than had been the case at Auburn. “Why couldn’t there be started here,” asked Mr. Osborne, “a kind of mutual improvement or mutual welfare league among the prisoners, whereby, in return for pledges of obedience and loyalty to the prison administration, greater freedom and more privileges might be obtained?”
The third step toward the present modified form of self-government occurred after Mr. Osborne, having emerged from his week’s imprisonment, gave public expression to his indignation at the alleged mediæval methods of treating human beings behind the bars. These published accounts, spread broadcast over the country, are well remembered. He set to work then to establish a league among the prisoners. And from the beginning he sought to have the League evolve its principles and its pledges from among the men themselves, not through him or through officials of the prison.
The organization was simple. Any prisoner could join the League. The motto was: “Do good, make good.” Unquestionably the incentive in the minds of most inmates to join the League was that there might be something in it for them. When similar motives are eliminated from the minds of men who undertake enterprises on the outside of the prison, it will be time to criticise unfavorably such motives inside the walls.
From the League members—and at present nearly every prisoner in Auburn is a member, wearing his little green and white button with “M. W. L.” thereon—a board of delegates, forty-nine in number, was elected by the prisoners themselves. This is Point Number Four. The prisoners did their own choosing of their delegate officers. The officers were not superimposed upon them by the prison officials. And in consequence, if these delegate officers did not act on the level; if they became stool-pigeons, bearing all sorts of tales to the prison officials and currying favor thereby, then the prison administration would not be to blame for the choice of inmate officers. It would be squarely up to the inmates themselves. What was the result? A very simple one. Both the companies of inmates and their officers instinctively aimed to adjust themselves to secure the minimum of trouble, at chapel, in the shops, at recreation. Splendid group psychology, and withal so simple. And incidentally it can be said that the inmates have been able to handle most dexterously not a few “tough guys” who had been giving great trouble to the prison administration.
At this stage the movement became bigger than any one man, even Mr. Osborne. The latter had imprisoned himself, he had suggested the formation of the League; he had organized the League; but now it was up to the inmates to make of the League a success.
The fifth stage in the development of the League came suddenly and through necessity. Early in June an epidemic of scarlatina struck the prison. Ultimately, about a thousand prisoners were infected. Few were in the hospital, but shop work slackened up to a considerable degree. Were the prisoners in consequence to be locked day after day in their cells? Was it longer necessary? The answer came one afternoon when Warden Rattigan took a long chance. He turned all the prisoners belonging to the League out to exercise or play according to their hearts’ content in the big yard, principally under the supervision of the delegates, who until now had been used to move the prisoners to chapel and to entertainments. It was a crucial test. It worked perfectly. Order was maintained, and no efforts to escape were made.
“The boys would tear a fellow to pieces that tried it,” one of the prisoners explained to me. “We’ve pledged ourselves to behave. Besides, do you think we want to lose the privileges we’ve gained?”
By the Fourth of July the daily recreation period, from four o’clock on, had been going for about a month. What have been the results?
“Everything,” answered one of the delegates. “Take my own case. Now I can sleep nights in that small hole in the wall called a cell. I have been here for years, and hardly ever had I had a decent night’s sleep. Now I get tired in the recreation hour. And then, too, we have something to look forward to. It’s a fearful mistake to make prison life so hopeless. You can’t get the best out of a man, in work or anything else, if you don’t give him something to work for. Now, if we behave ourselves and are decent members of the League, we have a decent amount of freedom and privileges. We have competitive games in baseball, bowling, and the like. We feel we amount to something. The boys march now with their heads up. We eat better. The food tastes better. A lot of the sullen resentment and hatred of the prison administration is gone. The work in the shops is better. There’s better discipline.”
“What about dope?” we asked. “They say it’s a curse at Sing Sing.”
“Very little here now,” said several delegates at once. “It isn’t needed now, and it’s frowned upon.” Then up spoke one of the huskiest and best proportioned of the Executive Committee of the League. “I’ll be frank,” he said, emphatically. “I’ve taken pretty nearly every kind of dope that’s known. I took it deliberately. Now I don’t need it, and I’ve cut it out.”
“Let me say something else, too,” said another delegate. “There’s mighty little prison vice here now. You know what I mean. Formerly, when we were all locked up for sixteen hours a day, and hadn’t had any decent exercise, or anything to take our minds off of ourselves and our grievances, all sorts of bad things happened. That’s the curse of the old prison regime. It turned out, among other things, a lot of degenerates. Now—well, we get pretty well tired, and our mind’s taken off of ourselves, and we sleep. There’s a good deal, too, in having that sort of thing put under the ban by the fellows themselves.”
One of us then asked, “How about the growing criticism that prisoners are getting to have too easy a time of it? When we tell the public in general about this Fourth of July celebration, many will say that the prisoners are having more fun and an easier time than the honest taxpayer.”
The delegate, in answering, flared up. “Tell those people to try any prison for a while! What’s a prison for? To torture a man, and send him out hating society, and determined to get even for the years he’s spent as the old-line prison made him spend it? Nobody except the fellow that’s been through it knows what being in prison is. Does the public want us to go insane, get tuberculosis, contract wretched vices, rebel in mutinies, live sixteen hours out of twenty-four in a living tomb, and have day-in and day-out a miserable monotony of existence that dulls our minds and makes us hate the State that munificently pays us a cent and a half a day, and then often takes away the earnings of months in one single fine for some offense that the very manner of existence here almost forces us to commit? Why, what is this hour of recreation, anyway? It’s a health measure, a safety measure, a reformatory measure.
“Do you think fellows would commit crime in order to get into prison to have this little pittance of pleasure? Let me tell you that the very people that talk so about putting the clamps on this giving of soft snaps to prisoners don’t know what that other system did to us. Why, there are a lot of fellows here that had made up their minds to pull off another trick just as soon as they got out. Why shouldn’t they? But now we have something else to work for.”
Much of the above conversation occurred at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the League, to which we were invited. It was essentially a novel experience. Here sat, in the warden’s office, and without the warden or any prison official present, a round dozen of convicts, gray-suited and thoroughly in earnest. They discussed prison conditions and prison problems with all the freedom of a board of managers, and with far greater knowledge of actual conditions. Prisoners know more about a prison than does the warden, the warden than does the superintendent of prisons, the superintendent of prisons than do the inspectors, and the inspectors than does the public. Therefore, if the best efforts and the best loyalty of the prisoners can be harnessed up to a reformatory programme of the square deal for both sides, the possibilities of the future loom far larger than have reformatory possibilities in the past.
So Auburn Prison is pointing the way, by an almost revolutionary experiment, to large possibilities in inmate self-government in State prisons and reformatories. As I write these lines the newspapers bring a word of a similar Saturday afternoon passed in sports for the first time in the history of Sing Sing. Within the last week the State Reformatory of New Jersey, at Rahway, has adopted tentatively a modified form of inmate self-government. Great Meadow Prison, in New York State, which has been for several years the conspicuous honor prison of the eastern part of the country, marched its six hundred men down to the baseball game on July Fourth, a half-mile from the prison, under inmate overseers.
Self-government, to the limit of its possibilities, is almost a fetish with Mr. Osborne. For many years he was President of the Board of Trustees of the George Junior Republic; there he became convinced that self-government is workable not only for youngsters but for older delinquents.
In the old-line prison the ever-present dread of the traditional warden was an escape. His career was judged largely by his ability to suppress escapes and frequently by his ability to suppress public knowledge of the methods he used to keep order. Today the warden is judged able or poor partly by his ability to develop men out of his prisoners, men who on going out will make good. The entire theory of the old-line prison construction was based on the principle that any prisoner would escape if he could, and use desperate means of so doing. The bars and steel-work that you see everywhere in prisons throughout the country show how ingrained the theory has been. But up at Great Meadow, where the bulk of the prisoners roam unattended by guards at their work during the day, it is almost ridiculous to see them securely caged behind several strata of tool-proof steel at night.
In the last few years demonstrations in scores of prisons and other correctional institutions have shown that, if given the chance, when on honor, the prisoners won’t run away. The old adage of “honor among thieves” has taken on an entirely new meaning. It is now “honor among thieves toward the State that trusts them.”
The power of discipline in the League is very limited. The only punishment is suspension or elimination from the League. Such action is delegated to the Executive Committee of the League. Actually, this exclusion from the body politic—since almost every prisoner is a member of the League—carries with it two important disadvantages. It stamps the excluded inmates as anti-social, not only to the prison administration, but to the body of prisoners. Secondly, it bars the prisoner from enjoying the freedom privileges that the League enjoys. Therefore the power of suspension, be it for but a few days, has real force. The powers of discipline given to the League by the warden have not been accurately fixed as yet. The warden has told the League that all minor cases of discipline could be punished by them; wisely, I think, the officers of the League have not been desirous of punishing.
So that at present men are turned back to the prison authorities by the League for violation of the League discipline. The theory is that these men will be put back under the old discipline of silence and confinement, because they are no longer members of the League. The main body of the prisoners have then no official interest in them, so that the suspension involves practically a return to the old prison routine.
Recently a new Board of Delegates has been elected, and one of their first acts was to adopt a probation system instead of the definite sentence, in the cases of offenders against the League. A committee of parole has been established, which shall visit the suspended men at least once a week, and as soon as the committee thinks that the state of mind of the suspended men warrants the action the Parole Committee recommends to the Executive Committee the restoration of the men to the full privileges of the League.
“A big test is coming,” said one delegate, “when the members of the League go out. It will be up to them to justify by their conduct after prison the principles they accepted here and the privileges they received.” And the story was told us of one young man who was the first of the delegates to receive his release from prison. He is said to have made a hard fight to stay straight, mainly because he didn’t want to “put the League in bad” by having one of its officers go crooked.
And here opens up still another far-reaching possibility. Why should not the members of the League, once released from prison, form committees in the various cities and communities of the State for the purpose of helping the still later ones who come out of Auburn to make good? Heretofore the best that we of the Prison Association of New York have achieved has been to employ big-hearted and sympathetic parole officers—real friends of the released inmates. And we have scored good success. But it has been always a case of supervision and encouragement by the officer.
And so this was the proposition which we members of the Board of Managers of the Prison Association made to the Executive Committee of the League: “Will you co-operate with us in helping released prisoners from Auburn make their parole satisfactorily? Will you have small groups of ex-League members ready in various parts of the State to work with our county committees to the one end of tiding and helping the discharged and released prisoner over the hard months that immediately follow his release?”
With enthusiasm the suggestion has been accepted. One delegate spoke up: “I’m going out next month. I don’t know where I’ll get work, but I’m willing to go anywhere the League sends me. I’m willing and eager to give my life to this work, if I’m wanted!”
Such, briefly, is a picture of the Mutual Welfare League. That it is significant in its possibilities no one can doubt. What its outcome will be a year from now it would be hazardous to forecast. It may be but a burst ahead of the general humanitarian movement that characterizes prison reform throughout the country. It may be that when the altruistic enthusiasm that now holds the more thoughtful members of the League wanes, as wane it will to some extent, there will come a slump, and an arrogance of demand for more privileges that will give to the reactionary among prison administrators a chance to say, “I told you so!”
But I much doubt it. The greater danger will come from possible stupidity of prison administration, a change perhaps of authority at the prison, and a consequent lack of sympathy with the purpose of the League.
One thing seems sure. Prisons and reformatories will not go back to the old-line repressive and often brutal treatment. The transition to what will ultimately become the new treatment of delinquents is being attended by various experiments, often startling and sometimes amazing. We are not a Nation that thinks for a long time before acting in prison reform. Our successes have come so far largely from experimenting, retaining the successes and scrapping the failures. How much of the honor system, the back-to-the-land movement, the road-work movement, and the increasing classification of prisoners will be scrapped, it is much too early as yet to say.
The final test will probably be along two lines. We shall determine how the “new freedom” works within prison walls, applying the acid tests of health, increased efficiency in labor, reformative value, education, and general training for a decent life in society. We shall also have to show, if we are friends of the “new freedom,” that such treatment within the prison produces a larger number of permanent reformations after prison, a higher percentage of those who make good.
In short, the ultimate test is going to be not the increased possibility afforded the prisoner of enduring his prison term, nor yet the increased ease of administration of correctional institutions, but fairly and squarely as to whether society, from which all these prisoners come, and which has been the sufferer by them, is to be permanently better protected from their further depredations by giving them what today seems to be a square deal within the prisons, and a decent chance to make good after they come out.