MILITARY PRISONERS AND PRISONS.
By OLIVER W. LONGAN,
Adjutant General’s Office, War Department.
Lest the term “military prisoner” should mislead some reader whose recollection of the events of the late civil war, or of the stories concerning the treatment of prisoners brings to mind the captured soldier and his hardships and sufferings, it should be stated that a “prisoner of war” and a “military prisoner” sustain entirely different relations to the authority they serve. The former is a prisoner because of capture and detention by an enemy. The latter is a prisoner undergoing discipline or punishment because of some misdemeanor or crime committed against military law or regulations. In the greatest number of cases the offense is simply an absence without leave, now called desertion, which is the act of one who wilfully absents himself from his proper command with the intention not to return to it again. A military prisoner may be called a convict, and he may be a criminal, but either name is inappropriate in its ordinary sense. It is true the prisoner has been convicted of an offense against a law, but if a single example may be used to illustrate the majority, his offense has not been prompted by a vicious disposition or an evil nature. His guilt is not such as necessarily indicates degraded impulses or base endowments, hence it is manifest that a well defined line of separation may easily be drawn between the military prisoner and the one who may properly be called a criminal or a convict. The reason is also manifest why the institution where he is to be detained for punishment should be one especially set apart for his class.
It has been stated that the majority of military prisoners have been guilty of the one crime of desertion. The fact is the number will reach eighty-five or ninety out of every hundred. It is proper in this connection to refer to some of the causes or supposed causes for the commission of so serious a crime which, if it could be entirely prevented, would reduce the number of “military prisoners” to an exceedingly small percentage of those who now suffer penalty for a crime committed without criminal intent.
The number of men who applied during the last year for enlistment in the military service of United States was nearly thirty thousand. Of the number applying only about one-third were found qualified. The other two-thirds were rejected on account of disqualifications either legal, moral, social, mental, or physical. About one-twelfth of those rejected were boys under the age of twenty-one years. About the same proportion were foreigners who had not sufficient knowledge of the English language to enable them to learn their duties. Now, if the standard for acceptance be ever so high it can not reach absolute perfection, for there are disabilities or disqualifications which it is impossible to discover, particularly under the effort which is apt to be made by the applicant to conceal his defects, until time and conduct develop them. Manifest defects there are in all who are rejected, yet some, in the natural order of things must come very near the standard, some again, who reach the standard and are accepted, have so little margin upon which they succeed that they are separated a very little from those who are rejected.
The motives are various which induce men in time of peace to relinquish the privileges enjoyed as civilians, to give up their freedom of movement and their right of choice in all things which aid in making up the sum of their liberties, and to voluntarily enter into an agreement obligating themselves for a term of years to render any service that may be ordered by proper authority and accept such remuneration and privileges as may be given them by the same authority, and they are perhaps impossible to enumerate, but it is known that many seek the service for a livelihood, others out of a desire for adventure, others to escape some threatened penalty or impending difficulty likely to result from the commission of some crime or misdemeanor. Very few enter the first time with any intention of making a profession so poorly paid their own, and none, it may be, have a good idea of what they are to encounter. They are met at the outset with lessons which teach them subordination to a commander rather than to a duty. They find that food and clothing are measured to them by a rule which makes no discrimination between them, and the one with great expectations is under no better care than the one of smallest desires. They receive treatment at the hands of petty officers which they choose to believe is cause for resentment. They incur sharp rebuke for some error or delinquency and seeking redress in their own way, as for an injury, they learn that “what in the captain is but a choleric word, in the soldier is flat blasphemy.”