For years different convict camps were established within the colony, and changed because the prisoners died of fever in droves—which would not have mattered had not some of their guardians suffered the same fate. In 1867 there were 18,000 convicts, with an average of 1200 arriving every year. They are divided at present among four penal stations, of which that at the mouth of the Maroni River and the big stone penitentiary on a slight plateau at the edge of the sea in Cayenne are, the most important, the latter housing about 330 regular prisoners and 400 “transients” at the time of my visit. Though they come from all the other French colonies,—Algeria, the West Indies, Madagascar, and the rest—by far the majority of the convicts one sees in Cayenne are white men from France, probably a large percentage of them from Paris, many of them truly rough looking customers, for all their whipped-dog attitude. A few are educated men of good families who have gone seriously astray and been caught at it. The man who stole millions of French church money after these churches were declared state property; another once high up in the government who made undue use of that position to feather his own nest; several lawyers who were unusually rapacious in robbing their clients; half a dozen traitors are there—or were, for one must not assume the present tense long in such surroundings—all dressed in exactly the same buff-colored blouse and trousers of coarsest canvas-like stuff, the former generally open to the navel, and a crude straw hat woven of the awara palm-leaf, working at the same digging of sewers, the cutting of grass, or the breaking of stone in the public streets as the thieving degenerates from Les Halles and the perverted apaches from Montmartre. Irrespective of their origin and former habits, newcomers begin at the hardest manual labor under the blazing tropical sun, which soon kills off the weak and establishes a new sort of survival of the fittest. “The climate itself is a great factor in bringing repentance,” as a jailer puts it. This, the arduous toil, and the diet—or lack of it—give those who survive a greatly changed appearance, and it is only by looking twice that one can see the Parisian apache or trickster under the sallow, yellow faces, gaunt with fever, of the wretches whose clothing hangs about them as from a clothes-pole.
The déportés are divided into three classes,—transportés, merely sentenced to a certain number of years at forced labor; rélégués, serving life sentences; and libérés, former convicts free to live where they choose within the colony. Highwaymen, burglars, and murderers make up a large percentage of the list; yet if he is asked, almost any one of them will answer “affaire de femme,” though he may be the most miserable sneak thief or a man who “only killed his mother.” There are no women in the Cayenne penitentiary, for they are sent to a prison in charge of the Sisters of St. Laurent over on the boundary of Dutch Guiana. Professional criminals and recidivists are particularly assigned to the Cayenne establishment; though there are men with sentences of from five years up for almost every conceivable crime. In practice, any man sentenced to seven years or more is virtually a life prisoner. Even if his sentence is less than that, he can only get back to France after serving a like term as libéré and earning his own passage money honestly—and honest money does not float about French Guiana. When one considers how stern is the struggle for existence in crowded French cities, the hardship of the accused being obliged to prove his innocence under French law, and the carelessness or indifference of French judges in handing out sentences of seven years or more for almost minor crimes, it is not strange that, though the world has never heard of them, there are many more examples of the devilish injustice of man to man than the notorious case of Dreyfus.
Not only can he wear only the two coarse garments and a hat, without shoes, but the prisoner is denuded even of the Frenchman’s pride, his mustache, being clean shaven and shorn to accentuate the difference between him as an outcast and the free members of society. Luckily, I was wearing a labial decoration, and thus was looked on with less scorn and suspicion by the negro population than might otherwise have been the case; for the standards and symbols of Cayenne are to their primitive minds also those of the outside world. Educated prisoners are sometimes made use of, after they have served the first part of their time at hard labor, as bookkeepers or skilled mechanics—a bright-looking rélégué was installing new telephone lines with convict workmen during my visit—but these things are mainly for the convenience of the administration and to save the officers in charge from work, never with the idea of helping the man himself. In fact, “the regeneration of the man sentenced to travaux forcés, imagined by the law of 1854, has become a legend at which the first to laugh are the unregenerated themselves.” Somehow I had pictured to myself a penal colony as a place where the unfortunate, removed from their former troubles and temptations, were turned loose in a new and virgin land and, with an occasional helping hand from above, given the opportunity to begin life anew. Nothing could be farther from the fact in French Guiana. The officers themselves consider it a punishment to be sent there, and their treatment of the wretches under them is that of noxious animals which it is an advantage to be rid of as soon as possible. In view of the many splendid qualities of the French, it is incredible how few “bowels for their kindred” these officers in charge have for their prisoners, unbelievable that the French soldier, who has known some of the hardships of life as a conscript, can treat his own flesh and blood in a way that does not seem human, giving the onlooker full credence in the story of “Jean Valjean,” making their helpless victims feel that what society seeks is not reform, but revenge—revenge for forcing the particular members of it with whom they come in contact to spend months or years as prison-guards or administrators in a hot and fever-stricken land far from their beloved France.
I am not a particularly firm believer in the efficacy of repentance, but even if he felt the desire to do better stirring within him, the convict of Cayenne would find every conceivable difficulty on the road to reform. He is marked and stamped with, and hounded for, his past sins, without a friend on earth, except in the rare cases when he has money, without which he is made to understand that his early elimination is the thing most desirable. The great majority, of course, are scoundrels who deserve their fate—or at least a somewhat more humane one. But imagine yourself an educated, well-bred man who, succumbing to overwhelming temptation or cruel force of circumstances, has appropriated public funds, for example, and been suddenly removed from Paris boulevards to dig sewer-trenches in stony soil in the public streets of a negro city beneath a tropical sun, working in bare feet on the scantiest of prison rations under a bullying negro boss! The most iniquitous part of the whole French system is that not only are white prisoners set at the most degrading tasks among the black population, but that they are often under command of negroes—and naturally, the effect of this on the primitive African mind is to double their native insolence and convince them that all white men are of a low and criminal type. The other two Guianas would never dream of letting the negro population see white men doing manual labor, even though they were sentenced to it—much less put them under negro command; but the intangibility of the color-line among the French is notorious.
Forty years after the establishment of the penal colony, the prisoners were allowed to be rented out to private individuals. Those who hire them must pay the prison authorities about two and a half francs a day each, defray certain hospital insurance, and comply with several irksome and rather stupid rules. The red tape and poor dovetailing between departments is especially troublesome. The man who hires a prisoner pays the government a total of 78 francs a month, or considerably more than the wages of free labor—when this can be had. A foreigner long resident in the colony had found that only by giving the convicts wine with their meals, tobacco at night, if they had worked well during the day, and other gratuities, could he get any real work out of them, so that in the end the prisoner cost twice as much as free labor and was a much poorer workman; while if the convict falls ill, a mishap at which he is an expert, the cost becomes “fantastic.” Most of the prisoners, therefore, still toil directly for the government on public works, and, the negro freeman scorning labor, private persons who require workmen usually hire libérés, whom it is not necessary either to treat or pay well.
Though he cannot leave the colony, the libéré can go where he chooses within it, and dress like a civilian—if he can afford it. When his sentence is up he is given a suit of blue jeans, a slouch felt hat, clumsy shoes, and is left to shift for himself, though often obliged to report to the authorities at frequent intervals. Almost always he has an avoid-your-eyes manner which discloses his past, even if his five years or more as prisoner has not made his face familiar to all the colony. Here and there in a stroll through the town one is startled—at least after three years of disconnection between manual labor and the European race—to find white men working as shoemakers, butchers, small mechanics, or anything else at which they can rake and scrape a livelihood. These are invariably libérés, some of whom have formed alliances with such females as the colony affords and bred more of their kind with negro trimmings. As there are no white women available for this class, and the libéré has been a familiar sight in French Guiana for the past sixty years, unquestionably many of the mulattoes and quadroons one sees strutting about town, holding political places of importance and looking with deepest scorn upon the white convicts, are the sons and daughters of released criminals. Having in most cases lost all sense of shame or decency during their bestial imprisonment, libérés not only work at odd jobs about the market and the town, but throughout the colony, the sight of their groveling and lowly estate naturally not decreasing the negro’s conviction of his own superiority over the white race. Coming from prison life after a background of artificial civilization, most of them cannot cope with existence in such surroundings and often commit new crimes for no other purpose than to get back into prison and at least have something to eat again.
Though there has been an average of 1200 convict arrivals a year since 1854, and almost none have returned home, the number in the colony remains almost stationary, at the remarkably low figure of from six to eight thousand. Of the surplus, perhaps four per cent. have escaped; many have been shot by guards or been killed in prison feuds, while great numbers have died of tropical diseases, rough treatment, and virtual starvation. Many have run away into the bush or the dense jungles on the Brazilian or the Dutch side of the colony; but being mainly city men and generally of slight education or intelligence, they have absolutely no adaptability in the bush, not even knowing enough to take directions by the sun; and while a man used to wilderness travel might get away, most of the refugees have found the jungle impossible and have returned to serve life sentences. The bones of others are not infrequently found up in the interior. The few who reach civilization in Brazil are the most fortunate. Those who get into Dutch Guiana are, in theory, subject to extradition, but are commonly overlooked, unless they make themselves conspicuous by becoming penniless or returning to their old ways. A few have become men of importance in the neighboring colony, particularly a well-dressed rascal who has lived some twenty years now as a merchant in Paramaribo. Rafts of moco-moco stems, and a canoe made from a sheet, are among the curiosities left by escaped prisoners to the Cayenne museum. On the Dutch side of the Maroni River they are free from French pursuit, but have still greater trials with the Indians, and particularly with the wild negroes, who shoot them freely, or more often, make them slaves and work them until they are all but dead, then bring them back to the French and claim the standing reward.
It is against the law, or at least almost impossible, to visit the “camp,” as the big prison in the town of Cayenne is called, particularly since some American got the former commander “in wrong” with the French Government by publishing an account of such a visit. But neither laws nor strict rules survive personal friendship in Latin countries, and I had made good use of my short acquaintance with the four Frenchmen who had landed with me. At that, they politely hedged when I hinted a desire to get inside the prison, until one morning, catching alone one of them who had just been transferred from New Caledonia as a guard, I mellowed him with strong iced drinks under the earth-floored veranda of Cayenne’s least disreputable café. So wheedlingly did he introduce me to the stern “principal” of the prison, a French captain, that the cut and dried refusal shriveled on his lips and, taking down a large bunch of big keys, he led us into the prison in person.
It is under strict military régime, the building that forms a part of the wall of the immense yard being the barracks of soldier guards. Here they had good spring beds and paid the nominal sum of one franc twenty-five centimes a day, with an additional two francs for their wives, in the rare cases in which they had brought them out from France. There were separate rooms for one or two families, and a good kitchen well served by convicts, with wine and champagne for those who could afford it. Across the bare yard were many massive gates with prisoner turnkeys, for discipline is maintained largely by making trusties and “stool-pigeons” and setting them as spies over the rest. There was an infirmérie where the merely sick are shut up in pens, a sad looking place with much fever and crude, careless surgery without anesthetics, from which those who can convince the hardhearted officials that they are really ill are sent to the hospital. The “principal” was full of courtesies for me, but he took it out on the prisoners, always addressing them as one might a particularly low class of animal. Indeed, officials high and low were incredibly prejudiced against the convicts; not one of them seemed to be large enough to recognize them as partly the victims of society or of circumstances. The officers have a secret identification system, and the prisoners a secret argot, or slang, which keep guards and guarded still farther apart. There are special and incredible punishments for the slightest offenses, such as failing to grovel before the meanest underling among the soldier guards, which increases the number of invalids. Even in the infirmary there was not a book to be had, nothing whatever to take the minds of inmates off their present deplorable surroundings, not even a sign of a priest. I have never seen a human institution over the door of which Dante’s famous phrase would be more entirely appropriate. The bitter cynicism of the monument of Schoelcher freeing a black slave in the main square of Cayenne is sure to strike one after a visit to the prison.
The bulk of the prison is made up of big dungeons with a few small barred windows high above the unleveled earth floor, in which are confined the regular prisoners divided by “classes,”—Arabs here, men from Madagascar there, white Frenchmen in others. This division is no concession to the color-line, but is merely for the purpose of simplifying the administration. Three feet above the ground were four parallel poles, and fastened to these were strips of stiff canvas two feet wide and a little more than five long, all so close together that even a thin man could barely squeeze between them, forming two rows of sleeping quarters the length of each dungeon. Evidently nothing else was allowed, for one fellow with a fever being covered with a dirty old rag the “principal” demanded of the trembling trusty in charge, in a voice such as one might use to a street cur, at the same time snatching the cover off the invalid, “Where did he get that?” The trusty shakingly replied that it was an old flour sack, which he was forthwith ordered to turn over to the guard outside. “Do you dare not rise and take off your hat when you see me pass?” bellowed the commander to another emaciated wretch who with the greatest difficulty could crawl to his feet and force his legs to hold him, though he hastened to do both. Even this was not enough for my wine-cheered friend from the boat, who proceeded to shout more insults at the fellow for his “insubordination.”