There was an aspect of the Canadian-prison experience less commendable than its order and its providing the prisoners with a good library, its wholesome and on the whole human management so glaringly in contrast with the American prisons pictured in this story—and that was flogging. In these days of a return to medieval punishments for criminals, advocated by many leading citizens, it is well to realize how devastating to Black were his two experiences of brutal force—flogging in Canada, the strait-jacket in Folsom. They made him—and many others—inhuman wild beasts ready for murder or suicide. They left Black not cowed, but mutinous, hating and hateful. The experience was wholly bad and futile, except possibly as a test of his own growing self-control. It does not need Jack Black’s corroborative evidence to know that brutality does not pay, even when applied to the dangerous and to the outcast. In spite of the talk about reviving the whipping post, we know that the use of physical brutality—floggings, strait-jackets, and third-degree methods—will disappear: they are failures in getting results from human beings. It is only a crude society, as ours still is largely, that would tolerate what goes on often in our larger prisons, where the application of “justice” is left to a class little removed from the criminals on whom they operate. To maim and mutilate human beings, to terrify and brutalize them in order to correct them, is so obviously foolish and wicked that it hardly needs statement.
In some cases like Black’s the victim is not broken, but tempered and hardened in will, in evil. And that brings me to the most depressing fact in criminology that the present book illustrates: the criminal is almost always of an inferior mentality. It is only a superior mentality such as Black’s that can survive and ultimately win freedom. Probably Jack Black would admit that among his wide acquaintance in the criminal class only a few, a very few, had the mental quality, the character, to break their chains. The mass were condemned to remain criminals because of defective mentality. That suggests inevitably the confused subject of eugenics and birth control, in society’s relation to the criminal class, which it so much fears and detests, but before which it so often seems, as at the present moment, hopeless, like an ignorant, half well-meaning parent angry over a troublesome child whose troublesomeness is in large part the fruit of the parent’s own defective character. Many of these aberrant specimens might be deflected from crime by feeding their minds. Few ever can do it for themselves as Black almost wholly did it for himself. Does modern life offer youth sufficient mental stimulus? The motor car, the movie, bootleg liquor, and sex—these are the raw stimuli with which youth tries to infuse some color and movement into the tyrannous drabness of a standardized industrial life. In drawing his moral at the end Black forgets, as the middle-aged are wont to forget, the glamour and the lure of the “hangout” and the open road, which in his boyhood seemed to be the only way out of a cheerless drudgery. There are, of course, many other ways, which Black discovered later for himself. And that is why I think his story is so well worth while reading and pondering upon. Besides it is entertaining, because unvarnished and unpretentious.
Robert Herrick.
YOU CAN’T WIN
CHAPTER I
I am now librarian of the San Francisco Call.
Do I look like one? I turn my chair so I can look in the mirror. I don’t see the face of a librarian. There is no smooth, high, white forehead. I do not see the calm, placid, composed countenance of the student. The forehead I see is high enough, but it is lined with furrows that look like knife scars. There are two vertical furrows between my eyes that make me appear to be wearing a continual scowl. My eyes are wide enough apart and not small, but they are hard, cold, calculating. They are blue, but of that shade of blue farthest removed from the violet.
My nose is not long, not sharp. Nevertheless it is an inquisitive nose. My mouth is large—one corner of it is higher than the other and I appear to be continually sneering. I do not scowl, I do not sneer; yet there is something in my face that causes a man or woman to hesitate before asking to be directed to Dr. Gordon’s church. I can’t remember a time that any woman, young or old, ever stopped me on the street and asked to be directed. Once in a great while a drunk will roll over to where I am standing and ask how he can get to “Tw’ninth ’n’ Mission.”
If I gaze into the mirror long enough and think hard enough I can conjure up another face. The old one seems to dissolve and in its place I see the face of a schoolboy—a bright, shining, innocent face. I see a mop of white hair, a pair of blue eyes, and an inquisitive nose. I see myself standing on the broad steps of the Sisters’ Convent School. At the age of fourteen, after three years’ “board and tuition,” I am leaving to go home to my father and then to another school for “big boys.”
My teacher, a sweet, gentle Sister, a madonna, is holding my hand. She is crying. I must hurry away or I will be crying, too. The Mother Superior says good-by. Her thin lips are pressed so tightly together that I can barely see the line where they meet. She is looking into my eyes intently and I am wondering what she is going to say to me when the crunching of gravel warns us that the old coach is ready and I must be off. The Mother takes my teacher gently by the hand. I see them go through the wide door and disappear silently down the long, dark hall.