This may sound silly, in the case of two men much nearer three score and ten than three score, and untrained to gain a livelihood by crime. Bertillon measurements were not needed to identify us, nor photographs without mustaches. But, in the first place, prison rules apply to the mass, not to individuals; and secondly, it has been resolved by the wisdom of our rulers that a man who reverts to crime after one or more convictions shall be more severely punished than a first offender. Nobody stops to question the logic of this ostensibly prudent provision. But the convict knows that his chances of making an honest livelihood after a conviction are many times less than before. Spies are on his trail at every turn, and if ever he succeed in securing legitimate employment, an officer of the secret service presently informs his employer that he has a jail-bird on his pay-roll. Naturally he is promptly paid off and dismissed, and he may go through the same experience as often as he is foolish enough to try it. But even if he be inactive, he is not safe—far from it. He is known to the police and liable to arrest at any moment as a vagrant, without visible means of support. Nor is this all. Suppose him to be recorded in prison archives as a safe-blower, and that a safe is blown somewhere and the culprits escape. The credit of the police department demands that an arrest be made, if not of the person or persons actually guilty of this particular crime, then of some one who may be plausibly represented as guilty of it. Accordingly, our friend is apprehended and charged with the crime; there is his record, and it is easy to secure "evidence" that he was on the spot at the time, though he may have been, in fact, a hundred or two miles away from it. Detectives are experts at providing this sort of evidence; and it frequently happens that they get the corroboration of the victim himself by assuring him that, if he will confess, the judge will let him off with a light sentence, whereas if he prove "stubborn," it will go hard with him—a matter of ten years or so. Ten years in jail for something you did not do! Six months or a year if you confess! Perjury is wrong no doubt; but, were you who read this placed in that predicament, which horn of the dilemma would you select? If you have never served an actual jail term, you might virtuously hesitate; but it is the world against a mustard seed that you wouldn't hesitate if you had. The crisp of the joke is, however,—and of course it serves you right,—that the judge, after all, gives you the ten years, and that means life, for you will never be long out of jail afterward. As I write this, I have in mind several instances of it among my personal acquaintances at Atlanta.
If then our convict, upon his release, cannot keep himself in any honest employment, and cannot avoid arrest even when he is doing nothing at all, good or bad, it seems plain that he must either hunt out a quiet place where he may starve to death before the officer can arrest him for starving, or commit suicide in some more sudden and active manner, or he must accept the opportunity which is always at hand in "revert to a career of crime," as the saying is. Ex-convicts are often still human enough to be averse from starvation, and even from easier forms of self-destruction; and they yield to the temptation to steal. Like the idiots they are, they may hope to make a big strike and get away with it, and in some remote or foreign place, under another name, live out an unobserved and blameless existence.
Thereupon there is rejoicing in the ranks of the secret service; armed with their bertillons, they swoop upon their quarry and bear him away. "May it please the Court, this man is an incorrigible; not deterred by previous punishment, immediately upon release he plunges again into crime; he should receive the limit!" The Court thinks so too; the limit is imposed, and the malefactor is led out to the living death which will end with death in reality. And now will some righteous and competent person arise and proclaim that this man's yielding to his first temptation to crime did NOT involve greater moral turpitude than did his yielding to the second temptation or to the third—greater or at least as great—and that therefore the severer sentence is justified? His first misdeed was prompted by hunger, ignorance, drunkenness, or cupidity; the others were the fruit of desperation itself—and how many of you have known what desperation means?
You perceive that this story proceeds by digressions; such value as it may have it will owe mainly to such digressions, so I will not apologize for them. My friend and I, our ordeal completed, were returned to our cells to think it over. The walls and ceiling of the cells are painted a light gray color; it is against the rules, except by special indulgence, to affix pictures or other objects to them. The "coddling of criminals," so widely advertised, does not include permission to give a homelike look to their perennial quarters; it is more conducive to moral reform that they should contemplate painted steel. There was one camp-stool in our cell; later, cells were supplied with two wooden chairs, the seats sloping at such an angle with the backs as rendered sitting a penance; cushions were not provided. I remember seeing similar contrivances in old English cathedrals, relics of a day when monks had to be kept from falling asleep during the religious rites. We might also sit upon the lower bunk, bent forward in such an attitude as would avert bumping our heads against the upper one. Each convict, early in his sojourn, has a religious interview with the Chaplain, who presents him with a copy of the New Testament—not also of the Old; you may remember that the latter records certain regrettable incidents of a sinister and immoral sort, calculated, I presume, to shock the tender budding impulses toward regeneration of prison readers. One may get other books of a secular kind from the library, upon written application; and prisoners of the first grade may subscribe for newspapers that contain no objectionable matter. But only a small proportion of the inmates is addicted to reading, and the opportunities for doing so are limited. And as months and years go by, the desolation and sterility of the place weigh heavier upon the spirit, the mind reduces its radius and grows inert, and stimulants stronger than current fiction are needed to rouse it. Prison, prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate screechings and clangings of whistles and gongs; the endless filings to and fro, in and out; the stealthy insolence of guards, or their treacherous good-fellowship; the abstracted or menacing gaze of the higher officials; the dreariness, aimlessness, and sometimes the severity of the daily labor; the sullen threat of the loaded rifles; the hollow, echoing spaces that shut out hope; the thought of the stifling stench of the dungeons beneath the pavements, hidden from all save the victims, whose very existence is officially denied; the closing of all personal communication with the outer world, except such as commends itself to the whims of the official censors; this morgue of human beings still alive—the impenetrable stupidity, futility and outrage of it all—slowly or not so slowly unbalance the mind and corrupt the nature. Meanwhile, newspapers clamor against the coddling of criminals, and the too indulgent officials smile sadly and protest that they have not the heart to be stern. "Coddling criminals"—the alliteration makes it roll pleasantly off the tongue!
But do I forget the many indulgences given to prisoners—and so profusely celebrated in every mention publicly made of Atlanta Penitentiary? Let me name them once more. Saturday being a non-working day, it used to be the custom to lock the prisoners in their cells from Saturday morning till Monday morning—a custom still followed at many penitentiaries; for how could they be controlled if not split up into working gangs, and thus prevented from conspiring to mutiny? It is one of the obsessions of prison authorities that the prisoners are severally and collectively a sort of wild beast, always straining at the leash, and ready at the least opportunity to break forth in wild and deadly disorder. It is obviously expedient, too, to impress the public with this conviction, and therefore, in part, we have the clubs, rifles, and general parade of watchfulness. As a matter of fact, meanwhile, nothing is more easy to handle than a prisonful of convicts, if the most elementary tact be used; and they are eagerly grateful for the smallest unforced and spontaneous act of kindness.
Until about eighteen months ago, however, severe restrictions were in vogue, and the warden declared that it was his belief and policy that men in prison should be taught by precept and illustration to regard themselves as dead to the world; that they should be held practically incommunicado, no visitors, letters at most but once a month, no conversation between prisoners—silence, solitude, suffocation in this terrible quicksand of jail for months, years, or a lifetime, at the mercy of men to whom mercy is a jest. Such a régimen is still in force at many jails, and when combined with contract labor, nothing in the age-long history of penal imprisonment shows a blacker record. It is advocated as the best way to induce men to reform, and become, after release, useful and industrious members of the community.
A couple of years or so ago, Atlanta was visited by an Attorney-General, who was not prepared for what he saw, nor had the things he should not have seen been removed from sight before he saw them. He demanded some improvements on the spot, and soon after a new deputy warden was appointed—a young man, of kindly disposition, though weak, not inured as yet to the conventional brutalities, and with a backing in Washington which gave him unusual powers. Among good things which he instituted and insisted on were—two and a half hours outdoors on Saturday afternoons, for baseball and general relaxation; conversation at meals; music at dinner by a band made up from convicts; regular bi-weekly letters, with extra letters allowed between times by special request to orderly convicts; concerts or vaudeville performances every month or so in the chapel, by professionals.
Insanity became less frequent after this, and the general health of the men improved. They had something to look forward to, and to look back to, and the freedom of the baseball concession led to no disorders; something like hope and cheerfulness began to appear, like green blades of grass in spring. The warden cleverly seized the opportunity to take credit to himself for all the improvements, and to circulate industriously in the local papers the praise of the model penitentiary. But neither did he fail to take advantage of the new situation to tighten his grasp upon the reins of control. The majority of jails, in addition to the ordinary spy system operated by officials, organize a supplementary one composed of convicts themselves—stool pigeons—certain carefully selected prisoners, who are rewarded for treachery to their fellows by various indulgences and secret liberties. The principle is detestable, and has evil effects. The stool pigeons themselves are of course the basest members of the community, and the other prisoners, soon learning to suspect them, come at last to a miserable distrust of one another—for the comrade apparently most sincere may be at heart only a more artful traitor. In this, they play into the officials' hands, whose theory of government is fear, and who find aid to themselves in the mutual misgivings and hatreds of their charges.
Evidently, the relaxations of the baseball afternoons afforded a capital opportunity to the stool pigeons, and the results were soon apparent. The spies, in order to curry favor with their employers, reported not actual infringements of discipline only, but guessed at what might be, and even invented what was not, often by way of retaliation against personal enemies. I shall return to this subject hereafter; enough, for the present, that it counterbalanced in a degree the physical benefits of the new concessions by engendering mental disquiets and animosities among the entire population, and especially inflaming them against the officials. I am not myself sure, for example, whether or not one or another of my most intimate acquaintances among the prisoners may not all the while have been on the watch to betray me behind my back. For aught I know, it may have been to some such sordid treachery that I owe the refusal of my parole, when it became due. And any respect for constituted prison authorities, upheld by such means, was impossible.
When the coddling of prisoners involves feeding them on poison, they would prefer Spartan severity and fair warning.