Such a state of mind is bred by prison experience—not otherwise. Prison obstructs or altogether closes every door to genuine moral reform in prisoners.
A few larger souls overcome the obstructions; for example, our John Ross, who more than thirty-three years ago, in the blindness of a drunken spree in Yokahoma, killed a shipmate who angered him. He died in jail last June (1913). He was sentenced to death, but got commutation to life imprisonment. He was a fine type of man, physically and mentally. His spirit was never broken by what he endured, and some years before being transferred to Atlanta, he became, in a simple, non-sensational, but profound way, religious. At Atlanta, in his cell, he was a center of good influence on his fellow convicts; truthful, hearty, faithful, manly, cheerful; his preaching was by personal example, and by support and help given at need to the weak and despairing. He was promised freedom on parole; the promise was not kept; but even this last betrayal failed to break his staunch heart. He died like a man, with composure and dignity.
With a few such exceptions, prisoners are unrepentant except for business reasons—that is, either because they recognize that crime does not pay, or in order to influence in their favor the pardoning power. Many of them, of course, employ their prison opportunities to devise new crimes and to train fresh recruits from the younger convicts. Men who have been imprisoned more than once lose hope of anything better than transient freedom; they know they will be prevented by the police from earning an honest livelihood, and that they must either starve or steal. They become in the end mere prison creatures, destitute of evil or of good, active or passive.
I repeat that the experience of associating with men without disguises is novel and refreshing. A tedious burden is lifted from the shoulders; the bones in the sepulcher are less revolting than the whitewash outside; it is pleasanter to know what a man is than to suspect him. It is certainly much wholesomer, on the other hand, to uncover your own deformity than to hide it, especially when you know, or fear, that the hiding is unsuccessful.
There is a sense of brotherhood, long since unfamiliar to human intercourse under usual conditions, but welcome even at the cost of conditions such as these. The truth gradually emerges to our consciousness—it is not the evil in us that kills brotherhood, but the vain, unending effort to make the evil seem good. Now our eyes meet one another's frankly; the skilfullest counterfeit was worse than the worst reality. There is nothing in us to be proud of, but something to be thankful for. Society has done its worst to us; but it could not take away from us our mutual kindliness, or the qualities that justify it. We are condemned as wicked, but we are comforted by one another's good.
Prison, in short, more convincingly than any abstract argument, demonstrates its own futility as a means of either taking revenge upon the prisoner, or of inducing him to hate crime and to turn to good. Revenge, of course, is officially discredited nowadays, though it is practised as actively as ever under guises more or less civilized; but the pretense of moral reform by penal imprisonment is becoming too preposterous to be tolerated much longer. On the contrary, prison renders the great aggregate of prisoners collectively self-conscious; the goats find themselves, and are forced into antagonism with the sheep not only as individuals but as a body. They make common cause together, and in obscure ways achieve a degree of organization. They learn to regard the community not as better than themselves, but as more successful pensioners of fortune; they fear them because the advantage of numbers is on their side, but they hate them because they feel, either justly or unjustly, that they have suffered injustice at their hands, and they will prey upon them when opportunity serves not only from the original motive of physical need, but from the additional and more sinister one, bred in prison, of retaliation for the wrong done them.
When you sap a man's faith in plain justice, and terrify him with the threat of irresistible power, and torture him in mind and body through the exercise of that power, you drive him to the support and society of men similarly circumstanced, and thus create the precise analogue in the body politic of a cancer in the individual body. Prison attempts to segregate this cancer, but only promotes its increase. Its poison is in the blood and circulates everywhere.
As I passed out of the dining-room after meals each day, I came to notice a young man who sat at a table near the door. He sat with folded arms, and with a set and gloomy countenance; his eyes were fixed on vacancy, and he did not speak with his companions. A crutch leaned against his shoulder; he had lost one leg.
I learned his story. In the settlement of a small estate of which he was an heir, a sister of his had obtained money that belonged to him, and when asked to restore it to him, had refused to do so. After some fruitless negotiation, he got angry, and sent her through the mails a message containing violent expressions of reproach and animosity. The young woman took this paper to a United States marshal, who brought it to the attention of the district attorney, with the result that the brother was indicted under some law of libel or of obscene matter, was arrested, tried, and convicted, and sentenced to Atlanta penitentiary for five years. After he had been lodged in his cell, his sister repented of her action, and sought to have him freed; but the law does not recognize such changes of heart, and the brother must serve out his time.
We all know how easily family quarrels arise, how bitter they may be while they last, and how readily, withal, they may be accommodated by tactful handling. The sister had done wrong; the brother had lost his temper; in what family has not such an outbreak occurred? But because the brother had happened to put his bad temper on paper, the law, being rashly invoked, seizes him, takes five years out of his life, and brands him with the shame of the jail bird. Upon what plea can such an act be construed as justice? But the district attorney shows the court that the statute has been violated; the judge charges the jury, the jury finds its verdict in accordance with the legal evidence, and the thing is done. It is a mechanical process—nothing human about it.