The Subterranean Brotherhood

by Julian Hawthorne

THE TOIL OF SLAVERY

Before the Civil War there were some millions of negro slaves in the South, whom to set free we spent some billions of dollars and several hundred thousand lives. It was held that the result was worth the cost. But to-day we are creating some five hundred thousand slaves, white and black, each year—or that is about the number of made slaves each year in the United States; it costs us several millions to keep them in an enslaved condition, and their depredations upon society, before and after slavery, amount to several millions more. I have not the precise data, but the figures hazarded are not excessive. A sound statistician would make a more sensational showing; and when he proceeded to cast up his account for the aggregate of the years since the war, and of the estimated amounts for the coming fifty years, the bill would look large even with a hundred million paymasters to foot it.

In that bill, probably the smallest item would be the cost of crime itself—the actual loss caused to the community by the thieving of thieves,—of the thieves, that is, who have been convicted and condemned as such; for there is no way of figuring on how much the undetected thieves steal. Every time we shake the social body, in this or that spasm of probing and reform, hundreds drop out, like moths from an unprotected garment; so that at last we are prone to suspect that the thief, overt or covert, is more the rule than the exception, and that a good part of the cash in circulation was more or less dishonestly come by. But, leaving this aside, the money or values appropriated by thieves accredited as such and sent to jail, is an amount relatively inconsiderable, and by no means enough to pay the expenses of their apprehension, trial, and prison sojourn. It is, then, politically uneconomical to imprison them.

The reply to this is, of course, that penal slavery is preventive of crime; that if we did not prosecute malefactors, crime would multiply and abound, like weeds in a neglected garden. Perhaps it would; but the point is, that it multiplies and abounds even in the teeth of prosecutions; every year the number of convictions is greater, and the jails are already cracking their seams to contain the convicts. One might almost conclude that prisons, as now administered, stimulate crime instead of preventing it, and that we are in the predicament of Hercules in the fable, who, as fast as he cut off a head of the hydra, saw two others sprout in its place. At which rate, we might be led on to the surmise that it would be financially cheaper to let crime run on; the cost of our futile efforts to stop it would be saved, and might be set over against the loss from the increased annual depredations.

But finance is not the whole story; what about morality? and who can forecast the ruin of anarchy? The problem cannot be so crudely solved.

Crime must be prevented; doubtless nine-tenths even of the men in jail would agree to that proposition. The question is, can the jail system prevent it? and the answer is that, judged by long experience—the experience of thousands of years—it cannot. There are several reasons why it cannot, into some of which we may enquire later; but the objection to the jail system which I wish to emphasize just now is, that it not only makes slaves of convicts, but, unlike the more reasonable southern negro slavery, it makes them unproductive slaves. Either it withholds this vast body of men from production altogether, or else it forces them to toil under conditions which bring forth results the smallest possible and the most unsatisfactory. The men are not paid for what they do. Whatever profit (in "contract" prisons) accrues from their toil goes into the pockets of the contractors, or, perhaps, is used to defray the cost of their keep to the community. Or, again, if it is made to appear to go into the prisoners' pockets, it is deftly taken out again the next moment by an ingenious system of fines, which no prisoner can escape.

In short, prison labor is slave labor, and slave labor of a worse kind than was ever practised in negro slavery times. For on southern plantations, though slaves were not paid wages, they got wages' worth in good food and lodging, and (uniformly) in humane treatment, including, above all, the companionship of their wives and families; and they were able, in many instances, to buy themselves into freedom. Most of the negroes, moreover, had never known what it was to be free; their race, for generations unknown, had been slaves in their own country; they had never been free citizens of the United States, never had education, were unconscious of any disgrace in their condition, and were as happy as ever in their lives they had been or were capable of being—happier, indeed, than most negroes are in the community to-day. In all respects their condition compares favorably with that of our half million annual prison slaves, manufactured deliberately out of our own flesh and blood.

I used to contemplate the population in the Atlanta Penitentiary—the eight hundred of us—and then look at the construction work, the gardening, the tailoring, the carpentering, the product of the forge, the farming in the prison grounds outside the walls, and the work of clearing and grading on the area which the walls enclosed, and I marveled at the disproportion. Eight hundred men, many of them skilled in this or that industrial employment, most of them physically capable of active labor, and almost all of them eager to work if given intelligent and useful work to do; not a few, too, intellectually and educationally equipped to plan and direct industrial operations; and yet, with all this great potential force at command, all that was actually accomplished might have been done as well or better by a corporal's guard of willing and well managed men. The mere economic waste of such material was criminal, without regard to the evil effect of inadequate or misapplied labor upon the men's moral and mental state. Can it be, I asked myself, that this extravagant idleness is forced upon the prisoners as part, and not the least evil part of their punishment? Or is it the result of ignorance, incompetence, or indifference on the part of those appointed and paid to take care of men sentenced to "hard labor"?

That the men suffer from it is beyond question. And I cannot find that the law provides or intends that their suffering shall be of this kind. Much of the insanity in the prison is due to the way they are made, or made not, to work. There is a legend of a warden who, being unable to keep his prisoners otherwise busy, set them to piling up paving stones on one side of the yard, and then taking down the pile and repiling it on the other side. After a week of this, most of them were maniacs. It was not the severity of the labor that destroyed their minds, but the uselessness and objectlessness of it. Sane men require reasonable employment; idleness, or irrational work disintegrates their minds. They want to see and to foresee intelligible results from their toil; mere toil without such results is maddening, or it rots men's minds as scurvy rots their bodies. The reason is, that the men are human; and if you have hitherto supposed that convicts are not human, the insanity which so constantly follows upon prison idleness or mis-employment should correct you.

Others may describe the horrors, almost indescribable, of contract labor in prisons; I saw nothing of that at Atlanta—type of another widespread system of prison work—though I heard enough about it from men who had undergone it in state prisons. But during the few first days of my imprisonment, I saw a building gang at work (to call it work) upon a new wing destined to contain dormitories for the inmates. It was to be a seemly structure of granite, massive and well proportioned. But after three days, work on it was stopped, and was not resumed until a week or so before I left this prison, six months later. Meanwhile, I read in the Congressional Record the report of a debate in the House, in which, on the authority of a Texas representative, charges of graft or waste were laid against persons concerned in the erection of this building which seemed incredible, but of which I was able to find no refutation. The hospital building is open to the same criticism, and another, which I believe is designed to be the laundry, had got no further, at the date of my arrival, than a square hole in the ground, and when I left had been furthered by a single course of stone or cement laid round the hole. A New York contractor, graft or no graft, would have had all three of them finished and in commission in the same time, and with no better material in the way of laborers than our prison could supply.