The Subterranean Brotherhood

by Julian Hawthorne

The thirty-four foot wall surrounding the buildings, a mile in circuit, built of cement, had been completed before my time. I read in a report of the warden's that its existence was due to his enterprise, and that he looked upon it as a worthy monument to his activity and intelligence. At every hundred yards or so of its length it was strengthened by a tower, containing accommodations for a guard, day and night, who watches with his rifle in hand, ready to shoot down any prisoner who seems to be acting suspiciously. No such shooting by a tower guard has as yet taken place to my knowledge, and none ever will on the pretext suggested; for the wall is absolutely unscalable; being five or six feet thick, it is impenetrable, and its foundations going down six or eight feet below ground, it cannot be beaten by tunneling; yet the towers and the guards are there.

But the point is that the wall itself is quite preposterous and unnecessary. Escape for prisoners was quite as difficult before it was built as after. There are a hundred guards in the penitentiary—one for every eight prisoners—all armed and eager for action; every article of a prisoner's clothing bears the prison mark; and the population outside the walls is penetrated with the idea that the apprehension of escaping prisoners is morally as well as financially profitable. Every prisoner knows that an attempt to escape would be suicide—"you might get hurt," as the prison rule book euphemistically phrases it—and they generally prefer suicide in some other form.

The wall, then, is superfluous; a fence of electrified wire would have served as good a purpose at about one-thousandth of one per cent. of the cost. And what did the wall cost? Let the prison archives declare. And then, perhaps, it would be interesting to investigate the discrepancy, if any exist, between the price which the United States paid for the work, and the actual cost of erecting it.

The wall was some time in the building, but it seems to have been the only thing built in the prison, work upon which was continuous and energetic. And it was a useless work, better left undone. The warden was proud of it, however, and there it stands.

As for the twenty-seven acre enclosure, in which the prison buildings are, which is—according to official prognostics—to be graded, leveled, drained, cultivated and planted till it looks like a private millionaire's park, it is a raw, rough unsightly waste of red clay and weeds, gouged out here and there with random and meaningless excavations, heaped up in other places with piles of earth; diversified in one quarter with some forlorn chicken coops and fences, made by the voluntary and unskilled labor of one of the convicts; and adjoining these, with the Tuberculosis Camp, a row of a dozen or more tents mounted on wooden platforms, with little flower beds in front and behind, and a pigeon house at one end. The only part of these grounds on which any visible thought and labor has been expended is the baseball diamond, adjoining the northeast corner of the wall. Here, the ground has been leveled and smoothed over a space sufficient to include the diamond itself, and a few yards on its south and north sides; beyond that is waste ground, and along the northern boundary is a parapet of earth five or six feet high, presumably made of the material scraped off the diamond. A ball vigorously struck by a batter either goes over this parapet into the swamp ground beyond, or sails away toward the Tuberculosis Camp, to be retrieved from the weeds and rubbish in that vicinity.

There are some forty score men behind the bars who would rejoice to be allowed to put these grounds in order, and who, under proper guidance, could do the job in a month. It would be a useful work, it would benefit the men both in the doing and in the accomplishment, and it would be an excellent advertisement of the penitentiary for the visitors who daily stroll about the enclosure; yet months and years go by and nothing whatever is changed.

One day, in midsummer, I saw a gang of negroes digging a trench in front of the southern gate, and cutting out a heavy growth of weeds and underbrush on the slope above. Drain pipes were carted out and dumped in the vicinity of the trench, and three or four of them were laid down in it. This went on for three or four days, the whole gang of ten or a dozen men not achieving in that period more than one or two capable Irish or Italian navvies would have done in the same time. Then the gang disappeared; the open trench and the pipes remained in statu quo, and the weeds gradually resumed their ancient sway. So far as I know, work has not been resumed there since.

It is a typical example; even such work as is done, is done in such a discontinuous and futile way that it is impossible for any one doing it to feel any interest in it, or stimulus to do it well. Time, toil and money are frittered away, with nothing definite or substantial to show for it. Intermittent and barren tasks are doubly onerous. The overseers may not be to blame; they may be incompetent; they may be hampered by the ignorance, incompetence or voluntary policy of the prison authorities; the consequences, at all events, are disastrous. If a handful of hearty, clever, driving men were given control of the various industrial operations in the prison, the results would seem magical.

There is dry rot or something worse everywhere; and it is difficult to believe that anything is gained by it either for the convict or for the country. It is to be sure punishment for the former, and a bad form of punishment, but it would be grotesque to assume that it is inflicted by design of our lawmakers. It cannot be that the government deliberately proposes to destroy convicts, mind and body; on the contrary, we must suppose that it wishes to reform them and render them again useful agents in the community. There is no way to do this better than to give them honest and productive work while in jail, so that they may acquire the habit of such work, and be encouraged to pursue it when they get out.

But in order to induce them to work economically, it is indispensable to give them continuous, intelligent, and manifestly useful work, and to pay them for doing it. It can be and it is done in some jails even now. Warden Fenton, of the Nebraska State Prison, has been putting his men on the honor system, and sending squads of them out to work on farms or for contractors, without guards or other precautions, sometimes for weeks at a time; all he asks of them is their promise to return when the job is done, which they uniformly do. And for this work, he causes them to be regularly paid; he retains their wages for them until the term of their imprisonment has expired, and then hands it back to them. The men are encouraged and inspirited by this treatment, and the neighbors among whom their work is done, seem disposed to take a helpful and cooperative view of the enterprise. If the neighbors—the community—loses nothing by this system, and if the convicts gain by it, why should it not be made the general practise? Convicts in Nebraska are the same sort of people as those in Atlanta.