The Subterranean Brotherhood

by Julian Hawthorne

Warden Fenton is progressive, but most other wardens are not, and there is no certainty that future wardens of Nebraska prisons will be; therefore he has not solved the problem for good and all; something more than the benevolent or wise ideas of any individual is needed for that. Mr. Fenton has absolute power—power, therefore, to give or withhold favors as he may choose. Enlightened legislation would deprive him and other wardens of absolute power, and make it mandatory to treat prisoners as he is doing it voluntarily.

Moreover, if men will go off and work without guards for three weeks at a stretch, and then return uncompelled to the prison, what is the use of making them return to the prison at all, or of having any prison for them to return to? Is not their conviction prison enough for most of them? And for such as prove incorrigible, or are criminal degenerates, ought not pathological care, instead of penal slavery, to be provided? Professor Marchiafava, physician to the Pope, said recently, "Eighty per cent of youthful criminals are children of drunkards." That is a serious indictment of alcohol; but it indicts no less the policy which punishes victims of disease as if they were deliberate and freely choosing malefactors.

But leaving sick folk out of the argument, I say that, in view of Mr. Fenton's experiment, and others like it, conviction is prison enough for most persons who have slipped a cog in their moral machinery. Means could readily be found to make such persons recognizable at need, and they would have as great a stimulus to render themselves free from that stigma as they have now, and far better opportunities for doing it. They would have their families with them, or within touch, and they would no longer be slaves; and if they had been slaves to their own passions and propensities, the expediency of breaking such chains would become far more obvious than it ever can be when a guard and a warden is always round the corner waiting to club or dungeon them for infringement of a whimsical prison rule. It does not help a man to his manhood to see his keepers acting constantly the part of tyrants and torturers.

This is perhaps a novel doctrine, because, as the editorial writer in the Saturday Evening Post remarked the other day, "The truth is that, at least two times out of three, we send a man to jail because we do not know anything rational to do with him, and will not take the pains to find out." We lack imagination to devise more effective treatment, and we are wonderfully ignorant as to what prison treatment really means. And this indictment lies not only against the public at large, but against the Department of Justice and the Congress, who pass their judgments and inflict their penalties without in the least understanding what they are doing to human bodies and souls like their own.

Jail is the conventional and time-honored nostrum, which is administered with a glow of moral self-esteem, and no more thought about it. When a murderer is sent to jail for life, or a bank burglar or white slaver or financial crook for his specified term, do we not sit back in our chairs and clear our throats with a self-satisfied "hem!" and "There's one scoundrel has got his deserts, anyway!" Had it been your brother, father, son, or yourself, would you employ such language? Would you not rather say, "If the whole truth were known, this could not have happened?" But every case is a special case to the victim. And which of us who has not been a convict in prison has the right to declare that prison is the "desert" of any man? We do not know what we are talking about.

I was looking out of the window of the Isolation Building one day, with the runner, Ned, beside me; I did my writing there, and he was assigned for duty to the same building. Ned, to whom I have already referred, was a thoughtful young man, and often said a word that went to the center of the subject. We had no business, of course, to be conversing together, but the guard was absent for the moment. We were watching the convicts form in the yard for the march to their several places of occupation; there was a double row of them down there in front of us being marshaled to go to the stone-shed, about fifty yards away. There they would remain till evening, chipping away at blocks of granite, and breathing the dust created by their labor.

The stone-shed men were mostly recruited from the so-called hard cases among the convicts; the work was hard, and rapid-fire guards were generally picked to take care of them. A man had been shot to death there about five years before by a guard, on no better grounds than that the man had not moved quickly enough in response to an order. No action against the guard was taken, and he is still on duty in the prison; perhaps he knows too much. The stone-shed men prepare the stone used in the construction of the buildings already mentioned; and they are also employed at times, by no regulation to be found in any of the books, to do odd jobs for members of the prison force; as when, for example, they were required to turn out a monument for the wife or other relative of a guard who had died, and for whom he was unable to provide a suitable memorial at his own expense. For whatever purpose the stone work is done, legitimate or illegitimate, the workers are not enthusiastic about it, and probably not many of them will live long enough, at least in prison, to see their handiwork in practical use.

Arrayed near them was another file, destined to work on the grounds belonging to the prison outside the warden's famous wall, where turnips, potatoes, corn and other vegetables are grown. The vegetables grow—it can hardly be said that they are cultivated; I don't know what a New York market gardener would say to them. They grow, and in due season some of them appear on the prison table; others do not appear, but whether they are left to rot in the ground, or are put to a more remunerative use, I do not personally know. There is no great enthusiasm among the gardeners, either.

Suddenly, Ned groaned out, "Oh, the aimlessness of it! Why don't you write a piece in our paper about the aimlessness of prison work? Aimless—that's what it is! How can a fellow feel interested in what he's doing, when he never knows what he's doing it for, or what becomes of it when it's done—let alone that he isn't paid for it? Aimlessness—that's what we get here in prison, and that's all we learn here. Did you ever think what a prison would be if there was any common sense aim in anything? Those fellows could make this place the finest thing you could imagine, if they were taken hold of by somebody with common sense, and put on jobs that had any sense in them. But they are kept dawdling around, and never know where they're at. It kills 'em—that's what it does! You'd think a criminal would be taught anything but aimlessness; it was aimlessness that got him here in the first place, nine times out of ten.

"Why, take what goes on in the printing office that you were assigned to, for instance," he went on, with a sidelong grin at me. "You have a month to get out the paper, four to six pages large quarto. How long would it take to do that stunt in New York?"