"Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner!" we pray in our churches. But He says, "With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you again." We do not set the Lord a good example of mercy in our prisons.
XI
THE GRASP OF THE TENTACLES
I have spoken of punishments inside the prison. When a man has served his time and is set free (as it is called) another punishment begins, which may be worse and more disheartening than the suffering endured inside the walls.
As I listened, on Saturday afternoons, or at other times, to the stories hurriedly and guardedly told me by my fellow convicts who had served more terms than one, I said to myself, "The wrong of prison is bad enough; but this of what happens to a man after prison is worse, and monstrous." The endless tentacles follow him, reach out after him, surround him, fasten upon him, and draw him back whence he came. And not that only, but they mark him and isolate him, disable him from free action, make honesty impossible for him. No citizen of whatever integrity and standing, if so pursued, maligned and undermined, would have any choice left him but either to perish or to break the laws. The spies of the government, with the prestige and power of the government behind them (however despicable and vicious they may be in themselves), can ruin any man; but ex-convicts are their staple food.
In the latter part of June, 1913, a federal judge named Emory Speer was accused of evil deeds on the bench, and a congressional investigation was announced. The judge was taken ill, and at this writing the investigation still hangs fire. Now, the evidence against him had been collected, it would appear, by the agency of government spies, and this fact caused great indignation in some quarters. Here was a man not convicted of felony, but a pillar of the state, being pursued by detectives just as if for all the world he were an ordinary person—an obscure private citizen, say, or an ex-convict! The judge himself was very indignant, and his friends on the local press were rasping in their comments. In a long editorial entitled "The Shadow of the Spy," one Atlanta paper denounced the proceedings root and branch. It affirmed that the governmental spy system had assumed such proportions during the past few years as to threaten one of the mainstays of free government.
All this interested my comrades, not because the spy system was news to them, but because no public notice had been taken of it until it began to wring the withers of persons who had hitherto supposed themselves to be in the position of promoters instead of victims of the practise. A federal judge had never protested against pursuing with spies men suspected of crimes, or men who, having served time upon conviction, had then gone out into the world and attempted to lead a new life. The spy system, so conducted, seemed to such persons proper and normal. But the moment they found their own acts investigated, their own footsteps dogged, they became indignant, and denounced the whole principle of the thing.
No man convicted in a federal or state court, or set free after having done his time in prison, but is abundantly conversant with the methods of the American spy.
As we all know, the first thing done with a new prisoner is to take his bertillons, and the record of these measurements and observations, together with two photographs of him, or with four, if he had a beard when convicted, is sent to every police office in the country, and is there studied by the detectives and police. The intention, of course, is to render easier the recognition of "old offenders," and to curtail their future industries. It is generally affirmed that bertillons cannot be mistaken; but in a Detroit court, on January both, 1914, an expert declared that "a difference of one-eighth of an inch in the laying on of the fingers made an entirely different impression"; and "judgment was awarded against the bank," which, relying upon the infallibility of the finger record, had brought the action. At any rate, the bertillon is still a potent weapon with the police, and when they want a man for a crime committed, or when they desire to drive out of any given place on the face of the earth a man who has been previously a convict, they have but to point to his bertillons, and the thing is done.
Let us see how this may work out in practise. A convict, having served his term, is presented by the United States (or a state, as the case may be) with a suit of new clothes, and with a five dollar bill. He also gets a ticket on the railway to the place of his destination, and, though he is in theory a free man from the moment that he passes the prison gates, as a matter of fact an official is assigned to take charge of him and put him on his train; he cannot remain in Atlanta (supposing for the once that Atlanta Penitentiary has been his abiding place during his sentence) on penalty, if he do, of forfeiting his ticket and having to pay his own way. This may be a provision of the law, or it may be simply a measure to prevent ex-convicts from talking to newspaper reporters or other enquiring persons. The thing is invariably done, unless the man's residence happens to be Atlanta itself.