Can such things be? Indeed they can, and they are. There is poor C. in Atlanta now, the victim of such a deal; and S., and H., and many more. C., indeed, told me, and I believe him, that he never committed any crime at all, other than to get drunk and to sleep out on the road; he was apprehended for vagrancy, then charged with a post-office robbery in another state (which he had never visited), advised by the detective who "took an interest" in him to confess, upon the promise of being let off with a light sentence; he got the limit, and will wear out his youth in jail, while the detective is complimented for his efficiency.
The Government is extravagant. What is the use of spending money on a shoddy suit of clothes for each one of thousands of convicts every year, and giving each of them a five dollar bill, with the certainty that, in a large majority of cases, they will be back in their cells in a few days or weeks, or months? Look up, if you please, the statistics as to the number of convicts who are second or third offenders. Nay, the Government is itself the prime and most effective cause of their getting back, since it is government spies that provide the evidence that sends them up.
But can we afford to trust ex-convicts? Must we not keep a strict eye on them? If the strict eye were also a friendly one, it might be of some avail. But our hand is against them, and we need not wonder that theirs is against us. Not only are we their enemies when they emerge from jail, but (as has been repeated interminably by every investigator who has been qualified to speak on the subject) jails are the best and only schools of crime. In other words, we first educate men to be criminals by putting them in places where they can learn nothing else, and then we keep them criminals by shutting against them, when freed, every opportunity to earn food and lodging in legitimate ways. And then we complain that they are not to be trusted.
Neither can men fed on poisons be trusted to be well. Jail life is poisonous; I think it was Judge McLeland who said, last summer, "Our million dollar reformatories offer university courses in bestiality and crime; it is as logical to send a man to jail to make him better as to shut him up in a garbage-can to improve his digestion. Forty per cent. of those who go to jail, go back again," he added; "one man went back one hundred and seventy-six times. Others are sent because they are poor and cannot pay a fine, and they are there made real criminals."
An instance of this occurred in a Georgia chain-gang while I was in Atlanta. A man was sentenced for playing cards for money. He could not pay the $45 fine demanded, and in default, was sent to the chain-gang for eight months. He wore stripes, night and day, and if contumacious, was whipped by the guards. His work was in a stone quarry, a deep hole, into which the summer sun poured an insufferable heat. He was forced to do his work with a 49-pound hammer in that funnel-shaped pit, at a hundred degrees in the shade—if he could find any shade. One day he told the guard he was sick, and could not work any longer. The guard shifted the quid in his mouth and remarked that he ought to have said so that morning. But the man meant what he said, and proved it by dying a day or two later. Probably you may have played cards for money at some time in your life. Did it ever occur to you that you merited torture and death for it?
Or do you think that, after such an experience (if you survived it), or after being twice arrested for the same crime and kept in jail five years three times over, or after doing time for a crime you never committed—that you would come out at the end of it all, smiling, full of energy and enterprise, loving your neighbor, eager for honest toil? Would you embrace Mr. Moyer (or whomever your jailer was) and tell him, with tears of gratitude, that you could never repay him for his warm-hearted, big-brained care of you—the starving, the dungeoning, the clubbing, and all the rest of the university course?
Would you feel like that? Or would you stare out upon the world into which you were contemptuously tossed with dull, hating, revengeful eyes, suspicious of all men, hopeless of good, but resolved to get even, so far as you might, by plying the evil trades which your life of slavery had taught you? Would you behave like Christ upon the Cross, or like an ordinary man? Convicts are ordinary men, except that they are often, to begin with, diseased men, or hemmed in by conditions so untoward as to make an honest life ten or a hundred times harder than it ever was for you.
But you did not scruple to put this diseased or unfortunate version of yourself into the jail cauldron, to stew there with others like or worse than himself, for doing what, in most cases, he actually could not help doing; and when at last he was ejected like stale refuse, you were indignant because his looks did not please you, because he bore upon him the stains and the stench which the cauldron had fastened on him, because he did not, in the teeth of the secret service, the postoffice inspectors, the detective bureaus and the police, at once begin to lead an honest life and support the commonwealth. Do you say that none of this was your doing? But it is your doing, in just so far as you have not striven in every way open to you to extirpate the doing of it by this representative government.
The wonderful thing—the unexpected and pathetic thing—is, that so many convicts come out of jail in a kindly and inoffensive state of mind. They are men who were born weak, humble and yielding, never esteemed themselves, were always ready to take a back seat and give precedence to others. They do not understand the rights of the matter, but suppose it must be all right, that penal servitude is the proper thing for them, that laws were made by wise men and must be enforced. They admit their stealings and their trickery, and blame themselves, observing regretfully that they didn't seem able to help it. Next time—if they get a next time—they will try very hard to be straight, and perhaps they will succeed after all!
There was little J., in the barbers' gang, a cheerful, smiling, sweet tempered fellow, who had served I know not how many terms for small larcenies and turpitudes. "I've always been such a damned little fool," he would say to me, as he smoothed off my chin. "The boys would get round me and rope me into some scheme, and I didn't seem able to keep clear of 'em. But I'm goin' to be let out again next July, and I've made up my mind I'll never be seen here again! No, sir! Oh, I've been talkin' with the chaplain, too, and I've been reading the Bible, and all that, and I'm going to be a good man. Yes, sir! I've had my fling, and I'm through with it; when the boys get round me and tell me of some easy job, I'll tell 'em, No! Not for J."