He was a man of forty, as naive and "innocent" (in the unmoral sense) as a child; and he had been in jail off and on since he was ten years old. I happened to be in the front office at the moment when J. was signing receipts and receiving his property preparatory to leaving. He was dressed in a neat business suit of his own—not a prison-made monstrosity. He was clean and smooth and bright, and tremulous with excitement. He signed his papers with a shaking hand, he took up and put down again his well packed gripsack, he shook hands with a sort of clinging, appealing grasp, as if he were afraid of being left alone, he giggled and looked profoundly solemn by turns. The officials stood about, indifferent and contemptuous, the men who had been hard and cruel to him, and those who had not been so hard.
It was a bright, beautiful day, full of sunshine; J. picked up his grip and marched down the corridor and out into the free air. He wore a brave air of hope and determination, but one could detect underneath it symptoms of misgiving. He had vowed to be good, but could he keep the vow, when "the boys got round him"? I wished him good luck with all my heart. Six months have passed, and J. is not back in jail yet, so far as I have heard. But the spies are watching him, and he won't be safe till he is dead.
A man with whom chance brought me frequently in contact was H., a yegg, as the term is.
When a guard is escorting a batch of visitors about the prison, he speaks of the yeggs in an ominous tone, as if they were some deadly monster, hardly to be even looked at with impunity. But yeggs, as a body, are the best men in the prison; they have a code of honor, and strength of character. Outside, they blow open safes, and do other risky jobs; and they will shoot to kill on the occasions when it is their life or the other man's. They will do this, because they know what a prison is, and also what spies outside prison are. But they will spare your life, if possible; not because they care for you—they hate and despise you, as being a man who would be and have in the past been merciless to them, and as a hypocrite who is either a rascal on the sly or would be if you possessed the courage or were subjected to the temptation—they spare you not from mercy but a settled policy; killing is bad business, and means sooner or later a violent end for the killer.
Most yeggs are men of more than average intelligence, and sometimes of fair education; they were not born outlaws; but, if you can win them to speak of themselves, you will generally find that they have undergone things both in and out of prison enough to make an outlaw out of a saint. Most men succumb under such things, and either die, or become cowed in spirit; the yeggs have survived, and their spirit is unbroken. They hold the highest place in the estimation of their fellow prisoners; and the warden and the guards fear them. By that I mean that they fear to inflict severities upon them except upon some pretext at least plausible; for the yeggs know the rules, and though they will submit without a whimper to the crudest punishments if cause can be alleged for it, yet wanton liberties, such as prisoners less well informed or more pusillanimous submit to, cannot safely be taken with them.
The yeggs stand together; they have esprit de corps, and if, as happened last summer at Atlanta, the food supply drops actually to the starvation point in both quantity and quality, they stand forward—as they did then—as champions for the rest of the men; they protest openly, they will not be wheedled or terrorized, and they go to the hole as one man. Nor will they come out thence until the warden comes to them and promises improvement. The warden promises, not because he desires improvements, but because he fears the scandal of mutiny in the prison—an inconvenient thing when one is supposed to be conducting a model institution; and even an easy going public, which will tolerate other forms of cruelty to convicts, feels compunction about starving them, especially when it is taxed to provide them with wholesome and sufficient food.
About my friend H.—I have no space here to tell his story, nor to outline it even; it is a terrible one. I may be able, some time, in another place, to present it in full. I will say now only that he was once confined for three years in a contract labor jail which has the worst features conceivable in any prison of to-day or of a hundred years ago, and men are killed there by overwork and punishments as a matter of routine; few survive the treatment so long as H. did. Once during his three years he uttered three words aloud; for that he was punished so long and so savagely that the horror of it yet remains with him. Prisoners constantly maim their hands voluntarily in the machinery in order to be quit of the torture of the work; the bleeding stumps of their fingers or hands are roughly bound up, and they are driven back to their machines. The warden is an oily, comfortable rogue, who beams upon visitors and fools the prison commission to the top of its bent, and he bears an excellent reputation for the large amount of work he gets out of his prisoners; "They just love it, my boys do," he avers; "nothing like work to keep men happy, you know." And then, when the coast is clear, he turns upon his boys like a bloodthirsty tiger.
But what I wish to say here is, that when H. at last finished his term and was thrust forth into the crowded street of the city, his legs failed him, and he tottered along scared like a wild beast at the noise and bustle. A man addressed him, and he stared at him blankly, and could not command his tongue to speak words. He wandered on irregularly, starting at imaginary dangers, unnerved at the height of the sky, the noise, the movement. He sought the least frequented streets, but his aspect and bearing made people look suspiciously at him, and he found his way to the slums, where he got a room and shut himself in with a feeling of relief. It was several days before he could school himself to talk and act like an ordinary human being. His health was shattered, though he was naturally a strong and hearty man; eating made him sick, though he was faint for lack of right feeding.
He could find no steady employment, but helped himself along with odd jobs here and there. He was resolute to keep straight, but an old pal of his happened to meet him, did him some good turns, and finally proposed his joining two or three men in a promising burglary. H. asked time to think it over, and that night he left the city in a sort of panic, and traveled to a large town a hundred miles away. Here he succeeded in getting a good job; his spirits began to revive; he made some good acquaintances, and prospered beyond all expectation for nearly a year. One day he noticed a man in the street who stared hard at him; not long after he saw the same man standing in front of the house in which he lodged; the next morning his landlord came to him and, with some embarrassment, said that he would have to ask him for his room; a relative was about to visit him and he needed the accommodation.
It was as he had feared—the detectives had run him down. He put what he possessed in a trunk and left town that evening for a place nearly a thousand miles west. Here he was left undisturbed for fifteen months, and made a new start in business. Then the chief of the local police sent for him and said, "I don't want to be rough on you; but the best thing you can do is to skip; we're on to you—understand?" "But I'm doing a straight business," H. pleaded. "You may be; but you're a crook," was the reply.