We need not follow him further; he was driven from one place to another. At last he was caught with stolen goods on him, he having undertaken to help an old friend of his out of a tight place by carrying his gripsack from one place to another; it proved to contain some plunder from a recent burglary. He got off with a two year sentence; but it was the end of his attempt to reform. "Crooked or straight, I'll end in jail," he said to me, with that strange convict smile which means such unspeakable things. "I've got two years more here; if I last it out, they'll get me again."
I firmly believe that he would have been an honest and successful man if he had been let alone.
It sometimes happens that the manhood of a convict is so sapped by long sufferings that even his desire for freedom is lost. He is afraid to be free; he cannot live at ease outside of his cell walls. Perhaps you will say that goes to prove the gentleness and humanity of prison discipline. To me it seems a thing so appalling that I must be content with the bare statement of the fact. A man is afraid to be free, afraid of the great wonderful world, and of his fellow creatures, and can endure what he supposes to be life only in his steel cell. What has put that fear in him? But our laws provide no penalty for dehumanizing a fellow creature under the forms of law. If it be legal, it must be right.
I knew a man in our prison who had been thirty-five years in confinement, with short intervals of liberty. The best favor he could ask was to be allowed to stay all day and all night in his cell, doing nothing. Year after year, nothing else than this appeared to him worth while. He was well educated, as prisoners go, quiet and inoffensive. "I wish some doctor would examine me and tell me what is the matter with me," he remarked to me once. "Maybe I'm crazy!"
After all, the world, in its way, is as hard a place for ex-convicts as a jail; more cruel, perhaps, inasmuch as it seems to offer hopes that jails deny. But can a world be called civilized that is satisfied with that arraignment?
XII
THE PRISON SILENCE
How many convicts, during the past twenty years, have served their terms and been released? and yet what does the public know of the real inside of prisons? This used to perplex me at first. My fellow prisoners with whom I talked were bitter and voluble enough in denouncing the conditions; but no sooner had they passed the gates to freedom than they became strangely silent. Some of them even were quoted in the local papers as praising and upholding what they had just before condemned.
There was a Japanese prisoner, for example, the only man of his nation there, I think, who gained attention by copies of well-known pictures which he made, to be hung on the walls of the chapel, and by designing back and side scenes for the stage. I never talked personally with him, or saw him but at a distance, as he hastened along the corridor; but men who knew him said that he was especially savage in his diatribes against the prison and its keepers, and had promised, as soon as he was freed, to make numerous ugly disclosures to the world. But when we searched the local papers after his release, what we found was a hearty and explicit laudation of the prison and its officials. Had it been written by the warden himself, it could not have been more sunny and satisfied.
Again, there was a man with us who had been sentenced for life on a murder charge of a singularly revolting kind; he had been in confinement seventeen years when I first knew him, but had always consistently protested his innocence. He applied for parole, and his application was granted. At this time he occupied a large cell containing eleven other prisoners, of whom I was one; and he attached himself very closely to me, and upon coming in from his work each evening, would sit beside my cot and hold my hand and pour out his heart to me in lamentations, asseverations of his innocence, picturings of the horrors of his long confinement, forecastings of what he meant to do when he was freed—to address audiences from the pulpit and rostrum, and convince the world of the horrors of penal imprisonment. He was deeply religious, and had the moral courage to kneel down, before all the men in the cell, and spend five minutes or more in prayer every evening before going to bed. Every one believed that he had been wrongly convicted, if for no better reason, because he had never once wavered from his claim of innocence during those seventeen years, and because his conduct and bearing in the prison had always been exemplary. He was a man of powerful body and strong, impressive mind; his speech was simple and convincing, and I told him that I thought he would succeed as an avatar of prison iniquities. He professed an ardent affection for me, and expressed enthusiastic anticipations as to the outcome of my own projects for calling public attention to the evils in question.