The one-year-one-day men lost about thirty-three per cent. of their time during which they might have labored to reform themselves; and there were about one hundred of the two hundred and seventy whose sentences ran for a year and a day. Some sixty-five of the two hundred and seventy had sentences of more than a year and a day and less than two years; about thirty-five had over two years and under three years; from which it would appear that short term men, convicted of minor offenses, were given preference for parole over long term men. Yet it would seem to the ordinary intelligence that it should be the long term men who most needed parole and, if their conduct had been good, best deserved it. It often happened that men would be paroled when they had but a few weeks or even days yet to serve of their full sentence. In such cases, the prison got whatever credit may belong to granting parole, but the men got rather less than nothing, for they stood the risk of re-arrest and further confinement.
When an applicant goes before the board for examination, he is sometimes turned down summarily; but more often he goes out ignorant whether or not he will succeed, and, as I have already shown, he is not seldom kept in this torturing uncertainty until the day when he is either turned loose or told that he has been rejected. This seems unnecessary, and often appears to be due to sheer carelessness; the papers are not promptly submitted to the Attorney-General, or they are pigeonholed and forgotten. It may be true that the law does not categorically demand that a prisoner shall be released immediately upon a favorable report; but there is no obvious reason why he should not be, and it is cruel to keep him in suspense.
There was a young fellow while I was there, a well educated and agreeable man, whose conduct had always been unexceptionable; he applied when eligible for parole, and was informed that he would be released. Every morning thereafter for three weeks he arose with the hope that the release would come that day; every night he went to bed with a heart heavy with disappointment. He could not eat or sleep, he could not talk connectedly, he trembled and turned pale, and was on the way to becoming a nervous wreck; but no explanation was vouchsafed him. At last he was suddenly told that he might go. The sole reason that I ever heard for the delay was that the papers had been overlooked. There are a great many government employees at Washington; it might be worth while to appoint one more, charged with the duty of seeing that the overlooking of parole papers be henceforth avoided. This was a very mild instance; I have related how poor Dennis lingered for six months and finally died from the same inattention or indifference.
There was a friend of mine, M., a highly intelligent, good natured fellow, active and efficient in his prison duties, always courteous and obliging; he was serving a sentence of five years, I think, for some theft or confidence game. He had "done time" some six or seven years previously, but during the interval had lived straight. At the time of his last arrest he had been kept in the local jail, somewhere in New England, after conviction, for four months before being transferred to Atlanta. Time spent in a local jail before conviction is not counted in the prisoner's favor; for example, I was arrested several months before my conviction, and the trial itself lasted four months, and after the trial I spent ten days in the Tombs.
With the exception of the last ten days, however, I was lucky enough to be out on bail; but none of this time was applied to the lessening of my sojourn in Atlanta, although the judge specified in his sentence that my imprisonment there was to count from the time when the trial began; an injunction which, had it been observed, would have caused my release on parole a few days after my arrival at the penitentiary. But it appears that such rulings by a trial judge have no weight with the Department of Justice; and I am willing to admit that the judge's ruling in my case seemed rather like whipping the devil round the stump—an evasion of the manifest intent of the law, which, if I were guilty, I had no right to expect. At all events, the Attorney-General made a decision, based upon my case, that hereafter no such evasions were to be allowed; and I presume his authority must be superior to that of any federal judge.
But my friend's case did not come under this category. His four months in jail came after, not before, his conviction; and yet, when he arrived at Atlanta, he was told that this four months would not be deducted from his penitentiary time. Turn this which way you will, you cannot escape the conclusion that this man is getting four months more than the sentence of the judge required. Well, M. applied for parole on the plea of perfect conduct during his imprisonment; no denial of that was offered; but he was informed that his conviction seven years before, for which he had been duly punished at that time, prevented the board from giving favorable attention to his application.
This looks to me like trying a man twice for the same offense, and twice condemning him; and I can find nothing to warrant it in the wording of the parole law. If every actual or alleged mis-step of a man's whole life can be quoted against him as ground for refusing parole, it would seem tantamount to stultifying the law for parole.
This is not done in every case; but the point is that it may be done in any case, and thus the fate of the applicant is at the arbitrary and absolute disposal of the board, whether or not he have complied with the stated provisions of the law.
The president of the parole board, in my time, was a Mr. Robert LaDow. A former deputy warden of the Leavenworth Penitentiary, one W.H. Mackay, wrote a letter to the Attorney-General on the 6th of November, 1913, parts of which were published in newspapers about that time. In this letter he said that Mr. LaDow was egotistical, arrogant, negligent, extravagant, visionary and impractical, showed favoritism to prisoners, and was totally unfit for the position he held. He goes on as follows:
"Personally, he knows nothing of Leavenworth Federal Prison; he is too cowardly to go among the prisoners in the yards to make a personal investigation of conditions; he has dealt unfairly and hastily with so many at the parole meetings that he is afraid to meet prisoners face to face…. Prisoners will stand punishment without a murmur if there is a just reason for it, and they will permit you to be the judge; but when men under the law are entitled to parole, and the flimsy excuse to hold them in confinement is made that they will be a menace to society, they cannot see it in that way. The parole board at this time is arrogantly dominated by LaDow; it is practically a one-man board….