The Subterranean Brotherhood

by Julian Hawthorne

And what is the fruit of it? For pure, carefree, smiling, remorseless wickedness nothing in human annals surpasses the young criminals—black-mailers, bomb-throwers, gunmen—now infesting our cities. "I think no more of killing a houseful of human beings, men, women and children," one of them was quoted as saying the other day, "than of crushing so many beetles." How came such a monster to exist? Why, we bred him, supplied him with the poisonous conditions that generate such beings and can generate nothing else. He had intelligence enough to understand that the established order made earning an honest living hard work; saw thousands living well without labor apparently, other thousands robbing under cover of legal technicalities; a legal profession living by devising statutes to punish crimes and prosecuting the criminals thus manufactured; often living better yet by teaching criminals to escape the penalties which their law imposed. He saw reform schools which instructed such children as he had been to become such men as he was; prisons and penitentiaries which graduated such as he in the latest devices of crime—and he made up his mind that goodness was at bottom humbug, that only a fool would be honest or merciful when money could be got by theft and murder.

We breed poisonous snakes and scorpions, give them no chance to be anything but that, and then wonder they are not doves and butterflies. Things like this gangster are infernal spirits, irreclaimable; but we gain nothing by extirpating the individuals; the black stream which carries them must be dammed at its source. Of the conditions which generate them, a part is the prisons and their keepers. But we are not yet at the root of the matter—the keepers are not primarily to blame. It is the principle which prisons illustrate which attracts and molds keepers till they become often as bad as the men they have charge of, and often much worse.

Prisons mean social selfishness, the disowning of our own flesh and blood. They segregate visible consequences of social disease; but the disease is invisibly present in all parts of the body corporate, and can no more be healed by cutting off the visible part than we can heal small pox by cutting out the pustules. Prisons are not the right remedy; they inflame and disseminate the poison we would be rid of and prevent any chance of cure. The soul of all crime is self-seeking in place of neighborly good will; we send men to prison to get them out of our way, and that is criminal self seeking and ill will to the neighbor—delegating to hirelings our own proper business.

In attempting thus selfishly to extirpate crime, we commit the crime least of all forgivable—the denial of human brotherhood and responsibility. For that crime, no law sends us to prison; yet it is no sentimental notion, but the truth, that it is a crime worse than those for which we imprison men. Prisons are brimful of men less guilty before God than is the society that condemned them. You and I are not excused because we are not society—we are society. Society is not numbers but an idea—a mutual relation; we cannot shift our blame to people in the next street. "Am I my brother's keeper?" was an argument used long ago, and its reception was not encouraging.

Thoughts like these pass through a convict's mind when he discovers that he is on the last leg of his disastrous voyage. He then begins to see the whole matter in its general relations; what use was served? who is the better for it? "Prisons make a good man bad and a bad man worse," is the way I often heard the men at Atlanta put it. The situation, entire and in detail, is preposterous and futile. Grown men, from all ranks of life, or all degrees of intelligence and education, are herded promiscuously, and treated now like wild beasts, now like children. Discipline, in any condition of life, is a good thing, and no people need discipline more than we do; but in prison, discipline means punishment, and there is no discipline in the right sense of the word. A man is "disciplined" when he is starved, or clubbed, or put in the hole, or deprived of his good time.

Military discipline might be beneficial; it implies respect for rightful authority, and orderly conduct of one's own life. Officials in a penitentiary wear uniforms; prisoners wear prison clothes; but, in warm weather, officials go about, indoors and out, in their shirts and with the bearing of loafers; they have no official salutes, and the men are not allowed to salute them—to do so would expose them to "discipline." There is no drill in the prison, no soldierly bearing, no physical control of movement. The men are "lined up" to go to work, but it is a line of slouchers and derelicts; no spirit in it, no respect for themselves or one another, no decent example set by the guards. And yet armies in all ages and in all parts of the world have proved the value of discipline—its necessity, indeed—in all proper and intelligent handling and control of bodies of men; and it is as important for convicts as for soldiers. It would promote cheerfulness, smartness, efficiency; half an hour's lively drill of all the men in prison every morning and evening would do them good, improve relations between guards and prisoners, and lessen the danger of revolts. Why refuse it then? Is it because it would imply something human still lingering in convicts? or because it is feared that convicts taught to act in unison by military drill would combine more readily for mutiny? But order does not naturally lead to disorder but away from it, and mutinies are mostly impromptu affairs, contemplating revenge rather than escape. As for the other argument, a lie is not a sound basis to build on, and it is a lie that convicts are not human. To admit this would facilitate their management.

Physical exercise twice a day in the open air would diminish the sick line, produce better work, and help to put a soul in any prison. Desultory exercise—say two or three hours of baseball on Saturdays—does not meet the need—it emphasizes it rather. But at present the well-nigh universal aim seems to be to render the gray monotony of prison slavery as monotonous and as gray as possible. Any relief from it is opposed or made difficult. It is true that at Atlanta and elsewhere we have music (that is what it is called, and I have no wish to criticize the hardworking and zealous young fellows who produce it in and out of season; and some of the men may like it for aught I know); and that a vaudeville company performs for us occasionally. But I must look these gift horses in the mouth, and say that often we have them less for our own advantage than as an advertisement to the public of the liberality of prison authorities. And there to be sure at my prison, is Uncle Billy, who makes fiddles out of shingles, with nails, and plays on them, all with one hand. But he is—I hope I may now say, he was; for he was to have been paroled the other day; he was a lifer, and a picturesque and wholly innocuous figure—he was, then, permitted to pursue this industry, and visitors used to come and watch him do it; but he, too, was most useful to the prison press agent, and owed the indulgence to that functionary. On the other hand, there is a convict, also a lifer, who cultivated a most remarkable skill in inlaid woodwork, producing really beautiful and artistic boxes and other articles, and found some consolation for his awful fate in making them. But one day while I was there his cell was entered by the guard, his boxes and plant taken away and broken, and he was forbidden to do that work any more. Visitors did not know about him.

This was malicious. But some of the things done by prison authorities are apparently due to sheer stupidity and ignorance. For example, there were some cows belonging to Atlanta prison, and some of them calved. So there were half a dozen calves more or less, with prospects of more to come. The authorities decided that the expense of rearing these innocents was not justifiable; there was nothing in the rule book about it; besides, the jail was not designed to harbor innocent creatures. The minutes of the conference were not given out, and we can judge of what passed only by the results. The order went forth that the calves be killed; and the killing was actually perpetrated, and the bodies were buried somewhere in the prison grounds. The story seems incredible, but it was corroborated by several men cognizant of the facts. Why not, at least, have turned them into veal?

I was speaking just now of the promiscuous herding together of prisoners in prisons generally. No effort is made to separate the old from the young, the educated from the ignorant; the hardened sinners from the impressionable youths or newcomers; or (at Atlanta, except in the cells), the negroes from the whites. Association of negroes with whites, on a footing of enforced outward equality, is bad for both; not because a bad white man is worse than a bad negro, but because the physical, mental and moral qualities of either react unfavorably upon the other. The negro, being the more ignorant as a rule, falls more readily into degraded vices; the white man, being as a rule the dominant element in the situation, masters the will of the negro, but cannot or at least does not erect barriers against the latter's subtle corruption.

We must always bear in mind the abnormal conditions in a prison—the misery of it, the dearth of variety and relaxation, the terrible yearning for some form, any form, of distraction and amusement. The male is parted from the female, and from the resource of children; his nerves are on edge, his natural propensities starved, his thoughts wandering and embittered; he finds no good anywhere, nor any hope of it. He will seize upon any means of abating or dulling his cravings. The negro is pliant, unmoral, free from the restraints of white civilization. In the South especially, his subordination to the white is almost a second nature; but he involuntarily avenges himself (as all lower races do upon the stronger) by that readiness to comply which flatters the sense of power and superiority in the other, and leads to evil.