I wish to say, in passing, that my allusion to negroes in this connection is by no means to be taken as reflecting upon them all; some of the men in Atlanta for whom I had the highest respect were negroes; and I am inclined to think that the negro in his right place and function is a desirable element in civilization, and, if we would treat him aright, would do us as much good as we can do him. But the negro in jail is at his worst, just as white men are, and he is made worse by white companionship. There are more than two hundred of them in Atlanta jail, and some of them are the worst of their kind.
What is true of the association of negroes with whites is not less true of the association of what are called professional criminals with the young and unhardened. Various prison authorities claim that they have made some effort to prevent this contamination; but the only sign of it that I could ever discover at Atlanta was that the old and the young are not commonly assigned to the same cells. Obviously, however, a man young in years may be old in crime; there can be no security in the age test taken by itself; and no pretense of adopting any other test in a jail is made.
A young fellow, without inherited or acquired criminal tendencies, is sent to jail for some inadvertent and insignificant infraction of law. He had always meant to live straight; he had no enmity against society; he had always thought of himself as well intentioned and law abiding. But here he is; and he is shocked, shamed and appalled at the sudden grip and horror of the jail. Upon a mind thus astounded and distraught the professional criminal seizes and works.
The man of the world—of the criminal world—befriends him, chats with him, heartens him, and soon begins to fascinate him with ideas which had never till now occurred to him. He preaches the injustice and hostility of all mankind, and the hopelessness of the convict once in jail ever again reestablishing himself in the world. He tells his pupil that he is damned forever by his fellow men outside, and that unless he be prepared to lie down and starve, he must fight for life in the only way open to him—the way of crime. Then he proceeds to show him, progressively, the profits and advantages of criminal practises. It is only too easy for the trained crook to overcome the resistance of the unhardened youth; his arguments seem unanswerable; and the wholly justifiable feeling that prison is wrong and an outrage aids the corruptor at every turn. A few months is often enough to turn an innocent boy into a malefactor; a year or more of such instruction leaves him no chance of escape; and many an innocent boy finds himself in a cell for what seems to him a lifetime.
Last July, a justice of a State Supreme Court sentenced Thomas Baker, little more than a child, to fifteen years in jail for—what? If your mother was blind and helpless, and your stepfather came in and abused her and beat her, in your presence,—a big brute with whom you could not hope to contend physically,—what would be your feelings, and what would you be prompted to do? Thomas Baker, trembling and sobbing with rage and anguish, ran out of the house to a neighbor's, borrowed a shotgun, and ran back and emptied it into the brute's body, killing him on the spot. Fifteen years in prison for that! Shall we rejoice and say that justice, at last, is satisfied?—But that is a digression.
No doubt, meanwhile, Thomas Baker's one consolation in life is the reflection that he did succeed in killing his stepfather; and he will be very ready to give ear to an older and more experienced man who tells him that the only difference between good and bad in the world is that those are called good who have power over those who are called bad; and that the only way for him to get even for his wrongs is to become a crook—and not be a fool!
The wardens and guards do not prevent these companionships; whether or not they try to prevent them cannot be affirmed; but to my mind it is plain that they could not prevent it, try as they might. It is an evil inherent in prisons and ineradicable. As long as we have prisons, we shall see judges like Thomas Baker's sending boys to jail for such "crimes" as his, there to stay for fifteen years, more or less, and there to be changed from innocence into diabolism. But Thomas was not innocent, you say, but guilty. What is guilt? I find him innocent of the guilt of standing inactive by and seeing that cruel fist strike his blind mother's beloved face.
Anything unnatural seems unreal. I remarked some time ago that when I was sitting in the court room being tried on charges sworn to by certain postoffice officials, the dull and sordid scenes would sometimes vanish before me, and I would say to myself, "It is an illusion—what is really taking place is very different from this appearance."
This thought often recurred while I was in prison.
At meal times, the men would file in and take their places at the tables; anon, the meal over, they would rise and file out—men whom I knew, creatures like myself, slaves of an arbitrary power acting in accordance with principles long since known to be false and mischievous. And I would see men whom I knew, men like myself, jeered, insulted, clubbed, dragged to the hole. I would see the dead bodies of men whom I knew, men like myself, rattled out of the gate to the dumping ground and dropped there and forgotten—men with wives and children still living or dead in poverty and shame, their pleas unheard and their wrongs unrighted. I would contemplate the long rows of steel cells, cages for me and men like myself, locking us in for months and years and lifetimes, for an example to others and for the protection of society against our menace. I would glance, as I passed, at the aimless toilers in the workshops, standing or squatting in the foul atmosphere under the eye and rifle of the guard.