The Subterranean Brotherhood

by Julian Hawthorne

Meanwhile, it is for persons of intelligence and good will to consider whether, aside from physical penalties or jailing, we possess means for inducing criminals to abstain from crime. Let us leave abstract arguments and come to facts.

My license to speak in the premises is due to my being an ex-convict, sentenced to Atlanta Penitentiary for a year and a day, but recently released on "good time." I shall first give you a notion of what jail is, and of what is done and suffered there; then consider what has hitherto been done to alleviate prison conditions and abuses; and end with inquiring whether these measures, actively prosecuted, will prove adequate to the need, or whether something else and more is demanded. If so—what?

Purgatory is usually understood to be—as its etymology indicates—a place where persons encumbered with evil accretions may have them purged out of them, or stripped off from them, and so be fitted for the purity and innocence of Heaven. It is therefore a beneficent institution. Hell, on the other hand, was the inheritance of those whose evil is ingrowing and cannot be removed—a place where they may live out their diabolical or satanic natures and be punished and tortured by those of like nature with themselves.

Our prisons were, in the beginning, frankly hellish in their object; men who had incurred personal or society hostility were put in them to be tormented from motives of hate and revenge. But during the last few generations the humanitarian idea has come into being and has not only ameliorated prison conditions in some prisons and to some extent, but has caused prisons in general to cease being frank and to become hypocritical—to pretend that they are purgatories, aiming not at revenge but at reform. This pretense has been so industriously and sagaciously put forward that ninety-nine outsiders out of a hundred are misled by it, and believe that prisons are not, still, administered for the destruction of their inmates, physical, mental and moral, with such circumstances of cruelty and brutality as happen to suit the humor of the arbitrary and irresponsible guards and wardens; but that they are uniformly conducted with an eye to wooing away prisoners from sin and crime, and persuading them of the beauty and policy of honesty, gentleness and goodness. In fact it is probable that almost everybody believes this, except the wardens and guards, and the prisoners themselves—and a few Thomas Mott Osbornes and other prison workers who have had an amateur peep inside the walls and caught a fleeting glimpse of a horror or two before the discreet managers could get the door shut.

Not only so, but we read indignant articles in our morning paper about the coddling of criminals; and witty writers will have it that prisons are gentlemen's clubs where all the comforts of refined life are combined with a voluptuous idleness, or with only work enough to avert ennui. Criminals are depicted as waiting in cues at the gates of prisons for admission, like the public at the doors of a popular theater; though at the same time in another column, you may find the statement that, in view of modern legal technicalities, it has become almost impossible to get a man into jail. According to the logic of the witty writers, this near-impossibility should be more deplored by the technicality-inhibited criminals than by anybody else.

Prisons are not purgatories, nor gentlemen's clubs; they are just as much hell as they ever were, and as their managers can make them. Apart from any special leniency of local conditions, prisons are hell because they are prisons—because you are confined there and cannot get out; because you are a slave and have no redress; because your manhood is degraded; because despotic power is entrusted to the men who handle you, though they are never any better than you are, and are usually much worse, and regard you as an asset to make profit from, a thing to be driven and insulted to the last extremity and beyond it, and not as a human being. Prisons are hell because convicts are punished for trivial and whimsical reasons as much as for serious ones; and whether or not the punishment involve actual physical torture, the insolence, disgrace and injustice of it remain. Prisons are hell intrinsically, and always will be; and whoever doubts it has only to commit a crime and be sent to prison; that is the end of doubts.

Let every judge, attorney general, district attorney, and juryman at a trial spend a bona fide term in jail, and there would be no more convictions—prisons would end. Every convict and ex-convict knows that, and eternity will be too short to obliterate the knowledge in him.

The unctuous plausibility of the pretense that prisons are beneficent purgatories and not hells renders it the more sickening. Life is a God-given discipline for men, and at best a severe one; but if we believe in God, we know it is given in love, for loving ends. All mortal life is an imprisonment; the laws of it are essential and natural, and breaking them involves essential and natural penalties. God deputed this régimen of love to parents, and to those who deal with their fellow creatures from impulses of parental or brotherly love; but He never licensed any man to punish another from revenge or hate, or in mere indifference. He licensed no man to do it, nor any community or nation. And whoever does it, serves not God but the devil; and if any crime be unpardonable, it is that, because it is not essential or natural, but an usurpation against nature, and breeds not reform but more evil.

Prison officials, in their treatment of prisoners, are not actuated by love, but by indifference to suffering, or by animosity and brutality, or by desire of profit, and therefore their work is impious and wicked. And the longer they hold their office, the more hardened do they become to the spectacle of suffering and outrage; the more heedless of justice and mercy do they grow. They grow to disbelieve in any human truth and goodness; all men are to them criminals actual or potential; breathing and dwelling amidst crime, it enters into their own blood and temper. They will have their debt to pay; but neither may those escape who ignorantly or carelessly appointed them to office and hold them there—the Government, and the nation which creates Government as its representative. Ignorance does not excuse; knowledge on these subjects is a sacred duty. Man cannot break the bonds of his brotherhood with man; the blood shed will be required of him, and the usury of misery and tears.

"Throw him to the lions!—serve him right!" Most of us have joined in that barbarous cry upon occasion. But some of us have sickened at the slaughter, and are for paring the lions' claws, or at least exhorting them to roar less savagely, and to devour their prey in secret. But the lions, with their attendant hyenas and jackals, have so long been accepted as indispensable to the order and majesty of the State, that no one likes to stand up to his God-given intuitions, and demand the abolition of the whole prison circus. We hardly realize that the harm criminals do society cannot equal the harm that society does to itself by its handling of them and attitude toward them. The circus must go on, of course; but—let us ameliorate its coarser features!