[VI
UNWELCOMED HOME-COMING]
Liberty! How much that word means to all of us! It is the keynote of our Constitution. It is the proud right of every citizen. The very breeze that flutters our starry flag sings of it; the wild forests, the rocky crags, the mountain torrents, the waving grasses of the wide-stretching prairies echo and reecho it. Yet much as we may think we know of the fullness, sweetness and power of that word, we cannot form an estimate of its meaning to one who is in prison. He has lost the gift and those who have it not, can often prize the treasure more than those who possess it.
People have talked to me about the prisoner becoming quite reconciled to his lot, and in time growing indifferent to the regaining of liberty. I think this is one of the fallacies that the outside world has woven. I do not know from what prison such an idea emanated. So far as my observation goes, I have yet to find the first prisoner who did not long with an unspeakable desire for freedom. Even the older life-men who have been in long enough to outlive all their friends, who have no kith or kin to return to, and for whom there is no home-spot on earth, plead earnestly for the chance to die in liberty. They hope and plan, they appeal and pray for pardon, though it would send them from the familiar sheltering walls into a strange, cold world, but the world of free men. In every cell are men who count all dates by one date, the day coming to them in the future when they will be free again. Sometimes it is very far away and yet that does not make it any less vividly present in their thought. The chief use in the calendar is to mark off the passing days and some have even figured off minutely the hours that stand between them and liberty.
There is a weird cry that breaks out sometimes amid the midnight stillness of the prison cell-house, the venting of a heart's repressed longing, "Roll around, 1912," and from other cells other voices echo, each putting in the year of his liberty. I heard the cry break out in chapel one Christmas day as the gathering at their concert broke up, every year being called by the "boys" who looked forward to it as their special year of liberty. "Roll around, 1912." How far away it seems to us even in liberty, but how much further to the man who must view it through a vista of weary toilsome prison days.
Having talked with many just before their dis when the days and hours leave but a few grains to trickle through the glass of time they have watched so closely, I know just what a strain and tension these last days represent. Often the man cannot sleep for nights together under the excitement and the nervous strain proves intense. Through the dark nights of wakefulness he puts the finishing touches to the castles in the air that he has been building through the weary term when with his body in prison, his mind wandered out into the days to come, and hope, battling with fear, painted for him a rainbow in the storm clouds of the future.
Can you imagine how hard and bitter is the awakening for such a man when he returns to life to find himself a marked and branded being, one to be distrusted and watched, pointed out and whispered about, with all too often the door of honest toil shut in his face? The man discharged from prison is not unreasonable. He does not expect an easy path. We do not ask for him a way strewn with roses or a cheer of welcome. He has sinned, he has strayed from the right road, plunged over the precipice of wrong-doing, and it must at best be a hard climb back again. The men do not ask nor do we ask for them an easy position, the immediate restoration of the trust, confidence and sympathy of the world on the day of their return. They know they cannot expect, having thrown away their chances in an evil past, to find them awaiting their return to moral sanity. I have not found them unreasonable and certainly very few have been lazy or unwilling to prove their sincerity. What we do ask for the released prisoner and what we feel he has a right to ask of the world is a chance to live honestly, an opportunity to prove whether or not he has learned his lesson so that he may climb back into the world of freedom and into a useful respectable position where he may be trusted.
When God forgives us He says that our sins and transgressions shall be blotted out like a cloud or cast into the sea of His forgetfulness. He believes in a buried past. The world alas! too often goes back to that wretched old grave to dig up what lies there, and flaunts the miserable skeleton before the eyes of the poor soul, who had fondly hoped that when the law was satisfied to the last day and hour, he had paid for his crime, and might begin afresh with a clean sheet to write a new record.
How often we hear the term "ex-convict." Do the people who use it ever stop to think that the wound is as deep and the term as odious as that of "convict" to the man who has been in prison? When he is liberated, when the law has said, "Go in peace and sin no more," he is a free man, and no one has the right to regard him as other than this. Any name which marks him out is a cruel injustice. If the State provided for the future of these men; if they were not dependent on their own labors for their daily bread, it would not be quite so ghastly, but when one thinks that this prejudice and marking of discharged prisoners, robs them of the chance of gaining a living, and in many instances forces them back against their will into a dishonest career, one can realize how truly tragic the situation is.