After Prison--What?

by Maud Ballington Booth

"The one who has saved the babies and the mothers is equally successful with the man who comes Home. Every man is on honor. The farm and household duties, the care of the beautiful grounds give enough exercise to occupy the time though there is no particular task. Each one is interested in his Home. After the day is over there is the large library, music, games, etc. As the days go by, the man broken down by long imprisonment improves in body and mind. The living in God's sunshine helps body and soul. The terrible nervousness gives place to confidence, the prison pallor goes gradually, the good that has been sown brings forth fruit, the door is shut upon the past—tided over at the critical point—our comrade, ruddy in health and strong in spirit, is placed in a position. His past is known to one man—his employer. How different from all past attempts! No one can throw him down so long as he does well. The one who hires him will defend him and the Little Mother is his friend, and his comrades cheer him on.

"The story I've told is the same one three thousand made-over men can tell to-day. The V. P. L. has long since left the realms of theory for the stronghold of facts. The finest sermon preached in a man's life, the touchstone of our League is this, 'If a man is right, he will do right.'"

I must not forget the life-men in prison. If it were only for them, it would be well worth while to have our League established, that on their horizon otherwise so dark and gloomy, might be seen some breaking of the dawn that shall bring to them a brighter, sweeter life, when the full penalty has been paid and they pass into a world where the sweetest and fullest of liberty shall be theirs.

One of these life-men writes as follows:—"Dear Little Mother:—Nobody knows better than I do myself what the League has done for me and the men here. I have been in prison over twenty years, and know what I am talking about. Without it prison would be much like what it was before. I hope that with all the disappointments you are bound to meet with, you will continue to believe that there are hundreds of men in our great prisons who are in earnest. Most respectfully yours, No. 19595."

The following is written by one of our graduates who was for some years a member of the V. P. L. He did not himself need the shelter of Hope Hall, but he knew well what the Home was to those who were homeless. He is now a successful business man, has a happy home of his own and is a leader in the church to which he belongs, being the superintendent of the Sunday-school and much interested in all the active work of that little community.

"Dear Little Mother:—Word has reached me that you are completing a book telling the glorious story of the Volunteer Prison League and I am led to write you this expression of my joy that there is thus to be given to the world, something of the truth which you so well know of the real heart of the prisoner-man. Not only this, but after the passage of more than three years since I left prison, I want to bear this renewed testimony to you of the penetrating, permeating and abiding power of our loved League, to give and to hold hope and faith in the souls of disheartened, sinful, but contrite men.

"No good which has come to me in these prospering days of freedom, and no gladness which still unlived years may have in store for me, can ever dim in my grateful heart, the memory of what this League has done for me, and what I have seen it do for others in leading us out of despondency, imbuing us with courage, giving us strength to stand erect and in guiding us back to Christ and to God.

"Only those who have been face to face with the conditions of prison life, who know its revolting influences, who have daily breathed its debasing atmosphere, who have felt its contaminating touch, to whom has come the ever deepening sense of social degradation and of the repellent stigma placed indelibly upon them by their prison term can realize what the League means. They whose quickened consciences have scourged them unto the wish and the will to retrieve the sinful past, only to be hurled back into deeper disheartenment and desperation by the popular prejudice which questions their ability and almost denies them the rights to restoration, can fully appreciate the moral uplifting and incentive which this League gives. No words can express the tortures of the first awful days in prison. The isolation, the remorse, the heart-hardening power of stern discipline which regulates diet and toil, waking and sleeping and which sharply limits free-will and free-act; the dread consciousness that you are henceforth to be classed among social outcasts and forever mistrusted and distrusted are all part of an unspeakable whole. The association with the multitude of like conditioned men whose lengthened terms of confinement, and whose repeated convictions perhaps have given them a fixed sense of indifference to what happens to themselves and what they bring to pass upon others, and from whose forbidding experience you learn the awful truth of the fate which confronts you as a convicted man, and from which they insist there is no sure escape, however sincere and earnest the purpose and the striving, soon makes most prisoners hopeless, and many of them heartless. Is it any wonder?

"Such was the atmosphere and such the invariable impression and effect of prison life when I was justly condemned and confined. I found men all about me longing for a fair new chance to live aright, but impregnated with the doctrine that there was now no hope for them to do so. There were men of all types and all classes of social condition. Men serving their first term and others serving their second, third—or fourth—who in the confidence and candor of our mutual misery and degradation often told me (for we do communicate readily in prison, you know) that their supreme desire was for a return to decent citizenship, that they wanted to be 'straight' but that there was no chance for them to be so for no one would trust them.

"I was amazed to find among the most 'hardened' of my fellow-prisoners this controlling soul-thirst for confidence, for faith, and for trust. There was practically no rebellion against physical features of imprisonment and of prison discipline, there was no protest against the severity of the material pains and penalties of our punishment, but we yearned mightily for unselfish brotherly love and treasured to a degree unknown to those to whom it has never been denied, such fractions thereof as we received from each other. What was needed and all that was needed to give us the true impetus, the sufficient incentive, the conquering power to adjust ourselves anew and to set our lives in the right way for future freedom, was some agency which by stimulating unselfish love among ourselves and showing us that we were likewise loved by Christly men and women outside the prison walls, should inspire us to then and there have faith in God, to then and there have faith in our fellow-men and to then and there live loyally to the truth and the law.