After Prison--What?

by Maud Ballington Booth

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WIVES AND MOTHERS]

I had been presenting the cause of our "boys" in prison at a drawing-room gathering in a company of the wealthy and fortunate, whose lives were very remote from need, suffering and hunger. I passed over the main branch of our work, to one that has grown out of it, and told of the dark, sad shadow that has fallen on many homes, bringing untold suffering to the helpless and innocent. After the meeting was over, a lady made her way to my side and clasping my hand she said very fervently, "I do thank you specially for one thought you have given me this evening. I have seen the outside of state prisons and have always regarded them as places full of evil-doers who justly deserve what they are suffering, and there with me the whole question has ended. I never for one moment realized that these men had wives and mothers and little children. Of course, if I had stopped to think, I would have seen that side of it, but I never gave the question a thought." I believe there are very many who, if they confessed the truth, would have to admit the same thing. This perhaps saddest side of the question hidden away in aching hearts and shadowed homes does not flaunt itself in the press, does not beg on our streets nor appeal to us through Christian publications as do the needs that can be classified. Yet the need is there and it is very real and urgent. If there are eighty-four thousand men to-day in our prisons, think what a vast number of sorrowing hearts must be bearing their suffering and shame in the outside world!

I think my work has become doubly dear and sacred to me since I have realized that I could go to these "boys" as a messenger and representative of their mothers. Very grateful have I been for the name "Little Mother" which they have given me, for I feel that I go not to impress my own personality upon them, but to revive in them the sacred memories of the past and if possible, to help in bringing the answer to the many mothers' prayers that for so long have seemed fruitless of result.

I once received a letter from one of the men in which he said, "Little Mother, as you talked to us on Sunday in the chapel it was not your voice I heard, but it seemed to me my mother spoke again from the long ago, and it was not your face I saw, but her face that came up before me as I had seen it in the days of my childhood:" This thought has meant a great deal to me and having come to feel how true this is of my ministry to many of the prisoners, I have found I could take to them a double message, first from their God and then from some loved one, the very mention of whom aroused all their better nature and awakened purer thoughts within their minds.

I always believed that mother-love was next to Divine love, the most beautiful and unselfish of all affections, but the belief has been intensified since I have learned to know the many sorrowing mothers of our "boys" in prison, who despite all they have suffered; shame, disappointment and wrong, have loved on and stood faithfully by their erring ones. I believe such mothers are the great hope and very sheet anchor to men who can never quite forget them, however far they may go astray and disregard their prayers and wishes.

Just as we find within prison walls men of every class, so the homes on which the blow has fallen are widely different, and the needs represented are often in great contrast. One mother surrounded by wealth in a home of ease and comfort may not need material help, but craves that which comes from true heart sympathy. Another may, in her old age, be left utterly destitute and have to face sickness and want, yet with both, the boy in prison is the first thought, and any one who can help him is welcome as their friend. No work especially organized to help the mothers and families of men in prison and commencing with them, could be successful. They are not to be found by inquiries from tenement to tenement; they certainly would not be attracted by an announcement over an office building proclaiming it as a bureau for their special assistance. They have their pride and self-respect and rather than go and seek help or pour out the story of their woes and wrongs to strangers, they would hide away and bear their burden alone.

From the very commencement of our prison work I realized that it must be a movement of natural growth, that each want as it was found must be met by the method that developed to meet it. As the men grew to know and trust us, they began to tell us of the dear ones at home. Many a time a young man in prison under an alias would confide his real name, and give us the duty of breaking gently to his dear ones the knowledge of his whereabouts. With others there was the feeling that long silence spoke of unforgiveness at home, and it was for us to try and bring about a reconciliation. Very often the distress and suffering of his family has caused a man worry almost to the point of madness and a letter has been hurriedly written asking us to go post-haste and render the needed help.

On the other hand, as the men became interested in the League and the new experience deepened in their hearts, they wrote the good news to their homes, sometimes away over the seas, and back from every part of this country, and from very many distant lands came to us loving, grateful letters from mothers who felt they could pour out to us the heart-longings and anxiety that had been so long borne in solitude. The tie of friendship and understanding is much stronger and draws hearts together much more surely than that of charitable bounty. We can do far more in every way for these women for the reason that we are introduced to them by sons or husbands. My dear friend and helper, Mrs. McAlpin, has especially taken this work on her heart, so far as the prisons of this state are concerned, and through her talks with the men, she has been enabled to put us in touch with numbers of families who in this great city were in dire need of a helping hand. From the western prisons the work comes to us mostly through the mail, and we find that this new and unexpected field of usefulness has developed so rapidly that we have had to appoint one worker to do nothing else but visit the families thus referred to us. Before I write some of the stories of those materially helped, I want to speak of the mothers who have been cheered and comforted by good messages of their boys returning to the right path within prison walls.