[After Prison What?]
[I
GOLD IN THE MINE]
Long before the discovery of gold in Australasia, geologists had pronounced the strata auriferous. They had propounded to the world their theories and scientific conclusions on the subject. Those who read undoubtedly gave respectful credence to their interesting treatises because of the learning of the writers, and then as quickly forgot the facts that had not very strongly appealed to any personal interest. No one thought it worth while to sell out business, and leave home to risk or venture anything on the theories advanced. The gold lay there untouched until one day some shepherds from the bush came into Melbourne and displayed fragments of rock encrusted with glittering yellow particles which were found to be pure gold. After that people believed, for they had seen and to almost all the world "seeing is believing." The shepherds knew nothing of geology. They could not speak of the strata, but they had found and could show the gold, and in their footsteps tens of thousands followed in the great rush that opened up the mines and sent forth to the world the vast wealth that had lain hidden for ages.
Many who have faith in the hopefulness of all human nature have believed and told the world of their belief in the possible reformation of criminals. They have argued that every soul is precious in the eyes of the great Father in heaven, and that beneath the stain and dross of crime and sin must always be some grain of gold worth redeeming. Their great difficulty is to convince those who are hopeless as to human nature and who, seeing very vividly the evil, have not the discernment to see beneath it any possible good.
To the world at large a State Prison has been looked upon as an abode of the utterly evil, depraved and good-for-nothing. In the slums are the unfortunate victims of drink, the helpless poor and straying ones who can still be sought and saved, but in the prisons are those whose lives are spoiled and ruined beyond repair. Many of course give the subject no thought and their prejudices are the result of utter ignorance. Others form their conceptions from the sensational accounts of notorious criminals whose deeds have been exploited in the press. Some, perhaps, base their unfavorable judgment on the theories advanced against the possibility of reforming the criminal, and speak as if our prisons were full of perverted degenerates, at the mention of whom it is proper to shudder and about whom one can speak as of some species of human animal quite alien to the common thoughts, feelings, instincts and possibilities which are possessed by denizens of the outside world. How truly may it be said that prejudice builds a higher, thicker wall around our prisoners than those of brick and stone within which the law has placed them. Naturally in my extensive travels all over this country and my personal contact with people of every description, I have had ample opportunity to gauge the thought and feeling of the world towards those in whom I am so deeply interested, and, though during the last few years I have seen with joy a very marked change of feeling, there is yet much gross miscomprehension of the whole subject.
Those of us who have become familiar with the question on the inside of the walls have found a veritable gold mine of possibility. We realize fully however that it is only when they see this gold for themselves that the world will lay aside its doubting for faith in the future of these men and, casting to the wind prejudice, will stretch out a friendly hand of good-will to those who come forth from the testing furnace.
We realized in the early years of its history that such a work as the one of which I write could only be seen and appreciated by the world at large in the years of the future when our "boys" had come back into liberty and had had time to prove the genuineness of their purpose. Already this day has dawned, and all over the country the forerunners of the thousands still to come are proving that the work is no experiment, though naturally many have neither seen them nor looked into the lives of those still in prison. It is hard to make the wholly uninformed concede that any good thing can come from such a place. Many a time when talking to friends after some drawing-room gathering, at a dinner table or in the cars, they will say with a look of almost compassion, "But are you not afraid to talk with these men? Is it not very dreadful to have to come into contact with them?" I try to explain that they are my friends, that the respect, courtesy and attention I receive from them could not be excelled in any circle of society; but the raised eyebrows and incredulous looks tell plainly that I have not answered the question, simply because to their minds all criminals are of the same stamp as Tracy, the James brothers and Czolgosz. They cannot conceive of men of education, refinement or gentlemanly instincts in prison.
Constantly I am asked, "But how can you talk to these men; what can you say; how do you touch or appeal to such an audience?" I answer, "Precisely as I should to any lecture audience or from the pulpit of any fashionable church." I am talking, not to the criminal with the theft of a pocketbook or with manslaughter, burglary or murder on his record but to the man, to the soul, the heart. It is just here that a grave error could be made. If we always associate the prisoner with his crime, with the stripes, the cell, the surroundings, we get wofully far away from him and even find ourselves beyond the point where we can reach him at all. The crime was one incident of his life, his imprisonment is but the fact of to-day. Before he was a prisoner he was a man, and in the future world he will be simply a man, so why not talk to him and think of him as a man to-day. A lady was recently being shown over a penal institution (which will remain nameless save to say that it was not a state prison), and the officer who was explaining the system took her from room to room that she might understand their régime. He showed off company after company as a professor might exhibit specimens in the different classes of zoology, talking of them loudly in their hearing. At last coming to one of the lower grades he said, "You will note the inferior intelligence of these men, their poorer development. These are much lower in mental and moral capacity and there is very little hope for them. They are many of them very degraded and seem devoid of moral instinct." Certain malformed heads and many poorly nourished bodies were pointed out and all this while these classified animals stood listening. How should we like such an experience? What thoughts passed through those minds, what fierce hate, what hopeless despair may not have swept over them as they listened to the summing up of their case?
Prison communities come from no uncivilized island where they form a different species of the human family nor are they drawn from one section of the population confined to the slums. They are from the great, wide world at large. Some have had homes of ease and comfort and have been educated in our finest colleges and schools. Society gives its quota, so does the great world of the common people, while yet others come from homes of poverty and some from no homes at all. There are the educated and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, the industrious and the idle, the brilliant and the poorly endowed. In fact our audiences in Prison are much like the audiences that we meet in the free world, save that their hearts are sore and sensitive and that that great shadow of suffering, the awful loss of liberty, has brought anguish, despair and shame to quicken every feeling. Nowhere have I found audiences more attentive, earnest and intelligent than in prison and I find all who have had any experience will compare them most favorably with those of the outside. One thing is very evident—superficiality, seeming and artificiality have been swept away by the close and bitter contact with life, hence the real man is easier to recognize and reach. They in their turn are quick to read and judge the speaker behind the subject, the faith behind the doctrine.