Religion ought to be a mighty factor in correct prison discipline. If good men need religion to help them and sustain them, certainly bad men need it far more. This department of discipline should be presided over and directed by a strong, level-headed, pious God-fearing man, who may have at once the confidence of the warden and his subordinates, and the inmates as well, a very difficult undertaking.
A chaplain who mistakes his mission and attends to matters not within his province, can tear up and destroy the discipline of a prison more quickly and effectively than anyone else in it. But his opportunities for good are as great as, or greater than, for evil, and if he can discern between those who desire real spiritual consolation and those who are after the loaves and fishes, between spiritual pardon and official clemency, and devote himself unreservedly to the one and resolutely eschew the other, no man can overestimate his value.
The warden and the chaplain should go hand in hand, each sustaining the other. They need to have a perfect understanding, neither mistrusting the other. And with such an understanding, let the chaplain have entire charge of his church and other spiritual services, and resolutely exclude the self-constituted evangelist, the chance visitor, and forbid absolutely the spectacular and highly emotional harangues of people utterly unacquainted with the population with which they seek to deal. In nothing should there be more rigid censorship and more careful espionage than in the chapel and other religious services.
To quote from an address made by me before the National Prison Association in Louisville in 1903: “The influence of sightseers and idle visitors to prisons, always bad, reaches the acme of its perniciousness in the chapel service, if unrestrained and unguided by prison officials of experience and firmness, who alone are in a position to know that sickly sentimentalism is the worst possible pabulum to offer men already too eager to justify their evil deeds.”
THE DISCIPLINE OF OFFICERS
The question at once comes up, how are all these elements of discipline to be arranged for in a prison. Who are to provide and arrange for them?
This is altogether the most difficult question to answer. The most careful and exacting discipline is not for the convict, but for the officials of a prison.
If convicts are to be gradually educated and turned from crime into virtue, out of slothfulness and viciousness into habits of industry, thrift, sobriety, regularity and evenness of life, it must be through the agency of officers, themselves disciplined, educated and schooled in self-control. “No man is fit to command who has not first learned to obey.”
No man can hope to have zeal, skill and care, the patience and fidelity to bring up men from the depths of ignorance to the level of intelligence, who has not himself gone over a part of the road. “Such officers are not found.” “They must be taught and trained.”
Superintendent Brockway has said: “The warden of a prison receives into his charge with the bodily presence of the prisoners, their very soul life, and is clothed with the authority and the duty to develop that life for fullness and perfection. He who enters upon the work of soul culture, touches the life and forces of a mysterious realm. His attitude should be profoundly reverent, for he invades a sacred precinct.”