I had a grand jury visit me the other day; it is a custom over in our country for the grand juries to come over a few times a year and tell us how to run the place (they sometimes stay an hour), and the foreman, before he went away, said to me, “Warden, I suppose you select the men whom you take out to the farm.” I said, “No, sir, I don’t.” He said, “How do you manage?” I said, “I select a very few whom I don’t take;” for I can take 90 per cent. About three weeks ago I was going into the farm one day, it was a cold, snowy, blowing, blustering day; the thermometer was about zero. When I came near to our building it was quarter to twelve o’clock, and I saw men coming from this direction and that direction, and from every direction pass alone; no officers with them at all, and it impressed me, perhaps, much more than it would another one not engaged in this work, for I asked myself the question, “How is it? These are the very men that I have had in Toronto behind bolts and bars, watched over by guns and guards, and here they are out here as free as this air that blows, and they are all coming in to sit down with each other at dinner.” I have asked our men on the farm—many of them different types, at different places, at different times—and I have asked them all the same question. “What do you find the greatest difference as between the prison in the city and the prison out here on the farm?” And without a single exception, in one form or another, those men have invariably given me the same reply. We give good board at the prison, but it was not that; it was not this liberty, comparative liberty. They have said to me: “Warden, to get away from that cell! To get away from that cell!”
I asked a boy two weeks ago, a young man, and he said, “Warden, to get away from that cell; for,” he said, “to sit there on Sunday, every evening and on holidays and have that cell gate staring you in the face, it is hell;” and he didn’t say it to be irreverent or disrespectful, but it was his pent-up emotions. I believe there is something debasing—debasing to a man’s personal manhood—about life in a cell that no one can describe. Our men plow, they harrow, they sow the grain, they reap it; there is no guard with them at all. Of course, these are men who are near the end of their terms, perhaps men who have three months or less to do; but every prison contains enough of that class to enable them to carry on this class of work, agricultural work, to a financial advantage. If we had to pay guard to be with these various men we couldn’t do it, but we don’t. There is an indefinable something in God’s out-of-doors that has a beneficial effect upon humanity. I cannot tell you what it is. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but thou canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. So is every man that is born of the spirit.”
A few months ago a professor from the University of Kansas wrote a little poem of two or three verses, and one of the verses reads like this:
“A breeze on the far horizon,
The infinite tender sky—
The ripe, rich tint of the corn fields
And the wild geese sailing high;
And all over upland and lowland
The charm of the goldenrod:
Some of us call it autumn
And others call it God.”
Do you catch the spirit of those beautiful lines? They tell (what I should like to tell were I able) of the way God speaks to our delinquents out on the farm through the hazy atmosphere and the golden sunsets; they tell of the way God speaks to those poor fellows through the growing and the ripening grains, and of the message that God sends to them through the birds that sing and soar over their heads. It suggests that beautiful thought of Browning’s:
“This world, as God has made it,
Always glitters. And knowing this is love,
And love is duty.”
We are aiming at something definite in the construction of our new prison. We are going to try to give that large class of boys and young men that come to prison for the first time, one more opportunity of going through life without being immured in a prison cell. In the construction of our buildings our domicile accommodations will be largely of the dormitory type—small dormitories, accommodating fourteen beds, with a large, semicircular bay window on one side which will serve as a sitting room, attached to which dormitory will be a completely equipped bedroom and dressing room. The corridor, which runs along the side where the officers will patrol, is divided from these rooms that I speak of by a glass partition, so that our men are thoroughly under observation every hour of the day and night, and there will be no opportunities whatever for some of those things that penologists so much dread. In addition to that, we have a number of single rooms and a number of cells, but in a prison which is destined to accommodate 600, we are only putting in 40 cells. The men who behave and who demonstrate that they can appreciate that dormitory life and maintain the condition of it, we hope to give ultimately a single room, and the men who fail to appreciate this dormitory life and don’t behave as we wish them to, will then be demoted into a cell; but we are going to try, as I say, to get those boys through life, if possible, without the cell. Will we succeed? I don’t know. I don’t know. We have our critics, but this world will never be saved by the critics; it will be saved by the dreamers. The history of humanity is the history of indomitable hope. Emerson says that “Every thing is free to the man that can grasp it;” that “He who despairs is wrong.”
In dealing with delinquents, it is the personal touch that tells. Human nature craves for sympathy. Kingsley was once asked what the secret of his joyous, buoyant life was, and his ready reply was, “I had a friend.” Our Saviour was no exception to this rule, for as our Saviour approached Gethsemane, he yearned for a friend whom he could rely upon to wait and watch while he endured, and expressed it in that pathetic request to the drowsy Peter and his sleepy comrades. When we see a very simple duty staring us in the face in dealing with this class, we are too prone to say: “Lord, here am I. Send him.” It is an easy matter for a man of means to write his check, or give his cash, but it is an entirely different thing to carry that gift to some poor fellow who is down and out and sweeten it with the fragrance of personal kindness.
“Not what we give, but what we share;
The gift without the giver is bare.”
We have church service at our place every Sunday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon. One day our preacher failed to materialize; the men were in the chapel and I did not wish to have them return to the cells without saying something to them; as I could not preach, I thought I would do the next best thing, and I would read another fellow’s sermon, only I gave the other fellow credit for it. I was reading a book just then that interested me very much, and I went down to the office and got it and I read the first chapter, and when I finished I asked if I should read more, and they said, “Yes, Warden.” I read a second and a third chapter; I read as long as my voice would hold out; and as I had finished a man down in the audience said, “Won’t you be kind enough to tell me the name of that book and the author?” I was very glad to have them ask the question; I told him. The next morning when I was going through the prison industries, the officers kept asking me what book I read the previous day. I said, “Why do you ask?” They said, “The men are all talking about it.” I sent down town and got fifteen copies and sent them around among the cells, with instructions that no one man could keep it for more than a week. When we collected the books at the end of the first week I found that a great many men had taken paper and copied out portions of it. This was practically a non-reading population. They had refused a lot of good books we had put in our library which I had thought were fine, much to my disappointment. Perhaps you would like to know the kind of book they so much enjoyed, and, with your permission, I will just read you the first page of the first chapter.