I am indeed exceedingly glad to have this opportunity of bearing witness to the considerate manner in which released prisoners are treated by the police. I have never met with any instance of persecution. A good deal has been said about them hunting up and betraying ticket-of-leave holders and discharged prisoners generally; my experience has been exactly to the contrary. I have known numberless instances of kind actions, and even of thoughtful care, displayed by detectives and others. Again and again have such officers brought old offenders to me, asking my help on their behalf. The police have a difficult task to perform; it is their duty to be suspicious, but I know that many of them are really glad to see an old offender go straight and proper.
He was a most ingenious man, and invented a new and pretty system of ornamenting the edges of books. He was justly proud of this, and took great delight in it. I saw him pursuing his experiments time after time, with all the ardour of an inventor. We were just taking steps to patent it, when he was again carried captive by his old enemy. With some pounds of his own honest earnings in his pocket, with a watch and chain and plenty of good tailor-made clothes, with a thriving business that promised him independence, with a smile on his face and a ‘Good-afternoon, Mr. Holmes,’ he left my house and went to the suburbs, and broke into a mean little house, where it was impossible for him to secure portable goods to anything like the value of the money then in his own pocket. He was caught in the act, received a sentence of five years, and had his ticket-of-leave revoked. So again he writes to me from a convict prison, and pitiful his letters are. ‘I don’t know why I did it, but I was compelled to do it.’ He begs me to write to him, and implores me not to cast him off, but to let him live on with one hope and with the knowledge that he has one friend in the world. I do write to him, but what can I say to cheer him? Were he at liberty, what could I do to help him? My poor wits are powerless and my resources useless before his inscrutable madness or his demoniacal possession. But I shall never see him again at liberty—nay, nay, for in less than nine years he will have eaten his own heart. I sit writing with the books he bound all around me. I take one in my hand, and I see proofs not only of skill but of honest workmanship, and of a conscientious man. And then, far away from the work he has left behind, I can fancy him, a man of many talents and infinite resource, at the daily round, the maddening round, of his monotonous task. I see him in the silence and long-continued solitude of his cell; I watch the disappearance of the man and the revival of the animal. But never again shall I see his deft fingers at work; never again shall I hear his brisk step at my door; for heart-disease has already hold of him, and small wonder. A year or two of maddening thought, incessant reflection and choking confinement, and he will have passed into the presence-chamber of the great Judge.
Many a castle in the air I built for him. I thought I had surrounded him with every safeguard, and my heart is still sad for him; but I regret not my efforts on his behalf, neither do I count my labours lost, nor my time wasted, for I learned to know him, I learned to appreciate the awful power of his strange mania. Otherwise his life was gentle, and but for this curse he was a man. ‘I ask you to believe me when I say that I was sincere in my promises to you. I told you that I considered myself in honour bound to do right, and to justify the confidence you have shown in me. I am no hypocrite, but why cannot I be as your sons? Why there should be a power within me impelling me to do these things I don’t know; but I do know at times that I am utterly unable to resist it. Do you think there is any truth in fatalism? Is it my destiny? Is it any use my struggling against it?’ These words form a portion of the last letter received from him, and he puts me questions that I cannot answer. I did not save him, but I tried my best.
Perhaps my methods were wrong, but to me they seem right; for I hold that if a man cannot be saved by faith and hope, by friendship and respect, there is no social salvation for him. There is a large class of criminals of this kind, not all possessed of the same mania, but impelled by the same power. Day by day men of brain and energy are released from our prisons. They have skill, but not muscle; intelligence, but not brute force. What will save them? Not wood-chopping ten hours a day in a ‘labour home’; not envelope addressing at half a crown per thousand! not paper-sorting under unpleasant conditions; not pick and shovel in competition with the navvy; not even clerical work, where, because of their past, they do two men’s work for a boy’s pay. These will not, cannot, redeem long-time men. If the consecration of loving hearts fails, if the dedication to their service of home, intelligence, family life, and a man’s own self fails, if that divine inspiration that comes from human goodness fails, it is absurd to suppose that monotonous, ill-requited drudgery will succeed. Some kind people can, I believe, find a sort of gratification in making a profit or in getting cheap labour from men and women who are down. Thank God this cannot be laid to my charge, no, nor to my wife’s; for if the old ‘unfortunate,’ the hero of a hundred convictions, has lived with us and worked for us, we have paid her adequately. If the criminal who has spent a quarter of a century in prison has worked for us, we have paid him, and his labour has been as well requited as if his character was perfect and his past unsullied. Why should Christian people seek to get some advantage from unfortunate men and women who have fallen deeply into vice or sin? The return path to rectitude and citizenship is always a hard road to travel, and rightly so; but to make that road harder by imposing such heavy tolls upon the travellers is like unto casting out the devil by Beelzebub. I know a man at the present moment—a married man and a first-rate scholar, about thirty-five years of age—not long from prison who, because of his past and his helplessness, is earning ten shillings a week in a position to which he has been ‘recommended.’
A large number of good people are tarred with this brush, for I have received scores of letters at different times from persons who required either servants or assistants of some sort, and who were willing to take, with a view to their reformation, some girl or woman who had gone wrong, or some man who was down, the condition being that I should recommend them. ‘What are the duties? What is the payment? What references can you give?’ I have always inquired of them. I invariably found that the duties were numerous and heavy, and the pay about half the current rate. The question of references was often taken as a gratuitous insult on my part; but I had good reasons for the question, and I could not think of sending any broken sinner who had some desire of amendment to any place or situation where that hope would soon be extinguished, or where their labour would altogether be inadequately rewarded. I have sent back to their homes, in various parts of England, women, healthy, strong, and useful, who have been sent up to London to be ‘rescued,’ and after being ‘rescued’ have been sent out to drudgery at half a crown or three shillings per week, with certain deductions. Needless to say, they found their way into our police courts.
I do not want men and women bribed to be good, for goodness so obtained would be shoddy stuff. I do not want criminals and offenders to have an easier time or, indeed, as easy a path in life as the honest, sober, and industrious; nay, with all my soul, I protest against the lives of decent people being made harder and their difficulties increased by ill-considered efforts in rescue work. It avails little to set up Peter and knock Paul down, yet this must inevitably be the result if fallen men and women are to do vast quantities of useful work for little or no remuneration; but I do want fallen men and women to have some chance of reform, and I do pray that the return path to rectitude and decency may not be made too thorny.
How to right one wrong without creating another is then the problem, and it is almost insoluble—almost, but, I venture to think, not quite. We must, however, begin at the beginning. Our prisons should be the starting-place, and these must no longer be ‘vengeance houses.’ The law must be satisfied, I know; but surely the law ought to be satisfied with the protection of society and the punishment of the criminal, without also claiming as its due the demoralization of the prisoner. I say advisedly, after taking counsel with and making friends of many who have been only too familiar with prison, that the present methods conduce to that state of mind and body which renders discharged prisoners almost certain to commit crime. Crime, generally, is the result of some peculiar condition of the mind or, it may be, of the body of the perpetrator. I cannot differentiate, but men whose business it is to know should be able to do so. Certain actions follow, and we say that crime has been committed, and that the criminal is morally diseased; so we proceed to take vengeance upon him. It would be considered insanity if physical or mental disease were so treated.
Prisons, then, should not only be the means of protecting society against the depredations of the criminals, but should also be hospitals or asylums for the study and cure of moral disease. Neither can I imagine a study and science more absorbing, for the wonders of the moral nature are greater even than the wonders of physiology. Have our prison officials studied in this direction? If not, what qualifies them for the positions they hold? Very respectfully, but very seriously, I would ask whether the army is the best training for the governor of a prison? Are our prison doctors selected because of their researches in the domains of moral, mental, and physical disease? Have our prison chaplains taken a degree in the university of human nature? Are the warders possessed of some useful technical knowledge, as well as of a knowledge of men? In mechanical trades a training has to be undergone before good workmanship is arrived at. In the professions long and severe courses of study are gone through, and examinations are held to test the fitness of the aspirants for certificates of knowledge or skill; but to deal with human nature of the darkest and worst descriptions, it appears as though anyone will do. No special fitness is required, no training is looked for, and no knowledge of humanity is for; in any other department of life the thing would asked be absurd.
If specialists are required anywhere, they are required in our prison officialdom. Not cranks or doctrinaires, not men who have made up their minds that they know all there is to be known about criminals and human nature, not fussy and ‘goody-goody’ people, and certainly not official martinets, should be in control of our prisons. Order and discipline there must, of course, be, but there is a discipline that kills as well as one that makes alive. There is small use in trying to discipline men by killing their better parts and destroying their useful faculties. Great-hearted, wise-headed men, men of tact but men of sympathy, men who have above all things a knowledge of human nature, should have control of our prisoners. The medical profession must play a more important part, and the chaplains must be embodiments of a living Christ, and full of a Divine pity even for the very worst. ‘The greater sinner a man is, the greater the need of his reform; the lower a man has fallen, the greater his need to rise; the more hopeless a man seems, the greater his claim for pity.’ So writes a criminal to me, and on these grounds he implores me to help him when his sentence has expired. I think Christ would have said the same. ‘I, whose vast pity almost makes me die,’ Tennyson makes King Arthur say; and such a vast pity should permeate the heart—nay, the very bones and marrow of every prison chaplain. ‘Power itself hath not half the might of gentleness’ has been well said; and of all qualities of the human heart and mind, the power of sympathy is the mightiest, for it disarms resistance and overcomes evil with good. Once let our prisoners know that the officials are animated with a desire for their welfare, and all things will be possible; but they must feel it.
The best qualified officials will, however, be comparatively helpless without a proper system; true, they can make the best of a bad system, but with a good system their work would be powerful for good. They too, themselves, would profit, for it would interest them, and call into activity their better qualities, many of which must lie dormant under the present condition of affairs. We want a system that will help to humanize the prisoner, not to brutalize him. It will, I know, pass the wit of man to devise any plan by which the whole of our prisoners can be ‘cured’; it is impossible to invent any system that will be suitable for every prisoner, for they are varied as nature itself. But it is practicable, and it would be wise, to have a system that, while punishing the prisoner, shall not by its punishments defeat the object it has in view. The ‘terrors of the law’ have little effect upon brutalized men, for they feel themselves at war with society, and, by the treatment meted out to them in prison, society has declared itself at war with them. Consequently they come out of prison more hardened than when they entered it, and a repetition of crime is most likely to result.