VOLUME IV, No. 8. AUGUST, 1914
THE DELINQUENT
A MONTHLY PERIODICAL, PUBLISHED BY THE
NATIONAL PRISONERS’ AID ASSOCIATION
AT 135 EAST 15th STREET, NEW YORK CITY.
THIS COPY TEN CENTS. ONE DOLLAR A YEAR

Entered as second-class mail matter at New York.

TOM BROWN AT AUBURN

By Hastings H Hart.
Director Child Caring Work, Russell Sage Foundation.

[This very illuminating book review of “Within Prison Walls,” a book by Thomas Mott Osborne, has, by agreement, been published jointly in The Delinquent and The Survey. The editor of The Delinquent had at first planned to give to several persons the pleasant task of reviewing Mr. Osborne’s important book. But Dr. Hart has written so graphic a review that we shall be content with this. The second article in this month’s magazine follows logically this review.]

In his book, “Within Prison Walls,” “Tom Brown,” (Hon. Thomas Mott Osborne) has given a remarkable study of the mind of the convict. This book should be read in connection with Donald Lowrie’s book, “My Life In Prison,” which portrays the prisoner from the vantage point of actual and prolonged experience but without the advantage of Mr. Osborne’s wider knowledge of human life and human philosophy.

Mr. Osborne’s study is an astonishing achievement for a single week. To break the crust of officialism and without legal authority to command the co-operation of unwilling prison officials; to overcome the suspicions and the reticence of the prisoners, to secure their general co-operation in his plan, and to gain admission to the inner circles of convict life; and then to really put himself in the place of a prisoner and to realize how he feels, how he thinks and to catch his viewpoint—to do all this in a week was an astonishing piece of work.

Of course, his work was fragmentary and incomplete, but the writer has known prison officers who have associated with prisoners for years without obtaining such a knowledge of their mental processes as Mr. Osborne gained in a week.

It is much to be regretted that Mr. Julian Hawthorne did not seize the opportunity of his experience at Atlanta and apply his literary genius to record and analyze the effects of prison life upon himself and his associates. He might have written a classic equal to De Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium Eater,” but he choose instead to retell the gossip and scandals of the State prisons, true and false, as given him by second and third-term convicts.