This summer the difference is enormous and fundamental. For an hour or a little more on each week-day, and for four full hours on Sunday, the prisoners are turned out to recreation according to their bent. And coincidentally with this all-important change in the prison’s policy toward the inmates has come an all-important reduction in the number of prison guards needed to supervise the prisoners at their play. On the morning of the Fourth, for instance, an entertainment was given in the auditorium by a local theatrical company. Practically all the inmates—fourteen hundred—were present. Many of the guards sat in one little corner of the room, in the extreme rear. They had been invited by the Mutual Welfare League, the prisoners’ organization, to attend if they desired!
In the afternoon there were four keepers in all in the yard, so I was informed. They were thoroughly inconspicuous. The “P. K.” (which is short for Principal Keeper) started the afternoon in uniform, but shortly changed to street clothes. “You’ll find him playing ball with the boys later today,” said one inmate to me. All the guarding at the several exits of the yard was done—apart from the few guards—by the “delegates” of the Mutual Welfare League.
The Mutual Welfare League! To many prison officials, long in the service, the name undoubtedly has a very sentimental sound. I frankly confess that several of us in the little party invited by Mr. Thomas Mott Osborne to attend the League’s celebration of the Fourth of July were skeptical. We were afraid it might prove to be amateurish and mushy, even though we knew of the signal value of Mr. Osborne’s self-imposed incarceration at Auburn Prison last fall, as shown by the Nation-wide attention given to his subsequent story of the fearful and unnecessary monotony and desperation of prison life. But, as one of our party said on Sunday morning, after we had sat for several hours with the Executive Committee of the League: “I didn’t exactly come to scoff and remain to pray; but I did come with doubt, and I go away converted.”
What is it, then, about this new freedom at Auburn Prison that has not only converted a cautious, conservative president of a board of reformatory managers in another State, but has led him within a week from his experience at Auburn to urge successfully the introduction of a similar league in his own institution? Two facts, principally, I think. In the first place, the Mutual Welfare League plan works. Secondly, there is a convincing air of sincerity, and even devotion, about it all.
May I repeat what seems to me the all-important fact about this development at Auburn? The prisoners, in their hours of recreation, in their attendance at chapel, in their attendance at Sunday afternoon concerts or entertainments, run themselves in large measure. They have not only given their promise to be good, but they have chosen their own inmate officers to see that they keep their promise. There is all the difference in the world between being run by a group of prison guards, even under the best of benevolent prison despotisms, and being run by prisoner guards of one’s own election.
If, then, the most sacred prerogative of the traditional prison official can thus be usurped by the prisoners themselves, and if, in their own expressive language, they can “get away with it,” in the sense of securing better order, more work in the shops, a marked reduction in the number of offences committed or reported, and a radical betterment in the always limited joy of life in a penal institution, what is the inference?
The organization and development of the Mutual Welfare League were simple enough. Last fall, when Mr. Osborne, as chairman of a prison reform commission that had been appointed by the Governor, sent himself to prison for a week, aided thereto by a friendly warden, he informed the prisoners at a previous chapel service that he was coming into prison to try to understand the prison life from the standpoint of the prisoner. He asked the inmates to regard him, “Tom Brown,” not as a stool-pigeon, nor as simply a foolish amateur, but as thoroughly in earnest in his desire to better prison conditions by experiencing them, even if only briefly and partially for a week.
That was point Number One in the development of what has happened at Auburn. Those who make light of Mr. Osborne’s brief career in prison may have a certain justification, in so far as the real prison life can be learned only slowly; but, after all, the results of that October week of Mr. Osborne’s, measured by general results both upon himself and upon the prison, have been perhaps the greatest in the history of the century-old prison.
Point Number Two in the development of the new freedom occurred in the basket shop, where Mr. Osborne was given as a teacher and side-partner for the week Jack Murphy, whom Mr. Osborne describes as a very fine and sincere man. From Murphy’s character came unconsciously to Mr. Osborne the suggestion that prisoners could be trusted far more than had been the case at Auburn. “Why couldn’t there be started here,” asked Mr. Osborne, “a kind of mutual improvement or mutual welfare league among the prisoners, whereby, in return for pledges of obedience and loyalty to the prison administration, greater freedom and more privileges might be obtained?”
The third step toward the present modified form of self-government occurred after Mr. Osborne, having emerged from his week’s imprisonment, gave public expression to his indignation at the alleged mediæval methods of treating human beings behind the bars. These published accounts, spread broadcast over the country, are well remembered. He set to work then to establish a league among the prisoners. And from the beginning he sought to have the League evolve its principles and its pledges from among the men themselves, not through him or through officials of the prison.