One of us then asked, “How about the growing criticism that prisoners are getting to have too easy a time of it? When we tell the public in general about this Fourth of July celebration, many will say that the prisoners are having more fun and an easier time than the honest taxpayer.”
The delegate, in answering, flared up. “Tell those people to try any prison for a while! What’s a prison for? To torture a man, and send him out hating society, and determined to get even for the years he’s spent as the old-line prison made him spend it? Nobody except the fellow that’s been through it knows what being in prison is. Does the public want us to go insane, get tuberculosis, contract wretched vices, rebel in mutinies, live sixteen hours out of twenty-four in a living tomb, and have day-in and day-out a miserable monotony of existence that dulls our minds and makes us hate the State that munificently pays us a cent and a half a day, and then often takes away the earnings of months in one single fine for some offense that the very manner of existence here almost forces us to commit? Why, what is this hour of recreation, anyway? It’s a health measure, a safety measure, a reformatory measure.
“Do you think fellows would commit crime in order to get into prison to have this little pittance of pleasure? Let me tell you that the very people that talk so about putting the clamps on this giving of soft snaps to prisoners don’t know what that other system did to us. Why, there are a lot of fellows here that had made up their minds to pull off another trick just as soon as they got out. Why shouldn’t they? But now we have something else to work for.”
Much of the above conversation occurred at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the League, to which we were invited. It was essentially a novel experience. Here sat, in the warden’s office, and without the warden or any prison official present, a round dozen of convicts, gray-suited and thoroughly in earnest. They discussed prison conditions and prison problems with all the freedom of a board of managers, and with far greater knowledge of actual conditions. Prisoners know more about a prison than does the warden, the warden than does the superintendent of prisons, the superintendent of prisons than do the inspectors, and the inspectors than does the public. Therefore, if the best efforts and the best loyalty of the prisoners can be harnessed up to a reformatory programme of the square deal for both sides, the possibilities of the future loom far larger than have reformatory possibilities in the past.
So Auburn Prison is pointing the way, by an almost revolutionary experiment, to large possibilities in inmate self-government in State prisons and reformatories. As I write these lines the newspapers bring a word of a similar Saturday afternoon passed in sports for the first time in the history of Sing Sing. Within the last week the State Reformatory of New Jersey, at Rahway, has adopted tentatively a modified form of inmate self-government. Great Meadow Prison, in New York State, which has been for several years the conspicuous honor prison of the eastern part of the country, marched its six hundred men down to the baseball game on July Fourth, a half-mile from the prison, under inmate overseers.
Self-government, to the limit of its possibilities, is almost a fetish with Mr. Osborne. For many years he was President of the Board of Trustees of the George Junior Republic; there he became convinced that self-government is workable not only for youngsters but for older delinquents.
In the old-line prison the ever-present dread of the traditional warden was an escape. His career was judged largely by his ability to suppress escapes and frequently by his ability to suppress public knowledge of the methods he used to keep order. Today the warden is judged able or poor partly by his ability to develop men out of his prisoners, men who on going out will make good. The entire theory of the old-line prison construction was based on the principle that any prisoner would escape if he could, and use desperate means of so doing. The bars and steel-work that you see everywhere in prisons throughout the country show how ingrained the theory has been. But up at Great Meadow, where the bulk of the prisoners roam unattended by guards at their work during the day, it is almost ridiculous to see them securely caged behind several strata of tool-proof steel at night.
In the last few years demonstrations in scores of prisons and other correctional institutions have shown that, if given the chance, when on honor, the prisoners won’t run away. The old adage of “honor among thieves” has taken on an entirely new meaning. It is now “honor among thieves toward the State that trusts them.”
The power of discipline in the League is very limited. The only punishment is suspension or elimination from the League. Such action is delegated to the Executive Committee of the League. Actually, this exclusion from the body politic—since almost every prisoner is a member of the League—carries with it two important disadvantages. It stamps the excluded inmates as anti-social, not only to the prison administration, but to the body of prisoners. Secondly, it bars the prisoner from enjoying the freedom privileges that the League enjoys. Therefore the power of suspension, be it for but a few days, has real force. The powers of discipline given to the League by the warden have not been accurately fixed as yet. The warden has told the League that all minor cases of discipline could be punished by them; wisely, I think, the officers of the League have not been desirous of punishing.
So that at present men are turned back to the prison authorities by the League for violation of the League discipline. The theory is that these men will be put back under the old discipline of silence and confinement, because they are no longer members of the League. The main body of the prisoners have then no official interest in them, so that the suspension involves practically a return to the old prison routine.