And the woman expressed a great verity. This little episode I relate to show you that society has two obligations: one to the man shut up within the prison, and perhaps an even greater obligation to the poor woman and children dependent upon the man shut up within the prison. It is necessary to lock up a certain class of men that society may be protected, and that these men may be improved; but when we do that, are we going to put their families in a position in which they will be impelled into either vice or crime? I think it is Milton who asks the pertinent question:
“What boots it, by one gate to make defence
And at another to let in the foe?”
In dealing with the wives and children, as well as with the prison inmates, over in our place, we find an immense help from the Salvation Army. We have a prisoner’s aid association and they work harmoniously together; but the Army has one or two advantages in this work that no other organization possesses. In the first place, they are not sentimentalists. They detail one man to give his time to it. He is as free to go into our prison as I am; and I think he spends as much time there as I do. He is there at night, on Sundays, on holidays, at noon hours; and he is going from cell to cell—he becomes thoroughly acquainted with every inmate. That gives that man an immense advantage in dealing with those men when their terms expire. The prison worker that expects to meet the discharged prisoner at the prison gate the morning he comes out, is much more apt to be worked by the prisoner than he is to work the prisoner. In three cases out of five he is clay in the hands of a designing man. One of our governors some years ago said that Canada was a land of magnificent distances. The same remark applies to your republic; but we get prisoners 1,300 miles from our prison. The Army, learning the condition of the families dependent on the man within the prison, writes to the corps, the Salvation Army corps in the town or the city where the man came from, and they are able, by their very extensive and highly perfected organization, to make a study of each family, in addition to having arrangements made there for the employment of that man when his term has expired. We try, just as far as possible, to get all of our ex-prisoners out of the city. We do not wish them to colonize; we try to get them back to their homes where they came from; for unless a man is willing to go back and face society, and live it down, the chances are that he will be driven into what is wrong sometimes through fear.
A year ago now, we started our farm. It is fifty miles out of the city; it contains 530 acres. I commenced by taking up a little detachment of 14 men; and I rapidly increased that until I had 180 men, housed in temporary quarters on this farm. The average term of the man on the farm was about five or six months, though I had several men there who had to do from one to two years. So far we have taken out to this farm 500 men, and out of that 500, four have escaped successfully, and three or four have attempted to escape—unsuccessfully. The other day a minister in our city was calling, and I gave him these statistics, and he looked very sad; he said it was a pity. I said it was; “but,” I said, “can you take 500 of your church membership and have 495 of them make good?” And he changed the subject.
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 guards 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 can not 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—