We all have our standards and ideals, not by which we live but by which we judge one another. This woman knew the sweat-shops and she knew that Christian as well as Jew lived in luxury from the profits derived from the labor of the sweat-shops, and of the underpaid shop-girls. To her the great city churches meant oppression and selfishness, power and wealth, arrayed against poverty and weakness, against fair pay and fair play. Her own actual personal experience with some persons classed as Christians had been bitter and cruel; thus her vision was warped and her judgment misled. Much of the same feeling had prevailed through the prisons; and I know that one reason why so many of "the incorrigibles" gave me their confidence was owing to the word passed round among them: "You can trust her; she is no Christian."
This has a strange sound to us. But it does not sound strange at all when we hear from the other side: "You can't trust that man—he's been a convict."
Through the genius, the energy, the spiritual enthusiasm of that remarkable woman known among prisoners as "The Little Mother," the barrier between the churches and the prisons is recently and for the time giving way on the one side. The chaplains are taken for granted as part of the prison equipment, and their preaching on Sunday as the work for which they are paid. But "The Little Mother" comes from the outside, literally giving her life to secure a chance for ex-convicts in this world. She brings to the prisons a fresh interpretation of the Christian religion, as help for the helpless, as a friend to the friendless. In her they find at once their ideal of human goodness and a lovely womanhood, and through her they are beginning to understand what the Christian churches intend to stand for. But to undermine the barrier on the side of society—to bring about a better understanding of the individuals confined behind the walls which society still believes necessary in self-protection—is, in the very nature of the case, a far more difficult undertaking. Almost inaccessible to the outsider is the heart of a convict, or the criminal's point of view of life. In fact their hearts and their points of view differ according to their natures and experiences. But to think of our prisoners in the mass—the thousand or two thousand men cut off from the world and immured in each of our great penitentiaries—is to think of them as the Inarticulate. The repression of their lives has been fearful. All that was required of them was to be part of the machinery of the prison system; to work, to obey, to maintain discipline. Absolutely nothing was done to develop the individual. The mental and psychic influence of the prison has been indescribably stifling and deadening. Every instinctive impulse of movement, the glance of the eye, the smile of understanding, the stretch of weary muscles, the turning of the head, all must be guarded or repressed. The whole tendency of prison discipline has been to detach the individual from his fellow man; at all costs to prevent communication between convicts; and to stifle all expression of individuality except between cell-mates when the day's work was over. And companionship of cell-mates is likely to pall when the same two men are confined in a seven-by-four cell for three hundred and sixty-five evenings in a year. Gradually but inevitably the mind dulls; mental impressions lose their clear outlines and the faculties become atrophied. I have seen this happen over and over again.
When first the drama of prison life began to unfold before me I looked for some prisoner to tell the story; he only could know what it really meant. But the desire to forget, to shake off all association, even the very thought of having been connected with convict life, has been the instinctive aim of the average man seeking reinstatement in society. Occasionally a human document from the pen of an ex-convict appeared in print, but few of them were convincing. The writer's own consciousness of having been a convict may have prevented him from striking out from the shoulder, from speaking as man to man, or something in the mind of the reader may have discounted the value of the statement coming from an ex-convict; more likely than either the spirit was so gone out of the man before his release that he had no heart or courage to grapple with the subject; and he, too, shared the popular belief that prisons are necessary—for others.
It was the poet and the artist in Oscar Wilde that made it possible—perhaps inevitable—for him to rend the veil that hides the convict prison execution, and to etch the horror in all its blackness—a scaffold silhouetted against the sky—in "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." The picture is a masterpiece, and it is the naked truth; more effective with the general reader than his "De Profundis," which is no less remarkable as literature but is more exclusively an analysis of Oscar Wilde's own spiritual development during his prison experience. The Russian writer Dostoyevski, also with pen dipped in the tears and blood of actual experience, has given scenes of Russian convict life so terrible and intense that the mind of the reader recoils with horror, scoring one more black mark against Russia and thanking God that in our dealings with convicts we are not as these other men. But not long ago a cry from the inside penetrated the walls of a Western prison in "Con Sordini," a poem of remarkable power, written by a young poet-musician who, held by the clutches of the law, was suffering an injustice which a Russian would be slow to indorse. No doubt other gifted spirits will have their messages. But in the mind of the public, genius seemed to lift these men out of the convict into the literary class, and their most human documents were too likely to be regarded only as literature.[1]
Genius is rare in all classes of life and my prison friends were of the common clay. The rank and file of our convicts are almost as inarticulate as dumb, driven cattle, many of them incapable of tracing the steps by which they fell into crime or of analyzing the effects of imprisonment. Some of them have not learned how to handle words and find difficulty in expressing thoughts or feelings; especially is this true of the ignorant foreigners.
One of the men whom I knew, not a foreigner, but absolutely illiterate, early fell into criminal life, and before he was twenty years old was serving a sentence of life imprisonment. After a period of unspeakable loneliness and mental misery he was allowed attendance at the prison evening school. He told me that he could not sleep for joy and excitement when first he realized that through printed and written words he could come into communication with other minds, find companionship, gain information, and come in touch with the great free world on the outside.[2]
As I look back through my twenty-five years of prison friendship it is like looking through a long portrait-gallery, only the faces are living faces and the lips unite in the one message: "We, too, are human beings of like nature with yourselves." To me, however, each face brings its own special message, for each one in turn has been my teacher in the book of life. And now for their sakes I am going to break the seal of my prison friendships, and to let some of these convicts open their hearts to the world as they have been opened to me, and to give their vision of human life; to draw the picture as they have seen it. Some of them bear the brand of murderer, others belong to the class which the law denominated as "incorrigible." I believe I had the reputation of knowing the very worst men in the prison, "the old-timers." It could not have been true that my friends were among the worst men there, for my prison friendships, like all friendships, were founded upon mutual confidence; and never once did one of these men betray my trust.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Recent periodicals have given many disclosures convincing to the public from men who know only too well the cruel and barbarous conditions of convict life. I have long held that no judge should be authorized to sentence a man to prison until the judge knew by experience what prison life really was. And now we are having authentic reports from those in authority who have taken a voluntary experience of convict life.