The Man Behind the Bars

by Winifred Louise Taylor

During the last twenty-five years there has been a general tendency to draw sharp hard-and-fast dividing lines between the "corrigible" and the "incorrigible" criminal. It has been assumed that a man only once convicted of a crime may yet be amenable to reform, but that a second or third conviction—convictions, not necessarily crimes—is proof that a man is "incorrigible," that the criminal dye is set and the man should therefore be permanently removed from society. This really does appear a most sensible arrangement as we look down upon the upper side of the proposition; to those who look up to it from below the appearance is altogether different.

A distinguished professor in a law school has said: "If any person shall be a third time convicted of any crime, no matter of what nature, he should be imprisoned at hard labor for life." At a National Prison Congress in 1886 another eminent professor thus indorsed this sentiment: "I believe there is but one cure for this great and growing evil, and this is the imprisonment for life of the criminal once pronounced 'incorrigible.'" Later the governor of my own State told me that he would consider no petition for shortening the sentence of an "habitual criminal." Any leniency of attitude was stigmatized as "rose-water sentiment." And the heart of the community hardened itself against any plea for the twice-convicted man. What fate he was consigned to was not their affair so long as he was safely locked up.

In our eagerness for self-protection at any cost we lose sight of the fact that the criminal problem is one of conditions quite as much as of "cases." In our large cities, the great reservoirs of crime, we are but reaping the harvest of centuries of evil in older civilizations, and in our own civilization as well.

So far we have been dealing with effects more than with causes. Indeed, our dealings with lawbreakers, from the hour of arrest to the hour of discharge from prison have served to increase rather than to diminish the causes of crime. True enough it is that thousands of our fellow men have found life one great quicksand of criminal and prison experience in which cause and effect became in time inextricably tangled.

And it sometimes happens that the twice-convicted man is in no way responsible for his first conviction, as happened to James Hopkins, a good boy reared in a New England family to a belief in God and respect for our courts. He was earning his living honestly when he was arrested on suspicion in Chicago and convicted of a burglary of which he knew nothing. He knew nothing either of the wiles of the courts and depended on his innocence as his defence. But the burglary was a daring one; some one must be punished, no other culprit was captured, so Hopkins was sent to one of our schools of crime supported by public taxation under the name of penitentiaries. Pure homesickness simply overpowered the boy at first. "Night after night I cried myself to sleep," he told me. His cell happened to be on the top row where there was a window across the corridor, and summer evenings he could look across out into a field so like the field at home where he had played as a child. But the darkness of the winter evening shut out every glimpse of anything associated with home. He had not written his mother; he could not disgrace her with a letter from a convict son. She had warned him of the dangers of the city, but she had never dreamed of what those dangers really were. She firmly believed that the courts were for the protection of the innocent, and would she believe that a court of justice had sent an innocent man to prison? He lost all faith in God and his heart hardened. Branded as a criminal, a criminal he resolved to be; and when I met him twenty years later he had a genuine criminal record as a scientific safe-blower.

In spite of his criminal career some of the roots of the good New England stock from which he was descended cropped out. With me he was the gentleman pure and simple, discussing courts and prisons in a manner as impersonal as my own; and he was a man of intelligence and an interesting talker. I had come in touch with Hopkins because I was at the time planning the future of his young cell-mate and I wanted the advice of the older man, as well as his assistance in preparing the younger to meet the responsibilities and temptations of freedom; and a better assistant I could not have had. Concerning his own future Hopkins maintained discreet reserve and unbroken silence as to his inner life. He had deliberately stifled a Puritan conscience; but I doubt if it was completely silenced, for while the lines in his face indicated nothing criminal nor dissipated it was the face of a man in whom hope and ambition were forever dead, a face of unutterable sadness.[3]

I am free to admit that when I glance over the newspaper reports of brutal outrages and horrible crimes my sympathy swings over wholly to the injured party; I, too, feel as if no measure could be too severe for the perpetrator of the crime. That there are human beings whose confinement is demanded by public safety I do not question, but modern scientific study is leading us to the conclusion that back of abnormal crimes are abnormal physiological conditions or abnormal race tendencies. And the "habitual criminal" is not so designated because of the nature of his crimes but because of the number of his infractions of the law.

I might have concurred with the opinions of the learned professors were it not that just when legislation in my own State was giving no quarter to second and third offenders I was being led into the midst of this submerged tenth of our prison population, and my loyalty to their cause has been unswerving ever since.

"Have any of your 'habituals' permanently reformed?" I am asked.