The Man Behind the Bars

by Winifred Louise Taylor

For two years he had been an invalid and his world had now narrowed to the "idle room," the hospital yard, and the hospital; his associates incapacitated, sick or dying convicts; his only occupation waiting for death. But he was given ample opportunity to study the character and the fate of these sick and dying comrades. He made no allusion to his own fate but told me how day after day his heart had been wrung with pity, with "the agony of compassion" for these others.

He knew of instances where innocent men were imprisoned on outrageously severe and unjust sentences, of men whose health was ruined and whose lives were blighted at the hands of the State for some trifling violation of the law; of cases where the sin of the culprit was white in comparison with the sin of the State in evils inflicted in the name of justice. He counted it a lighter sin to rob a man of a watch than to rob a man of his manhood or his health. It was, indeed, in bitterness of spirit that he regarded the courts and the churches which stood for justice and religion, yet allowed these wrongs to multiply. His point of View of the prison problem was quite the opposite of theirs.

Now, as I could have matched his score with cases of injustice, as my heart, too, had been wrung with pity, when he realized that I believed him and felt with him the last barrier between us was melted.

There were at that time few persons in my world who felt as I did on the prison question, but in this heart suddenly opened to me I found many of my own thoughts and feelings reflected, and we stood as friends on the common ground of sympathy for suffering humanity.

Another surprise was awaiting me when I changed the subject by asking Bryan what he was reading. It seemed that his starving heart had been seeking sympathy and companionship in books. He had turned first to the Greek philosophers, and in their philosophy and stoicism he seemed to have found some strength for endurance; but it was in the great religious teachers, those lovers of the poor, those pitiers of the oppressed, Jesus Christ and Buddha, that he had found what he was really seeking. He had been reading Renan's "Jesus," also Farrar's "Life of Christ," as well as the New Testament.

"Buddha was great and good and so were some of the other religious teachers," he said, "but Jesus Christ is better than all the rest." And with that Friend of the friendless I left him.

Strange indeed it seemed how the criminal life appeared to have fallen from him as a garment, and yet in our prison administration this man stood as the very type of the "incorrigible." What his course of action would have been had Bryan been given his freedom I should not care to predict. Physically he was absolutely incapable of supporting himself honestly, and he might have agreed with another who said to me: "Any man of self-respect would rather steal than beg." There are those to whom no bread is quite so bitter as the bread of charity. But I am certain that the John Bryan who revealed himself to me in that last interview was the real man, the man who was going forward, apparently without fear, to meet the judgment of his Maker.

A noted preacher once said to me: "Oh, give up this prison business. It's too hard on you, too wearing and depressing." And I replied: "Not all the preachers in the land could teach me spiritually what these convicts are teaching me, or give me such faith in the ultimate destiny of the human soul." Perhaps my experience has been exceptional, but it was the older criminals, the men who had sowed their wild oats and come to their senses, who most deepened my faith in human nature.

I am glad to quote in this connection the words of an experienced warden of a large Eastern penitentiary, who says: "I have yet to find a case where I believe that crime has been taught by older criminals to younger ones. I believe, on the contrary, that the usual advice of the old criminal to the boys is: 'See what crime has brought me to, and when you get out of here behave yourselves.'"

My whole study of "old-timers" verifies this statement; moreover, I am inclined to believe that in very many instances the criminal impulses exhaust themselves shortly after the period of adolescence, when the fever of antagonism to all restraint has run its course, so to say; and I believe the time is coming when this branch of the subject will be scientifically studied.