The Man Behind the Bars

by Winifred Louise Taylor

"Alfred is the queerest sort of a chap," the man began. "He's a professional burglar, and the most innocent fellow I ever knew; always reading history and political economy, and just wild to get into the library to work. He hasn't a relative that he knows and never has a visit nor a letter, and I wish you'd ask to see him."

On this introduction I promised to interview Alfred Allen the next evening. The warden allowed me the privilege of evening interviews with prisoners, the time limited only by the hour when every man must be in his cell for the night.

It was an unprecedented event for Alfred to be called out to see a visitor, and he greeted me with a broad smile and two outstretched hands. With that first hand-clasp we were friends, for the door of that starved and eager heart was thrown generously open and all his soul was in his big dark eyes. I understood instantly what the other man meant by calling Alfred "innocent," for a more direct and guileless nature I have never known. The boy, for he was not yet twenty-one, had so many things to say. The flood-gates were open at last. I remember his suddenly pausing, then exclaiming: "Why, how strange this is! Ten minutes ago I'd never seen you, and now I feel as if I'd known you all my life."

In reply to my inquiries he rapidly sketched the main events in his history. Of Welsh parentage he had learned to read before he was five years old, when his mother died. While yet a child he lost his father, and when ten years old, a homeless waif, morally and physically starving, in the struggle for existence he was a bootblack, newsboy, and sometimes thief. "To get something to eat, clothes to cover me, and a place to sleep was my only thought; these things I must have. Often in the day I looked for a place where the sun had warmed the sidewalk beside barrels, and I'd go there to sleep at night."

At last, when about thirteen years old, he found a friendly, helping hand. A man whose boots he had blacked several times, who doubtless sized up Alfred as to ability, took the boy to his house, fed him well, and clothed him comfortably. Very anxiously did the older man, who must have felt Alfred's intrinsic honesty, unfold to the boy the secret of his calling and the source from which he garnered the money spent for the comfort of the street waif. And Alfred had small scruple in consenting to aid his protector by wriggling his supple young body through small apertures into buildings which he had no right to enter. And so he was drifted into the lucrative business of store burglary.[6] After the strain and stress and desperate scramble for existence of the lonely child, one can imagine how easily he embraced this new vocation. It was a kind of life, too, which had its fascination for his adventurous spirit; it even enabled him to indulge in what was to him the greatest of luxuries, the luxury of giving. His own hardships had made him keenly sensitive to the suffering of others. But Alfred was not of the stuff from which successful criminals are made, for at eighteen he was in prison for the second time and was classed with the incorrigible.

It was during this last imprisonment that thought and study had developed his dominant trait of generosity into a broader altruism. He now realized that he could serve humanity better than by stealing money to give away. He was studying the conditions of the working and of the criminal classes, the needs of the side of society from which he was an outgrowth. The starting-point of this change was an Englishman's report of a visit to this country as "A place where each lived for the good of all." (?) "When I read that," said Alfred, "I stopped and asked myself: 'Have I been living for the good of all?' And I saw how I had been an enemy to society, and that I must start again in the opposite direction." It was not the cruelty of social conditions which he accused for his past. His good Welsh conscience came bravely forward and convicted him of his own share in social wrong-doing. "Now that I'm going to be a good man," Alfred continued, "I suppose I must be a Christian"—reversing the usual order of "conversion"—"and so I've been studying religion also lately. I've been hard at work trying to understand the Trinity." Alfred did not undertake things by halves.

I advised him not to bother with theology, but to content himself with the clear and simple working principles of Christianity, which would really count for something in his future battle with life.

When we touched upon books I was surprised to find this boy perfectly at home with his Thackeray and his Scott, and far more deeply read in history and political economy than I. He said that he had always read, as a newsboy at news-stands, at mission reading-rooms, wherever he could lay his hands on a book. He talked fluently, picturesquely, with absolute freedom from self-consciousness.

In Alfred's physiognomy—his photograph lies before me—there was no trace of the so-called criminal type; his face was distinctively that of the student, the thinker, the enthusiast. His fate seemed such a cruel waste of a piece of humanity of fine fibre, with a brain that would have made a brilliant record in any university. But the moral and physical deprivations from which his boyhood suffered had wrought havoc with his health and undermined his constitution.

This November interview resulted immediately in a correspondence, limited on Alfred's side to the rule allowing convicts to write but one letter a month. On my part, the letters were more frequent, and magazines for the Sundays were regularly sent. Alfred was a novice in correspondence, probably not having written fifty letters in his life. I was surprised at the high average of his spelling and the uniform excellency of his handwriting. In order to make the most of the allotted one leaf of foolscap paper he left no margins and soon evolved a small, upright writing, clear and almost as fine as magazine type.