The Man Behind the Bars

by Winifred Louise Taylor

CHAPTER V

An habitual criminal of the pronounced type was my friend Dick Mallory. I have no remembrance of our first meeting, but he must have been thirty years old at the time, was in the penitentiary for the third time, and serving a fourteen-year sentence. Early in our acquaintance I asked him to write for me a detailed account of his childhood and boyhood, the environment and influences which had made him what he was, and also his impression of the various reformatories and minor penal institutions of which he had been an inmate. This he was allowed to do by special permission, and the warden of the penitentiary gave his indorsement as to the general reliability of his statements. The following brief sketch of his youth is summarized from his own accounts.

One cannot hold Dick Mallory as a victim of social conditions, neither was he of criminal parentage. One of his grandfathers was a farmer, the other a mechanic. His father was a working-man, his mother a big-hearted woman, thoroughly kindly and to the last devoted to her son. There must have been some constitutional lack of moral fibre in Dick, who was the same wayward, unmanageable boy known to heart-broken mothers in all classes of life. Impulsive, generous, with an overflowing sociability of disposition, he won his way with convicts and guards in the different penal institutions included in his varied experience. I hate to put it into words, but Dick was undeniably a thief; and his career as a thief began very early. When seven years of age he was sent to a parish school, and there, he tells me, "A tough set of boys they were, including myself. There I received my first lessons in stealing. We would go through all the alley ways on our way to and from school, and break into sheds and steal anything we could sell for a few cents, using the money to get into cheap theatres."

This early lawlessness led to more serious misdemeanors until the boy at thirteen was sent to the reform school. This reform-school experience—in the late seventies—afforded the best possible culture for all the evil in his nature. This reform school was openly designated a "hotbed of crime" for the State. Inevitably Dick left it a worse boy than at his entrance. Another delinquency soon followed, for which he was sent to jail for a month, the mother hoping that this would "teach him a lesson." "It did. But oh, what a lesson. Oh! but it was a hard place for a boy! There were from three to seven in each cell, some of them boys younger than I, some hardened criminals. We were herded together in idleness, learning only lessons in crime. In less than six months I was there a second time. Then mother moved into another neighborhood, but alas, for the change. That same locality has turned out more thieves than any other portion of Chicago, that sin-begrimed city. From the time I became acquainted in that neighborhood I was a confirmed thief, and a constant object of suspicion to the police.

"One evening I was arrested on general principles, taken into the police station and paraded before the whole squad of the police, the captain saying, 'This is the notorious Dick Mallory, take a good look at him, and bring him in night or day, wherever you may find him.'" This completed his enmity to law and order.

Soon after followed an experience in the house of correction of which he says: "This was my first time there and a miserable time it was. Sodom and Gomorrah in their palmiest days could not hold a candle to it. You know that by this time I was no spring chicken, but the place actually made me sick; it was literally swarming with vermin, the men half starved and half clad." This workhouse experience was repeated several times and was regarded afterward as the lowest depth of moral degradation of his whole career. "I did not try to obtain work in these intervals of liberty, because I was arrested every time I was met by a policeman who had seen me before."

Thoroughly demoralized Dick Mallory sought the saloons, at first for the sake of sociability, then for the stimulant which gave temporary zest to life, until the habit of drinking was confirmed and led to more serious crimes.

Perhaps neither our modern juvenile courts nor our improved methods in reform school and house of correction would have materially altered the course of Dick Mallory's life, although a thorough course of manual training might have turned his destructive tendencies into constructive forces and the right teaching might have instilled into him some principles of good citizenship. Be that as it may, the fact remained that before this boy had reached his majority his imprisonment had become a social necessity; he had become the very type against whom our most severe legislation has been directed.

But this was not the Dick Mallory whom I came to know so well ten years later, and who was for two years or more my guide and director in some of the best work I ever accomplished for prisoners. Strange to say, this man, utterly irresponsible and lawless as he had heretofore been, was a model prisoner. He fell into line at once, learned his trade on the shoe contract rapidly, became an expert workman, earning something like sixty dollars a year by extra work. He was cheerful, sensible, level-headed; and settled down to convict life with the determination to make the best of it, and the most of the opportunity to read and study evenings. The normal man within him came into expression. His comparison between the house of correction and the penitentiary was wholly in favor of the latter. He recognized the necessity of a strict discipline for men like himself; he appreciated the difficulties of the warden's position and his criticisms of the institutions were confined mostly to the abuses inherent in the contract system. Never coming into contact with the sick or disabled, himself blessed with the irrepressible buoyancy of the sons of Erin, physically capable of doing more than all the work required of him, his point of view of convict life and prison administration was at that time altogether different from that of John Bryan. He plunged into correspondence with me with an ardor that never flagged, covering every inch of the writing-paper allotted him, treasuring every line of my letters, and re-reading them on the long Sunday afternoons in his cell. For years he had made the most of the prison libraries. His reading was mainly along scientific lines; Galton, Draper, and Herbert Spencer he treasured especially. His favorite novel was M. Linton's "Joshua Davidson," a striking modern paraphrase of the life of Jesus. His good nature won him many small favors and privileges from the prison guards, and the time that I knew him as a prisoner was unquestionably the happiest period of his life.