It strikes me that prison chaplains would do well to heed this convict point of view of their preaching.
I do not recall that Shannon ever made a criticism upon the administration of the prison of which he was then an inmate, but he gives free expression to his opinion of our general system of imprisonment. He had been studying the reports of a prison congress recently in session where various "reformatory measures" had been discussed, or, to use his expression, "expatiated upon," and writes:
"I wish to make a few remarks from personal observation upon this subject of prison reform. I will admit, to begin with, that upon the ground of protection to society, the next best thing to hanging a criminal is to put him in prison, providing you keep him there; but if you seek his reformation it is the worst thing you can do with him. Convicts generally are not philosophers, neither are they men of pure thought or deep religious feelings. They are not all sufficient to themselves, and for this reason confinement never did, never can and never will have a good effect upon them.
"I have known hundreds of men, young and old, who have served time in prison. I have known many of them to grow crafty in prison and upon release to employ their peculiar talents in some other line of business, safer but not less degrading to themselves; but I never knew one to have been made a better man by prison discipline;—those who reformed did so through other influences.
"It may be a good prison or a bad one, with discipline lax or rigorous, but the effect, though different, is never good: it never can be. Crime is older than prisons. According to best accounts it began in the Garden of Eden, but God—who knew human nature—instead of shutting up Adam and Eve separately, drove them out into the world where they could exercise their minds hustling for themselves. Since then there has been but one system that reformed a man without killing him, namely, transportation.
"This system, instead of leaving a bad man in prison, to saturate himself with his own poison, sent him to a distant country, where under new conditions, and with something to work and hope for, he could harmlessly dissipate that poison among the wilds of nature. It may be no other system is possible; that the world is getting too densely populated to admit of transportation; or that society owes nothing to one who has broken her laws. I write this, not as 'an Echo from a Living Tomb,' but as plain common sense."[13]
Personal pride, one of the very elements of the man's nature, kept him from ever uttering a complaint of individual hardships; but the mere fact of confinement, the lack of air, space, freedom of movement and action, oppressed him as if the iron bars were actually pressing against his spirit. His one aim was to find some Lethe in which he could drown memory and consciousness of self. In all the years of his manhood there seemed to have been no sunny spot in which memory could find a resting-place.
From first to last his misdirection of life had been such a frightful blunder; even in its own line such a dismal failure. His boasted "fine art" of burglary had landed him in the ranks of murderers. He had despised cowardice and yet at the critical hour in the destiny of another he had proven himself a coward. And when by complete self-sacrifice he had sought to right the wrong the sacrifice had been in vain.