The Man Behind the Bars

by Winifred Louise Taylor

Strict repressive discipline applied to organized enslavement of labor is in direct violation of all these principles. The penal colony seems a rational method of dealing with those whose permanent removal from our midst is deemed necessary. Time and again have penal colonies given satisfactory solution to the criminal problem. Virginia and Maryland absorbed the human exports from English courts, and their descendants joined in the building of a great nation; while the penal colony in Australia resulted in a civilization of the first rank. While the deportation of our criminals to-day may be neither practicable nor desirable, the establishment of industrial penal communities in every State, on a profit-sharing basis, is both practicable and desirable, and would unquestionably result in the permanent reform of many who are now a menace to public safety.

Notwithstanding that progressive wardens are accomplishing all-important changes in their domains, permanent reform work for convicts demands a number of concessions in legislation. Until the contract system is wholly and finally abolished in favor of the state-use system the power of even the best warden will be limited. With the state-use system and the prison farm the prisoners have a variety in opportunity of industrial training almost as great as that offered on the outside.

That the earnings of prisoners, beyond the cost of their maintenance, should either be credited to the man himself or sent to the family dependent upon him is but fair to the prisoner, and would relieve the county from which he is sent from taxation toward the support of the man's family. This is so obvious that it is now widely advocated for both economic and humanitarian reasons, and in several States has already been adopted.

Another concession is of still greater importance, since its neglect has been in direct violation not only of every principle of justice but of common every-day honesty. This concession is the recognition of the duty of the state to make what reparation is possible to the man who has suffered imprisonment for a crime of which he was innocent.

Years ago, during one of my visits to our penitentiary, a lawyer of wide experience made the remark: "From what I know of court proceedings I suppose twenty per cent of these convicts are innocent of the charge for which they are here." I did not credit that statement, and afterward repeated it to another lawyer, who said: "I should estimate the percentage even higher." I did not believe that estimate either; nor do I now believe it. But having worked up the cases and secured the pardons of two innocent men, and having personally known two other men imprisoned for crimes in which they took no part, I know that innocent men are sent to prison. Lawyers are prone to dispose of such instances with the offhand remark, "Well, they might not have been guilty of that particular act, but no doubt they had committed crimes for which they escaped punishment." I have positive knowledge of only those four cases, but in none of them was the convicted man from the criminal class. Another remark which I have met is this: "Doubtless there are innocent men in prison, but there are more guilty ones who escape," which reminds one of Charles Lamb's admission: "Yes, I am often late to business in the morning, but then I always go home early in the afternoon." Plausible as the excuse sounds, it but aggravates the admission.

It happened some years ago in my own State that a working man was convicted of killing another. Henry Briggs asserted his innocence, but a network of plausible evidence was drawn about him and he was sent to prison for life. His widowed mother had faith in his innocence and paid two thousand dollars to lawyers, who promised to secure her son's pardon but accomplished nothing in that direction. Briggs had been in prison some ten years when he told his story to me and I believed that he told the truth. His home town was across the State from me, but I wrote the ex-sheriff, who was supposed to know all about the case, that the prisoner's mother would give another thousand dollars to him if he could secure evidence of Henry's innocence and obtain his pardon. A long and interesting correspondence followed, and at the end of two years evidence of the man's innocence was secured and Henry Briggs was a free man. In his last letter the sheriff wrote me: "To think that all these twelve years that convicted man had been telling the absolute truth and it never occurred to any one to believe him until you heard his story." But that ex-sheriff, who had collected his sheriff's fees and mileage for taking an innocent man to prison—he was really indebted to the prisoner for a neat little sum paid by the county—yet that sheriff had no scruples in taking the thousand dollars from Mrs. Briggs for righting a wrong which, he frankly admitted to me, he had taken part in perpetrating. Now, in common honesty, in dollars and cents, the county from which Henry was sent owed the Briggs mother and son at least ten thousand dollars; instead of which the mother was left an impoverished widow, while the son, with youth and health gone, had to begin life over again.

When men are maimed for life in a railroad accident the owners of the road are obliged to pay a good round sum in compensation. The employer is liable for damages when an employee is injured by defective machinery; but to the victims of our penal machinery no compensation is made by the state, at whose hands the outrage was committed. It is true that the injured party is at liberty to bring suit against the individual who charged him with the crime, but as the burned child dreads the fire so the innocent man convicted of a crime dreads the courts.

But we are waking up to a sense of this most cruel robbery; the robbery of a man's liberty, his earnings, his reputation, and too often his health; and we are coming to see that compensation from the state, on receiving convincing evidence of the man's innocence, is only the man's just due—is even far less than fair play.