The Man Behind the Bars

by Winifred Louise Taylor

"I'll break him of swearing," said the man impetuously, "and I'll try to break him of lying. Can't he see what I am? Can't he see what he'll come to if he doesn't brace up? I'm a living argument—a living example of the folly and degradation of stealing and lying. I can't ever be anything but what I am now, but there's hope for that boy if some one will only give him a chance, and I want you to help him."

The force of his appeal was not to be resisted, and I agreed to follow his lead in an effort to save his fellow prisoner from destruction. As I stood there in the twilight beside this man reaching out from the wreck and ruin of his own life to lend a hand in the rescue of this boy, if only the "good people" would do their part, I hoped that Saint Peter and the Recording Angel were looking down. And as I said good night—with a hand-clasp—I felt that I had touched a human soul.

The man kept his word, the boy gave up swearing and braced up generally, and I kept my part of the agreement; but I do not know if our combined efforts had a lasting effect on the young culprit.

As time passed many of these men were sent from the jail to the State penitentiary, and often a wife or family was left in destitution; and the destitution of a prisoner's wife means not only poverty but heart-break, disgrace, and despair. Never shall I forget the first time I saw the parting of a wife from her husband the morning he was taken to prison. A sensitive, high-strung, fragile creature she was; and going out in the bitter cold of December, carrying a heavy boy of eighteen months and followed by an older girl, she seemed the very embodiment of desolation. I have been told by those who do not know the poor that they do not feel as we do, that their sensibilities are blunted, their imagination torpid. Could we but know! Could we but know, we should not be so insensate to their sufferings. It is we who are dull. To that prisoner's wife that morning life was one quivering torture, with absolutely no escape from agonizing thoughts. Her "home" to which I went that afternoon was a cabin in which there was one fire, but scant food, and no stock of clothing; the woman was ignorant of charitable societies and shrinking from the shame of exposing her needs as a convict's wife.

It is not difficult to make things happen in small towns when people know each other and live within easy distances. In less time, really less actual time than it would have taken to write a paper for the Woman's Club on "The Problems of Poverty," this prisoner's wife was relieved from immediate want. To tell her story to half a dozen acquaintances who had children and superfluous clothing, to secure a certain monthly help from the city, was a simple matter; and in a few months the woman was taking in sewing—and doing good work—for a reliable class of patrons.

I have not found the poor ungrateful; twenty years afterward this woman came to me in prosperity from another town, where she had been a successful dressmaker, to express once more her gratitude for the friendship given in her time of need. Almost without exception with my prisoners and with their families I have found gratitude and loyalty unbounded.

When the men sent from the jail to the penitentiary had no family they naturally wrote to me. Sometimes they learned to write while in jail or after they reached the prison just for the pleasure of interchanging letters with some one. All prison correspondence is censored by some official; and as my letters soon revealed my disinterested relation to the prisoners, the warden, R. W. McClaughrey, now of national fame, sent me an invitation to spend several days as his guest, and thus to become acquainted with the institution.

It was a great experience, an overwhelming experience when first I realized the meaning of prison life. I seemed to be taken right into the heart of it at once. The monstrous unnaturalness of it all appalled me. The great gangs of creatures in stripes moving in the lock-step like huge serpents were all so unhuman. Their dumb silence—for even the eyes of a prisoner must be dumb—was oppressive as a nightmare. The hopeless misery of the men there for life; already entombed, however long the years might stretch out before them, and the wild entreaty in the eyes of those dying in the hospital—for the eyes of the dying break all bonds—these things haunted my dreams long afterward. Later I learned that even in prison there are lights among the shadows, and that sunny hearts may still have their gleams of sunshine breaking through the darkness of their fate; but my first impression was one of unmitigated gloom. When I expressed something of this to the warden his response was: "Yes, every life here represents a tragedy—a tragedy if the man is guilty, and scarcely less a tragedy if he is innocent."

As the guest of the warden I remained at the penitentiary for several days and received a most cordial standing invitation to the institution, with the privilege of talking with any prisoner without the presence of an officer. The unspeakable luxury to those men of a visit without the presence of a guard! Some of the men with whom I talked had been in prison for ten years or more with never a visitor from the living world and only an occasional letter.