On a lovely evening some thirty years ago there was a jolly wedding at the home of a young Irish girl in a Western city. Tom Evans, the groom, a big-hearted, jovial fellow, was deeply in love with the girl of his choice. He was earning good wages and he intended to take good care of his wife.
It was midnight, and the streets were flooded with brilliant moonlight when Evans started to take his bride from her home to his, accompanied on the way by Jim Maguire, Larry Flannigan, and Ned Foster, three of the wedding guests. They were not carriage folks and were walking to the street-car when Jim Maguire, who had not been averse to the exhilarating liquids in hospitable circulation at the wedding feast, became unduly hilarious and disported himself with song and dance along the sidewalk—a diversion in which the others took no part. This hilarity was summarily interrupted by a policeman, who attempted to arrest the young man for disorderly conduct, a proceeding vigorously resisted by Maguire.
This was the beginning of an affray in which the policeman was killed, and the whole party were arrested and taken into custody. As the policeman was well known, one of the most popular men on the force, naturally public indignation ran high and the feeling against his slayers was bitter and violent.
Tom Evans and Jim Maguire were held for murder, while Larry Flannigan, a boy of seventeen, and Ned Foster, as participants in the affair, were charged with manslaughter. The men were given fair trials—separate trials, I believe—in different courts, but it was impossible to get at the facts of the case, as there were no actual witnesses outside of those directly affected by the outcome; while each lawyer for the defence did his best to clear his own client from direct responsibility for the death of the policeman, regardless of the deserts of the others under accusation.
And so it came to pass that Jim Maguire and Tom Evans were "sent up" for life, while the bride of an hour returned to her father's house and in the course of time became the bride of another. Larry Flannigan was sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment. Ned Foster, having served a shorter sentence, was released previous to my acquaintance with the others.
Some five years later one of the prison officers interested in Jim Maguire asked me to interview the man. Maguire was a tall, muscular fellow, restive under confinement as a hound in leash; nervous, too, and with abounding vitality ready at a moment's notice again to break out in song and dance if only the chance were given. This very overcharge of high animal spirits, excited by the wedding festivities, was the starting-point of all the tragedy. No doubt, too, in his make-up there were corresponding elements of recklessness and defiance.
Our first interview was the beginning of an acquaintance resulting in an interchange of letters; but it was not until a year afterward that in a long conversation Maguire gave me an account of his part in the midnight street encounter. Admitting disorderly conduct and resistance against the officer, he claimed that it was resistance only and not a counter attack; stating that the struggle between the two continued until the officer had the upper hand and then continued beating him into subjection so vigorously that Maguire called for help and was rescued from the hands of the officer by "one of the other boys." He did not say which one nor further implicate any one.
Ask the other boys, he said. "Larry didn't have anything to do with the killing, but he saw the whole thing. Get Larry to tell the story," he urged.
And so I was introduced to Larry. He was altogether of another type from Maguire. I hardly knew whether he wore the convict stripes or broadcloth when I was looking into that face, so sunny, so kindly, so frank. After all these years I can never think of Larry without a glow in my heart. He alone, of all my prisoners, appeared to have no consciousness of degradation, of being a convict; but met me simply and naturally as if we had been introduced at a picnic.
I told him of my interview with Jim Maguire and his immediate comment was: "Jim ought not to be here; he resisted arrest but he did not kill the officer; he's here for life and it's wrong, it's terrible. I hope you will do something for Jim."
But what of yourself? I asked; "you seem to have been outside of the affair altogether. I think I'd better do something for you."
Oh, no! he protested, "you can get one man out easier than two. I want to see Jim out, and I don't want to stand in his way. You know I am innocent, and all my friends believe me innocent, and I'm young and well and can stand my sentence; it will be less than ten years with good time off. My record is perfect and I shall get along all right. But Jim is here for life."
I felt as if I were dreaming. I knew it would be a simple matter to obtain release for Larry, who had already been there six years, but no, the boy would not consider that, would not even discuss it. His thought was all for Jim, and he was unconscious of self-sacrifice. He simply set aside what seemed to him the lesser good in order to secure the greater.
Did you ever make a full statement in court? I asked.
No. We were only allowed to answer direct questions in the examinations. None of us were given a chance to tell the straight story.
So the straight story never came out at any of the trials?
No.
Thinking it high time that the facts of a case in which two men were suffering imprisonment for life should be ascertained and put on record somewhere, it then remained for me to interview Evans, and to see how nearly the statements of the three men agreed, each given to me in private six years after the occurrence of the event.
Tom Evans—I see him now clearly as if it were but yesterday—a thick-set, burly figure with an intelligent face of good lines and strong character; a man of force who from his beginning as brakesman might have worked his way up to superintending a railroad, had the plan of his destiny been different.
I told him frankly that I had asked to see him in the interest of the other two, and that what I wanted first of all was to get the facts of the case, for the tragedy was still a "case" to me.
And you want me to tell the story? I felt the vibration of restrained emotion in the man from the first as he pictured the drama enacted in that midnight moonlight.
I had just been married and we were going to my home. The streets were light as day. Jim was singing and dancing, when the policeman seized him. I saw there was going to be a fight and I made up my mind to keep out of it; for when I let my temper go it gets away with me. So I stood back with my girl. Jim called for help but I stood back till I really believed Jim might be killed. I couldn't stand by and see a friend beaten to death, or take any chance of that. And so I broke into the fight. I got hold of the policeman's club and began to beat the policeman. I am a strong man and I can strike a powerful blow.
Here Evans paused, and there was silence between us until he said with a change of tone and expression:
It was Larry who came to the help of the policeman and got the club away from me. It's Larry that ought to be out. Jim made the trouble and I killed the policeman, but Larry is wholly innocent. He is the one I want to see out.
At last we were down to bed-rock; there was no doubt now of the facts which the clumsy machinery of the courts had failed to reach.
I assured Evans that I would gladly do what I could for Larry, and then and there Evans and I joined hands to help "the other boys." I realized something of the sacrifice involved when I asked Evans if he was willing to make a sworn statement in the presence of the warden of the facts he had given me. What a touchstone of the man's nature! But he was following the lead of truth and justice and there was no turning back.
We all felt that it was a serious transaction in the warden's office next day when Evans came in and, after a little quiet conversation with the warden, made and signed a statement to the effect that he, and he only, struck the blows that killed the policeman, and with hand on the Bible made oath to the truth of the statement, which was then signed, as witnesses, by the warden and a notary.
As Evans left the office the warden said to me: "Something ought to be done for that man also when the other boys are out."
I knew that in securing this confession I had committed myself to all the necessary steps involved before the prison doors could be opened to Maguire and Larry. And in my heart I was already pledged to befriend the man who, with unflinching courage, had imperilled his own chances of liberation in favor of the others; for I was now beginning to regard Evans as the central figure in the tragedy.
It is no brief nor simple matter to obtain the release of a man convicted of murder by the court and sentenced to life imprisonment unless one has political influence strong enough to override all obstacles. Almost endless are the delays likely to occur and the details to be worked out before one has in hand all the threads necessary to be woven into the fabric of a petition for executive clemency.
In order to come directly in touch with the families of Larry and Maguire, and with the competent lawyer already enlisted in their service and now in possession of the statement of Evans, I went to the city where the crime was committed. The very saddest face that I had seen in connection with this affair was the face of Maguire's widowed mother. She was such a little woman, with spirit too crushed and broken by poverty and the fate of her son to revive even at the hope of his release. It was only the ghost of a smile with which she greeted me; but when we parted her gratitude called down the blessings of all the saints in the calendar to follow me all my days.
Larry's people I found much the same sort as he, cheerful, generous, bravely meeting their share of the hard luck that had befallen him, apparently cherishing the treasure of his innocence more than resenting the injustice, but most grateful for any assistance toward his liberation. The lawyer who had interviewed Larry and Maguire at the penitentiary expressed amazement at what he called "the unbelievable unselfishness" of Larry. "I did not suppose it possible to find that spirit anywhere, last of all in a prison," he said. Larry had consented to be included on the petition drawn up for Maguire only when convinced that it would not impair Maguire's chances.
When I left the place the lines appeared to be well laid for the smooth running of our plans. I do not now remember what prevented the presentation of the petition for commutation of both sentences to twelve years; but more than a year passed before the opportune time seemed to be at hand.
During this interval Evans was by no means living always in disinterested plans for the benefit of the others. The burden of his own fate hung heavily over him and no one in the prison was more athirst for freedom than he. In books from the prison library he found some diversion, and when tired of fiction he turned to philosophy, seeking to apply its reasoning to his own hard lot; again, he sought in the poets some expression and interpretation of his own feelings. It was in the ever welcome letters that he found most actual pleasure, but he encountered difficulties in writing replies satisfactory to himself. In a letter now before me he says:
"I only wish that I could write as I feel, then indeed would you receive a gem; but I can't, more's the pity. But I can peruse and cherish your letters, and if I dare I would ask you to write oftener. Just think, the idea strikes me that I am writing to an authorous, me that never could spell a little bit. But the authorous is my friend, is she not, and will overlook this my defect. I have done the best I could to write a nice letter and I hope it will please you, but, in the words of Byron, 'What is writ is writ:
"Would it were worthier. But I am not now
That which I have been, and my visions flit
Less palpably before me, and the glow
Which in my spirit dwelt is fluttering faint and low.'
With the last line of your letter I close, 'write soon, will you not?'
Evans's letters to me were infrequent, as he kept in correspondence with his lawyers, who encouraged him to hope that he would not spend all his life behind the bars. Others, too, claimed his letters. He writes me:
I have a poor old mother who expects and always gets my Christmas letters, but I resolved that you should have my first New Years letter, so here it is, wishing you a happy new year and many of them. No doubt you had many Christmas letters from here telling you of the time we had, and a jolly good time it was. It is awfully dark here in the cells to day and I can hardly see the lines to write on. I hope you won't have as much trouble in reading it. The handwriting in Evans's letters is vigorous, clear, and open; a straightforward, manly hand, without frills or flourishes.
Just as I was leaving home for one of my semi-annual visits to the penitentiary, I had information from their lawyer that the petition for Maguire and Larry would be presented to the governor the following month. Very much elated with the good news I was bringing I asked first for an interview with Evans. He came in, evidently in very good spirits, but as I proceeded to relate with enthusiasm what we had accomplished I felt an increasing lack of response on the part of Evans and saw the light fading from his face.
O Miss Taylor, he said at last, with such a note of pain in his voice, "you know my lawyers have been working for me all this time. Of course I told them of the statement I made in the warden's office, and then left the case in their hands. One of them was here yesterday and has a petition now ready asking that my sentence be reduced to fifteen years. Now if the other petition goes in first——"
There was no need to finish the sentence for the conflict of interests was clear; and Evans was visibly unnerved. We talked together for a long time. While unwilling to influence his decision I realized that, if his petition should have first consideration and be granted, the value of that confession, so important to the others, would be impaired, and the chances of Maguire's release lessened; for the governors are wary in accepting as evidence the confession of a man who has nothing to lose. On the other hand, I had not the heart to quench the hopes that Evans's lawyers had kindled. And in answer to his question, "What shall I do?" I could only say: "That is for you to decide."
At last Evans pulled himself together enough to say: "Well, I'm not going back on the boys now. I didn't realize just how my lawyers' efforts were going to affect them. I'm going to leave the matter in your hands, for I know you will do what is right." And this he insisted on.
Whatever course may seem best to take now, Tom, after this I shall never rest till I see you, too, out of prison, was my earnest assurance.
There had been such a spirit of fair play among these men that I next laid the case before Maguire and Larry, and we three held a consultation as to the best line of action. They, too, appreciated the generosity of Evans and realized, far more than I could, what it might cost him. Doubtless each one of the three felt the strong pull of self-interest; but there was no faltering in their unanimous choice of a square deal all around. One thing was clear, the necessity of bringing about an understanding and concerted action between the lawyers whose present intentions so seriously conflicted. The advice and moral support of the warden had been invaluable to me, and he and I both felt, if the lawyers could be induced to meet at the prison and consult not only with each other but with their three clients, if they could only come in direct touch with these convicts and realize that they were men who wanted to do the right thing and the fair thing, that a petition could be drawn placing Evans and Maguire on the same footing, and asking the same reduction of sentence for both; while Larry in justice was entitled to a full pardon. I still believe that if this course had been taken both petitions would have been granted. But lawyers in general seem to have a constitutional aversion to short cuts and simple measures, and Evans's lawyers made no response to any overtures toward co-operation.
At about this time occurred a change in the State administration, with the consequent inevitable delay in the consideration of petitions for executive clemency; as it was considered impolitic for the newly elected governor to begin his career by hasty interference with the decision of the courts, or too lenient an attitude toward convicts.
Then ensued that period of suspense which seems fairly to corrode the heart and nerves of the long-time convict. The spirit alternates between the fever of hope and the chill of despair. Men pray then who never prayed before. The days drag as they never dragged before; and when evening comes the mind cannot occupy itself with books while across the printed page the same questions are ever writing themselves: "Shall I hear to-morrow?" "Will the governor grant or refuse my petition?" One closes the book only to enter the restless and wearisome night, breathing the dead air of the prison cell, listening to the tread of the guard in the corridor. Small wonder would it be if in those midnight hours Evans cursed the day in which he declared that he alone killed the policeman; but neither in his letters to me nor in his conversation was there ever an indication of regret for that action. The Catholic chaplain of the prison was truly a good shepherd and comforter to his flock, and it was real spiritual help and support that he gave to the men. His advice at the confessional may have been the seed from which sprung Evans's resolve to clear his own conscience and exonerate the others when the opportunity came.
Maguire never fluctuated in his confidence that freedom was on the way, but he was consumed with impatience; Larry alone, who never sought release, bided his time in serene cheerfulness.
And the powers that be accepted Larry's sacrifice; for so long was the delay in the governor's office that Maguire was released on the day on which Larry's sentence expired. The world looked very bright to Jim Maguire and Larry Flannigan as they passed out of the prison doors into liberty together. Maguire took up life again in his old environment, not very successfully, I have reason to think. But Larry made a fresh start in a distant city, unhampered by the fact that he was an ex-convict.
It was then that the deadly blight of prison life began to throw its pall over Evans, and the long nervous strain to undermine his health. He wrote me:
I am still working at the old job, and I can say with truth that my antipathy to it increases each day. I am sick and tired of writing to lawyers for the last two years, and it amounted to nothing. I will gladly turn the case over to you if you can do anything with it.
The event proved that these lawyers were interested in their case, but politically they were in opposition to the governor and had no influence; nor did I succeed better in making the matter crystallize.
I had always found Evans animated and interested in whatever we were talking about until one interview when he had been in prison about thirteen years, all that time on prison contract work. The change in his appearance was evident when he came into the room. He seated himself listlessly, and my heart sank, for too well I knew that dull apathy to which the long-time men succumb. Now, knowing with what glad anticipation he had formerly looked forward to our interviews, I was determined that the hour should not pass without leaving some pleasant memory; but it was twenty minutes or more before the cloud in his eyes lifted and the smile with which he had always greeted me appeared. His whole manner changed as he said: "Why, Miss Taylor, I am just waking up, beginning to realize that you are here. My mind is getting so dull that nothing seems to make any impression any more." He was all animation for the rest of the time, eagerly drinking in the joy of sympathetic companionship.—What greater joy does life give?
But I had taken the alarm, for clearly the man was breaking down, and I urged the warden to give him a change of work. The warden said he had tried to arrange that; but Evans was on contract work, one of the best men in the shop, and the contractors were unwilling to give up so profitable a workman—the evils of the contract system have much to answer for. So Evans continued to work on the contract, and the prison blight progressed and the man's vitality was steadily drained. When the next winter came and la grippe invaded the prison, the resisting power of Evans was sapped; and when attacked by the disease he was relegated to the prison hospital to recuperate. He did not recuperate; on the contrary, various symptoms of general physical deterioration appeared and it was evident that his working days on the prison contract were over.
A renewed attempt was now made to procure the release of Evans, as his broken health furnished a reason for urgency toward immediate action on the part of the governor, and this last attempt was successful. The good news was sent to Evans that in a month he would be a free man, and I was at the prison soon after the petition was granted. I knew that Evans was in the hospital, but had not been informed of his critical condition until the hospital physician told me that serious heart trouble had developed, intensified by excitement over the certainty of release.
No shadow of death was visible or was felt in this my last visit with Evans, who was dressed and sitting up when I went in to see him. Never, never have I seen any one so happy as was Evans that morning. With heart overflowing with joy and with gratitude, his face was radiant with delight. All the old animation was kindled again, and the voice, no longer lifeless, was colored and warm with feeling.
I want to thank everybody, he said, "the governor, my lawyers, the warden, and you. Everybody has been so good to me these last weeks. And I shall be home for next Sunday. My sister is coming to take me to her home, and she and my mother will take care of me until I'm able to work. Sister writes me that mother can't sit still, but walks up and down the room in her impatience to see me."
We two friends, who had clasped hands in the darkness of his fate, were together now when the dawn of his freedom was breaking, neither of us realizing that it was to be the greater freedom of the Life Invisible.
To us both, however, this hour was the beautiful culmination of our years of friendship. I read the man's heart as if it were an open book and it held only good will toward all the world.
Something moved me to speak to him as I had never spoken to one of my prisoners, to try and make him feel my appreciation of his courage, his unselfishness, his faithfulness. I told him that I realized how he had lived out the qualities of the most heroic soldier. To give one's life for one's country when the very air is charged with the spirit of patriotism is a fine thing and worthy of the thrill of admiration which it always excites. But liberty is dearer than life, and the prison atmosphere gives little inspiration to knightly deeds. This man had risen above himself into that higher region of moral victory. And so I said what was in my heart, while something deeper than happiness came into Evans's face.
And then we said good-by, smiling into each other's eyes. This happened, I think, on the last day but one of Evans's life.
Afterward it was told in the prison that Evans died of joy at the prospect of release. For him to be carried into the new life on this high tide of happiness seemed to me a gift from heaven. For in the thought of the prisoner freedom includes everything to be desired in life. The joy of that anticipation had blinded Evans to the fact that his health was ruined beyond repair. He was spared the realization that the life of freedom, so fair to his imagination, could never truly be his; for the prison-house of disease has bolts and bars which no human hand can withdraw.
But that mother! If she could have read only once again the light of his love for her in the eyes of her son! But the sorrows of life fall alike upon the just and the unjust.
FOOTNOTE:
The good time allowed on a twelve years' sentence reduces it to seven years and three months.
The psychological side of convict life is intensely interesting, but in studying brain processes, supposed to be mechanical, one's theories and one's logical conclusions are likely to be baffled by a factor that will not be harnessed to any set of theories; namely, that something which we call conscience. We forget that the criminal is only a human being who has committed a crime, and that back of the crime is the same human nature common to us all.
During the first years when I was in touch with prison life I had only occasional glimpses of remorse for crimes committed. The minds of most of the convicts seemed to dwell on the "extenuating circumstances" more than on the criminal act, and the hardships of prison life were almost ever present in their thoughts. I had nearly come to consider the remorse pictured in literature and the drama as an unreal thing, when I made the acquaintance of Ellis Shannon and found it: a monster that gripped the human heart and held it as in a vise. Nemesis never completed a work of retribution more fully than it was completed in the life of Ellis Shannon.
Shannon was born in an Eastern city, was a boy of more than average ability, and there seemed no reason why he should have gone wrong; but he early lost his father, his mother failed to control him, and when about sixteen years of age he fell into bad company and was soon launched in his criminal career. He broke off all connection with his family, went West, and for ten years was successful in his line of business—regular burglary. He was widely known among men of his calling as "The Greek," and his "professional standing" was of the highest. The first I ever heard of him was from one of my other prison friends, who wrote me: "If you want to know about life in —— prison, write to Ellis Shannon, who is there now. You can depend absolutely on what he says—and when one professional says that of another you know it means something." I did not, however, avail myself of this introduction.
Shannon's reputation for cool nerve was undisputed, and it was said that he did not know what fear was. In order to keep a clear head and steady hand he refrained from dissipation; he prided himself upon never endangering the lives of those whose houses he entered, and despised the bunglers who did not know their business well enough to avoid personal encounter in their midnight raids. Unlike most men of his calling he always used a candle on entering a building, and his associates often told him that sometime that candle would get him into trouble.
One night the house of a prominent and popular citizen was entered. While the burglar was pursuing his nefarious work the citizen suddenly seized him by the shoulders, pulling him backward. The burglar managed to fire backward over his own head, the citizen's hold was relaxed, and the burglar fled. The shot proved fatal; the only trace left by the assailant was a candle dropped on the floor.
A reward was offered for the capture and conviction of the murderer. Circumstantial evidence connected with the candle led to the arrest of George Brett, a young man of the same town, not of the criminal class. The verdict in the case turned upon the identification of the piece of candle found in the house with one procured by the accused the previous day; and in the opinion of the court this identification was proven. Brett admitted having obtained a piece of candle from that grocer on that afternoon, but claimed that he had used it in a jack-o'-lantern made for a child in the family. Proof was insufficient to convict the man of the actual crime, but this bit of evidence, with some other less direct, was deemed sufficiently incriminating to warrant sending Brett to prison for a term of years—seventeen, I think; and though the convicted man always asserted his innocence his guilt was taken for granted while six years slipped by.
Ellis Shannon, in the meantime, had been arrested for burglary in another State and had served a sentence in another penitentiary. He seemed to have lost his nerve, and luck had turned against him. On his release still another burglary resulted in a ten years' sentence, this time to the same prison where Brett was paying the penalty of the crime in which the candle had played so important a part.
The two convicts happened to have cells in the same part of the prison, and for the first time Ellis Shannon came face to face with George Brett. A few days later Shannon requested an interview with the warden. In the warden's office he announced that he was the man guilty of the crime for which Brett was suffering, and that Brett had no part in it. He drew a sketch of the house burglarized—not altogether correct—gave a succinct account of the whole affair, and declared his readiness to go into court, plead guilty to murder, and accept the sentence, even to the death penalty. Action on this confession was promptly taken. Shannon was sent into court and on his confession alone was sentenced to imprisonment for life.
Brett was overjoyed by this vindication and the expectation of immediate release. But, no; the prosecuting parties were unconvinced by Shannon's confession, which, in their opinion, did not dispose of the evidence against Brett.
It was a curious state of affairs, and one perhaps never paralleled, that, while a man's unsupported statement was considered sufficient to justify the imposing of a sentence to life imprisonment, this statement counted for nothing as affecting the fate of the other man involved. And there was never a trace of collusion between the two men, either at the time of the crime or afterward.
Shannon's story of the crime I shall give in his own terse language, quoted from his confession published in the newspapers:
"Up to the time of killing Mr. —— I had never even wounded anybody. I had very little regard for the rights of property, but to shoot a man dead at night in his own house was a climax of villainy I had not counted on. A professional thief is not so blood-thirsty a wretch as he is thought to be.... I am setting up no defense for the crime of murder or burglary—it is all horrible enough. It was a miserable combination of circumstances that caused the shooting that night. I was not feeling well and so went into the house with my overcoat on—something I had never done before. It was buttoned to the throat. I had looked at Mr. —— a moment before and he was asleep. I had then turned and taken down his clothes. I had a candle in one hand and the clothes in the other. I would have left in a second of time when suddenly, before I could turn, Mr. —— spoke. As quick as the word he had his arms thrown around me; the candle went out and we were in the dark. Now I could hardly remember afterwards how it all occurred. There was no time to think. I was helpless as a baby in the position in which I was held. There is no time for reflection in a struggle like this. He was holding me and I was struggling to get away. I told him several times to let go or I'd shoot. I was nearly crazy with excitement and it was simply the animal instinct of self-preservation that caused me to fire the shots.
" "I was so weak when I got outside that in running I fell down two or three times. That night in Chicago I was in hopes the man was only wounded, and in that case I had determined to quit the business. When I read the account in the papers next morning all I can say is that, although I was in the city and perfectly safe, with as little chance of being discovered as if I were in another planet, I would have taken my chances—whether it would have been five or twenty years for the burglary—if it were only in my power to do the thing over again. I did not much care what I did after this. I thought I could be no worse than I was. In a few months I was arrested and got five years for a burglary in ——. I read what I could of the trial from what papers I could get; and for the first time I saw what a deadly web circumstances and the conceit of human shrewdness can weave around an innocent man.
" "The trial went on. I did not open my mouth. I knew that if I said a word and went into court fresh from the penitentiary I would certainly be hanged, and I had not reached a point when I was ready to sacrifice my life for a stranger. In the feverish life I led in the short time out of prison I forgot all about this, until I found myself here for ten years and then I thought: there is a man in this prison doing hard work, eating coarse food, deprived of everything that makes life worth having, and suffering for a crime of which he knows as little as the dust that is yet to be created to fill these miserable cells. I thought what a hell the place must be to him.
"No one has worked this confession out of me. I wish to implicate no one, but myself. If you will not believe what I say now, and —— stays in prison, it is likely the truth will never be known. But if in the future the man who was with me that night will come to the front, whether I am alive or dead, you will find that what I have told you is as true as the law of gravitation. I was never in the town of —— before that time or since. I did not know whom I had killed until I read of it. I do not know —— (Brett) or any of his friends. But I do know that he is perfectly innocent of the crime he is in prison for. I know it better than any one in the world because I committed the crime myself.
The position of Brett was not affected in the least by this confession, though his family were doing all in their power to secure his release. The case was considered most difficult of solution. The theory of delusion on Shannon's part was advanced and was accepted by those who believed Brett guilty, but received no credence among the convicts who knew Shannon and the burglar associated with him at the time the crime was committed.
I had never sought the acquaintance of a "noted criminal" before, but this case interested me and I asked to see Shannon. For the first time I felt myself at a disadvantage in an interview with a convict. A sort of aloofness seemed to form the very atmosphere of his personality, and though he sat near me it was with face averted and downcast eyes; the face seemed cut in marble, it was so pale and cold, with clear-cut, regular features, suggesting a singular appropriateness in his being known as "The Greek."
I opened conversation with some reference to the newspaper reports; Shannon listened courteously but with face averted and eyes downcast, and then in low, level tones, but with a certain incisiveness, he entered upon the motive which led to his confession, revealing to me also his own point of view of the situation. Six years had passed since the crime was committed, and all that time, he said, he had believed that, if he could bring himself to confess, Brett would be cleared—that during these six years the murder had become a thing of the past, partially extenuated in his mind, on the ground of self-defence; but when he found himself in the same prison with Brett, here was a result of his crime, living, suffering; and in the depths of Shannon's own conscience pleading for vindication and liberty. As a burden on his own soul the murder might have been borne in silence between himself and his Creator, but as a living curse on another it demanded confession. And the desire to right that wrong swept through his being with overmastering force.
I had always believed, he said, "that 'truth crushed to earth would rise again,' and I was willing to give my life for truth; but I learned that the word of a convict is nothing—truth in a convict counts for nothing."
The man had scarcely moved when he told me all this, and he sat like a statue of despair when he relapsed into silence—still with downcast eyes; I was absolutely convinced of the truth of what he had told me, of the central truth of the whole affair, his guilt and his consciousness of the innocence of the other man. That his impressions of some of the details of the case might not square with known facts was of secondary importance; to me the internal evidence was convincing. Isn't there something in the Bible to the effect that "spirit beareth witness unto spirit"? At all events, sometimes a woman knows.
I told Shannon that I believed in his truth, and I offered to send him magazines and letters if he wished. Then he gave me one swift glance of scrutiny, with eyes accustomed to reading people, thanked me, and added as we parted: "If there were more people like you in this world there wouldn't be so many like me."
My belief in the truth of Shannon's statement was purely intuitive, but in order to make it clear to my understanding as well I studied every objection to its acceptance by those who believed Shannon to be the victim of a delusion. His sincerity no one doubted. It was claimed that Shannon had manifested no interest in the case previous to his arrival in the prison where Brett was. On the way to this prison Shannon, in attempting to escape from the sheriff, had received a blow on the back of his head, which it was assumed might have affected his mind. Among my convict acquaintances was a man who had worked in the shop beside Shannon in another prison, at the time of Brett's trial for the crime, and this man could have had no possible motive for incriminating Shannon. He told me that during all the time of the trial, five years previous to the blow on his head, Shannon was greatly disturbed, impatient to get hold of newspapers which he had to borrow, and apparently absorbed in studying the evidence against Brett, but saying always, "They can't convict him." This convict went on to tell me that after the case was decided against Brett Shannon seemed to lose his nerve and all interest in life. This account tallies exactly with Shannon's printed confession, in which he says: "I read what I could of the trial in what papers I could get. I had not yet reached the point where I was willing to sacrifice my life for a stranger."
In his confession Shannon had spoken of his accomplice in that terrible night's work as one who could come forward and substantiate his statements. Four different convicts of my acquaintance knew who this man was, but not one of them was able to put me in communication with him. The man had utterly disappeared. But this bit of evidence as to his knowledge of the crime I did collect—his whereabouts was known to at least one other of my convict acquaintances till the day after Shannon's confession was made public. That day my acquaintance received from Shannon's accomplice a paper with the confession marked and from that day had lost all trace of him. The convict made this comment in defence of the silence of the accomplice:
He wouldn't be such a fool as to come forward and incriminate himself after Shannon's experience.
Convicts in several States were aware of Shannon's fruitless effort to right a wrong, and knew of the punishment brought upon himself by his attempt. The outcome of the occurrence must have been regarded as a warning to other convicts who might be prompted to honest confession in behalf of another.
At that time I had never seen George Brett, and not until later was I in communication with his lawyers. But I was convinced that only from convicts could evidence verifying Shannon's confession be gleaned.
As far as I know, nothing more connected with that crime has ever come to light. And even to-day there is doubtless a division of opinion among those best informed. Finding there was nothing I could do in the matter, my interest became centred in the study of the man Shannon. He was an interesting study from the purely psychological side, still more so in the gradual revelation of his real inner life.
It is difficult to reconcile Shannon's life of action with his life of thought, for he was a man of intellect, a student and a thinker. His use of English was always correct. The range of his reading was wide, including the best fiction, philosophy, science, and, more unusual, the English essayists—Addison, Steele, and other contributors to The Spectator. The true philosopher is shown in the following extract from one of his letters to me:
I beg you not to think that I consider myself a martyr to the cause of truth. That my statement was rejected takes nothing from the naked fact, but simply proves the failure of conditions by which it was to be established as such. It did not come within the rules of acceptance in these things, consequently it was not accepted. This is a world of method. Things should be in their place. People do not go to a fish-monger for diamonds, nor to a prison for truth. I recognize the incongruity of my position and submit to the inevitable.
In explanation of his reception of my first call he writes:
"I don't think that at first I quite understood the nature of your call—it was so unexpected. If my meaning in what I said was obscure it was because in thinking and brooding too much one becomes unable to talk and gradually falls into a state where words seem unnatural. And these prison thoughts are terrible. In their uselessness they are like spiders building cobwebs in the brain, clouding it and clogging it beyond repair. I try to use imagination as a drug to fill my mind with a fanciful contentment that I can know in no other way. When I was a child I used to dream and speculate in anticipation of the world that was coming. Now I do the same, but for a different reason—to make me forget the detestable period of fact that has intervened. So when I am not reading or sleeping, and when my work may be performed mechanically and with least mental exertion, I live away from myself and surroundings as much as possible. I was in a condition something like this at the time of your call. A dreamer dislikes at best to be awakened and in a situation like mine it is especially trying. While talking in this way I must beg pardon, for I did really appreciate your visit and felt more human after it. I would not have you infer from this that the slightest imagination entered into my story of that unfortunate affair. I would it were so; but if it is a fact that I exist, all that I related is just as true.""
"His choice of Schopenhauer as a friend illustrates the hom?opathic principle of like curing like.
Schopenhauer is an old friend and favorite of mine. Very often when I am getting wretchedly blue and when everything as seen through my eyes is wearing a most rascally tinge, I derive an immense amount of comfort and consolation by thinking how much worse they have appeared to Schopenhauer. In other words, the great pessimist served to produce a healthy reaction.
But this reaction was but for the hour. All through Shannon's letters there runs a vein of the bitterest pessimism. He distrusted all forms of religion and arraigns the prison chaplains in these words:
I have never met a class of men who appear to know less of the spiritual nature or the wants of their flocks. It is strange to me that men, who might so easily gather material for the finest practical lessons, surrounded as they are by real life experiences and illustrations by which they might well teach that crime does not pay either in coin or happiness, that they will ignore all this and rack their brains to produce elaborate theological discourses founded upon some sentence of a fisherman who existed two thousand years ago, to paralyze and mystify a lot of poor plain horse thieves and burglars. What prisoners are in need of is a man able to preach natural, every-day common sense, with occasionally a little humor or an agreeable story or incident to illustrate a moral. It seems to me if I were to turn preacher I would try and study the simple character of the great master as it is handed down to us.
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.""
"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.
Understanding something of the world in which he lived, I suggested the study of a new language as a mental occupation requiring concentration on a line entirely disconnected from his past. He gladly adopted my suggestion and began the study of German; but it was all in vain—he could not escape from himself.
He had managed to keep so brave a front in his letters that I was unaware that the man was completely breaking down until the spring morning when we had our last interview.
There was in his face the unmistakable look of the man who is doomed—so many of my prisoners died. His remorse was like a living thing that had eaten into his life—a very wolf within his breast. He was no longer impassive, but fairly writhing in mental agony. He did not seem to know that he was dying; he certainly did not care. His one thought was for Brett and the far-reaching, irreparable wrong that Brett had suffered through him. When I said that I thought the fate of the innocent man in prison was not so dreadful as that of the guilty man Shannon exclaimed: "You are mistaken. I don't see how it is possible for a man unjustly imprisoned to believe in any justice, human or divine, or in any God above," and he continued with an impassioned appeal on behalf of innocent prisoners which left a deep impression with me. In his own being he seemed to be actually experiencing at once the fate of the innocent victim of injustice and of the guilty man suffering just punishment. He spoke of his intense spiritual loneliness, which human sympathy was powerless to reach, and of how thankful he should be if he could find light or hope in any religion; but he could not believe in any God of truth or justice while Brett was left in prison. A soul more completely desolate it is impossible to imagine.
My next letter from Shannon was written from the hospital, and expresses the expectation of being "all right again in a few days"; farther on in the letter come these words:
I do believe in a future life. Without this hope and its consoling influence life would scarcely be worth living. I believe that all the men who have ever died, Atheists or whatever they professed to be, did so with the hope more or less sustaining them, of awakening to a future life. This hope is implanted by nature universally in the human breast and it is not unlikely to suppose that it has some meaning.
A few weeks later I received a line from the warden telling me of the death of Ellis Shannon, and from the prison hospital was sent me a little volume of translations from Socrates which had been Shannon's companion in his last days. A slip of paper between the leaves marked Socrates's reflections on death and immortality. The report of one of the hospital nurses to me was:
Shannon had consumption, but he died of grief. It is not often that one dies of a broken heart outside the pages of fiction and romance, but medical authority assures us that it sometimes happens.
Up to this time I had never seen George Brett, but after the death of Shannon we had one long interview. What first struck me was the remarkable similarity between the voices of Brett and Shannon, as supposed identification of the voice of Brett with that of the burglar had been accepted as evidence at the trial. My general impression of the man was wholly favorable. He was depressed and discouraged, but responsive, frank, and unstudied in all that he said. When he mentioned the man shot in the burglary I watched him closely; his whole manner brightened as he said:
Why, he was one of the best men in the world, a man that little children loved. He was good to every one.
And you could never speak of that man as you are speaking now if you had taken his life, was my inward comment.
Brett's attitude toward Shannon was free from any shade of resentment, but what most impressed me was that Shannon's belief that the unjust conviction of Brett and his own fruitless effort to right the wrong must make it impossible for Brett ever to believe in a just God—in other words, that the most cruel injury to Brett was the spiritual injury. This belief proved to be without foundation. George Brett had not been a religious man, but in Shannon he saw that truth and honor were more than life, stronger than the instinct of self-preservation; and he could hardly escape from the belief that divine justice itself was the impelling power back of the impulse prompting Shannon to confession. In the strange action and interaction of one life upon another, in the final summing up of the relation of these two men, it seemed to have been given to Shannon to touch the deeper springs of spiritual life in Brett, to reveal to him something of the eternal verities of existence.
And truth crushed to earth did rise again; for not long after the death of Shannon, in the eighth year of his imprisonment, George Brett was pardoned, with the public statement that he had been convicted on doubtful evidence and that the confession of Shannon had been accepted in proof of his innocence.
No adequate compensation can ever be made to one who has suffered unjust imprisonment, but there are already indications of the dawn of a to-morrow when the state, in common honesty, will feel bound to make at least financial restitution to those who have been the victims of such injustice.
FOOTNOTES:
The crime was committed after the midnight of Hallowe'en.
This letter was written twenty-five years ago. The logic of Shannon's argument is unquestionably sound. The futility of imprisonment as a reformatory agent is now widely recognized. But better than transportation is the system of conditional liberation of men after conviction now receiving favorable consideration—even tentative adoption—in many States.
There is another chapter to my experience with prisoners; it is the story of what they have done for me, for they have kept the balance of give and take very even between us. I have an odd collection of souvenirs and keepsakes, but, incongruous as the different articles are, one thread connects them all; from the coarse, stubby pair of little mittens suggesting the hand of a six-year-old country boy to the flask of rare Venetian glass in the dull Oriental tones dear to the ?sthetic soul; from the hammock that swings under the maple-trees to the diminutive heart in delicately veined onyx, designed to be worn as a pendant.
The mittens came from Jackson Currant, a friendly soul who unravelled the one pair of mittens allowed him for the winter, contrived to possess himself of a piece of wire from which he fashioned a hook, and evenings in his cell crocheted for me a pair of mittens. Funny little things they were, but a real gift, for this prisoner took from himself and gave to me the one thing he had to give.
Another gift which touched me came from an old Rocky Mountain trapper—then a prisoner for life. His one most cherished possession was a copy of "A Day in Athens with Socrates," sent him by the translator. After keeping the precious book for three years and learning its contents by heart, he sent it to me as a birthday gift and I found it among other birthday presents one February morning. Then there is the cherry box that holds my stationery, with E. A.'s initials carved in the cover; E. A., who is reclaiming his future from all shadow of his past. It was E. A. who introduced me to my Welsh boy, Alfred Allen, and it was Alfred who opened my heart to all the street waifs in the universe.
In many ways my life has been enriched by my prisoners. Most delightful social affiliations, most stimulating intellectual influences, and some of the warmest friendships of my life, by odd chains of circumstances have developed from my prison interests.
Almost any friend can give us material gifts—the gift of things—the friend who widens our social relations or broadens our interests does us far better service; but it is the rare friend who opens our spiritual perception to whom we are most indebted. For through the ages has been pursued the quest of some proof that man is a spiritual being, some evidence that what we call the soul has its origin beyond the realm of the material; the learning of all time has failed to satisfy this quest; and the wealth of the world cannot purchase one fragment of such proof.
And yet it is to one of my prisoners that I owe the gift of an hour in which the spirit of man seemed the one vital fact of his existence, the one thing beyond the reach of death; and time has given priceless value to that hour.
I met James Wilson in the first years of my prison acquaintance, and it was long before it occurred to me that under later legislation he would have been classed as an habitual criminal. I have often wondered at the power of his personality; it must have been purely the result of innate qualities. He was brave, he was generous, he was loyalty itself; and his sympathies were responsive as those of a woman. He would have been an intrepid soldier, a venturesome explorer, a chivalrous knight; but in the confusion of human life the boy was shoved to the wrong track and having the momentum of youth and strong vitality he rushed recklessly onward into the course of a Robin Hood; living in an age when those who come into collision with the social forces of law and order are called criminals, his career in that direction fortunately was of short duration.
Had Wilson not been arrested in his downward course he might never have come into possession of the self whom I knew so well, that true self at last so clearly victorious over adverse circumstances. In this sketch I have not used Wilson's letters; they were so purely personal, so wholly of his inner life, that to give them to the public seemed desecration.
I can give but one glimpse of his childhood. When he was a very little boy he sat on his father's knee and looked up into kind and loving gray eyes. The father died, and the son remembered him always as kind and loving.
The loss of his father changed the course of Wilson's life. The mother formed other ties; the boy was one too many, and left home altogether as soon as he was old enough to shift for himself. He went honestly to work, where so many boys along the Mississippi Valley are morally ruined—on a river-boat.
After a time things began to go wrong with him. I don't know whether the injury was real or fancied, but the boy believed himself maliciously injured; and in the blind passion following he left the river, taking with him money that belonged to the man who had angered him. Wilson had meant to square the score, to balance wrong with wrong; but his revenge recoiled upon himself and at sixteen he was a thief and a fugitive. Before the impetus of that moral movement was exhausted he was in the penitentiary—"one of the most vigorous and fine-looking men in the prison, tall and splendidly built," so said another prisoner who knew him at that time.
At the expiration of his three years' sentence Wilson began work in a Saint Louis printing-office, opening, so he believed, a new chapter in life. He was then twenty years of age.
During that year all through the West—if the Mississippi region can still be called West—there were serious labor troubles. Men were discharged from every branch of employment where they could be spared; and the day came when all the "new hands" in the printing-office where Wilson worked were turned off.
Wilson had saved something from his earnings, and while his money lasted he lived honestly, seeking employment, but the money was gone before he found employment. Outside the cities the country was overrun with tramps; temptations to lawlessness were multiplied; starvation, stealing, or begging seemed the only pathway open to many. None starved; there was little choice between the other alternatives. Jails and prisons were crowded with inmates, some of whom felt themselves fortunate in being provided with food and shelter even at the cost of liberty. "I have gone hungry so many days and slept on the ground so many nights that the thought of a prison seems something like home," was a remark made to me. "The world owes me a living" was a thought that came in the form of temptation to many a man who could get no honest work.
After Wilson had been out of employment for two or three months there occurred a great commotion near a small town within fifty miles of Saint Louis. Stores had been broken into and property carried off, and a desperate attempt was made to capture the burglars, who were supposed to be in that vicinity. A man who had gone to a stream of water was arrested and identified as belonging to the gang. He was ordered to betray his accomplices; he refused absolutely. The reckless courage in his nature once aroused, the "honor" observed among thieves was his inevitable course. A rope was brought, and Wilson was taken to a tree where the story of his life would doubtless have ended had not a shout from others, who were still searching, proclaimed the discovery of the retreat of his companions. Wilson and Davis, the two leaders, were sentenced each to four years in the penitentiary.
Defeated, dishonored, penniless, and friendless, Wilson found himself again in prison; this time under the more than double disgrace of being a "second-term" man, with consciousness of having deliberately made a choice of crime. He was an avowed infidel, and his impetuous, unsubdued nature was at war with life and the world. For two years he lived on in this way; then his health began to fail under the strain of work and confinement.
With the loss of strength his heart grew harder and more desperate. One day his old recklessness broke out in open revolt against prison authority. He was punished by being sent to the "solitary," where the temperature in summer is much lower than that of the shops where the men work; he took cold, a hemorrhage of the lungs resulted, and he was sent to the prison hospital.
There, on a Sunday morning two months later, I first met Wilson. I think it was the glance of the dark-gray eyes under long, sweeping black lashes that first attracted me. But it was the expression of the face, the quiet, dignified courtesy of manner, and the candid statement of his history that made the deeper impression. Simply and briefly he gave me the outlines of his past; and he spoke with deep, concentrated bitterness of the crushing, terrible life in prison. His unspoken loneliness—he had lost all trace of his mother—and his illness, almost ignored but evident, appealed to my sympathy and prompted me to offer to write to him. He thought it would be a pleasure to receive letters, but assured me that he could write nothing worth reading in return.
Long afterward I asked what induced him to reply to my questions so frankly and sincerely. His answer was: "Because I knew if I lied to you, it would make it harder for you to believe the next man you talked with, who might tell you the truth." During all that Sunday afternoon and evening Wilson remained in my thoughts, and the next afternoon—Hallowe'en, as it happened—found me again at the hospital. I stopped for a few moments at the bedside of a young prisoner who was flushed with hectic fever and wildly rebellious over the thought of dying in prison—he lived to die an honest man in freedom, in the dress of a civilized being and not in the barbarous, zebra-like suit then worn in the prison. I remained for a longer time beside the bed of a man who was serving a sentence of imprisonment for life for a crime of which he was innocent. After twelve years his innocence was proved; he was released a crippled invalid, with no means of support except by hands robbed of their power to work. The State makes no reparation for an unspeakable wrong like this, far more cruel than death.
When I turned to look for Wilson he was sitting apart from the other men, with a vacant chair beside him. Joining him beside that west window, flooded with the golden light of an autumn sunset, I took the vacant seat intended for me; and the hour that followed so influenced Wilson's future that he adopted that day—Hallowe'en—as his birthday. He knew the year but not the month in which he was born.
I have not the slightest recollection of what I said while we sat beside the window. But even now I can see Wilson's face as he listened with silent attention, not meeting my eyes. I think I spoke of his personal responsibility for the life he had lived. I am certain that I said nothing about swearing and that I asked no promises.
But thoughts not in my mind were suggested to him. For when I ceased speaking he raised his eyes, and looking at me intently he said: "I can't promise to be a Christian; my life has been too bad for that; but I want to promise you that I will give up swearing and try to have pure thoughts. I can promise you that, because these things lie in my own power; but there's too much wickedness between me and God for me ever to be a Christian."
His only possession was the kingdom of his thoughts; without reservation it was offered to his friend, and with the sure understanding that she would value it.
It was a surprise when I received Wilson's first letter to see the unformed writing and the uncertain spelling; but the spirit of the man could be traced, even through the inadequate medium. In earnestness and simplicity he was seeking to fulfil his promise, finding, as he inevitably must, that he had committed himself to more than his promise. It was not long before he wrote that he had begun a new life altogether "for your sake and for my own." His "thoughts" gave him great trouble, for the old channels were still open, and his cell-mate's mind was steeped in wickedness. But he made the best of the situation, and instead of seeking to ward off evil he took the higher course of sharing his own better thoughts with his cell-mate, over whom he acquired a strong influence. Steadfastly he sought to overcome evil with good. Very slowly grew his confidence in himself; and his great anxiety seemed to be lest I should think him better than he was.
Like all persons with tuberculosis Wilson was sanguine of recovery; and as he went back to work in one of the shops the day after I left, and always wrote hopefully, I took it for granted that his health was improving.
Six months only passed before we met again, and I was wholly unprepared for the startling change in Wilson's appearance. His cough and the shortness of his breath were distressing. But the poor fellow was so delighted to see me that he tried to set his own condition entirely aside.
We had a long talk in the twilight of that lovely May evening, and again we were seated beside a window, through which the light and sounds of spring came in. I learned then how hard life was for that dying man. He was still subject to the strict discipline of the most strictly disciplined prison in the country: compelled to rise at five in the morning and go through the hurried but exact preparations for the day required of well men. He was kept on the coarse prison fare, forced to march breathlessly in the rapid lock-step of the gang of strong men with whom he worked, and kept at work in the shop all through the long days. The strain on nerve and will and physical strength was never relaxed.
These things he told me, and they were all true; but he told me also better things, not so hard for me to know. He gave me the history of his moral struggles and victories. He told me of the "comfort" my letters had been to him; his whole heart was opened to me in the faith that I would understand and believe him. It was then that he told me he was trying to live by some verses he had learned; and in answer to my request, hesitatingly, and with breath shortened still more by embarrassment, he repeated the lines:
"I stand upon the Mount of God, With gladness in my soul, I hear the storms in vale beneath— I hear the thunder roll. But I am calm with Thee, my God,
"Beneath these glorious skies,
And to the height on which I stand
No storm nor cloud can rise."
He was wholly unconscious that there was anything unusual in his reaching up from the depths of sin, misery, and degradation to the spiritual heights of eternal light. He rather reproached himself for having left the valley of repentance, seeming to feel that he had escaped mental suffering that was deserved; although he admitted: "The night after you left me in October, when I went back to my cell, the tears were just running down my face—if that could be called repentance."
At the close of our interview, as Wilson was going out, he passed another prisoner on the way in to see me.
Do you know Wilson? was Newton's greeting as he approached me.
Do you know Wilson? was my question in reply.
Newton had taken offence at something in one of my letters and it was to make peace with him that I had planned the interview, but all misunderstanding evaporated completely in our common regret and anxiety about Wilson; for my feeling was fully shared by this man who—well, he was pretty thoroughly hardened on all other subjects. But here the chord of tenderness was touched; and all his hardness and resentment melted in the relief of finding some one who felt as he did on the subject nearest his heart.
I have worked beside Wilson in the shop for two years, and I have never loved any man as I have grown to love him, he said. "And it has been so terrible to see him dying by inches, and kept at work when he could scarcely stand." The man spoke with strong emotion; the very depths of his nature were stirred. He told me all about this friendship, which had developed notwithstanding the fact that conversation between convicts was supposed to be confined to necessary communication in relation to work. Side by side they had worked in the shop, and as Wilson's strength failed Newton managed to help him. Newton's praise and affection really counted for something, as he was an embittered man with small faith in human nature. He said that in all his life nothing had been so hard as to see his friend sinking under his fate, while he was powerless to interfere. Newton and I had one comfort, however, in the fact that Wilson's sentence was near the end. In justice to the authorities of the prison where these men were confined I wish to state that dying prisoners were usually sent to the hospital. Wilson's was an exceptional case of hardship.
Early in July Wilson was released from prison. When he reached Chicago his evident weakness arrested the attention of a passer-by, who hired a boy to carry his bundle and see him to his destination. He had determined to try to support himself, believing that freedom would bring increased strength; but he was too ill to work. The doctor whom he consulted spoke encouragingly, but urged the necessity of rest and Minnesota air. I therefore sent him a pass to Minneapolis, and the route was by way of my own home.
Life was hard on Wilson, but it gave him one day of happiness apart from poverty or crime, when he felt himself a welcome guest in the home of a friend. When his train arrived from Chicago I was at the station to meet him, and before driving home we called on my physician that I might know what to anticipate. The doctor commended the plan for the climate of Minnesota, and spoke encouragingly to Wilson, but to me privately he gave the fiat, "No hope."
Wilson spent the rest of that day in the library of my home, and all the afternoon he was smiling. My face reflected his smiles, but I could not forget the shadow of death in the background. We talked of many things that afternoon; the breadth and fairness of his opinions on prison matters, the impersonal way in which he was able to consider the subject, surprised me, for his individual experience had been exceptionally severe.
When weariness came into his eyes and his voice I suggested a little music. The gayer music did not so much appeal to him, but I shall never forget the man's delight in the sweet and restful cadences of Mendelssohn. After a simple tea served Wilson in the library we took a drive into the country, where the invalid enjoyed the lovely view of hills and valleys wrapped in the glow of the summer sunset; and then I left him for the night at a comfortable hotel.
The next morning Wilson was radiantly happy, notwithstanding "a hard night"; and it happened to be one of the days when summer does her best to keep us in love with life. All the forenoon we spent under a great maple-tree, with birds in the branches and blue sky overhead, Wilson abandoning himself to the simple joy of living and resting. Wilson was a fine-looking man in citizen's dress, his regular features refined and spiritualized by illness.
There were preparations to be made for Minnesota and the suit-case to be repacked, and what value Wilson placed upon the various articles I contributed! I think it was the cake of scented soap—clearly a luxury—that pleased him most, but he was interested in every single thing, and his heart was warmed by the cordial friendliness of my mother, who added her own contribution to his future comfort. His one regret was that he had nothing to give us in return.
But time was on the wing, and the morning slipped by all too rapidly, as the hours of red-letter days always do, and the afternoon brought the parting at the train for Minneapolis. Wilson lingered beside me while there was time, then looking gravely into my eyes, he said: "Good-by; I hope that we shall meet again—on this side." A moment later the moving train carried him away toward the north, which to him meant the hope of health.
Exhausted by the journey to Minneapolis, he at once applied for admission to a Catholic hospital, and here I will let him speak for himself, through the first letter that I received after he left me.
"Dear Friend:
"I am now in the hospital, and I am so sleepy when I try to write that I asked one of the sisters to write for me.
"I felt quite weak when I first came here, but now I take beef-tea, and I feel so much stronger, I think I will be very much better by the end of this month.
"The Mother Superior is most kind and calls me her boy and thinks she will soon have me quite well again. I have a fine room to myself, and I feel most happy as I enjoy the beautiful fresh air from the Mississippi River, which runs quite near me.
"Dear friend, I wish you were here to enjoy a few days and see how happy I am."
And scrawled below, in a feeble but familiar handwriting, were the words:
I tried to write, but failed.
Under the influence of the sisters Wilson was led back to the church into which he had been baptized, and although he did not accept its limitations he found great comfort in the sense of protection that it gave him. Rest and nursing and the magical air of Minnesota effected such an improvement in his health that before many weeks Wilson was discharged from the hospital.
After a short period of outdoor work, in which he tested his strength, he went into a printing-office, where, for a month, he felt himself a man among men. But it was an overambitious and unwise step—confinement and close air of the office were more than he could endure, and with great regret he gave up the situation.
Winter was setting in and he found no work that he could do, and yet thought himself too well to again seek admission to a hospital. The outlook of life darkened, for there seemed to be no place for him anywhere. He did not write to me during that time of uncertainty, and one day, after having spent three nights in a railroad station, as a last resort he asked to be sent to the county home and was received there; after that he could not easily obtain admission to a hospital.
Western county homes were at that time hard places; in some respects existence there was harder than in the prison, where restraint and discipline are in a measure a protection, securing a man undisturbed possession of his inner life and thoughts, during working hours at least. The ceaselessly intrusive life of the home, with the lack of discipline and the unrestrained intercourse of inmates, with the idleness and the dirt, is far more demoralizing; crime itself does not sap self-respect like being an idle pauper among paupers. All this could be read between the lines of Wilson's letters.
And now a new dread was taking hold of him. All his hope and ambition had centred in the desire to be good for this life. He had persistently shut out the thought of death as the one thing that would prevent his realizing this desire. Nature and youth clung passionately to life, and all the strength of his will was nerved to resist the advance of disease. But day by day the realization that life was slipping from him forced itself deeper into his consciousness; even for the time discouraging him morally. His high resolves seemed of no avail. It was all of no use. He must die a pauper with no chance to regain his lost manhood; life seemed indeed a hopeless failure. I had supplied Wilson with paper and envelopes, stamped and addressed, that I might never fail of hearing from him directly or through others; but there came an interval of several weeks when I heard nothing, although writing regularly. Perplexed, as well as anxious, in my determination to break the silence at all hazards, I wrote a somewhat peremptory letter. The answer came by return mail, but it was the keeper of the county home who wrote that Wilson had written regularly and that he was very unhappy over my last letter, adding:
He says that if this room was filled with money it would not tempt him to neglect his best friend; and when I told him that this room was pretty big and would hold a lot of money he said that didn't make any difference.
I could not be reconciled to Wilson's dying in that place, and when the spring days came he was sent to Chicago, where his entrance to a hospital had been arranged. It was an April afternoon when I found him in one of the main wards of the hospital, a large room flooded with sunshine and fresh air. Young women, charming in their nurses' uniform, with skilled and gentle hands, were the ministering spirits there; the presiding genius a beautiful Philadelphian whose gracious tranquillity was in itself a heavenly benediction to the sick and suffering among whom she lived. On a table beside Wilson's bed trailing arbutus was filling the air with fragrance and telling the story of spring.
Wilson was greatly altered; but his face was radiant in the gladness of our meeting. For weeks previous he had not been able to write me of his thoughts or feelings, and I do not know when the change came. But it was clearly evident that, as death approached, he had turned to meet it; and had found, as so many others have found, that death no longer seemed an enemy and the end of all things, but a friend who was leading the way to fuller life; he assumed that I understood all this; he would have found it difficult to express it in words; but he had much to tell me of all those around him, and wished to share with me the friendships he had formed in the hospital; and I was interested in the way the quality of the man's nature had made itself felt among nurses and patients alike.
One of the patients who had just been discharged came to the bedside to bid him good-by; Wilson grasped his hand and in a few earnest words reminded him of promises given in a previous conversation. With broken voice the man renewed his promises, and left with his eyes full of tears. He was unable to utter the good-by he had come to give.
At the close of my visit Wilson insisted upon giving me the loveliest cluster of his arbutus; while Miss Alden, the Philadelphian, sanctioned with a smile his sharing of her gift with another.
As Miss Alden went with me to the door she told me of her deep interest in Wilson, and of the respect and affection he had won from all who had come in contact with him. "The nurses consider it a pleasure to do anything for one who asks so little and is so grateful," she said. Though knowing that he had been in prison, Miss Alden was surprised to learn that Wilson was not a man of education. His use of English, the general tone of his thoughts and conversation, had classed him as a man familiar with good literature and refined associations. She, too, had felt in him a certain spiritual strength, and was touched by his loyalty to me, which seemed never obscured by his gratitude to others. She believed that only the strength of his desire to see me once again had kept him in this world for the previous week.
The next morning Wilson was visibly weaker; the animation caused by the excitement of seeing me the day before was gone; but the spiritual peace and strength which had come to him were the more evident.
At his dictation I wrote a last message to Newton, and directions as to the disposal of his clothing, to be given to patients whose needs he had discovered. He expressed a wish to leave some little remembrances for each of the nurses; there were six to whom he felt particularly indebted. There was Miss Stevens, "who has been so very kind at night"; every one had her special claim, and I promised that each should receive some token of his gratitude.
Afterward he spoke of the new life before him as naturally and easily as he spoke of the hospital. He seemed already to have crossed the border of the new life. His heart had found its home in God; there he could give himself without reserve. Life and eternity were gladly offered to the One in whom he had perfect trust.
Tell me, I said, "what is your thought of heaven, now that it is so near? What do you expect?"
How full of courage and trust and honesty was his answer! "I do not expect happiness; at least not at once. God is too just for that, after the life I have lived." Imprisonment, sickness, poverty, all the evils that we most dread, had been endured for years, but counted for nothing to him when weighed against his ruined life. But the thought of suffering brought no fear. The justice of God was dearer to him than personal happiness. I left that feeling undisturbed. He was nearer than I to the light of the perfect day, and I could see that, unconsciously, he had ceased to look to any one "on this side" for light.
Wilson was sleeping when I saw him again, but the rapid change which had taken place was apparent at a glance. When he opened his eyes and saw me standing beside him he looked at me silently for a moment. With an effort he gathered strength for what he evidently wished to say; and all the gratitude and affection that he had never before attempted to express to me directly were revealed in a few simple words. He would have no good-by; the loss of the supreme friendship of his life formed no part of his idea of death. Then he spoke of the larger life of humanity for which he had learned to feel so deeply, and his final words to me were: "Be to others what you have been to me. We are all brothers and sisters." The last thought between us was not to be of an exclusive, individual friendship, but of that universal tie which binds each to all.
Before midnight the earthly life had ended, peacefully and without fear. The stem of Easter lilies that I carried to the hospital next day was placed in the hands folded in the last sleep, and Wilson clasped in death the symbol of new life and heavenly purity.
Wilson was one of the men behind the bars; but it is as man among men that I think of him; and his last words to me, "We are all brothers and sisters," sum up the truth that inspires every effort the round world over to answer the call of those who are desolate or oppressed—whether the cry comes from little children in the mine, the workshop, or the tenement, or from those who are in slavery, in hospital, or in prison.
It was during the eighties and the nineties of the last century that I was most closely in touch with prison life; and it was at that time that the men whose stories I have told and from whose letters I have quoted were behind the bars. For forty years or more there was no radical change in methods of discipline in this prison, but material conditions were somewhat improved, the stripes and the lock-step were abandoned, and sanitation was bettered.
This institution stood as one of the best in the country, and doubtless it was above the average in most respects. While the convicts were under rigid repressive regulations, the guards were under rules scarcely less strict, no favoritism was allowed, no bribery tolerated, and the successive administrations were thoroughly honorable. While the different wardens conformed to accepted standards of discipline there were many instances of individual kindness from members of the administration, and no favor that I asked for a prisoner was ever refused.
But the twentieth century has brought a complete revolution in methods of dealing with convicts. This radical revolution is overthrowing century-old customs, and theories both ancient and modern. It has been sprung upon us so suddenly that we have not yet grasped its full meaning, but the causes leading up to it have been silently working these many years.
For ages the individuality of the human being has been merged in the term criminal; the criminal had practically ceased to be a man, and was classified only according to his offence; as murderer, thief, forger, pickpocket, etc. During the nineteenth century there was a gradual mitigation of the fate of the convict: laws became more flexible, efforts were made to secure more uniformity in the length of sentence imposed, many States discarded the lock-step and the striped clothing, and the contract system was giving place to other employment of convicts. While the older prisons were growing unspeakably worse through decaying walls and increasing vermin, as new penitentiaries were built more light, better ventilation, larger cells, and altogether better sanitation were adopted. However, the Lombroso theory of a distinct criminal type, stamped with pronounced physical characteristics, was taught in all our universities and so generally accepted by the public that the criminal was believed to be a different kind of man.
The courts did a thriving business collecting all their fees and keeping our prisons well filled, while the discipline of the convicts was left to the prison officials, with practically no interference. Prison congresses were held and there was much talk around and about the criminal, but he was not regarded as a man with human feelings and human rights; methods of management were discussed, but the inhuman punishments sanctioned by some of these very wardens were never mentioned in these discussions. "We are in charge; all's right in the convict world," was the impression given the outsider who listened to their addresses.
Unquestionably many of these prison wardens were at heart humanitarians, and gave to their prisons a distinctive atmosphere as the result of their personal characteristics, but they were all the victims of tradition as to dealing with convicts—tradition and precedent, the established order of prison management. The inexperienced warden taking charge naturally followed the beaten tracks; he studied the situation from the point of view of his predecessor, and the position at best was a difficult one; radical innovations could be made only with the sanction of the prison commissioners, who seemed to be mainly interested in the prison as a paying proposition; and pay it did under the abominable contract system.
And so the years went on with the main lines of prison discipline—the daily lives of the convicts—practically unchanged. The convict was merely a human machine to be worked a certain number of hours with no incentive to good work beyond the fear of punishment. No thought was given to fitting him for future citizenship. Every prison had its punishment cells, some of them underground, most of them dark, where men were confined for days on bread and water, usually shackled standing to the iron door of the cell during working hours, and at night sleeping on the stone floor unless a board was provided—the food a scant allowance of bread and water. Punishment of this kind was inflicted for even slight infractions of rules, while floggings, "water cures," and other devilish methods were sometimes resorted to. In prisons of the better grade the most rigidly repressive measures were enforced and all natural human impulses were repressed. This was considered "excellent discipline."
Now, as to the results of those severe punishments and rigid repressive methods: were the criminals reformed? Was society protected? What were the fruits of our prisons and reformatories? I have before me reliable, up-to-date statistics from a neighboring State as to the number of men convicted of a second offence after serving one term in prison. The general average shows that forty, out of every hundred men sent to prison for the first time, on being released commit a second crime. This percentage represents a fair average of the results of non-progressive prison methods to-day. But while our prisons were practically at a standstill and crime was on the increase the world was moving, new ideas were in the very air, destined to be of no less importance in human development than the mastery of electricity is proving in the material world.
There is an old proverb that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Some fifteen years ago the vital truth contained in this old saying suddenly crystallized into the playground movement. More chance for recreation, more variety in mental occupation, more fresh air and sunshine, were strenuously demanded. Not only have playgrounds broken out even in the midst of our crowded cities, but open-air schools have sprung into existence in Europe and are gaining in favor in this country where climate permits. Athletics in all forms have steadily gained in popularity. Freedom for the body, exercise for every muscle, is not only advocated by physicians but has become the fashion, until golf is now the great American pastime, and the benefit of physical recreation is no longer questioned.
Even more far-reaching in eventual influence is the modern recognition of the rights and claims of the individual. This awakening is so widespread that it cannot be centralized in any personal leadership. It is like the dawning of a great light upon the life of the twentieth century in all civilized countries, and already it is affecting existence in countless directions.
In the army the common soldier is no longer regarded as merely a shooting-machine, he is drilled and trained and schooled into development as a man as well as a soldier. In the treatment of the insane, physical restraint is gradually being relegated to the past; the patient is regarded first of all as a human being, not merely as a case. More and more the individual needs are studied and individual talents brought into activity. In schools for the mentally defective the very foundation of the methods and aims is to promote the development of the individual, to draw out to the utmost whatever rudiments of ability the child may possess and to keep the light turned steadily on the normal rather than the abnormal in his nature. Physicians, psychologists, and educators alike are realizing the importance of adapting methods to the needs of the individual.
Child-study—unfortunately, in many cases the study of text-books rather than of the living child in the family, but child-study in some form—prevails among the mothers of to-day. The gifted Madame Montessori, from both the scientific and the humanitarian standpoint, is emphasizing the importance of giving the child freedom for self-expression. In the suffrage movement we have another evidence of the same impulse toward recognition of individual rights. It comes to us from every direction, even from the battle-field where the Red Cross nurse sees neither friend nor foe, only a suffering man needing her care.
Here we have two great forces: nature's imperative demand for more freedom for the body, more of God's sunshine and fresh air; and the still more imperative demand from the spirit in man for recognition and release. The two forces unite in the one demand, Pro sanitate totius hominis—for the health of the whole man.
Some thirty years ago Richard Dugdale, a large-hearted, large-brained student of sociology, had the courage to state that the great blunder of society in dealing with criminals began with shutting up so many of them within our prisons, practically enslaving them to the state, depriving them of all rewards for their labor and often throwing their families upon public taxation for support; even in many cases making the punishment fall more heavily upon innocent relatives than upon the offenders themselves. He believed, however, that there would be a residue of practically irreclaimable criminals whose permanent removal from society was necessary, but that life for this class should be made as nearly normal as possible. Richard Dugdale was a man of prophetic insight, with a clear vision of the whole question of social economics—social duties as well. Unfortunately, his death soon followed the publication of his articles. But time is making his dreams come true, and vindicating the soundness of his theories. Even during the lifetime of this man spasmodic efforts were made in placing men on probation after a first offence instead of sending them to prison.
With the introduction of the juvenile courts early in the present century this idea assumed practical form; and Judge Lindsey, of Denver, gave such impetus to the movement to save young offenders from the demoralizing influence of jails and miscalled reformatories that this example has been followed in all directions, and thousands of boys have been rescued from criminal life. "Save the boys and girls" appealed directly to the masses, and this ounce of prevention was indorsed with little opposition.
But when the extension of the probation privilege to include adult offenders—still further to reduce the prison population—was advocated the public held back, fearing danger to society in allowing these older lawbreakers to escape the legal penalties of their offences. However, the current of progress was not to be stemmed, and adult probation has been legalized in many States. The results have been satisfactory beyond expectation, showing an average of less than five per cent of men released on probation reverting to crime, against forty per cent of reversions after a term in a non-progressive penitentiary.
This adult probation law confers upon the judge not mandatory but discretionary power, and the character of the judge plays a part not less important than the character of the offender; the application of the law is primarily a relation of man to man; the unjust judge will be unjust still, the timid judge will avoid taking risks; in the very human side in which lies the strength of this course lie also its limitations.
Now the very foundation of the probation idea is the recognition of the individual character of the offender and the circumstances leading to the crime. But no sooner was the adult probation law in force than the claim of the individual from another direction began to be recognized. Curiously enough, in legal proceedings against criminals the injured party had been entirely ignored—according to the old English precedent. It was not the crime of man against man but the crime of man against the state, the violation of a state law, that was punished. To the mind of the criminal a crime against the state was but a vague and indefinite abstraction, except in case of murder unlikely to cause remorse, or any feeling of responsibility toward the person injured. If the injured party were revengeful he had the satisfaction of knowing that the criminal was punished; but the sending of the delinquent to prison deprived him of all opportunity for reparation.
An interesting thing begins to happen when the judge is given power to put a man on probation. At last the injury to the individual is taken into consideration. Here is an actual instance in point.
"Five thousand dollars was embezzled from a Los Angeles theatre and dissipated in high living by a man twenty-one years old. He confessed and received this sentence from the judge: 'You shall stay at home nights. You shall remain within the limits of this county. You shall not play billiards or pool, frequent cafés or drink intoxicating liquors, and you shall go immediately to work and keep at it till you pay back every dollar that you stole. Violate these terms and you go to prison.'""
"This practice of making restitution one of the conditions of probation is spreading rapidly. Here we have a method hitherto unapproached of securing all-round, common-sense justice, directly in line also with sound social economics. Mr. Morrison Swift has well said of a term in prison that "it breaks the current between the man and life, so that when he emerges it is hard to form connections again. He has lost his job, and too often health, nerve, and self-respect are impaired. These obstacles to reformation are swept away when a man retains his connection with the community by working in it like anybody else."
Another factor in the scheme of probation is that it brings the delinquent directly in touch with a friendly, guiding, and helping hand, placing him at once under good influences; for it is the duty of the probation officer to secure for his charge environment calculated to foster reformation: he becomes indeed his brother's keeper.
While modern ideas have thus been applied in the rescue of the individual before he has become identified with criminal life, even more marked has been the invasion of recent movements into the very stronghold of the penitentiary itself.
The twentieth century marks the beginning of the crusade against tuberculosis. Physicians, philanthropists, and legislators combined against the fearful ravages of this enemy to the very life of the people. Generous appropriations were given by the state for the cure of the disease and every effort was made to trace the sources of the evil. And then it transpired that, while the state with her left hand was establishing out-of-door colonies for the treatment of tuberculosis, with her right hand she was maintaining laboratories for the culture of the fatal germs, and industriously scattering the seeds in localities where they would be most fruitful. In other words, the very walls of our prisons had become beds of infection. Doctor J. B. Ransome, of New York State, finds that from forty to sixty per cent of the deaths in all prisons are from tuberculosis; at times the mortality has run as high as eighty per cent. He tells us also that in the United States to-day there are twenty thousand tubercular prisoners, most of whom will return to the congested districts and stuffy tenements where the disease is most rapidly and virulently spread.
He urges as of the utmost importance that infected prisons be destroyed, and that convicts be given work in the open air when possible; and that light, air, exercise, more nourishing food, and more healthful conditions generally be substituted for the disease-breeding conditions under which prisons have always existed. Thus, apart from all humanitarian considerations, public health demands radical changes in prisons and in the lives of the prisoners.
The automobile, the autocrat of the present day, has little of the missionary spirit; but it has made its imperious demand for good roads all over the country, and legislation now authorizing convict labor on State roads is not only responding to this demand but is partly solving the vexed problem of the employment of convicts.
How far the men responsible for the revolution in the management of prisoners have studied these trends of the times I do not know. Most of these men have doubtless builded better than they knew. All the winds of progress, moving from every direction, seem to be concentrating in one blast destined to crumble the walls of our prisons as the walls of Jericho are said to have crumbled under the blast of the trumpets of the hosts of the Lord. It may even be that the hosts of the Lord are back of these winds of progress.
The introduction of this reform movement required men of exceptional force and ability, and in answer to this demand just such men are coming to the front. The United States has already developed a remarkable line of captains of industry, but not less remarkable men are taking this humanitarian field to-day.
The pioneer in revolutionizing prison-management was neither penologist nor philanthropist. The first step was taken for purely practical ends. It happened, when the twentieth century had just begun, that Mr. John Cleghorne, a newly appointed warden of a Colorado penitentiary, found that the State had provided neither cells nor workshops within the prison for the number of convicts sentenced to hard labor. To meet this exigency this warden decided to put a number of men to work outside the walls, organizing a camp and putting the men, then in striped clothing, on their honor not to escape. The experiment was altogether successful; but so quietly carried on that it received little attention outside the borders of its own State until the appointment of the next warden, Thomas J. Tynan, who recognized the beginning of true reform in the treatment of convicts and openly advocated the changes from humanitarian motives.
While to Colorado is given the precedence in this movement, a notable feature is the nearly simultaneous expression of feeling and ideas practically the same in widely separated localities, from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic, and even on the shores of Panama. Naturally the movement started in the West, in newer States less trammelled by precedent than the older States, where traditions of prison discipline had been handed down for two centuries; but the time was ripe for the change and it has been brought about through men, some of them trained penologists, others practical men of affairs, but all united in faith in human nature and in the one aim of fitting the men under their jurisdiction for self-supporting, law-abiding citizenship.
Sceptics as to the effect on the prisoner of this liberalizing tendency are silenced by the amazing response on the part of the convicts in every prison where the honor system has been applied. This response is unquestionable: a spirit of mutual confidence is displacing one of suspicion and discouragement, and in supplanting the old antagonism to prison authorities by a hearty sense of co-operation with them an inestimable point in prison discipline is gained. We hear much these days of the power of suggestion, and the suggestion, conscious and unconscious, permeating the very atmosphere of these progressive prisons is hopeful and helpful.
Never before in the tragic history of prisons has a spiritual force been applied to the control of prisoners; and yet with one consent the first step taken by these progressive wardens is to place convicts on their honor: not chains and shackles, not bolts and bars, no form of physical restraint; but a force indefinable, impalpable, invisible, applied to the spirit of these men. In bringing this force to bear on their charges these wardens have indeed "hitched their wagon to a star."
FOOTNOTES:
Morrison I. Swift, Atlantic Monthly, August, 1911.
Atlantic Monthly, August, 1911.
And the time came, in 1913, when the wave of revolution in prison methods struck the penitentiary which formed the background of the lives pictured within these pages. Back of all my friendships with these men had loomed the prison under the old methods, casting its dark shadow across their lives. Many of them died within the walls; others came out only to die in charity hospitals, or to take up the battle of life with enfeebled health and enfeebled powers of resistance and endurance. Almost as one man they had protected me from the realization of what they endured in the punishment cells—from what the physical conditions of prison life really were; but I knew far more than they thought I did—as much as I could endure to know—and in our interviews we understood that it was useless to discuss evils which I was powerless to help; and then, too, I always tried to make those interviews oases in the desert of their lives. But across my own heart also the shadow of the prison lay all those years. Into the bright melody of a June morning the sudden thought of the prison would crash with cruel discord; at times everything most bright and beautiful would but the more sharply accent the tragedy of prison life. Deep below the surface of my thought there was always the consciousness of the prison; but, on the other hand, this abiding consciousness made the ordinary trials and annoyances inseparable from human life seem of little moment, passing clouds across the sunlight of a more fortunate existence; and I was thankful that from my own happy hours I could glean some ray of brightness to pour into lives utterly desolate. So absolutely did I enter into the prison life that even to-day it forms one of the most vivid chapters of my personal experience. Accordingly, my point of view of the change in the prison situation cannot be altogether that of the outsider. I know what this change means to the men within the walls; for in feeling, I too have been a prisoner.
A little paper lies before me, the first number of a new monthly publication from behind the bars of the prison I know so well. In its pages is mirrored a new dispensation—the new dispensation sweeping with irresistible force from State to State. Too deep for words was the thankfulness that filled my heart as I tried to realize that at last the day had come when prisoners were recognized as men, and that this blessed change had come to my own State. I knew it was on the way; I knew that things were working in the right direction; I had even talked with the new warden about some of these very changes; but here it was in black and white, over the signatures of the warden, his deputy, two chaplains, the prison doctor, and several representatives of the prisoners themselves: all bearing witness to the new order of things; to the facts already accomplished and to plans for the betterment of existing conditions. Of the fifteen hundred convicts fifty have been for several months employed on State roads under the supervision of two unarmed guards. The fifty men were honor men and none have broken faith. Two hundred more honor men will be sent out in the same way during the summer of 1914. Another three hundred will work on the prison farm of one thousand acres, erecting farm buildings and raising garden and farm products for the prison and the stock, and gaining health for themselves in a life practically free during working hours.
To the men inside the prison walls the routine of daily life is wholly altered. No longer do they eat in silence with downcast eyes; the table is a meeting-place of human beings where talk flows naturally. No longer is life one dull round from prison cell to shop, where talk and movements of relaxation are forbidden; and back in silent march to prison cell, with never a breath of fresh air except on the march to and from the shops. This monotony is now broken by a recreation hour in the open air every day, given in turn to companies of the men taken from the workshops in which exchange of remarks is now allowed. In pleasant weather this recreation is taken in games or other diversions involving exercise. "Everything goes but fighting" is the liberal permission, and recreation in cold weather takes the form of marching.
From October to May, for five hours in the day, six days in the week, school is in session in four separate rooms, the highest classes covering the eighth grade of our public schools. Any prisoner may absent himself from work one hour a day if desiring to attend the school, and can pursue his studies in his cell evenings. Competent teachers are found among the prisoners, and no guard is present during instruction hours. Arrangements are now on foot for educational correspondence connected with the State university.
The time given to recreation and to education has not lessened the output of the shops; on the contrary, the new spirit pervading the prison has so energized the men, so awakened their ambition, that more and better work is done in the shops than before. The grade of "industrial efficiency" recently introduced serves as a further incentive to skill and industry and will secure special recommendation for efficiency when the men are free to take their own places in the world.
Nor is this all; for each prisoner as far as is practicable is assigned work for which he is individually fitted. Men educated as physicians are transferred from the shops to the staff of hospital assistants; honor men qualified for positions where paid attendants have hitherto been employed are transferred to these positions, thus reducing expenses. Honor men having mechanical faculty are permitted during the evenings in their cells to make articles, the sale of which gives them a little money independently earned. Also in some of the prison shops the workers are allowed a share in the profits. It is the warden's aim to utilize as far as possible individual talent among his wards, to give every man every possible chance to earn an honest living on his release; to make the prison, as he puts it, "a school of citizenship." To every cell is furnished a copy of the Constitution of the United States and of the State in which the prison is located, with the laws affecting criminals. Further instructions relating to American citizenship are given, and are especially valuable to foreigners.
But helpful as are all these changes in method, the real heart of the change, the vital transforming quality is in the personal relation of the warden to his wards. In conferences held in the prison chapel the warden makes known his views and aims, speaking freely of prison matters, endeavoring to inspire the men with high ideals of conduct and to secure their intelligent and hearty co-operation for their present and their future. Here it is also that the men are free to make known their prison troubles, sure of the warden's sympathetic consideration of means of adjustment. Heart and soul the warden is devoted to his work, never losing sight of his ultimate aim of restoring to society law-abiding citizens, but also feeling the daily need of these prisoners for encouragement and for warm human sympathy.
Mr. Fielding-Hall, after many years of practical experience with criminals, reached the conclusion that humanity and compassion are essential requisites in all attempts "to cure the disease of crime," and the curative power of sympathy is old as the hills; it began with the mother who first kissed the place to make it well; and from that day to this the limit to the power of sympathy has never been compassed, when sympathy is not allowed to evaporate as an emotion, but, hardened into a motive, becomes a lever to raise the fallen.
It is largely owing to the sympathy of the present warden that light and air have come into the moral and mental atmosphere of this prison. In the natures of the men qualities hitherto dormant and undiscovered have come to the surface and are in the ascendant, aroused by the warden's appeal to their manhood; and the warden's enthusiasm is the spark that has touched the spirit of the subordinate officials and has fused into unison the whole administration. And the warden is fortunate in the combination of men working with him. His deputy, the disciplinarian of the place, served for twenty-five years on the police force of Chicago, a position directly antagonized to crime and yet affording exceptional opportunity for the study of criminals. True to his colors as a protector of society, he now feels that society is best protected through the reclamation of those who have broken its laws; he believes that the true disciplinarian is not the one who punishes most severely but the one who trains his charges to join hands with him in the maintenance of law and order within their little community; and he has already reduced the punishment record for violation of rules to scarcely more than one-tenth of former averages; and the shackling of men in the punishment cells is abolished.
The prison physician is an up-to-date man, fully in accord with the views of the warden, and with admirable hospital equipment where excellent surgical work is done when required. The two chaplains have a missionary field of the highest opportunities, where a sympathetic friendship for the prisoner during six days in the week becomes the highway to their hearts on the seventh.
The faces of the prisoners bear witness to the life-giving influences at work among them; the downcast apathy has given place to an expression of cheerful interest, and the prison pallor to a healthful color. And the old prison buildings—the living tomb of hundreds of men—are themselves now doomed. On the adjacent farm the prisoners will eventually build new quarters, either one modern prison into which God's sunlight and the free air of heaven will have access, or, better still, a prison village, a community in detached buildings, after the plan which has proven so satisfactory in other State institutions.
And what of the women sent to prison in this State? For fifteen years and more they have been housed in a separate institution. This has never been a place of degradation. Every inmate has a light, well-ventilated, outside room, supplied with simple furnishings and toilet conveniences; white spreads cover the beds, and the home touch is evident in the photographs and fancy-work so dear to the heart of woman. The prisoners in their dress of blue-and-white check are neat and trim in appearance as maids from Holland. They number but sixty-five, and conversation is allowed.
The women have a recreation playground for open-air exercise and an assembly-room for evening entertainments. They are given industrial training and elementary education; and though the discipline is firm the life is kept normal as possible; and wilful violation of rules seldom occurs. The present superintendent is a woman of exceptional qualifications for the position—a woman of quick, responsive sympathies, and wide experience, with fine executive ability. A thorough course in domestic science is fitting the women for domestic service or future home-making, and some of them are skilled in fine needle-work and embroidery.
The lines in the old picture of prison life so deeply etched into my consciousness are already fading; for while I know that in too many States the awakening has not come, and the fate of the prisoner is still a blot on our civilization, the light has broken and the way is clear. Not only in my own State but to every State in the union the death-knell of the old penitentiary, with its noisome cells and dark dungeons, has struck. The bloodless revolution of the reform movement is irresistible simply because it is in line with human progress.
Not until the present generation of criminals has passed away can adequate results of the widespreading change in prison management be expected; for a large percentage of our convicts to-day are the product of crime-breeding jails, reformatories, and prisons. The "incorrigibles" are all men who have been subjected to demoralizing and brutalizing influences. In the blood-curdling outbreaks of gunmen and train-holdups society is but reaping the harvest of evils it has allowed. Not until police stations, jails, workhouses, reformatories, and prisons are all radically changed can any fair estimate be made of the value of the recent humane methods.
The basic principle of reform in those who prey upon society is the changing of energies destructive into energies constructive. It is the opening of fresh channels for human forces. Change of environment, the breaking of every association connected with criminal pursuits, life in the open in contrast with the tainted atmosphere of crowded tenements and dance halls—all this has a healthful, liberating influence on the mind; abnormal obsessions are relaxed, different brain-cells become active, and the moral fibre of the man as well as his physical being absorbs vital elements. That the laborer is entitled to a share in the fruits of his labor is true the world over, and industry and efficiency are stimulated by recognition of the relation of achievement to reward.
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.
To Wisconsin belongs the honor of taking the lead in this most important reform, since in 1913 Wisconsin passed a law insuring compensation in money from the State in every case where proof could be furnished that one was not guilty of the crime for which he had suffered imprisonment. A more just and righteous law was never passed. Money alone can never compensate for unjust imprisonment, but the only atonement possible is financial compensation and public vindication.
The measures so far considered are all remedial; but while we have recently made rapid progress in measures applied after men have been sent to prison we have thought little of preventive measures. And just here we face again the spirit of the times.
All along the latter half of the nineteenth century men of science—chemists, biologists, physicians—were studying preventive measures to stem the tide of evil in the form of disease. Previously medical science had been directed chiefly to battling with diseased conditions already developed; but under the leadership of Pasteur and Lord Lister the medical world was aroused to the fact that it was possible to avert the terrible ravages of many of the diseases which fifty years earlier had been accepted as visitations from Providence. Henceforth "preventive measures" became watchwords among men devoting themselves to the physical welfare of the race; and "preventive measures" have also a most important relation to the moral welfare of the community, and the way is opening for their application.
For instance, the imprisonment of innocent men would be largely prevented by the abolition of all fees in connection with arrests and convictions. The system of rewards for arrests and convictions is absolutely demoralizing to justice; for as long as the whole battalion of men employed to protect the public have a direct financial interest in the increase of crime it is unreasonable to expect decrease in the number of men confined in our jails and prisons. An official inspector of jails and police stations in my own State reports that she has frequently had police officers admit to her that it was a great temptation to arrest some poor devil, since the city paid fees for such arrests; and she further states that in Chicago the entire basis of the city penal administration is fees, and she adds: "What better inducement could be offered to officials to penalize some unoffending stranger looking for work?" All the evils arising from this abominable and indefensible arrangement would be in a measure decreased by the simple process of abolishing fees and increasing salaries. This has already been done in some localities; and doubtless the coming generation will wonder how the feeing system could ever have been adopted or tolerated.
The most impregnable stronghold of inhumanity in dealing with persons suspected of connection with crime is our police stations; especially is this so in our larger cities. The police station and the feeing system are the parent of one most barbarous custom; an evil most elusive, its roots, like the roots of the vicious bindweed, so far underground, with such complicated entanglement of relationships, as to be almost ineradicable, involving in some instances State attorneys of good standing, detectives, policemen, sheriffs—in fact, more or less involving the whole force of agents supposed to be protectors of the public. This abuse is called the third degree, or the sweat-box.
A man is arrested, accused of a crime or of knowledge of a crime. Before he is given any trial in any court unscrupulous means are resorted to in order to extort an admission of crime or complicity in crime—or even of knowledge connected with a crime.
A physician who knew all the circumstances recently called my attention to the case of a woman supposed to have some knowledge that might implicate her husband in a burglary. The woman was an invalid. After being kept for forty-eight hours without food or water, forced to walk when she seemed likely to fall asleep from exhaustion, she was told that her husband had deserted her, taken her child, and gone off with another woman. She was by this time in a frantic condition, and when told that her torture would cease with her admission of her husband's guilt, too distracted to question his desertion of her, she gave false evidence against her husband and was set free.
The husband was in no way implicated in the crime, but the consequences of the affair were disastrous to his business. He had never thought of deserting his wife, but it was part of the scheme of the third degree to keep the husband and the lawyer whom he had engaged from seeing the woman until the end sought was accomplished.
A young lawyer told me of a most revolting third degree scene witnessed by him, and he told me the story as an instance of the cleverness which devised a terrible nervous shock in order to throw a supposedly guilty woman off her guard; the shock was enough to have driven the woman raving insane.
Whenever I have spoken of this subject to those familiar with sweat-box methods, the evil has been frankly admitted and unhesitatingly condemned, but I hear always the same thing: "Yes, we know that it is a terrible abuse, but we have not been able to prevent it." It is simply a public crime that such a system should be tolerated for one day. Mr. W. D. Howells has well said: "The law and order which defy justice and humanity are merely organized anarchy."
I have not hesitated to brand my own State with this third-degree evil, but I understand it is practised also in other States on the pretext that the end justifies the means—but what if the end is the life imprisonment of an innocent man? I have in mind a young man who was subjected to four days of sweat-box torture. At the end of that time, when even death by hanging offered at least a respite from his tormentors, he signed a statement, drawn up by those tormentors, to the effect that he was guilty of murder. The boy was only eighteen, but was sent to prison for life, though it now seems likely that he had nothing to do with the crime. However, it is difficult to secure pardon for a man sent to prison on his own confession; and there is just where the injustice is blackest: it cuts from under a man's feet all substance in a subsequent declaration of innocence, for it stands on the records of the case that he confessed his guilt.
There are of course many cases where the third degree is not resorted to; indeed, its use seems to be mainly confined to the cities where police stations are a ring within a ring. In smaller towns after the arrest is made the case usually comes to trial with no previous unauthorized attempt to induce the prisoner to convict himself, and, if the accused is a man of means who can employ an able lawyer, the trial becomes a game between the opposing lawyers, and both sides have at least a fair chance. Not so when the court appoints a lawyer for the poor man. The prosecution then plays the game with loaded dice; for it is the custom for the court to appoint the least experienced fledgling in the profession. Los Angeles, Cal., has recently introduced an admirable measure to secure a nearer approach to justice in the courts for the poor man, by the appointment of a regular district attorney for the defence of accused persons who are unable to pay for a competent lawyer. This appointment of a public defender has been made solely with the aim of securing justice for the poor and for the ignorant foreigner; it is a most encouraging step in the right direction, and seems a hopeful means of exterminating the sweat-box system.
We cannot hope to accomplish much with preventive measures until we frankly face the causes of the evils we would reduce. That the saloon is a prolific source of crime the records of all the courts unquestionably prove; it is also one of the causes of the poverty which in its turn becomes a cause of crime. The saloon is wholly in the hands of the public, to be modified, controlled, or abolished according to the dictates of the majority. This is not so easy as it sounds, but when we realize that while the saloon-keeper reaps all the profits of his business it is the taxpayer who is obliged to pay the expense of the crimes resulting from that business, the question becomes one of public economy as well as of public morals. The force which makes for social evolution is bound to win in the long run, and the gradual elimination of the saloon as it stands to-day is inevitable; and certain it is that with the control of the saloon evil there will be a marked reduction in the number of crimes committed.
The criminal ranks receive annual reinforcement from a number of sources now tolerated by a long-suffering public. We still have our army of tramps, caused in part by defective management of county jails where men are supported in enforced idleness at the expense of the working community; the result also of unstable industrial conditions and far greater competition, since women, by cutting wages, have so largely taken possession of industrial fields. Constitutional restlessness and aversion to steady work also cause men and boys to try the easy if precarious tramp life; and in hard-luck times the slip into crime comes almost as a matter of course.
The trail of the banishment of the tramp evil has already been blazed through Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland by the development of the farm colony to which every tramp is rigidly sent. There he is subjected to an industrial training involving recognition of individual ability, and development along the lines to which he is best adapted. These farm colonies are schools of industry where every man is obliged to work for his living while there, and is fitted to earn a living when he leaves. The results of these measures have been altogether satisfactory, and we have but to adapt their methods to conditions in this country to accomplish similar results. The elimination of the tramp is a necessary safeguard to the community; and to the tramp himself it is rescue from cumulative degradation.
Mr. Fielding-Hall, an Englishman, at one time magistrate, later warden of the largest prison in the world, and the most radical of humanitarians, after years of exhaustive study of the causes of crime, declares that society alone is responsible. He adds: "It is no use saying that criminals are born, not made; they are made and they are made by society." And it is true that in every community where human beings are herded in foul tenements, herded in crowded, unsanitary factories, or live their days underground in mines, we shall continue to breed a class mentally, morally, and physically defective, some of whom will inevitably be subject to criminal outbreaks. Poverty causes ill health, and malnutrition saps the power of self-control.
Medical science is even now telling us that there is probably no form of criminal tendency unrelated to physiological defects: brain-cells poisoned by disease; brain-cells defective either through heredity—as in the offspring of the feeble-minded—or enfeebled through malnutrition in childhood, the offspring of want; brains slightly out of balance; and, more rarely, the criminal impulse developed as the result of direct injury to the brain caused by a blow. Crimes are also committed under temporary abnormal conditions such as "dual personality" or double consciousness. In this diagnosis of crime we find ourselves next door to a hospital; and this class of criminals does closely parallel what alienists call "borderland cases," while the unscientific penologist has carelessly classified them as "degenerates." Physicians tell us that when Lombroso was studying "types," if he had invaded the charity hospitals of large cities he would have found the same stunted, undernourished, physically defective specimens of humanity that he stigmatized as the "criminal type."
Of two prisoners whom I knew well one was subject to slight attacks of catalepsy, the other to epilepsy; each of these men had committed a murder, and each said to me the same thing: "I had no reason to kill that person and I don't know why I did it." Both these men were religious and extremely conscientious; but when the "spells" came on them they were irresponsible as a leaf blown by the wind; and while passionately regretting their deeds of horror they seemed always to regard the act as something outside themselves.
None of us yet understand the interaction between the mental and physical in the nature of man, but the fact of this interdependence is clear; and while progressive prison wardens are sifting the human material thrown into their hands, giving comparative freedom to "honor men," and industrial training and elementary education to those within the walls, they do not ignore the fact that there is a residue—they are in all our prisons—a residue of men who cannot stand alone morally; handicapped by causes for which they may not be responsible they cannot hope to be "honor men" for they are moral invalids—often mental invalids as well. That they should be kept under restraint goes without saying. They need the control of a firm yet flexible hand, and they should be under direct medical supervision; for back of their crimes may be causes other than bad blood.
Improved factory laws, better housing of the poor, the enforcement of regulations for public hygiene, the application of some of the saner theories of eugenics, the work of district nurses, all these are on the way to reduce the number of diseased or abnormal individuals who fall so readily into crime. Already we have several recorded instances when a blow on the head had caused uncontrollable criminal impulses, where skilful brain surgery removed the pressure, and with the restoration of the normal brain the nature of the individual recovered its moral balance. Every large city should have its psychopathic detention hospital in connection with its courts, to be resorted to in all cases where there is doubt of the responsibility of any person accused of crime, and every large penitentiary should have its psychopathic department for men sent to prison from smaller towns.
But when all is said and done, when the main sources of crime are recognized and controlled, when sound sociology unites with Christianity as the basis of management in every prison, when the "criminal type" of Lombroso has been finally consigned to the limbo of exploded theories, crime will still be with us, simply because human nature is human nature; and whatever else human nature may be it is a violent explosive, whether we agree with Saint Paul as to "the old Adam" or believe with the evolutionist that we are slowly emerging from the brute and that the beast of prey still sleeps within us—not sleeping but rampant in men and women allied in white-slave traffic and in those responsible for the wholesale slaughter of mankind and the destruction of property caused by war. Nothing short of the complete regeneration of human nature can banish crime; and after we who call ourselves "society" have done our best human nature will continue to break out in lawless acts. As long as we have poverty in our midst desperate want will revolt in desperate deeds, and poverty we shall have until the race has reached a higher average of thrift and efficiency, and industrial conditions are developed on a basis of fairness to all; and where there is a weak link in the moral nature of a man undue pressure of temptation, brought to bear on that link, will cause it to break, even while in his heart the man may be hungering and thirsting for righteousness. When the science of eugenics has given its helping hand it will still be baffled by the appearance of the proverbial black sheep in folds where heredity and environment logically should have produced snowy fleece; and who among us dare assert that no infusion of bad blood discolors his own tangled ancestry?
All the evils of poverty, vice, and crime are but expressions of imperfection of the human nature common to us all. The warp of the fabric is the same, various as are the colors and tones, and the strength of the threads of which the individual lives are woven. Whether or not we realize it, all our efforts toward social reform indicate a growing consciousness of the oneness of humanity.
With all our imperfections, is not human nature sound at heart? Do we not love that which seems to us good and hate the apparent evil? We do not realize the insidious working of evil in ourselves; but when it is revealed to us objectively, when it is thrown into relief by an outbreak of evil deeds in others, our healthy instinctive impulse is to crush it. Surely back of the religious and the legal persecutions has been the desire to exterminate apparent evil; that desire is still with us but we are learning better methods of handling it than to unleash the bloodhounds of cruelty. We are beginning to understand that evil can be conquered only by good.
As the words of the Founder of Christianity first led me into my prison experience, after all these years of study of the subject I find myself coming out at the same door wherein I went, and believing that every theory of social reform, including all the 'ologies, resolves itself in the last analysis to a wise conformity to the Golden Rule. On the fly-leaf of a little note-book which I carried when visiting the penitentiary were pencilled these words: "The Christian religion is the ministry of love and common sense," and I have lived to see the teaching of Christianity forming the basis of prison reform, and science clasping the hand of religion in this relation of man to man. Henceforth I shall believe that nothing is too good to be true, not even the coming of universal peace.
The End