Before the old thief died the old trusty had gone, and I had to take his place. I did so only with great reluctance, and with many misgivings as to my peace of mind and body.
I had noticed how the convicts nagged and harassed the old trusty with insults and petty, malicious persecutions to revenge themselves for his greed and his authoritative, arrogant manner towards them.
I realized that life might be made unbearable for me, and that I might be forced to go downstairs to the cells before I had completed my cure.
When the old trusty received fruit he had sold it promptly to the convicts for money. He asked five cents for an apple, ten cents for an orange, so much for tobacco or for a pipe, another price for suspenders, handkerchiefs, or whatever he might have to sell or barter.
After his release the Italian consumptive said that he had got only half portions of his special food that had been sent in for him, as the trusty cut the portions in half in order to sell the remainder to others.
I unconsciously sensed that the only successful method of taming the ferocious, revengeful natures of the convicts was by kindness and patience; by treating them as friends in misfortune, and not as enemies or inferiors.
When I received tobacco or fruit I divided it among the men who seldom if ever had any visits or mail; the magazines were distributed among them and later were carried downstairs from cell to cell, until the whole prison had read them. To my intense surprise, English, German, Italian—even "high brow" magazines like the Mercure de France and La Revue were eagerly demanded and read by some of these strangely intellectual convicts.
The men who had considered me an aristocrat, and nicknamed me "The Count," soon began to discover that my sympathy was for their troubles, their unhappiness, their helplessness, and not for the warden and the keepers.
I was fully repaid for my attitude. I was made their confidant, their confessor, the judge of their squabbles, a peacemaker and a go-between; when trouble and punishment were in sight, when some particularly unclean and revolting duty was to be performed, the convicts always asked to relieve me of it; and it came to pass that after a while I could devote most of my time to reading, and only attended to the less manual work, such as acting as assistant to the doctor.
Among the patients there was a one-legged negro who was suffering from a painful and unmentionable disease. His big lips, square jaw and scowling countenance made him resemble a big, black bull-dog. Even the keepers were in awe of him. In a fit of danger one day before the old trusty left he very nearly smashed the old man's skull with his crutch.
The first morning that I was left in charge of the hospital I felt some trepidation as to the outcome of my policy of kindness.
The test came quickly. During lunch the negro ordered me, in a loud, angry voice, to bring him something. I went over to his bed and told him gently I was surprised that he had forgotten his good manners; that he had evidently made a mistake in thinking that I was either his keeper or his valet; that we were both convicts, both in trouble, and should treat each other like self-respecting men, helpfully and considerately.
He looked at me with a frown on his face, as he was not quite certain whether I was deriding him; but soon the frown disappeared, and then I said to him: "Now, Davis, what can I do for you?" He answered in a gentle and friendly voice: "Excuse me, mister. I always been treated like a dog. Will you please bring me a spoon?"
From that day on he was tamed; he became more talkative, and even polite. During the long winter evenings he broke the morose silences to tell us of his adventures, and to relate the story of his tragic and terrible life.
He had lost his leg in a railroad accident; and then he had spent several years in hospitals and more years in legal fights to try to collect a few hundred dollars which were never paid. Then, jobless, hungry, destitute, desperate, he had begun to steal. Always unlucky and awkward, he was invariably caught, arrested, and sentenced to jail. Twenty years of his life he had spent in jails and prisons all over the country, and he had even had a taste of the horrible chain gangs of Georgia. He described the punishments he had to undergo because of his inability to work in prison shops; the weeks passed in the "coolers"; the beatings, the tortures he had undergone at the hands of savage, ruthless wardens.
It was an awful, an almost incredible story! It seemed somehow impossible that a human being could go through such an ordeal, such harrowing brutalities, and come out alive and tell the story.
One day he said, "I ain't no good since my accident. Never had a chance to learn a trade or be honest. If I don't come across to the 'bulls' they send me back to the 'pen' for a year. I'm sick of this life. Next time I'll do something that'll send me to Sing Sing for life. This dump is rotten. I'd rather go up the river for two years than stay in here for six months."
The orderly asks me to attend to the consumptive, as he hates to do it himself. I have to bring him his food, I have to clean the cup which he uses as a cuspidor, and be careful to wash it in a solution of carbolic acid, and wash my hands each time afterwards.
The poor boy flies into uncontrollable fits of anger over trifles; then his face becomes almost a livid green, and he seems to be foaming at the mouth—little flecks of foam and saliva—like a vicious horned toad. When in that state I usually speak to him in a low, monotonous voice, hoping to quiet him; and after a while he becomes calmer, his features relax, his body slowly unbends, and he finally slips under the bed sheets, going to sleep as if the effort had completely exhausted him.
It used to remind me of the snake charmers in India, taming angry and hissing cobras by the monotonous sound of a flute. Suddenly the hoods would fold, the terrible fanged mouths close, and the snakes would wag their heads slowly to and fro, with little red tongues playfully wiggling in sign of delight until placed, harmless and hypnotized, in a capacious basket.
I do not know if it was my arguments or my voice that attained the object with my consumptive patient, but the result was evident after I had talked to the poor boy for a few minutes.
In great excitement he confessed to me one morning that he had made up his mind to commit suicide if his fine was not remitted, and he was not released after his one year term. I told the Sister of Mercy of his threat and she promised to see to it that the judge would remit the fine. When the day of his release came, much to my relief, he was freed.
I have reached some interesting conclusions as a result of my observations of the ways of the convicts and their attitudes towards one another.
Life in a prison, under ignorant and often vicious wardens and keepers, although seemingly leveling the men's standard to the most degrading and contemptible measure allowed by law, does not eradicate the convict's idea of class. A class, or perhaps it would be better to say a caste system, exists here, as in all the jails all over the world, as well and as subtly graded as social life in Manhattan, London, or Benares.
The Camorra, of Naples, originated in the jails of the old kingdom of Naples during the rule of the Spaniards and Bourbons, being invented by the convicts to protect themselves against the greed of the prison authorities. Later it branched out and was organized outside. The same holds true in America, in the sense that convicts in prison plot and plan crimes before their release, and agree to continue their acquaintance and work on the outside. Boys and young men serving their first term are easy prey for older and wiser criminals.
Although the ideas of caste in prison are not the same, and are not formulated according to religious, financial, intellectual or aristocratic standards, nevertheless the principle is the same. In most societies the leaders are people with "blood," money, or privileges of some sort. In India the high caste Brahmin is born to his station, and no amount of money or intellectual attainment can make one if he is not born to it.
In prison the ethical standard is as simple as the cave dweller's, or as that of savage tribes. Caste among convicts is a sop to their vanity, to their outraged and primitive sense of justice; society made them outcasts, and they retaliate by creating a society of outcasts wherein they strive to become the leaders, the greatest, the bravest, the cleverest among the Pariahs; and like the Pariahs they consider other castes outside as lower than their own.
Convicts admire physical prowess and brute strength, fearlessness, "nerve"; they look up to those who commit deeds of violence, such as gang men, bandits, burglars; men who will take their chances at killing or being killed rather than be arrested.
Next to these in the order of caste come the more intelligent but less courageous types of crooks, such as confidence men, forgers, gamblers, dishonest bankers, embezzlers, lawyers, politicians. They represent the intellectual aristocracy of crime, to be approved of but not to be put on the same plane as the former.
To the third caste, even less brave, less cunning, belong the sneak thieves, the pickpockets, repeaters, bums; marking the border line on its downward course with such types as wife beaters, wandering tramps, bums, and dope fiends who steal only to satisfy their irresistible cravings for drugs. Those individuals who live on white slavery, professional degenerates, and their like, are ridiculed and nagged by the upper castes; the effeminate "sissies" are also a constant butt for the jests and abuse not only of convicts, but of keepers as well.
On the lowest rung of the social ladder stand the stool pigeons and the detectives who are so unlucky as to be sent to prison. These latter are hated, abominated, despised, by their fellow prisoners with all the intensity, ferocity, and implacable hatred of which such men are capable. It sometimes happens, in spite of the vigilance of the keepers, that they are murdered in prison. In the minds of the other convicts these stool pigeons and detectives are their most dangerous foes, because of the intimate knowledge they possess of the technique of crime, and because of the similarity of their ways of living.
The one-legged, bull-faced negro in the hospital was watching my assistant, who, of his own volition, and without being ordered to do it, was laboriously polishing the brass chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.
That boy ain't no thief, he remarked philosophically. "A thief is a thief 'cause he won't work, in or out of jail."
A crook will waste many days, nay, sometimes weeks and months, and take infinite pains to plan a robbery, the result of which he imagines is getting something for nothing. Sometimes the prize is nothing, sometimes it is considerable; and then it is dissipated in gambling, dope, and riotous living. The fruit of legitimate work he considers a meagre result of foolish painstaking effort.
The mental calibre of these men is similar to that of naughty, precocious children, or of savages; they have streaks of yellow and streaks of insanity; they often have a strong will, but no morality; a keen intelligence, but no principle; a purpose, but no good or high-minded ambition. Almost without exception they are gamblers; they lack imagination, but they are possessed of an over-weening, childish vanity; they have great stubbornnesses, but no sense of proportion or responsibility.
Their ideals are wholly physical; they love fine clothes, jewelry, good food; they admire the fair sex, they crave money for all the physical results it will bring. They are very proud of their criminal successes, of their reputations as "tough guys," bad men with terrible records, fierce and relentless in their loathing for "squealers" and "bulls."
They consider their gallery of Immortals as unique, and never sufficiently appreciated by those outside their world of life.
A complete lack of imagination prevents them from foreseeing the futility and the inevitable result of their lonesome battle against the united forces of society.
An almost unanimous characteristic is their cheap sentimentality, but at bottom they are nearly always kind hearted. They have, too, a keen sense of justice, and often they are willing to admit that they deserve their punishment; but they rebel savagely against the injustices, the inhuman treatment, the tortures, inflicted by prison authorities. It is the helplessness of these prisoners, and the indifference of the public towards them and their fate, that make prison authorities so cowardly and brutal. A healthy publicity in prison matters, and a more charitable and sympathetic attitude on the part of the public, would very soon change the attitude of the wardens and the keepers.
In the beginning the reticence of the convicts puzzled me, even after I knew that they regarded me as a political prisoner and not as a stool pigeon. Only after a long acquaintance, and then unwillingly, would they admit shamefacedly that their living was acquired by criminal methods. More than any other argument this proved to me that their criminal pride is only a bluff, their pose as "tough guys" only a pretence, and the supposed excitement of their profession only a misdirected and false energy. Their vainglorious, strutting behaviour is really the result of the insulting, demoralizing, contemptuous attitude of the prison authorities, which seems to say: "We are virtuous men; you are only crooks and bums. We are paid by the authorities and the state to punish you and to break your spirit."
The convicts believe that few of the keepers are virtuous or honest men, and the constant revelations of prison graft only arouse their envy, and the galling thought that they are the helpless victims of a higher type of crooks. In seeming self-defense, therefore, they assume their attitude of revenge toward society, of stubbornness and pride and defiance toward the keepers. They soon discover, if they have not already learned, that humanity, charity, and justice are not to be expected from their oppressors; and that our justice is not Christian, nor scientific nor human; but only vindictive, wasteful, idiotic and indeed blind. And so in despair these misguided men become more vicious, hardened and corrupt than they were before prison took a hand in their shaping.
A prison term, which is supposed to reform them and to break their wills, is only a school for criminality, a higher school or university for the underworld, where confidences are exchanged, new alliances are formed, diseases and homosexual habits contracted. The spirit is tempered for future criminal records, instead of being broken, and the body strengthened for coming excesses.
The line of convicts which upon their release streams out of our prisons, is like a large sewer emptying its filth back into society; slowly corrupting, demoralizing and polluting everything it touches.
The stool pigeons are feared by the convicts as well as by the keepers. They keep the warden informed of the mysterious happenings, among the prisoners, and the illicit relations between the keepers and the convicts. In their turn the stool pigeons are rewarded with privileges, such for instance as not being punished for infractions of the rules, which would mean the terrible "cooler" to the ordinary convict. The wardens' greatest fear is that letters written by convicts relating some of the outrageous occurrences of every day in prison may reach the columns of a newspaper and bring about unpleasant notoriety, and even a more disagreeable investigation.
On very rare occasions some angry convict will write to a newspaper relating his unpleasant experiences, but the rule is that the sooner one forgets having been behind the bars the better it is.
A prisoner caught sending communications to the outside world by underground methods, without having his message read by the office, is punished with a few days in the dreaded "cooler."
This is what the "cooler" is: The convict is divested of all clothes except his underwear, and he is then taken to a cell which contains only a bucket and a wooden plank on the floor as a place of rest and sleep. The cell is hermetically closed by a door which keeps out all light and air. A little ventilation, just enough to keep him from suffocation, comes through a small hole in the wall. The darkness is like a solid mass; it is so intense that the prisoner cannot see his hand near his face. Every twenty-four hours the cell is opened and the convict is given a thin slice of bread and about a thimble full of water, just enough to keep him alive. This performance is repeated according to the length of the punishment, that is to say, the door is opened only once in twenty-four hours, to permit the giving of food and water and the emptying of the bucket, whether the prisoner stays in that awful place one day or twenty-one. Many prisoners have been known to stay in the cooler for weeks at a time.
After having lived in complete darkness for a long time, coming out into broad daylight causes untold agonies, and very often has tragic effects upon the eyes and eyesight of the prisoner; usually they have to be sent to the hospital to be treated for inflammation of the eyes or for partial blindness. Men kept long in the cooler sometimes become driveling idiots; others go violently insane and have to be sent to Matteawan for life.
The punishments are all inflicted by the warden, on the word of a stool pigeon, of a keeper, or of a man in charge of the workshops who seems to be a contractor of almost unlimited power in the prison, second only to the warden.
The prison authorities are not supposed to abuse, vilify or use blasphemous language towards the prisoners; it is forbidden under penalty of the law.
Of course, as far as the convict is concerned, such a law or rule is a dead letter. Should a prisoner protest to the warden against vilification or profanity, he would only be laughed at; and should he insist on making his complaint to the prison commissioner, his letter would never be sent, and his persecution would begin at once.
The other day a quarrel broke out between two prisoners. A keeper tried to stop it by hitting one of the offenders with his stick, and at the same time calling him an unmentionable name. The convict retaliated with a punch on the jaw that floored the keeper.
The convict was punished with two days in the "cooler," but the offending keeper was not reprimanded by the warden. And when the man came out of the "cooler," the doctor found him suffering from an inflammation of the eyes which kept him in the hospital for two months.
When he asked for writing materials he was told that the punishment meted out to him automatically eliminated all the privileges of a convict; and he was not permitted to write home or to receive visitors for two months. The electric light in his cell was cut off and he was not allowed to read books or magazines, newspapers being always barred.
In the beginning of my stay in prison the use of profane language was, to put it mildly, quite prevalent; but it became rare soon after the election of Mayor Gaynor. Even their sticks were taken away from the keepers for a while. And it was discovered that discipline did not suffer in the least from the lack either of foul language or the stick.
The food, brought up by a convict from the keepers' kitchen to the hospital, is distributed by us thrice a day, on a long table covered by white linoleum and standing in the middle of the room.
We have to clean the bathroom and the spittoons, sweep the floor, empty the garbage can, get the ice, make the beds, give the medicine, take the temperatures, mark the charts, help the doctor, besides giving and receiving the laundry—in short, the immediate and dirty work of the hospital is in our hands. The one happy hour of the day is at nine in the morning, when we are privileged to empty the garbage can at the docks on the Brooklyn side or go to a nearby oven to burn its contents.
For a few minutes, while filling a pail with water from the river to wash out the empty garbage can, we watch the tug boats, the canal boats, passenger boats or yachts pass by, and the people on board always greet us with a wave of the hand or a merry shout. But never have the passengers of the aristocratic yachts even condescended to look at us.
No matter if it rains or snows, or if fog hangs over the whole landscape, the few minutes alone, untrammelled by the presence of a keeper or the crisscross pattern of the bars, make us feel as if we were really free men; then we march reluctantly towards the ice house to the big chest containing the supply of ice for the different departments. The ice is cut and put into the empty and clean garbage can. When there are no keepers around we linger to talk to the "skin" gang, which is composed of a few convicts whose duty it is to peel potatoes, onions, carrots and cabbage for the kitchen.
It is a great place for the exchange of news of the day—of the gossip of new arrivals, the punishments, the petty incidents or the headliners of the most important events, the opinions of the convicts about the goodness or badness of the keepers; in short it is a sort of clearing house for information as to whatever is happening in the penitentiary.
One of the men in charge of the gang is a blond, powerful, fine-looking convict of German parentage. He belongs to the high caste among the prisoners, and shows it by his manner toward the lesser castes.
In the beginning he answered my questions in monosyllables, but after several months of daily intercourse, when he had thoroughly satisfied himself of my status, my attitude, and my antecedents, and when he learned that I was an aristocrat only in thought but a democrat in manners, he became talkative, and piece by piece, incident by incident, he told me of his life, until I was able to construct it almost as a whole.
He was the son of honest parents, who had started him in life as a skilled workingman. He lost his position during a strike, and one of his children died of starvation. Fearing that his other child would meet a similar fate, and seeing no prospect of another job, he started on his career as a burglar. Being a skilled mechanic, he found it easy to fashion tools for his trade, which, as he claimed, brought immediate and satisfactory results.