IN 1849 Feodor Dostoyevsky wrote on the wall of his prison
cell the following story of The Priest and the Devil:
"'Hello, you little fat father!' the devil said to the
priest. 'What made you lie so to those poor, misled people? What
tortures of hell did you depict? Don't you know they are already
suffering the tortures of hell in their earthly lives? Don't you know
that you and the authorities of the State are my representatives on
earth? It is you that make them suffer the pains of hell with which
you threaten them. Don't you know this? Well, then, come with me!'
"The devil grabbed the priest by the collar, lifted him
high in the air, and carried him to a factory, to an iron foundry. He
saw the workmen there running and hurrying to and fro, and toiling in
the scorching heat. Very soon the thick, heavy air and the heat are
too much for the priest. With tears in his eyes, he pleads with the
devil: 'Let me go! Let me leave this hell!'
"'Oh, my dear friend, I must show you many more
places.' The devil gets hold of him again and drags him off to a
farm. There he sees workmen threshing the grain. The dust and heat
are insufferable. The overseer carries a knout, and unmercifully
beats anyone who falls to the ground overcome by hard toil or hunger.
"Next the priest is taken to the huts where these same
workers live with their families--dirty, cold, smoky, ill-smelling
holes. The devil grins. He points out the poverty and hardships which
are at home here.
"'Well, isn't this enough?' he asks. And it seems as if
even he, the devil, pities the people. The pious servant of God can
hardly bear it. With uplifted hands he begs: 'Let me go away from
here. Yes, yes! This is hell on earth!'
"'Well, then, you see. And you still promise them
another hell. You torment them, torture them to death mentally when
they are already all but dead physically! Come on! I will show you
one more hell--one more, the very worst.'
"He took him to a prison and showed him a dungeon, with
its foul air and the many human forms, robbed of all health and
energy, lying on the floor, covered with vermin that were devouring
their poor, naked, emaciated bodies.
"'Take off your silken clothes,' said the devil to the
priest, 'put on your ankles heavy chains such as these unfortunates
wear; lie down on the cold and filthy floor--and then talk to them
about a hell that still awaits them!'
"'No, no!' answered the priest, 'I cannot think of
anything more dreadful than this. I entreat you, let me go away from
here!'
"'Yes, this is hell. There can be no worse hell than
this. Did you not know it? Did you not know that these men and women
whom you are frightening with the picture of a hell hereafter--did
you not know that they are in hell right here, before they die?"
This was written fifty years ago in dark Russia, on the wall
of one of the most horrible prisons. Yet who can deny that the same
applies with equal force to the present time, even to American
prisons?
With all our boasted reforms, our great social changes, and
our far-reaching discoveries, human beings continue to be sent to the
worst of hells, wherein they are outraged, degraded, and tortured,
that society may be "protected" from the phantoms of its
own making.
Prison, a social protection? What monstrous mind ever
conceived such an idea? Just as well say that health can be promoted
by a widespread contagion.
After eighteen months of horror in an English prison, Oscar
Wilde gave to the world his great masterpiece, The Ballad of
Reading Goal:
The vilest deeds, like poison weeds,
Bloom
well in prison air;
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there.
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy
gate,
And the Warder is Despair.
Society goes on perpetuating this poisonous air, not
realizing that out of it can come naught but the most poisonous
results.
We are spending at the present $3,500,000 per day,
$1,000,095,000 per year, to maintain prison institutions, and that in
a democratic country,--a sum almost as large as the combined output
of wheat, valued at $750,000,000, and the output of coal, valued at
$350,000,000. Professor Bushnell of Washington, D.C., estimates the
cost of prisons at $6,000,000,000 annually, and Dr. G. Frank Lydston,
an eminent American writer on crime, gives $5,000,000,000 annually as
a reasonable figure. Such unheard-of expenditure for the purpose of
maintaining vast armies of human beings caged up like wild beasts! 1
Yet crimes are on the increase. Thus we learn that in
America there are four and a half times as many crimes to every
million population today as there were twenty years ago.
The most horrible aspect is that our national crime is
murder, not robbery, embezzlement, or rape, as in the South. London
is five times as large as Chicago, yet there are one hundred and
eighteen murders annually in the latter city, while only twenty in
London. Nor is Chicago the leading city in crime, since it is only
seventh on the list, which is headed by four Southern cities, and San
Francisco and Los Angeles. In view of such a terrible condition of
affairs, it seems ridiculous to prate of the protection society
derives from its prisons.
The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the
most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an
excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the
dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past
when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is
"ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law.
The widespread prison investigations, agitation, and
education during the last few years are conclusive proof that men are
learning to dig deep into the very bottom of society, down to the
causes of the terrible discrepancy between social and individual
life.
Why, then, are prisons a social crime and a failure? To
answer this vital question it behooves us to seek the nature and
cause of crimes, the methods employed in coping with them, and the
effects these methods produce in ridding society of the curse and
horror of crimes.
First, as to the nature of crime:
Havelock Ellis divides crime into four phases, the
political, the passional, the insane, and the occasional. He says
that the political criminal is the victim of an attempt of a more or
less despotic government to preserve its own stability. He is not
necessarily guilty of an unsocial offense; he simply tries to
overturn a certain political order which may itself be anti-social.
This truth is recognized all over the world, except in America where
the foolish notion still prevails that in a Democracy there is no
place for political criminals. Yet John Brown was a political
criminal; so were the Chicago Anarchists; so is every striker.
Consequently, says Havelock Ellis, the political criminal of our time
or place may be the hero, martyr, saint of another age. Lombroso
calls the political criminal the true precursor of the progressive
movement of humanity.
"The criminal by passion is usually a man of wholesome
birth and honest life, who under the stress of some great, unmerited
wrong has wrought justice for himself."2
Mr. Hugh C. Weir, in The Menace of the Police, cites
the case of Jim Flaherty, a criminal by passion, who, instead of
being saved by society, is turned into a drunkard and a recidivist,
with a ruined and poverty-stricken family as the result.
A more pathetic type is Archie, the victim in Brand
Whitlock's novel, The Turn of the Balance, the greatest
American exposé of crime in the making. Archie, even more than
Flaherty, was driven to crime and death by the cruel inhumanity of
his surroundings, and by the unscrupulous hounding of the machinery
of the law. Archie and Flaherty are but the types of many thousands,
demonstrating how the legal aspects of crime, and the methods of
dealing with it, help to create the disease which is undermining our
entire social life.
"The insane criminal really can no more be considered a
criminal than a child, since he is mentally in the same condition as
an infant or an animal." 3
The law already recognizes that, but only in rare cases of a
very flagrant nature, or when the culprit's wealth permits the luxury
of criminal insanity. It has become quite fashionable to be the
victim of paranoia. But on the whole the "sovereignty of
justice" still continues to punish criminally insane with the
whole severity of its power. Thus Mr. Ellis quotes from Dr. Richter's
statistics showing that in Germany one hundred and six madmen, out of
one hundred and forty-four criminally insane, were condemned to
severe punishment.
The occasional criminal "represents by far the largest
class of our prison population, hence is the greatest menace to
social well-being." What is the cause that compels a vast army
of the human family to take to crime, to prefer the hideous life
within prison walls to the life outside? Certainly that cause must be
an iron master, who leaves its victims no avenue of escape, for the
most depraved human being loves liberty.
This terrific force is conditioned in our cruel social and
economic arrangement. I do not mean to deny the biologic,
physiologic, or psychologic factors in creating crime; but there is
hardly an advanced criminologist who will not concede that the social
and economic influences are the most relentless, the most poisonous
germs of crime. Granted even that there are innate criminal
tendencies, it is none the less true that these tendencies find rich
nutrition in our social environment.
There is close relation, says Havelock Ellis, between crimes
against the person and the price of alcohol, between crimes against
property and the price of wheat. He quotes Quetelet and Lacassagne,
the former looking upon society as the preparer of crime, and the
criminals as instruments that execute them. The latter find that "the
social environment is the cultivation medium of criminality; that the
criminal is the microbe, an element which only becomes important when
it finds the medium which causes it to ferment; every society has
the criminals it deserves."4
The most "prosperous" industrial period makes it
impossible for the worker to earn enough to keep up health and vigor.
And as prosperity is, at best, an imaginary condition, thousands of
people are constantly added to the host of the unemployed. From East
to West, from South to North, this vast army tramps in search of work
or food, and all they find is the workhouse or the slums. Those who
have a spark of self-respect left, prefer open defiance, prefer crime
to the emaciated, degraded position of poverty.
Edward Carpenter estimates that five-sixths of indictable
crimes consist in some violation of property rights; but that is too
low a figure. A thorough investigation would prove that nine crimes
out of ten could be traced, directly or indirectly, to our economic
and social iniquities, to our system of remorseless exploitation and
robbery. There is no criminal so stupid but recognizes this terrible
fact, though he may not be able to account for it.
A collection of criminal philosophy, which Havelock Ellis,
Lombroso, and other eminent men have compiled, shows that the
criminal feels only too keenly that it is society that drives him to
crime. A Milanese thief said to Lombroso: "I do not rob, I
merely take from the rich their superfluities; besides, do not
advocates and merchants rob?" A murderer wrote: "Knowing
that three-fourths of the social virtues are cowardly vices, I
thought an open assault on a rich man would be less ignoble than the
cautious combination of fraud." Another wrote: "I am
imprisoned for stealing a half dozen eggs. Ministers who rob millions
are honored. Poor Italy!" An educated convict said to Mr.
Davitt: "The laws of society are framed for the purpose of
securing the wealth of the world to power and calculation, thereby
depriving the larger portion of mankind of its rights and chances.
Why should they punish me for taking by somewhat similar means from
those who have taken more than they had a right to?" The same
man added: "Religion robs the soul of its independence;
patriotism is the stupid worship of the world for which the
well-being and the peace of the inhabitants were sacrificed by those
who profit by it, while the laws of the land, in restraining natural
desires, were waging war on the manifest spirit of the law of our
beings. Compared with this," he concluded, "thieving is an
honorable pursuit." 5
Verily, there is greater truth in this philosophy than in
all the law-and-moral books of society.
The economic, political, moral, and physical factors being
the microbes of crime, how does society meet the situation?
The methods of coping with crime have no doubt undergone
several changes, but mainly in a theoretic sense. In practice,
society has retained the primitive motive in dealing with the
offender; that is, revenge. It has also adopted the theologic idea;
namely, punishment; while the legal and "civilized" methods
consist of deterrence or terror, and reform. We shall presently see
that all four modes have failed utterly, and that we are today no
nearer a solution than in the dark ages.
The natural impulse of the primitive man to strike back, to
avenge a wrong, is out of date. Instead, the civilized man, stripped
of courage and daring, has delegated to an organized machinery the
duty of avenging his wrongs, in the foolish belief that the State is
justified in doing what he no longer has the manhood or consistency
to do. The "majesty of the law" is a reasoning thing; it
would not stoop to primitive instincts. Its mission is of a "higher"
nature. True, it is still steeped in the theologic muddle, which
proclaims punishment as a means of purification, or the vicarious
atonement of sin. But legally and socially the statute exercises
punishment, not merely as an infliction of pain upon the offender,
but also for its terrifying effect upon others.
What is the real basis of punishment, however? The notion of
a free will, the idea that man is at all times a free agent for good
or evil; if he chooses the latter, he must be made to pay the price.
Although this theory has long been exploded, and thrown upon the
dustheap, it continues to be applied daily by the entire machinery of
government, turning it into the most cruel and brutal tormentor of
human life. The only reason for its continuance is the still more
cruel notion that the greater the terror punishment spreads, the more
certain its preventative effect.
Society is using the most drastic methods in dealing with
the social offender. Why do they not deter? Although in America a man
is supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty, the
instruments of law, the police, carry on a reign of terror, making
indiscriminate arrests, beating, clubbing, bullying people, using the
barbarous method of the "third degree," subjecting their
unfortunate victims to the foul air of the station house, and the
still fouler language of its guardians. Yet crimes are rapidly
multiplying, and society is paying the price. On the other hand, it
is an open secret that when the unfortunate citizen has been given
the full "mercy" of the law, and for the sake of safety is
hidden in the worst of hells, his real Calvary begins. Robbed of his
rights as a human being, degraded to a mere automaton without will or
feeling, dependent entirely upon the mercy of brutal keepers, he
daily goes through a process of dehumanization, compared with which
savage revenge was mere child's play.
There is not a single penal institution or reformatory in
the United States where men are not tortured "to be made good,"
by means of the black-jack, the club, the strait-jacket, the
water-cure, the "humming bird" (an electrical contrivance
run along the human body), the solitary, the bull-ring, and
starvation diet. In these institutions his will is broken, his soul
degraded, his spirit subdued by the deadly monotony and routine of
prison life. In Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and in the
South, these horrors have become so flagrant as to reach the outside
world, while in most other prisons the same Christian methods still
prevail. But prison walls rarely allow the agonized shrieks of the
victims to escape--prison walls are thick, they dull the sound.
Society might with greater immunity abolish all prisons at once, than
to hope for protection from these twentieth-century chambers of
horrors.
Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the
world an emaciated, deformed, will-less, ship-wrecked crew of
humanity, with the Cain mark on their foreheads, their hopes crushed,
all their natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but hunger and
inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink back into crime as
the only possibility of existence. It is not at all an unusual thing
to find men and women who have spent half their lives--nay, almost
their entire existence--in prison. I know a woman on Blackwell's
Island, who had been in and out thirty-eight times; and through a
friend I learn that a young boy of seventeen, whom he had nursed and
cared for in the Pittsburg penitentiary, had never known the meaning
of liberty. From the reformatory to the penitentiary had been the
path of this boy's life, until, broken in body, he died a victim of
social revenge. These personal experiences are substantiated by
extensive data giving overwhelming proof of the utter futility of
prisons as a means of deterrence or reform.
Well-meaning persons are now working for a new departure in
the prison question,--reclamation, to restore once more to the
prisoner the possibility of becoming a human being. Commendable as
this is, I fear it is impossible to hope for good results from
pouring good wine into a musty bottle. Nothing short of a complete
reconstruction of society will deliver mankind from the cancer of
crime. Still, if the dull edge of our social conscience would be
sharpened, the penal institutions might be given a new coat of
varnish. But the first step to be taken is the renovation of the
social consciousness, which is in a rather dilapidated condition. It
is sadly in need to be awakened to the fact that crime is a question
of degree, that we all have the rudiments of crime in us, more or
less, according to our mental, physical, and social environment; and
that the individual criminal is merely a reflex of the tendencies of
the aggregate.
With the social consciousness wakened, the average
individual may learn to refuse the "honor" of being the
bloodhound of the law. He may cease to persecute, despise, and
mistrust the social offender, and give him a chance to live and
breathe among his fellows. Institutions are, of course, harder to
reach. They are cold, impenetrable, and cruel; still, with the social
consciousness quickened, it might be possible to free the prison
victims from the brutality of prison officials, guards, and keepers.
Public opinion is a powerful weapon; keepers of human prey, even, are
afraid of it. They may be taught a little humanity, especially if
they realize that their jobs depend upon it.
But the most important step is to demand for the prisoner
the right to work while in prison, with some monetary recompense that
would enable him to lay aside a little for the day of his release,
the beginning of a new life.
It is almost ridiculous to hope much from present society
when we consider that workingmen, wage-slaves themselves, object to
convict labor. I shall not go into the cruelty of this objection, but
merely consider the impracticability of it. To begin with, the
opposition so far raised by organized labor has been directed against
windmills. Prisoners have always worked; only the State has been
their exploiter, even as the individual employer has been the robber
of organized labor. The States have either set the convicts to work
for the government, or they have farmed convict labor to private
individuals. Twenty-nine of the States pursue the latter plan. The
Federal government and seventeen States have discarded it, as have
the leading nations of Europe, since it leads to hideous overworking
and abuse of prisoners, and to endless graft.
"Rhode Island, the State dominated by Aldrich, offers
perhaps the worst example. Under a five-year contract, dated July
7th, 1906, and renewable for five years more at the option of private
contractors, the labor of the inmates of the Rhode Island
Penitentiary and the Providence County Jail is sold to the
Reliance-Sterling Mfg. Co. at the rate of a trifle less than 25 cents
a day per man. This Company is really a gigantic Prison Labor Trust,
for it also leases the convict labor of Connecticut, Michigan,
Indiana, Nebraska, and South Dakota penitentiaries, and the
reformatories of New Jersey, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, eleven
establishments in all.
"The enormity of the graft under the Rhode Island
contract may be estimated from the fact that this same Company pays
62 1/2 cents a day in Nebraska for the convict's labor, and that
Tennessee, for example, gets $1.10 a day for a convict's work from
the Gray-Dudley Hardware Co.; Missouri gets 70 cents a day from the
Star Overall Mfg. Co.; West Virginia 65 cents a day from the Kraft
Mfg. Co., and Maryland 55 cents a day from Oppenheim, Oberndorf &
Co., shirt manufacturers. The very difference in prices points to
enormous graft. For example, the Reliance-Sterling Mfg. Co.
manufactures shirts, the cost of free labor being not less than $1.20
per dozen, while it pays Rhode Island thirty cents a dozen.
Furthermore, the State charges this Trust no rent for the use of its
huge factory, charges nothing for power, heat, light, or even
drainage, and exacts no taxes. What graft!"6
It is estimated that more than twelve million dollars' worth
of workingmen's shirts and overalls is produced annually in this
country by prison labor. It is a woman's industry, and the first
reflection that arises is that an immense amount of free female labor
is thus displaced. The second consideration is that male convicts,
who should be learning trades that would give them some chance of
being self-supporting after their release, are kept at this work at
which they can not possibly make a dollar. This is the more serious
when we consider that much of this labor is done in reformatories,
which so loudly profess to be training their inmates to become useful
citizens.
The third, and most important, consideration is that the
enormous profits thus wrung from convict labor are a constant
incentive to the contractors to exact from their unhappy victims
tasks altogether beyond their strength, and to punish them cruelly
when their work does not come up to the excessive demands made.
Another word on the condemnation of convicts to tasks at
which they cannot hope to make a living after release. Indiana, for
example, is a State that has made a great splurge over being in the
front rank of modern penological improvements. Yet, according to the
report rendered in 1908 by the training school of its "reformatory,"
135 were engaged in the manufacture of chains, 207 in that of shirts,
and 255 in the foundry--a total of 597 in three occupations. But at
this so-called reformatory 59 occupations were represented by the
inmates, 39 of which were connected with country pursuits. Indiana,
like other States, professes to be training the inmates of her
reformatory to occupations by which they will be able to make their
living when released. She actually sets them to work making chains,
shirts, and brooms, the latter for the benefit of the Louisville
Fancy Grocery Co. Broom-making is a trade largely monopolized by the
blind, shirt-making is done by women, and there is only one free
chain-factory in the State, and at that a released convict can not
hope to get employment. The whole thing is a cruel farce.
If, then, the States can be instrumental in robbing their
helpless victims of such tremendous profits is it not high time for
organized labor to stop its idle howl, and to insist on decent
remuneration for the convict, even as labor organizations claim for
themselves? In that way workingmen would kill the germ which makes of
the prisoner an enemy to the interests of labor. I have said
elsewhere that thousands of convicts, incompetent and without a
trade, without means of subsistence, are yearly turned back into the
social fold. These men and women must live, for even an ex-convict
has needs. Prison life has made them anti-social beings, and the
rigidly closed doors that meet them on their release are not likely
to decrease their bitterness. The inevitable result is that they form
a favorable nucleus out of which scabs, black-legs, detectives, and
policemen are drawn, only too willing to do the master's bidding.
Thus organized labor, by its foolish opposition to work in prison,
defeats its own ends. It helps to create poisonous fumes that stifle
every attempt for economic betterment. If the workingman wants to
avoid these effects, he should insist on the right of the
convict to work, he should meet him as a brother, take him into his
organization, and with his aid turn against the system which
grinds them both.
Last, but not least, is the growing realization of the
barbarity and the inadequacy of the definite sentence. Those who
believe in, and earnestly aim at, a change are fast coming to the
conclusion that man must be given an opportunity to make good. And
how is he to do it with ten, fifteen, or twenty years' imprisonment
before him? The hope of liberty and of opportunity is the only
incentive to life, especially the prisoner's life. Society has sinned
so long against him--it ought at least to leave him that. I am not
very sanguine that it will, or that any real change in that direction
can take place until the conditions that breed both the prisoner and
the jailer will be forever abolished.
Out of his mouth a red, red rose!
Out of his
heart a white!
For who can say by what strange way
Christ brings his will to light,
Since the barren staff the
pilgrim bore
Bloomed in the great Pope's sight.
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