Bubonic plague cannot be reformed; it is bad intrinsically and must be extirpated. Born in Asiatic filth, ignorance and barbarism, it now menaces modern civilization. While it killed millions in India or China only, we endured it, but when we hear it at our own door we turn and listen. The instinct of self-preservation, older and often more urgent than Christianity, says, "Destroy it or it will destroy you!"

We send our scientific martyrs to the front, who perish in the effort to solve the deadly riddle. We would pour out billions of money in the fight if need come. Rich men will spend all they possess rather than die, and see those they love die of it. Nations will do the same. Compromises are not considered; no one talks of reforming the Black Death. Unless it be jettisoned from the Ship of Civilization, progress and enlightenment go by the board.

And yet the disease is but physical—attacks the body only. It does not touch the immortal spirit. It has not rooted itself in the entrails of our social economy and order. It does not undermine our common humanity, or bankrupt human charity and infect it with indifference, suspicion or mutual hostility. It does not prompt law and justice to play the roles of persecution and oppression. It does not arrogate to itself the right to judge between man and his brother man, protecting the one and damning the other. It does not authorize us to say of the victim of sickness or circumstance, "Throw him to the lions!" and to affirm of his torture and death, "Serves him right!" Compared with such a plague as that, the Black Death would appear benign.

Penal imprisonment is an institution of old date, born of barbarism and ignorance, nurtured in filth and darkness, and cruelly administered. It began with the dominion of the strong over the weak, and when the former was recognized as the community, it was called the authority of good over evil. Man took the reins of government from the hands of the Almighty, and amended the Ten Commandments with statute law.

Evil is—to prefer the good of self before good of the neighbor; crime is to act in accordance with that preference. Every son of Adam is born to evil, and society is but his multiplication; but society could exist only by the compromise that the hostility of man against neighbor should mask itself as mutual forbearance. Impossible that every one should possess every thing; therefore dissimulate your greed and divide. But certain persons, missing their share either through non-conformity with the doctrine, or by force of circumstances, stuck to the old principle of each man for himself, and became "criminals." Their hand was against society, and society's against them.

In eras before society became integrated, some of these non-conformists prevailed over such strength as could be mustered against them, and by hearty and forthright robberies and murders came to be leaders and rulers of men—earls, barons, kings. The aristocracy of modern Europe is descended from such stout rebels. They became reconciled with, and organized, society, and aided it in war against the weaker of their own sort; and it was they who devised prisons for such captives as it might be inexpedient to kill outright.

All this did not alter the truth that all men are alike evil, and that such as are not also criminals, forbear—at the outset at least—from motives of enlightened selfishness. But in course of time, even enforced good behavior breeds good intent, and "good" people. For God rules us through our very sins, and will lead us, (with our passive cooperation) to religion and regeneration in the end.

But the segregation of a criminal class is manifestly human, not Divine; economic, not moral; illusory, not real. Consequently, pains and penalties inflicted by men upon other men, by society upon individuals, by the community upon "criminals," have no warrant of Divine authority, but only of superior numbers or physical strength. The only proper punishment for crime is the criminal's conscience, and if he have none available, he is liable to the natural contingency that violence breeds violence, and may get him in the long run—though it often happens that, measured by mortal standards, the run is not long enough for us to see the finish. We may console ourselves with the reflection that a finish, somewhere, there will be.

Meanwhile, it is for persons of intelligence and good will to consider whether, aside from physical penalties or jailing, we possess means for inducing criminals to abstain from crime. Let us leave abstract arguments and come to facts.

My license to speak in the premises is due to my being an ex-convict, sentenced to Atlanta Penitentiary for a year and a day, but recently released on "good time." I shall first give you a notion of what jail is, and of what is done and suffered there; then consider what has hitherto been done to alleviate prison conditions and abuses; and end with inquiring whether these measures, actively prosecuted, will prove adequate to the need, or whether something else and more is demanded. If so—what?

Purgatory is usually understood to be—as its etymology indicates—a place where persons encumbered with evil accretions may have them purged out of them, or stripped off from them, and so be fitted for the purity and innocence of Heaven. It is therefore a beneficent institution. Hell, on the other hand, was the inheritance of those whose evil is ingrowing and cannot be removed—a place where they may live out their diabolical or satanic natures and be punished and tortured by those of like nature with themselves.

Our prisons were, in the beginning, frankly hellish in their object; men who had incurred personal or society hostility were put in them to be tormented from motives of hate and revenge. But during the last few generations the humanitarian idea has come into being and has not only ameliorated prison conditions in some prisons and to some extent, but has caused prisons in general to cease being frank and to become hypocritical—to pretend that they are purgatories, aiming not at revenge but at reform. This pretense has been so industriously and sagaciously put forward that ninety-nine outsiders out of a hundred are misled by it, and believe that prisons are not, still, administered for the destruction of their inmates, physical, mental and moral, with such circumstances of cruelty and brutality as happen to suit the humor of the arbitrary and irresponsible guards and wardens; but that they are uniformly conducted with an eye to wooing away prisoners from sin and crime, and persuading them of the beauty and policy of honesty, gentleness and goodness. In fact it is probable that almost everybody believes this, except the wardens and guards, and the prisoners themselves—and a few Thomas Mott Osbornes and other prison workers who have had an amateur peep inside the walls and caught a fleeting glimpse of a horror or two before the discreet managers could get the door shut.

Not only so, but we read indignant articles in our morning paper about the coddling of criminals; and witty writers will have it that prisons are gentlemen's clubs where all the comforts of refined life are combined with a voluptuous idleness, or with only work enough to avert ennui. Criminals are depicted as waiting in cues at the gates of prisons for admission, like the public at the doors of a popular theater; though at the same time in another column, you may find the statement that, in view of modern legal technicalities, it has become almost impossible to get a man into jail. According to the logic of the witty writers, this near-impossibility should be more deplored by the technicality-inhibited criminals than by anybody else.

Prisons are not purgatories, nor gentlemen's clubs; they are just as much hell as they ever were, and as their managers can make them. Apart from any special leniency of local conditions, prisons are hell because they are prisons—because you are confined there and cannot get out; because you are a slave and have no redress; because your manhood is degraded; because despotic power is entrusted to the men who handle you, though they are never any better than you are, and are usually much worse, and regard you as an asset to make profit from, a thing to be driven and insulted to the last extremity and beyond it, and not as a human being. Prisons are hell because convicts are punished for trivial and whimsical reasons as much as for serious ones; and whether or not the punishment involve actual physical torture, the insolence, disgrace and injustice of it remain. Prisons are hell intrinsically, and always will be; and whoever doubts it has only to commit a crime and be sent to prison; that is the end of doubts.

Let every judge, attorney general, district attorney, and juryman at a trial spend a bona fide term in jail, and there would be no more convictions—prisons would end. Every convict and ex-convict knows that, and eternity will be too short to obliterate the knowledge in him.

The unctuous plausibility of the pretense that prisons are beneficent purgatories and not hells renders it the more sickening. Life is a God-given discipline for men, and at best a severe one; but if we believe in God, we know it is given in love, for loving ends. All mortal life is an imprisonment; the laws of it are essential and natural, and breaking them involves essential and natural penalties. God deputed this rÉgimen of love to parents, and to those who deal with their fellow creatures from impulses of parental or brotherly love; but He never licensed any man to punish another from revenge or hate, or in mere indifference. He licensed no man to do it, nor any community or nation. And whoever does it, serves not God but the devil; and if any crime be unpardonable, it is that, because it is not essential or natural, but an usurpation against nature, and breeds not reform but more evil.

Prison officials, in their treatment of prisoners, are not actuated by love, but by indifference to suffering, or by animosity and brutality, or by desire of profit, and therefore their work is impious and wicked. And the longer they hold their office, the more hardened do they become to the spectacle of suffering and outrage; the more heedless of justice and mercy do they grow. They grow to disbelieve in any human truth and goodness; all men are to them criminals actual or potential; breathing and dwelling amidst crime, it enters into their own blood and temper. They will have their debt to pay; but neither may those escape who ignorantly or carelessly appointed them to office and hold them there—the Government, and the nation which creates Government as its representative. Ignorance does not excuse; knowledge on these subjects is a sacred duty. Man cannot break the bonds of his brotherhood with man; the blood shed will be required of him, and the usury of misery and tears.

"Throw him to the lions!—serve him right!" Most of us have joined in that barbarous cry upon occasion. But some of us have sickened at the slaughter, and are for paring the lions' claws, or at least exhorting them to roar less savagely, and to devour their prey in secret. But the lions, with their attendant hyenas and jackals, have so long been accepted as indispensable to the order and majesty of the State, that no one likes to stand up to his God-given intuitions, and demand the abolition of the whole prison circus. We hardly realize that the harm criminals do society cannot equal the harm that society does to itself by its handling of them and attitude toward them. The circus must go on, of course; but—let us ameliorate its coarser features!

Let us make our prisons hygienic—larger cells, drainage, air, exercise; let us select nice, kindly persons for guards and wardens; let us give the convicts useful industrial occupation, which will not only keep them happy and sane, but pay the cost of their keep to a tender-hearted but economic state; let us even be very venturesome, and—with reasonable precautions—put the men on their honor, suffer them to run out a little way and labor in the free sunshine, upon their promising to remember that they are not really free, and to return at night to their cages. And after they have served their terms, and the souls within them are moribund or dead, let us get or solicit jobs for them, and at all events keep a sentimental eye on them for a while. All this—only let us keep our prisons! For think what would happen if those terrible creatures were let loose upon us, to keep on murdering and robbing us with impunity! Remember that they are a class apart, unlike ourselves, whose perverted nature, though it may be lulled by gentleness and tact, can never become truly human.

No: the Laodicean spirit will not serve! I do not ridicule or belittle the efforts of generous and genial men and women who give their spare time, or their whole time, to bettering the plight of convicts. But the diabolical spirit of the prisons sneers at them, and sits undisturbed. Let air and sunshine come to outer courts and clean-swept cells; the star-chambers and the secret dungeons remain. Let the outraged creatures out, to stray to the extent of their honor-tether; they are slaves and prisoners still. There were compassionate reformers in Ancient Egypt, who tried to make the lot of the captive Israelites easier; but the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, and God Himself must intervene before he would let the people go. Nor does it help that the slaves themselves are grateful for hard-won privileges, and that we read urbane descriptions of smiling and rosy felons working on state roads in "Don't Worry" camps. Is it ground for congratulation that the very victims of the specious pretense of the eternal right and necessity of prisons should have succumbed to that delusion? Does it not prove a need yet more urgent to be up and at them? Is it not humiliating to know that men, our brothers, partakers of our common nature, can be so abased as to kiss the rod, and joke about their fetters, and accept as favor what none is entitled to deny them?

Prisons are hell—we come back to that; and they are not and cannot be made purgatories. Men competent to make them purgatories are not to be had at Government prices; no duties more onerous than those of a fit conscientious warden exist under the state; and how can we look for such a man at a four or five thousand dollar salary? Twenty-five or even fifty thousand would be moderate, and the men who are worth that are in some other business. The foremost citizens of the nation would not be too good for the job, and we content ourselves with ward heelers and rough-necks, who undertake it not for the salary, but for the graft that goes with it and exceeds it. Politics and graft sit in the warden's office, and walk the ranges in guards' uniform, and crush the manhood out of our brothers for money, and out of sheer wanton inhumanity. Of all the inmates of the jail, these men are the veritable and incorrigible and unpardonable criminals; for they were not driven to crime by passion, hunger, drink or ignorance, they have not been reduced to the state of desperate pariahs, outcasts and scapegoats of the race, but they willingly embrace the function entrusted to them—the Government license to steal, bully, torture and murder—with a grotesque sanctimonious leer for the public, and for the convicts—what! The rÉgimen of hell!

This writer's statements seem a trifle emphatic, do they not? May we not surmise that they are motived by some personal grudge? have we not heard an old adage—"No thief e'er felt the halter draw with good opinion of the law?" Would it not be prudent to take all this with a grain of salt? Shall we be driven to rash measures by the objurgations of an ex-convict?

Of the right or wrong of my conviction and sentence I am not to speak here, nor do they specially interest me now, except as illustrations of the working of the machine. But personal grudge against officials of my prison I have none. I was treated with consideration and lenity. I came out in better condition upon the whole than I went in, both of body and spirit, though nothing would have been easier than to murder me under the forms of routine prison discipline. What was the reason of this? I was never informed; I might guess at it, but I don't know. Nevertheless, the sweetness and light of the prison dispensation as regarded myself did not blind my eyes or stop my ears to what was being done to others, not elected to dreams thus beautiful. I saw men beside whom I sat at meat or labored in the vineyard, fading and failing day by day; I saw some of them die of broken hearts or broken bodies; I heard their stories and was certified of their truth; I saw the cart rattle out of the gate with the pine box containing the body of the man who could only thus find freedom; I visited the graves of those who had been needlessly and sometimes wantonly slain. I could not ignore these things because I myself escaped them. After a few months of durance, I went forth free, leaving behind me men as good as I or better, sentenced to serve years, lifetimes, under treatment which I cannot imagine myself as surviving at all. My grudge is deep, but no personal one.

I shall not at present discuss Government measures of so-called mitigation—suspended sentence, parole, indeterminate sentence. In the intention of their originators they may have appeared beneficent; in practise, they proved sinister and abominable means to cruelty and despotism. There can be no compromises with hell.

But can I pretend to solve the age-long problem of the right handling of crime in the community? I am not wiser than my fellows, but I have felt and known at first hand more of certain grievous wrongs than most of them have, and even those who have known and felt may not possess the opportunity or facility to speak that I have. I must say what is in me, and leave to the collective judgment of the nation, and to the further teaching of time, what shall be changed, abolished, and done.

One thing seems plain—there must be an act of faith. Worldly wisdom and enlightened selfishness have been tried out thoroughly and are thoroughly discredited. Their proposal was first to cure crime, and only after that was done, to abolish prisons. But it turns out that prisons generate, teach, perpetuate and inflame crime; never extirpate it, though they often deter specific persons from continuing a criminal career by either killing them outright, or destroying in them their effective spiritual manhood. Therefore the selfishly enlightened and worldly-wise shake their heads and declare that crime in criminals is ineradicable. If medicine for crime be futile, save as a temporary physical preventive, all that is left to us is to continue it as a preventive, while admitting its impotence as a cure. Protection of society is the paramount consideration.

Yes: but is society protected by prisons? John Jones has been jailed for burglary, it is true; but straightway Tom Brown, Jem Smith and Reginald Montmorency start in as train-robber, murderer and confidence man. We have sown the dragon's tooth, and reap three for one. Lynch your negro, and before the smell of roast flesh is out of the air, several fresh cases of rape are reported.—But there is no visible connection between alleged cause and effect—it just happens so.—Yes, but if it does happen almost invariably, we cannot avoid the suspicion that a connection, even though invisible to the outward eye, there must be.

Moreover, on what grounds does society claim protection against evils for which its own constitution and administration are responsible? The greatest happiness of the greatest number?—Are we so happy, then? The happy man has been sought for long, but the seekers still delay to return. To what end shall we cut the cancer out of the body politic, if it sprout again in a more vital spot? If we could only reach the cancer germ!—But the germ is not found by the knife. There are more criminals than there ever have been heretofore. The jails are over-crowded; we must either build new ones, or transform those we have into castles of refuge to which good people may fly to escape the criminal nations outside; there will be no over-crowding then!

Let worldly wisdom and enlightened selfishness retire, and listen for a while to believers—fanatics even. An act of faith: that is to say, first abolish jails, and then see what can be done with criminals! It is vain to beat about the bush; we must face the alternative. The syllogism runs thus: criminality is incompatible with true civilization—with a normal and secure society. Jails are a crime; society makes and warrants jails; therefore society is criminal. And the abolition of jails—repudiation both of the principle and of the concrete fact—is the only way to social redemption.

The one escape from this conclusion is, of course, denial that jails are a crime. I will not further contest that point, but only repeat: Let the deniers and doubters try a year behind the bars, themselves, and then register their revised opinion.

But, obviously, though jails are a crime, they are not the only crime; there are also the specific crimes of individual malefactors; and it seems inevitable that by relieving these of prison restraints, we must increase the prevalence of crime in the community, however much we might be absolving the community itself from its characteristic crime of jails. Is there any answer to that?

I am not logically constrained to make any, because if jails are a crime they should be abolished, let the consequences be what they may. But I will suggest two considerations. Individual crimes are the outcome either of a pathological condition in the agent, or of conditions in his nurture and environment which are due to social negligence or hardness of heart. These conditions tempted him beyond his power of resistance, or reduced him to desperation; in other words, no sane and normal man commits crimes for the fun of it, and as not he but society created the conditions, the latter must shoulder its part, at least, of the blame. And this implies that it should devote itself to so improving these evil conditions as to give the criminal a fair chance.

That is easily written, but it involves nothing less than a radical readjustment of our whole attitude toward life. It also brings me to my second suggestion—that this should be accomplished. We must embark upon a great adventure—the greatest, so far as I know, ever undertaken in this world. We must overcome the anti-human prejudice that there is a distinct criminal class; we must recognize the latent criminality in us all, and regard those in whom from latent it has become active as such men as we, but for fortunate circumstances, would have been. There is no other distinction between them and us.

Can brotherly companionship and trust reform them? If all of us sincerely and practically united in trusting and companioning them,—so sincerely as to convince them of the fact—I would have small misgivings. But we can expect no universal revolution to kindness. Many of us, probably the vast majority, would fail to rise to the height of the occasion. Yet I can believe that many would achieve that faith and stanchness; enough to make a beginning of success. And I have no doubt whatever that, so far as the kindness was credited by its objects, they would do their part. Few men that I or any one have known in jail have been incorrigibly wicked at heart. There are indeed incorrigibly wicked men, but they are at least as frequent outside as inside jails, because the crime of wanton hatred and cruelty to others which is theirs, comes only accidentally if at all under the cognizance of our law.

When jails are razed and their inmates let forth, they are not to be left to shift for themselves. They are to be taken heartily and unreservedly into the community, made a part of us, protected against want and against their sinister propensities, given work to do, taught how to work, compensated for it, and shown by constant example the wholesomeness and beauty of good and decent living. Will they rob and murder their hosts? Such calamities will no doubt occur here and there; there have been martyrs in all great causes, and will be in this. But blood so shed will not be wasted. And if the nation, or a considerable part of it, turns resolutely and persistently to its mighty task, it will not fail in the end.

There is nothing original or startling about the Golden Rule as a proposition; but it will seem to tear us to pieces when it is put in practise. But that will do us no harm; we have been long enough compacted together in error and selfishness. The revolution will come; it is still for us to say whether it shall be outward and terrible, or spiritual and benign. Penal imprisonment and all that it implies is not sane nor safe; and the cry, To the lions—serves him right!—belongs to the dark ages, and not to the future.—Reprinted by kind permission from Hearst's Magazine for February, 1914.

THE WALL

The long, high wall that shuts out life—
That death-in-life holds in its coil—
Its height and reach cannot prevent
The sky, nor check the immortal strife
We wage with hungry Fate, nor spoil
Our desperate hope, nor circumvent
Dreams, that redeem our aimless toil!

What Fear and Ignorance have built
Shall pass, with Ignorance and Fear,
Before the breath of Love; and men,
Casting aside the mask of guilt
That baffled, mocked and cursed them here,
Shall know each other once again!
—And must we die, release so near!

Written in Atlanta Penitentiary,
October, 1913.)

*****

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