The Subterranean Brotherhood by Julian Hawthorne

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But the point is that the wall itself is quite preposterous and
unnecessary. Escape for prisoners was quite as difficult before it was
built as after. There are a hundred guards in the penitentiary--one for
every eight prisoners--all armed and eager for action; every article of
a prisoner's clothing bears the prison mark; and the population outside
the walls is penetrated with the idea that the apprehension of escaping
prisoners is morally as well as financially profitable. Every prisoner
knows that an attempt to escape would be suicide--"you might get hurt,"
as the prison rule book euphemistically phrases it--and they generally
prefer suicide in some other form.

The wall, then, is superfluous; a fence of electrified wire would have
served as good a purpose at about one-thousandth of one per cent. of the
cost. And what did the wall cost? Let the prison archives declare. And
then, perhaps, it would be interesting to investigate the discrepancy,
if any exist, between the price which the United States paid for the
work, and the actual cost of erecting it.

The wall was some time in the building, but it seems to have been the
only thing built in the prison, work upon which was continuous and
energetic. And it was a useless work, better left undone. The warden was
proud of it, however, and there it stands.

As for the twenty-seven acre enclosure, in which the prison buildings
are, which is--according to official prognostics--to be graded, leveled,
drained, cultivated and planted till it looks like a private
millionaire's park, it is a raw, rough unsightly waste of red clay and
weeds, gouged out here and there with random and meaningless
excavations, heaped up in other places with piles of earth; diversified
in one quarter with some forlorn chicken coops and fences, made by the
voluntary and unskilled labor of one of the convicts; and adjoining
these, with the Tuberculosis Camp, a row of a dozen or more tents
mounted on wooden platforms, with little flower beds in front and
behind, and a pigeon house at one end. The only part of these grounds on
which any visible thought and labor has been expended is the baseball
diamond, adjoining the northeast corner of the wall. Here, the ground
has been leveled and smoothed over a space sufficient to include the
diamond itself, and a few yards on its south and north sides; beyond
that is waste ground, and along the northern boundary is a parapet of
earth five or six feet high, presumably made of the material scraped off
the diamond. A ball vigorously struck by a batter either goes over this
parapet into the swamp ground beyond, or sails away toward the
Tuberculosis Camp, to be retrieved from the weeds and rubbish in that
vicinity.

There are some forty score men behind the bars who would rejoice to be
allowed to put these grounds in order, and who, under proper guidance,
could do the job in a month. It would be a useful work, it would benefit
the men both in the doing and in the accomplishment, and it would be an
excellent advertisement of the penitentiary for the visitors who daily
stroll about the enclosure; yet months and years go by and nothing
whatever is changed.

One day, in midsummer, I saw a gang of negroes digging a trench in front
of the southern gate, and cutting out a heavy growth of weeds and
underbrush on the slope above. Drain pipes were carted out and dumped in
the vicinity of the trench, and three or four of them were laid down in
it. This went on for three or four days, the whole gang of ten or a
dozen men not achieving in that period more than one or two capable
Irish or Italian navvies would have done in the same time. Then the gang
disappeared; the open trench and the pipes remained in statu quo, and
the weeds gradually resumed their ancient sway. So far as I know, work
has not been resumed there since.

It is a typical example; even such work as is done, is done in such a
discontinuous and futile way that it is impossible for any one doing it
to feel any interest in it, or stimulus to do it well. Time, toil and
money are frittered away, with nothing definite or substantial to show
for it. Intermittent and barren tasks are doubly onerous. The overseers
may not be to blame; they may be incompetent; they may be hampered by
the ignorance, incompetence or voluntary policy of the prison
authorities; the consequences, at all events, are disastrous. If a
handful of hearty, clever, driving men were given control of the various
industrial operations in the prison, the results would seem magical.

There is dry rot or something worse everywhere; and it is difficult to
believe that anything is gained by it either for the convict or for the
country. It is to be sure punishment for the former, and a bad form of
punishment, but it would be grotesque to assume that it is inflicted by
design of our lawmakers. It cannot be that the government deliberately
proposes to destroy convicts, mind and body; on the contrary, we must
suppose that it wishes to reform them and render them again useful
agents in the community. There is no way to do this better than to give
them honest and productive work while in jail, so that they may acquire
the habit of such work, and be encouraged to pursue it when they get
out.

But in order to induce them to work economically, it is indispensable to
give them continuous, intelligent, and manifestly useful work, and to
pay them for doing it. It can be and it is done in some jails even now.
Warden Fenton, of the Nebraska State Prison, has been putting his men on
the honor system, and sending squads of them out to work on farms or for
contractors, without guards or other precautions, sometimes for weeks at
a time; all he asks of them is their promise to return when the job is
done, which they uniformly do. And for this work, he causes them to be
regularly paid; he retains their wages for them until the term of their
imprisonment has expired, and then hands it back to them. The men are
encouraged and inspirited by this treatment, and the neighbors among
whom their work is done, seem disposed to take a helpful and cooperative
view of the enterprise. If the neighbors--the community--loses nothing
by this system, and if the convicts gain by it, why should it not be
made the general practise? Convicts in Nebraska are the same sort of
people as those in Atlanta.

Warden Fenton is progressive, but most other wardens are not, and there
is no certainty that future wardens of Nebraska prisons will be;
therefore he has not solved the problem for good and all; something more
than the benevolent or wise ideas of any individual is needed for that.
Mr. Fenton has absolute power--power, therefore, to give or withhold
favors as he may choose. Enlightened legislation would deprive him and
other wardens of absolute power, and make it mandatory to treat
prisoners as he is doing it voluntarily.

Moreover, if men will go off and work without guards for three weeks at
a stretch, and then return uncompelled to the prison, what is the use of
making them return to the prison at all, or of having any prison for
them to return to? Is not their conviction prison enough for most of
them? And for such as prove incorrigible, or are criminal degenerates,
ought not pathological care, instead of penal slavery, to be provided?
Professor Marchiafava, physician to the Pope, said recently, "Eighty per
cent of youthful criminals are children of drunkards." That is a serious
indictment of alcohol; but it indicts no less the policy which punishes
victims of disease as if they were deliberate and freely choosing
malefactors.

But leaving sick folk out of the argument, I say that, in view of Mr.
Fenton's experiment, and others like it, conviction is prison enough for
most persons who have slipped a cog in their moral machinery. Means
could readily be found to make such persons recognizable at need, and
they would have as great a stimulus to render themselves free from that
stigma as they have now, and far better opportunities for doing it. They
would have their families with them, or within touch, and they would no
longer be slaves; and if they had been slaves to their own passions and
propensities, the expediency of breaking such chains would become far
more obvious than it ever can be when a guard and a warden is always
round the corner waiting to club or dungeon them for infringement of a
whimsical prison rule. It does not help a man to his manhood to see his
keepers acting constantly the part of tyrants and torturers.

This is perhaps a novel doctrine, because, as the editorial writer in
the _Saturday Evening Post_ remarked the other day, "The truth is that,
at least two times out of three, we send a man to jail because we do not
know anything rational to do with him, and will not take the pains to
find out." We lack imagination to devise more effective treatment, and
we are wonderfully ignorant as to what prison treatment really means.
And this indictment lies not only against the public at large, but
against the Department of Justice and the Congress, who pass their
judgments and inflict their penalties without in the least understanding
what they are doing to human bodies and souls like their own.

Jail is the conventional and time-honored nostrum, which is administered
with a glow of moral self-esteem, and no more thought about it. When a
murderer is sent to jail for life, or a bank burglar or white slaver or
financial crook for his specified term, do we not sit back in our chairs
and clear our throats with a self-satisfied "hem!" and "There's one
scoundrel has got his deserts, anyway!" Had it been your brother,
father, son, or yourself, would you employ such language? Would you not
rather say, "If the whole truth were known, this could not have
happened?" But every case is a special case to the victim. And which of
us who has not been a convict in prison has the right to declare that
prison is the "desert" of any man? We do not know what we are talking
about.

I was looking out of the window of the Isolation Building one day, with
the runner, Ned, beside me; I did my writing there, and he was assigned
for duty to the same building. Ned, to whom I have already referred, was
a thoughtful young man, and often said a word that went to the center of
the subject. We had no business, of course, to be conversing together,
but the guard was absent for the moment. We were watching the convicts
form in the yard for the march to their several places of occupation;
there was a double row of them down there in front of us being marshaled
to go to the stone-shed, about fifty yards away. There they would remain
till evening, chipping away at blocks of granite, and breathing the dust
created by their labor.

The stone-shed men were mostly recruited from the so-called hard cases
among the convicts; the work was hard, and rapid-fire guards were
generally picked to take care of them. A man had been shot to death
there about five years before by a guard, on no better grounds than that
the man had not moved quickly enough in response to an order. No action
against the guard was taken, and he is still on duty in the prison;
perhaps he knows too much. The stone-shed men prepare the stone used in
the construction of the buildings already mentioned; and they are also
employed at times, by no regulation to be found in any of the books, to
do odd jobs for members of the prison force; as when, for example, they
were required to turn out a monument for the wife or other relative of a
guard who had died, and for whom he was unable to provide a suitable
memorial at his own expense. For whatever purpose the stone work is
done, legitimate or illegitimate, the workers are not enthusiastic about
it, and probably not many of them will live long enough, at least in
prison, to see their handiwork in practical use.

Arrayed near them was another file, destined to work on the grounds
belonging to the prison outside the warden's famous wall, where
turnips, potatoes, corn and other vegetables are grown. The
vegetables grow--it can hardly be said that they are cultivated; I
don't know what a New York market gardener would say to them. They
grow, and in due season some of them appear on the prison table;
others do not appear, but whether they are left to rot in the ground,
or are put to a more remunerative use, I do not personally know.
There is no great enthusiasm among the gardeners, either.

Suddenly, Ned groaned out, "Oh, the aimlessness of it! Why don't you
write a piece in our paper about the aimlessness of prison work?
Aimless--that's what it is! How can a fellow feel interested in what
he's doing, when he never knows what he's doing it for, or what
becomes of it when it's done--let alone that he isn't paid for it?
Aimlessness--that's what we get here in prison, and that's all we
learn here. Did you ever think what a prison would be if there was
any common sense aim in anything? Those fellows could make this place
the finest thing you could imagine, if they were taken hold of by
somebody with common sense, and put on jobs that had any sense in
them. But they are kept dawdling around, and never know where they're
at. It kills 'em--that's what it does! You'd think a criminal would
be taught anything but aimlessness; it was aimlessness that got him
here in the first place, nine times out of ten.

"Why, take what goes on in the printing office that you were assigned
to, for instance," he went on, with a sidelong grin at me. "You have a
month to get out the paper, four to six pages large quarto. How long
would it take to do that stunt in New York?"

"I suppose it could be done in twenty-four hours," I admitted.

"Yes, and there are six men down there, and they have thirty times
twenty-four hours. They are in a cellar underground, with the air that
hasn't been changed in years, and the heat-pipes making it worse. Their
health can't stand it--you know that--but there they've got to stay
every day from eight till half after four, pottering round with their
types and proofs and stuff, and trying to drag it along till time's
up--what's the good of it to anybody? It's the same everywhere; look at
the tailorshop! Those fellows sit and fool around there, with the guard
slinging language at 'em every few minutes, and taking an hour to sew a
hem six inches long; and all the time here's you and me wearing clothes
that were new maybe five or six years ago, as you may see by the numbers
that have been stamped on your back and then blotted out, and were worn,
since then, by some poor devil with tuberculous trouble or worse; but
they'll be worn out for fair before we get any others. Why, look at your
pants! They're split all down the leg, and there's your knee sticking
out of the hole! The prison authorities call that economy, may be; what
do you call it?"

I said that I was not competing for the glass of fashion just then. Ned
offered to sew up the rent for me, but I said that the safety-pin now on
duty would suffice. He still had some of his theme left in him, and he
went on:

"Look at that power house, that's kept going night and day, the year
round, with coal at government expense, running all sorts of machinery,
and what do they get out of it? I was in the carpenter's shop the other
day, and there was all kinds of machines going, lathes, and I don't know
what; you'd think by the noise of them they was building the Ark at
least. But I nosied round, and couldn't find anybody that seemed to be
working much. At last I came to one of the big steam lathes, and there
was a man that looked to be busy about something, so I went up to watch
him. Well, what do you think he was doing? He was making one of these
here little sticks that a fellow cleans his nails with! The power house
was burning tons of coal, and everything humming, and that was what came
out of it all. A nail stick! What do you think of that?"

No doubt there was rhetorical exaggeration about this; but Ned's
arraignment was on the whole not devoid of justification. There are
abundant means in the prison for carrying on useful and energetic work,
but they are not properly employed. Neither the convicts nor the
community benefits by it.

Not that it is wholly without benefit to anybody, either. Good clothes
are made in the tailor shop, but they are not worn by convicts. At least
one excellent dwelling house has been made by prisoners, but it is
occupied by a high prison official. Unexceptionable meals are cooked in
the convict kitchen, but convicts do not eat them. There is an admirable
and productive kitchen garden attached to the prison, but its contents
never appear on convict tables. There is a fine lawn, diversified with
brilliant flower-beds, in front of the main prison building, and it is
greatly admired by visitors and passers-by; but the convict sees it
twice only during his term--once when he is brought into the prison, and
again when he is led out. On neither occasion is he, perhaps, in the
best mood to profit by it. Perhaps the prison officials do profit by it;
but if so, the results are not seen in their intercourse with the
prisoners. There is nothing flower-like in that.

Idleness is an evil thing; purposeless work is idleness in another and
worse form. Aimlessness, as my friend Ned said, is a miserable state for
a man; it tortures him in prison, and the habit of it, acquired in
prison, cripples and degrades him after he gets out. Contract labor is a
crime which is getting recognized as such; it disgraces the nation or
the state which tolerates it, and the shame of it, if not its
immorality, may lead to its general suppression. Unpaid convict labor
for the state, as on roads and so forth, is better than private contract
labor, but is also a disgrace to the employer--a contemptible saving of
pennies at the cost of human souls. Honest work is a manly thing, and
those who do it should be treated like men, and as laborers worthy of
their hire. Because we have rendered them helpless to demand their
rights is no excuse for denying them. It is cheap, but shameful, and can
only teach them that the community can be as dishonest as the veriest
thief of them all.

But a system of work of which that at Atlanta is a type (and, alas! the
type is far too numerous) is anomalous and abominable; it is aimless,
and abhorrent to man, God and devil alike. It is difficult to absolve
such a prison from the charge of being run at the expense of prisoners,
for the benefit of its officials, since they alone appear to prosper by
it.

X

OUR BROTHER'S KEEPER

Tigers love their cubs, hens their chickens, dogs love their masters and
all these will fight and die in defense of what they love. Human mothers
generally love their offspring. Love in the common sense is common or
instinctive, and involves no moral quality. It is love of one's own, and
contains a better form of self love.

But mercy is of higher birth. Animals know nothing of it; savages and
the lower types of man ignore it. We ascribe a divine source to it when
we pray God to have mercy on us; we do not ask Him to love us. All
higher religions enjoin it. Mercy is love purified from self, or wholly
altruistic. It is a man loving another not because of blood
relationship, or because of expected benefits, or even because of
benefits bestowed, but on the simple ground that he is his human
brother, child of the same Divine Father. It is purer than the racial
feeling, and it includes the animal creation outside humanity in its
scope--as the Bible puts it, "the merciful man is merciful to his
beast."

It is the Golden Rule in manifestation; we see in the one to whom we are
merciful ourself in another form, under different conditions, and we do
to him as we would have him do to us. It seems to require a certain
maturity of mind, acquired or inherited; children below puberty seldom
have it. It is easily forfeited, and indifference to the suffering of
others is readily established. It is to be guarded and developed as a
sacred possession of man at his highest, and constantly nourished by
thought and deed. And no man is so high and strong but he may and does
need the mercy of some being loftier and more powerful than himself,
which he cannot claim if he have not himself done mercifully to those
below him.

I have remarked heretofore that officials of prisons should be men of
the highest character in the state--at least as high as what we would
wish to ascribe to our judges of the criminal bench. Judges send men to
prison; but prison guards and wardens have charge of them during their
imprisonment, with powers practically unlimited.

Unlimited power is a trust too arduous for any mortal, for it should
presuppose perfect knowledge, all-penetrating intelligence, boundless
experience, and the mercy which is born of these--for there is a bastard
brother of mercy which is of the parentage of ignorance and cowardice,
which shrinks from the sight of suffering from mere pusillanimity of the
nerves, and does not recognize that suffering may be mercifully
inflicted or permitted and beneficently endured.

But the community does not select its prison officials on the basis
above indicated; it is satisfied if they be competent to "handle men,"
have a sagacious familiarity with human depravity, will tolerate no
nonsense, can indict plausible reports for the Department, and show a
good balance at the end of the fiscal year, or, as guards and
under-strappers, keep the men submissive and orderly and allow no
outbreaks. As for knowledge, a public school education is ample, with
such intelligence as may be supposed to go with it; and the experience
of a ward heeler or a thug will ordinarily suffice to pass a candidate.
As a matter of fact, the community never knows anything about its prison
officials until some special scandal transpires under their
administration, or unless some heaven-sent phoenix of a warden
unaccountably manifests humane and enlightened tendencies. Their
appointment is left to the political machine, which hands it out on the
principle of what is he, or was he worth to us? As for justice and
mercy--my good sir, you seem to forget we are talking of convicted
criminals!

I affirm, however, that justice--which is intelligent mercy--is required
nowhere so urgently as with convicts; that any punishment which aims at
more than restraining convicts from practises calculated to injure their
own best interests, is a crime; and that cruelty to persons imprisoned
and helpless, be the plea in extenuation of it what it may, is damnable
and unpardonable wickedness. Meanwhile, there is not and has never been
in the United States a jail in which revengeful, malicious and
unjustifiable punishments have not been inflicted, and in which cruelty
does not stain the record of each year and day.

There have appeared lately in the newspapers stories of enormities
perpetrated in Russian prisons. Terrible barbarians, those Russians!
Yet, barring one feature of them only, they can be paralleled by what is
currently done in prisons here. This one feature, is the absence in the
Russian infernos of all hypocritical protestations to the public of
humane treatment and of aversion from severities. The Russian cannot do
more than beat, torture and kill his prisoners; but we do the same. It
is done at Blackwell's Island, at Sing Sing, at Auburn, at Jefferson
City, at Leavenworth (until the other day at least), in San Quentin, and
countless others, including my own Atlanta: only, there, the policy of
suppression of news and promulgation of falsehood is perhaps carried to
a more nearly perfect extreme than in most other prisons.

A few years ago, but under the present regimen at Atlanta, the workers in
the stone shed there were pursuing their occupation in the torrid heat
of a summer day, when one of them, a young man named Ed Richmond, asked
the guard on duty for leave to retire for a few moments. Such requests
must of course often be made. But Richmond was a man who had not been
lucky enough to win the favor of the higher officials in the prison, and
this was known to the guards, who felt that they might with impunity
treat him harshly. Richmond had been a good deal abused, and his mind
had become somewhat unbalanced; he would sometimes talk incoherently and
act oddly. It had been noticed that the stone shed guard "had it in for
Ed," as the prisoners say; but nothing very serious was looked for.

Be that as it may, something serious was about to occur. Five or six
years after this day, I was walking, under convoy of the Deputy Warden,
in the prison grounds that lie outside the walls, when we stumbled upon
the prison graveyard. It lay at the crest of some rising ground, partly
overshadowed by second growth timber, and was merely an unenclosed
clearing in the rough undergrowth with rows of headstones standing one
behind the other, each with a name and date on it. But under all of them
lay all that remained on earth of prison tragedies; for even if a
prisoner die a natural death in prison, he dies with a broken heart and
poisoned mind, abandoned, in gray despair, friendless, shut out from sky
and freedom, hearing with dulled ears the clanging of steel gates,
seeing the blank walls, deprived of the sympathetic words and glances of
friends--a miserable, unknown death. Silence and obliteration close over
him; and here he lies.

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