The Subterranean Brotherhood by Julian Hawthorne

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Atlanta prison records show that out of one thousand prisoners who
applied for parole up to June 30th, 1913, two hundred and seventy were
successful. These applicants were serving terms of from one year and a
day to twenty-one years. The two hundred and seventy who were paroled
had served an aggregate of eighty-three years beyond the period when
they were eligible for parole (that is, after one-third of their
original sentence), or an average of about 112 days each, and with an
average of from twenty-five to forty per cent, of the time contemplated
for them to reestablish and rehabilitate themselves.

The one-year-one-day men lost about thirty-three per cent. of their time
during which they might have labored to reform themselves; and there
were about one hundred of the two hundred and seventy whose sentences
ran for a year and a day. Some sixty-five of the two hundred and seventy
had sentences of more than a year and a day and less than two years;
about thirty-five had over two years and under three years; from which
it would appear that short term men, convicted of minor offenses, were
given preference for parole over long term men. Yet it would seem to the
ordinary intelligence that it should be the long term men who most
needed parole and, if their conduct had been good, best deserved it. It
often happened that men would be paroled when they had but a few weeks
or even days yet to serve of their full sentence. In such cases, the
prison got whatever credit may belong to granting parole, but the men
got rather less than nothing, for they stood the risk of re-arrest and
further confinement.

When an applicant goes before the board for examination, he is sometimes
turned down summarily; but more often he goes out ignorant whether or
not he will succeed, and, as I have already shown, he is not seldom kept
in this torturing uncertainty until the day when he is either turned
loose or told that he has been rejected. This seems unnecessary, and
often appears to be due to sheer carelessness; the papers are not
promptly submitted to the Attorney-General, or they are pigeonholed and
forgotten. It may be true that the law does not categorically demand
that a prisoner shall be released immediately upon a favorable report;
but there is no obvious reason why he should not be, and it is cruel to
keep him in suspense.

There was a young fellow while I was there, a well educated and
agreeable man, whose conduct had always been unexceptionable; he applied
when eligible for parole, and was informed that he would be released.
Every morning thereafter for three weeks he arose with the hope that the
release would come that day; every night he went to bed with a heart
heavy with disappointment. He could not eat or sleep, he could not talk
connectedly, he trembled and turned pale, and was on the way to becoming
a nervous wreck; but no explanation was vouchsafed him. At last he was
suddenly told that he might go. The sole reason that I ever heard for
the delay was that the papers had been overlooked. There are a great
many government employees at Washington; it might be worth while to
appoint one more, charged with the duty of seeing that the overlooking
of parole papers be henceforth avoided. This was a very mild instance; I
have related how poor Dennis lingered for six months and finally died
from the same inattention or indifference.

There was a friend of mine, M., a highly intelligent, good natured
fellow, active and efficient in his prison duties, always courteous and
obliging; he was serving a sentence of five years, I think, for some
theft or confidence game. He had "done time" some six or seven years
previously, but during the interval had lived straight. At the time of
his last arrest he had been kept in the local jail, somewhere in New
England, after conviction, for four months before being transferred to
Atlanta. Time spent in a local jail before conviction is not counted in
the prisoner's favor; for example, I was arrested several months before
my conviction, and the trial itself lasted four months, and after the
trial I spent ten days in the Tombs.

With the exception of the last ten days, however, I was lucky enough to
be out on bail; but none of this time was applied to the lessening of my
sojourn in Atlanta, although the judge specified in his sentence that my
imprisonment there was to count from the time when the trial began; an
injunction which, had it been observed, would have caused my release on
parole a few days after my arrival at the penitentiary. But it appears
that such rulings by a trial judge have no weight with the Department of
Justice; and I am willing to admit that the judge's ruling in my case
seemed rather like whipping the devil round the stump--an evasion of the
manifest intent of the law, which, if I were guilty, I had no right to
expect. At all events, the Attorney-General made a decision, based upon
my case, that hereafter no such evasions were to be allowed; and I
presume his authority must be superior to that of any federal judge.

But my friend's case did not come under this category. His four months
in jail came after, not before, his conviction; and yet, when he arrived
at Atlanta, he was told that this four months would not be deducted from
his penitentiary time. Turn this which way you will, you cannot escape
the conclusion that this man is getting four months more than the
sentence of the judge required. Well, M. applied for parole on the plea
of perfect conduct during his imprisonment; no denial of that was
offered; but he was informed that his conviction seven years before, for
which he had been duly punished at that time, prevented the board from
giving favorable attention to his application.

This looks to me like trying a man twice for the same offense, and twice
condemning him; and I can find nothing to warrant it in the wording of
the parole law. If every actual or alleged mis-step of a man's whole
life can be quoted against him as ground for refusing parole, it would
seem tantamount to stultifying the law for parole.

This is not done in every case; but the point is that it may be done in
any case, and thus the fate of the applicant is at the arbitrary and
absolute disposal of the board, whether or not he have complied with the
stated provisions of the law.

The president of the parole board, in my time, was a Mr. Robert LaDow. A
former deputy warden of the Leavenworth Penitentiary, one W.H. Mackay,
wrote a letter to the Attorney-General on the 6th of November, 1913,
parts of which were published in newspapers about that time. In this
letter he said that Mr. LaDow was egotistical, arrogant, negligent,
extravagant, visionary and impractical, showed favoritism to prisoners,
and was totally unfit for the position he held. He goes on as follows:

"Personally, he knows nothing of Leavenworth Federal Prison; he is too
cowardly to go among the prisoners in the yards to make a personal
investigation of conditions; he has dealt unfairly and hastily with so
many at the parole meetings that he is afraid to meet prisoners face to
face.... Prisoners will stand punishment without a murmur if there is a
just reason for it, and they will permit you to be the judge; but when
men under the law are entitled to parole, and the flimsy excuse to hold
them in confinement is made that they will be a menace to society, they
cannot see it in that way. The parole board at this time is arrogantly
dominated by LaDow; it is practically a one-man board....

"When the board meets here, the men do not know sometimes for weeks and
months afterwards what their fate is.... Instances occur here where the
board acts unanimously upon a parole. Mr. LaDow takes these cases to
Washington and holds them thirty, sixty, and even ninety days on some
flimsy pretext or other. He often claims press of business, until
finally some senator or congressman or influential politician calls on
him, and then he gets busy very suddenly....

"When he comes to a parole meeting he begins work generally with a rush
and a flurry.... Usually has about 180 cases; he rushes them at the rate
of 60 to 80 a day, without getting at the merits or giving them serious
deliberation. He brings a stenographer, his private secretary, from
Washington at a heavy expense.... Then, when they return to Washington,
the stenographer writes up the result of the meeting, while LaDow will
take a junketing trip at Government expense ... as a sort of recreation
from his arduous duties."

I had not been long in Atlanta before a guard informed me that LaDow was
the best hated man in the prison, by officials and convicts alike. Nor
did I find any prisoner there, afterward, who did not speak to the same
tune. If he be really an efficient and trustworthy official, this is
singular and unfortunate. Mr. Mackay's charges against him at
Leavenworth are almost identically the same as what may be heard against
him any day in Atlanta. If there be any basis for them, perhaps it would
be expedient for the Government to supersede him. The parole law, at its
best, seems to be rather a weak-kneed and perverse institution, and it
would be a pity to deprive it of what value it may have by committing
its dispensation to the hands of a man not peculiarly fitted by nature
and temperament to carry out its provisions. It was Napoleon's opinion
that a blunder is worse than a crime.

XV

THE FRUIT OF PRISONS

After weathering Cape Parole, I laid my course for the Port of Good
Time. Men whose prison records are clear are liberated after serving
two-thirds of their original sentences. This new posture of my mind
invited a review of the experience through which I had been passing, and
of the conditions with which I had become conversant, and their
significance in connection with the policy of penal imprisonment in
general. I will introduce some of these reflections in this place.

As I have just said, men whose prison records are clear are liberated
after serving two-thirds of their original sentences. But part or all of
this abridgment may be lost by imperfect conduct. One man, at least,
within my knowledge, was punished by the dark hole several months before
the expiration of his original sentence, and was kept there until that
sentence had expired. Then, out of that filthy dungeon he was thrust
abruptly forth into broad daylight and the crowded world. It was a
miracle if he survived. What have most convicts to live for? Perhaps
those who have most to live for are unlikeliest to survive--their
anxiety is greater.

On the other hand, severity itself may stimulate a convict. His human
mind cannot comprehend despair. Instinct forces him to hope. So weeks,
months, years go by, and hope seems to him more instead of less
justifiable, till at last, perhaps, he dies with the illusion still
strong in him. Real despair is un-human and possibly rare. Otherwise
prison mutinies and killings would be more frequent. The argument of
despair is, "Since I must die here anyway, I'll take two or three of
those devils with me!" But few men believe they will die in jail,
therefore the guard or other official escapes.

Not ten percent of men in jail would regard such a killing as
unjustifiable. We were taught in school that resistance to tyrants is
obedience to God, and many who had disobeyed God in other ways would
gladly obey Him in this. I speak not merely of "ignorant and brutal"
convicts, but of educated and intelligent men like you and me. Even a
sensitive conscience may condone the killing of a tyrant who is slowly
and surely destroying you, body and soul, under sanction of law. But we
punish convicts who fight for revenge or liberty, and protect the
officials who taunt and torture them into doing it.

What a hideous and almost unbelievable situation! Historians wonder that
the Aztecs of Cortez' time, with their comparatively high civilization,
tolerated human sacrifices. But their human sacrifices were merciful
compared with ours. What is cutting out a man's heart on an altar to
propitiate a god, to hounding him to death through miserable years in a
prison to placate the spite of an accuser, the justice of a court, or
the grudge of a warden or guard?

And what is the fruit of it? For pure, carefree, smiling, remorseless
wickedness nothing in human annals surpasses the young criminals--black-
mailers, bomb-throwers, gunmen--now infesting our cities. "I think no
more of killing a houseful of human beings, men, women and children,"
one of them was quoted as saying the other day, "than of crushing so
many beetles." How came such a monster to exist? Why, we bred him,
supplied him with the poisonous conditions that generate such beings and
can generate nothing else. He had intelligence enough to understand that
the established order made earning an honest living hard work; saw
thousands living well without labor apparently, other thousands robbing
under cover of legal technicalities; a legal profession living by
devising statutes to punish crimes and prosecuting the criminals thus
manufactured; often living better yet by teaching criminals to escape
the penalties which their law imposed. He saw reform schools which
instructed such children as he had been to become such men as he was;
prisons and penitentiaries which graduated such as he in the latest
devices of crime--and he made up his mind that goodness was at bottom
humbug, that only a fool would be honest or merciful when money could be
got by theft and murder.

We breed poisonous snakes and scorpions, give them no chance to be
anything but that, and then wonder they are not doves and butterflies.
Things like this gangster are infernal spirits, irreclaimable; but we
gain nothing by extirpating the individuals; the black stream which
carries them must be dammed at its source. Of the conditions which
generate them, a part is the prisons and their keepers. But we are not
yet at the root of the matter--the keepers are not primarily to blame.
It is the principle which prisons illustrate which attracts and molds
keepers till they become often as bad as the men they have charge of,
and often much worse.

Prisons mean social selfishness, the disowning of our own flesh and
blood. They segregate visible consequences of social disease; but the
disease is invisibly present in all parts of the body corporate, and
can no more be healed by cutting off the visible part than we can
heal small pox by cutting out the pustules. Prisons are not the right
remedy; they inflame and disseminate the poison we would be rid of
and prevent any chance of cure. The soul of all crime is self-seeking
in place of neighborly good will; we send men to prison to get them
out of our way, and that is criminal self seeking and ill will to the
neighbor--delegating to hirelings our own proper business.

In attempting thus selfishly to extirpate crime, we commit the crime
least of all forgivable--the denial of human brotherhood and
responsibility. For that crime, no law sends us to prison; yet it is no
sentimental notion, but the truth, that it is a crime worse than those
for which we imprison men. Prisons are brimful of men less guilty before
God than is the society that condemned them. You and I are not excused
because we are not society--we are society. Society is not numbers but
an idea--a mutual relation; we cannot shift our blame to people in the
next street. "Am I my brother's keeper?" was an argument used long ago,
and its reception was not encouraging.

Thoughts like these pass through a convict's mind when he discovers that
he is on the last leg of his disastrous voyage. He then begins to see
the whole matter in its general relations; what use was served? who is
the better for it? "Prisons make a good man bad and a bad man worse," is
the way I often heard the men at Atlanta put it. The situation, entire
and in detail, is preposterous and futile. Grown men, from all ranks of
life, or all degrees of intelligence and education, are herded
promiscuously, and treated now like wild beasts, now like children.
Discipline, in any condition of life, is a good thing, and no people
need discipline more than we do; but in prison, discipline means
punishment, and there is no discipline in the right sense of the word. A
man is "disciplined" when he is starved, or clubbed, or put in the hole,
or deprived of his good time.

Military discipline might be beneficial; it implies respect for rightful
authority, and orderly conduct of one's own life. Officials in a
penitentiary wear uniforms; prisoners wear prison clothes; but, in warm
weather, officials go about, indoors and out, in their shirts and with
the bearing of loafers; they have no official salutes, and the men are
not allowed to salute them--to do so would expose them to "discipline."
There is no drill in the prison, no soldierly bearing, no physical
control of movement. The men are "lined up" to go to work, but it is a
line of slouchers and derelicts; no spirit in it, no respect for
themselves or one another, no decent example set by the guards. And yet
armies in all ages and in all parts of the world have proved the value
of discipline--its necessity, indeed--in all proper and intelligent
handling and control of bodies of men; and it is as important for
convicts as for soldiers. It would promote cheerfulness, smartness,
efficiency; half an hour's lively drill of all the men in prison every
morning and evening would do them good, improve relations between guards
and prisoners, and lessen the danger of revolts. Why refuse it then? Is
it because it would imply something human still lingering in convicts?
or because it is feared that convicts taught to act in unison by
military drill would combine more readily for mutiny? But order does not
naturally lead to disorder but away from it, and mutinies are mostly
impromptu affairs, contemplating revenge rather than escape. As for the
other argument, a lie is not a sound basis to build on, and it is a lie
that convicts are not human. To admit this would facilitate their
management.

Physical exercise twice a day in the open air would diminish the sick
line, produce better work, and help to put a soul in any prison.
Desultory exercise--say two or three hours of baseball on
Saturdays--does not meet the need--it emphasizes it rather. But at
present the well-nigh universal aim seems to be to render the gray
monotony of prison slavery as monotonous and as gray as possible. Any
relief from it is opposed or made difficult. It is true that at Atlanta
and elsewhere we have music (that is what it is called, and I have no
wish to criticize the hardworking and zealous young fellows who produce
it in and out of season; and some of the men may like it for aught I
know); and that a vaudeville company performs for us occasionally. But I
must look these gift horses in the mouth, and say that often we have
them less for our own advantage than as an advertisement to the public
of the liberality of prison authorities. And there to be sure at my
prison, is Uncle Billy, who makes fiddles out of shingles, with nails,
and plays on them, all with one hand. But he is--I hope I may now say,
he was; for he was to have been paroled the other day; he was a lifer,
and a picturesque and wholly innocuous figure--he was, then, permitted
to pursue this industry, and visitors used to come and watch him do it;
but he, too, was most useful to the prison press agent, and owed the
indulgence to that functionary. On the other hand, there is a convict,
also a lifer, who cultivated a most remarkable skill in inlaid woodwork,
producing really beautiful and artistic boxes and other articles, and
found some consolation for his awful fate in making them. But one day
while I was there his cell was entered by the guard, his boxes and plant
taken away and broken, and he was forbidden to do that work any more.
Visitors did not know about him.

This was malicious. But some of the things done by prison authorities
are apparently due to sheer stupidity and ignorance. For example, there
were some cows belonging to Atlanta prison, and some of them calved. So
there were half a dozen calves more or less, with prospects of more to
come. The authorities decided that the expense of rearing these
innocents was not justifiable; there was nothing in the rule book about
it; besides, the jail was not designed to harbor innocent creatures. The
minutes of the conference were not given out, and we can judge of what
passed only by the results. The order went forth that the calves be
killed; and the killing was actually perpetrated, and the bodies were
buried somewhere in the prison grounds. The story seems incredible, but
it was corroborated by several men cognizant of the facts. Why not, at
least, have turned them into veal?

I was speaking just now of the promiscuous herding together of prisoners
in prisons generally. No effort is made to separate the old from the
young, the educated from the ignorant; the hardened sinners from the
impressionable youths or newcomers; or (at Atlanta, except in the
cells), the negroes from the whites. Association of negroes with whites,
on a footing of enforced outward equality, is bad for both; not because
a bad white man is worse than a bad negro, but because the physical,
mental and moral qualities of either react unfavorably upon the other.
The negro, being the more ignorant as a rule, falls more readily into
degraded vices; the white man, being as a rule the dominant element in
the situation, masters the will of the negro, but cannot or at least
does not erect barriers against the latter's subtle corruption.

We must always bear in mind the abnormal conditions in a prison--the
misery of it, the dearth of variety and relaxation, the terrible
yearning for some form, any form, of distraction and amusement. The male
is parted from the female, and from the resource of children; his nerves
are on edge, his natural propensities starved, his thoughts wandering
and embittered; he finds no good anywhere, nor any hope of it. He will
seize upon any means of abating or dulling his cravings. The negro is
pliant, unmoral, free from the restraints of white civilization. In the
South especially, his subordination to the white is almost a second
nature; but he involuntarily avenges himself (as all lower races do upon
the stronger) by that readiness to comply which flatters the sense of
power and superiority in the other, and leads to evil.

I wish to say, in passing, that my allusion to negroes in this
connection is by no means to be taken as reflecting upon them all; some
of the men in Atlanta for whom I had the highest respect were negroes;
and I am inclined to think that the negro in his right place and
function is a desirable element in civilization, and, if we would treat
him aright, would do us as much good as we can do him. But the negro in
jail is at his worst, just as white men are, and he is made worse by
white companionship. There are more than two hundred of them in Atlanta
jail, and some of them are the worst of their kind.

What is true of the association of negroes with whites is not less true
of the association of what are called professional criminals with the
young and unhardened. Various prison authorities claim that they have
made some effort to prevent this contamination; but the only sign of it
that I could ever discover at Atlanta was that the old and the young are
not commonly assigned to the same cells. Obviously, however, a man young
in years may be old in crime; there can be no security in the age test
taken by itself; and no pretense of adopting any other test in a jail is
made.

A young fellow, without inherited or acquired criminal tendencies, is
sent to jail for some inadvertent and insignificant infraction of law.
He had always meant to live straight; he had no enmity against society;
he had always thought of himself as well intentioned and law abiding.
But here he is; and he is shocked, shamed and appalled at the sudden
grip and horror of the jail. Upon a mind thus astounded and distraught
the professional criminal seizes and works.

The man of the world--of the criminal world--befriends him, chats with
him, heartens him, and soon begins to fascinate him with ideas which had
never till now occurred to him. He preaches the injustice and hostility
of all mankind, and the hopelessness of the convict once in jail ever
again reestablishing himself in the world. He tells his pupil that he is
damned forever by his fellow men outside, and that unless he be prepared
to lie down and starve, he must fight for life in the only way open to
him--the way of crime. Then he proceeds to show him, progressively, the
profits and advantages of criminal practises. It is only too easy for
the trained crook to overcome the resistance of the unhardened youth;
his arguments seem unanswerable; and the wholly justifiable feeling that
prison is wrong and an outrage aids the corruptor at every turn. A few
months is often enough to turn an innocent boy into a malefactor; a year
or more of such instruction leaves him no chance of escape; and many an
innocent boy finds himself in a cell for what seems to him a lifetime.

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