The Subterranean Brotherhood by Julian Hawthorne

J >> Julian Hawthorne >> The Subterranean Brotherhood

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19

All crime is hateful; but I came to the conclusion that there is only
one crime which prompts us to hate the criminal as well as his crime
itself. For this crime is one which originates in our heart; it is not
forced upon us by need or passion or heredity. Therefore, it permeates
every fiber of our being, every thought of our mind, every impulse of
our soul; and we cannot say of it, this is one thing and we are another.
It is an unhuman crime; and yet there is no punishment for it among
human laws; rather, it is regarded as a mark of superiority. The most
respectable persons in the community are most apt to commit it. And it
was upon the suggestion and initiative of this crime that penal
imprisonment was invented, and is perpetrated to this day.

Christ condemned it; Christianity is based upon its repudiation; we call
ourselves Christians; and yet it is the characteristic crime of our
civilization. The Law and the Prophets are against it; it defies every
injunction of the Decalogue, for it takes the name of God in vain, it
steals, murders, commits adultery, covets and bears false witness; but
we clasp it to our bosoms, and actually persuade ourselves that it is
the master key to the gates of Heaven. What is it? It is the thought in
a man's heart that he is better, more meritorious, than his fellow.

It is engendered, most often, by a successful outward
morality--conformity to the letter of the Commandments--the whitening of
the outside of the sepulcher. But the stench of the interior
loathsomeness oozes through. The only person unaware of that stench is
the man himself. There is but one cure for it--what we call
Regeneration; which makes us sensible of that deadly odor, and drives us
freely and sincerely to detest ourselves in dust and ashes and bitter
humiliation, to pity, succor and love our brethren, and to wrestle with
the angel of the Lord for mercy. But we prefer to seek salvation from
evil in the building of prisons.

Now, this crime may survive even in prisons; but it is rarer there than
in any other aggregation of human beings. Therefore, there is a
wonderful sweetness in the prison atmosphere. It is a sweetness which is
perceived amid all the dreariness, stagnation and outrage, and it rises
above the vapors of physical crime, for it is a spiritual sweetness.
There men are locked in their cells, but the whited sepulcher is
shattered, and its sorry contents are purified by the pure light of
humiliation, confession and helplessness; there are no hypocrites there,
no masks, no holier-than-thou paraders. Their crimes have been
proclaimed, and branded upon their backs; pretenses are at an end for
them. It was wonderful to look into a man's face and see no disguise
there. "I am guilty--here I am!" This experience took the savor out of
ordinary worldly society for me. I go here and there, and everywhere
there is masquerading--the weaving of a thin deception which does not
deceive. We were sincere and humble in prison; but that is a result
which the builders of prisons hardly foresaw.

There was one more step toward compromise--to take the prisoner out of
his cell and send him outdoors without guards or precautions, nothing
but his promise that he would return when the work to which he was
assigned was done.

I read the other day an agreeable account of this "honor system." The
men were employed on road making chiefly, enjoyed the benefit of free
air and the outdoor scene, and kept order and faith among themselves.
But the prison walls were still around them, though unseen. They were
told that any attempt to escape would be punished by deprivation
thenceforth of all liberties--any attempt! and if the escape were
successful, the fugitive would know that the chances of recapture were a
thousand against one. Moreover, it was laid down that the escape or
attempt of any member of the gang would react upon the liberties of all.

This made the men guards over one another; it was not honor but
self-preservation that was relied on. And in any event, there was the
prison at last; the chain might be lengthened to hundreds of miles, but
it held them still. They were convicts; when their terms were up, they
would be jail birds. Society had set them apart from itself; they were a
contamination. "You are not fit to mingle with us on an equal footing."
Society might condescend to them, be friendly and helpful to them,
but--admit them of its own flesh and blood?--well, not quite that! "We
forgive you, but on sufferance; it is really a great concession; you
must show your gratitude by good works."

Oh, the Pharisees! the taint of it will not come out so easily; and
until it does come out, to the last filthy trace of it, prisons will
continue to be prisons, and compromises will be vain.

I repeat--the evil of prisons is the imprisonment. You must not deprive
a man of his liberty. His liberty is his life. He may, and probably he
will, use his liberty to the endangering of your property or comfort;
but has your own career been wholly free from infringement upon the
rights of your neighbor? If you send him to prison, you ought to link
arms with him and go there, too. You have not been convicted by a court,
but your own secret self-knowledge convicts you. When the prison doors
close upon you, you will discover that you have suffered an
injustice--that you are the victim of a blind stupidity. Not in this way
can you be reformed. All genuine reformation must proceed from within
you--it cannot be compelled by locks and bars; freedom is essential to
it. Locks and bars arouse only the impulse to break through them, and
this primal and righteous impulse leaves you no leisure to think of
relieving your soul from stains of guilt.

The only imprisonment to which a man can properly be subjected is that
imprisonment of good in him which evil-doing operates automatically and
spontaneously; any outside meddling with that operation hinders,
confuses, or defeats it. Crime weakens and shackles you; to put shackles
on the body is no way to remove shackles from the spirit. It is the
gross blunder of a brutal and immature era, but we have continued it
down to the present day. Jail is still the remedy.

The newspapers the other day told of a man who had been sentenced to
forty years in jail for an assault. A woman, hearing the verdict, said,
"Well, that's better than nothing; but he ought to have got life!" We
are told in the Bible that we must not let the sun go down upon our
wrath. The wrath of this lady could not be appeased with forty years.
Think of what that culprit will be after forty years in jail. Assuming
for the sake of argument the extreme absurdity that he is alive by that
time, picture to yourself a fellow creature of his--and a woman--saying,
"I won't forgive you yet." I pity her more than I do him, whose troubles
in this world will probably soon be over. But when her time comes, with
what face, on what plea, shall she ask forgiveness?

But if there are to be no prisons, what shall we do to be saved from
crime?

I cannot for my part imagine any hard and fast plan being laid down in
advance. But it would seem reasonable, to begin with, to free ourselves
from the social crime of claiming superiority to our brethren. Having
removed that beam from our eyes, we may see more clearly how to abate
the motes in the criminal's. If we can bring ourselves to regard
prisoners and jail birds as inferior to ourselves only in good fortune,
which has kept us out of jail and put them in, we may find ourselves on
the road to remedying their lapses from moral virtues.

The majority of prison crimes are against property, and are motived by
want and poverty. If the man had opportunity to work for his living, he
would as a rule abstain from stealing. Other crimes are committed in
passion; but such criminals need education and training in self-control,
and (often) removal of the provocations which set their passions afire.
Many other crimes, and almost all vices, are due to physical or mental
disease, or to actual insanity. It is the doctor and not the jailer who
should seek the cure of these.

But there are also some persons, chiefly brought up or brought down in
our cities, who practise crimes, apparently, for sheer love of evil.
These gunmen gangs are the most depraved and malignant members of the
community; they will not work, and they rob and murder not from want or
passion, but because the suffering of their victims gives them pleasure
and ministers to their pride and self-esteem. Most of these gangs, as we
have too much reason to believe, stand in with the police, giving them a
percentage of their plunder, and getting protection from them for their
misdeeds.

These creatures, as I have already suggested, are the distillation of
the various evils in our cities which society has failed frankly to
face, or genuinely to attempt to lessen. They are not responsible for
their existence, and, as they indicate a general condition, it can do no
good to kill them or otherwise put them out of the way; others would
take their place. They are not insane in the common sense, but they are
the product of insane social circumstances, responsibility for which
rests on us. They must be taken in hand individually, by workers
self-consecrated to that duty, and deterred from doing evil, and showed
the value of doing good. One might work a lifetime with some of them,
and have little to show for it in the end; but it took a long time to
build the pyramids and the Panama Canal, and to advance from the dugout
of the savage to the _Mauretania_. It is work better worth doing than
any of these.

Taking the situation by long and large, society must cease to be a sham
and become truly social. The thing seems inconceivable, and still less
practicable; but it is not. Nor has history failed to admonish us that
it has sometimes been the most difficult and improbable things which
have been nevertheless accomplished; as if their very difficulty, and
the labor and self-sacrifice involved in doing them, were themselves a
stimulus.

Europe, a handful of centuries ago, at the behest of a fanatical priest
or two, forsook all else and spent a generation in journeying to
Palestine and trying to get a certain city from the Turks.

The city was worth nothing to Europe; it was an idea that set them
crusading. Nothing else seemed so unpractical and feeble as the gospel
of Christ; but it crumbled the Roman Empire into dust, and has kept the
world guessing and maneuvering ever since--never more than to-day. On
the other hand, if you propose an easy job, something that can be done
with one hand tied behind you, and your attention is diverted, it is apt
to remain undone. Nobody can get up an interest in it. But talk of an
expedition to the South Pole, or a flight round the earth in a biplane,
with certainty of appalling hardships and all the odds in favor of
death, and you are mobbed with volunteers. Human nature likes to test
its thews and sinews.

Perhaps, however, nothing else was ever so difficult as to turn from our
flesh pots, our dinners and tangos, our summer resorts and winter
resorts, our business and idleness, and undertake to substitute for
prisons our personal care and help for criminals--to remove the causes
which led them to crime, to convince them of our good faith and good
will, and to disabuse them of their suspicion that we distrust them,
condescend to them, and despise them. For this prodigal brother of ours
has become a very unsightly and unattractive object during these
thousands of years of his sojourn among the pigsties and corn husks. He
does not speak in our language or observe our manners or contemplate our
ideals, or care for our refinements. We shall have to read again the
fairy stories where the prince has been changed by evil enchantment into
some uncouth and repulsive monster, but was redeemed to human form by
sympathy. The evil spell was of our working, and it behooves us to
overcome it. No one else can.

We must abolish the title of criminal as applied to any class or
individuals of our race in distinction from others, and use those of
unfortunates or scapegoats instead. They are our victims, and our
salvation depends upon our making good to them the evil we have done
them. It will not suffice to delegate the job to money, or to persons
chosen for that purpose; we must do it ourselves--make it one of the
main occupations of our lives. Riches and culture are fine things, but
making good out of evil is better. Its rewards may not be so immediate
or so visible, but they are real and permanent.

But I do not think morality will be enough to energize the effort;
morality should always be the incident and consequence of religious
feeling, not an aim in itself. As soon as it becomes an aim in itself,
it leads to self-righteousness, and paralyzes human love in its marrow.
And it is love, far more than wisdom, that is needed here. Love God and
keep His commandments; unless you first love Him, His commandments will
be left undone, or done only in the letter, which is the worst form of
not doing. But the way to love God is to love the neighbor, and the
neighbor is the criminal.

Who shall have the immortal credit of abolishing prisons--ourselves, or
our posterity? It will surely be done by our posterity if not by
ourselves.

APPENDIX

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
regimen 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!

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19