The Subterranean Brotherhood by Julian Hawthorne

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From the bath to the bedchamber. Up the darksome stairs again into the
stately corridor; through an inner gateway, and into a wide hall which
communicated to right and left, through small steel doors, with the west
and east ranges (dormitories). The west door was unlocked, and we were
pushed into a huge room, about two hundred feet by a hundred and twenty,
with tall barred windows along each side. Inside this space had been
constructed a sort of inner house of steel, seven or eight stories in
height, with zig-zag stairways at either end, leading to narrow
platforms that opened on the individual cell doors. These doors were
barred, and were locked by throwing a switch at the near end of the
ranges; but any particular door could also be opened by a key. The cell
doors of the inner structure were at a distance of some twenty feet from
the walls and windows of the outer shell, and got what light and air
they had from these--none too much of course. Also, the guard on duty in
the range, if the weather be chilly, will close the windows, against the
protests of the prisoners, and against the regulations too; but most of
the guards are thin-blooded Southerners, and diseased into the bargain,
and do not like cold air. The consequence is that the four hundred pairs
of lungs in each range soon vitiate the atmosphere; the prisoners turn
and toss in their cots, have bad dreams, and rise in the morning with a
headache.

We mounted three or four flights of iron steps, and were introduced into
a cell near the corner. It was, like all the others, a steel box about
eight feet long by five wide, and seven or eight high. On one side, two
cots two feet wide were hinged against the wall, one above another; they
reduced the living space to a breadth of three feet. The wall opposite
was made of plain plates of steel, and so was the inner end of the cell,
but in this, at a man's height from the floor, was a round hole an inch
in diameter. That was a part of the spy system; for between the two rows
of cells is a narrow passage, in which the guard can walk, and, himself
unseen and unheard, spy upon the prisoners and listen to their
conversation. All prisoners are at all times of the day and night under
observation. This seems a slight thing; but the cumulative effect of it
upon men's minds is disintegrating. At no moment of their lives can they
command the slightest privacy. And what right to privacy, you ask, has a
prisoner? Would he not use it to cut his way through the chilled steel
walls with his teeth and nails, or to plot revolt with his
cellmate?--Possibly; but even a beast seeks privacy at certain
junctures; and to deny all privacy tends to bestialize human beings. It
is a part of the "put-the-fear-of-God-in-his-heart" principle--to break,
humiliate, degrade the man, and render him unfit for human association.
There are a washbasin and a toilet seat at the foot of the cot, facing
the barred door. What difference can it make to a convict if the guard,
or any other passer-by, watches him while he uses them?

There had been issued to us sheets, a pillowcase, and a gray blanket of
the army sort; our first duty was to make our beds. Mattress and pillow
were stuffed stiff with what felt like wood chips, and was probably
straw and corn-husks; the pillow was cylindrical; the mattress was
hillocked and hollowed by the uneasy struggles with insomnia of
countless former users. There was a campstool whose luxuries we might
share. We had, each, a prison toothbrush, and a comb. In the ceiling of
the cell, beyond reach of an outstretched arm, was an electric bulb
which would be darkened at nine o'clock. But all this was welcome; I had
often roughed it in conditions quite as severe; my spirits could not be
dashed by mere hardships or inconveniences. We put our domestic menage
in order cheerfully, glad that we had been celled together, instead of
doubling up with strangers. Nor would it have discouraged us to know
that the west range was the one occupied by negroes and dangerous
characters. The place was silent; none of the demoniac chantings and
hyena laughter of the Tombs. We had our little jests and chucklings as
we made our arrangements; Courage, Comrade! the period of suspense and
anticipation is passed; we are at grips with the reality now!

Moreover--"Every prisoner, on installation in his cell, is supplied with
rolls and hot coffee, and with pipe and tobacco!" Thus would the
statement run in the report to the Department. What if the bread be
uneatable, the coffee undrinkable, and the tobacco unsmokable? The mere
idea of such things is something; besides, prisoners do contrive, being
hard put to it, to consume them. We ourselves at least tried all three;
if it proved easier to be abstinent than self-indulgent, that was our
own affair. Meanwhile, our mental appetites were appeased by a little
gray pamphlet, containing the rules governing the conduct of convicts in
the penitentiary. There were a great many of them, and not a few
required thought to penetrate their significance. Why, for instance,
should special emphasis be laid upon the injunction to rest one's shoes
against the bars of the door upon retiring? We were never informed; but
I presume it must have been to prevent a man being tempted to reach out
an arm a hundred feet long through his bars, throw the switch, steal
along the platform, open the steel door, unbar the two outer gates,
climb over the thirty-four foot wall, and escape--all the while avoiding
the notice of the range guard, of the guards in the corridors, and of
the watchman on the tower outside, all of whom were armed with magazine
rifles and were yearning for an opportunity to use them. Of course, he
would want to have on his shoes for such an enterprise, so that if the
shoes were visible inside his door, it was prima facie evidence that he
himself was also within. Another rule was italicized--"_Do not try to
escape--you might get hurt!_" I refrained from testing the validity of
either prohibition.

In the midst of our perusal, we were interrupted by the arrival of a
visitor. He was a slight-built, slope-shouldered young fellow, in prison
garb, with a meager visage heavily furrowed with sickness and
suffering--he had tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, and the indigestion
with which all prisoners who eat the regular prison fare are afflicted.
Not that Ned (as I will call him, since it was not his name) mentioned
his condition; it was determined long afterward by the diagnosis of my
friend; Ned's object in visiting us was not to air his own troubles, but
to assuage, so far as he might, the gloom and uneasiness of the new
arrivals. In his haggard face shone a pair of very intelligent and
kindly gray eyes, and above them rose a compact, well-filled forehead. I
was fortunate enough to keep in touch with this young man during my
stay, and I found no more lovable nature in the penitentiary. He made no
secret of the fact that he had been guilty of a Federal offense, and he
never expressed contrition for it; "I made a mistake in taking another
man in with me," he remarked; "you are never safe unless you go it
alone." He had not been systematically educated, but he had read widely
and judiciously, talked correctly, though with occasional colloquial
idioms thrown in, and he was a concentrated and original thinker. His
opinions were bold, independent, and sound, his insight was very
penetrating, and his knowledge of matters of criminal procedure and of
prison conditions was accurate and ample. Facts which I afterward
learned for myself were never out of accord with information he had
given me; and the sanity and clarity of his judgments were refreshing
and remarkable. His courage was undemonstrative but indomitable; he
never complained of his own condition and experiences, but was instant
in his sympathy with the misfortunes of others. No more welcome and
valuable counselor than he could have come to us in those first hours of
our durance.

That he was able to visit us was due to his being a "runner," as those
prisoners are termed who are assigned to carrying messages and doing odd
jobs in the ranges. He leaned against the bars and spoke manfully and
pungently, with touches of gay humor now and then; advised us to our
conduct--what to do and what to avoid; and when he noticed the little
gray pamphlet, said scornfully, "Don't muss up your ideas with that!
There's a hundred rules there, and every one of 'em is broken every day.
Those rules are for show; what happens to you depends on who the guard
is, and how he happens to be feeling. You can go as far as you like
sometimes, and other times you'll get hauled up if you turn your head
sideways. The screw" (guard) "on this range is decent; he won't crowd
you too much. Keep quiet, and do what they tell you, and the odds are
you'll get by all right. Of course, if some fellow gets a grudge against
you, he's liable to hammer you like hell; there are some prisoners here
that get on the wrong side of a screw, and--well, it goes hard with 'em!
But if you're a little careful, I guess you'll get through all right.

"I've read all about your case in the papers, and I know you oughtn't to
be here; and Bill" (the Warden) "likely knows it too, and as folks on
the outside are on the watch for what happens to you, he'll think twice
how he treats you. Bill is a cunning one; he keeps his ear to the
ground; when he sees that the reform people are going to put something
across, he backs it up, and gives out that he suggested it himself; but
up to a year or two ago, he did the worst sort of things to the men;
even in his early reports and addresses he advocated treatment that he'd
never dare stand for now--except on the quiet! He gets himself written
up in the local papers here as the model warden--warm-hearted and
broad-minded, and all that flap-doodle! But if he had his way, you'd
think you were back in the dark ages in this penitentiary. Wickersham
threw a bit of a scare into him a couple of years back; and there have
been others; but most of the inspectors that are sent here stand in with
him; he gives them good feeds in his house, and takes them out in his
auto, and fills 'em up with soft talk--about 'his boys,' and his
fatherly interest in 'em, and all that--but he keeps the dark cells and
the rest of the dirty work out of their sight, and of course none of the
men dares say anything to 'em--it would be all day with them if they
did--as soon as the inspector turned his back. That's what gets the
men's goat--that he puts up such a humane front, and all the while
hammers them on the sly. They'd prefer being told at the start they were
going to get hell, and then getting it; but it goes against their grain
to get it, and meantime have folks outside believe they're in a
gentlemen's country club!"

Ned imparted his information by fits and starts; ever and anon he would
break off abruptly and walk off down the range, to give the guard the
idea that he was about his ordinary business; then he would return,
squat down on his hams beside the door, and murmur along in his rapid,
distinct tones. All that he said was abundantly confirmed later.

Finally--"Good night--sleep well--they'll put you on some job in a few
days; it's the first days that go hardest with most men, but you'll get
used to it; you might get out on parole, too--but don't count on it; of
all the frauds in this prison, parole is the worst! And if they ever
pass that 'Indeterminate Sentence' law--good-by! Imagine Bill with that
thing to use as a club over us! He'd make every other man here a lifer!"

He laughed in the prison way--silently, in his throat--and went away,
after warning us that it was near nine o'clock. Our watches had been
taken away from us; no doubt, a prisoner might commit suicide by
sticking his watch in his windpipe, or he could bribe a guard with it to
bring him cigarette papers, or "dope." Besides, what has a man in jail
to do with time? Our warm-hearted and fatherly masters desire their
charges to exist so far as practical in a dead, unmeasured monotony,
where a minute may seem to prolong itself to the dimensions of an hour;
to feel themselves utterly severed from the world they have annoyed or
injured. That is the penitentiary ideal; but it has of late become
impossible fully to realize it. A prison will always be a prison; but at
any rate, light shall be let in on it.

Meanwhile, our cell light went out; and we waited for the dawn.

V

ROUTINE

I lay in the upper bunk. It was a six-foot drop to the cement floor
below. The mattress, though irregularly dented and bulged, was upon the
whole convex, and not over two feet wide. A vertical fence or bastion,
six or eight inches high, along the outer brink of this precipice would
have averted the danger of rolling off in the night; but nothing of the
sort had been provided. One must remember not to roll, even in the
nightmare. Convicts educate the subliminal self to a surprising degree,
and do not fall victims to this trap as often as one would expect; but
occasionally one of them forgets, and down he comes, sometimes getting
bruised only, but generally with a broken bone or so. I do not have
nightmares, and I lay prone, gripping the sides of the mattress with my
knees, as if it were a bucking broncho. So I journeyed, Mazeppa-wise,
through the abysses of that first night, and was not unhorsed.

Light glimmered obscurely through the bars of the cell from the
night-burner below. Odd sounds broke out at intervals. Half suppressed
coughs, sudden, brief cries, irregular wheezings and gurglings, due to
defective plumbing, occasionally a few muttered words; then a man in an
upper tier began to moan and groan dismally--a negro with a colic,
perhaps. Long, dead silences would be interrupted by inexplicable
noises. In the dead vast and middle of the night the prisoner in the
cell over mine began to pace up and down his floor, eighteen inches
above my head. Four paces one way, four back, over and over
interminably. Who was he? What was he thinking about? Something seemed
to goad him intolerably; that forging to and fro, like a tormented
pendulum with a soul in it, gave a stifling impression, as of one
tortured for air and space. How many years must he endure--how many
centuries? Was his wife dying, his children abandoned? Up and down he
padded; had he committed some ugly crime, for which he longed to
atone--but prison is not atonement! Had his conviction been unjust, and
was he raging impotently against injustice? Let him not rage too loudly,
for there was a guard yonder, indifferent to tortured souls, but
licensed to stop noises. A prison is a prison, not a sanitarium for
diseased crooks. But if the world could hear those footfalls, and
interpret their significance, how long would prisons last? A jail at
night is a strange place--eight hundred men packed in together, each
terrifyingly alone!

Some of the earlier workers had been roused at six or five o'clock or
earlier; but for the majority the six-thirty bell was the reveille. It
screeched violently and was silent. The watching devils or the guardian
angels of the night vanished, and up got the eight hundred members of
the Gentlemen's Country Club, to live as best they might through one day
more; coughing, hawking, spitting, murmuring--but all with a sense of
repression in it, the life-sapping drug of fear in its origin, but long
since become a mechanical habit with most of them. Eight hundred
criminals, herded beneath one roof to be cured of their crimes by
indifferent or threatening and hostile task-masters and irresponsible
discipline-mongers, and by association with one another--a regimen of
hell to extirpate deviltry! The twentieth century solution of the
problem of evil, unaltered in principle after thousands of years!

Civilization has progressed wonderfully, but always with this
death-house on its back. And the death-house gets bigger and more
populous every year. Reformers, exhorters, Christian Endeavorers,
humanitarians, Salvation Armies, social reformers, penologists,
scientific experimentalists with surgical apparatus, together with
parole laws, indeterminate sentences, commutations, pardons, not to
speak of a good warden here and there and a kind guard--all toiling and
tinkering to make prisons better, to sweep them, to air them, to instil
religion and education, to supply work and exercise and to pay
wages--and all the while the tide of criminals gets larger and the
accommodations for them less adequate. What can be the matter? Are we to
end by discovering that everybody is a criminal, and ripe for jail? or
shall we be driven to the realization that the fundamental idea of
imprisonment for crime is itself the most monstrous of crimes--and try
something else? What else is there to be tried? Are we to leave
criminals to their liberty among the community?

There will be time enough to discuss these riddles. It is time now to
get into your prison suit, with its "U.S.P." on the back of the coat,
and your number; its "U.S.P." on the back of the shirt, with your
number; its "U.S.P." on the front of your trousers-legs, and your
number; your canvas shoes and your vizored cap. But beware of putting on
the cap within prison walls, lest the guard report you to the captain,
the captain to the deputy, the deputy, if necessary, to the warden, and
ye be cast into the inner darkness. There shall there be thin slices of
bread, and water, and gnashing of teeth.

With a guard acting as cowboy, shepherd dog, or convict compeller, we
shuffled in a continuous line down the iron stairways and across the
hall into the dining room, a cement-floored barred-window desert sown
with tables in rows, seating eight men each; guards with clubs standing
at coigns of vantage or pacing up and down the aisles, and in one
window, commanding the whole room, a guard with a loaded rifle, licensed
to shoot down any misbehaver. At no time and in no part of this model
jail are you out of range of a loaded rifle, in the hands of men quick
and skilful in their use. They are the sauce for meals and the
encouragement to labor. But casualties seldom happen; when they do, they
are hushed up, and the body of the man is buried next day in the prison
graveyard.

I will postpone to a future chapter the subject of the dining room and
what is done there. As we filed out, I noticed "MERRY CHRISTMAS," and
"HAPPY NEW YEAR" emblazoned in green above the door. It was to remind
us, perhaps, of what we lost by being criminals. As we debouched into
the inner hall, separated from the corridor leading to the warden's
office, and to freedom, by a steel-barred gate, we saw a guard seated in
a chair with a rifle across his knees. Rats in a steel trap might have
mutinied with as much hope of success as we at that juncture; but the
guard had to be used for something, and convicts must not be allowed to
forget that they are in prison. At all events we forbore to mutiny, and
were rounded into our cells and locked up for half an hour, during which
we might smoke Golden Grain tobacco, fifty per cent, dirt, and the rest
the refuse of the weed, supplied to the prison by contract; or we might
read, or comb our hair, or do calisthenics, or invoke the Divine
blessing upon the labors of the coming day.

The interval is really provided as a measure of security; many of the
prisoners do their work outside the main buildings; but it is deemed
unsafe to unlock the outer gates while the whole body of prisoners is on
the move. They might make a concerted rush, and get out in the yard, to
be shot down in detail by the guards in the towers.

Mr. Sidney Ormund, to be sure, a special writer on the _Atlanta
Constitution_, makes the following statement in an issue of the paper
shortly after I had left the jail and recorded my opinion that "Warden
Moyer was unfit."--"It is safe to assume," Mr. Ormund affirms, "that if
all the prisoners at the Atlanta federal penitentiary were life-termers
and each had a voice in the selection of a warden to serve for a like
term, William Moyer, the present incumbent--a man who has done more to
make prison life bearable than any man in this country--would be
selected without a murmur of opposition."

That is a fine, explicit statement of Mr. Ormund's, such as any warden
in dire trouble and perplexity might be glad and proud to have a
faithful friend make concerning him. It has no strings to it, and is
followed up by similar sentiments throughout the article. But why, in
that case, are the gates into the yard locked, and the man with the
rifle provided? If Warden Moyer renders life at Atlanta prison more
bearable than at any other in the country, what conceivable grounds are
there that his affectionate inmates should wish to run away from him?
That warmhearted and big-brained gentleman would hardly put the
Government to the expense of supplying safeguards against a contingency
which his own tender and lovable nature renders unthinkable, even if the
thirty-four foot wall outside does not. There seems to be a non-sequitur
here, which Mr. Ormund, perhaps, may feel inspired to clear up. When he
has done that, it will be time to call his attention to a score or more
other incongruities which a residence of only six or seven months in
this humane institution has been sufficient to disclose.

At the expiration of the half hour, we laid aside our pipes, or our
prayer-books, and were ready for the activities of the day. The others
were detailed to their regular work; but my friend and I had our final
rites of initiation still to undergo. A young official, whose
countenance readily if not habitually assumed a sullen and menacing
expression, beckoned to us with his club, and we followed him downstairs
to an elevator, in which he ascended to the upper floor, while we
pursued him upward by way of the staircase. The cap of Mr. Ivy--such was
his poetic given name--was worn on the extreme rear projection of his
head, and he used his club in place of speech; not that he actually
pummeled us with it, but by wavings and pointings he made it indicate
his will, and kept us mindful how easily we might afford him a pretext
for putting it to its more normal use. Mr. Ivy, as I afterward learned,
was a Southerner by birth, as are the majority of the guards in the
penitentiary, and may have been, like most of them, a graduate from the
Army. In reporting the case of Private George, of the U.S. Army, now a
prisoner in stripes in the Leavenworth Penitentiary, it was stated by
Mr. Gilson Gardner that "The common soldier in the U.S. Army has no
rights. When he enlists, he gives up the guarantees of the Constitution,
the protection of jury trial, and even his right to petition for a
redress of grievances. He may be unjustly charged, secretly tried and
cruelly punished, and he has no remedy."

As regards unjust, cruel and despotic treatment, the status of the U.S.
soldier and of a penitentiary convict are on all fours, though of course
the former has the advantage of belonging to a service traditionally
honorable, of open air service and exercise in all parts of the country
or abroad, of reasonable freedom when off duty, and of whatever glory
and advancement campaigning against an enemy may bring him. But we may
readily perceive that a soldier who has felt the rough edge of
discipline and finds his health broken, perhaps, by indiscretions
incident to Army life, might say to himself, on receiving his discharge,
"I am bred to no trade, I am good for nothing, but I should like to get
back at somebody for the humiliations and hardships I have endured. Why
not take a job as a prison guard; the pay is only $70 a month, but
instead of being the under dog, I shall be on top, licensed to bully and
belabor to my heart's content, to insult, humiliate and berate, and to
get away with it unscathed!"

For my part, I can imagine no reason more plausible to explain the large
number of ex-soldiers among prison guards, and their conduct in that
position. With some shining exceptions, they are petty tyrants of the
worst type, sulky, sneering, malignant, brutal, and liars and
treacherous into the bargain. Their mode of life in a jail, immersed in
that sinister and unnatural atmosphere, hating and hated, with no sane
or absorbing occupation, encouraged by the jail customs to play the part
of spies and false witnesses, ignorant and demoralized,--tends to create
evil tendencies and to confirm such as exist. No worse originally than
the average of men, they are made baser and more savage by their
circumstances. And no man able to hold his own in the free life and
competition of the outside world, would stoop to accept a position as
guard in a jail.

I know nothing of the private biography of Mr. Ivy, and it is quite
possible that he may have possessed endearing traits which he had no
opportunity to manifest in our intercourse. It would be foolish and
futile for the ends I have in view in this writing to cite or comment on
individuals, save as they may illustrate the point under discussion. But
I am the less reluctant to animadvert upon this or that employee of the
penitentiary, because I feel satisfied that, so far from compromising
him with the higher prison authorities, abuse from me would only
recommend him to their favor.--Mr. Ivy, such as he was, conducted us to
a bench outside a closed door, already partly occupied by three or four
half naked convicts, white and black. We gathered from his gestures of
head and club that we were to remove our upper garments and our shoes
and stockings, and place them on the floor in front of us. It was a cold
morning, and the floor was of limestone. We obeyed instructions, and for
the next twenty minutes sat there, objects of pardonable curiosity or
amusement to our fellow benchers and to passers-by in the hall, and with
nothing to keep us warm but the genial influences of the occasion.
Finally, each in his turn, we were passed through the door into a sort
of office, with clerks and Dr. Weaver, the prison physician, at $1500 a
year,--a tall, wooden faced young medical school graduate, who
cultivated a skeptical expression and a jeering intonation of speech. He
and an assistant put us through a physical examination, and took a
series of measurements, all of which were entered by the clerks in
ledgers. Our photographs were then taken, and afterward (it was the next
day, but may as well be told here) we were further identified by taking
the impressions of our finger prints, and by a second photograph without
our mustaches--these having been removed in the meantime. We were now
convicts full-fledged and published, and our pictures were disseminated
to every prison and penitentiary in the country, to be enshrined in the
rogues' gallery and studied by all police officials.

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