PRISONS: A SOCIAL CRIME AND FAILURE
IN 1849 Feodor Dostoyevsky wrote on the wall of his prison cell the
following story of The Priest and the Devil:
"'Hello, you little fat father!' the devil said to the priest.
'What made you lie so to those poor, misled people? What tortures of
hell did you depict? Don't you know they are already suffering the
tortures of hell in their earthly lives? Don't you know that you and
the authorities of the State are my representatives on earth? It is
you that make them suffer the pains of hell with which you threaten
them. Don't you know this? Well, then, come with me!'
"The devil grabbed the priest by the collar, lifted him high in the
air, and carried him to a factory, to an iron foundry. He saw the
workmen there running and hurrying to and fro, and toiling in the
scorching heat. Very soon the thick, heavy air and the heat are too
much for the priest. With tears in his eyes, he pleads with the devil:
'Let me go! Let me leave this hell!'
"'Oh, my dear friend, I must show you many more places.' The devil gets
hold of him again and drags him off to a farm. There he sees workmen
threshing the grain. The dust and heat are insufferable. The overseer
carries a knout, and unmercifully beats anyone who falls to the ground
overcome by hard toil or hunger.
"Next the priest is taken to the huts where these same workers live
with their families--dirty, cold, smoky, ill-smelling holes. The devil
grins. He points out the poverty and hardships which are at home
here.
"'Well, isn't this enough?' he asks. And it seems as if even he, the
devil, pities the people. The pious servant of God can hardly bear it.
With uplifted hands he begs: 'Let me go away from here. Yes, yes! This
is hell on earth!'
"'Well, then, you see. And you still promise them another hell. You
torment them, torture them to death mentally when they are already all
but dead physically! Come on! I will show you one more hell--one more,
the very worst.'
"He took him to a prison and showed him a dungeon, with its foul air
and the many human forms, robbed of all health and energy, lying on
the floor, covered with vermin that were devouring their poor, naked,
emaciated bodies.
"'Take off your silken clothes,' said the devil to the priest, 'put on
your ankles heavy chains such as these unfortunates wear; lie down on
the cold and filthy floor--and then talk to them about a hell that
still awaits them!'
"'No, no!' answered the priest, 'I cannot think of anything more
dreadful than this. I entreat you, let me go away from here!'
"'Yes, this is hell. There can be no worse hell than this. Did you not
know it? Did you not know that these men and women whom you are
frightening with the picture of a hell hereafter--did you not know
that they are in hell right here, before they die?"
This was written fifty years ago in dark Russia, on the wall of one of
the most horrible prisons. Yet who can deny that the same applies with
equal force to the present time, even to American prisons?
With all our boasted reforms, our great social changes, and our
far-reaching discoveries, human beings continue to be sent to the
worst of hells, wherein they are outraged, degraded, and tortured,
that society may be "protected" from the phantoms of its own
making.
Prison, a social protection? What monstrous mind ever conceived such
an idea? Just as well say that health can be promoted by a widespread
contagion.
After eighteen months of horror in an English prison, Oscar Wilde gave
to the world his great masterpiece, The Ballad of Reading
Goal:
The vilest deeds, like poison weeds,
Bloom well in prison air;
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there.
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.
Society goes on perpetuating this poisonous air, not realizing that
out of it can come naught but the most poisonous results.
We are spending at the present $3,500,000 per day, $1,000,095,000 per
year, to maintain prison institutions, and that in a democratic
country,--a sum almost as large as the combined output of wheat,
valued at $750,000,000, and the output of coal, valued at
$350,000,000. Professor Bushnell of Washington, D.C., estimates the
cost of prisons at $6,000,000,000 annually, and Dr. G. Frank Lydston,
an eminent American writer on crime, gives $5,000,000,000 annually as
a reasonable figure. Such unheard-of expenditure for the purpose of
maintaining vast armies of human beings caged up like wild beasts!
1
Yet crimes are on the increase. Thus we learn that in America there
are four and a half times as many crimes to every million population
today as there were twenty years ago.
The most horrible aspect is that our national crime is murder, not
robbery, embezzlement, or rape, as in the South. London is five times
as large as Chicago, yet there are one hundred and eighteen murders
annually in the latter city, while only twenty in London. Nor is
Chicago the leading city in crime, since it is only seventh on the
list, which is headed by four Southern cities, and San Francisco and
Los Angeles. In view of such a terrible condition of affairs, it seems
ridiculous to prate of the protection society derives from its
prisons.
The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most
thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an
excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the
dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past
when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is
"ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law.
The widespread prison investigations, agitation, and education during
the last few years are conclusive proof that men are learning to dig
deep into the very bottom of society, down to the causes of the
terrible discrepancy between social and individual life.
Why, then, are prisons a social crime and a failure? To answer this
vital question it behooves us to seek the nature and cause of crimes,
the methods employed in coping with them, and the effects these
methods produce in ridding society of the curse and horror of
crimes.
First, as to the nature of crime:
Havelock Ellis divides crime into four phases, the political, the
passional, the insane, and the occasional. He says that the political
criminal is the victim of an attempt of a more or less despotic
government to preserve its own stability. He is not necessarily guilty
of an unsocial offense; he simply tries to overturn a certain
political order which may itself be anti-social. This truth is
recognized all over the world, except in America where the foolish
notion still prevails that in a Democracy there is no place for
political criminals. Yet John Brown was a political criminal; so were
the Chicago Anarchists; so is every striker. Consequently, says
Havelock Ellis, the political criminal of our time or place may be the
hero, martyr, saint of another age. Lombroso calls the political
criminal the true precursor of the progressive movement of
humanity.
"The criminal by passion is usually a man of wholesome birth and
honest life, who under the stress of some great, unmerited wrong has
wrought justice for himself."2
Mr. Hugh C. Weir, in The Menace of the Police, cites the case
of Jim Flaherty, a criminal by passion, who, instead of being saved by
society, is turned into a drunkard and a recidivist, with a ruined and
poverty-stricken family as the result.
A more pathetic type is Archie, the victim in Brand Whitlock's novel,
The Turn of the Balance, the greatest American exposé of crime
in the making. Archie, even more than Flaherty, was driven to crime
and death by the cruel inhumanity of his surroundings, and by the
unscrupulous hounding of the machinery of the law. Archie and Flaherty
are but the types of many thousands, demonstrating how the legal
aspects of crime, and the methods of dealing with it, help to create
the disease which is undermining our entire social life.
"The insane criminal really can no more be considered a criminal than
a child, since he is mentally in the same condition as an infant or an
animal." 3
The law already recognizes that, but only in rare cases of a very
flagrant nature, or when the culprit's wealth permits the luxury of
criminal insanity. It has become quite fashionable to be the victim of
paranoia. But on the whole the "sovereignty of justice" still
continues to punish criminally insane with the whole severity of its
power. Thus Mr. Ellis quotes from Dr. Richter's statistics showing
that in Germany one hundred and six madmen, out of one hundred and
forty-four criminally insane, were condemned to severe punishment.
The occasional criminal "represents by far the largest class of
our prison population, hence is the greatest menace to social
well-being." What is the cause that compels a vast army of the
human family to take to crime, to prefer the hideous life within
prison walls to the life outside? Certainly that cause must be an iron
master, who leaves its victims no avenue of escape, for the most
depraved human being loves liberty.
This terrific force is conditioned in our cruel social and economic
arrangement. I do not mean to deny the biologic, physiologic, or
psychologic factors in creating crime; but there is hardly an advanced
criminologist who will not concede that the social and economic
influences are the most relentless, the most poisonous germs of crime.
Granted even that there are innate criminal tendencies, it is none the
less true that these tendencies find rich nutrition in our social
environment.
There is close relation, says Havelock Ellis, between crimes against
the person and the price of alcohol, between crimes against property
and the price of wheat. He quotes Quetelet and Lacassagne, the former
looking upon society as the preparer of crime, and the criminals as
instruments that execute them. The latter find that "the social
environment is the cultivation medium of criminality; that the
criminal is the microbe, an element which only becomes important when
it finds the medium which causes it to ferment; every society has
the criminals it deserves."4
The most "prosperous" industrial period makes it impossible
for the worker to earn enough to keep up health and vigor. And as
prosperity is, at best, an imaginary condition, thousands of people
are constantly added to the host of the unemployed. From East to West,
from South to North, this vast army tramps in search of work or food,
and all they find is the workhouse or the slums. Those who have a
spark of self-respect left, prefer open defiance, prefer crime to the
emaciated, degraded position of poverty.
Edward Carpenter estimates that five-sixths of indictable crimes
consist in some violation of property rights; but that is too low a
figure. A thorough investigation would prove that nine crimes out of
ten could be traced, directly or indirectly, to our economic and
social iniquities, to our system of remorseless exploitation and
robbery. There is no criminal so stupid but recognizes this terrible
fact, though he may not be able to account for it.
A collection of criminal philosophy, which Havelock Ellis, Lombroso,
and other eminent men have compiled, shows that the criminal feels
only too keenly that it is society that drives him to crime. A
Milanese thief said to Lombroso: "I do not rob, I merely take from the
rich their superfluities; besides, do not advocates and merchants
rob?" A murderer wrote: "Knowing that three-fourths of the social
virtues are cowardly vices, I thought an open assault on a rich man
would be less ignoble than the cautious combination of fraud." Another
wrote: "I am imprisoned for stealing a half dozen eggs. Ministers who
rob millions are honored. Poor Italy!" An educated convict said to Mr.
Davitt: "The laws of society are framed for the purpose of securing
the wealth of the world to power and calculation, thereby depriving
the larger portion of mankind of its rights and chances. Why should
they punish me for taking by somewhat similar means from those who
have taken more than they had a right to?" The same man added:
"Religion robs the soul of its independence; patriotism is the stupid
worship of the world for which the well-being and the peace of the
inhabitants were sacrificed by those who profit by it, while the laws
of the land, in restraining natural desires, were waging war on the
manifest spirit of the law of our beings. Compared with this," he
concluded, "thieving is an honorable pursuit." 5
Verily, there is greater truth in this philosophy than in all the
law-and-moral books of society.
The economic, political, moral, and physical factors being the
microbes of crime, how does society meet the situation?
The methods of coping with crime have no doubt undergone several
changes, but mainly in a theoretic sense. In practice, society has
retained the primitive motive in dealing with the offender; that is,
revenge. It has also adopted the theologic idea; namely, punishment;
while the legal and "civilized" methods consist of deterrence or
terror, and reform. We shall presently see that all four modes have
failed utterly, and that we are today no nearer a solution than in the
dark ages.
The natural impulse of the primitive man to strike back, to avenge a
wrong, is out of date. Instead, the civilized man, stripped of courage
and daring, has delegated to an organized machinery the duty of
avenging his wrongs, in the foolish belief that the State is justified
in doing what he no longer has the manhood or consistency to do. The
"majesty of the law" is a reasoning thing; it would not stoop to
primitive instincts. Its mission is of a "higher" nature. True, it is
still steeped in the theologic muddle, which proclaims punishment as a
means of purification, or the vicarious atonement of sin. But legally
and socially the statute exercises punishment, not merely as an
infliction of pain upon the offender, but also for its terrifying
effect upon others.
What is the real basis of punishment, however? The notion of a free
will, the idea that man is at all times a free agent for good or evil;
if he chooses the latter, he must be made to pay the price. Although
this theory has long been exploded, and thrown upon the dustheap, it
continues to be applied daily by the entire machinery of government,
turning it into the most cruel and brutal tormentor of human life. The
only reason for its continuance is the still more cruel notion that
the greater the terror punishment spreads, the more certain its
preventative effect.
Society is using the most drastic methods in dealing with the social
offender. Why do they not deter? Although in America a man is supposed
to be considered innocent until proven guilty, the instruments of law,
the police, carry on a reign of terror, making indiscriminate arrests,
beating, clubbing, bullying people, using the barbarous method of the
"third degree," subjecting their unfortunate victims to the foul air
of the station house, and the still fouler language of its guardians.
Yet crimes are rapidly multiplying, and society is paying the price.
On the other hand, it is an open secret that when the unfortunate
citizen has been given the full "mercy" of the law, and for the sake
of safety is hidden in the worst of hells, his real Calvary begins.
Robbed of his rights as a human being, degraded to a mere automaton
without will or feeling, dependent entirely upon the mercy of brutal
keepers, he daily goes through a process of dehumanization, compared
with which savage revenge was mere child's play.
There is not a single penal institution or reformatory in the United
States where men are not tortured "to be made good," by means of the
black-jack, the club, the strait-jacket, the water-cure, the "humming
bird" (an electrical contrivance run along the human body), the
solitary, the bull-ring, and starvation diet. In these institutions
his will is broken, his soul degraded, his spirit subdued by the
deadly monotony and routine of prison life. In Ohio, Illinois,
Pennsylvania, Missouri, and in the South, these horrors have become so
flagrant as to reach the outside world, while in most other prisons
the same Christian methods still prevail. But prison walls rarely
allow the agonized shrieks of the victims to escape--prison walls are
thick, they dull the sound. Society might with greater immunity
abolish all prisons at once, than to hope for protection from these
twentieth-century chambers of horrors.
Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world an
emaciated, deformed, will-less, ship-wrecked crew of humanity, with
the Cain mark on their foreheads, their hopes crushed, all their
natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but hunger and inhumanity
to greet them, these victims soon sink back into crime as the only
possibility of existence. It is not at all an unusual thing to find
men and women who have spent half their lives--nay, almost their
entire existence--in prison. I know a woman on Blackwell's Island, who
had been in and out thirty-eight times; and through a friend I learn
that a young boy of seventeen, whom he had nursed and cared for in the
Pittsburg penitentiary, had never known the meaning of liberty. From
the reformatory to the penitentiary had been the path of this boy's
life, until, broken in body, he died a victim of social revenge. These
personal experiences are substantiated by extensive data giving
overwhelming proof of the utter futility of prisons as a means of
deterrence or reform.
Well-meaning persons are now working for a new departure in the prison
question,--reclamation, to restore once more to the prisoner the
possibility of becoming a human being. Commendable as this is, I fear
it is impossible to hope for good results from pouring good wine into
a musty bottle. Nothing short of a complete reconstruction of society
will deliver mankind from the cancer of crime. Still, if the dull edge
of our social conscience would be sharpened, the penal institutions
might be given a new coat of varnish. But the first step to be taken
is the renovation of the social consciousness, which is in a rather
dilapidated condition. It is sadly in need to be awakened to the fact
that crime is a question of degree, that we all have the rudiments of
crime in us, more or less, according to our mental, physical, and
social environment; and that the individual criminal is merely a
reflex of the tendencies of the aggregate.
With the social consciousness wakened, the average individual may
learn to refuse the "honor" of being the bloodhound of the law. He may
cease to persecute, despise, and mistrust the social offender, and
give him a chance to live and breathe among his fellows. Institutions
are, of course, harder to reach. They are cold, impenetrable, and
cruel; still, with the social consciousness quickened, it might be
possible to free the prison victims from the brutality of prison
officials, guards, and keepers. Public opinion is a powerful weapon;
keepers of human prey, even, are afraid of it. They may be taught a
little humanity, especially if they realize that their jobs depend
upon it.
But the most important step is to demand for the prisoner the right to
work while in prison, with some monetary recompense that would enable
him to lay aside a little for the day of his release, the beginning of
a new life.
It is almost ridiculous to hope much from present society when we
consider that workingmen, wage-slaves themselves, object to convict
labor. I shall not go into the cruelty of this objection, but merely
consider the impracticability of it. To begin with, the opposition so
far raised by organized labor has been directed against windmills.
Prisoners have always worked; only the State has been their exploiter,
even as the individual employer has been the robber of organized
labor. The States have either set the convicts to work for the
government, or they have farmed convict labor to private individuals.
Twenty-nine of the States pursue the latter plan. The Federal
government and seventeen States have discarded it, as have the leading
nations of Europe, since it leads to hideous overworking and abuse of
prisoners, and to endless graft.
"Rhode Island, the State dominated by Aldrich, offers perhaps the
worst example. Under a five-year contract, dated July 7th, 1906, and
renewable for five years more at the option of private contractors,
the labor of the inmates of the Rhode Island Penitentiary and the
Providence County Jail is sold to the Reliance-Sterling Mfg. Co. at
the rate of a trifle less than 25 cents a day per man. This Company is
really a gigantic Prison Labor Trust, for it also leases the convict
labor of Connecticut, Michigan, Indiana, Nebraska, and South Dakota
penitentiaries, and the reformatories of New Jersey, Indiana,
Illinois, and Wisconsin, eleven establishments in all.
"The enormity of the graft under the Rhode Island contract may be
estimated from the fact that this same Company pays 62 1/2 cents a day
in Nebraska for the convict's labor, and that Tennessee, for example,
gets $1.10 a day for a convict's work from the Gray-Dudley Hardware
Co.; Missouri gets 70 cents a day from the Star Overall Mfg. Co.; West
Virginia 65 cents a day from the Kraft Mfg. Co., and Maryland 55 cents
a day from Oppenheim, Oberndorf & Co., shirt manufacturers. The
very difference in prices points to enormous graft. For example, the
Reliance-Sterling Mfg. Co. manufactures shirts, the cost of free labor
being not less than $1.20 per dozen, while it pays Rhode Island thirty
cents a dozen. Furthermore, the State charges this Trust no rent for
the use of its huge factory, charges nothing for power, heat, light,
or even drainage, and exacts no taxes. What graft!"6
It is estimated that more than twelve million dollars' worth of
workingmen's shirts and overalls is produced annually in this country
by prison labor. It is a woman's industry, and the first reflection
that arises is that an immense amount of free female labor is thus
displaced. The second consideration is that male convicts, who should
be learning trades that would give them some chance of being
self-supporting after their release, are kept at this work at which
they can not possibly make a dollar. This is the more serious when we
consider that much of this labor is done in reformatories, which so
loudly profess to be training their inmates to become useful citizens.
The third, and most important, consideration is that the enormous
profits thus wrung from convict labor are a constant incentive to the
contractors to exact from their unhappy victims tasks altogether
beyond their strength, and to punish them cruelly when their work does
not come up to the excessive demands made.
Another word on the condemnation of convicts to tasks at which they
cannot hope to make a living after release. Indiana, for example, is a
State that has made a great splurge over being in the front rank of
modern penological improvements. Yet, according to the report rendered
in 1908 by the training school of its "reformatory," 135
were engaged in the manufacture of chains, 207 in that of shirts, and
255 in the foundry--a total of 597 in three occupations. But at this
so-called reformatory 59 occupations were represented by the inmates,
39 of which were connected with country pursuits. Indiana, like other
States, professes to be training the inmates of her reformatory to
occupations by which they will be able to make their living when
released. She actually sets them to work making chains, shirts, and
brooms, the latter for the benefit of the Louisville Fancy Grocery Co.
Broom-making is a trade largely monopolized by the blind, shirt-making
is done by women, and there is only one free chain-factory in the
State, and at that a released convict can not hope to get employment.
The whole thing is a cruel farce.
If, then, the States can be instrumental in robbing their helpless
victims of such tremendous profits is it not high time for organized
labor to stop its idle howl, and to insist on decent remuneration for
the convict, even as labor organizations claim for themselves? In that
way workingmen would kill the germ which makes of the prisoner an
enemy to the interests of labor. I have said elsewhere that thousands
of convicts, incompetent and without a trade, without means of
subsistence, are yearly turned back into the social fold. These men
and women must live, for even an ex-convict has needs. Prison life has
made them anti-social beings, and the rigidly closed doors that meet
them on their release are not likely to decrease their bitterness. The
inevitable result is that they form a favorable nucleus out of which
scabs, black-legs, detectives, and policemen are drawn, only too
willing to do the master's bidding. Thus organized labor, by its
foolish opposition to work in prison, defeats its own ends. It helps
to create poisonous fumes that stifle every attempt for economic
betterment. If the workingman wants to avoid these effects, he should
insist on the right of the convict to work, he should
meet him as a brother, take him into his organization, and with his
aid turn against the system which grinds them both.
Last, but not least, is the growing realization of the barbarity and
the inadequacy of the definite sentence. Those who believe in, and
earnestly aim at, a change are fast coming to the conclusion that man
must be given an opportunity to make good. And how is he to do it with
ten, fifteen, or twenty years' imprisonment before him? The hope of
liberty and of opportunity is the only incentive to life, especially
the prisoner's life. Society has sinned so long against him--it ought
at least to leave him that. I am not very sanguine that it will, or
that any real change in that direction can take place until the
conditions that breed both the prisoner and the jailer will be forever
abolished.
Out of his mouth a red, red rose!
Out of his heart a white!
For who can say by what strange way
Christ brings his will to light,
Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore
Bloomed in the great Pope's sight.
FOOTNOTES:
1Crime and Criminals. W. C. Owen.
2The Criminal, Havelock Ellis.
3The Criminal.
4The Criminal.
5The Criminal.
6Quoted from the publications of the National Committee on Prison Labor.
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