I had money enough to last some little time, long enough to get my
strength back, perhaps. I paid the landlady a month’s rent and told her
I was a sick man and would be in my room all the time and not to disturb
me.
In this way I hoped to account for never stirring out of doors, which I
did not dare do. I certainly was a sick man, and looked it.
This landlady was very good-hearted, and, sympathizing with my illness,
she did not leave me alone two hours in succession. She sent a Chinese
boy every hour or two to see how I felt, and in the morning she would
send in coffee and toast and come in herself to inquire how I was.
After the boy had made the bed in the morning, she must come in to see
if he had turned the mattress and shaken up the pillows for me. She was
so busy helping me out that she nearly landed me back in jail.
I came back to my room from the bathroom one morning, and there she
stood staring at a gun I had been keeping under the mattress. She had
insisted on turning the mattress herself and found it. She was standing
there staring at it like she would at a rattlesnake, and asked me what I
was doing with that “awful thing.”
I sat down and said to her: “Mrs. Alexander, I bought that pistol to
kill myself with in case I get physically disabled. You see, I’m a sick
man. I told you I was a sick man, and I have a suspicion I am a
consumptive. I don’t want to go to doctors and I’m going to let this
thing run its course, but if I find I am down and out and done for I’m
going to shoot myself. That’s what I have it for.”
She was all upset with sympathy. She said: “You’re no consumptive. You
are only run down. You’ll be all right in a few months, with good food
and care. Let me keep this thing. I’ll take it and keep it. Don’t get
downhearted, you’ll be all right.”
Of course I had to let her take it. That night I went out and bought
another one. I also bought a bag and a few clothes, and I was careful
after that to lock the new pistol up in the bag when she was around.
So I settled down to fight it out with my opium habit, at the same time
keeping on the watch all the time for the police.
I had been using opium steadily for ten years. For ten years I had never
gone to sleep without taking it. I owed to it all the sleep, all the
rest and forgetfulness and contentment I had had in that time.
Now I made up my mind to quit. Right away I found I had to pay back
every second of sleep, every quiet, restful moment I had got from the
opium in the whole ten years.
I was taking about five grains a day. I began to taper down slowly. I
cut off a grain a week at the start, then for a couple of months I took
only three grains a day.
It would have been a good deal harder to quit if I hadn’t had that fear
of the jail always before me. That took my mind off the opium. The
worst hold the drug gets on a man is the mental hold. It becomes a
mental habit. A man has to keep a hard grip on his mind; he has to want
to quit, first, and keep wanting to quit all the time, then he can do
it.
I could stick the daytime out. I found something to do; I read, or ate,
or walked around the room. I did not dare go out in the daytime, for
fear I would be recognized by the police or by some stool pigeon. This
worry was always on my mind, and in a way it helped, because while I was
thinking of that I was not thinking about the opium.
It was the small, still hours of the night that got me. I had to get
some sleep and strength for the next day. Every particle of opium I cut
off my daily dose cut off just that much sleep. For years in the jail I
had slept away all the time I could; I had slept ten or twelve or
fourteen hours a day. Now I had to pay back all that sleep I had stolen
from myself.
I put in twenty-three hours a day waiting for the twenty-fourth, when I
could take my little jolt of hop. Every day when the hour arrived I was
tempted to take one more good jolt, so that I could have a decent
night’s sleep and forget everything for a few hours.
But the last words of my friend who had rescued me were always in my
ears. “Lay away from that stuff. It will make a bum of you.”
Hundreds of times it was just that memory that tipped the balance, and I
would take only what I had allowed myself, no more. I believe now I quit
because he said that to me. I felt that if I could not do that much, and
it was the only thing he ever asked me to do, I wasn’t worthy of the
friendship of such a man as he had shown himself to be.
Then I would go to bed and try to sleep. After several hours I would get
up and go out for a walk, to get some exercise. I would walk as fast as
I could for three or four hours in the darkness, always keeping watch
for a policeman or for any one who knew me.
I would walk until I was tired out, because I was still pretty weak, and
it did not take much to tire me. Then I would hope to sleep a little.
But in the long, still hours my nerves demanded opium. And I resisted
and fought it out till my strength got down to the vanishing point.
Then I would get up and drench myself with whisky and wash it down with
absinth. My room looked like a cross between a drug store and a
distillery. I had bottles of tonics, invalid’s port wine, whisky and
absinth.
I would take a drink out of every bottle in the room and fall down on
the bed or on the floor in a stupor and sleep for a few hours.
In this manner I stuck it out. I took a small portion of hop each
evening, reducing it daily according to the system I planned. Finally I
got to the stage where I could skip one day’s portion and get two hours’
natural sleep.
Then I tried skipping two days and got by with it, but on the third day
I was tied in a knot with cramps and aches and nothing but hop would put
me on my feet.
All this time Mrs. Alexander, my kindly landlady, was urging me to go
out in the sunshine during the day. She said it would do me good to get
more air, and she could see no reason why I wouldn’t do it.
So at last I went out one afternoon.
I went to a little park where it was quiet and lay on the grass. It was
so good to touch and smell the grass again that I couldn’t get enough of
it. It seemed to me that grass was the most beautiful thing in the
world. I felt as though I could eat it.
I lay there in the sunshine and ran my hands through it and pulled a
blade or two and chewed it. I had not been in the sunshine nor been
able to touch anything green and growing for over six years. I wouldn’t
have spoiled that lawn, put a cigarette stub or an orange peel on it for
anything in the world.
After that I went out three or four afternoons a week and lay on that
grass in the park. I could feel that I was getting stronger, I could eat
with good appetite, and every night I decreased the opium according to
my schedule. I finally got the dose down to an eighth of a grain.
Even that amount, even the smallest particle that I could get on the end
of a toothpick, would make the difference between sleeping all night or
not.
I don’t believe in those radical cures. It stands to reason you can’t
cure in three days a habit that it took you five or ten years to build
up. I think any man can cure himself. He must first be cured mentally,
he must *want* to be cured. If he doesn’t want to be cured, all the
treatments in the world aren’t going to do it. You can lock men in
prisons and deprive them of hop, and they will come right back and get
it again because they don’t want to be cured. But the man who *wants* to
quit can.
It took me six months to get the dose down to nothing. Even then for
months more the thing might jump out at me at any minute, like a wild
beast and tear me to pieces. I would go half crazy for the time, I would
be mad to get hold of some hop. But that would last only a few hours,
and every time I got through it safe I knew it would be easier next
time.
Every minute I was out of the house in the daytime I kept watching for
people who knew me. A good many men had been through Ingleside jail in
the six years I was there and Vancouver was full of them. None of them
ever saw me, because I saw them first. I tried to see every man in the
block ahead of me the minute I stepped on the curb.
Cured of the habit now, I went back “on the road,” determined to stay in
Canada, keep away from big cities and wise coppers, and try to do the
twenty-five-year sentence outside instead of at Folsom. I traveled east
over the Canadian Pacific Railway to the booming province of Alberta.
One morning after an all-night ride, I crawled out of a box car in the
town of Strathcona, tired, hungry, and dirty. I was not in distress for
money, and looked around for a quiet place where I could lay off for a
week and rest up. After a breakfast, a bath, and a shave, I walked
around a while and located a quiet, respectable-looking place with a
“board and rooms” sign. It looked to be a half-private, out-of-the-way
place, so I went in.
A Chinese boy was dusting up in the lounging room, and I asked him for
the “boss man.” He disappeared out in the hall. In a few minutes I heard
a heavy step and turned around to face Salt Chunk Mary, the friend of
the bums and yeggs at Pocatello. More than fifteen years had passed
since she disappeared, yet I knew her instantly. The same, level “right
now” look from her cold blue eyes; the same severe parting of her
brick-red hair; the same careful, clean, starched house dress, and the
same few short, sharp, meaningful words told me it was she who had
broken open the town jail and set me free when no man would turn a hand.
“Oh, Mary!” I cried, and my hand went out to her. I said something
about Pocatello and the night I saw her last, and about Foot-’n’-a-half
George, long dead, but she stopped me cold. Looking me straight in the
eye, she said in a tone of finality that left no chance of an answer:
“You are mistaken; you don’t know me. My name’s not Mary, and I was
never in Pocatello in my life.”
When Mary said no she meant it. I went out and away, envying that
courageous woman who had the strength to leave Pocatello and her life
there, and bury herself in a far corner of the North.
After much thought I decided that Salt Chunk Mary had washed her hands
of the old life and old associates and was trying to spend her remaining
days in peace. I saw her no more, and went my solitary way, pistoling
people away from their money—the highwayman’s way.
A distinguished chief of police in one of our big cities gave this
advice to the public:
“If a holdup man stops you, grab him and yell at the top of your voice.”
That was the advice of a policeman; more, the advice of a policeman who
was never stuck up. I know something about the stick-up game. I’ve been
stuck up myself. This is the first time I’ve told about it, and it will
be the last. I’m not advising any reader what to do in case of a
stick-up. I’m only telling what I did.
As I was walking home one mild midnight up Haight Street, a young man
came down the street toward me. He was whistling a little tune, his hat
was on the back of his head, and he walked briskly, swinging his arms.
“Ah, ha,” thinks I, “here’s a young fellow that’s just left his girl at
her door. She gave him a kiss, and he’s happy. He’s hurrying home now,
and—” my reflections ended. About ten feet away from me his arms swung
together and his right hand pulled a long gun out of his left sleeve.
“The real thing,” I said to myself, stopping.
“Put up your hands.”
I did.
“Turn your face to that fence.”
I did.
He stepped up behind me and put something hard against my spine.
“All right, brother,” I said meekly. “It’s all yours. It’s in my
left-hand pants pocket.”
He found it.
“I’ve got a watch, brother, that’s worth a lot to me; I wish you’d let
me keep it. It would bring you four dollars, but it might bring you
forty years.”
“Huh!” he grunted. He felt for the watch, took it out of its pocket,
“hefted” it in his hand, and put it back. “You keep your face to that
fence till I get out of the block or I’ll ‘spray’ you with this
automatic.”
I did.
That’s the way I deal with a stick-up man.
There is no way I know of to protect yourself from the starving moron
who pounces on you out of a dark doorway, knocks you on the head with a
“blunt instrument,” and goes through your pockets after you are on the
sidewalk. That kind of “work” is unprofessional, unnatural, and
disgusting, and does not concern me. The psychiatrist might explain and
classify it; I cannot.
After circulating around with my pistol for a few months I was arrested
and, almost by chance, identified as a fugitive from California justice.
In short order I was brought back to San Francisco.
The first man that came to see me in the city prison was Sam Newburgh,
the attorney who had my case when I escaped from the jail.
Two days before I had escaped, the last fifty-dollar payment on his fee
had come due. At that time I was almost sure I would escape and get away
without any trouble, and I was tempted to defer this payment and put him
off until later, because I saw I would have use for the fifty dollars
myself.
But when he came out to the jail I paid it to him.
He remembered this, and when I was brought back he was the first man
there to see me. To my surprise and delight, he told me that my legal
status was just about the same as when I left. My appeal was still
pending.
I had some thoughts that Mr. Older might feel I had abused his
confidence in leaving the jail, when he was trying to do something for
me. But he knew at the time that I was turned down by every one and
didn’t have a chance of getting my liberty, so I hoped he would
understand.
He came immediately to see me, and I explained this to him. I said I
never would have made a move of that kind if there had been a chance;
that I had to do it in order to do myself justice. I said I knew I would
not live another two years in that jail; they had all admitted they
could do nothing for me, and I thought I had a right to do as I did.
He said, “I think you did the only thing. It was the only way out for
you. I would probably have done the same thing myself.”
He remarked that I was looking stronger and healthier. I had gained
about thirty pounds in weight. Mr. Older could see in a minute that I
had quit the opium. He spoke of it at once.
He said he would see if something could be done for me. He thought it
might be possible that the district attorney’s office, on account of all
the complications of the case, would agree to ask for an amended
sentence, a sentence of only a year or two, if I would stop fighting and
plead guilty.
I said: “If I had thought such a thing possible, Mr. Older, I’d have
paid my way back here and given myself up!”
I had little hope that any such thing would be done. I had never
encountered anything like it. The next day Maxwell McNutt of the
district attorney’s office came in to talk to me.
He spoke about my escape, and I told him the reasons for it as I had
told the others. I explained that I would not have had to do it if my
friends had been able to do something for me in the way of a lighter
sentence.
He said that so far as the district attorney was concerned, he thought I
had served almost enough time. I was astounded when I heard this. In all
my experience I had never encountered a district attorney’s office that
thought any criminal had served enough time.
This was a revelation to me in the ways of courts and police. It was the
first time I ever got any better than the worst of it. I saw myself
relieved of that burden of a twenty-five-year sentence. I saw myself
coming out in a couple of years with the slate wiped clean.
I realized that Judge Dunne would be taking a chance in giving me a
sentence that amounted practically to nothing. He had his place on the
bench and his reputation with his fellow judges and the people to
consider. If I came out of prison and got into trouble immediately
after, I would be double-crossing him.
I saw it was up to me to square myself and go to work when I came out.
After some delay the district attorney and the trial judge agreed to
amend the judgment, and a day was set for me to go into court. Mr. Older
asked me to make a statement, hoping there might be something in my
experience that would throw some light on the criminal problem that
might help people to help criminals.
When I got into court I decided not to make this statement until after I
was sentenced, because I didn’t want any one to feel that what I said
was said for selfish reasons, and if I said it before I was sentenced it
might appear that I was talking for leniency.
I decided I had got all the leniency that was coming to me, and very
much more than I ever expected.
The judge sentenced me to one year. That was better than I had hoped
for. The district attorney had suggested it probably would not be more
than two years, but here the judge had cut even that in two.
As near as I can recall them, my words were as follows:
“I would like to make a statement before it is too late. I feel that
this will be my last appearance in any court as a defendant, and I want
to make this statement in the hope that there may be something in my
experience that will prove valuable to some one, perhaps some one in
authority who has to do with the instruction and correction of
offenders, particularly of the younger ones.
“I would not make this statement if I ever expected to appear in court
again as a defendant. As criminal as it is, I will consider it as
nothing if it prove of value to any one, if my failure would cause some
young man to hesitate before it is too late, before he finds himself
charged with crime.
“My prison experiences began with a sentence of two years and thirty
lashes in a Canadian prison. I could not see that I deserved this
flogging, and it seemed when I got it that all the cruelty in the world
was visited on me—all the brutality, all the violence. There was a
lesson in cruelty I have never forgotten. Fortunately, I had a
disposition that hardened with the flogging instead of breaking under
it.
“I proved an incorrigible prisoner while there. I broke the rules many,
many times in a small way—nothing violent, nothing desperate, but I
would talk, laugh, whistle and sing, and that outraged the silence of
the system then in vogue.
“I was punished repeatedly on bread and water, the dark cell. The warden
was a hard, stern man. His motto was—‘break them first and make them
after.’
“Then came the day for the second installment of my flogging and my
discharge from prison. I went out with the skin on my back blistered and
broken and my mind bent on revenge. I went out of there with a hatred
for law and order, society and justice, discipline and restraint, and
everything that was orderly and systematic. I had a hatred for courts,
jailers, prison keepers, and wardens. I hated policemen, prosecutors,
judges and jurors.
“If I had reasoned right, I might have made a better start than I did.
But I had no experience to guide me. I planned for revenge and I turned
on society to get it, because society furnishes the judges, the jurors,
the policemen, the prosecutors. Before I got fairly started on my career
of revenge I was back in prison.
“When I went back I learned more brutality and violence. I knew the
bread-and-water punishment, the dark cell, the strait-jacket and the
water cure. I thought violent thoughts, I planned violent plans, and I
executed those plans as best I could as soon as I got outside. I suppose
a man’s actions are the creatures of his thought, and his thoughts are
naturally the products of his environment and the conditions under which
he is forced to live.
“If you put a boy in prison at the age I was, as prisons were then, he
will become a criminal as sure as the day follows the night or the night
follows the day. I imagine those conditions were responsible for many
criminals of my age or thereabouts, who were considered incorrigible. I
won’t say confirmed, because I believe there is no such thing as a
confirmed criminal. I have seen many miraculous reformations. One man
may be reformed through a woman, a woman’s plea, a mother’s love. Others
might be reformed through the assistance and kindness of friends. But
still another might be reformed by an act of kindness from some
unexpected source. I believe that one who has been brutalized can be
turned right by an act of kindness and be regenerated. It looks
reasonable.
“When I stood up in this court to be sentenced for twenty-five years, I
was a criminal, as I have described. I had learned the lesson of
violence in prison, and I believed that I lived in a world of violence,
had to use violence, and use it first. I had no more thought of right or
wrong than a wolf that prowls the prairie. I hunted because I was
hunted myself, and I showed no consideration for anybody or anything
because I knew I would receive none.
“I was a habitual criminal. I had formed the criminal habit. Habit is
the strongest thing in life, and criminals such as I have described obey
the impulse to commit a crime almost subconsciously. So far as the right
or wrong is concerned, he gives it no more thought than you would when
you walk down the street and open the gate to enter your front door. It
is a habit with you.
“The twenty-five-year sentence I received made no impression on me
whatever. I expected it, and had expected it for years. It was simply an
incident, an obstacle, another delay—a violent one, to be sure; but I
had dealt the game of violence, and when forced to play at it I am not
the one to complain.
“So I went back to the county jail and my lawyer went back to his law.
Then came the fire that destroyed the records of my conviction and
sentence, and put me in the perpetual criminal class at the county jail.
I became more permanent than the sheriff. I saw them come and go, and
after years of comparative peace and quiet and fair treatment in the
county jail I began to change my views and think different thoughts, and
I looked forward to a different sort of life.
“A few friends rallied around and began to plan ways and means to help
me. They investigated, found it impossible, and told me.
“The future looked dark, and I was in despair. The day of my
deliverance seemed to be receding instead of advancing. I planned to get
my liberty in another way, and I did get it, but I got it under such
circumstances as to make it impossible for me to lead the life I had
planned.
“It was impossible for me to mix with men in the daytime. I was a
fugitive. I was hunted again. I had to seek the back streets on the
darkest nights.
“In a few months I found myself back in jail in San Francisco. Then
something occurred that surprised me more than I can tell. I was told
that there was a possibility of my getting credit for the time that I
had served in the county jail, that I might get a sentence I would see
the end of, instead of one that would see the end of me, and that it
might be possible for me to get out and lead a different kind of life.
“This made a greater impression upon me than the twenty-five-year
sentence, this offer of help from such a surprising source. At first I
thought I was getting the double-cross, but I investigated and found it
was true, and what little doubts I had were completely shattered. I did
not admit the possibility of any kindness from judges, district
attorneys, prosecutors, or anybody who represents the people.
“I now saw that I was wrong, and that it was up to me to build new rules
to regulate my conduct in the future, that I would have to formulate a
philosophy that would admit the possibility of kindness from such
sources; from people who desired to help me if I would help myself.
“I have promised myself, and I promise the court, that when I finish
this sentence I shall look for the best instead of the worst, that I
shall look for kindness instead of cruelty, and that I shall look for
the good instead of the bad, and when I find them I shall return them
with interest.
“I am confident when I promise the court this that I will not fail. I
imagine I have enough character left as a foundation on which to build a
reformed life. If I had no character, no will power, no determination,
I would have been broken long ago by the years of imprisonment and
punishment; and I would have been useless and harmless and helpless, a
force for neither good nor bad.”
Judge Dunne asked me if I had any choice of prisons, and I said I
preferred San Quentin because I had already been in every other prison
in the state, and I would like to go over there and see what that place
was like.
I left the courtroom with that one-year sentence feeling as if I had
received a Christmas gift; it was the twenty-fourth of December.
At San Quentin I had a hard time to convince friends that my sentence
was cut to one year. The atmosphere there surprised me. There was none
of that smoldering hatred of officers; no hopeless, despairing
prisoners; no opium and no scheming to get it in. Everybody was looking
forward to parole. There was no brutal punishment. A man’s credits were
safe. All those changes worked for the best. Prisoners had a chance to
shorten their time by good conduct, and their conduct was good.
One of the first “cons” to reach me was my friend, Soldier Johnnie,
doing a short sentence.
I hadn’t seen him since leaving the Canadian prison, where I got the
dark cell for speaking to him. We were comparing notes for a week. It
was from him I learned that the Sanctimonious Kid had escaped from Canon
City before finishing his fifteen years, and that he had gone to
Australia, where he was hanged for killing a police constable. In turn,
I told him of Foot-’n’-a-half George’s death, and of Mary’s
disappearance into the Far North.
Johnnie finished his time first, and went back to the road, where he
probably will live out his life and die unwept, unhonored, and unhung.
I put in my sentence without any trouble and came out in ten months.
That was thirteen years ago.
On the boat for San Francisco I saw the bar. At once I felt that I
needed a jolt of booze. I got it.
Then I saw the lunch counter. I at once felt the need of a cup of real
coffee. I got that. After that, I sat down on a bench and thought it
over.
Here I was, physically fit and serviceably sound, walking up to that bar
and buying a drink of whisky I didn’t need just because I happened to
see the bar, and then a cup of coffee just because I saw the coffee urn.
I decided I would have to beware of the power of suggestion. The bar had
suggested whisky and the lunch counter coffee, and I fell for them both.
Anyway, I made up my mind that I would close my eyes when I got to the
ferry building for fear I might see a sack of registered mail lying
around loose. It would suggest days of ease and nights of pleasure, and
I might fall for that.
I got through the ferry building and walked up Market Street, as they
all do. In time I found myself in Mr. Older’s anteroom. There were
several men waiting to see him. I looked them over and said to myself,
“There’s preachers, politicians, and pickpockets in that bunch. I’ll be
lucky if I don’t have to wait an hour.”
The young lady took my name and I was the first one in. Mr. Older was
there with a suggestion, too; luncheon at the Palace Hotel.
I’m not strong for eating in swell places, but I do like quick
contrasts. I had my breakfast in San Quentin, so why not lunch at the
Palace?
We had a good meal. While we were eating, Mr. Older suggested that I
come down to his ranch for a few days, till I got my bearings again in
the outside world and was ready to begin work.
I was glad to do this. It helped get me over the hardest part of the
life of the ex-prisoner who intends to go square; the first few weeks
out of prison. I went down that night for a week and stayed six months.
I would have been content to stay there always. I was able to do enough
on the ranch to pay for my board and shelter, and I liked it. But it was
necessary after a while for me to come back to San Francisco and go to
work. My room was wanted on the ranch by other men who needed it worse
than I did.
Eddie Graney needs no introduction here. I only hope this story has as
many readers as he has friends. While he is known and respected for his
square decisions as a referee of big fights, I think his fame rests
chiefly on the fact that while he has the finest billiard rooms west
of—oh, well, west of anywhere—he has not yet learned how to play
billiards.
Graney gave me my first job—cashier in his pool room—handling his money.
After a few months a better job appeared. With a letter of introduction
I saw Mr. B. F. Schlesinger of the Emporium.
“Where did you work last?” he asked.
“At Eddie Graney’s.”
“And before that?”
“At San Quentin, in the jute mill.”
He knew all about me and put me to work as salesman in the book
department. I knew something about books—I had been librarian at the
county jail. I was honest—hadn’t stolen any of Graney’s money. I felt
perfectly at ease among the books, and made good. Book selling grew
dull later, and I was slated for a transfer to another department. At
the manager’s office I was told that the only vacancy was on the ribbon
counter. I looked in a mirror on the wall and saw a face in it that
didn’t seem to belong behind the ribbon counter.
I said: “Mr. Schlesinger, this is a great life if you know when to
weaken. I think this is where I’ll weaken.”
At lunch time I saw Mr. Older and told him about it. Fortunately, there
was a vacancy at the *Bulletin* in the circulation department just then
and I got the job. I left the Emporium with the best wishes and good
will of everybody I met there. When Mr. Older became editor of *The
Call* he found a place there for me as librarian; I still have that job.
In thirteen years I have learned to work—some day I may learn to like
it. Yet it is so easy and simple and safe and secure that I now wonder
how any man coming out of prison could think of doing anything else.
The pity of it is that so many ex-prisoners who do think of trying to
work can’t get it. I take no credit whatever for going to work. I could
have done that years before.
I quit stealing and learned working because I was in a hole where I
could not do otherwise. I was in hock to friends who saved me from a
heavy sentence, provided me with work, and expected only that I stay out
of jail. That’s not asking much of a man—to keep out of jail. The judge
who cut my sentence took a greater chance than I ever did. If I had gone
back “sticking up” people, the judge’s critics could have said that he,
and he alone, made it possible—and that’s precisely why I quit.
If I had stolen Graney’s, the Emporium’s, or the *Bulletin’s* money,
they could have said that Older made it possible, and had I been tempted
to steal that thought would have stopped me. I cannot say I quit
stealing because I knew it was wrong. I quit because there was no other
way for me to discharge the obligations I had accepted. Whatever measure
of reformation I have won is directly due to Fremont Older and Judge
Dunne of the Superior Court. They took a chance on me, a long chance,
and it will be a long time before they regret it. Fremont Older has been
a rock in a weary land to me, and Judge Dunne has been a shelter in the
time of storm.
It has been easy for me. The noble woman who found me rotting in jail
physically and mentally is still my friend, I am proud to say. The
kindly Christian couple who gave me a home with them in San Francisco
and treated me as a son are still my friends. Friends everywhere, to
help and advise and encourage. Even friends from the road and the
jungles drop into my office and shake hands and say: “More power to you,
old-timer. You’re sure makin’ good. I’m goin’ to try it myself some
day.”
My feuds with the police are dead and buried. No copper has bothered me
or obstructed me. Many of them have offered in good faith to help me.
And so I say it has been easy for me to go on the square. I speak only
of my own experience; others may not have been so fortunate in finding
friends.
I wish I could sift out a few grains of wisdom from my life that would
help people to help prisoners, and help prisoners to help themselves,
but I can’t find them. I don’t know. All I can say with certainty is
that kindness begets kindness, and cruelty begets cruelty. You can make
your choice and reap as you sow.
I am not worrying about prisons. If they improve as much in the coming
twenty years as they have in the last twenty, they will have to be
called something else. While the number of convicts is increasing, the
percentage of second and third timers, habitual criminals, is
decreasing. That’s hopeful, and it’s because of more humane treatment,
more liberal parole laws, and the extension of road building and other
work, that fits a prisoner for the outside, gives him the work habit.
Highway building by convicts is the sanest and most constructive step I
have seen. Instead of appropriating money to build a third prison in
California, the same money might be expended in road-building materials,
and one of our two prisons emptied into the road camps, where the
prisoner could be self-supporting and not a dead weight on the taxpayer
while in prison, and worse after he gets out.
A certain number of prisoners, say ten per cent, always have and always
will abuse probation and parole. The ninety per cent of prisoners who
respect probation and parole more than justify the laws under which they
are released. Probation to boys and young men should be extended.
Paroles to first-time convicts should be more liberal. Paroles to
second-timers might well be closely scrutinized, and for third-timers—if
the Prison Board “throws the key away” on them they will die off and
settle their own problem. I am in the third or fourth-timer class
myself, and if I got back into prison and the board sentenced me to life
with the privilege of applying for parole after fifteen years, I
wouldn’t have to look very far for the person responsible for it.
As I see it, the criminals of this generation should cause no concern.
They will soon be out of the way. The problem wouldn’t be solved by
shooting them all at sunrise, or by releasing them all at sunrise.
Something might be done for the generation that is coming up. It seems
to me there’s the place to start—but what to do, I don’t know.
I am sure of but one thing—I failed as a thief, and at that I am luckier
than most of them. I quit with my health and liberty. What price
larceny, burglary, and robbery? Half my thirty years in the underworld
was spent in prison. Say I handled $50,000 in the fifteen years I was
outside; that’s about nine dollars a day. How much of that went to
lawyers, fixers, bondsmen, and other places? Then count in the years in
prison—suffering, hardship, privation. This was years ago when there was
much less police protection.
“What chance have you now?” I would ask any young man, “with shotgun
squads, strong-arm squads, and crime crushers cruising the highways and
byways; with the deadly fingerprinting, central identification bureau,
and telephotȯing of pictures; and soon every police station broadcasting
ahead of you your description and record? Then consider the accidents
and snitches—what chance have you? Figure it out yourself. I can’t.”
Had I spent that thirty years at any useful occupation and worked as
hard at it and thought and planned and brought such ingenuity and
concentration to bear on it, I would be independent to-day. I would have
a home, a family perhaps, and a respected position in my community. I
have none of those, but I have a job, I have two suits of clothes, I
have two furnished rooms in a flat. I have as many friends as I can be
loyal to. I am fifty years old, and so healthy that when I hear my
friends holding forth about their ailments I feel ashamed of myself. I
would not turn time backward and be young again, neither do I wish to
reach the century mark and possible senility.
I have no money, no wife, no auto. I have no dog. I have neither a
radio set nor a rubber plant—I have no troubles.
I borrow money from my friends in a pinch, ride in their machines,
listen to their radios, make friends with their dogs, admire their
flowers, and praise their wives’ cooking.
If I could wish for anything else it would be a little more moderation,
a little more tolerance, and a little more of the trustful innocence of
that boy who learned his prayers at the knee of the gentle, kindly old
priest in the Sisters’ Convent School.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by asterisks.
The following typographical errors in the Macmillan edition from 1926
have been corrected:
- An extra comma appeared after "Well, whatever" in Chapter 3 on
page 21.
- A period was missing after the word "toes" at the end of a
sentence in Chapter 9 on page 108.
- "Zion's co-operative Mercantile Institution" in Chapter 13 on page
170 is a proper noun and the name of a business, so the "c" has
been capitalized as well.
- A period was missing at the end of the sentence that begins with
"The lashing is regulated by law" in Chapter 19 on page 277.
- "Ottawa" was misspelled as "Ottowa" in Chapter 20 on page 312.
Ottawa is later spelled correctly in Chapter 22. The variant with
two O's only appeared in this single instance.