How shall we approach a prison to see it fairly and to study it
intelligently?
Let us imagine ourselves visitors from a world outside of this.
Far off in infinite space there is a small whirling planet--our
earth.
Little creatures move about this planet, chained to it by the
force of gravity. But they MOVE as they choose, and they call
themselves FREE.
There are millions of free square miles, and hundreds of millions
of free human beings.
But there just below us is the prison at Auburn. There the human
beings are not free. There suffer those who for any reason have
violated the established rules of the little globe that supports
them.
They have not even the freedom of the little patch of soil fenced
in for them. They cannot walk, speak, sit down, lie down, or
stand up as they please.
They have broken some of the rules established for the protection
of all. They have misused their freedom, and in punishment their
freedom is taken away from them.
They live in small cells, in a very big prison.
Gray stone, iron bars, striped suits, enforced silence, enforced
work, enforced regularity of life--all these punish most keenly
those whose first crime was lack of self-control and lack of
regularity. ----
In every prison and in every prisoner there are lessons for each
of us. You will not waste time to-day if you walk through this
great Auburn prison and think of the men there think why they
came there, think how they could have been saved, think what will
gradually empty prisons and make them unnecessary.
A man with one arm opens the first iron gate--his mutilated body
foreshadows the mutilated minds and souls within.
Before the door of the prison there are bright flowers--the name
of the prison itself stands out in brightly colored blossoms to
prove the gardener's ability and strange sense of the
appropriate. Many of the causes that bring men there are written
out in just such bright colors--when first seen--and many a
prisoner must have thought of that as he passed through the iron
door.
A party of six or seven go through the prison with you.
There is a woman of middle age, stout and cheerful, in a bright
purple dress. There are two children, a moon-faced man, a
tall, thin man, and others whom you do not notice.
Carelessly they look at a nervous woman sitting in the reception
room talking to a convict. They take no interest in her, no
interest in the convict. To you the prison guide says:
"She comes here to see him as often as the rules allow. She's
his wife. She's been coming for seven years. I tell you,
women get the hard end of it in this world."
Women do indeed get the hard end of it. There are twelve hundred
men in that prison--and every one of them has caused some woman
to suffer. And every one has broken the heart of one other
woman--his mother.
Through a narrow door you travel with your fellow-visitors.
At every step you marvel at the curious indifference of average
humanity to the one interesting thing--their fellow-man.
There are shown to you piles upon piles of loaves of bread--fresh
and brown. The guide says: "We bake every day. Nine hundred
loaves a day."
The stout woman in purple sighs with amazement, the children
gape, the man with the round face has an anxious look--he seems
to be a taxpayer.
But not one looks at or thinks of the convict who turns quickly
away to hide a thin, white face. To you the guide says: "He's a
forger. You can see he's sensitive about being here. Some of
them never seem to get used to it." ----
The stout woman in purple is delighted with the enormous copper
vats for making the convicts' coffee. She is charmed with the
great iron pots for boiling soup.
But you will be more interested in these facts:
There is a great chapel--BUT NO CONVICT IS COMPELLED TO ATTEND.
There is a huge wash room--fitted with showers for the hardy,
with porcelain tubs for the old and crippled--AND EVERY MAN IS
COMPELLED TO TAKE HIS BATH.
How much of progress, how much that is hopeful for humanity, is
told in those words!
Religious services are optional--no more compulsion of man's soul
or of his belief.
Bathing IS COMPULSORY. Truly, we progress, and the prison rules
prove it.
There were showers in every prison and in every insane asylum one
hundred years ago--but those showers were used only to torture
the criminal or the lunatic. He was doused with cold water until
senseless.
There were chapels in the old-time prisons, and all were forced
to accept and profess such views as the majority or the ruler
chose to profess.
That prison at Auburn is a monument to humanity's sorrows and
weaknesses. But it tells in every department of human decency
and of a constant striving by those who are fortunate to help
others.
In the prison yard a squad of convicts are marching. The
lock-step is there no longer. Prison reform has ended that. The
convict is no longer forced into a gait which stamps him ever
after.
There are electric lights in the hundreds of cells--and there is
absolute cleanliness throughout the vast structure. No hotel is
cleaner, if any be as clean.
The convicts get their letters twice a week. They have pictures
in their cells--and they may have musical instruments if they
wish; and many a man, beside his narrow plank bed, has a strip of
rag carpet made at home. Their lives are horrible--for
confinement kills men's souls; and one has said who knew prison
life:
"It is only what is GOOD in man
That wastes and withers there;
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair." ----
While you go through the prison you see the things
mentioned--electric lights, clean halls, bathing apparatus, and
the rest. But you STUDY the human beings working at their
fixed tasks, or moving about in their dismal, heavy suits of
stripes.
Just as many kinds of faces as you see in a city street you see
in that prison--but there you see more than elsewhere the
failures, the human weeds.
But at least there is a striving to make things better. Society
no longer willingly tortures its failures. It controls,
punishes, but does not hate them. There are no beatings, no
tortures, no close-cropped heads, even, for the convict may grow
his hair as he chooses.
Every man who knows no trade is taught one. There is a feeling
of moral responsibility to the criminal, and a desire at least to
make him NO WORSE.
The prisoners are divided into two classes: those whose faces
and skulls tell of evil birth and predestined failure, and those
who are simply like others--average men, victims of chance, of
temptation, of ability ill-balanced, of ignorance, of drink, or
even of accident.
In one great room the convicts are weaving--working at hand
looms. The work is desperately hard. Both hands and both feet
are going constantly. Human power is used, that the greatest
amount of labor and least competition with the outside working
world may be simultaneously achieved.
At one loom sits a poor creature, a dismal human failure. His
forehead is half an inch high and a bony ridge-telling of
unfortunate prenatal influence--runs high along the top of his
head. His small eyes are close together. His exaggerated
chin protrudes; only a cunning look directed now and then toward
the watchful warden tells that any thinking goes on in that
miserable being. His best place, perhaps, is there. He is
protected against himself, and society has no other way of taking
care of him.
Near him sits a young boy in his teens. His face is intelligent;
he is not a born criminal. He is above the average in
intelligence, and in him there are all possibilities of success
and usefulness.
A boyish piece of criminal foolishness brought him there--and he
must now spend years degenerating into real criminality under the
influences around him.
There are the two extreme samples of humanity in that cage which
we build to protect ourselves against ourselves.
It is a dismal garden set apart for human weeds and in it many a
good plant is hopelessly driven into the weed class.
Of the men in that prison may truly be said what a great student
of plant life--Luther Burbank-- says of the poor weeds that we
despise among plants:
There is not one weed or flower, wild or domesticated, which
will not, sooner or later, respond liberally to good cultivation
and persistent selection. * * * Weeds are weeds because they are
jostled, crowded, cropped and trampled upon, scorched by fierce
heat, starved, or, perhaps, suffering with cold, wet feet,
tormented by insect pests or lack of nourishing food and
sunshine.
Most of them have no opportunity for blossoming out in luxurious
beauty and abundance. * * * When a plant once wakes up to the
new influences brought to bear upon it the road is opened for
endless improvement in all directions.
More pitiable than any weeds in a garden and more worthy of
sympathy are those poor human weeds in the great prison.
Crowded and kept ignorant in youth, tempted, ill-fed, cold and
worried in after years, their lot was hard--and their fall almost
inevitable. They must be confined, they must be protected
against themselves, they must suffer for the poor start given to
them.
But the duty of those who are FREE and fortunate is to treat
kindly those who fall, and especially to deal in such fashion
with the young as shall minimize the crop of weeds later.
Fortunately, it may truly be said that humanity begins to realize
its responsibilities in both lines of effort.
Kindness reaches the convict in his prison.
And Education, the thrice blessed AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL, does
steadily the work that makes useful plants of growing youth,
diminishing year by year the crop of weeds.
Kindness and EDUCATION--go to Auburn prison and you will
realize how much work they have still to do in our country.