[Stenographic report of Dr. Gilmour’s address at the annual meeting
of the New Jersey State Charities Aid and Prison Reform Association,
April 1, 1911. Though The Review guards jealously its space, having
but sixteen pages monthly, we are sure our readers will agree with us
that the space filled by this article is well filled.--Editor]
When we speak of criminals, we are very apt to picture in our mind’s
eye the great criminals, those who commit atrocious crimes. But that
class forms but a very small percentage of every prison population, and
the methods of dealing with this class are much more clear and definite
than dealing with the much larger class that are not quite so dangerous
to society. When we speak of criminals we are apt to think of them _en
masse_ as a congregation of a few hundred or a few thousand men walled
within a prison. Carlyle dissipates this view when he says: “Masses?
Yea, masses, every unit of whom has his own heart and sorrows--stands
there covered with his own skin; and if you prick him he will bleed.”
In dealing with delinquency there are two basic facts; that the great
majority of criminals are made in their youth, and that the great
majority of youthful criminals are handicapped in life’s race either
by physical, mental, or moral defects. That prince of sociologists,
Victor Hugo, evidently appreciated these conditions when he gave us
that beautiful injunction to study evil lovingly, and then, later on,
he gave the key when he said: “There are no bad weeds. They are only
bad cultivators.”
Two or three weeks ago a young man came into the corridor of our
prison one day and asked, “Warden, will you take me out to the farm?”
(A prison farm, of which I hope to speak a little later). I said,
“No, Smith, I cannot take you out.” Over in our country when we wish
to conceal a man’s identity we always call him Smith; and if we are
particularly careful, we call him John Smith. This man was a repeater;
he was doing his fifth term; the four previous terms he had been a very
difficult man to get along with; but this time he had done very well.
We could take no exception to either his conduct or his industry. He
said to me, “Have I not done well this time?” I said, “You certainly
have.” “Well, then,” he said, “Won’t you give me a chance?” Of course,
he had me there; I couldn’t refuse him. I said, “Yes, I’ll give you
a chance.” I took him up to the farm on a Monday; he worked well on
Tuesday and on Wednesday; and on Wednesday night he skipped. The
following Friday we got him again, in a town one hundred and fifty
miles from home; and I pitied the poor fellow when he came back, he
looked so dejected and so crestfallen; but I blamed myself entirely.
I had imposed a burden of self-denial and a responsibility of conduct
upon that man that he was not able to bear. He was one of that class,
typical of a considerable percentage of our prison populations, that
is on the borderland between sanity and insanity; and all the prison
officials who are here to-night will recall scores of that class who
form a part of their prison population.
As I say, I had made a mistake with this boy; but it only goes to show
that penologists are not infallible, not even the youngest of them. If
we were to stop to speculate upon the place that this element occupies
in the divine scheme, we might tread upon very dangerous ground. It
is enough for us to know that the God that made them is the God that
will judge them; and herein lies our consolation. I had a man come into
prison a few weeks ago to do two years; and yesterday afternoon, just
an hour before I left home for coming down here, his wife came into my
office leading a beautiful child five years of age by the hand. She
came, as so many poor women come, to see if it were not possible to get
some relief from her almost intolerable position. As the cruel truth
dawned upon her that it was impossible for me to exercise clemency in
regard to her husband, the women turned to me and she said, with much
emphasis, “If they would only send me and my child to prison, how much
better it would have been.”
And the woman expressed a great verity. This little episode I relate
to show you that society has two obligations: one to the man shut up
within the prison, and perhaps an even greater obligation to the poor
woman and children dependent upon the man shut up within the prison.
It is necessary to lock up a certain class of men that society may be
protected, and that these men may be improved; but when we do that,
are we going to put their families in a position in which they will be
impelled into either vice or crime? I think it is Milton who asks the
pertinent question:
“What boots it, by one gate to make defence
And at another to let in the foe?”
In dealing with the wives and children, as well as with the prison
inmates, over in our place, we find an immense help from the Salvation
Army. We have a prisoner’s aid association and they work harmoniously
together; but the Army has one or two advantages in this work that
no other organization possesses. In the first place, they are not
sentimentalists. They detail one man to give his time to it. He is
as free to go into our prison as I am; and I think he spends as much
time there as I do. He is there at night, on Sundays, on holidays, at
noon hours; and he is going from cell to cell--he becomes thoroughly
acquainted with every inmate. That gives that man an immense advantage
in dealing with those men when their terms expire. The prison worker
that expects to meet the discharged prisoner at the prison gate the
morning he comes out, is much more apt to be worked by the prisoner
than he is to work the prisoner. In three cases out of five he is clay
in the hands of a designing man. One of our governors some years ago
said that Canada was a land of magnificent distances. The same remark
applies to your republic; but we get prisoners 1,300 miles from our
prison. The Army, learning the condition of the families dependent on
the man within the prison, writes to the corps, the Salvation Army
corps in the town or the city where the man came from, and they are
able, by their very extensive and highly perfected organization, to
make a study of each family, in addition to having arrangements made
there for the employment of that man when his term has expired. We try,
just as far as possible, to get all of our ex-prisoners out of the
city. We do not wish them to colonize; we try to get them back to their
homes where they came from; for unless a man is willing to go back and
face society, and live it down, the chances are that he will be driven
into what is wrong sometimes through fear.
A year ago now, we started our farm. It is fifty miles out of the city;
it contains 530 acres. I commenced by taking up a little detachment
of 14 men; and I rapidly increased that until I had 180 men, housed
in temporary quarters on this farm. The average term of the man on
the farm was about five or six months, though I had several men there
who had to do from one to two years. So far we have taken out to this
farm 500 men, and out of that 500, four have escaped successfully, and
three or four have attempted to escape--unsuccessfully. The other day
a minister in our city was calling, and I gave him these statistics,
and he looked very sad; he said it was a pity. I said it was; “but,” I
said, “can you take 500 of your church membership and have 495 of them
make good?” And he changed the subject.
I had a grand jury visit me the other day; it is a custom, over in
our country, for the grand juries to come over a few times a year and
tell us how to run the place (they sometimes stay an hour); and the
foreman, before he went away, said to me, “Warden, I suppose you select
the men whom you take out to the farm.” I said, “No, sir. I don’t.” He
said, “How do you manage?” I said, “I select a very few whom I _don’t_
take;” for I can take 90 per cent. About three weeks ago I was going
into the farm one day; it was a cold, snowy, blowing, blustering day;
the thermometer was about zero. When I came near to our building it was
quarter to twelve o’clock; and I saw men coming from this direction,
and that direction, and from every direction pass alone; no officers
with them at all; and it impressed me, perhaps, much more than it
would another one not engaged in this work; for I asked myself the
question--“How is it? These are the very men that I have had in Toronto
behind bolts and bars, watched over by guns and guards; and here they
are out here, as free as this air that blows, and they are all coming
in to sit down with each other at dinner.” I have asked our men on the
farm--many of them, different types, at different places, at different
times, and I have asked them all the same question:--“What do you find
the greatest difference as between the prison in the city and the
prison out here on the farm?” And without a single exception, in one
form or another those men have invariably given me the same reply. We
give good board at the prison, but it was not that; it was not this
liberty, comparative liberty. They have said to me: “Warden, to get
away from that cell! To get away from that cell!”
I asked a boy two weeks ago, a young man, and he said, “Warden, to
get away from that cell; for,” he said, “to sit there on Sunday,
every evening and on holidays and have that cell gate staring you
in the face, it is hell;” and he didn’t say it to be irreverent or
disrespectful, but it was his pent up emotions. I believe there is
something debasing--debasing to a man’s personal manhood--about life in
a cell that no one can describe. Our men plow, they harrow, they sow
the grain, they reap it; there is no guard with them at all. Of course,
these are men who are near the end of their terms, perhaps men who have
three months or less to do; but every prison contains enough of that
class to enable them to carry on this class of work, agricultural work,
to a financial advantage. If we had to pay guards to be with these
various men, we couldn’t do it; but we don’t. There is an indefinable
something in God’s out-of-doors that has a beneficial effect upon
humanity. I can not tell you what it is. “The wind bloweth where it
listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but thou canst not tell
whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. So is every man that is born of
the spirit.”
A few months ago a professor from the University of Kansas wrote a
little poem of two or three verses; and one of the verses reads like
this:
“A breeze on the far horizon,
The infinite tender sky--
The ripe, rich tint of the corn fields
And the wild geese sailing high;
And all over upland and lowland
The charm of the golden-rod:
Some of us call it autumn
And others call it God.”
Do you catch the spirit of those beautiful lines? They tell (what
I should like to tell were I able) of the way God speaks to our
delinquents out on the farm through the hazy atmosphere and the golden
sunsets; they tell of the way God speaks to those poor fellows through
the growing and the ripening grains, and of the message that God sends
to them through the birds that sing and soar over their heads. It
suggests that beautiful thought of Browning’s:
“This world, as God has made it,
Always glitters. And knowing this is love,
And love is duty.”
We are aiming at something definite in the construction of our new
prison. We are going to try to give that large class of boys and
young men that come to prison for the first time one more opportunity
of going through life without being immured in a prison cell. In
the construction of our buildings, our domicile accommodation will
be largely of the dormitory type;--small dormitories, accommodating
14 beds, with a large, semi-circular bay window on one side which
will serve as a sitting room; attached to which dormitory will be a
completely equipped bedroom and dressing room. The corridor which
runs along the side where the officers will patrol is divided from
these rooms that I speak of by a glass partition, so that our men are
thoroughly under observation every hour of the day and night, and
there will be no opportunities whatever for some of those things that
penologists so much dread. In addition to that, we have a number of
single rooms and a number of cells; but in a prison which is destined
to accommodate 600, we are only putting in 40 cells. The men who behave
and who demonstrate that they can appreciate that dormitory life and
maintain the condition of it, we hope to give ultimately a single room;
and the men who fail to appreciate this dormitory life and don’t behave
as we wish them to will then be demoted into a cell; but we are going
to try, as I say, to get those boys through life, if possible, without
the cell. Will we succeed? I don’t know. I don’t know. We have our
critics; but this world will never be saved by the critics; it will
be saved by the dreamers. The history of humanity is the history of
indomitable hope. Emerson says that “Every thing is free to the man
that can grasp it;” that “He who despairs is wrong.”
In dealing with delinquents, it is the personal touch that tells. Human
nature craves for sympathy. Kingsley was once asked what the secret
of his joyous, buoyant life was; and his ready reply was: “I had a
friend.” Our Saviour was no exception to this rule; for as our Saviour
approached Gethsemane, he yearned for a friend whom he could rely upon
to wait and watch while he endured; and expressed it in that pathetic
request to the drowsy Peter and his sleepy comrades. When we see a very
simple duty staring us in the face in dealing with this class, we are
too prone to say, “Lord, here am I. Send him.” It is an easy matter
for a man of means to write his check, or give his cash; but it is an
entirely different thing to carry that gift to some poor fellow who is
down and out and sweeten it with the fragrance of personal kindness.
“Not what we give, but what we share;
The gift without the giver is bare.”
We have church service at our place every Sunday afternoon and
Wednesday afternoon; one day our preacher failed to materialize. The
men were in the chapel; and I did not wish to have them return to the
cells without saying something to them; as I could not preach I thought
I would do the next best thing, and I would read another fellow’s
sermon; only, I gave the other fellow credit for it. I was reading a
book just then that interested me very much; and I went down to the
office and got it, and I read the first chapter; and when I finished,
I asked if I should read more, and they said, “Yes, Warden.” I read
a second and a third chapter; I read as long as my voice would hold
out; and as I had finished, a man down in the audience said, “Won’t
you be kind enough to tell me the name of that book, and the author?”
I was very glad to have them ask the question; I told him. The next
morning when I was going through the prison industries, the officers
kept asking me what book I read, the previous day. I said, “Why do
you ask?” They said, “The men are all talking about it.” I sent down
town and got fifteen copies and sent it around among the cells, with
instructions that no one man could keep it for more than a week. When
we collected the books at the end of the first week, I found that a
great many men had taken paper and copied out portions of it. This was
practically a non-reading population. They had refused a lot of good
books we had put in our library which I had thought were fine, much to
my disappointment. Perhaps you would like to know the kind of book they
so much enjoyed; and, with your permission, I will just read you the
first page of the first chapter.
“Man has two Creators: his God, and himself. The first creator
furnishes him the raw material of his life and the laws of conformity
with which he can make that life what he will. His second creator,
himself, has marvelous powers he rarely realizes. It is what a man
makes of himself that counts. If a man fails in life he usually says,
I am as God made me. When he succeeds in life, he proudly proclaims
himself a self-made man. Man is placed into this world not as a
finality, but as a possibility. Man’s greatest enemy is himself. Man in
his weakness is the creature of circumstances; man in his strength is
the creator of circumstances. Whether he be victim or victor depends
largely on himself. Man is never truly great, merely for what he is,
but ever for what he may become.”
Now, that is pretty good meat. And that afternoon I was the one who
learned the great lesson; for I learned that if we approach this
subject in the right way we can waken, even in dormant minds, a
desire for good literature. And my little experience of the afternoon
revolutionized my method of dealing with the boys in this respect.
My time is up.
(A Voice: “Go on!”)
A MEMBER: Who is the author of that book?
DR. GILMOUR: Dr. Jordan, of Boston, is the author of that book, and
it is called “Self-Control.” If you hadn’t asked me that question I
would have thought I had missed my mission here to-night. Briefly and
hurriedly I have just tried to sketch some of the phases in dealing
with delinquency. Who are they for whom we should do these things?
What claim have they upon us? What is our relationship to them? Did
you ever hear the story of the Scotch girl, the one who was carrying a
crippled boy over a street-crossing in Edinburgh? A gentleman, seeing
her burden, hastened up to assist and sympathize with her; and the girl
looked up smiling and replied: “Ah, sir. I dinna mind it. He is my
brither!”