A PENOLOGICAL PILGRIMAGE.
One of the advantages that the itinerant policeman has over the
stationary officer is that he can inspect a large number of penal
institutions, and find out who, among the people he has to keep track
of, are shut up. The municipal officer may know that a certain
"professional" is out of his bailiwick, but unless he can place him
elsewhere he is never sure when or where he may turn up again. The
itinerant officer, on the other hand, can follow a man, and if he gets
into prison the officer knows it immediately. This is a very definite
gain in the police business, and it would be well if police forces
generally were given the benefit of it. There is a National Bureau of
Identification to which officers who are members may apply for
information in regard to any offender of whom there is a record, and the
institution is to be recommended to those who are connected with police
life, but voluntary information in regard to convicts sent to police
chiefs by prison wardens would also be helpful.
My interest in the lock-ups, jails, workhouses, and penitentiaries that
I visited on my travels was, in a measure, professional, but I was
mainly concerned in getting information in regard to their condition and
management, and in finding out to what extent they have a deterrent
effect on crime. All told, I inspected about thirty-five places of
detention and penal institutions, and they represent the best and worst
of their kind in the country. In criticising them I would not have it
understood that I hold the officials in charge necessarily responsible
for their condition--the taxpayers decide whether a community shall have
a truly modern prison or not; my purpose is merely to report what I saw,
and to comment objectively on my finding.
I visited more lock-ups than anything else. On reaching a town, I went
as soon as possible to the "calaboose" to see who were held there.
Sometimes the little prison was empty, and then again every cell would
be occupied, but in a week I generally saw from thirty to fifty inmates.
Mature men predominated, but women and boys were also to be found. The
women were invariably separated from the men by at least a cell wall,
but the boys, and I saw some not over ten years old, were thrown in with
the most hardened criminals. They were allowed to pass about among the
men in the lock-up corridor, and at night were shut up with them in the
cells. This is the worst feature of the lock-up system in the United
States. Very little effort is made in the smaller towns to separate the
young from the old, the hardened from the unhardened, and even in the
lock-ups of large cities a much more careful classification of the
inmates is necessary. The officials in charge of these places excuse the
policy now in vogue on the ground that there is not room enough to give
the boys better attention, and the taxpayers say that there is not
money enough in the community to build larger lock-ups. There is always
a reason of some sort for every blunder that is made, but as long as we
make our lock-ups "kindergartens of crime," as I once heard a criminal
call them, there is no excuse whatever to wonder why there are so many
offenders. It is a fashion, nowadays, to run to "the positive school" of
Italy and France for an explanation concerning the origin of the
criminal, to ask Signor Lombroso to diagnose the situation, but in this
country we need but make a round of our lock-ups to discover where the
fresh crop of offenders comes from. They generally get to the lock-up
from the "slum," where they may or may not have shown criminal
proclivities, but once in the lock-up and allowed to associate with the
old offenders, very few of them, indeed, escape the contaminating
influences brought to bear upon them.
The county jail may be described as the public school of crime. There
are some county jails in which a thorough classification of the inmates
is secured, but there is a very small number of these jails compared
with the hundreds in which young and old, first offenders and habitual
criminals, are all jumbled together. I can write from a full experience
in regard to our county jails, because I have not only had to visit them
as a police officer, but I have also had to "serve time" in them as a
tramp, and I know whereof I speak. Practically any boy, no matter what
his training has been, can be made a criminal if handed over to skilled
jail instructors, and every day in the year some lad, who, after all is
said, is really only mischievous, is committed by a magistrate or
justice of the peace to a county prison. There is no other place for the
magistrate to send the boy, if his parents demand his incarceration, and
the sheriff is not prepared to take him to the reform school
immediately, and so he is tossed into the general rag-bag of offenders
to take his chances. He is eventually sent to the reform school or house
of correction, where it is theoretically supposed that he is going to be
reformed; but it is a fact that the majority of professional offenders
in this country have generally spent a part of their youth in just such
institutions, where they were no more reformed than is a confirmed
jailbird on his release from a penitentiary. It is an extremely
difficult task to change any boy who goes to a reform school after a
long sitting in a county jail, and the wonder to me is that our
reformatories accomplish what they do. The superintendent of a
reformatory school in Colorado took me to task some years ago for making
the statement in public, in regard to tramps, that I have just made
about professional criminals,--that the majority of them have
experienced reform-school discipline,--and he said that it was a
thoroughly established fact that tramps keep out of such places. Of
course they keep out of them as full-grown men, as do also grown-up
thieves, but they are sent to them as youngsters, if apprehended for
some offence, whether they like it or not, and any one who is acquainted
with tramps and criminal life knows this to be true.
I make so much mention of boys in this paper because they are to be the
next generation of offenders, unless we succeed in rescuing them from a
criminal life while they are still susceptible to good influences; and
we are not doing this, or even seriously thinking about it, when we give
them professional thieves and convicted murderers as associates in
jails.
Various suggestions have been made by which the county jail system can
be improved, and I favour the one which recommends that the county
institution be abolished entirely, and that two or three well-equipped
houses of detention be made to suffice for an entire State. Such an
arrangement would not only be a great deal cheaper than the present
practice, but it would permit of a careful division of all the inmates.
Some of our workhouses are already run on this basis, several counties
contributing toward the support and maintenance of each. It would, of
course, be necessary to make a county's contributions toward the support
of a jail proportionate to its population, but there ought not to be any
great difficulty in arranging a satisfactory contract; and it is time,
anyhow, that we throw over some of our commercial notions about making
corrective and penal institutions pay their way. The thing to do is to
make them effective in checking crime, and if they are successful in
this very important particular, we can well afford to put a little money
in them without worrying about the financial returns.
I visited but one reformatory during my pilgrimage, but it was
representative of the latest of these institutions. I refer to the
Elmira, N. Y. type. The old and hardened "professional" calls these
places the high schools of crime, the next grade after the county jail,
but I do not agree with him in this classification. It is true, as he
says, that a number of offenders are committed to these institutions,
who ought to have been sent to the penitentiary, and it is particularly
disgusting to him to see educated men, with "pull" and friends, who have
been convicted of crimes for which less favoured offenders would receive
sentences to the State prison, relieved of the disgrace of going to
prison by being sent to the "kids' pen," as the reformatory is also
sometimes called; but, admitting all this, I believe that the modern
reformatory, when well managed, represents the best penological notions.
As in all prisons, however, where the inmates work on the association
basis, a great deal can be taught that is not in the curriculum of the
institution, and it is consequently no surprise to meet, in the open,
criminals who have "served time" in reformatories. In the reformatory
that I visited, it was a disappointment to me to find that men whose
faces, manner, and bearing proved them to be, if not actual
professionals, at least understudies of men who are, were mixed up in
the workshops with young fellows whom any one would have picked out; for
comparatively innocent offenders. I believe in the principle of
association in certain corrective institutions also, but I do not
approve of indiscriminate companionship. A natural reply to my criticism
is that it is hard to tell who are the old offenders, but a prison
official who knows his business, and has learned how to read faces and
to interpret actions, ought to be able to separate the "crook" from the
beginner in crime. It is a false notion to think that the former is
going to be helped by association with the latter. A prison is a prison,
no matter what euphemistic name it is called, and the old offender is
not going to allow any "mother's boy" fellow prisoner to set him an
example. In the criminal world, as in the larger world on which it
lives, the law of the survival of the fittest is operative, and the
fittest, as a rule, are those who are the most hardened; in prison and
out, it is they who really run things.
Another mistake made in the reformatory in question, according to my
view, is the age limit by which admission into the institution is
regulated. When a young man has reached his twenty-first year, and
commits a crime which calls for a prison sentence, I say let him have
it, no matter whose son he may be, provided the penitentiary authorities
observe the classification referred to above. If it can be proved
beyond a reasonable doubt that the young man is mentally deficient, and
not accountable for his actions, it is obvious that the State prison is
no place for him; but, otherwise, it is my observation that more good
than harm is done, if he is made to suffer the punishment that the law
demands. I realise that I am on debatable ground in taking this view of
such cases, but they are debatable largely because the different
opinions held in regard to them are the result of different
observations. Mine have been made mainly in the outdoor criminal world,
and I have not had a wide experience with the offender in confinement,
but I have met the pampered young criminal so often, and it has been so
plain that it was light punishment which trained him to stand the more
severe, that I have come to believe that a quick checking-up at the
start would have been more beneficial.
Of penitentiaries I saw two, each in a different State. One contained
about two thousand five hundred inmates, and the other about one
thousand eight hundred. It is not easy even for a police officer to
explore these institutions freely. I know of one warden who refuses to
let the police have photographs of criminals in his charge; he says that
"it is not nice to pass them around,"--but I managed to see a good deal
that I could not possibly have seen as an ordinary visitor, hurried
through by a guard.
As a general statement, it may be said that a penitentiary reflects the
warden's personality. There are rules to be observed and work to be
done, which have been arranged and planned for by the board of
directors, but the warden is the man with whom the prisoners have to
deal, and they look up to him as the principal authority in every-day
matters. His main anxiety is to get good conduct out of his charges, and
he has to experiment with various methods. Some wardens favour one
method and some another. One, for instance, will think that leniency and
kindness work best, while another will recommend whipping, the dungeon,
electricity, hot water, etc., for recalcitrant inmates. The idea of each
warden is that he wants things to go smoothly, and if they do not, he
has to straighten them out as best he can. All this is very interesting
from the warden's point of view, and it interested me also somewhat when
visiting the two penitentiaries; but my main endeavour was to try to
find out to what extent these institutions were lessening the number of
criminals in the communities which they served. A man may be as gentle
as a lamb while in durance, and the warden may pride himself on the good
conduct he is getting out of him, but how is he going to be when he has
his liberty once more? The cleverest criminal is usually the most docile
prisoner, and yet he takes up crime again as his profession after his
time has expired, and the penitentiary has been in his case merely a
house of detention. Excepting the death penalty, however, imprisonment
in a penitentiary is the final form of punishment that we have in this
country, and if it fails to check crime, either our criminals are
increasing out of proportion to our means for taking care of them, or we
do not administer the proper chastisement. From what I have been able
to see of our penitentiaries as a visitor, and have heard about them as
a fellow traveller with tramps, and incidentally with criminals, I am
inclined to accept the second conclusion. Crime has increased in this
country faster than the population, but in the older States there are
enough penal institutions to take care of the offenders, if they were
made to have the discouraging effect on criminals that similar
institutions have in Europe.
The late Austin Bidwell, an American offender who had a long experience
in an English prison, and who was a competent judge of the kind of
punishment that is the most deterrent, once said to me that he believed
that a short imprisonment, if made very severe, accomplished more than a
long imprisonment with comforts. And he added that he thought that in
the United States a mistake was made in giving criminals long sentences
to easy prisons. I hold more or less to the same view. Penologically, I
think that the punishment in vogue in Delaware, for certain offences,
is wiser and more to the point than that in any other State in the
Union. Punishment in prison ought not to be wholly retributive,--it has
been well called expiatory discipline,--but it ought to check crime, and
up to date there is no satisfactory evidence that our prisons are
achieving this end. In many of them the discipline is too lenient. At
one of the prisons I visited, two Sundays of the month are given up to a
lawn festival, which the prisoners' friends may attend. They bring lunch
baskets and join the prisoners in the prison garden, where they chat,
eat ice-cream, and drink lemonade, sold at a booth presided over by one
of the prisoners, and generally amuse themselves. It seemed to me that I
was attending a picnic. In a talk with the warden in regard to the
affair, he said that he found that such favours made the prisoners more
tractable.
In my humble opinion, a prison is not a place where favours of this
character need be expected or shown, and if good conduct can only be got
out of them by being "nice" to them after this fashion, they would
better be shut up in their cells until they can learn to obey.
In conclusion, I desire to put two queries: Why is it that the cleverest
criminals in our prisons are frequently to be found taking their ease in
the prison hospitals and "insane wards," and how does it come that men
who belong to the class of prisoners who ought to wear the "stripes" are
allowed the clothes which ordinarily are only given to prisoners who
have passed the "stripe" period of their incarceration? In one
penitentiary I found a politician and rich physician favoured in the
latter particular, and in the hospital and insane ward of another,
enjoying themselves in rocking-chairs and a private garden, I found more
professional thieves than in any other part of the institution. I ask
the questions in all innocence, but there are those who claim that
correct answers to them would disclose some very bad practices in prison
management.