During the last twenty-five years there has been a general tendency to
draw sharp hard-and-fast dividing lines between the "corrigible" and the
"incorrigible" criminal. It has been assumed that a man only once
convicted of a crime may yet be amenable to reform, but that a second or
third conviction--convictions, not necessarily crimes--is proof that a
man is "incorrigible," that the criminal dye is set and the man should
therefore be permanently removed from society. This really does appear a
most sensible arrangement as we look down upon the upper side of the
proposition; to those who look up to it from below the appearance is
altogether different.
A distinguished professor in a law school has said: "If any person shall
be a third time convicted of _any crime, no matter of what nature_, he
should be imprisoned at hard labor for life." At a National Prison
Congress in 1886 another eminent professor thus indorsed this sentiment:
"I believe there is but one cure for this great and growing evil, and
this is the imprisonment for life of the criminal once pronounced
'incorrigible.'" Later the governor of my own State told me that he
would consider no petition for shortening the sentence of an "habitual
criminal." Any leniency of attitude was stigmatized as "rose-water
sentiment." And the heart of the community hardened itself against any
plea for the twice-convicted man. What fate he was consigned to was not
their affair so long as he was safely locked up.
In our eagerness for self-protection at any cost we lose sight of the
fact that the criminal problem is one of conditions quite as much as of
"cases." In our large cities, the great reservoirs of crime, we are but
reaping the harvest of centuries of evil in older civilizations, and in
our own civilization as well.
So far we have been dealing with effects more than with causes. Indeed,
our dealings with lawbreakers, from the hour of arrest to the hour of
discharge from prison have served to increase rather than to diminish
the causes of crime. True enough it is that thousands of our fellow men
have found life one great quicksand of criminal and prison experience in
which cause and effect became in time inextricably tangled.
And it sometimes happens that the twice-convicted man is in no way
responsible for his first conviction, as happened to James Hopkins, a
good boy reared in a New England family to a belief in God and respect
for our courts. He was earning his living honestly when he was arrested
on suspicion in Chicago and convicted of a burglary of which he knew
nothing. He knew nothing either of the wiles of the courts and depended
on his innocence as his defence. But the burglary was a daring one; some
one must be punished, no other culprit was captured, so Hopkins was sent
to one of our schools of crime supported by public taxation under the
name of penitentiaries. Pure homesickness simply overpowered the boy at
first. "Night after night I cried myself to sleep," he told me. His cell
happened to be on the top row where there was a window across the
corridor, and summer evenings he could look across out into a field so
like the field at home where he had played as a child. But the darkness
of the winter evening shut out every glimpse of anything associated with
home. He had not written his mother; he could not disgrace her with a
letter from a convict son. She had warned him of the dangers of the
city, but she had never dreamed of what those dangers really were. She
firmly believed that the courts were for the protection of the innocent,
and would she believe that a court of justice had sent an innocent man
to prison? He lost all faith in God and his heart hardened. Branded as a
criminal, a criminal he resolved to be; and when I met him twenty years
later he had a genuine criminal record as a scientific safe-blower.
In spite of his criminal career some of the roots of the good New
England stock from which he was descended cropped out. With me he was
the gentleman pure and simple, discussing courts and prisons in a manner
as impersonal as my own; and he was a man of intelligence and an
interesting talker. I had come in touch with Hopkins because I was at
the time planning the future of his young cell-mate and I wanted the
advice of the older man, as well as his assistance in preparing the
younger to meet the responsibilities and temptations of freedom; and a
better assistant I could not have had. Concerning his own future Hopkins
maintained discreet reserve and unbroken silence as to his inner life.
He had deliberately stifled a Puritan conscience; but I doubt if it was
completely silenced, for while the lines in his face indicated nothing
criminal nor dissipated it was the face of a man in whom hope and
ambition were forever dead, a face of unutterable sadness.[3]
I am free to admit that when I glance over the newspaper reports of
brutal outrages and horrible crimes my sympathy swings over wholly to
the injured party; I, too, feel as if no measure could be too severe for
the perpetrator of the crime. That there are human beings whose
confinement is demanded by public safety I do not question, but modern
scientific study is leading us to the conclusion that back of abnormal
crimes are abnormal physiological conditions or abnormal race
tendencies. And the "habitual criminal" is _not_ so designated because
of the nature of his crimes but because of the number of his infractions
of the law.
I might have concurred with the opinions of the learned professors were
it not that just when legislation in my own State was giving no quarter
to second and third offenders I was being led into the midst of this
submerged tenth of our prison population, and my loyalty to their cause
has been unswerving ever since.
"Have any of your 'habituals' permanently reformed?" I am asked.
They certainly have, more of them than even my optimism expected and
under circumstances when I have been amazed that their moral
determination did not break. In my preconceived opinion, the most
hopeless case I ever assisted surprised me by settling down, under
favorable environment, into an honest, self-supporting citizen; and we
may rest assured that he is guarding his boys from all knowledge of
criminal life.
After I came to understand how all the odds were against the penniless
one, scarred and crippled by repeated crimes and punishments, it was not
his past nor his future that interested me so deeply as _what was left
of the man_. I suppose I was always in search of that something which we
call the soul. And I sometimes found it where I least looked for
it--among the very dregs of convict life.
John Bryan stands out in clear relief in this connection. How well I
remember my first meeting with this man, who was then more than forty
years old, in broken health, serving a twenty-year sentence which he
could not possibly survive. He had no family, received no letters, was
utterly an outcast. Crime had been his "profession."[4] His face was not
brutal, but it was hard, guarded in expression and seamed with lines.
The facts of his existence he accepted apparently without remorse,
certainly without hope. This was life as he had made it, yes--but also
as he had found it. His friends had been men of his own kind, and,
judged by a standard of his own, he had respected them, trusted them,
and been loyal to them. I knew this well for I sought his acquaintance
hoping to obtain information supposed to be the missing link in a chain
of evidence upon which the fate of another man depended. I assured Bryan
that I would absolutely guard the safety of the man whose address I
wanted, but Bryan was uncompromising in his refusal to give it to me,
saying only: "Jenkins is a friend of mine. You can't induce me to give
him away. You may be sincere enough in your promises, but it's too
risky. I don't know you; but if I did you couldn't get this information
out of me." Knowing that "honor among thieves" is no fiction I respected
his attitude.
However, something in the man interested me, and moved to break in upon
the loneliness and desolation of his life I offered to send him
magazines and to answer any letters he might write me. Doubtless he
suspected some ulterior motive on my part, for in the few letters that
we exchanged I made little headway in acquaintance nor was a second
interview more satisfactory. Bryan was courteous--my prisoners were
always courteous to me--but it was evident that I stood for nothing in
his world. One day he wrote me that he did not care to continue our
correspondence, and did not desire another interview. Regretting only
that I had failed to touch a responsive chord in his nature I did not
pursue the acquaintance further.
Some time afterward, when in the prison hospital, I noticed the name
"John Bryan" over the door of one of the cells. Before I had time to
think John Bryan stood in the door with outstretched hand and a smile
of warmest welcome, saying:
"I am so glad to see you. Do come in and have a visit with me."
"But I thought you wanted never to see me again," I answered.
"It wasn't _you_ I wanted to shut out. It was the thought of the whole
dreadful outside world that lets us suffer so in here, and you were a
part of that world."
In a flash I understood the world of meaning in his words and during the
next hour, in this our last meeting, the seed of our friendship grew and
blossomed like the plants of the Orient under the hand of the magician.
It evidently had not dawned on him before that I, too, knew his world,
that I could understand his feeling about it.
For two years he had been an invalid and his world had now narrowed to
the "idle room," the hospital yard, and the hospital; his associates
incapacitated, sick or dying convicts; his only occupation waiting for
death. But he was given ample opportunity to study the character and the
fate of these sick and dying comrades. He made no allusion to his own
fate but told me how day after day his heart had been wrung with pity,
with "the agony of compassion" for these others.
He knew of instances where innocent men were imprisoned on outrageously
severe and unjust sentences, of men whose health was ruined and whose
lives were blighted at the hands of the State for some trifling
violation of the law; of cases where the sin of the culprit was white in
comparison with the sin of the State in evils inflicted in the name of
justice. He counted it a lighter sin to rob a man of a watch than to rob
a man of his manhood or his health. It was, indeed, in bitterness of
spirit that he regarded the courts and the churches which stood for
justice and religion, yet allowed these wrongs to multiply. His point of
View of the prison problem was quite the opposite of theirs.
Now, as I could have matched his score with cases of injustice, as my
heart, too, had been wrung with pity, when he realized that I believed
him and felt with him the last barrier between us was melted.
There were at that time few persons in my world who felt as I did on the
prison question, but in this heart suddenly opened to me I found many of
my own thoughts and feelings reflected, and we stood as friends on the
common ground of sympathy for suffering humanity.
Another surprise was awaiting me when I changed the subject by asking
Bryan what he was reading. It seemed that his starving heart had been
seeking sympathy and companionship in books. He had turned first to the
Greek philosophers, and in their philosophy and stoicism he seemed to
have found some strength for endurance; but it was in the great
religious teachers, those lovers of the poor, those pitiers of the
oppressed, Jesus Christ and Buddha, that he had found what he was really
seeking. He had been reading Renan's "Jesus," also Farrar's "Life of
Christ," as well as the New Testament.
"Buddha was great and good and so were some of the other religious
teachers," he said, "but Jesus Christ is better than all the rest." And
with that Friend of the friendless I left him.
Strange indeed it seemed how the criminal life appeared to have fallen
from him as a garment, and yet in our prison administration this man
stood as the very type of the "incorrigible." What his course of action
would have been had Bryan been given his freedom I should not care to
predict. Physically he was absolutely incapable of supporting himself
honestly, and he might have agreed with another who said to me: "Any man
of self-respect would rather steal than beg." There are those to whom no
bread is quite so bitter as the bread of charity. But I am certain that
the John Bryan who revealed himself to me in that last interview was the
_real_ man, the man who was going forward, apparently without fear, to
meet the judgment of his Maker.
A noted preacher once said to me: "Oh, give up this prison business.
It's too hard on you, too wearing and depressing." And I replied: "Not
all the preachers in the land could teach me spiritually what these
convicts are teaching me, or give me such faith in the ultimate destiny
of the human soul." Perhaps my experience has been exceptional, but it
was the older criminals, the men who had sowed their wild oats and come
to their senses, who most deepened my faith in human nature.
I am glad to quote in this connection the words of an experienced warden
of a large Eastern penitentiary, who says: "I have yet to find a case
where I believe that crime has been taught by older criminals to younger
ones. I believe, on the contrary, that the usual advice of the old
criminal to the boys is: 'See what crime has brought me to, and when you
get out of here behave yourselves.'"
My whole study of "old-timers" verifies this statement; moreover, I am
inclined to believe that in very many instances the criminal impulses
exhaust themselves shortly after the period of adolescence, when the
fever of antagonism to all restraint has run its course, so to say; and
I believe the time is coming when this branch of the subject will be
scientifically studied.
It is greatly to be regretted that the juvenile courts, now so efficient
in rescuing the young offender from the criminal ranks, had not begun
their work before the second or third offence had blotted hope from the
future of so many of the younger men in our penitentiaries; for the
indeterminate sentence under the board of pardons has done little to
mitigate the fate of those whose criminal records show previous
convictions.
Hitherto we have been dealing with crimes. But the time is at hand when
we shall deal with men.[5]
FOOTNOTES:
[3] We instinctively visualize "confirmed criminals" with faces
corresponding to their crimes. But our prejudices are often misleading.
I once handed to a group of prison commissioners the newspaper picture
of a crew of a leading Eastern university. The crew were in striped
suits and were assumed to be convicts, with the aid of a little
suggestion. It was interesting to see the confidence of the
commissioners as they pronounced one face after another "the regular
criminal type." The fact is that with one or two exceptions my
"habituals," properly clothed, might have passed as church members, some
of them even as theological students.
[4] I seldom heard the terms "habitual" or "incorrigible" used by men of
his class, but the "professionals" seemed to have a certain standing
with each other.
[5] For full discussion of this matter the reader is referred to
"Individualism in Punishment," by M. Salielles, one of the most valuable
contributions yet made to the study of penology. Also Sir James Barr's
"The Aim and Scope of Eugenics" demands the recognition of the
_individual_ in the criminal.