ROUTINE

I lay in the upper bunk. It was a six-foot drop to the cement floor

below. The mattress, though irregularly dented and bulged, was upon the

whole convex, and not over two feet wide. A vertical fence or bastion,

six or eight inches high, along the outer brink of this precipice would

have averted the danger of rolling off in the night; but nothing of the

sort had been provided. One must remember not to roll, even in the

nightmare. Convicts educate the subliminal self to a surprising degree,

and do not fall victims to this trap as often as one would expect; but

occasionally one of them forgets, and down he comes, sometimes getting

bruised only, but generally with a broken bone or so. I do not have

nightmares, and I lay prone, gripping the sides of the mattress with my

knees, as if it were a bucking broncho. So I journeyed, Mazeppa-wise,

through the abysses of that first night, and was not unhorsed.

Light glimmered obscurely through the bars of the cell from the

night-burner below. Odd sounds broke out at intervals. Half suppressed

coughs, sudden, brief cries, irregular wheezings and gurglings, due to

defective plumbing, occasionally a few muttered words; then a man in an

upper tier began to moan and groan dismally--a negro with a colic,

perhaps. Long, dead silences would be interrupted by inexplicable

noises. In the dead vast and middle of the night the prisoner in the

cell over mine began to pace up and down his floor, eighteen inches

above my head. Four paces one way, four back, over and over

interminably. Who was he? What was he thinking about? Something seemed

to goad him intolerably; that forging to and fro, like a tormented

pendulum with a soul in it, gave a stifling impression, as of one

tortured for air and space. How many years must he endure--how many

centuries? Was his wife dying, his children abandoned? Up and down he

padded; had he committed some ugly crime, for which he longed to

atone--but prison is not atonement! Had his conviction been unjust, and

was he raging impotently against injustice? Let him not rage too loudly,

for there was a guard yonder, indifferent to tortured souls, but

licensed to stop noises. A prison is a prison, not a sanitarium for

diseased crooks. But if the world could hear those footfalls, and

interpret their significance, how long would prisons last? A jail at

night is a strange place--eight hundred men packed in together, each

terrifyingly alone!

Some of the earlier workers had been roused at six or five o'clock or

earlier; but for the majority the six-thirty bell was the reveille. It

screeched violently and was silent. The watching devils or the guardian

angels of the night vanished, and up got the eight hundred members of

the Gentlemen's Country Club, to live as best they might through one day

more; coughing, hawking, spitting, murmuring--but all with a sense of

repression in it, the life-sapping drug of fear in its origin, but long

since become a mechanical habit with most of them. Eight hundred

criminals, herded beneath one roof to be cured of their crimes by

indifferent or threatening and hostile task-masters and irresponsible

discipline-mongers, and by association with one another--a régimen of

hell to extirpate deviltry! The twentieth century solution of the

problem of evil, unaltered in principle after thousands of years!

Civilization has progressed wonderfully, but always with this

death-house on its back. And the death-house gets bigger and more

populous every year. Reformers, exhorters, Christian Endeavorers,

humanitarians, Salvation Armies, social reformers, penologists,

scientific experimentalists with surgical apparatus, together with

parole laws, indeterminate sentences, commutations, pardons, not to

speak of a good warden here and there and a kind guard--all toiling and

tinkering to make prisons better, to sweep them, to air them, to instil

religion and education, to supply work and exercise and to pay

wages--and all the while the tide of criminals gets larger and the

accommodations for them less adequate. What can be the matter? Are we to

end by discovering that everybody is a criminal, and ripe for jail? or

shall we be driven to the realization that the fundamental idea of

imprisonment for crime is itself the most monstrous of crimes--and try

something else? What else is there to be tried? Are we to leave

criminals to their liberty among the community?

There will be time enough to discuss these riddles. It is time now to

get into your prison suit, with its "U.S.P." on the back of the coat,

and your number; its "U.S.P." on the back of the shirt, with your

number; its "U.S.P." on the front of your trousers-legs, and your

number; your canvas shoes and your vizored cap. But beware of putting on

the cap within prison walls, lest the guard report you to the captain,

the captain to the deputy, the deputy, if necessary, to the warden, and

ye be cast into the inner darkness. There shall there be thin slices of

bread, and water, and gnashing of teeth.

With a guard acting as cowboy, shepherd dog, or convict compeller, we

shuffled in a continuous line down the iron stairways and across the

hall into the dining room, a cement-floored barred-window desert sown

with tables in rows, seating eight men each; guards with clubs standing

at coigns of vantage or pacing up and down the aisles, and in one

window, commanding the whole room, a guard with a loaded rifle, licensed

to shoot down any misbehaver. At no time and in no part of this model

jail are you out of range of a loaded rifle, in the hands of men quick

and skilful in their use. They are the sauce for meals and the

encouragement to labor. But casualties seldom happen; when they do, they

are hushed up, and the body of the man is buried next day in the prison

graveyard.

I will postpone to a future chapter the subject of the dining room and

what is done there. As we filed out, I noticed "MERRY CHRISTMAS," and

"HAPPY NEW YEAR" emblazoned in green above the door. It was to remind

us, perhaps, of what we lost by being criminals. As we debouched into

the inner hall, separated from the corridor leading to the warden's

office, and to freedom, by a steel-barred gate, we saw a guard seated in

a chair with a rifle across his knees. Rats in a steel trap might have

mutinied with as much hope of success as we at that juncture; but the

guard had to be used for something, and convicts must not be allowed to

forget that they are in prison. At all events we forbore to mutiny, and

were rounded into our cells and locked up for half an hour, during which

we might smoke Golden Grain tobacco, fifty per cent, dirt, and the rest

the refuse of the weed, supplied to the prison by contract; or we might

read, or comb our hair, or do calisthenics, or invoke the Divine

blessing upon the labors of the coming day.

The interval is really provided as a measure of security; many of the

prisoners do their work outside the main buildings; but it is deemed

unsafe to unlock the outer gates while the whole body of prisoners is on

the move. They might make a concerted rush, and get out in the yard, to

be shot down in detail by the guards in the towers.

Mr. Sidney Ormund, to be sure, a special writer on the _Atlanta

Constitution_, makes the following statement in an issue of the paper

shortly after I had left the jail and recorded my opinion that "Warden

Moyer was unfit."--"It is safe to assume," Mr. Ormund affirms, "that if

all the prisoners at the Atlanta federal penitentiary were life-termers

and each had a voice in the selection of a warden to serve for a like

term, William Moyer, the present incumbent--a man who has done more to

make prison life bearable than any man in this country--would be

selected without a murmur of opposition."

That is a fine, explicit statement of Mr. Ormund's, such as any warden

in dire trouble and perplexity might be glad and proud to have a

faithful friend make concerning him. It has no strings to it, and is

followed up by similar sentiments throughout the article. But why, in

that case, are the gates into the yard locked, and the man with the

rifle provided? If Warden Moyer renders life at Atlanta prison more

bearable than at any other in the country, what conceivable grounds are

there that his affectionate inmates should wish to run away from him?

That warmhearted and big-brained gentleman would hardly put the

Government to the expense of supplying safeguards against a contingency

which his own tender and lovable nature renders unthinkable, even if the

thirty-four foot wall outside does not. There seems to be a non-sequitur

here, which Mr. Ormund, perhaps, may feel inspired to clear up. When he

has done that, it will be time to call his attention to a score or more

other incongruities which a residence of only six or seven months in

this humane institution has been sufficient to disclose.

At the expiration of the half hour, we laid aside our pipes, or our

prayer-books, and were ready for the activities of the day. The others

were detailed to their regular work; but my friend and I had our final

rites of initiation still to undergo. A young official, whose

countenance readily if not habitually assumed a sullen and menacing

expression, beckoned to us with his club, and we followed him downstairs

to an elevator, in which he ascended to the upper floor, while we

pursued him upward by way of the staircase. The cap of Mr. Ivy--such was

his poetic given name--was worn on the extreme rear projection of his

head, and he used his club in place of speech; not that he actually

pummeled us with it, but by wavings and pointings he made it indicate

his will, and kept us mindful how easily we might afford him a pretext

for putting it to its more normal use. Mr. Ivy, as I afterward learned,

was a Southerner by birth, as are the majority of the guards in the

penitentiary, and may have been, like most of them, a graduate from the

Army. In reporting the case of Private George, of the U.S. Army, now a

prisoner in stripes in the Leavenworth Penitentiary, it was stated by

Mr. Gilson Gardner that "The common soldier in the U.S. Army has no

rights. When he enlists, he gives up the guarantees of the Constitution,

the protection of jury trial, and even his right to petition for a

redress of grievances. He may be unjustly charged, secretly tried and

cruelly punished, and he has no remedy."

As regards unjust, cruel and despotic treatment, the status of the U.S.

soldier and of a penitentiary convict are on all fours, though of course

the former has the advantage of belonging to a service traditionally

honorable, of open air service and exercise in all parts of the country

or abroad, of reasonable freedom when off duty, and of whatever glory

and advancement campaigning against an enemy may bring him. But we may

readily perceive that a soldier who has felt the rough edge of

discipline and finds his health broken, perhaps, by indiscretions

incident to Army life, might say to himself, on receiving his discharge,

"I am bred to no trade, I am good for nothing, but I should like to get

back at somebody for the humiliations and hardships I have endured. Why

not take a job as a prison guard; the pay is only $70 a month, but

instead of being the under dog, I shall be on top, licensed to bully and

belabor to my heart's content, to insult, humiliate and berate, and to

get away with it unscathed!"

For my part, I can imagine no reason more plausible to explain the large

number of ex-soldiers among prison guards, and their conduct in that

position. With some shining exceptions, they are petty tyrants of the

worst type, sulky, sneering, malignant, brutal, and liars and

treacherous into the bargain. Their mode of life in a jail, immersed in

that sinister and unnatural atmosphere, hating and hated, with no sane

or absorbing occupation, encouraged by the jail customs to play the part

of spies and false witnesses, ignorant and demoralized,--tends to create

evil tendencies and to confirm such as exist. No worse originally than

the average of men, they are made baser and more savage by their

circumstances. And no man able to hold his own in the free life and

competition of the outside world, would stoop to accept a position as

guard in a jail.

I know nothing of the private biography of Mr. Ivy, and it is quite

possible that he may have possessed endearing traits which he had no

opportunity to manifest in our intercourse. It would be foolish and

futile for the ends I have in view in this writing to cite or comment on

individuals, save as they may illustrate the point under discussion. But

I am the less reluctant to animadvert upon this or that employee of the

penitentiary, because I feel satisfied that, so far from compromising

him with the higher prison authorities, abuse from me would only

recommend him to their favor.--Mr. Ivy, such as he was, conducted us to

a bench outside a closed door, already partly occupied by three or four

half naked convicts, white and black. We gathered from his gestures of

head and club that we were to remove our upper garments and our shoes

and stockings, and place them on the floor in front of us. It was a cold

morning, and the floor was of limestone. We obeyed instructions, and for

the next twenty minutes sat there, objects of pardonable curiosity or

amusement to our fellow benchers and to passers-by in the hall, and with

nothing to keep us warm but the genial influences of the occasion.

Finally, each in his turn, we were passed through the door into a sort

of office, with clerks and Dr. Weaver, the prison physician, at $1500 a

year,--a tall, wooden faced young medical school graduate, who

cultivated a skeptical expression and a jeering intonation of speech. He

and an assistant put us through a physical examination, and took a

series of measurements, all of which were entered by the clerks in

ledgers. Our photographs were then taken, and afterward (it was the next

day, but may as well be told here) we were further identified by taking

the impressions of our finger prints, and by a second photograph without

our mustaches--these having been removed in the meantime. We were now

convicts full-fledged and published, and our pictures were disseminated

to every prison and penitentiary in the country, to be enshrined in the

rogues' gallery and studied by all police officials.

This may sound silly, in the case of two men much nearer three score and

ten than three score, and untrained to gain a livelihood by crime.

Bertillon measurements were not needed to identify us, nor photographs

without mustaches. But, in the first place, prison rules apply to the

mass, not to individuals; and secondly, it has been resolved by the

wisdom of our rulers that a man who reverts to crime after one or more

convictions shall be more severely punished than a first offender.

Nobody stops to question the logic of this ostensibly prudent provision.

But the convict knows that his chances of making an honest livelihood

after a conviction are many times less than before. Spies are on his

trail at every turn, and if ever he succeed in securing legitimate

employment, an officer of the secret service presently informs his

employer that he has a jail-bird on his pay-roll. Naturally he is

promptly paid off and dismissed, and he may go through the same

experience as often as he is foolish enough to try it. But even if he be

inactive, he is not safe--far from it. He is known to the police and

liable to arrest at any moment as a vagrant, without visible means of

support. Nor is this all. Suppose him to be recorded in prison archives

as a safe-blower, and that a safe is blown somewhere and the culprits

escape. The credit of the police department demands that an arrest be

made, if not of the person or persons actually guilty of this particular

crime, then of some one who may be plausibly represented as guilty of

it. Accordingly, our friend is apprehended and charged with the crime;

there is his record, and it is easy to secure "evidence" that he was on

the spot at the time, though he may have been, in fact, a hundred or two

miles away from it. Detectives are experts at providing this sort of

evidence; and it frequently happens that they get the corroboration of

the victim himself by assuring him that, if he will confess, the judge

will let him off with a light sentence, whereas if he prove "stubborn,"

it will go hard with him--a matter of ten years or so. Ten years in jail

for something you did not do! Six months or a year if you confess!

Perjury is wrong no doubt; but, were you who read this placed in that

predicament, which horn of the dilemma would you select? If you have

never served an actual jail term, you might virtuously hesitate; but it

is the world against a mustard seed that you wouldn't hesitate if you

had. The crisp of the joke is, however,--and of course it serves you

right,--that the judge, after all, gives you the ten years, and that

means life, for you will never be long out of jail afterward. As I write

this, I have in mind several instances of it among my personal

acquaintances at Atlanta.

If then our convict, upon his release, cannot keep himself in any honest

employment, and cannot avoid arrest even when he is doing nothing at

all, good or bad, it seems plain that he must either hunt out a quiet

place where he may starve to death before the officer can arrest him for

starving, or commit suicide in some more sudden and active manner, or he

must accept the opportunity which is always at hand in "revert to a

career of crime," as the saying is. Ex-convicts are often still human

enough to be averse from starvation, and even from easier forms of

self-destruction; and they yield to the temptation to steal. Like the

idiots they are, they may hope to make a big strike and get away with

it, and in some remote or foreign place, under another name, live out an

unobserved and blameless existence.

Thereupon there is rejoicing in the ranks of the secret service; armed

with their bertillons, they swoop upon their quarry and bear him away.

"May it please the Court, this man is an incorrigible; not deterred by

previous punishment, immediately upon release he plunges again into

crime; he should receive the limit!" The Court thinks so too; the limit

is imposed, and the malefactor is led out to the living death which will

end with death in reality. And now will some righteous and competent

person arise and proclaim that this man's yielding to his first

temptation to crime did NOT involve greater moral turpitude than did his

yielding to the second temptation or to the third--greater or at least

as great--and that therefore the severer sentence is justified? His

first misdeed was prompted by hunger, ignorance, drunkenness, or

cupidity; the others were the fruit of desperation itself--and how many

of you have known what desperation means?

You perceive that this story proceeds by digressions; such value as it

may have it will owe mainly to such digressions, so I will not apologize

for them. My friend and I, our ordeal completed, were returned to our

cells to think it over. The walls and ceiling of the cells are painted a

light gray color; it is against the rules, except by special indulgence,

to affix pictures or other objects to them. The "coddling of criminals,"

so widely advertised, does not include permission to give a homelike

look to their perennial quarters; it is more conducive to moral reform

that they should contemplate painted steel. There was one camp-stool in

our cell; later, cells were supplied with two wooden chairs, the seats

sloping at such an angle with the backs as rendered sitting a penance;

cushions were not provided. I remember seeing similar contrivances in

old English cathedrals, relics of a day when monks had to be kept from

falling asleep during the religious rites. We might also sit upon the

lower bunk, bent forward in such an attitude as would avert bumping our

heads against the upper one. Each convict, early in his sojourn, has a

religious interview with the Chaplain, who presents him with a copy of

the New Testament--not also of the Old; you may remember that the latter

records certain regrettable incidents of a sinister and immoral sort,

calculated, I presume, to shock the tender budding impulses toward

regeneration of prison readers. One may get other books of a secular

kind from the library, upon written application; and prisoners of the

first grade may subscribe for newspapers that contain no objectionable

matter. But only a small proportion of the inmates is addicted to

reading, and the opportunities for doing so are limited. And as months

and years go by, the desolation and sterility of the place weigh heavier

upon the spirit, the mind reduces its radius and grows inert, and

stimulants stronger than current fiction are needed to rouse it. Prison,

prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate screechings

and clangings of whistles and gongs; the endless filings to and fro, in

and out; the stealthy insolence of guards, or their treacherous

good-fellowship; the abstracted or menacing gaze of the higher

officials; the dreariness, aimlessness, and sometimes the severity of

the daily labor; the sullen threat of the loaded rifles; the hollow,

echoing spaces that shut out hope; the thought of the stifling stench of

the dungeons beneath the pavements, hidden from all save the victims,

whose very existence is officially denied; the closing of all personal

communication with the outer world, except such as commends itself to

the whims of the official censors; this morgue of human beings still

alive--the impenetrable stupidity, futility and outrage of it

all--slowly or not so slowly unbalance the mind and corrupt the nature.

Meanwhile, newspapers clamor against the coddling of criminals, and the

too indulgent officials smile sadly and protest that they have not the

heart to be stern. "Coddling criminals"--the alliteration makes it roll

pleasantly off the tongue!

But do I forget the many indulgences given to prisoners--and so

profusely celebrated in every mention publicly made of Atlanta

Penitentiary? Let me name them once more. Saturday being a non-working

day, it used to be the custom to lock the prisoners in their cells from

Saturday morning till Monday morning--a custom still followed at many

penitentiaries; for how could they be controlled if not split up into

working gangs, and thus prevented from conspiring to mutiny? It is one

of the obsessions of prison authorities that the prisoners are severally

and collectively a sort of wild beast, always straining at the leash,

and ready at the least opportunity to break forth in wild and deadly

disorder. It is obviously expedient, too, to impress the public with

this conviction, and therefore, in part, we have the clubs, rifles, and

general parade of watchfulness. As a matter of fact, meanwhile, nothing

is more easy to handle than a prisonful of convicts, if the most

elementary tact be used; and they are eagerly grateful for the smallest

unforced and spontaneous act of kindness.

Until about eighteen months ago, however, severe restrictions were in

vogue, and the warden declared that it was his belief and policy that

men in prison should be taught by precept and illustration to regard

themselves as dead to the world; that they should be held practically

incommunicado, no visitors, letters at most but once a month, no

conversation between prisoners--silence, solitude, suffocation in this

terrible quicksand of jail for months, years, or a lifetime, at the

mercy of men to whom mercy is a jest. Such a régimen is still in force

at many jails, and when combined with contract labor, nothing in the

age-long history of penal imprisonment shows a blacker record. It is

advocated as the best way to induce men to reform, and become, after

release, useful and industrious members of the community.

A couple of years or so ago, Atlanta was visited by an Attorney-General,

who was not prepared for what he saw, nor had the things he should not

have seen been removed from sight before he saw them. He demanded some

improvements on the spot, and soon after a new deputy warden was

appointed--a young man, of kindly disposition, though weak, not inured

as yet to the conventional brutalities, and with a backing in Washington

which gave him unusual powers. Among good things which he instituted and

insisted on were--two and a half hours outdoors on Saturday afternoons,

for baseball and general relaxation; conversation at meals; music at

dinner by a band made up from convicts; regular bi-weekly letters, with

extra letters allowed between times by special request to orderly

convicts; concerts or vaudeville performances every month or so in the

chapel, by professionals.

Insanity became less frequent after this, and the general health of the

men improved. They had something to look forward to, and to look back

to, and the freedom of the baseball concession led to no disorders;

something like hope and cheerfulness began to appear, like green blades

of grass in spring. The warden cleverly seized the opportunity to take

credit to himself for all the improvements, and to circulate

industriously in the local papers the praise of the model penitentiary.

But neither did he fail to take advantage of the new situation to

tighten his grasp upon the reins of control. The majority of jails, in

addition to the ordinary spy system operated by officials, organize a

supplementary one composed of convicts themselves--stool

pigeons--certain carefully selected prisoners, who are rewarded for

treachery to their fellows by various indulgences and secret liberties.

The principle is detestable, and has evil effects. The stool pigeons

themselves are of course the basest members of the community, and the

other prisoners, soon learning to suspect them, come at last to a

miserable distrust of one another--for the comrade apparently most

sincere may be at heart only a more artful traitor. In this, they play

into the officials' hands, whose theory of government is fear, and who

find aid to themselves in the mutual misgivings and hatreds of their

charges.

Evidently, the relaxations of the baseball afternoons afforded a capital

opportunity to the stool pigeons, and the results were soon apparent.

The spies, in order to curry favor with their employers, reported not

actual infringements of discipline only, but guessed at what might be,

and even invented what was not, often by way of retaliation against

personal enemies. I shall return to this subject hereafter; enough, for

the present, that it counterbalanced in a degree the physical benefits

of the new concessions by engendering mental disquiets and animosities

among the entire population, and especially inflaming them against the

officials. I am not myself sure, for example, whether or not one or

another of my most intimate acquaintances among the prisoners may not

all the while have been on the watch to betray me behind my back. For

aught I know, it may have been to some such sordid treachery that I owe

the refusal of my parole, when it became due. And any respect for

constituted prison authorities, upheld by such means, was impossible.

When the coddling of prisoners involves feeding them on poison, they

would prefer Spartan severity and fair warning.