Walls and bars

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By

VICTOR DEBS

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WALLS AND BARS

OF THE
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WALLS AND BARS

By
EUGENE VICTOR DEBS

5

SOCIALIST PARTY

2653 Washington Blvd.

Chicago, Illinois

Price SI. 50

Copyright, 1927, by
SOCIALIST PARTY

Press of
John F. Higgins

376 W, Monroe St.
Chicago, lU.

A WOED.

The pen of the author of this book has been
forever silenced by death. To the suffering soula
who vision life only within gray stone walls,
through cold steel bars, whose days are sunless,
whose nights are starless, from whose melancholy
hearts hope has fled — to these, all of them victims
of a cruel and inhuman social system, this volume
is re-dedicated in tender and loving commemo-
ration of the writer by his brother and fellow-
worker, Theodore Debs.

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* 945470

SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS.

I.

The Relation of Society to the Convict.

My prison experience includes three county
jails, one state penitentiary, and one federal
prison. — I have no personal grievance to air.
Special favors were never accorded me, nor would
I accept any. — Introduced to jail life in Chicago,
1894. — Eecognized my kinship with prisoners
everywhere. — Prison problem is co-related with
poverty which is a social disease. — Any of us may
go to prison at any time for breaking the law or
upholding it. — My spirit was never imprisoned,

n.

The Prison as an Incubator of Crime.

The boy's first offense. — Convicted, manacled
and taken to prison. — How he is received and
what happens to him. — How he feels about it. —
He is thrown into contact with hardened crim-
inals; the degenerating process begins. — A few
days later the change is apparent. — He acquires a
new vocabulary. — His self-respect begins to
wane. — He has taken the^ first lesson in the school
of vice and crime from which he is to graduate
as a finished product at the expiration of his
term.

m.

I Become U. S. Convict, No. 9653.

Transferred from Moundsville penitentiary in
charge of an United States Marshal and three

deputies. — How I was received in Atlanta and my
first impressions. — The Bertillon system is ap-
plied.— Stripped, bathed and put in prison garb.
— In the office of the deputy warden. — My intro-
duction to the warden. — Assigned to duty in the
clothing room. — I begin to serve my sentence.

IV.

Sharing the Lot of Les Miserables.

My cell and cell mates. — The prison routine. —
Prison food and how it is served. — My first in-
fraction of prison rules; how it resulted and the
outcome. — Caged fourteen hours daily. — Getting
in touch with my fellow prisoners in the stock-
ade.

V.

Transferred From My Cell to the Hospital.

Mingling with the diseased, the maimed and
the infirm. — The drug addicts and their treat-
ment.— Hospital guard clubs a convict. — The
blood-covered victim and the dismissal of the
guard. — The dying and the dead. — Eeading and
writing their letters. — My voluntary ministra-
tions to the suffering. — The moral atmosphere
changes.

VI.

Visitors and Visiting.

Privileges and the lack of them. — Restrictions
upon visits. — A guard sits between the convict
and his visitor to overhear. — A state delegation
pays me a call. — The curiosity of casual visitors
to see me is denied. — My visitors included Mel-
ville E. Stone, Samuel Gompers, Lincoln Steffens,

Norman Hapgood, Clarence Darrow, and other
prominent personages.

vn.

The 1920 Campaign for President.

Unanimous nomination by the New York con-
vention.— The notification committee appears. —
Eeception in the warden's office. — Addressing the
voters through weekly statements issued from
prison. — The inmates are enthusiastic and as-
sure the candidate he will carry the prison unani-
mously.— Receiving the returns on election night
in the warden's office. — I concede Harding's elec-
tion to waiting reporters.

VIII.

A Christmas Eve Reception.

My fellow prisoners spread a bounteous table
of their gifts and make me their guest of honor. —
President Wilson denies Attorney General Pal-
mer's recommendation for my release, Christmas,
1920. — The beautiful aspect of prison fellowship.
— My comment on President Wilson results in the
suspension of my writing and visiting privileges,
and I am placed incommunicado. — The instant
and widespread protest, that followed, forces
revocation of the order.

IX.

Leaving the Prison.

Sensational demonstration at parting and
agitation of the inmates. Leaving them behind
overcame me as with a sense of desertion and
guilt. — Pallid faces pressed hard against the
bars of that living tomb. — Outside the portals and

midway across the reservation, the warden and
his deputy stood aghast as there came from the
prison a demonstration repeated over and over. —
Never had the rules been thus violated at the de-
parture of an inmate. — Tearful, haunted faces,
swept by emotion, forgot for the moment hard
and forbidding prison rules, giving a last roar of
emotion as our auto was lost in the distance.

X.

General Prison Conditions.

The guns on the walls. — The clubs in the hands
of the guards. — Brutal, stupid and unnecessary
rules. — Guards with clubs preside over devotion-
al services. — Inmates at the mercy of prison
guards. — Work of convicts grudgingly done. —
Stool pigeons play their nefarious part. — The
maddening monotony and its demoralizing re-
sults.

XI.

Poverty Populates the Prison.

With but few exceptions the poor go to prison.
— The moneyless man in court. — The law's delay.
— Holding the accused in jail under graft system
of petty officials. — In the pillory of a courtroom.
— Foulness of county jails and contamination of
youthful first offenders. — Perversion of natural
sex instincts and resultant vice and immorality.

xn.

Creating the Criminal.

How the lack of money presumes guilt in ad-
vance of trial. — Poverty the deadly nemesis on the
track of accused. — The process of creating the
criminal. — The arrest, trial and conviction as now

conducted, and the sentence that follows as now
served, almost irrevocably doom the victim to
physical and moral wreckage. — Why the prison
as a reformatory is not only a flat failure, but a
promotor of that which it blindly and stupidly
attempts to suppress.

xni.

How I Would Manage the Prison.

The civil service farce in relation to the guards.
— The prison under control of absent politicians
who have never seen it. — How the drug traffic
thrives. — Conflicting rules and a dozen petty
prisons behind the same walls. — The planless,
purposeless and aimless way of doing things. —
Eobbing the prisoners and starving their fami-
lies.— The redeeming power of kindness as a sub-
stitute for the brutalizing power of cruelty. — The
human element actually applied in Atlanta prison
and its amazing results. — A challenge to the pow-
ers and personalities that control jails, prisons
and penitentiaries in the United States.

XIV.

Capitalism and Crime.

Capitalism and crime almost synonymous
terms. — Private ownership of the means of the
common life at bottom of prison evil. — Capital-
ism must have prisons to protect itself from the V
criminals it has created. — Proud of its prisons
which fitly symbolize the character of its institu-
tions.— The letter of a convict forty-eight years
behind the bars.

XV.

Poverty and the Pbison.

Intimate relation between poor-house and
prison. — Poverty the common lot of the great
mass of mankind. — It is poverty from which the
slums, the red light district, the asylums, the
jails and prisons are mainly recruited. — No ex-
cuse today for widespread poverty. — A barbarous
judge recommends re-establishment of the whip-
ping post. — ^Abolish the social system that makes
the prison necessary and populates it with the
victims of poverty.

XVI.

Socialism and the Prison.

Socialism and prison antagonistic terms. — So-
cialism will abolish the prison as it is today by
removing its cause. — Capitalism and crime have
had their day and must go. — The working class to
become the sovereign rulers of the world. — The
triumph of socialism will mean the liberation of
humanity throughout the world.

LEAVING THE PRISON.
XVII.

Prison Labor, Its Effects on Industry
AND Trade.

Address before the Nineteenth Century Club at
Delmonico's, New York City, March 21st, 1899.

xvni.

Studies Behind Prison Walls.
An article reproduced by the courtesy of its

publishers from the Century Magazine for July,
1922.

XIX.

Wasting Life.

Eeproduced from The World Tomorrow for
August, 1922, by the courtesy of its publishers.

''The social environment is the cultural me-
dium of criminality; the criminal is the microbe —
an element that becomes important only when it
finds a medium which will cause it to ferment.
Every society has the criminals it deserves^'.

— Lascussagne.

MY PEISON CEEED.

While there is a lower class I am in it;
While there is a criminal element I am of it;
While there 's a soul in prison I am not free.

BEYOND.

Beyond these walls,

Sweet Freedom calls;
In accents clear and brave she speaks,
And lo ! my spirit scales the peaks.

Beyond these bars,

I see the stars;
God's glittering heralds beckon me —
My soul is winged; Behold, I'm free!

To the countless thousands of my
brothers and sisters who have suf-
fered the cruel and pitiless torture
and degradation of imprisonment
in the jails, penitentiaries and
other barbarous and brutalizing
penal institutions of capitalism un-
der our much-vaunted Christian
civilization, and who in consequence
now bear the ineffaceable brand of
convicts and criminals, this volume
is dedicated with affection and de-
votion by one of their number.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND APPRECIATION

The deep, sincere and grateful acknowledg-
ment due the many friends and comrades, near
and far, not only in this country but beyond the
seas, who followed me so faithfully through the
very prison doors and who sympathized with all
their loyal hearts and literally shared every hour
of my imprisonment, can never be expressed in
words. By day and by night these devoted com-
rades were with me, so near that I could feel the
touch of their loving hands and hear their loyal
heart-beats in my prison cell.

From all directions, by mail and by wire, there
came the message of comfort and good cheer from
men, women and children, thousands upon thou-
sands of them, the number increasing with the
passing days to attest the growing sympathy and
loyalty of the host of steadfast devotees.

How lightly the sentence I was serving rested
upon me with such a noble legion of loving com-
rades to cheer and sustain me every moment of
my imprisonment ! To them I owe a debt of love
and gratitude that never can be paid. They all
but entered the prison and served my sentence
for me ; they not only sent me their precious and
heartening messages, food prepared with their
own dear hands, wearing apparel, and other gifts
as testimonials of their faith and constancy, but

16 WALLS AlTD BAB6

they came in person over long and wearied
stretches of travel to give aid and comfort and
affectionate ministration in every way in their
power.

The tender regard, the loving care, the unfail-
ing devotion shown to my wife to relieve her
loneliness and to enable her to bear with fortitude
the trials of my prison days; the aid and as-
sistance so freely and generously given to my
brother in meeting party demands and in the dis-
charge of official duties in my absence, constitute
a chapter of loving service and self-consecration,
a manifestation of the utter divinity of human
comradeship that can not be traced upon the
written page but must remain forever a hallowed
memory.

To these dear friends and comrades, beloved
and appreciated beyond expression, I now make
grateful acknowledgement and give thanks with
all my heart. I can not here attempt to call them
all by name, but vividly do they appear before me
in their radiant and inspiring comradeship, and to
each and all of them do I give hail and greeting
and pledge my love, my gratitude and my unre-
laxing fidelity to the cause they so bravely sus-
tained and vindicated during my prison days.

To these brave, noble hearts I owe my life and
liberation. But for their loyal devotion and un-
tiring agitation my life would have gone out be-
hind prison walls.

And now in turn I sense the solemn duty to

ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND APPBECIATION 17

join and persist in the demand for the release of
all other comrades still immured in dungeon cells
until the last prisoner of the class war has secured
his liberation.

INTRODUCTION.

While still an inmate of the United States
Penitentiary at Atlanta, Georgia, the suggestion
was made to me by interested publishers that
upon my release 1 write a series of articles de-
scribing my prison experience. The sugges-
tion, coming from various sources, appealed to
me for the reason that I saw in it an oppor-
tunity to give the general public certain infor-
mation in regard to the prison, based upon my
personal observation and experience, that I
hoped might result in some beneficial changes in
the management of prisons and in the treatment
of their inmates.

While serving my term at Atlanta I saw so
much that offended me, as being needlessly cruel
and abusive; I came in direct contact with so
many of the victims of prison mismanagement
and its harsh and inhuman regulations, that I
resolved upon my release to espouse the cause
of these unfortunates and do what was in my
power to put an end to the wrongs and abuses
of which they were the victims under the present
system.

If there are men and women anywhere among
us who need to have their condition looked into
in an enlightened, sympathetic and helpful way;
if there are any whose very helplessness should

INTEODUCTION 19

excite our interest, to say nothing of our com-
passion as human beings, they are the inmates of
our jails, prisons and penitentiaries, hidden
from our view by grim walls, who suffer in
silence, and whose cries are not permitted to reach
our ears.

The inmates of prisons are not the irretriev-
ably vicious and depraved element they are
commonly believed to be, but upon the average
they are like ourselves, and it is more often their
misfortune than their crime that is responsible
for their plight. If these prisoners were treated
as they should be, with due regard to all the
circumstances surrounding their cases, a very
great majority of them, instead of being dis-
eased, crazed and wrecked morally and physic-
ally under a cruel and degrading prison system,
would be reclaimed and restored to societv, the
better, not the worse, for their experience.

In this, society as well as the individual would
be the gainer, and to that extent crime in the
community would cease.

Shortly after my release negotiations were
concluded with the Bell Syndicate of New York
for the publication of a series of prison articles
to appear simultaneously in newspapers sub-
scribing for them throughout the country. These
articles, written for the capitalist-owned dailies,
had to be prepared with a distinct reserve to
insure their publication. This concession had to
be made to avoid peremptory refusal of any

20 WALLS AND BAES

dieariiig at all through the public press of the
abuses and crimes which cried to heaven from
behind prison walls.

It was therefore made a specific condition by
the Syndicate and a guarantee to the papers
subscribing for the articles that they should con-
tain no ^ ^ propaganda ". The reason for this
precaution on the part of the capitalist press is
perfectly obvious and self-evident. Any intelli-
gent understanding of the prison system as it
now exists, based upon a true knowledge of the
graft and corruption which prevail in its manage-
ment, and of the appalling vice and immorality,
cruelty and crime for which the prison is re-
sponsible and of which the inmates are the help-
less victims, would inevitably mean the im-
peachment of our smug and self-complacent capi-
talist society at the bar of civilization, and the
utter condemnation of the capitalist system of
which the prison is a necessary adjunct, and of
which these rich and powerful papers are the
official organs and mouthpieces.

It was this that these papers had in mind when
the assurance had to be given them that my arti-
cles would contain no *^ propaganda '\

They did not want, nor do they now, the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
about our corrupt, brutalizing and criminal-
breeding prison system to be known to the peo-
ple, for they know not only that such a revelation
would shock and scandalize the country but that

INTBODUCTION 21

it would expose and condemn the impoverishing,
enslaving and crime-inciting social system of
which they are the organs and beneficiaries.

When the opening article appeared the fol-
lowing bracketed notice was placed at its head :

(**The views expressed in this article and in
the others of this series are those of Eugene
V. Debs and not of the Bell Syndicate, Inc.
Mr. Debs has agreed not to insert any political
propaganda into the article/')

Well does the capitalist press know that the
naked truth about our foul prison system would
be the deadliest kind of ^ Apolitical propaganda''
against the capitalist system which created and
is responsible for that festering evil, and against
the equally foul political parties which uphold
capitalism and perpetuate its corrupt and crim-
inal misrule.

The capitalist dailies were desirous enough to
have the articles, knowing they would create in-
terest and have a wide reading, thus proving a
feature of value to them, but tiiey wanted them
toned down, emasculated in fact, to render them
harmless as possible and at the same time secure
them against the danger they so mortally dread
of containing other than their own ^^ political
propaganda". They insist upon a monopoly of
their own brand, and such is their faith in its
efficacy, that they will tolerate no encroach-
ment upon their vested propaganda interests.

22 WALLS AND BARS

Soon after the first article appeared complaints
were made from various quarters that there was
*' propaganda'^ in the series. This justified
them in expunging entire paragraphs and finally
in not publishing at all the closing articles of
the series.

The first eight and the tenth to the thirteenth
chapters in this book constitute the series of
twelve articles given to the daily press through
the Bell Syndicate and are here reprinted through
their courtesy.

In this connection it should be said that but
nine of the twelve articles furnished the press
were published, and in some instances the papers
struck out parts and paragraphs they did not
like on the ground that they were ^ ' propaganda ' '
or ^^too radical", thus withholding from their
readers the very points of information and the
very vital passages to which the writer was most
anxious to give publicity for the end he had in
view.

To the twelve original articles there have been
added three chapters for the purpose not only of
amplifying the treatment of the subject, but that
the writer might discuss more critically and
fundamentally the vital phases of the prison
question, including especially the cause of and the
responsibility for this crying evil, than was pos-
sible in the newspaper articles.

There has also been added an Address before
the Nineteenth Century Club at Delmonico's,

INTEODUCTiON 23

New York City, on Prison; Labor, Its Effects on
Industry and Trade, March 21st., 1899; an arti-
cle contributed to the Century Magazine for July,
1922, and another to The World Tomorrow for
August, 1922, and reproduced here by the cour-
tesy of those periodicals.

In the latter chapters I have undertaken to
show that the prison in our modern life is essen-
tially a capitalistic institution, an inherent and
inseparable part of the social and economic sys-
tem under which the mass of mankind are ruth-
lessly exploited and kept in an impoverished
state, as a result of which the struggle for ex-
istence, cruel and relentless at best, drives thou-
sands of its victims into the commission of of-
fenses which they are forced to expiate in the
dungeons provided for them by their masters.

The prison as a rule, to which there are few
exceptions, is for the poor.

The owning and ruling class hold the keys of
the prison the same as they do of the mill and
mine. They are the keepers of both and their
exploited slaves are the inmates and victims of
both.

As long as the people are satisfied with capital-
ism they will have to bear its consequences in the
prison sentences imposed upon increasing num-
bers of them, and also bear the poverty and mis-
ery which fall to the lot of those who toil and pro-
duce the wealth of the nation.

The prison at present is at best a monumental

24 WALLS AND BABS

evil and a buming shame to society. It ought not
merely to be reformed but abolished as an in-
stitution for the punishment and degradation of
imfortunate human beings.

EUGENE V. DEBS.
Terre Haute, Indiana, July 1st., 1926.

CHAPTER I.

The Eelation of Society to the Convict.

A prison is a cross section of society in which
every human strain is clearly revealed. An
average prison, and its inmates, in point of
character, intelligence and habits, will compare
favorably with any similar number of persons
outside of prison walls.

I believe that my enemies, as well as my
friends, will concede to me the right to arrive
at some conclusions with respect to prisons and
prisoners by virtue of my personal experience,
for I have been an inmate of three county jails,
one state jDrison and one federal penitentiary.
A total of almost four vears of mv life has been
spent behind the bars as a common prisoner; but
an experience of such a nature cannot be meas-
ured in point of years. It is measured by the
capacity to see, to feel and to comprehend the
social significance and the human import of the
prison in its relation to society.

In the very beginning I desire to stress the
point that I have no personal grievance to air as
a result of my imprisonment. I was never per-
sonally mistreated, and no man was ever brutal
to me. On the other hand, during my prison
years I was treated uniformly with a peculiar

26 WALLS AND BAES

personal kindliness by my fellow-prisoners, and
not infrequently by officials. I do not mean to
imply that any special favors were ever accorded
me. I never requested nor would I accept any-
thing that could not be obtained on the same
basis by the humblest prisoner. I realized that I
was a convict, and as such I chose to share the
lot of those around me on the same rigorous
terms that were imposed upon all.

It is true that I have taken an active part in
public affairs for the past forty years. In a
consecutive period of that length a man is bound
to acquire a reputation of one kind or another.
My adversaries and I are alike perfectly satis-
fied with the sort of reputation they have given
me. A man should take to himself no discom-
fort from an opinion expressed or implied by
his adversary, but it is difficult, and often-times
humiliating to attempt to justify the kindness of
one's friends. When my enemies do not indulge
in calumny I find it exceedingly difficult to an-
swer their charges against me. In fact, I am
guilty of believing in a broader humanity and
a nobler civilization. I am guilty also of being
opposed to force and violence. I am guilty of
believing that the human race can be humanized
and enriched in every spiritual inference through
the saner and more beneficent processes of peace-
ful persuasion applied to material problems
rather than through wars, riots and bloodshed.
I went to prison because I was guilty of believing

RELATION OF SOCIETY TO THE CONVICT 27

these things. I have dedicated my life to these
beliefs and shall continue to embrace them to
the end.

My first prison experience occurred in 1894
when, as president of the American Railway
Union I was locked up in the Cook County Jail,
Chicago, because of my activities in the great
railroad strike that was in full force at that
time. I was given a cell occupied by five other
men. It was infested with vermin, and sewer
rats scurried back and forth over the floors of
that human cesspool in such numbers that it was
almost impossible for me to place my feet on
the stone floor. Those rats were nearly as big
as cats, and vicious. I recall a deputy jailer
passing one day with a fox-terrier. I asked him
to please leave his dog in my cell for a little
while so that the rat population might thereby be
reduced. He agreed, and the dog was locked up
with us, but not for long, for when two or three
sewer rats appeared the terrier let out such an
appealing howl that the jailer came and saved
him from being devoured.

I recall seeing my fellow inmates of Cook
County Jail stripping themselves to their waists
to scratch the bites inflicted by all manner of
nameless vermin, and when they were through
the blood would trickle down their bare bodies in
tiny red rivulets. Such was the torture suffered
by these men who as yet had been convicted of no
crime, but who were awaiting trial. I was given

28 WALLS AND BABS

a cell that a guard took the pains to tell me had
been occupied by Prendergast, who assassinated
Mayor Carter H. Harrison. He showed me the
bloody rope with which Prendergast had been
hanged and intimated with apparent glee spark-
ling in his eyes that the same fate awaited me.
His intimation was perhaps predicated upon what
he read in the newspapers of that period, for my
associates and I were accused of every conceiv-
able crime in connection with that historic strike.
I was shown the cells that had been occupied by
the Chicago anarchists who were hanged, and was
told that the gallows awaited the man in this
countiy who strove to better the living conditions
of his fellowmen.

Such was my introduction to prison life. I
can never forget the sobbing and screaming that
I heard, while in Cook County Jail, from the
fifty or more women prisoners who were there.
From that moment I felt my kinship with every
human being in prison, and I made a solemn res-
olution with myself that if ever the time came
and I could be of any assistance to those nn-
fortunate souls, I would embrace the opportunity
with every ounce of my strength. I felt myself
on the same human level with those Chicago
prisoners. I was not one whit better than they.
I felt that they had done the best they could with
their physical and mental equipment to improve
their sad lot in life, just as I had employed my
physical and mental equipment in the service

0^ THE
JNIYERSIT ' TF ILLIM^IF

RELATION OF SOCIETY TO THE CONVICT 29

of those about me, to whom I was responsible,
whose lot I shared, — and the energy expended had
landed us both in jail. There we were on a level
with each other.

With my associate officers of the American
Eailway Union I was transferred to the McHenry
County Jail, Woodstock, Illinois, where I served
a six months' sentence in 1895 for contempt of
court in connection with the federal proceedings
that grew out of the Pullman strike in 1894. My as-
sociates served three months, but my time was
doubled because the federal judges considered
me a dangerous man and a menace to society.
In the years that intervened some national at-
tention was paid to me because I happened to
have been named a presidential candidate in sev-
eral successive camiDaigns.

But there was no real rejoicing from the in-
fluential and powerful side of our national life
until June, 1918, when I was arrested by Depart-
ment of Justice agents in Cleveland for a speech
that I had delivered in Canton, Ohio. I was taken
to the Cuyahoga County Jail, and when the in-
mates heard that I was in prison with them there
was a mild to-do about it, and they congratulated
me through their cells. A deputy observed the
fraternity that had sprung up, and I was re-
moved to a more remote comer. Just after I re-
tired that Sunday midnight I heard a voice call-
ing my name through a small aperture and in-
quiring if I were asleep. I replied no.

30 WALLS AND BABS

**Well, you've been nominated for Congress
from the Fifth District in Indiana. Good luck
to you!'^ he said.

When a jury in the federal court in Cleveland
found me guilty of violating the Espionage Law,
through a speech delivered in Canton on June
16, 1918, Judge Westenhaver sentenced me to
serve ten years in the West Virginia State Pen-
itentiary, at Moundsville. This prison had en-
tered into an agreement with the government to
receive and hold federal prisoners for the sum
of forty cents per day per prisoner. On June 2,
1919, the State Board of Control wrote a letter
to the Federal Superintendent of Prisons com-
plaining that my presence had cost the state $500
a month for extra guards and requested that the
government send more federal prisoners to
Moundsville to meet this expense. The govern-
ment could not see its way clear to do this, since
it was claimed there was plenty of room at At-
lanta, and if, as the State Board of Control
averred, I was a liability rather than an asset
to the State, the government would transfer me
to its own federal prison at Atlanta, which it did
on June 13, 1919, exactly two months after the
date on which I began to serve my ten years im-
prisonment— a sentence which was communted
by President Warren G. Harding on Christmas
day, 1922.

I was aware of a marvelous change that came
over me during and immediately after my first

RELATION" OF SOCIETY TO THE CONVICT 31

incarceration. Before that time I had looked
upon prisons and prisoners as a rather sad affair,
;biit a condition that somehow could not be rem-
edied. It was not until I was a prisoner myself
that I realized, and fully comprehended, the prison
problem and the responsibility that, in the last
analysis, falls directly upon society itself.

The prison problem is directly co-related with
poverty, and poverty as we see it today is es-
sentially a social disease. It is a cancerous
growth in a vulnerable spot of the social system.
There should be no poverty among hard-working
people. Those who produce should have, but we
know that those who produce the most — that is,
those who work hardest, and at the most difficult
and most menial tasks, have the least. But of
this I shall have more to say. After all, the
purpose of these chapters is to set forth the
prison problem as one of the most vital concerns
of present day society. A prison is an institution
to which any of us may go at any time. Some of
us go to prison for breaking the law, and some of
US for upholding and abiding by the Constitution
to which the law is supposed to adhere. Some
go to prison for killing their fellowmen, and
others for believing that murder is a violation of
one of the Commandments. Some go to prison
for stealing, and others for believing that a better
system can be provided and maintained than one
that makes it necessary for a man to steal in order
to live.

32 WALLS AND BAES

The prison has always been a part of human
society. It has always been deemed an essential
factor in organized society. The prison has its
place and its purpose in every civilized nation.
It is only in uncivilized places that you will not
find the prison. Man is the only animal that
constructs a cage for his neighbor and puts him
in it. To punish by imprisonment, involving
torture in every conceivable form, is a most
tragic phase in the annals of mankind. The
ancient idea was that the more cruel the punish-
ment the more certain the reformation. This
idea, fortunately, has to a great extent receded
into the limbo of savagery whence it sprang. We
now know that brutality iDegets brutality, and we
know that through the centuries there has been
a steady modification of discipline and method in
the treatment of prisoners. I will concede that
the prison today is not nearly as barbarous as
it was in the past, but there is yet room for vast
improvement, and it is for the purpose of causing
to be corrected some of the crying evils that
obtain in present day prisons and making pos-
sible such changes in our penal system as will
mitigate the unnecessary suffering of the help-
less and unfortunate inmates that I set myself
the task of writing these articles before I turn my
attention to anything else.

It has been demonstrated beyond cavil that the
more favorable prison conditions are to the in-
mates, the better is the result for society. We

BELATION OF SOCIETY TO THE CONVICT 33

should bear in mind that few men go to prison
for life, and the force that swept them into prison
sweeps them out again, and they must go back
into the social stream and fight for a living. I
have heard people refer to the ^* criminal coun-
tenance ' '. I never saw one. Any man or woman
looks like a criminal behind bars. Criminality is
often a state of mind created by circumstances
or conditions which a person has no power to
control or direct; he may be swamped by over-
whelming influences that promise but one avenue
to peace of mind; in sheer desperation the dis-
tressed victim may choose the one way, only to
find he has broken the law — and at the end of
the tape loom the turrets of the prison. Once a
convict always a convict. That is one brand that
is never outworn by time.

How many people in your community would be
out of prison if they would frankly confess their
sins against society and the law were enforced
against them"?

How many lash and accuse themselves of
nameless and unnumbered crimes for which there
is no punishment save the torment visited upon
the individual conscience! Yet, they who so ac-
cuse themselves, assuming there exist reasons to
warrant accusation, would never admit to them-
selves the possession of a criminal countenance.
In Atlanta Prison I made it a point to seek out
those men that were called '^bad''. I found the
men, but I did not find them bad. They responded

34 WALLS AND BARS

to kindness with, the simplicity of a child. In no
other institution on the face of the earth are men
so sensitive as those who are caged in prison. They
are ofttimes terror-stricken; they do not see the
years ahead which may be full of promise, they
see only the walls and the steel bars that separate
them from their loved ones. I never saw those
bars nor the walls in the nearly three years that
I spent in Atlanta. I was never conscious of
being a prisoner. If I had had that consciousness
it would have been tantamount to an admission
of guilt, which I never attached to myself.

It was because I was oblivious of the prison as
a thing that held my body under restraint that I
was able to let my spirit soar and commune with
the friends of freedom everywhere. The in-
trinsic me was never in prison. No matter what
might have happened to me I would still have
been at large in the spirit. Many years ago,
when I made my choice of what life had to offer,
I realized, saw plainly, that the route I had
chosen would be shadowed somewhere by the steel
bars of a prison gate. I accepted it, and under-
stood it perfectly. I consider that the years I
spent in prison were necessary to complete my
particular education for the part that I am per-
mitted to play in human affairs. I would cer-
tainly not exchange that experience, if I could,
to be President of the United States, although
some people indulge the erroneous belief that I

KELATION OF SOCIETY TO THE COITVICT 35

have coveted that office in several political cam-
paigns.

The time will come when the prison as we now
know it will disappear, and the hospital and
asylums and farm will take its place. In that
day we shall have succeeded in taking the jail out
of man as well as taking man out of jail.

Think of sending a man out from prison and
into the world with a shoddy suit of clothes that
is recognized by every detective as a prison gar-
ment, a pair of paper shoes, a hat that will
shrink to half its size when it rains, a railroad
ticket, a ^ve dollar bill and seven cents car-
fare ! Bear in mind that the railroad ticket does
not necessarily take a man back into the bosom
of his family, but to the place where he was con-
victed of crime. In other words a prisoner, after
he has served his sentence, goes back to the scene
of his crime. Society's resiDonsibility ends there
— so it thinks. But does it? I say not. With the
prison system what it is, with my knowledge of
what it does to men after they get into prison,
and with the contempt with which society regards
them after they come out, the wonder is not that
we have periodical crime waves in times of
economic and industrial depression, but the won-
der is that the social system is not constantly in
convulsions as a result of the desperate deeds of
the thousands of men and women who pour in
and pour out of our jails and prisons in never
ending streams of human misery and suffering.

36 WALLS AND BAKS

But society lias managed to protect itself
against the revenge of tlie prisoner by dehuman-
izing him while he is in prison. The process is
slow, by degrees, like polluted water trickling
from the slimy mouth of a corroded and en-
crusted spout — but it is a sure process. When a
man has remained in prison over a certain length
of time his spirit is doomed. He is stripped of
his manhood. He is fearful and afraid. Pie has
not been redeemed. He has been crucified. He
has not reformed. He has become a roving ani-
mal casting about for prey, and too weak to seize
it. He is often too weak to live even by the law
of the fang and the claw. He is not acceptable
even in the jungle of human life, for the denizens
of the wilderness demand strength and braverj^
as the price and tax of admission.

Withal, a prison is a most optimistic institu-
tion. Every man somehow believes that he can
**beaf his sentence. He relies always upon the
*' technical poinf which he thinks has been over-
looked by his lawyers. He sometimes imagines
that fond friends are busily working in his be-
half on the outside. But in a little while the
bubble breaks, disillusion appears, the letters
from home become fewer and fewer, and the pris-
oner in tears of desperation resigns himself to
his lot. Society has won in him an abiding
enemy. If, perchance, he is not wholly broken
by the wrecking process by the time his sentence

RELATIOIT OF SOCIETY TO THE CONVICT 37

is served, he may seek to strike back. In either
case society has lost. ^""^

I do not know how many prisoners came to me
with their letters soaked in tears. They sought
my advice. They believed I could help them over
the rough edges. I could do nothing but listen
and offer them my kindness and counsel. They
would stop me in the corridors, and on my way
to the mess room and say: ^'Mr. Debs, I want to
get a minute with you to tell you about my case".
Or, ''Mr. Debs, will you read this letter from my
wife; she says she can't stand the gaff any long-
er'\ Or, "Mr. Debs, my daughter has gone on
the town; what in God's name can you do about
it?" What could I do about it? I could only
pray with all my heart for strength to contribute
toward the re-arrangement of human affairs so
that this needless suffering might be abolished.
Two or three concrete cases will suffice as ex-
amples of the suffering that I saw.

Jenkins, but that is not his name, was a rail-
road man. Aged, 35. Married and six children;
the oldest a daughter, aged 16 years. His wages
were too small to support his family in decency.
He broke into a freight car in interstate com-
merce. Sentenced to five years in Atlanta. He
received a letter a little while before his term
expired telling him that his daughter had been
seduced and was in the **red light" district.
This man came to me with his tears and swore he
would spend the rest of his life tracking down

38 WALLS AND BAES

the man wlio ruined his daughter, and, upon
finding him, he would kill him. For days I sought
that man out and talked with him, and persuaded
him against his rash program. His wife stopped
writing to him. She had found an easier, but a
sadder, way of solving her economic problems.
His home was completely broken up by the time
he got out of prison.

Another prisoner who had been a small trades-
man, married and the father of eight children,
also broke into a freight car. It was his first
offence. He got five years. He showed me a
letter from his wife saying there was no food in
the house and no shoes for the children. The
landlord had threatened them with eviction.
That man was thirsting for revenge. Society
had robbed his family of the breadwinner. The
mother had too many children to leave them and
work herself. If society deprives a family of
their provider should it not provide for the
family? It would have been more humane to
have sent the whole family to prison.

Another young man, aged 25, showed me a let-
ter from his wife. He was married a little while
before he was convicted. His wife was pregnant
and was living with the prisoner's invalid mother.
She had written to him saying that unless she got
relief from somewhere both herself and his
mother had made up their minds to commit sui-
cide. They were destitute. They had been re-

RELATION OF SOCIETY TO THE CONVICT 39

fused further credit. They could endure the mis-
ery no longer.

Many men attempt suicide in prison. One
of the most damaging influences in prison life is
the long sentence. It produces a reaction in the
heart and mind of the man who receives it that
defeats its intended purpose.

Every prison of which I have any knowledge
is a breeding place for evil, an incubator for
crime. This is especially true about the influence
of the prison upon the youth and young man.
Of him I shall write in my next article.

CHAPTER 11.

The Pkison as an Incubatob of Crime.

The boy who is arrested for the first time
charged with an offence against the law, con-
stitutes one of the most vital and portentous
phases of the prison problem. He may be entire-
ly innocent, but this does not save him from go-
ing to jail and have a jail record fastened upon
him as an unending stigma.

If he happens to be a poor boy, as is most fre-
quently the case, he may be kept in jail, and
often is, for an indefinite period, notwithstanding
the constitutional guarantees of a speedy trial.
Very often this delay occurs through the manipu-
lation of the sheriff who derives a revenue from
feeding prisoners and keeping them in the county
jail. Thus, the sheriff's income is enlarged. It
is a notorious fact that prisoners by hundreds
all over the country are kept in jails, and their
trials are delayed or postponed because the
sheriff and others derive a direct income thereby
under a contract with the county for feeding
prisoners.

The scandalous effects of this pernicious ar-
rangement are apparent in the miserable food
given to prisoners in the average county jail;
helpless and untried boys and young men, pes-

PEISON AS AN INCUBATOR OF CRIME 41

sibly innocent, are kept in jail to their physical
and moral undoing.

Just here it may be pertinent to observe that
the average county jail is an absolutely unfit
place in which to lodge any human being, how-
ever low his social status may be. As these lines
are written, this charge is confirmed in the report
of a state commission condemning the jails of
Indiana as unsanitary, foul and disease-breeding,
wholly unfit for human occupation. But if every
state in the union were to appoint a commission
to investigate its jails and prisons the conclusion
would be the same as that reached by the Indiana
body.

We must bear in mind that the boy or young
man who is put in the toils is usually poor, and
his friends are without any considerable influ-
ence in the community. It may be that his par-
ents have had to devote every minute of their
time to the proposition of making an uncertain
living; the boy and his brothers and sisters, if
he has any, are neglected ; they do not receive the
proper attention in the home that is the right of
every growing child. Their education is often
neglected for the sufficient reason that their la-
bor power, such as it is, is required to help main-
tain what passes for a home, but which is often
a shack, a lair, a place in which mother and
father and their brood come to lay their tired and
weary bodies after the day's work is done. Such
an atmosphere is not conducive to the sweeter

42 WALLS AND BAKS

amenities of life, but begets a sad, sordid and
drab existence, out of which all hope, some day,
to climb.

If the boy be a spirited lad he will rebel
against the conditions that obtain at home, the
significance of which he does not in the least per-
ceive. If, in this trying period of his young man-,
hood, he had at least someone who would extend
the helping hand, speak the kindly word, and give
the encouraging embrace, the boy might respond
to these beneficent influences and direct his steps
into avenues of useful citizenship. But up to
this moment society has not been collectively in-
terested in alleviating the conditions that make
for the so-called criminal. Society does appear
to be highly indignant when the boy or young man
rebels and strikes back in the only way that he
knows how to strike — in the way that he has been
taught by the social conditions in which he lives.
The policeman, the sheriff and the judge do pos-
sess intelligence enough to see the fact, but what
they do not see is the impulse in the boy to live,
which is before the fact, and the consequence of
their own blindness which comes in due time after
the fact.

I do not know if I should go to the length of
saying with the poet that **no hell is so black as
the court that sentences man to it", but I have no
hesitancy in declaring that no social system is so
stupid as the one that sows the seeds of vice and
crime and later becomes purple with indignation

PEISON AS AN INCUBATOR OF CEIMB 43

and horror when the crop is ripe for picking.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap I

It may be unfortunate and a bit disconcerting
that the inexorable law of compensation must
forever operate in the affairs of society, for if it
could be repealed, or even suspended for a time,
mankind might be spared the unpleasantness of
gazing upon some of the human manifestations
that are wrought, willy-nilly, against the inten-
tions of most of us, who have, I take it, a more or
less generous regard for our fellow man.

Holding men in jail week after week, monthi
after month, as is commonly the case, is not only
one of the inexcusable vices of the present system
of administering the law, but is directly respon-
sible for debauching the manhood of the victims
especially the young and those of maturer age
who have committed their first offence.

If, finally, upon trial, persons so held are found
to be innocent of the charges against them, or if
the cases are dismissed for want of evidence upon
which to convict them, or other reasons, an irre-
parable injury has been done them by society,
not only in point of moral contamination, but in
branding them as jail birds, the record of which
is ineffaceable and might as well be stamped
upon their foreheads. That record will follow
them through every avenue and lane of life and
will serve to convict them in advance of any
charge that any malevolent person might subse-
quently bring against them.

44 WALLS AND BAKS

The most vicious phase of all in this connection
is the fact that if the victim is finally convicted
after lying and festering in jail for three months,
six months, or even a year or more, the time thus
served is not allowed to count in his prison sen-
tence, which has to be served in full in addition
to the time spent in the county jail.

In the light of these flagrant abuses of our
helpless fellow beings, what else can the prison
be considered than a breeder of vice, immorality
and disease, and condemned as an incubator for
crime ?

Think of a boy 13, or 14 years of age, perhaps
wrongly accused, in such a place ; among the con-
firmed and hardened criminals of all types, learn-
ing their language, and absorbing their moral
perversions, and witnessing their spiritual decay !

How does such a boy feel, and what must be his
reaction to such a rude shock to his young life!
I am sure I know, for I have been with him. I
have seen his fear-stricken countenance, felt his
trembling hand in mine, and heard his troubled
heart-beat.

Society, and those who function for it in the
name of the law should pause long and consider
well before putting the boy in jail for the first
time, — especially the boy who has not the few
dollars that are sometimes necessary to keep him
out of jail. That boy may, by such initiation into
the ways of law and justice, be started upon a

PEISON AS AN INCUBATOE OF CBIME 45

career of reprisal for Trhicli society may pay
dearly, perhaps with life itself in the end.

Every community should have at least as much
interest in the condition and management of its
jail as it pretends to have in its schoolhouse, and
as it certainly has in its center of amusement and
entertainment.

The jail, after all, indifferent or scornful as
we may be to the fact, is not only an integral part
of the social fabric, but is a darkened room sepa-
rated only by a shallow door from the rest of the
apartments in the community house. If pesti-
lence prevails there, if moral miasma issues forth
from that cesspool the community is to just that
extent contaminated and imperilled.

The abuses of the prison system, and the
crimes against criminals in the perverted name of
law and order, are as constantly visited upon the
community responsible for them as a devastating
plague follows in the wake of disease and death-
dealing germs.

Every community should look into its jail, find
out who is there and why, how the prisoners are
fed, and if they are held for purposes of graft
that finds its way into the pockets of the petty
politicians, the chief of whom, in this case is the
sheriff of the county. The community should in-
sist that the men held in its jail be either tried
or released, for every hour that a man is held in
jail he is a liability, not an asset, to the commun-
ity which pays the tax that is levied against it to

46 WALLS AND BABS

feed and shelter its erring members. From the
purely selfish, monetary standpoint, if not from
the broader social questions raised, society at
large, and each component part of society, should
be concerned in this problem.

From the standpoint of the erring boy, the
young man, and the first offender the prison
problem is not the last rung of the social ladder
that he must mount, but the first one. Shall he
be branded with the flaming torch that writes in
scarlet letters the word ^^Convicf across his
brow, and condemned to a fugitive existence for
the remainder of his days because he chanced to
be unfortunate either through the manner of
birth, or through circumstances that he could not
control, or because of direful conditions with
which he could not cope with his poor physicial
or material equipment? For good or for bad, is
he not an inevitable product of the social system?
And should he be doomed at the first crossroad
in his young life because society had failed to
prepare for him a kindlier reception at his birth,
and ignored him thereafter, except as it might
exploit whatever brawn or cunning that he pos-
sessed.

Youthful and first offenders are also the legiti-
mate prey of unscrupulous lawyers, the hangers-
on of police courts, who seek to extract every dol-
lar the accused can beg or borrow, and who all
the while know that the track is clear between his
so-called client and the penitentiary. Time with-

PEISON AS AN INCUBATOB OF CRIME 47

out number this type of lawyer keeps the prisoner
in a county jail under the pretext given to the
court that he is not ready for trial, that there is
more evidence to be obtained for his client, when
as a matter of fact the mercenary lawyer in his
craven heart knows he is seeking, not for evi-
dence with which to liberate the defenceless vic-
tim but to extract the last possible penny from
the man in jail before he is railroaded beyond his
reach to the penitentiary. I have known of help-
less prisoners to be pursued by avaricious lawj^ers
after they had begun to serve their sentences, and
the simple-hearted victims would often write to
their destitute families asking them to send their
last dollars to attorneys in exchange for a gilded
lie which the simple prisoners made themselves
believe was a fresh promise of liberty.

Let us now deal with the first offender who,
after interminable delays, is convicted and his
money gone. He has been pilloried, put on exhi-
bition in the courtroom before the gaze of the
curious, his plight ridiculed in the press. He
feels himself an outcast, friendless, and indeed
he is. The judge pronounces the victim's doom
from an elevated throne and passes on to the
next case. Persons accused of crime lose their
identity as human beings and become ^^ cases'',
just as workingmen are only ** hands" to some
employers. The sentence of the law is executed
with all the solemnity and ceremony of a funeral,
and the culprit, with head bowed either from

48 WALLS AND BARS

grief or rage, is led from the courtroom between
two feelingless factotums to begin his punish-
men — justice is served, society is avenged, and all
is well once more. But is it? Not so fast!

The victim has already suffered every torment
and feels the keenest sense of shame and humilia-
tion, but this does not count in the matter of
atonement. He goes back to jail until the sheriff
can arrange to take him to the *^pen'\

The fateful day arrives! He is manacled,
sometimes hand and foot, and put on a train
where everyone learns he is a convict and se-
cretly mocks him.

He is delivered, signed for, sheds his name and
receives a number. He is no longer a man but a
thing. He has ceased to be a human being. He
is stripped naked under the clubs of guards who
hurl insults and epithets at him about his body.
He is put into a cheap prison garb that in itself
proclaims the status to which he has been re-
duced. He is examined in a rude and perfunctory
way by the physician's assistant who himself
may be a convict. He is made to sign a document
stating where his body is to be shipped in case of
death. He is handled as if he were a bag of malt
as he goes through the Bertillon system. Note
is taken and a record made of every mark upon
his body. All his personal effects are taken from
him. These are supposed to be shipped back to
his home, if he has one, and if he has money to
pay the charges. The chances are, however, his

PBISON AS AN INCUBATOR OF CRIME 49

effects will be stolen before they leave the prison,
if they have any value.

In this particular I have had some personal
experience, for when I went to Atlanta Prison
only a part of my effects that should have been
sent to my home arrived there. Whereas I indi^
cated that the traveling bag that I carried there
with me should be left among my personal posses-
sions in the prison, I was given a cardboard to-
mato case when I left as travelling equipment.
Among other things, I especially recall that cuff
and shirt buttons, small trinkets that were given
to me as mementoes by friends, and some shirts
and other articles that were sent to me, were
stolen after I arrived in Atlanta. I am making
no charges, but stating a fact. What happened
in my case happens in all cases in greater or
smaller degree.

But as to the boy ! The letter a week he is per-
mitted to write is censored, and those he receives
are opened and read. Little tokens of sentiment
are extracted and thrown away. Even a lock of
his mother's hair may not reach him.

If he should deign to go to the chapel to pray
and take communion with his soul a guard sits
over him with a club to sweeten his spirit and
temper his piety.

The miserable food he receives starves, rather
than feeds his body. The process in the mess
room is more like slopping hogs than feeding
humans, with the difference that hogs fatten

50 WALLS AND BAKS

while humans starve. Here is where he makes
his first acquaintance with stale old beef hearts
and livers, and the classic brand of hash known
in prison parlance as ^* concrete balls '\ The
gravy is loud enough to talk and the oleo strong
enough to walk. Bugs and worms figure pro-
verbially in the prison menu.

The youth is beginning to realize the deadening
monotony of prison life. His spirit is crushed.
His sensibilities have become numb. His eyes do
not see beyond the height of the gray prison
walls upon which armed guards idle away the
hours by watching eagerly for an opportunity to
* Ving^' a fleeing jailbird.

He is put to work under the domination of the
man with the club. He is watched and reported
by the stool-pigeon who is himself a convict who
has wormed into the graces of the officials and
guards by spying upon his fellow prisoners.
Every prison is a whispering gallery. Whatever
is said is sure to reach the office promptly. No
criticism is tolerated, and no complaint may get
beyond the walls.

A prisoner cannot know the time of day, for
there are no clocks in prison, the purpose being
to cut the convict off as completely as possible
from the outside world in which he had his being.
The youth is thrown among all sorts and condi-
tions of old and hardened convicts, and he soon
acquires a new vocabulary peculiar to prison life.
The foulest language flowers in the poisoned at-

PKISON AS AN INCUBATOR OF CEIME 51

mosphere of the prison pen. There he is
schooled in the science of burglary taught by old
professors in the art, and he learns at first hand
from professional adepts all about every form of
vice and crime known to man.

Here, also, where his sex instincts are sup-
pressed, he is schooled in nameless forms of per-
version of body, mind and soul that cause human
beings to sink to abysmal depths of depravity
which the lower animals do not know. These per-
versions wreck the lives of countless thousands
and send their wretched victims to premature and
dishonored graves.

This is but one of the horrors of our modem
civilization and the prison is its native breeding
ground.

CHAPTER in.

I Become U. S. Convict No. 9653.

Warden Joseph Z. Terrell, of the West Vir-
ginia State Penitentiary at Moundsville, a former
railroad station agent, had but recently been put
in charge of the prison when I began to serve
my ten-year sentence there on April 13, 1919. He
treated me with perfect fairness, and I got along
quite well and without the slightest trouble dur-
ing the time I was in prison there.

On June 13, just two months after my sentence
commenced, Mr. Terrell reluctantly informed me
that I had been ordered transferred to Atlanta.
The order came just in time to enable me to pack
my belongings and get ready for the train that
was to carry me to my southern destination.

Strict secrecy was enjoined by the government
as to my removal, and especially as to the train
upon which I was to take my departure. I have
since been informed that before I left Mounds-
ville the government officials commanded the two
telegraph offices in Wheeling to accept no mes-
sages from reporters or other persons about my
leaving West Virginia prison until the next morn-
ing. In spite of this attempt to effect profound
secrecy as to my movements, a leak occurred
somehow, for I was interviewed by a reporter

I BECAME U. S. CONVICT NO. 9653 53

the same day at Cincinnati en route to the south.

It appears that I was too near the coal fields in
West Virginia, in which 1 had previously spent
considerable time organizing the miners who were
greatly agitated over my imprisonment. At one
mass meeting at Charleston, which was attended
by several thousand miners and other citizens,
resolutions were passed threatening a march on
Moundsville if I was not released.

Warden Terrell gave me a friendly introduc-
tion to U. S. Marshal Smith, who with his three
deputies, took me in charge on arrival at Wheel-
ing, whither the warden and his son had taken me
in their automobile. The marshal and his depu-
ties treated me with all consideration over the en-
tire journey. The marshal bore a letter from
Warden Terrell to Warden Fred. G. Zerbst at
Atlanta, commending me on the basis of my
prison record.

Shortly after the noon hour on the following
day, June 14, we arrived in Atlanta. The marshal
called for a taxicab.

** Where do you want to go?'' asked the chauf-
feur.

*^Take us to your best penitentiary, ' ' replied
the marshal. Less than half an hour later we
were landed at the gates of my new home, and
I was delivered, signed for, and the marshal and
his deputies took their departure, wishing me a
pleasant stay.

In the massive main corridor in which I found

54 WALLS AND BAltS

myself I had my first view and received my first
impression of the sinister institution, known as
the U. S. Penitentiary at Atlanta. It seemed to
me like a vast sepulchre in which the living dead
had been sequestered by society. Through the
steel gate at the end of the corridor I could see
human forms hurrying back and forth under the
watchful eyes of guards with clubs, and they ap-
peared to me with all the uncanniness of spectral
shapes in the infernal regions. I was perfectly
calm and self-possessed for I had made up my
mind from the beginning that whatever my prison
experience might be I should face it without fear
or regret.

Such serenity is always vouchsafed by the
psychology of the man who follows the dictates of
his own conscience and is true to his own soul.
I could not help feeling aware of the curiosity
which my presence aroused among the convicts
and some of the officials. A few of the latter, I
observed, smothered whatever interest, hostile or
kindly, they may have felt over my presence by
a Sphinx-like sullenness which I readily compre-
hended.

There seems to be a studied mental attitude
on the part of most prison officials I have met,
particularly the guards, that has for its purpose
to impress upon the prisoner that the official is
wholly disinterested in the human equation, in the
natural impulses that make us what we are. He
strives to appear as unhuman as possible^^ and

I BECAME U. S. CONVICT NO. 9653 55

this psychological sub-normality on his part
comes to fruitage in what is often his inhuman
conduct toward the prisoner. So far as the pris-
oners were concerned, I felt their kindly interest
expressed in their furtive glances toward me, and
their good will was apparent on every hand.

The guard in charge conducted me to a shower
bath where I divested myself of my clothing.
Every article, including a quill toothpick, was
taken from me and my garments were minutely
searched. The guard, I wish to admit, treated
me quite decently, although I confess that but
for my having steeled myself against whatever
might be in the program I should have felt out-
raged by the harsh and unfeeling method with
which the thing was done.

The introduction a prisoner receives and the
way be is put through the initial stages of his
sentence are not calculated to impress him with
the fact that a prison is a human institution. The
rigorous treatment he receives will not convince
him that he had been placed there to redeem him
from his transgressions and reclaim him as a
human being. On the contrary, the process em-
bitters him against all who had any part in his
plight, estranges him from whatever kindly in-
fluences that may still be operating in his behalf,
and alienates him from society which, in the first
and final analysis, is responsible for him, and,
perhaps in the end must answer to him.

After the bath I was clothed in cheap faded

56 WALLS AND BARS

blue denim which had been discarded by some
prisoner who had gone out into the world. In
company with several others who, also, had just
arrived, I was escorted to the kitchen where our
first meal was served, the dinner hour in the gen-
eral mess having passed. Save for the bread, I
could not say what the meal consisted of as I
could not make it out, nor did I attempt any in-
ternal analysis of the menu. The food and the
manner in which it was served created nausea
rather than an appetite. While we sat at the
table a bulky guard stood over us swinging his
club and delivering himself in a gruff voice of
certain instructions as to table conduct at the
prison. I suspected that a passage or two in his
culinary flight was made for my benefit, and I
applauded in silence.

A little later the routine led to the hospital,
where I was subjected to a physical examination ;
sundry blanks and reports, descriptive of me and
my physical condition, were filled out for the
prison archives.

The ** mugging gallery*' was next visited and
there two pictures were taken by a convict pho-
tographer— one profile and one full-face — for the
rogue's gallery. Before the camera was snapped
a narrow plate showing my registration number
was put around my neck. I was next assigned to
a temporary cell with one other convict who had
arrived on the same train with me. He was a
young man who had but recently married. He

I BECAME U. S. CONVICT NO. 9653 57

would serve a year for taking some goods out of
a freight car to piece out Ms wages which were
too small to provide for his family. I had been
shocked when I first saw this young man on the
train, his feet and hands shackled and an expres-
sion of mingled terror and humiliation ui3on his
countenance. The sad picture of that wretched
and dejected youth will forever remain in my
memory. He was assigned to a sewing machine
and he seemed happy when he could renew the
missing buttons on my prison suit.

I was taken in turn to the office of the Protes-
tant and Catholic chaplains who questioned me
about my spiritual beliefs and denominational
affiliation. I gladly affirmed the first in a way
that I fear was not clearly comprehended by
these estimable gentlemen of the cloth, whose in-
tentions, I am sure, were the best; as regards the
second inquiry, I had to disappoint both of my
interrogators for in my mind true and sincere
spirituality carries with it no theological or de-
nominational partisanship.

On this point I should like to digress a mo-
ment to say that when I went to Atlanta prison
attendance at the chapel services was compulsory.
Guards with clubs in their hands and scowls on
their faces were stationed inside of this sanctu-
ary where pious appeals were made to the pris-
oners to emulate Jesus and follow His teachings.
The setting and the appeal were most incongru-
ous to say the least, and my refusal to attend such

58 WALLS AND BABS

a ghastly travesty upon religious worship was
later followed by an order that made chapel at-
tendance optional with the prisoners. But the
guards with clubs were not displaced and for that
reason, if for no other, I did not attend.

The day following the inquisition in the office
of the chaplains a number of us new arrivals — a
dozen in all — ^black and white, stood around the
desk of the deputy warden. It was a motley crew
rather than a picturesque audience. I was in the
midst of what are called the lowest types of crim-
inals flanked by Negro murderers, and yet, I
never felt myself more perfectly at one with my
fellow beings. We were all on a dead level there
and I felt my heart beat in unison with the heart-
beats of those brothers of mine whose hunted
looks and wretched appearance were proof
enough to me that they had been denied a decent
chance in the outer world ; I felt that I, who had
fared so infinitely better, was bound to love and
serve them as best I could within the prison walls
in which we were alike victims.

One of the Negroes in that little coterie said to
another of his race a few days later in referring
to me:

**I would stay here for life to see that man go
out." He meant it. There was to me a whole
beautiful Christly sermon in those few words
for that poor unlettered black brother.

Seated at his desk the deputy warden delivered
an odd admixture of instructions, orders and

I BECAME U. S. CONVICT NO. 9653 59

warnings. It was his official duty to relieve him-
self of the same homily on arrival of all incoming
prisoners. We were given to understand that
^*the goblins would get us if we didn't watch
out."

The deputy, who was a rigid orthodox Calvin-
ist, had previously officiated as foreman of a
chain gang in Fulton County, Georgia. In the
lecture which he delivered to us he bore especially
on the penalty that would be imposed for the use
of foul language. He repeated some of the
frightful words in common use in the vocabulary
of convicts, and he threatened dire punishment to
any who might repeat them. It is a fact, how-
ever, notwithstanding his rigorous discipline and
his solemn threats and warnings, that foul lan-
guage continued to flow. Its usage is fostered,
not repressed, by club rule and black-hole tor-
ture.

I would be laying no flattering unction upon
myself if I should say that merely by speaking
kindly with my fellow prisoners, treating them
as equals, making them feel as I felt that their
interest was mine and mine was theirs, the use
of foul language declined to such a happy degree
in the prison that it was a matter of comment
among the prisoners and officials. I remember
especially one convict who had been in Atlanta
many years and was destined to spend his re-
maining ones within those gray walls. This man
had been cruelly treated all his life by guards.

60 WALLS AND BARS

He had known no law that was not enforced with
the club. He had been brutalized, and whatever
human impulses to do good he might have felt
were crushed by those who held him captive.

This man used foul language the same as the
rest. I understood the reason for it, and my
sympathy went out to him. I put my arm across
his shoulder and told him that if he must use that
kind of language to please not employ it in my
presence, not because it hurt me, I said, but be-
cause it hurt him.

*^I hate to think of you,'* I said to him, ** using
that fine body of yours as a sewer from which
to emit such filthy words. '^ He perceived me,
and soon this man's vocabulary was free from
foulness except when he saw a stool-pigeon whom
he loathed and abominated.

The deputy warden, upon hearing that this
man had almost cleansed his vocabulary, sent for
him one day and asked him how he had succeed-
ed in doing it

^* Mister Debs jest asked me to,'* he replied
simply. **He is the only Christ I know anything
about, 'cause I see how he lives and feels about
these things. There is as much difference be-
tween Mister Debs and the rest of the people in
this place as there is between mud and ice-
cream." I know that my black brother greatly
exaggerated my little part in his partial refor-
mation. The good was in him, and I had merely
brought it to his attention.

I BECAME U. S. CONVICT NO. 9653 61

On leaving the deputy warden's office my fel-
low prisoners and I were returned to onr tem-
porary cells, and the following day we were as-
signed to onr respective duties. I was given a
clerical position in the clothiag room where the
outfiitting of the prisoners takes place, and
where, also, prison supplies are stored and fur-
nished to the several departments.

My duties were very simple and entirely agree-
able as prison service. The official in charge
treated me well and all the prisoners employed
in that department vied with each other in help-
ing me to get along. After the day's work we
were allowed half an hour for exercise in the
stockade before supper, for which twenty min-
utes was allowed. I was not eager about meal-
time. I was in Atlanta prison nearly two weeks /
and pretty well starved before nature forced me
to become receptive to the food and the manner 1
in which it was served.

After a few days in a temporary cell I was
assigned to my regular cage which was occupied
by five other men, one of whom was a German,
one a Jew, one an Irishman and two Americans.
Being the latest arrival I should have occupied
an upper bunk, but the German, who had the
lower, insisted on taking the upper and giving
me his own sleeping slab. He also insisted on
making my bed, as I had some difficulty in making
it up so it would pass inspection. He continued
this kindness all the time I occupied that cell.

62 WALLS AND BABS

He likewise did my laundering of the smaller
items of apparel that had to be done in our cells.

This German was sentenced for five years be-
cause some liquor had been found in the lodging
house of which he was tlie proprietor and at
which soldiers were quartered during the war.
This is one of the many savage sentences that
was brought to my personal attention, and which
excited my indignation and revolt. I never knew
a finer man, and I could not have been treated
more kindly and considerately had these five con-
victs been my own brothers. Upon the German's
release from prison be sent me a beautiful pipe,
and he has been writing to me ever since.

Incidents of human kindness in this prison also
could be multiplied by the hundreds. I would
not give the impression that I was the sole bene-
ficiary of these loving acts, for I have seen pris-
oners manifest the same regard toward each
other, in spite of the harsh rules and regulations
that seem to be calculated to crush magnanimity;
wherever it lifts its benevolent hand.

Just beyond the prison cells lies the campus
along the walls of which guards in uniform pass
back and forth swinging their Winchester rifles
as if they were going out to shoot squirrels. The
sight shocked me through and through with its
horrid significance as a symbol of man's inhu-
manity under the prison regime. For paltry pay
these guards contract to send a bullet through
the heart of some hapless wretch who might have

I BECAME U. S. CONVICT NO. 9653 63

dreamed of liberty, and attempted to escape the
tortures of a prison hell.

I had been in prison about a week when I first
met Warden Zerbst, who sent for me and whom
I met in his private office. He received me kindly
and referred to the letter regarding me which
he received from Warden Terrell at Monndsville.
We had a frank conversation about the prison
and my relation to it as an inmate.

I told Mr. Zerbst that the prison as an institu-
tion and I were deadly enemies, but that within
the walls I should observe the rules and get along
without trouble. I gave him to understand that
I neither desired, expected, nor would I accept
any privileges or favors that were denied to other
prisoners. All I asked was that I be treated the
same as the rest, neither better nor worse. The
warden assured me that on that basis I should
have no cause for complaint.

So far as I personally am concerned I have no
complaint now to lodge against Warden Zerbst,
his successor, J. E. Dyche, or Mr. Terrell at
Moundsville, all of whom treated me fairly and
humanely.

One day a prisoner found pasted on the wall of
his cell a quatrain, anonymously written, which
he copied and gave to me. I put it in here not
only as indicating the poetry that is often dis-
covered in the hearts of some prisoners, but as
a passionate appeal which all of them make for

64 WALLS AND BARS

those opportunities in society whicli are so often
ruthlessly denied them:

**0h, oft the sky's most glorious blue
Smiles through the captive's cell,

For he alone of heaven can think
Who dreams through nights of hell."

CHAPTER IV.

Shaeing the Lot of ^*Les Miseeables*'.

In the preceding chapter reference was made to
my cell and cell mates. To be more specific, I
was lodged in Cell No. 4, Range No. 7, Cellhouse
B. In this limited space I soon began to feel
that we had to set up a little world of onr own.

Cut off almost completely from the outside
world and from all former activities, the prob-
lem of what it was possible to do that would be
helpful or of some service to my fellow prisoners
as well as myself arose, and I found myself oc-
cupied in making a daily program and endeavor-
ing to carry it out. I missed greatly the papers,
magazines and other literature I had been re-
ceiving and reading. All this was completely ex-
cluded by order, I was told, of the Department
of Justice. This order was not revoked until a
few days before I left the prison. The issue was
raised at that time with the department at Wash-
ington by some of the more influential publica-
tions which had been excluded, and whose pub-
lishers demanded to know upon what authority
papers that were received and transmitted
through the mails were intercepted and prevented
from reaching their destination.

Not a socialist or radical paper, or magazine,

66 WALLS AND BARS

or book addressed to rne was allowed to reach me
until the revocation of the order that came near
the expiration of my term. These papers, when
they arrived at the prison, were torn up and
thrown into the wastebasket. Parts of them were
sometimes x^icked out and pieced together by
some prisoner employed in the office when they
contained something that he thought might
especially interest me, and he would hand these
scraps to me in the stockade.

For reasons not necessary to explain the prison
authorities took every precaution to have social-
ist and radical literature excluded from the pris-
on, and in this they were no more successful than
in keeping out ^'dope'' and other contraband
articles.

As my cell became my world, and I understood
its limitations, it began to expand and I so
adapted myself to my prison situation that the
steel bars and gray walls melted away. I set
myself at liberty in a way to demonstrate, to my-
self at least, the triumph of the spirit over the
material environment under any possible cir-
cumstances. During the day I was at my work
in the clothing room where I came into intimate
contact with a number of young prisoners, some
of whom were having their first taste of prison
life, and with whose co-operation the simple
duties exacted from me were performed in a
spirit of mutual sympathy which afforded me,
as I believe it did them, great satisfaction.

SHAKING THE LOT OP **LES MISEEABLES*' 67

Just after being assigned to the clotMng room
I had my first brush with prison guards. Here
let it be said that some of the guards are decent
and humane fellows who treat the prisoners with
all the consideration the rules will allow, but there
are others who are scarcely a degree above the
brute and wholly unfit to have authority over
helpless prisoners.

There was one in particular whose duty it was
to escort the prisoners to the stockade. He was
ashamed of his club and refused to carry it. I
never once saw him with a club in his hands. The
hundreds of men he had in charge held him in
high esteem and they were the most perfectly
behaved body of men in the prison.

The incident which I am about to relate oc-
curred in front of the building in which I was
employed. The isolation building to which pris-
oners under punishment are committed was near
by. The rules forbade any communication with
them by sign or otherwise. All of the prisoners
in isolation were interested in me and would
watch for me to pass their grated windows. One
day one of them called me by name and waved
his hand in friendly recognition. I waved my
hand in return.

There and then I had committed a grave of-
fence against the prison code and was myself due
for a course of bread and water diet in isolation.
A guard rushed at me like an infuriated bull, up-
braiding me and taking my number. I calmly

68 WALLS AND BAES

told him to report me as he had threatened to do,
saymg that if I had violated a rule I was pre-
pared to take the consequences the same as any
other prisoner. The report of the incident rap-
idly spread among the other prisoners and great
excitement prevailed for a time.

Would they put me in the ^^hole"? That ques-
tion was repeated on every tongue. I neither
knew, nor did I care. I wanted what came to all
the rest of the prisoners under the same circum-
stances, whatever that might be. The guard re-
ported me to the deputy warden, and the latter
to the warden, as I was told, but nothing came of
it. It was my first reported infraction, and the
reader may judge as to the gravity of the offence.

Mealtime always presented a lively scene in
the general mess. Twenty minutes were allowed
at table and conversation was permitted during
the period. Breakfast, dinner and supper were
served at about 7, 12 and 5 o'clock respectively.
After supper we marched to our cells and there we
remained until the breakfast hour the following
morning. Fourteen consecutive hours every day
in the week to be locked in a cage with five other
men is a long and monotonous siege, as any pris-
oner will testify.

At Moundsville the prisoners were given an
hour of recreation in the yard after their supper
before being committed to their cells.

On one of his regular trips of inspection of
Atlanta Penitentiary Denver S. Dickerson,

SHAKING THE LOT OF ''LES MISEEABLES'* 69

former superintendent of federal prisons, came
to see me after he had concluded his business
with the prison, and in our interview I asked
him why the same arrangement could not be
made there that they had at Moundsville. I
pointed out what a benefit it would be to the pris-
oners and what a good moral effect it would have
upon them, especially during the sweltering days
of the long southern summer.

He agreed to see what could be done about it
when he returned to Washington. To my great
satisfaction the order was issued and became
effective with the beginning of summer and re-
mained so during the entire season. Each even-
ing all save those in solitary confinement were
given the freedom of the ball grounds where
prisoners may spend Saturday and Sunday after-
noons, and holidays. For some reason the con-
cession was allowed only that one season. I was
told it was not renewed because of the incon-
venience occasioned to the guards by having to
do extra duty during that interval.

The evening hours spent in the cell were de-
voted mainly to reading and conversation. Every
conceivable subject was brought under discus-
sion, and I was benefited as well as surprised by
the wide range of worldly knowledge possessed
by my fellow prisoners. One of them had
travelled extensively in Europe, as well as in
this country, and had an unending fund of in-
formation and experience to relate. Each of the

70 WALLS AND BAES

others had his own stories to tell, and here it
may be said that every man in prison embraces
in his person a volume of biography in which the
tragedy of life is written in agony and tears. In
the humblest among them there is in his life's
story and his failure to overcome the odds
against him a dramatic element that makes him
a study well worth while to any one who loves
his fellow man and wonders why he happened
to be marked by the fates to have his life — the
most precious thing of all he possesses — ^wasted
in a prison den.

The cell in which I had settled assumed the
institutional form of a perfect little democracy.
We had all things in common — or would have
had if we had had the things. This reminds me
of a little anecdote related by one of the convicts.

Two tramps who had spent the night together
in a box-car were wondering how and where they
were to get their breakfast.

'*What will we have to eat this morning' '?
asked the first one, whose sense of humor had
not deserted him.

**WelP', replied the second one, '*if we had
ham we would have ham and eggs, if we had the
eggs.''

But speaking seriously, I was never more free
in my life, so far as my spirit was concerned,
than I was in that prison cell. There was never
a harsh or an unkind word spoken in that little
community. When the lights were switched off

SHAKING THE LOT OP *'lES MISEEABLES" 71

at ten o'clock, and we had to retire whether we
felt like sleeping or not, we bade each other good
night just as though we had been intimates all
of our lives.

The incentive to greed which dominates in the
other world was lacking there, and human na-
ture, unalloyed, had a chance to express itself,
and it did so in a spirit of mutual kindness and
understanding which greatly impressed me and
which I shall never forget.

These men were convicted felons, outcasts from
society, pariahs, and yet in their ministrations
to me and to each other in their unselfish desire
to give rather than receive, and in their eagerness
to serve rather than be served, they set an ex-
ample that might well be followed by some peo-
ple who never saw the inside of prison walls.

In our cell in the great Federal Penitentiary
from which the world was shut out we were alike
branded as criminal convicts, but in the little
community tliat we had set up in that cell there
was not the slightest trace of a criminal, and the
brotherly relation to each other, and the condi-
tion from which it sprang precluded the possi-
bility of crime or criminal intent from entering
that voluntary prison brotherhood.

The prison food was the one great unending
source of complaint. The same is time to a great-
er or lesser extent of every jail and prison in the
land. There was no lack of food at Atlanta so
far as quantity was concerned. The bread was
the one item about which no reasonable complaint

72 WALLS AND BAES

could be made ; as for the rest, it was the cheap-
est and stalest conglomeration of stuff that the
market afforded. Coupled with this was the fact
that the food was never properly cooked, but
steamed and stewed. Even had it been of better
quality when it left the market-place, it would
have been rendered unedible by the steaming
process. This ill-cooked stuff was served in a
manner to cause revulsion to all alike, and that
item in the prison life aroused more ill-feeling
and resentment than all other causes combined.

No satisfactory system of feeding prisoners,
free from graft, peculation and other corrupt
practices known to prison institutions has ever
yet been devised so far as I know. The usually
accepted theory is that anything is good enough
for jailbirds and convicts. That inhuman attitude
which is part and parcel of the prison discipline is
shared by society, any of whose members may
at any time become convicts either for breaking
the law or for upholding the law in time of public
excitement as well as in popular tranquility.
Whatever modification there may have been in
the barbarous punitive theory in relation to
offenders against society that system is still
stoutly upheld and vindicated in the wretched
menu and table service of every prison in the land.

It is extremely difficult to say whether men
who go to prison are ruined more quickly physic-
ally by the rotten food served to them, or morally
and spiritually by the harsh and bitter treat-

SHAEING THE LOT OF **LES MISEKABLES'' 73

ment they receive. "WTiichever method of degra-
dation comes first in the inevitable prison proc-
ess of human deterioration, it can be said with-
out fear of contradiction that they are twin evils
in reducing men to caricatures.

To feed prisoners decently and wholesomely,
not extravagantly, but in a clean, plain and sub-
stantial manner to conserve their health instead
of undermining and destroying it, would do more
to humanize the prison and to make it reforma-
tory, rather than a deformatory, than any other
one thing that could be suggested in the prevail-
ing social system. But as to the necessity of the
prison at all I shall have something to say in a
later chapter.

Such a system, however, will never be estab-
lished until direct and effective measures have
been taken to eliminate the graft of one kind
and another in the contracts under which the
food is furnished, and in the handling of the food
inside the walls from the time it is delivered un-
til it is served to the convicts.

As a single typical instance I may relate the
following incident:

It was commonly understood that there was a
regularly organized traffic carried on in the pris-
on kitchen at Atlanta in which the choicest foods
were privately sold and disposed of under the
government's roof. Two of my cell-mates had
told me that they knew of two employes in the
kitchen who had bought their jobs at a hundred

74 WALLS AND BAKS

dollars each. In their positions they were able
to realize handsomely from the foodstuffs that
passed through their hands by selling it to fa-
vored prisoners in exchange for tobacco, which,
in prison, is equivalent to legal tender in the
outer world, and for cash when they could strike
a bargain either inside or outside, which was fre-
quently the case.

Eealizing that the general run of the prisoners
Avere the victims of this arrangement, and that
they were not getting the food the government
was paying for, I reported the matter to Super-
intendent Dickerson on his next visit and had
him confronted with the men who made the
charge; those men came before Mr. Dickerson
and named the purchasers and the sums they had
paid for their kitchen jobs.

Mr. Dickerson made notes of the evidence and
said the matter would be investigated. On his
leaving the city the two men who gave the testi-
mony and exposed the corrupt practice were re-
duced to menial positions, and thus were made
to pay the penalty for exposing one of the vicious
abuses that obtain within prison walls.

The stockade at the Atlanta prison in which
prisoners enjoyed their brief season of com-
parative freedom afforded excellent opportunity
for the study of human nature as it is influenced
by prison life. Each day, when the weather per-
mits, the prisoners, save those in isolation, are
permitted an hour in the stockade to which they

SHAKING THE LOT OF *'lES MISEEABLES" 75

are escorted in relays by their respective guards.

On Saturday and Sunday afternoons when the
entire body of prisoners were allowed the free-
dom of the ball park, the social life of the prison
found its most interesting expression. AH sorts
and conditions of men mingled freely there — men
charged with every conceivable crime, and gener-
ally regarded as dangerous criminals. Yet, I
never saw a more orderly and well-behaved
crowd of people in the outside world.

When I appeared among them it was a con-
trriuous reception until the bugle called us back
to our cells. Scores of these prisoners had been
waiting during the week for the ojDportunity to
tell me their stories, to examine the papers in
their cases, to read their letters, and to give them
counsel. My time among them was wholly taken
up in this way and often I was unable to give
attention to all who wished to see me.

It was in this way that I came to know inti-
mately the men in prison, the kind of men they
were, how they came to be there, and their re-
action to prison life. It was to me a sympathetic
study of such intense human interest that I say
deliberately that I would not exchange the years
spent in prison for any similar period in my life.

It has been my conviction since having had the
actual experience that only the inmate, the im-
prisoned convict, actually knows the prison and
what it means to him and his kind. Even the
officials in charge and on the grounds, and in

76 WALLS AND BARS

close personal contact with the inmates, do not
know the prison. Indeed, they cannot know it,
for they have never felt its blighting influence,
nor been oppressed by its rigorous discipline;
nor have they suffered the mental and physical
hunger, the isolation, the deprivation and the
cruel and relentless punishment it imposes.

If one could read what the iron fist of the prison
traces in the heart of its inmate, what is regis-
tered there in bitterness and resentment, he
would know more about the prison than he could
ever learn in a life time as a mere observer or
even as an officer in charge.

Many persons visit prisons and imagine after
being conducted through its corridors and over
its grounds that they have learned something
about that mysterious institution; not a few of
them are impressed with the plaza at the front of
the reservation and with other external features
intended to relieve the grimness of the gray walls
and steel bars. They conclude that the state has
provided a comfortable resort and has done
handsomely by the criminals who are confined
there.

As a matter of fact, they have been permitted
to make but a very superficial examination and
have been shown only such parts of the institu-
tion as were most likely to impress them favor-
ably, and to send them forth commenting upon
the humaneness with which the state treats its
prisoners.

SHAKING THE LOT OF ^*LES MISEKABLES" 7T

Had these visitors and others, who complacent-
ly acx2ept the present prison as the final solution
of the crime problem, been obliged to spend a
month within the walls, submit to the iron dis-
cipline enforced there, eat the nauseating food,
and feel themselves isolated, cramped, watched
day and night, counted at regular intervals, and
dwarfed and dulled by the daily deadly routine,
they would undergo a radical change of opinion
in regard to the lot of men and women who are
caged like animals by human society.

CHAPTER V.

Teansferred From My Cell to the Hospital.

After spending two months in a cell during tlie
blazing hot summer of 1919, and starved rather
than nourished by the food, I was reduced to
almost a skeleton. My normal weight is 185
pounds, but at the time of my transfer to the
hospital I weighed less than 160. Reports as to
my being in a critical condition reached the out-
side world, and the warden received frequent in-
quiries both from the press and my friends con-
cerning my health.

It was at this time that the press in Atlanta
received advices from New York that I had been
reported dead. The warden was besieged with
inquiries by telephone and otherwise. Not con-
tented with his assurance that I was alive, the
press representatives came to the prison and
would not be satisfied until the warden sent for
me to appear before them and contradict the re-
port of my demise. But it must be confessed in
all candor, that in all but the spirit there was
scarcely enough left of me to make a successful
denial.

Having heard these alarming reports, my com-
rades in Ohio, from whence I had been sent to
prison, asked Mrs. Marguerite Prevey, who had

TEANSFEKEED FEOM CELL TO HOSPITAL 79

been one of the signers of my bond in the federal
court at Cleveland, to come to Atlanta to make
a personal observation of me. Mrs. Prevey ap-
peared to be greatly shocked when she saw me
and noted the change that my physical condition
had undergone in prison. After my interview
with her, unbeknown to me, she saw the warden,
and as the result of her talk with him I was or-
dered transferred to the hospital that same
evening.

Upon being advised of the order I protested
and endeavored to see the warden to have it re-
voked, but he had already left for his home. The
recollection of my former reception at the hos-
pital when I went there for examination on being
admitted to the prison lingered to remind me
that I was not welcome there.

That evening in the hospital I had a brusque
interchange with Mr. John C. Weaver, the prison
physician, who, I felt had not a sympathetic feel-
ing for me. But subsequently we came to a mu-
tual understanding and were on most agreeable
terms all the time I was there. The following
morning Dr. Weaver explained in a friendly way
that I had been ordered to the hospital where I
might have the care and attention that he said
my condition required, and that I would soon
realize the change was to my advantage. Dr.
Edgar S. Bullis, who at that time was the as-
sistant physician, had said, in answer to an in-
quiry, '^Debs may die any minute '\ This re-

80 WALLS AND BAES

port reached the Department of Justice at Wash-
ington and a telegraphic order was issued by
Attorney General Palmer for a special exami-
nation and for an immediate report of my con-
dition.

My heart action was weak on account of the
low state of my vitality, and this was the ex-
citing cause of the alarming statements that
eminated from the prison. Just what kind of an
official report was issued in my case the rules
did not permit me to know, but I could not help
wondering why on two separate occasions special
information as to the state of my health was
ordered from Washington, knowing that, save in
a single instance which is too well known to merit
mention here, no prisoner had ever been released
from Atlanta on account of his physical condi-
tion, or because of the probability of his dying
there. Many inmates died in the prison hospital
while I was there. Some of the cases were too
pathetic for words. Mothers, fathers, wives and
children often entreated in tears that their be-
loved might be returned to them and allowed to die
at home rather than in prison with its attendant
disgrace to the bereaved ones. But all in vain !

I recall a number of particularly tragic and
heartbreaking instances. There is space to relate
but one of them.

A fellow prisoner of exceptionally fine fibre,
with whom I became quite intimate, was taken
seriously ill and brought to the hospital. He was

TBANSFEEBED FKOM CELL TO HOSPITAL 81

a man of refined nature who loved music, litera-
ture, children and pets. We had spent some very
agreeable hours together. This was his first
offence against the law, and he became a convict
as the result of an unfortunate business trans-
action, his lawyers having completed his ruin.
No man could possibly have been more out of
place in the role of a convict than this gentle
soul. He was eligible for parole, but it was de-
nied him.

I should like to observe here that in the mat-
ter of parole the granting of some seems as
strange as the refusal of others to those who do
not know the hidden hands that pull the wires
behind the scenes. Money and political in-
fluence are frequently determining factors in
such issues.

This aflSicted prisoner made a special appeal
to the superintendent of prisons that the parole,
to which he was eligible, might be granted so
as to enable him to undergo a very necessary
operation at a hospital in New York, his home.
His request was denied.

At this time the superintendent of prisoners
was a minister of the gospel.

The wife of the prisoner went to Washington
and made a tearful plea to the Department of
Justice, but to no avail. Resigned to his fate,
the prisoner submitted to an operation in the
prison hospital in a most downcast frame of mind
and spirit.

82 WALLS AND BAKS

Before going under the surgeon's knife he
asked me to write a telegram to his wife, reas-
suring her as to the operation being successful
and giving promise of speedy recovery. I wrote
the telegram and it was sent in accordance with
his wishes. The next morning I tip-toed into his
room and found him ghastly pale, scarcely
breathing, and unable to speak. In calling on
him I had violated a prison rule which forbids
a prisoner going into the room of another con-
vict. My instinct of common humanity compelled
me to persistently violate tliis senseless rule all
the time I was there. That evening my friend
was dead. The report came to me as a painful
shock, though it did not surprise me. It would
have required a contented, peaceful state of mind
for a man to have undergone such an operation
successfully outside of prison. In this man's de-
pressed condition the surgeon's knife only sealed
the doom that was already upon him.

His wife and children, a beautiful family, were
heart-broken. The tragic scene that was enacted
behind those grim, gray walls when the wife
came to claim the body of the beloved husband
and father cannot be described here. It was but
one of the many unspeakably moving incidents of
prison barbarity.

In many cases there are no loved ones to gent-
ly bear the convict's body back to the homestead
and the remains are unceremoniously carted to
the weed-grown prison burial ground to vanish

TRANSFEEEED FEOM CELL TO HOSPITAL 83

in that forsaken enclosure from tlie scenes of men
and there foil ignominy and disgrace by rotting
away in oblivion.

A prison hospital appeals not only to sympa-
thetic study by its many pathetic aspects, but it
excites all the emotions of the soul of a sensitive
human nature. I still feel the stab of pain I ex-
perienced on bidding my last farewell to my
mates, one in an adjoining room, his loyal wife
sitting by his side and the eyes of both filled with
tears; another close by suffering from locomotor
ataxia ; another with an arm gone and still another
paralyzed — and so on, in all the rooms and wards
surrounding me. Such suffering, misery, help-
lessness and despair ! "What pen or tongue could
do it justice? The wails of agony, the groans of
despair echoing through those sepulchral cor-
ridors the long, interminable nights through! I
can still hear them and they awaken me from my
slumber.

Not only are these suffering wretches con-
victs, but they are the diseased and maimed in-
mates of a hospital within the prison. These in-
describably hapless victims are imprisoned in a
double sense. I have seen men die in there under
circumstances that would move a heart of stone
and bring tears to the eyes of those not easily
moved by another's woe.

One of the most harrowing aspects of the
prison hospital is the drug addict whom I learned
to know there in a way to compel the most vivid

84 WALLS AND BAKS

and shocking remembrance of him to the last of
my days. It is incredible that a human being
mentally and physically afflicted should be con-
signed by a so-called court of justice in a civil-
ized and Christian nation to a penitentiary as a
felon, there to expiate his weakness; and yet,
hundreds of these unfortunates were sent to At-
lanta prison while I was there, and ofttimes I had
to bear witness to the horror of their torture
when they were summarily separated from the
drug they craved.

I have seen these addicts seized with the mad-
ness and convulsions peculiar to their condition,
and which are terrible even in memory. As many
as a score and more of these drug victims were
brought to the hospital at once, and the first few
days of some of them were filled with all the
ghastly and gruesome writhings, shrieks and en-
treaties, and all the hideous torments ever con-
jured up in the infernal regions.

One young man, who occupied the room next
to mine shortly after I entered the hospital, in-
voluntarily compelled me to share his agony and
torture. For the first week or more he could
not eat a morsel of food, nor be at rest a mo-
ment. His eyes rolled in their sockets, he raved
like a madman, tore his hair, swore and prayed
by turns, begged to be saved one moment and
pleading for death the next — all this excruciating
agony for just one **shot of the dope'' for which
he would have bartered his soul to the devil.

TRANSFEKKED FROM CELL TO HOSPITAL 85

This lad was under what is called the **cold tur-
key treatment, the drug being entirely cut off
in accordance with the rules of the prison. The
pity I felt for him and for others in a more
or less similar condition made me ill. Night after
night there was no sleep because of the suffering
and outcries of these wretched creatures.

Blame them as one may, how is it possible in
good conscience to punish them for their awful
affliction with a prison sentence as if they were
common felons. They are sick people who re-
quire special treatment, and not vicious ones to
be sent to the torture chamber of a prison, and it
is nothing less than a reproach to society and a
disgrace to our civilization that this malady is
branded as a crime instead of being ministered
to as an affliction, which it most assuredly is.

It would be quite as rational and humane to
send men to the penitentiary and make them slaves
of the galleys because they happened to have
cancer or consumption as it is to sentence and
treat them as criminals for being addicted to the
use of drugs.

In the light of such crude and barbarous mis-
apprehension of the evil itself, and the utterly
stupid and unscientific way of dealing with it,
we may well stand appalled as we contemplate
the startling and menacing increase in the num-
ber of **dope fiends '* all over the United States.

Very shortly after I entered the hospital a
brutal and bloody assault was made by a hospital

86 WALLS AND BAKS

guard on passing a prisoner who was not an in-
mate of the hospital. The attack was utterly
without provocation. This guard, for reasons of
his own, appeared to be especially kind to me,
but a terror to the other prisoners. With a blow
of his club he felled his victim who cried aloud
that he had done nothing to warrant the assault
made upon him. The blood streamed from the
wound in his scalp.

The warden soon heard of the incident and
hurried over to the hospital to investigate it. He
jcame to see me at once and I told him what I
knew of the outrage. I had not witnessed the
attack, but I had heard the thud of the club and
the prisoner shriek from pain.

Let it be said to the warden's credit that he
discharged the guard instantly and the latter left
town that night, it being reported that some of
his previous victims were laying for him to
avenge the brutalities they had suffered at his
hands. He was never again heard from at the
prison.

At the time this guard was removed I ventured
to recommend a certain other guard to fill the
vacancy. He was appointed and has been there
ever since. After this incident occurred there
was a most radical change in the temper and
morale of the prison hospital. The terrorism
which had previously prevailed ceased, and from
that time forward there was an entirely different

TRANSFERBED FROM CELL TO HOSPITAL 87

moral condition and a different relation between
the guards and inmates of the hospital.

I was permitted by implied, if not by expressed
sanction of the prison officials, to serve and min-
ister to the sick and afflicted prisoners. I wrote
for them the letters they either could not write,
or were too ill to write; filled out their pardon,
parole and commutation blanks; interceded for
them whenever possible; gave them counsel and
advice when they sought it, and in the intervals
when we sat and smoked in the ''sun parlor '^ we
had many an hour of mutually heartening com-
munion together.

How often they brought me their letters, either
because they could not read, or because they
wished me to share in the grief or gladness that
might be contained in the missives from home!
I have often since thought that if I but had pos-
session of the letters received by prisoners at
Atlanta which I was permitted to read, and these
could be printed and bound they would present a
volume of prison literature that would make the
gods themselves cry out in jorotest against the
shocking cruelties now perpetrated upon the in-
nocent families of the convicts, to say nothing of
the prisoners themselves under the present harsh,
cruel and callous regime that obtains in every
penal institution in the land.

CHAPTER VI.

VisiTOKS AND Visiting.

The circumstances under which visitors are per-
mitted to see a prisoner are such that I did not
encourage my friends to come to see me. On the
contrary, I had too much respect for them to wish
to have them subjected to the rules of the prison
governing visits and visitors.

The visiting privilege is a very restricted one
in the average prison and Atlanta is no exception
to the rule. From thirty minutes to an hour is
the time allotted. Persons coming to see their
friend or loved one in prison are likely to be
shocked by the rude manner in which tiiey are
received by the guard at the main gate of the
prison.

At Atlanta a visitor must first pass two out-
post guards stationed on the reservation like
sentinels. These guards are armed with Win-
chester rifles, and as a visitor approaches the
main walk the guard comes out from his solitary
barrack and inquires his business. This is purely
perfunctory on the part of the guard for the vis-
itor invariably is permitted to pass on. The sec-
ond sentinel is quartered directly in front of the
main entrance to the prison. He also inquires
as to the visitor's business, and scrutinizes him

VISITORS AND VISITING 89

to see if he carries a camera or weapons, al-
though no search is made of the visitor.

By this time our friend from the outside world
has been impressed that he is about to enter a
prison, the inner workings of which are dark and
forbidding. Before the gate is opened to admit
him a guard peers through the bars and asks what
is wanted. If he is satisfied that the call is a
legitimate one he will open the gate; if not, the
visitor is sent away.

Once inside the penitentiary, the visitor is es-
corted to a little desk in the main corridor where
he fills out a small blank, stating the name of
the prisoner he wants to see, his own name and
address, and the reason for his calling upon the
inmate. The guard takes this slip and writes
the registration number of the convict in one cor-
ner. Then a hurried inquiry is made by the guard
to ascertain whether or not the particular pris-
oner has had his quota of visitors for that month.
If he has, the new arrival is told that he cannot
see the prisoner for that reason. In cases where
the visitor has come from a distance, and can
show that he has peculiarly personal reason for
his visit an appeal may be made to the guard who,
in turn, may obtain sanction from the warden, or
some other higher official, to grant the interview.
In cases of this kind the prisoner is always im-
pressed with the fact that a special dispensation
of justice has been made in his behalf.

A convict runner or messenger always stationed

90 WALLS AND BAKS

in the corridor beyond the second gate takes the
slip from the first guard and goes to call the
prisoner, wherever he may be, who is merely told
that his presence is wanted in the office of the
captain of the guards. A prisoner so informed
does not know that he has a caller awaiting him,
and on the way to the office he has often con-
jured up in his mind some form of punishment
that is about to be meted out to him for reasons
that he does not know. This suspense is not long,
however, for he is escorted from the captain's
office to one of several reception rooms where in-
terviews with prisoners are permitted.

The visitor waiting in the corridor is now
notified that the interview is about to take place,
and he follows a guard into the reception room
where the prisoner is sitting on the far side of
a long, plain table. The room is perfectly bare,
and barred at the windows. The visitor must sit
on the opposite side of the table and keep his
hands in view of the guard who sits at the head
of the table and overhears every word that is
said, and sees that nothing passes between the
prisoner and his visitor. To prevent the latter
the table has underneath it a partition that ex-
tends down to the floor. No writing, not even
a scrap of paper is permitted to be handed to
the prisoner until it is first inspected by the
guard who may or may not permit the convict to
receive it.

A rather humorous incident is recalled here.

VISITORS AND VISITING 91

A friend came to see me and brought a letter that
he wished me to read. He attempted to pass the
letter to me, but the guard snatched it from his
hand saying, *^Here, let me see that''. He ex-
amined the document critically, but it was ap-
parent that he could not read it, and he had to
pass it to my friend and have it read to him.
The exceedingly stupid expression upon the fkce
of the guard while the missive was being read to
him indicated the grade of intelligence that is
placed and kept in a federal prison under civil
service regulations.

There are men in prison who will not permit
their wives and daughters, or, in fact, any woman
for whom they have respect, to come to see them.
The reason for this attitude on the prisoners'
part became apparent to the writer when he per-
ceived the low moral state of the prison in gen-
eral and some of its attaches in particular. No
man who is sensitive about that sort of thing
cares to risk having his wife or daughter made
the target of lewd and lascivious comments from
the guards or inmates. So far as any wantonness
may be manifested by the prisoners, it is at least
excusable on the ground that the manner and
method of their isolation is of itself unnatural,
and therefore gives rise to tlioughts that would
not be perverted were they not caged like wild
beasts and their natural instincts repressed, and
therefore unclean.

Visitors bringing fruits, candies, tobacco or

92 WALLS AND BAKS

other articles to their friends behind the bars
are subjected to both surprise and disappoint-
ment. The guard takes possession of the gifts
with the statement that he will have to deposit
them in the office before turning them over to
the prisoner ; the chances are that the convict has
seen the last of the articles selected for him by
loving and tender hands. It requires no flight
of the imagination to figure out in whose hands
they have fallen, and will probably remain.
Articles without number brought or sent to me
by friends never came into my hands. Gifts to
prisoners are considered the legitimate spoils for
the prison attaches who handle them.

Incidentally, if you were a prisoner, and your
friend had sent a nice pipe, or a necktie, or any
other article of that kind, it would not be sur-
prising if it did not reach you at all. Very often
an inferior article is substituted for the one sent.
If you have a friend in prison and you send him
a fine pipe it is not unlikely that it will be re-
placed by a cheap pipe, and the helpless prisoner
is grimly amused when he receives your letter
and reads your comment about the nice pipe he is
now smoking in the solitude of his cell. A num-
ber of such instances were brought to my atten-
tion. A friend of mine in Florida who is a mer-
chant, sent me a large box containing animal
crackers done up in small packages. I always
gave those kind of things away, passing them
around among the other prisoners, and as I

VISITOES AND VISITING 93

opened the case I was happy in the thought that
these crackers would go a long way — there ap-
j)eared to be so many of them. When I had taken
out the top layer of packages the layers under-
neath collapsed; the box had been robbed before
it got to me, and had been skillfully " packed '^
so as to present an intact appearance.

There were a great many persons who were
desirous of visiting me at Atlanta, including a
considerable number of residents of that city and
vicinity, but for obvious reasons it was not pos-
sible for me to see them.

First of all, as I have said, I felt a reluctance,
as many other prisoners do, to have those I love
and esteem subjected to the humiliating condi-
tions imposed upon visitors by the prison regime.
In the next place, my attitude from the begin-
ning had been that I would permit the prison to
confer no privilege upon me, and I had no right
to expect any favors on this score. It was in
consequence of this that the report went out from
Atlanta that I had refused to see certain visitors.
As a matter of fact, such instances were due
either to my already having received the full
quota of visitors allowed by the rules, or else
because the visitor happened to have come under
the head of a certain order that was specially
issued in my case by the department at Wash-
ington, and which placed me incommunicado for
a time. In this position no press representative
was permitted to see me, nor in fact anyone else

94 WALLS AND BABS

save in the discretion of the warden. Of this
order of the department, which completely sus-
pended my writing and visiting privileges for a
time, I shall have more to say in a later chapter.

An interesting visit to me was that of the dele-
gation of socialists composing the state conven-
tion of the party in Georgia. This visit occurred
during the administration of Warden Zerbst who
had given the convention special permission,
upon their application, to visit me in a body.
There were fully a hundred or more men and
women in the delegation that came to the prison,
and I was permitted to meet them in the main
corridor where I was tendered their congratula-
tions in the most loyal and devoted terms, and to
which I made due response. It was to me a most
impressive occasion, and I doubt if a similar in-
cident ever occurred before in an American
prison.

During the informalities the guards stood by
attentively, and I felt that they were as respon-
sive to the beautiful spirit of the occasion as
their prison duty would allow. Tears glistened
in the eyes of most of these comrades of mine as
they took me by the hand one by one and passed
out through the prison doors.

It is true that I did receive many visitors in
the nearly three years that I spent in Atlanta
prison. As far as it was possible, I discouraged
persons from coming to see me. I knew well
enough that many of my fellow prisoners never

VISITOES AND VISITING 95

received a single visitor in all the years they had
spent behind those gray, grim vralls. Yet, I could
not share my visitors with these neglected souls,
and I wanted nothing that they could not have.
I anticipate the comment that this may be purely
sentimental on my part, but whether it is or not,
I tried to be careful lest some favor or privilege
were extended to me because of the position that
I had held in the outside world, that would em-
phasize in the mind and heart of the neglected
prisoner his own loneliness and isolation.

Among other visitors there were a number of
prominent persons who came to see me, and these
included Clarence Darrow, attorney, of Chicago;
Melville E. Stone, former general manager of the
Associated Press; Norman Hapgood, former
United States minister to Denmark and publicist;
Samuel Gompers, president of the American
Federation of Labor, and Lincoln Steffens, au-
thor and journalist. I have known Mr. Darrow
for many years. He. was one of my attorneys in
the federal court proceedings that resulted from
the great railroad strike of 1894 sponsored by the
American Eailway Union of which I was presi-
dent. I have had several very happy personal
meetings with Mr. Darrow since those distant
days, and not the least of the pleasant ones oc-
curred when he came to see me of his own
volition in Atlanta prison.

Mr. Darrow had been to Washington inter-
ceding in my behalf. He was on personal terms

96 WALLS AND BABS

witJi Newton D. Baker, then secretary of war,
and A. Mitchell Palmer, former attorney gen-
eral. Mr. Darrow reported to me that Mr.
Palmer had expressed himself as being more than
casually interested in my case, and that Mr.
Baker was not unfriendly disposed toward me.

Mr. Darrow asked me if I had any objection in
his seeing what he could do in my behalf looking
toward a possible release from prison, and if I
had any objection to others working along similar
lines with a similar purpose in view. I told Mr,
Darrow that I would ask for nothing for myself,
nor did I wish my friends to appeal specially in
my behalf for executive clemency. I told him that
I could not prevent my friends doing what they
could for me, but I wished them to base their ap-
peal and petition on the broad grounds of free-
dom for all the political prisoners, leaving no
one out who had been sent to prison because of
his opinions on a public question, such as the
war. "When Mr. Darrow left Atlanta he went
back to Washington, and had further interviews
with the higher officials there.

I met Mr. Gompers when he came to the prison,
at the invitation of the warden, to deliver an ad-
dress to the convicts in the auditorium of the
penitentiary. Mr. Gompers was courteously re-
ceived by the inmates, and their response to his
remarks was appreciative and generous. After
his prison address we enjoyed a brief visit in the
office of the warden.

VISITORS AND VISITING 97

Mr. Hapgood's visit was particularly pleas-
ant to me. He was at that time writing for a
newspaper syndicate in Washington, and I fol-
lowed his articles in the Atlanta newspaper that
published them. I understood that Mr. Hapgood
had visited me so that he might write a series of
articles about my case. After an hour's talk to-
gether he left, and I was much impressed by his
kindly manner, his charming personality and his
sincerity in the issue that had brought him to
Atlanta prison. His articles appeared a few
weeks later, and I am sure they had a salutary in-
fluence in directing the public's attention to the
fact that many men and women had suffered im-
prisonment because they had stood ujDon their
constitutional right to hold a point of view and
express it.

I had not seen Melville E. Stone for twenty-
five years. At that time Mr. Stone was editor
of Victor Lawson's Chicago Eecord, and we were
brought together through Eugene Field, whose
close personal friendship it was my privilege to
possess. At that time Mr. Stone and I under-
stood each other perfectly. He was on one side
of many public questions affecting the interests
of the common people, while I was on the other.
Those are matters not to be discussed here;
suffice it to say that Mr. Stone and I were per-
sonally friendly, and on the occasion of his visit
with me his eyes filled with tears as he took my
hand and told me that his faith in me as a man

98 WALLS AND BABS

had never wavered, and that notwithstanding the
fact that we were on opposite sides, he had never
permitted a reflection upon me as a man to re-
main unchallenged.

It had been my pleasure to meet Mr. Steffens
many years ago. He came to see me once in
Boston during the campaign of 1908 when I was
a candidate for President. His visit to Atlanta
occurred a few weeks before my release, and he
told me much about the political and economic
conditions in Eussia, where he had, spent con-
siderable time investigating and obselfving them.
Mr. Steffens was also interesting himself in the
question of amnesty for political prisoners in the
United States, and we talked at some length upon
that subject.

The casual visitors who came to Atlanta Prison
to see the institution itself almost never failed to
ask the guards to permit them to see me. Many
of them must have thought I was some sort of
curiosity, and I was told that not infrequently
guards and even trusties were offered small
sums of money by these prison tourists if they
would point me out to them. In almost every
case they were disappointed, for my quarters
were in the hospital to which visitors were not
usually admitted.

One of the rules of the prison forbids a con-
vict from addressing himself to a person from
the outside unless he is specially permitted so
to do. One day I was ordered to go to the war-

VISITORS AND VISITING 99

den's office, and as I passed through the maiD
corridor an Atlanta friend saw me and got np
to greet me. I extended my hand to him, when
suddenly a guard screamed at the person, seized
him roughly and threatened to eject him from the
prison. By the same token, I had also violated
a solemn rule, hut no punishment was inflicted
for the infraction.

CHAPTER VII.

My 1920 Campaign for President.

It may or may not, according to the point of
view, be an enviable distinction to be nominated
for the high office of President of the United
States while in the garb of a felon and serving a
term as such in one of its penitentiaries.

I am reminded of an editorial paragraph ap-
pearing in one of the eastern dailies at the time
of my imprisonment at Moundsville which read
something like this : * ^ Debs started for the White
House, but he only got as far as the federal
prison''. I was not the least perturbed by this
comment for I knew in advance that my course
led, not to the presidential mansion, but through
the prison gates. I had already been the candidate
of the socialist party in four previous campaigns
for President— 1900, 1904, 1908 and 1912.

Having had almost a million votes cast for me
in the latter campaign and as many more that
were not counted, and feeling that I had been
more than sufficiently honored, I concluded not
to be a presidential candidate again, and in the
national political contest of 1916 I did not per-
mit the use of my name in the nominations.
However, in the congressional convention of nay
district (the fifth Indiana), which followed a lit-

MY 1920 CAMPAIGN FOE PRESIDENT 101

tie later, dnring my absence on a speaking tour,
I was nnanimoiisly chosen as the candidate for
Congress and stood as the nominee in that cam-
paign, my supporters refusing to permit me to
withdraw my name from the ticket.

When the time came for making the nomina-
tions for President in 1920 I was serving my
sentence in Atlanta prison, and in response to
urgent solicitations from the membership at first
positively declined to be considered a candidate.
Later, however, when I was assured that the
nomination would be made irrespective of my
views in the matter, and that it would be unani-
mous, I yielded to the wishes of the delegates.
The nomination followed and, as predicted, was
made by acclamation in the convention held in
New York City.

During the year previous to the convention
many of the party papers carried the slogan,
^^From the Prison to the White House '^ and I
was told by many of my visitors and correspon-
dents that I would be the choice of the rank and
file of the party for President. This was an
honor which I had never sought; in fact, I had
my own personal reasons for not wishing to be
the standard bearer, reasons which dated back to
the time when I was a member of the Indiana
legislature. I made a resolution to myself that
I would never again be a candidate for a public
office, preferring to devote my energies to tasks
immediately identified with the industrial side of

102 WALLS AND BAES

the labor movement The party to which I gave
allegiance chose otherwise, thus setting aside my
personal wishes.

Men had been nominated for President who
were bom in log cabins to testify to their lowly
origin, but never before had such a nomination
been conferred upon an imprisoned convict. It
was indeed an unprecedented distinction which
had been bestowed upon me, and the reader may
place his own interpretation upon its significance.

Next in order was the visit to the prison of the
committee on notification, the department at
Washington having granted the necessary per-
mission for such a committee to call upon me.
In due time the committee arrived, consisting of
both men and women, and the ceremony occurred
in the warden's office, Mr. Zerbst and other offi-
cials of the institution being interested spectators.

The nomination address was in the nature of
a most complimentary tribute to which I re-
sponded in an expression of my thanks and ap-
preciation. The occasion was altogether as im-
pressive as it was unique and created a lively in-
terest throughout the prison.

To have a presidential candidate in their midst
was a thing the nearly three thousand prisoners
had never experienced before and they seemed to
feel a thrill of pride as if they, too, shared in
whatever distinction was bestowed upon me,
] which indeed they did, for I can say in all sin-
cerity that there is among men in prison a fel-

MY 1920 CAMPAIGN FOE PEESIDENT 103

low-feeling that in some respects is less selfish
and more refined and generous than that which
commonly prevails in the outer world.

The representatives of the press were in the
prison at the time of the notification ceremonies
and gave good accounts to their readers of the
very unusual proceedings at the prison. The film
photographers were also in eager evidence, as
is their wont, to pictorialize the event, and a few
days later the scenes were reproduced on screens
in thousands of motion picture theaters through-
out the country. The warden permitted me to
be escorted by the committee outside the prison
gates where informal conversations were held,
more pictures taken, and where a group of At-
lanta children presented me with a bouquet of
red roses caught at the stems by a splash of scar-
let ribbon. In this instance, as in a number of
others, Warden Zerbst exhibited toward me per-
sonally a friendliness for which I am grateful to
him.

Never in all of my experience as a presidential
candidate had I been so deeply touched and so
profoundly impressed by the congratulations of
friends as I was by those I received that day and
in the days that followed from the inmates of
the Atlanta federal prison. The hands, black
and white, were extended to me from the cells
and from all directions, while faces beamed with
a warmth and sincerity that found expression
from eager lips.

104 WALLS AND BAES

The little speeches made by some of these poor
broken brothers of mine to whom no nomination
had ever come, save that issued by the judge who
pronounced their doom, voiced genuine pride and
joy in the honor which had come to me, evincing
a beautiful and generous human spirit that, in
spite of its hardening and degrading conditions,
the prison could not extinguish.

To be perfectly candid, I felt more highly hon-
ored by these manifestations of my fellow con-
victs, on account of their obvious unselfishness,
their spontaneous and generous enthusiasm, than
any congratulatory occasion I had ever before
experienced. Many were the convicts of the
various hues and shades of intelligence that made
up the prison population who actually believed
from the enthusiasm at the moment surrounded
them, augmented by the items appearing from
time to time in the daily press about me, that my
election was at least probable, and that with my in-
duction into the "White House a new era would
dawn for them and other prisoners confined in
penitentiaries and jails in the United States.

My fellow prisoners were not only much im-
pressed by the political delegations that came to
see me, but they followed closely the daily papers
seeking for items that might have some reference
to me. When these appeared they seemed to
have the effect of an affirmation of the simple
belief held by many of the prisoners that I was
due to be inaugurated President in the March

MY 1920 CAMPAIGN FOE PRESIDENT 105

following the election. Not a few of the more
naive convicts came to look upon their liberty
as being restored to them, not when their sen-
tences would have been completed, but when I
should be placed in the executive mansion.

Among the colored prisoners it was current
that they were to share equally with the white
convicts in whatever beneficial change that was
to take place under my administration.

One of the popular comments heard in the
course of the prison campaign was that I was cer-
tain to sweep every precinct in the penitentiary,
and that neither Mr. Harding nor Mr. Cox, my
political adversaries, would receive a single
prison electoral vote.

It seems, and to my mind it certainly is, a
pathetic commentary upon our social life that a
faith so simple and child-like as was here mani-
fested should have been sealed and crowned by
a cruel and debasing prison sentence.

I was amused by the wit of a newspaper wag
who said at the beginning of the campaign that
Cox would make his speeches from the tail end
of a train, Harding would appeal for votes from
his front porch, while I would make my bid for
the support of the electorate from a front cell.
To this it was added that my political conferees
would have the advantage of knowing where I
stood, and that they would always find me in
when they wanted to confer with me.

I was certainly saved from one embarrassment

106 WALLS AND BARS

to which other presidential candidates are uni-
formly subjected ; I was not called upon to prom-
ise a postoffice to each of several candidates of
rival factions. Neither did the matter of a presi-
dential candidate's political expenses cause me
any annoyance, for under the rules of the prison
to which my campaign activities were confined, a
chap, even though a nominee for the highest
office, caught with so little as a dime in his
pockets is ruthlessly pounced upon by a guard
and the culprit haled before the prison magistrate
in the person of the deputy warden and punished
as if he had robbed a bank.

Not a penny is a prisoner permitted to have
in his possession, and I wondered about the con-
sternation there would be among my rival candi-
dates for office in the outer world if they were
deprived of the use of money at election time.

During the campaign the attorney general per-
mitted me to issue a weekly statement in limited
form discussing the political issues. I wrote
these statements in my room in the hospital, and
each week mailed them to my home in Terre
Haute where they were typed and sent to the
national office of the party in Chicago from
whence they were distributed to the press asso-
ciations and party newspapers. In this manner
the convict candidate's messages were given a
wide and ofttimes sympathetic readins:.

Strange as it may appear, I received but two
or three uncomplimentary letters during the en-

MY 1920 CAMPAIGN FOR PRESIDENT 107

tire campaign. The mail of nearly every candi-
date for an important office is burdened during
his campaign with all sorts of insulting and
threatening letters. One of my correspondents
said that I should be shot, and the other wrote
that I was at last where I belonged, and he hoped
I would not leave there alive; he concluded with
the hope that the warden would have my naked
back lashed until it bled every day I was there.
This benevolent writer also advised me in the
same letter that he had written to the warden
to the same effect.

Of course all these mercifully-inspired epistles
were from anonymous writers who declared their
implacable hatred of all things un-American, and
vouchsafed their red-blooded loyalty to American
ideals.

There was no attempt made at any time either
by the prison officials or the department at Wash-
ington to restrict my little campaign messages.
As the weeks lengthened into months I became
more than ever a curiosity to casual visitors to
the prison, and they employed every ruse and
subterfuge with the attaches to get a glimpse of
the man who had converted a federal iDcnitentiary
into his campaign headquarters.

Notwithstanding that I was clothed in the faded
and frayed garb of a felon, I felt aware of a cer-
tain dignity that my peculiar position as a candi-
date imposed, expressive as it was of a confidence
that remained unshaken in the face of all the de-

108 WALLS AND BAES

nial it had encountered. Certainly no candidate
could have been shown more respect or treated
with greater courtesy than was I by the prison
population and all others with whom I incidentally
came into contact.

Election night is vividly recalled as a pleasant
and interesting special occasion. Soon after the
supper hour I was sent for and received by the
deputy warden who conducted me to the warden's
office to hear the returns that were being received
by telephone and in the form of special mes-
sages. The warden and his wife were present as
were representatives of the press. The bulletins
came in rapidly and the table was soon covered
with these returns.

Early in the evening I conceded the election of
"Warren G. Harding and my own defeat, which
apparently excited no surprise among those in
the office and beyond the walls ; the only surprise,
if not chagrin, that was felt came from the prison
cells. An interesting question arose while we sat
there in the warden's office as to a pardon to
myself in the event of my election, and we all
found some mirth in debating it. I am sure the
question did not disturb my slumber in the nights
preceding this particular one.

We remained in the office of the warden until
the election of Harding was assured, when I once
more breathed a sigh of relief as a defeated
presidential candidate. I was not in the least
downcast that I had not been elected President

MY 1920 CAMPAIGN FOB PRESIDENT 109

of the United States. In the next hour I was in
dreamland sailing the seven seas in quest of new
worlds to conquer.

The sincere regret expressed the following day
by my prison mates that I had not been trans-
ferred from Atlanta to Washington by the Ameri-
can people would have compensated me for any
disappointment I might have felt over the con-
duct of the campaign and its final results.

CHAPTER Vin.

'A Chkistmas Eve Reception.

There are certain occasions in my prison ex-
perience that are vividly preserved as beautiful
pictures. One of these v^as the celebration of
Christmas Eve, 1920, in the basement of the
prison hospital.

Permission had been secured by the inmates of
the hospital from the officials to hold a Christmas
Eve communion and spread a banquet to which
the prisoners contributed the gifts that came
from their families and friends. So quietly had
all this been arranged, that I was in blissful
ignorance of it until I was escorted to the spa-
cious and brilliantly illuminated basement where
I beheld with astonishment and delight an ex-
tended table spread with a banquet of delicious
dishes that was equally tempting to the eye and
palate.

Every hospital inmate who had received any
gifts at all contributed them to the common lot.
The holly-stamped paper in which the gifts had
been wrapped was carefully preserved by the
prisoners, one of whom fashioned fancy doilies
out of it and spread them under each plate. The
myriad colored ribbons were used as part of the
festoons, and from somewhere flowers had been

A CHRISTMAS EVE EECEPTION 111

obtained for decorating the table. Each prisoner
had brought his own little iron chair from his
room or the wards, and when they were all seated
they held consultation as to who should come to
my room, to escort me to the festive board.

Every prisoner wanted what he considered was
that honor, and since the dispute could be solved
in no other way they decided to hold nominations
and elect an escorting committee of two. It hap-
pened that an Irishman and a Chinese were
chosen. I was sitting in my own room when the
two convicts came to my door and told me that
I was wanted in the basement. The Irishman
tried his best to appear solemn, but the face of
the Mongolian beamed with anticipatory delight
over the surprise that he knew would be mine in
a few moments. Flanked on either side by my
fellow prisoners, I walked through the silent
corridors of the now deserted hospital, and down
the stairs to the basement, where for the first
time I realized the purpose of my being sum-
moned. In every eye there was an expression
of delight and kindness, and if I had never before
understood the meaning of human happiness and
the radiant heights to which it may ascend, I per-
ceived it that night before me in the faces of my
fellow prisoners who had in this loving and sim-
ple way translated the thought of *^good will
among men'^ into kindly deed.

The convict committee escorted me to the head
of the table where I was informed that I was

112 WALLS AND BAKS

their guest of honor. Sometimes there come to
all of us feelings that sing in the heart and sigh
for expression when only our silence really reg-
isters the depth of our emotion and our moist
eyes suggest what the world could never reveal.
So I cannot tell you of the deep stirrings within
me as I looked down the lanes of that burdened
board and beheld in the countenances of those
convicts a joyous unselfishness that passes all
understanding in the outer world.

I am sure my eyes never rested upon a more
beautiful and inviting feast. If I had never be-
fore forgotten that I was enclosed in prison walls
it certainly did not occur to me during that ex-
traordinary evening that I was being held in
custody.

In all the more than three score years of my
life there had been but two Christmas eves that
I spent away from home. It had been an un-
written rule in our large family to gather under
the rooftree of the old home at Christmas time
and spend the holidays there. It was always the
occasion for a beautiful family reunion, the mem-
ory of which is treasured by me and will be ^* un-
til it empties its urn into forgetfulness.''

The first was in 1897 when I was filling a series
of speaking engagements in Iowa, and had the
detectives of the railroad companies at my heels ;
they followed me from point to point to assist
me in my work in the way peculiar to those func-
tionaries. This was due to my former activities

A CHRISTMAS EVE RECEPTION 113

among railroad men, organizing them into the
American Eailway Union which had sponsored
the great strike of three years before, resulting,
so far as I personally was concerned, in my im-
prisonment in McHenry County Jail, Illinois, for
six months for disregarding an injunction issued
by a federal court which had held me in contempt.
Christmas eve, 1897, found me in Des Moines with-
out money to pay my railroad fare and that ac-
counts for my missing the celebration at home.
The second occasion of my absence was in 1919,
when I was in Atlanta federal prison.

I have mixed feelings as to the compensation
that was awarded me in 1920 for my inability
to be at my own fireside, but I am sure I shall
never forget the manner in which my fellow
prisoners exerted themselves at that prison ban-
quet for my surprise and happiness. The scene
presented aspects so unusual that I felt myself
not only highly honored, but there was a silent
and subtle appeal to my emotions that cannot be
expressed in words.

I had never before been the recipient of
such bounty, nor from such a source, nor more
graciously and tenderly offered. Each had con-
tributed his all for the enjoyment of all.

A noticeable incident that impressed me was
the insistence of the prisoners to serve at the
tables instead of being seated as guests. That
concrete and steel-barred prison basement was
a temple of spiritual fellowship in blessed re-

114 WALLS AND BARS

union that night. Seated around that hospitable
board we were brothers indeed, and I only wish
it had been possible for those who think of in-
mates of prison in terms of crime and degeneracy
to have looked upon that gathering of convicts
and then have been asked in what essential par-
ticular they were inferior to or different from
any similar number of human beings who were
celebrating, in stately edifices dedicated to his
name, the natal day of the Man who was born
in a stable.

It may be a fancy, but I somehow felt that
Jesus Christ was in prison that night.

Some weeks before Christmas a case contain-
ing 500 copies of a book entitled, ^^Debs and the
Poets'', was shipped to the prison. This book
was an anthology of verse and comment collected
by Euth LePrade and published by Upton Sin-
clair at Pasadena, California. It was the desire
of the author and publisher that I autograph the
books which were to be sold by them in the inter-
est of a fund being raised to continue the agita-
tion for general amnesty for political prisoners.
When the books arrived a copy was scrutinized
by Warden Zerbst who decided that the intro-
duction supplied by Upton Sinclair was not par-
ticularly complimentary to the prison idea, nor
was some of the poetry. Now, although prisons
have concrete hides to cover their guilt, like all
guilty creatures they are exceedingly sensitive
as to having that guilt exposed, so a copy of the

A CHEISTMAS EVE EECEPTION 115

book in question was sent to Attorney General
Palmer who ruled there was nothing objection-
able in it, and that I might be permitted to auto-
graph the copies.

At that time David Karsner was in Atlanta as
the correspondent of a New York newspaper,
and he with Samuel M. Castleton, a local attor-
ney, who had been personally friendly to me
while I was in the prison there, asked the war-
den if I might be permitted to inscribe the books
Christmas Eve night. The request was granted
and the hour to begin was fixed at seven o'clock.
After the banquet in the prison hospital base-
ment was over I went to the clerk's office where
I found Karsner and Castleton awaiting my pres-
ence. With them was David H. Clark, an At-
lanta comrade, who, I learned later, had re-
signed his position in the post office that night
so that he might be able to join his friends in
the unusual visit with me. I recall remarking to
my friends that my batteries were all charged,
as indeed they were, for at the basement banquet
I had been called upon to deliver an address for
the occasion. I spoke over half an hour to my
fellow prisoners and I am sure I was never more
inspired to make an address than I was that
night. Several of the prisoners responded to my
remarks and I shall never forget the homely
eloquence that flowed from their honest hearts.

The books which I was to autograph were piled
on either side of me at the clerk's desk and the

116 'VV'ALLS AND BAES

work commenced. In the corridor outside a
dozen or more prisoners were assembling the
last of the Christmas packages for the convicts
and there was an atmosphere of fellowship that
pervaded the entire scene. From time to time
prisoners slipped in and out of the room where
I was at work to drop a kindly word, and my
friends from the outside world remarked upon
the amiable manner in which every convict con-
ducted himself. Later that evening it was sug-
gested by one of my visitors that maybe the
prisoners assorting Christmas boxes would like
to have a soft drink, so the matter was put up to
the chief clerk who was superintending the work,
and he agreed to it. Thereupon Karsner and
Clark went out of the prison and down to a little
store outside the gates where they purchased
two dozen bottles of ginger ale.

It happened that when they asked to be read-
mitted to the penitentiary Deputy Warden Greg-
ory was in the main corridor and he came to the
gate to inquire what was in the box that Karsner
carried.

He was told of its contents and that permit had
been secured to bring it in the prison for the men
who were at work over the Christmas gifts. The
deputy warden felt that he should have first been
consulted about the matter and he refused to
allow the refreshment given to the convicts. This
is but one indication of how senseless, and need-
lessly harsh, are prison rules. Later the deputy

A CHEISTMAS EVE EECEPTION 117

attempted to explain in a somewliat apologetic
manner to Karsner that "who knows but that
those bottles might contain 'dope' and files '\
This, in spite of the fact that he could have re-
assured himself on that score in a moment by
observing that every bottle was sealed.

My visitors and I kept at the task of signing
the books, every copy of which was numbered,
until midnight. Then Karsner, Castleton and
Clark presented me with their own inscribed
copy number 65 as significant of the total of my
years.

A nation-wide holiday camjoaign had been in-
augurated for my release so that I might return
home for Christmas. It has long been a cus-
tom with the i3ardoning jDower at Washington to
grant a meritorious prisoner his freedom as an
act of grace at the season of "peace on earth and
good will among men". President Wilson
granted the Christmas pardon as usual, but in
this instance it was not in response to the nu-
merously signed petitions reiDresenting every state
in the union which had been presented to him,
but the boon was granted to an Indian who was
serving a life sentence for murder.

Attorney General Palmer had finally filed with
the President his long delayed and expected re-
port on my case. Speculation was rife as to
whether the recommendation would be favorable
or otherwise. The doubt was summarily dis-
pelled when the report flashed over the wires

118 WALLS AND BARS

that President Wilson had refused to grant the
petition circulated and forwarded to him in my
behalf, notwithstanding the Attorney GreneraPs
recommendation for my release.

When Mr. Palmer's report was placed before
the ailing President the latter had but one word
to offer as signifying his attitude toward me.
Over the face of the recommendation he scrawled,
^'DENIED".

I have been a trifle more than casually inter-
ested in the reason that prompted Mr. Wilson to
arrive at that state of mind which is furnished
by his former private secretary, Joseph P. Tu-
multy who, in his book, ^^Woodrow Wilson as I
Knew Him'', sets down this record of the Presi-
dent's comment in my case:

^ ' One of the things to which he paid particular
attention at this time, the last days of his rule,
was the matter of the pardon of Eugene V. Debs.
The day that the recommendation arrived at the
White House he looked it over and examined it
carefully and said:

** *I will never consent to the pardon of this
man. I know that in certain quarters of the coun-
try there is a popular demand for the pardon of
Debs, but it shall never be accomplished with
my consent. Were I to consent to it, I should
never be able to look into the faces of the moth-
ers of this country who sent their boys to the
other side. While the flower of American youth
was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause

A CHRISTMAS EVE EECEPTION 119

of civilization, tMs man Debs stood behind the
lines, sniping, attacking and denouncing them.
Before the war he had a perfect right to exercise
his freedom of speech and to express his own
opinion, but after the Congress of the United
States declared war silence on his part would
have been the proper course to pursue.

*' ^ I know there will be a great deal of de-
nunciation of me for refusing this pardon. They
will say I am cold-blooded and indifferent, but
it will make no impression on me. This man was
a traitor to his country, and he will never be
pardoned during my administration' ".

Personally I have no fault to find, nor any
criticism to level at President Wilson for what
he considered to be his proper course. But in-
terest is quite naturally aroused when we come
upon an expression such as the following from
Mr. Wilson:

**I have no fault to find, Tumulty, with the men
who disagree with me, and I ought not to pena-
lize them when they give honest expression to
what they believe are honest opinions''.

I have nothing but pity and compassion for a
man, even though he be President of the United
States, who feels himself so unutterably lonely
as to be impelled to give voice to such a sad senti-
ment as the following:

**It is no compliment to have it said that I am
only a highly developed intellectual machine.
G-ood God! Is there no more to me than that?

120 WALLS AND BARS

Well, I want the people to love me, but I sup-
pose they never will.''

Immediately following the action of Mr. Wil-
son representatives of the press appeared at the
prison for an interview, but I declined to com-
ment on the executive's action. Some days later
I was visited by two friends, one of whom was
an Atlanta reporter, and during the conversation
that followed I expressed my opinion of the
President's action. In so doing I was entirely
within my rights under the rules of the prison.

The report of my comment was published the
following day and appears to have displeased the
President, for immediately afterward an order
was issued depriving me of all writing and vis-
iting privileges and placing me incommunicado
for an indefinite period. I was told that this
measure had been taken by order of the Presi-
dent himself because my observations had vexed
him and he wanted no more of them.

This action created a sensation in the prison
and was flashed broadcast over the country. The
reaction that followed was swift and emphatic.
Popular resentment was far more widespread
than that which attended my incarceration.
Thousands of people who were not in agreement
with me at all felt that my imprisonment was
sufficient without depriving me of the limited
rights that remained to me as a prisoner, and
joined in the swelling demand that the order
placing me incommunicado be revoked.

A CHKISTMAS EVE EECEPTION 121

Public men of prominence and some newspa-
pers of influence joined in the protest. So in-
sistent became the demand for the restoration
of my prison privileges that after a period of al-
most three weeks, during which my family and
friends were permitted neither to see nor hear
from me, the order was partially, and doubtless
grudgingly revoked on the day before Mr. Wil-
son's retirement from office; but I was never
again permitted to see a newspaper man or any
one who was in any way connected with the press.

It was the general opinion about the prison
that the revocation was deferred until the Presi-
dent was about to leave office and that action was
taken then only because my limited privileges
would almost certainly be restored by President
Harding, The effect of Mr. Wilson's order of
revocation increased the desire and insistence of
newspaper men to see me and obtain a further
expression of my views which the warden spared
me under the iron-clad special rule that forbade
my seeing, much less being interviewed, by re-
porters. The warden was kept busy enforcing
the rule and a sharp lookout was kept to prevent
a possible newspaper man from satisfying the
public curiosity as to what I had to say about not
being permitted to say anything.

CHAPTER IX.

Leaving the Peison.

The spontaneous and sensational demonstra-
tion that occurred upon my leaving the prison at
Atlanta will abide with me vividly to the last
hour of my life. The startling, thrilling, dra-
matic and deeply touching scene of that strange
leave-taking is etched into my very soul. It was
Christmas day. The definite order for my re-
lease had come at last after weeks and months
of baseless rumors. The prison was tense with
excitement. In cells and corridors, in the duck
mill, in the mess room, the stockade, everywhere
it was the one topic of conversation and com-
ment. The very atmosphere seemed charged with
some mysterious element, some dynamic force
about to break forth to shake that formidable
pile to its foundations.

The twenty-three hundred corraled convicts,
so-called, of all colors, creeds and conditions,
gathered there from all quarters, seemed in that
pregnant, pulsing hour to typify with pathetic
appeal and dramatic impressiveness, the unity of
mankind, and the common brotherhood of the
race.

For nearly three years I had been the daily
associate and companion of these tortured souls

LEAVING THE PBISON 123

' — these imprisoned victims of a cruel and re-
lentless fate. I had shared with them on equal
terms in all things and they knew it and loved
me as I loved them. They were my friends not
only, but my brothers and realized and rejoiced
in our mutual and intimate relations. In a
thousand ways, by stealth when necessary, and
by other means when possible, they made mani-
fest their confidence and their loyalty, and com-
ing from that pathetic source, from hearts that
once beat high with hope but many of which had
long been dead to the thrill of enthusiasm and
the joy of life, this tender, loving tribute touched
me to the heart and had for me a meaning too
deep and overmastering to be expressed in words.

The hour had come when we must part. Great
was its rejoicing over my release, but the part-
ing and the uncertainty of ever meeting again
struck their hearts and mine with sorrow and
regret.

As the noon hour approached the Warden and
Deputy Warden called to inform me that the
time had come for me to take my leave. My
brother had arrived to join me as I left the
prison for the homeward journey. The last in-
mate I clasped hands with was a Negro serving
a life sentence. As the poor fellow stood before
me sobbing I literally saw the prison in tears.

For a moment I was rooted to the spot and
shaken with emotion. I felt as if I was deserting

124 WALLS AND BARS

my friends and a sense of guilt gripped my con-
science.

I could see their anxious eyes peering at me
from all directions, and how could I turn my back
on them and leave them there ! They wanted me
to go, to join my family, to have my liberty, while
the impulse seized me to stay with them until we
could walk out of the barred cells together into
the sunlight of the outer world.

It was a strange, sad, mystifying experience.
As I pen these lines I live over again those
solemn, heart-gripping moments. The pathetic
smiles on the pallid faces that pressed so hard
against the relentless bars of that living tomb
will haunt me to my dying day.

What would I not have given to fling those
gates of hell wide open and give to every soul
therein his life and freedom!

The grim guard simply opened the steel door
in front at a signal from the Warden.

The portals of the prison were soon left be-
hind. At the edge of the reservation an auto-
mobile stood in readiness to whirl me to the
depot. Flanked by the Warden and Deputy, who
treated me with perfect courtesy, I was soon to
greet my eager long-waiting friends and com-
rades.

Midway in the reservation, between the prison
entrance and the street, we were halted by what
seemed a rumbling of the earth as if shaken by
some violent explosion. It was a roar of voices —

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LEAVING THE PRISON 125

the hoarse voices of a caged humaii host that had
forgotten how to cheer and gave vent to their
long pent-up emotions in thunder volleys I never
heard before and never shall again, for that over-
whelming, bewildering scene, without a parallel
in prison history, will never be re-enacted in my
life.

The demonstration was spontaneous as it was
startling and spectacular. No one could have
planned or sponsored the sensational outburst.
It all happened in a twinkling and gave the offi-
cials and guards a surprise that struck them
dumb. They stood staring and speechless as they
beheld the wild demonstration of the mob of con-
victs who but a moment before were the silent
and submissive slaves of a brutal prison regime.

Feeling themselves free for the moment at
least they let loose again and again in roars of
farewell salutation. Prison rules, hard and for-
bidding, as if by magic, fled the scene, while grim
guards, the pitiless terror and torment of the
convicts, looked on paralyzed and speechless with
amazement.

Not a word passed between the Warden, the
Deputy Warden and myself as we stood rooted
where we had been halted by the first outburst
in the prison. We had wheeled about as one, and
there we stood, mute witnesses to a scene of such
tragic human appeal as would have moved a
heart of stone.

My own heart almost ceased to beat. I felt

126 WALLS AND BAKS

myself overwhelmed with painful and saddening
emotions. The impulse again seized me to turn
back. I had no right to leave. Those tearful,
haunting faces, pressing against the barred
prison windows — how they appealed to me — and
accused me!

But I had to go. As I stepped into the waiting
car and waved my last farewell another mighty
shout was heard. And then another and another
and still another, until far, far up the winding
road and far away from the terrible prison, the
last faint echo of the convict-host that wept as
it cheered, died away in the distance,

CHAPTER X.

General Prison Conditions.

During the nearly three years that I was in
Atlanta Federal Prison a number of convicts
spoke to me from time to time of their desire and
intention to escape from the prison. I invariably
and emphatically advised them against it, know-
ing as I did, what lay in store for them as the
fruit of such rashness. I also ad^dsed the men to
keep within the rules and conduct themselves as
decently as possible in the interest of their own
protection and well-being against the cruel
prison regime in general and the brutality ot
some of the guards in jDarticular.

It should be conceded here that prison condi-
tions, generally speaking, are today far better
than they were at any time before in history.
The truth of this is more apparent when we con-
sider the state of the prison and its inmates in
this country a century and more ago. To realize
what a foul and hideous institution the prison
was at that time one need only read the pages of
McMasters' ''History of the United States''
dealing with prison life during the colonial
period.

At that time men were still imprisoned for
debt, and the prison sometimes consisted of an

128 WALLS AND BAES

abandoned mine, a pest hole in which men and
women were confined and in which they literally
rotted away in filth and loathsomeness. Capital
punishment would have been more merciful than
the unspeakable torture visited upon the unfor-
tunate poor who were thrown into these black
holes and doomed to slow and shocking death for
the crime of being poor and unable to pay some
small debt.

In the progress of society, the prison has in
the very nature of things undergone some im-
provement, but there are vast stretches yet to be
covered before the prison becomes, if it ever
does, an institution for the reclamation and re-
habilitation of erring and unfortunate men and
women.

The general public knows practically nothing
about the prison and appears to be little con-
cerned about how it is managed and how prison-
ers are treated. Not until the average man finds
himself behind steel bars does he realize how in-
different he has been to a problem in which he
should have felt himself vitally concerned.

As a rule, prisons are under the control of
politicians to whom the welfare of its inmates,
and the welfare of society as it is affected by
them, is but a secondary consideration, if, indeed,
that question really engages their attention at all.
The wardenship of a federal or a state prison
is, in my opinion, of more importance to society
than the presidency of a college. The latter is

GENERAL PRISON CONDITIONS 129

chosen with at least some reference to his chac-
acter and his qualifications for the position,
whereas the warden is usually awarded his office
in return for his political services irrespective of
his fitness to hold a position that has to do with
the welfare of human beings.

The president of a college has supervision of
an institution in which young and normal people
are dealt with, and who readily understand and
embrace the opportunity afforded them to secure
educational advantages to fit them for the strug-
gle of life. The warden of a prison, on the other
hand, is in charge of and has almost absolute
power over the life and destiny of thousands of
human beings, some of whom are subnormal,
most of whom have, for the time at least, been
broken and beaten in the battle of life, and all of
whom are in need of such humane and intelligent
understanding and treatment as is necessary to
retrieve their lost character and standing, rein-
vest them with self-respect and restore them to
society fitted for useful service to themselves and
their fellowmen.

But how many are there who take this view
of the importance of the character and the fit-
ness of prison officials, and of the function and
purpose for which the prison is maintained?
When it is taken into account that in the United
States several hundred thousand men, women and
children pass through our prisons annually and
are influenced for better or for evil by their ex-

130 WALLS AND BAKS

periences in such institutions, it should appear
apparent to even the most casual observer that
the prison problem is one of the most vital con-
cern to the people, and that the prison as an in-
stitution should be maintained with jealous care
as to the character of the officials who are to
preside over it, and as to the moral and physical
treatment of its inmates.

If the people would but analyze the human
equation of a prison they might better account
for the crimes that are visited upon them in
cities, towns and hamlets, ofttimes by men who
graduated with an education and equipment for
just that sort of retributive service from some
penal institution.

There was a time not long ago when prison
guards were armed with deadly weapons, when
convicts kept the lockstep in hideous stripes, and
were forbidden to speak or even look at one an-
other. Most prisons have outgrown these abomi-
nations because it was realized that under their
brutal and degrading influence men were turned
into sodden beasts and subsequently settled their
account with society upon the basis of the depth
to which prison barbarity had sunk them.

Prison guards at Atlanta and many other peni-
tentiaries have been divested of their deadly
weapons, and are no longer permitted to bear
them. They now carry clubs. In the march of
prison progress we have passed from the gun to
the club. I have reference here to the guards

GENERAL PEISON CONDITIONS 131

within and not those who surmount the walls,
for the latter in their watchtowers are still armed
with rifles and under orders to shoot to kill the
inmate who may try to escape.

I must digress here a moment to say a word
ahout the prisoner who attempts to escape. The
very moment the ** count", which is taken several
times a day, tells of his escape, a siren, known
as the ^^ escape whistle'^, is blown and continues
to screech at intervals for a considerable time.
This is the signal for the farmers in the sur-
rounding vicinity to rush eagerly for their shot-
guns and rifles and join in the mad man-hunt in
which a prize is awarded to the lucky one who
stalks the quarry. Fifty dollars, dead or alive,
is the reward paid for the capture of the escap-
ing convict, and I have been told that those who
participate in it find it more exciting than a fox
chase.

I shall not stop to comment here about my per-
sonal views as to the elevating influence of
sportmanship of this nature. It is nothing less
than folly, and ofttimes suicidal, for a prisoner to
attempt to escape, whatever the temptation may
be, for it is next to impossible for him to make
his way through the lines. If he should yield to
the natural impulse to break the bonds that hold
him in captivity and is recaptured he must pay
the severest penalty for his ill-advised attempt.

The guns on the walls that surround the prison
accurately, though unwittingly, index the true

132 WALLS AND BAES

character of the penitentiary in our day. It is
a killing institution in a moral as well as in a
physical sense. It is designed to break men and
not to make them. If they are partly undone
before they go to prison that institution will
complete the wrecking process. The many ex-
pressions of bitterness, hatred and revenge I
heard from the lips of departing prisoners who
had served their sentences, left no doubt in my
mind as to the effect of prison life upon its vic-
tims.

Ever since leaving the prison I have been
haunted by those guns on the walls, and those
clubs in the hands of guards within the walls.
Neither the guns nor the clubs should be there.
To the extent that they serve at all it is in a
brutalizing way which tends to promote rather
than restrain attempts to escape, and causes
lesser infractions of the prison discipline.

The gun and the club are the signs and sym-
bols of the prison institution and they proclaim
its cruel function to the world.

In one of my last interviews with Warden
Dyche before leaving Atlanta I took occasion to
relate to him what I had seen of club rule in
the prison and why I felt that the club should
follow the gun out of prison. I told him that
only men should be allowed to serve as guards
who could control the prisoners in their charge
through respect for their character instead of
through fear for the clubs they carried. A man

GENEKAL PBISON CONDITIONS 133

who can command tlie respect of other men only
because he holds a club in his hand is totally
unfit to be in any position of authority in the
outside world, much less so in a prison.

After associating freely with those convicts,
day in and day out, I knew beyond any question
of doubt that they could be kept in far better
order, that their deportment would be improved,
and the morale of the prison made higher with-
out the club to remind them that they were under
its rule and were subject at any time to its use
in regulating their conduct.

One day we were marching back into prison
after being out in the yard. A few feet in ad-
vance of me an undersized and emaciated con-
vict was shuffling along in the line. It was rather
warm and his jumper was open at his neck. This
was contrary to the rule, and a guard standing
by gave him a vigorous punch with his club that
doubled up the prisoner in pain, the guard yell-
ing above the shriek of his victim, ^* Button up
there!'' It was with difficulty that I restrained
my own feelings. I did not report the guard for
the reason that I had made up my mind from the
beginning of my sentence to make no individual
complaints while I was within the walls, having
concluded it would be better policy to accept the
situation as it was, and bide my time until I
should be free to register my opposition to the
whole prison system.

Another personal experience with a brutal

134 WALLS AND BAKS

prison guard is recalled. It was on a Sunday
morning in the prison chapel where I had gone
to join the other inmates in attending devotional
exercises. At an appointed hour the prisoners
march into the chapel which is on an upper floor
of one of the main buildings. The inner blinds
were partly closed and the room was rather dark.
As we filed in, I stood for a moment at the end
of a row, not knowing until the men in advance
of me were seated if I was to occupy that row
or the one behind it. In that moment of innocent
pause I excited the wrath of a guard who was
standing by swinging his club. I do not know
if he knew me, nor does it matter. I only know
that he howled loud enough to be heard a block
away, * ^ Sit down there ! ' '

I felt that it was the club rather than the brute
in the man that had proclaimed its authority.
I did not resent the outrage, for I never per-
mitted acts of that kind to insult me, or to dis-
turb my equanimity, which I managed to main-
tain throughout my nearly three years in At-
lanta prison, as a convict of the United States
Government because I delivered a speech during
the war expounding the cause of universal peace
on earth and good will among men.

Hundreds of stories of the experiences of oth-
ers along similar lines reached me whenever the
inmates had a chance to tell me of their troubles,
and what they thought of the guards, the clubs,
the rules, and the prison in general.

GENEEAL PEISON CONDITIOKS 135

The rules of the average prison are evidently
framed by men who have but a superficial knowl-
edge of the prison, and but vague and indefinite
ideas of the way it should be managed for the
good of its inmates and society. The one dom-
inating purpose of these rules is repressive and
the stupidity in framing them is crowned with
the statement that they are expected to be
** cheerfully obeyed''. No prison rule was ever
cheerfully obeyed, and no work done under such
rules as prevail was ever cheerfully accomplished.

On the contrary, the work that a man does
under the club of another is grudgingly and sul-
lenly done. There is no joy in a prison task.
Work behind prison walls is slavish in its very
nature and is done only under protest. No in-
telligent attempt has yet been made to organize
a prison on a scientific and humane basis to
achieve the best possible results under the best
possible conditions.

The very walls of the prison buildings betray
the convict labor that reared them. The bricks
in their lack of proper laying and the irregular
spaces that lie between them all denote a kind of
protest against the conditions under which work
is done while guards with clubs in their hands
stand by and watch.

Every prison is infested with that lowest of
mortal creatures — the stool pigeon. In prison
parlance he is known as ^Hhe rat". The stool
pigeon seems to be a necessary part of a prison

136 WALLS AND BAES

under club rule. Human beings ruled by brute
force resent and resist and properly so, at every
opportunity, and they must be spied upon and
watched and betrayed by their own fellow pris-
oners in order to be kept in subjection.

The stool pigeon is the silent ally of the guard.
He noses around to see and hear what he can
that he may report what he considers to be to
his advantage, and what may cause those spied
upon serious trouble. The stool pigeon finds his
reward in immunity from punishment and in pro-
moting his chances for the favorable considera-
tion of his application for pardon, or parole, or
commutation. This particular subject was the
source of frequent comment among the prisoners
during my term.

The stool pigeon and his encouragement in the
nefarious part he plays is in itself a reproach to,
and an indictment of, prison management. Not
for one moment should such a perverted creature
be permitted to function in a prison. The service
he is permitted to render betrays a condition
which condemns the prison by the very means it
employs as a low and demoralizing institution.

Chief among the features of the prison which
mark it as an inhuman institution is the mad-
dening monotony of the daily routine. The same
dull and deadening program is set for each day,
and no effort is made to relieve it by a change of
any kind. Almost everything is done in a hap-
hazard way. Prisoners are placed in positions

GENERAL. PRISON CONDITIONS 137

for which they are unfitted, and assigned to tasks
repugnant to their natures.

It is this daily and continuous monotony that
dulls the brain of the prisoner, saps his initiative,
very often in his youth, undermines his health,
and lays the foundation for his physical and men-
tal deterioration and final ruin.

CHAPTER XI.

Poverty Populates the Prison.

When we come to make an intelligent study of
the prison at first hand, which can only be made
by one who has had actual contact with convicts
and who himself has suffered under the brutal
regime that holds sway in every penal institution,
and arrive at a final analysis of our study, we
are bound to conclude that after all it is not so
much crime in its general sense that is penalized,
but that it is poverty which is punished, and
which lies at the bottom of most crime perpe-
trated in the present day.

In a word, poverty is the crime, penalized by
society which is responsible for the crime it
penalizes. Take a census of the average prison
and you will find that a large majority of people
are there not so much because of the particular
crime they are alleged to have committed, but
for the reason that they are poor and either
lacked the money to engage the services of first
class and influential lawyers, or because they
lacked the means through which they might have
been able to put off the day of final conviction and
sentence by postponements, continuances and
other delays, artifices and subterfuges, in the
handling of which high grade lawyers are skilled

POVERTY POPUIATES THE PEISON 139

adepts. A poor man cannot afford to pay fees
to attorneys who often use their offices to dis-
pose of witnesses whose testimony might be
damaging to the cases of their clients. The poor
man caught in the meshes of the law must run
his chances, whatever they are, and take the con-
sequences, whatever they may be.

It is too obvious to require special stress upon
the point that there are a thousand ways in which
the man with money who is charged with crime
may escape at least the prison penalty from the
moment that his bail money keeps him out of
jail and through all the myriad technicalities his
purse will permit him to take advantage of ; some
of these technicalities not infrequently have ref-
erence to the personnel of the jury that will try
his case, and other phases of the trial which can,
by the use and influence of money, be made to
serve to the advantage of the man who has it.

Instances without number might be cited in
support of this flagrant fact, but one will suffice
for the present purpose.

Charles W. Morse, a multi-millionaire, was sen-
tenced to serve fourteen years in Atlanta Federal
Penitentiary for illegal financial manipulations
involving millions of dollars. It was a rare in-
stance, indeed, that a man of millions should be
sent to prison, and it was only possible through
his having come into collision with still more
powerful financial interests. Now, prisons are
not made to hold multi-millionaires, but only the

140 WALLS AND BABS

impoverislied victims of their manifold manipu-
lations.

These favored few who may appropriate to
themselves untold wealth usually operate pru-
dently within the law under expert legal advice
and guardianship of the highest priced lawyers
in the land. The imprisonment of one of them
is an anomaly for which there must be special
and extraordinary reason.

Of course Mr. Morse was not permitted to
serve his sentence. From the moment the prison
doors closed upon him there ensued the most un-
usual solicitude on the part of the government
for his well being.

Very shortly after Mr. Morse entered Atlanta
prison the assistant surgeon general and next the
surgeon general of the United States paid him a
personal visit in their official capacities. As a
result of their visits, either directly or indirectly,
Mr. Morse was transferred to Fort McPherson
and placed in charge of two special nurses. The
examining physicians then reported to the de-
partment at Washington that in prison the
patient would die within three months, and that
his release would prolong his life to not exceed-
ing half a year.

Some interesting details which I possess could
be added here, but a few incidents will serve the
present purpose. According to common report
at the prison and elsewhere, including an admis-
sion by Mr. Morse himself, fabulous fees figured

POVEETY POPULATES THE PRISON 141

in the affair. A certain lawyer who formerly
resided in Atlanta is understood to have received
a sum in six figures for his part in Mr. Morse's
release, and he is now practicing law in New
York.

Harry M. Daugherty, one of the acting attor-
neys for Mr. Morse at that time (1908) who was
later Attorney General, also received a fee which
no poor man could ever have paid for a service
of which no poor man ever would have been the
beneficiary^ The man in the White House who
issued the order that cancelled the sentence of
the multi-millionaire and set him free is now
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United
States.

It remains but to add that Mr. Morse, who was
to have died ten years ago, in the professional
opinion of the physicians who examined him, is
still alive, and has once more come into collision
with the Department of Justice at Washington
in matters that are said to involve more millions.

One more similar case is here cited.

Frank Xoble, a wealthy tile manufacturer, was
sentenced to ser\^e four months in jail in New
Jersey in November, 1922. Mr. Noble, with
twenty-nine other persons and nineteen corjDora-
tions, was convicted on evidence obtained by the
Lockwood Committee in New York City of hav-
ing violated the Sherman anti-trust law. Five
physicians examined the wealthy prisoner, and
as a result of their report President Warren G.

142 waijLS and baes

Harding ordered him released from jail on Janu-
ary 8.

Let it not be understood that any satisfaction
would come to me from seeing a rich man kept
in prison. I do not believe that a prison is a fit
place for any human being, rich or poor, and I
would not confine my worst enemy in its cruel
cages.

My feeling toward the prison from the hour I
entered it was such that I rejoiced in the de-
parture of each of those whose terms had ex-
pired, and I was saddened by the entrance of
every man whose shadow was cast upon its grim
portals.

If poverty, of which so many are now the help-
less victims, could by some magic of power be
abolished the prison would cease to exist, for the
prison as an institution is cornerstoned in the
misery, despair and desperation that poverty en-
tails.

The reason I believe that the time will come
when the shadow of the prison will no longer
fall upon the land is predicated upon my convic-
tion that the day will dawn when the scourge of
poverty — the foster parent of ignorance, im-
morality, vice and other ills that afflict the chil-
dren of men — ^will be Banished from the earth.

During my prison days I made it a special
point in my contact with the convicts to ascertain
to what extent their poverty, their lack of pe-
cuniary means, was responsible for their im-

POVEETY POPULATES THE PEISON 143

prisonment. The conclusion was forced upon me
that an overwhelming majority were sent to
prison only because they did not have money to
take full advantage of the means afforded to
those who iDossess it of escaping the penalties of
the law in the prevailing system of its admini-
stration.

"When I stand before the turrets and battle-
ments of a prison I have a sickening sense that
the institution is the negation of hope, the
breaker of bodies, the blighter of spirits, — a
scowling reproach to society and a towering
menace to civilization. If any good issues from
it under its present regime it is in spite of its
cruel and repressive purposes and methods, not
because of them.

I am wondering in this connection what I
would think of myself if I inflicted poverty upon
my fellow-man and then damned him for being
poor by thrusting him into a steel dungeon to
expiate his ^' crime*'.

"When human society has become intelligent
enough to realize the responsibility for poverty
it will also be humane enough to refrain from
punishing its victims by consigning them to
felons' cells.

It is unfortunate that hitherto no scientific and
comprehensive method has been devised of as-
certaining and setting forth clearly to just what
extent poverty is directly and indirectly respon-
sible for crime. It may be pertinent to observe

144 WALLS AND BAKS

here that it is certainly not a flattering commen-
tary upon society that so many find it easier to
steal than to earn an honest living.

We know beyond all question of doubt, after
the most searching investigations, that among
women poverty is responsible in an overwhelm-
ing number of cases for what is known as pros-
titution. Is it not shocking to think, for instance,
that a woman can command more money for traf-
fic in her sex in an hour than it would be possible
for her to earn in a week of legitimate labor?

The law's delay is the prolific source of not
only gross miscarriages of justice, but of the most
cruel discriminations against those least able to
bear it. Chief Justice Taft is on record as saying
that such delay is a burning disgrace to the
American system of jurisprudence. Here let it
be stated that the law's delay almost invariably
serves the interest of the man who has money
and to the disadvantage of the man who has none.

The man of financial resources has no trouble
to find the legal technicalities through which al-
most indefinite delay finally results in his ac-
quittal of the charges against him, or in the case
being forgotten altogether. On the other hand,
the man who has little money, or none at all, is
juggled by cheap lawyers through the courts un-
til his means are exhausted, and he is then kept
in jail for weeks, sometimes months, all the while
his presence there swelling the revenue of graft-
ing officials.

POVEKTY POPULATES THE PRISON 145

It is in the jails where many young men are
initiated into the ways of crime and are subse-
quently launched on criminal careers. When these
men leave the filthy pest houses and come to real-
ize the injustice they have suffered on account of
their poverty, and how indifferent society is to
it all, they are apt to conclude that they must
find ways and means to shift for themselves,
especially as they now bear the brand of Cain
for life, — for having a jail record is quite as irrev-
ocable as any other feature of their personali-
ties.

A few days ago a young man called upon me to
relate his sad story. He was a prisoner at At-
lanta while I was there. He was quite young,
and on his release he appeared to be deeply peni-
tent, resolving to ^^go straight" for the re-
mainder of his life. He soon obtained a satis-
factory position, but after being installed in it
he felt that he should be frank with his employer,
whom he now came to look upon as his bene-
factor, and concluded that he must tell him of
his prison record.

The employer was rather profuse in his ex-
pressions of sorrow for the former plight of his
new employee, but told him that he could not
afford to have in his employ a man who had been
a convict. Some persons might think the young
man was foolish in disclosing his prison record,
but the chances are the employer would have
heard of it anyway, and summarily dismissed him.

146 WALLS AND BAKS

Now what IS a man to do who is not allowed to
make an honest living because he has been in
prison? The question answers itself. Is he not
almost inevitably driven into crime and sooner or
later forced back into prison by a society that
forbade him from earning an honest livelihood?

Many a man has revenged himself upon so-
ciety in the most gruesome and terrible manner
for having been denied the opportunity to live
down an error in his past life. I maintain that
the state, as a mere matter of self-protection, to
say nothing of its moral obligation, should con-
cern itself directly with men and women released
from prisons and see that they are provided with
a fair opportunity to maintain themselves and
their families in decency and comfort, and that all
possible encouragement is given them to lead
clean and useful lives. If this simple device
were at once made effective it would, without a
doubt, result in a material diminution of crime.

But almost the opposite manner now has public
sanction in dealing with ex-prisoners and con-
victs. It is taken for granted that they are all
vicious and incorrigible. Their very sentence is
prima facie evidence of their innate depravity,
and they are not only marked for perpetual
ostracism, but are to be pursued and hunted and
hounded back into prison again as if their crime
consisted in being turned back into society.

I have already referred to how the offender is
pilloried in the courtroom and how he is punished

POVEETY POPULATES THE PEISON 147

there by exposure and hnmiliation even though
he may not be guilty of the charge lodged against
him. Much more could be said, also, about the
foulness of county jails and the contamination
of youthful first offenders who are consigned to
them, and of the process whereby criminals are
made and crime is spawned and fostered.

I shall conclude this chapter with a brief state-
ment of the foulest and most abhorrent and de-
structive evil of which the prison is the pestilential
breeding place. I vshrink from the loathesome
and repellant task of bringing this hidden horror
to light. It is a subject so incredibly shocking to
me that, but for the charge of recreance that
might be brought against me were I to omit it, I
would prefer to make no reference to it at all.

Every prison of which I have any knowledge,
either of my own or through my observation and
study, reeks with sodomy. It is the vice of vices
consequent upon the suppression of the sex in-,
stinct in prison life. I am unable to state here
the many hideous and unbelievable forms in
which this fearful and debauching vice is de-
veloped and practiced.

I saw the body and soul-destroying effects in
many of its victims and I heard tales of actual
occurrence that sickened and almost prostrated
me. It is this abominable vice to which many
young men fall victims soon after they enter the
(prison — a vice which often blasts their hopes,
ruins their lives and leaves them sodden wrecks.

148 WALLS AND BAKS

It may be imagined that the perverted practicers
and purveyors of sodomy are its only victims,
but this is an awful mistake when we come to
realize that the depravity visited upon these un-
fortunate by the prison system goes back into
society to contaminate and corrupt to the extent
of their own pollution.

The stream of foul language that flows from
the lips of the sodomite registers unerringly the
degree of the depravity to which he has sunk as
an imprisoned human pervert.

Not as long as the prison is a punitive institu-
tion, and has the punitive spirit, and is under
punitive regulation can this shocking and dev-
astating evil ever be successfully coped with,
or its frightful consequences to its immediate vic-
tims and their ultimate ones be materially miti-
gated.

CHAPTER XII.

Creating the Criminal..

The most vitally important phase of the en-
tire criminal question is the creation of the
criminal and launching him upon his criminal
career. If the criminal were not created the
prison would be unknown. If, as seems to me
self-evident, the so-called criminal is a social
product, it is of supreme importance that society
should realize not only its own responsibility, but
the necessity of making the most searching in-
vestigation of the process whereby crime is pro-
duced, and devising means to suppress or at least
to mitigate the evil.

There is much said and written these days,
especially by lawyers in trial courts, about crim-
inal psychology. The subject has, in my opinion,
been considerably overdone. If the criminal in-
stinct actually exisits in the human beiag as a
positive factor in his mental and physical organ-
ism it is so rare and exceptional as to make it a
subject for pathological treatment, and only by
extravagant exaggeration can it be regarded as a
prevalent psychology. Most men and women
who, by the lofty professional criminologists,
would be charged with having a criminal
psychology are simply the victims of social in-

150 WALLS AND BAKS

justice in some form, and when the canse of this
is ascertained and removed and the victims are
accorded human treatment in terms of love and
service their *' criminal psychology'* at once
vanishes.

I should rejoice in the opportunity to take a
dozen of the most pronounced cases wherein
criminal psychology has been established by the
professors who delve into the mysteries of the
underworld, place them in their proper environ-
ment, surround them with wholesome influence,
and give them such incentives to right living as
every human being should enjoy, and then see
what becomes of the ^* criminal psychology'* with
which these dozen human specimens are supposed
to be afflicted. It has been a matter of such com-
mon observation with me that poverty, generally
speaking, is the basis of crime that in discuss-
ing this phase of the question I am under the
necessity of repeating and emphasizing such ref-
erences to poverty in relation to crime as were
made in preceding chapters.

I have seen boys in jail not because they had
committed crime, but because they could not fur-
nish bail for their release until the charge of
crime lodged against them was proven at their
trial. They were not guilty, but were presumed
to be innocent, for they had not been tried. Yet,
they were in jail and their poverty was therefore
their crime. Many a hardened criminal of today
was started on his career in some such way, as

CEEATIXG THE CKIMINAL 151

I learned from the heart to heart stories I heard
from their lips as we sat together in the shadows
of the prison walls.

At this point there occurs to me a most
poignant and concrete incident in relation to the
point I have just made, with the exception that
the case concerns a girl instead of a boy. Be-
tween the period of my sentence in Cleveland in
September, 1918, and my going to Moundsville
Prison to serve it in April, 1919, I made an al-
most daily speaking tonr of the territory em-
braced by the federal judicial district of northern
Ohio, being joermitted so to do by the court that
had pronounced my sentence. An appeal in my
case was at that time pending before the Supreme
Court of the United States.

I had filled a speaking engagement near Cleve-
land, after which I visited the county jail and
took to several of the inmates some cigars, to-
bacco and confections. As I was about to leave
the grim and forbidding institution I heard the
shrieks of a girl, and turning around I saw a lit-
tle lass, certainly not more than 16, struggling
between two policemen and pleading with them
not to throw her in jail because of the disgrace
that she felt would come upon her mother and
knew would fall upon her. I made hurried in-
quiry of the officers and learned that a police
matron was the direct cause of the plight of this
child, who had been spied upon by the elder
woman when the girl, in desperate economic

152 WALLS AND BAKS

necessity, had solicited a man on the street and
taken him to her room. There she was pounced
upon by the matron, taken to the police station
and from there sent to the county jail to await
trial.

I had but a few moments in which to catch a
train that would take me to my next speaking en-
gagement, but I went to the office of the sheriff
and left some money which I hoped would pay
the immediate costs of the girl's case, and re-
quested that if there was any change it should be
turned over to her. If there had been the least
human kindness, sympathy and understanding in
the police matron who made the arrest after spy-
ing upon the girl and hunting her down, she
would have found a way to mainfest it by caution-
ing the child against continuing the sad life which
she had involuntarily persuaded herself to fol-
low. It seems to me that the innate instinct of a
woman would have prevented the matron from
adopting the brutal and unreasoning course
which she, in her infinite ignorance, probably
deemed a most worthy and virtuous action.

I am not unmindful of the fact that many peo-
ple will uphold the matron and will consider that
she vindicated the best interests of society by
causing this child to be branded not only as a
common prostitute, which she was not, but stig-
matizing her for the rest of her life as a woman
with a police record. Between those who adhere
to this point of view and me there yawns a

CREATING THE CRIMINAL 153

psychological chasm as broad and as deep as that
which stretches between love and hate.

No man and no women, more especially no boy
and no girl should ever be put in jail for being
unable to furnish bail. We declare that under
our benign code a man is innocent until he is
proven guilty and the next moment we lock him
in jail before he is tried. If the honor of men
were appealed to, and they were trusted to put
in their appearance when they were needed, as
was the common practice among Indians under
their tribal code, few would betray the confidence
reposed in them, and far better it would be should
such rare instances as a betrayal of confidence oc-
cur, than that a single innocent boy should be
lodged in jail and given a police record and
started on his criminal career. In such a case a
crime is indeed committed, a crime of cruel and
tragic consequences, and society itself is the
criminal.

The man with money is never the victim of
such a crime. His money and not necessarily his
innocence keeps him out of jail. He can furnish
bail though he may be guilty, while the poor man
must go to jail though he may be innocent. Yet
we proudly boast that all men stand equal before
the law. If this were true one of two things
would follow, either men would no longer be sen-
tenced to prison and the prison would cease to
exist, or so many would be sentenced to prison

154 WALLS AND BAKS

that innumerable additional bastiles wonld have
to be built to confine them.

There is not the slightest doubt in my mind
that, as a general rule, the criminal is created by
the society in which he lives, and his crime as a
rule is rooted in his poverty; yet little intelligent
attention is given to that vital and fundamental
phase of crime which has to do with the creation
of the criminal. Society is greatly agitated over
the epidemic of crime and cries out for protection
against criminals, little realizing that it is but
reaping the fearful harvest of dragon's teeth
sown by itself.

And what is the usual remedy proposed for
combatting crime which steadily increases in
spite of the church, the school and the country
club? Adopt more drastic laws! Increase the
police force! Pronounce longer sentences! In-
flict severer punishment on the evil doers, etc.,
etc., — all of which simply indicates the puerile
understanding we have of this social phenomenon
known as crime. All our efforts are put forth
to suppress the effect while blindly ignoring the
cause, and of course our efforts are futile and
barren of results.

Crime, in whatever form it may make itself
' \ manifest, is traceable in every instance to a
definite cause, and until the cause is removed
crime will flourish and grow apace with our
vaunted civilization. We deal with effects only
when we build prisons for the incarceration of

CREATING THE CRIMINAL 155

criminals that we ourselves have created and for
whom we are responsible.

The three boys, mere children, who were con-
victed at Chicago some years ago as *'car bam
bandits ' \ never had a home in any decent, whole-
some sense of the term. They were the inevitable
products of poverty and the slums. The only in-
terest that society had in them it imposed upon
them as a penalty of its own. neglect by hanging
them by the neck until they were dead.

Hard economic conditions under which life in
its richness and fullness and beauty is denied,
and under which gaunt necessity has sway, bear a
greater share of responsibility for the creation
of criminals and the commission of crime than
all other causes combined. The young man whose
wage is insufficient to enable him to marry the
girl he loves feels himself tempted to take what,
in his inexperienced youth, may seem as the
easier way to increase his scant revenue so that
he may realize his youthful dream. The girl in
the city store, or the factory, whose paltry
stipend barely keeps her in the actual neces-
sities of physical existence, and whose natural
desire to indulge in some of the beauty and en-
joyment of life which she beholds all about her,
and which are denied by virtue of her stem
economic condition, is peculiarly in a position to
yield to the temptation that may lead her into the
district from which there is no return.

The bitter struggle for existence is account-

156 WALLS AND BAKS

able, directly and indirectly, for men turning
criminals and attacking by lawless means the so-
ciety which would lawfully allow them but a pre-
carious and miserable existence. The arrest of
a person, however innocent, is generally regarded
as prima facie evidence of his guilt. Had he been
innocent he would not have been arrested, so
concludes the average mind, and thus he is al-
ready convicted.

Is it not apparent at a glance that the first
step has been taken in creating the criminal when
he is placed under arrest, a circumstance which
is often heralded to the public in sensational re-
ports from day to day? After the arrest follows
the jail if bail money is lacking, as is frequently
the case, and the jail is most likely a filthy den
wherein the first offender receives a rude shock
not at all calculated to increase his self-respect,
or enchance his confidence in law and in his own
future. From the jail he is taken to court under
guard perhaps handcuffed, and there he is placed
in the pillory as a public exhibit. Everything is
done as publicly as possible for his benefit, and
all this occurs before he has been tried, and while
he is presumably entirely innocent.

The public does not know the secret shame and
humiliation which the untried culprit is made to
suffer in this round of public exhibition in which
he is the involuntary star performer. He is
being punished in the most cruel and harrowing
manner, and yet the unthinking crowd that ogles

CKEATING THE CBIMINAL 157

him in a courtroom concludes that he has entirely
escaped punishment unless he is sentenced to
serve a term in a penitentiary.

Here let it be observed that the agony a man
not utterly devoid of self-respect suffers, the
punishment he endures as the result of his first
arrest, his initiation as a jailbird, his advertising
in the press, his exhibition in the courtroom,
guarded as if he were a convicted felon, are more
poignant, more terrible, and sear and scar his
spirit more deeply than any prison sentence that
may subsequently be imposed.

What does the man care about a prison sen-
tence so far as his shame and degradation are
concerned after he has experienced the prelim-
inary stages of his ruin and downfall in the pub-
lic and cold-blooded manner of his arrest, in-
carceration, trial, conviction and sentence? When
he finally reaches the prison his case as a convict
is settled and his status fixed as a part of the
criminal element. He may be still further
hardened in his bitterness and resentment, and
he may become sullen and defiant as he dons his
shabby prison garb, but it is almost certain that
from the time he enters prison the baser qualities
of his nature will be developed and find expres-
sion.

As a matter of fact, he was already branded a
felon before his trial began and, figuratively
speaking, he had already served his sentence be-
fore he was actually convicted.

158 WALLS AND BAES

Oh, if we were but more hmnan in our spirit
and attitude toward the wayward boy or girl,
the erring and unfortunate amongst us, what in-
finite pain and trouble and expense we could
escape ourselves, and what tragedy and grief we
would spare our victims!

How far better it were to quietly caution the
young against their indiscretions than to have
them spied upon by detectives and matrons,
trapped and seized and exposed, their good name
blasted, and their future destroyed. The reason
for this is that the minions of the law, not always
too scrupulous in its administration, thrive in
crime, hold their official tenures, and receive
their emoluments and rewards from crime.

CHAPTER XHL

How I Would Manage the Prison.

Civil service regulations have little efficiency
under a corrupt political system. The farcical
nature of civil service rule as it applies to the
selection of minor officials and guards in federal
prisons is reflected in the low character, the
ignorance, brutality and general unfitness of
some of these functionaries who secure and hold
their tenure through political ''pulP' on the out-
side in spite of civil service reform.

The prison warden cannot remove his guards
except for specific flagrant misconduct and the
immimity they thus enjoy is a virtual license to
them to bully and intimidate the prisoners. The
fundamental evil in the present prison regime is
that the institution is under the absolute control
of office holders and politicians who, even if they
had the inclination, have not the time to concern
themselves with prison affairs.

Attorney General Daugherty, for example,
who was vested by law with almost absolute
power of control over federal prisons had prob-
ably never seen one of these institutions. He
had the power of life and death over every one of
the thousands of inmates, and yet what does he
know, what could he know of his own knowledge

160 WALLS AND BAES

of the prison in whicli they are confined, the con-
ditions that exist there, and the many evils and
abuses of which they are the suffering victims?

He had to rely absolutely upon what was fur-
nished him in the way of information upon his
subordinates who, like himself, derive their in-
formation from still other subordinates who may
perhaps be thriving in, and are possibly the di-
rect beneficiaries of the conditions which cry for
correction.

The drug traffic is one of the most pernicious
and shameless evils of our prison system. It
could not exist without official connivance and for
this reason has never been suppressed in any
federal or state prison. In certain instances the
most sensational disclosures have been made of
the traffic in ^^dope'', organized by prison officials
and attaches, whereby the inmates by submitting
to gross extortion were furnished with the drugs
and appurtenances for their use by the very
officials who were hired and paid to suppress such
abuses.

It so happens that I had an active hand in the
sensational and shocking exposure that was made
some years ago of the appalling conditions in the
federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, and
which created a national scandal. An official
shake-up followed, for the facts were too flag-
rantly in evidence to be concealed, notwithstand-
ing the tremendous political pressure from the
outside brought to bear to that end. One of the

HOW I WOULD MANAGE THE PRISON 161

high officials of Leavenworth was accused of per-
verted practices with the inmates and was al-
lowed to resign. Expensive suits of clothes were
made by prison tailors for political patrons of
the officials. Worst of all, however, was the
organized drug traffic under the control of guards
and other officials who derived enormous revenue
from furnishing the iamates with the ^'dope"
with which to debauch and destroy themselves.

I was at that time one of the editors of a Kan-
sas paper which had a national circulation. Tak-
ing the cue from certain reports which reached
us, we conducted a secret investigation of Leaven-
worth Prison in which we had the co-operation of
certain minor officials and inmates. After ascer-
taining the facts, we proceeded to make the ex-
posure in a series of decidedly sensational issues.
All kinds of reprisals were threatened by prison
officials and politicians.

Space will not allow a detailed review of the
case here, but I must at least make mention of
my having been indicted in the federal court in
Kansas for my part in the exposure. The in-
tention of those who had been exposed was to
clap me in Leavenworth Prison along with the
rest of their victims, but they found that I and
my associates were sure of our facts and that
we courted the most searching inquiry. For
reasons sufficient to themselves, the prison and
court officials reconsidered their course and
quietly struck the indictment from the docket.

162 WALLS AND BARS

Some of the prison rules must have been in-
spired, if not written by such humorists as Arte-
mus Ward and Mark Twain, or such satirists as
Bernard Shaw and Henry L. Mencken. I shall
allude to the rules of Atlanta Prison, but there is
little difference, if any, between these and the
regulations that obtain in other penitentiaries.

For instance, one rule says: *^You must not
try to escape". This naive injunction issued in
the shadow of the cold steel which bars every
door and window in every solitary building with-
in the towering walled enclosures surmounted by
sharpshooters would seem to be a trifle superflu-
ous.

Another rule to which reference has already
been made, provides that inmates are expected to
''Cheerfully obey all rules". Comment is un-
necessary.

Still another forbids an inmate to approach an
officer in addressing him within six feet of his
august presence.

*'You must uncover your head in respectful
manner and touch your hat or cap if out of doors
in addressing or being addressed by an officer or
guard" — but the official keeps his hat on his sov-
ereign head. I am wondering what Lincoln would
have thought of that rule.

The prisoner who makes the mistake of getting
into the wrong cell may be punished under the
provision of another rule.

Personally, I not infrequently found myself

HOW I WOULD MANAGE THE PEISON 163

violating the important rule that my shirt had to
be buttoned at the band. Most of the time there
was no button at the band. It seems strange to
me that pockets were allowed in jumpers or over-
alls, for a specific rule forbids prisoners from
putting their hands in their pockets.

Prisoners are required to rinse out their
mouths and keep their lips and tongues free from
tobacco stains. (This rule might be extended to
the outside).

Whistling or singing is in violation of another
rule, — and no wonder, for what business has a
song to be heard in a dungeon?

In the prison's present raw, haphazard, utterly
unscientific state of management almost every-
thing is done in a wrong, fruitless, wasteful way.
There is little method and no system.

There are, in fact, in every prison a dozen or
more little prisons and the inmate is subject to
the regulations of them all, and not infrequently
these regulations are in conflict. On a number of
occasions I found myself violating the rules of
one of these prisons while endeavoring to obey
the rules of another.

The various departments are under control of
petty officials and each is an autocrat in his own
sphere. There is often clash of authority, but in
a final test they all stick together for their mutual
protection. And it should be remembered that
not one word in the way of a report or a com-
plaint in regard to what goes on is permitted to

164 WALLS AND BAES

be sent out by the inmate while he is behind the
walls.

If the prison were scientifically organized and
humanely conducted prisoners would be sys-
tematically assigned to useful tasks and paid ac-
cordingly, instead of being robbed by the state
and their families allowed to suffer penury and
want. What possible excuse or justification can
there be for the state robbing a helpless prisoner
of his labor and subjecting his family to starva-
tion?

In a great many cases the prisoner himself
was guilty of no such crime against society as
that which society perpetrates upon him and his
offspring.

I marvel at the incredible stupidity that blinds
the men in control of prisons to the redeeming
power of kindness as a substitute for the de-
structive power of brutality. Every instinct of
our nature protests against cruelty to the help-
less and defenceless, yet of all places where it is
most needed mercy is least practiced in the treat-
ment of convicts. I have seen men of mild tem-
per and gentle disposition made sullen and
vicious by harshness and I have also seen the
toughest specimens of ^'bad men'* softened and
made gentle by a kind word and the touch of a
friendly hand. Upon this point I can admit of
no possibility of a doubt as to the saner and
humaner method of dealing with the prison pop-
ulation.

HOW I WOULD MANAGE THE PRISON 165

In hedging a prisoner about with stern and re-
pressive rules to reinforce the intimidation of
the frowning ways every effort is seemingly
made to exclude the human element in the fra-
ternity of prisoners and in the autocratic rela-
tion assumed toward them by their keepers.
The guard and the inmate cease to be human
beings when they meet in prison. The one be-
comes a domineering petty official and the other
a cowering convict. The rules enforce this re-
lation and absolutely forbid any intimacy with
the human touch in it between them.

The guard looks down upon the convict he now
has at his mercy, who has ceased to be a man and
is known only by his number, while, little as the
guard may suspect it, the prisoner looks down
upon him as being even lower than an inmate.

I have a thousand times had this borne in upon
me touching the relation of the guard and the
prisoners in his custody.

Not until the prison problem in all of its vari-
ous phases is recognized as of national instead
of local concern can it be dealt with in a compre-
Ihensive and effective manner.

Scientific experts would find here a field of
boundless opportunity for service second to none
in value and importance to humanity. Plans could
be formulated upon a nation-wide scale for the
development of the country's resources, for the
opening of highways, the reclaiming of swamp
lands and desert wastes, and the construction of

166 WALLS AND BAKS

public works of all kinds to absorb tbe labor of
every prison inmate in a useful and constructive
way so that he could be remunerated for his ser-
vices at the prevailing rate of wages without
coming into demoralizing competition with his
fellow worker in the outer world.

This would at once create an incentive to the
prisoner to do his best, to look up and to feel he
was having a fair chance to retrieve himself.
His wages would meanwhile support his family
and educate his children instead of allowing
them, as now, in penury and under ostracism,
to become a charge upon the community.

But what could be done under rational control
to correct the abuses and improve the conditions
of the prison as it exists today? Very much
indeed could be done were it not for the organ-
ized opposition of the prison power itself to any
radical departure from the present corrupt, in-
efficient and extravagant system. Men whose
positions are at stake do not look with friendly
eyes upon such a change as is contemplated in
this proposal.

Thomas Mott Osborne is intensely unpopular
among prison officials of high and low degree, for
they see in his plan of prison management the
abolition of the corrupting and grafting misrule
of which many of them are the beneficiaries.

Coming directly to the question of improving
the prison as it exists today, the first thing I
would do would be to take it completely out of

HOW I WOULD MANAGE THE PRISON 167

the hands of politicians and place it under the
absolute control of a board or commission con-
sisting of resident men and women of the high-
est character, the humanest impulses, and the
most efficient qualifications for their task. The
board or commission should have complete and
final authority over the prison, full power of
pardon, parole and commutation, and in every-
way charged with the responsibility to the state
or the community for the management of the
prison.

In the next place, I would have the prison
population organized upon a basis of mutuality
of interest and self-government. I would forth-
with remove every gun and club from within the
walls and dismiss every guard. At Atlanta
Prison, for example, there are about 125 guards
maintained at an enormous expense and the
prison could be managed far better without
them.

The most efficient guards and the only ones
interested in making the prison clean and keep-
ing out '^dope'' would be those chosen by the in-
mates from their own ranks. As previously
stated, any honest warden would admit that 75
per cent of the prison population consists of de-
cent, dependable men, and with this for a founda-
tion I would proceed to build up the superstruc-
ture of the prison's self-determination.

T\^olesome, nourishing food is the vital ele-
ment in the sustenance of physical life and in

168 WALLS AND BAKS

prison is even more imperatively necessary than
in any other place, save a hospital. The federal
government makes sufficient allowance for this
purpose, but there is a wide space between the
treasury from which the money is drawn to the
table upon which the food is served, and in the
present process the food deteriorates sadly in
various ways before it reaches the convicts. The
matter of feeding the prisoners should have the
most careful and thorough supervision of the
officiating board who could, without doubt, devise
a method of having the food furnished that the
government pays for free from graft and pecula-
tion, and cooked and served in a clean, decent and
appetizing manner.

The industrial life of the prison should be
organized and systematized under the direction
of the board, supplemented and in co-operation
with a subordinate body chosen by the convicts of
the prison. It might be necessary to employ a
few experts or specialists from the outside, but
nearly all the minor official positions in the
offices, shops, yards, cell-houses and about the
grounds and walls could and should be filled by
the inmates.

I would have all the prisoners congregated to
hear the announcement of the proposed changes,
inviting their suggestions and appealing for their
co-operation and support. This would be a di-
rect appeal to their honor, their self-respect, as
well as their intelligent self-interest, and there

HOW I WOULD MANAGE THE PBISON 169

wonld be few indeed wlio wonld fail to respond
with gladness of heart. An overwhelming ma-
jority wonld give eager acclaim to the new ad-
venture, especially if the proposal were submit-
ted and the appeal made in a spirit of human
kindness and even-handed justice.

I would have the great body of prisoners com-
pose a parliament established for self-rule and
for the promotion of the welfare and common
interest of all. A code of by-laws and regula-
tions would have to be adopted, subject to the ap-
proval of the governing body of the institution.

An executive council consisting of inmate mem-
bers should be created having power to hold
daily sessions to receive suggestions, to hear and
determine complaints, subject to appeal to the
governing board, and to have general supervision
and direction of affairs within the prison. Minor
bodies for special service of whatever nature
could be provided for as the situation might re-
quire.

The limited space at my command prevents
further amplification of my idea of prison manage-
ment, but I have a profound conviction that it is
fundamentally sound and practical — so sound
and practical that I challenge the powers that
control our prisons to give me the opportunity
to put it to the test in any prison in this country.
I should guarantee to greatly improve the morale
of the prison the first week, to reduce the prac-
tice of immoral, health-destroying habits, and

170 WALLS AND BARS

the admission of *^dope'' to the minimum; in-
crease the efficiency of the service, reduce ma-
terially tlie expenses of maintenance, and return
the inmates to society in a different spirit and
appreciably nearer rehabilitation than is now
done or possible to be done under the prevailing
system.

I should expect no remuneration for my ser-
vice, but should regard it as a contribution to
society in return for my education in and gradua-
tion from one of its chief penal institutions.

In this connection I cannot refrain from ex-
pressing to my readers the conviction that the
economic and social ideals which I hold, — ideals
which have sustained me inviolate in every hour
of darkness and trial, would, if once realized,
not only reform the prison and mitigate its evils,
but would absolutely abolish that grim and
menacing survival of the dark ages.

CHAPTER XIV.

Capitalism and Crime.

Crime in all of its varied forms and manifesta-
tions is of such a common nature under the
capitalist system that capitalism and crime have
become almost synonomous terms.

Private appropriation of the earth's surface,
the natural resources, and the means of life is
nothing less than a crime against humanity, but
the comparative few who are the beneficiaries of
this iniquitous social arrangement, far from
being viewed as criminals meriting punishment,
are the exalted rulers of society and the people
they exploit gladly render them homage and
obeisance.

The few who own and control the means of
existence are literally the masters of mankind.
The great mass of dispossessed people are their
slaves.

The ancient master owned his slaves under the
law and could dispose of them at will. He could
even kill his slave the same as he could any do-
mestic animal that belonged to him. The feudal
lord of the Middle Ages did not own his serfs
bodily, but he did own the land without which
they could not live. The serfs were not allowed
to own land and could work only by the consent

172 WALLS AND BARS

of the feudal master who appropriated to him-
self the fruit of their labor, leaving for them but
a bare subsistence.

The capitalist of our day, who is the social,
economic and political successor of the feudal
lord of the Middle Ages, and the patrician mas-
ter of the ancient world, holds the great mass of
the people in bondage, not by owning them under
the law, nor by having sole proprietorship of the
land, but by virtue of his ownership of industry,
the tools and machinery with which work is done
and wealth produced. In a word, the capitalist
owns the tools and the jobs of the workers, and
therefore they are his economic dependents. In
that relation the capitalist has the power to ap-
propriate to himself the products of the workers
and to become rich in idleness while the workers,
who produce all the wealth that he enjoys, re-
main in poverty.

To. buttress and safeguard this exploiting sys-
tem, private property of the capitalist has been
made a fetish, a sacred thing, and thousands of
laws have been enacted and more thousands sup-
plemented by court decisions to punish so-called
crimes against the holy institution of private
property.

A vast majority of the crimes that are pun-
ished under the law and for which men are sent
to prison, are committed directly or indirectly
against property. Under the capitalist system
there is far more concern about property and in-

CAPITALISM AND CEIME 173

finitely greater care in its conservation than in
human life.

Multiplied thousands of men, women and chil-
dren are killed and maimed in American indus-
try by absolutely preventable accidents every
year, yet no one ever dreams of indicting the
capitalist masters who are guilty of the crime.
The capitalist owners of fire traps and of fetid
sweating dens, where the lives of the workers are
ruthlessly sacrificed and their health wantonly
undermined, are not indicted and sent to prison
for the reason that they own and control the in-
dicting machinery just as they own and control
the industrial machinery in their system.

The economic-owning class is always the po-
litical ruling class.

Laws in the aggregate are largely to keep the
people in subjection to their masters.

Under the capitalist system, based upon pri-
vate property in the means of life, the exploita-
tion that follows impoverishes the masses, and
their precarious economic condition, their bitter
struggle for existence, drives increasing numbers
of them to despair and desperation, to crime and
destruction.

The inmates of an average county jail consist
mainly of such victims. They also constitute the
great majority in the state prisons and federal
penitentiaries. The inmates of prisons are pro-
verbially the poorer people recruited from what
we know as the ** lower class*'. The rich are not

174 WALLS AND BARS

to be found in prison save in such rare instances
as to prove the rule that penitentiaries are built
for the poor.

Capitalism needs and must have the prison to
protect itself from the criminals it has created.
It not only impoverishes the masses when they
are at work, but it still further reduces them by
not allowing millions to work at all. The capi-
talist's profit has supreme consideration; the life
of the workers is of little consequence.

If a hundred men are blown up in a mine a
hundred others rush there eagerly to take the
places of the dead even before the remnants of
their bodies have been laid away. Protracted
periods of enforced idleness under capitalism
have resulted in thousands of industrious work-
ing men becoming tramps and vagabonds, and
in thousands of tramps and vagabonds becoming
outcasts and criminals..

It is in this process that crime is generated and
proceeds in its logical stages from petty larceny
to highway robbery and homicide. Getting a liv-
ing under capitalism — the system in which the
few who toil not are millionaires and billionaires,
while the mass of the people who toil and sweat
and produce all the wealth are victims of poverty
and pauperism — getting a living under this in-
expressibly cruel and inhuman system is so pre-
carious, so uncertain, fraught with such pain and
struggle that the wonder is not that so many peo-
ple become vicious and criminal, but that so

CAPITALISM AND CEIME 175

many remain in docile submission to such a
tyrannous and debasing condition.

It is a beautiful commentary on human nature
that so little of it is defiled and that so much of
it resists corruption under a social system which
would seem to have for its deliberate purpose the
conversion of men into derelicts and criminals,
and the earth into a vast poorhouse and prison.

The prison of capitalism is a finished institu-
tion compared to the cruder bastiles of earlier
periods in human history. The evolution of the
prison has kept pace with the evolution of so-
ciety and the exploitation upon which society is
based.

Just as the exploitation of the many by the few
has reached its highest cultivation and refine-
ment under present day capitalism, and is now
carried on more scientifically and successfully,
and is yielding infinitely richer returns than ever
before, so has the prison under this system been
cultivated and refined in the infliction of its
cruelty, and in its enlarged sphere and increased
capacity.

Externally, at least, the prison under capital-
ism presents a beautiful and inviting appearance,
but behind its grim and turretted walls the vic-
tims still crouch in terror under the bludgeons of
their brutal keepers, and the progress of the cen-
turies, the march of Christian civilization, mean
little to them, save that the prisons of capitalism
are far more numerous and capacious, and more

176 WALLS AND BAKS

readily accessible tlian ever before in history.
They signalize the civilization of onr age by being
composed of steel and concrete and presenting a
veritable triumph in architectural art.

Capitalism is proud of its prisons which fitly
symbolize the character of its institutions and
.constitute one of the chief elements in its philan-
thropy.

I have seen men working for paltry wages and
other men in enforced idleness without any in-
come at all sink by degrees into vagabondage and
crime, and I have not only found no fault with
them, but I have sympathized with them entirely,
charging the responsibility for their ruin on the
capitalist system, and resolving to fight that sys-
tem relentlessly with all the strength of mind and
body that I possess until that system is destroyed
root and branch and wiped from the earth.

During my prison years I met many men who
were incarcerated as the victims of capitalism.
Let me tell of one in particular. This will typify
many other cases with variations, according to
the circumstances.

This man has spent nearly forty-eight years
in reformatories and prisons. His father died
when he was a child and his mother was poor
and could ill provide for her offspring. At the
tender age of seven years he found himself in a
so-called House of Correction. There he was
starved and beaten and learned to steal.

Escaping from that institution, he was cap-

CAPITALISM AND CKIME 177

tured and returned. From that time on he was
marked and his life was a continuous battle. He
was dogged and suspected and the little time that
he was out of jail was spent in dodging the de-
tectives who were ever on his track like keen-
scented hounds in pursuit of their prey. They
were determined that he should be inside of
prison walls. In this cruel manner his fate was
sealed as a mere child. The House of Correction
for poor boys and girls comes nearer being a
House of Destruction.

I spent many hours talking with this victim of
the sordid social system under which we live.
Despite the cruelties he had suffered at its hands,
he was as gentle as a child and responded to the
touch of kindness as quickly as* anyone I ever
knew. Society, which first denied him the op-
portunity to acquire a decent means of living and
subsequently punished him for the crime which it
had committed against him and of which he was
the victim, could have won an upright and use-
ful member in this man.

As I have already stated in a foregoing chap-
ter, I declined to attend the prison chapel ex-
ercises. There were many other convicts who
lent their presence to the mockery of religious
worship over which guards presided with clubs
because they were compelled so to do. The par-
ticular prisoner to whom I have referred ad-
dressed a letter to the warden protesting that he
did not wish to attend devotional exercises and

178 WALLS AND BARS

stated the reason for his attitude. He wrote and
gave to me a copy of the letter and I introduce
it here as indicating that this victim of the bru-
tality of the capitalist system, in spite of the fact
that he had spent nearly half a century behind
prison bars, still possessed sufficient manhood
and courage to assert himself in face of his
cruel captors.

The letter follows as he wrote it :
*^Sir:

**I desire to be excused from attendance on
all religious services here which no longer ap-
peal to my curiosity or sense of obligation. I
need practical assistance not spiritual consola-
tion.

*^My imagination has already been over-
worked to the impairment of my other mental
faculties.

^*I do not believe in the Christian religion. I

have formulated a creed agreeable to my mind.

**I have always been fearful of those to

whom government grants the special privilege

to furnish a particular brand of theology.

**I deny the right of government to compel
me to attend any kind of religious service. I
claim and proclaim my religious freedom under
the U. S. constitution.
Note,

**In reformatory and penal institutions I
have attended religious service every Sunday
for forty odd years — to ivhat purpose f

CAPITALISM AlTD CEIME 179

The entire career of this imfortunate prisoner
was deteiinined by liis imprisonment in Ms cMld-
hood, and as well might he have been sentenced
for life in his cradle. The system in which he
was born in poverty condemned him to a life
of crime and penal servitude in which he tyi^ifies
the lot of countless thousands of others doomed
to a living death behind prison walls.

CHAPTER XV.

Poverty and the Prison.

There is an intimate relation between the poor-
house and the prison. Both are made necessary
in a society which is based upon exploitation.
The aged and infirm who remain docile and sub-
missive through the struggle for existence, to
whatever straits it may reduce them, are per-
mitted to spend their declining days in the coun-
ty house and to rest at last in the pottersfield.

But they who protest against their pitiless fate
rather than yield to its stern decrees, they who
refuse to beg, preferring to take the chances of
helping themselves by whatever means seem most
available, are almost inevitably booked for the
jail and the prison.

Poverty has in all ages, in every nation, and
under every government recorded in history, been
the common lot of the great mass of mankind.
The many have had to toil and produce in pov-
erty that the few might enjoy in luxury and ex-
travagance. But however necessary this may
have been in the past, it need no longer be true
in our day.

Through invention and discovery and the ap-
plication of machinery to industry, the produc-
tive forces of labor have been so vastly aug-

POVERTY AND THE PRISON 181

merited that if society were properly organized
the great body of the people, who constitute the
workers and producers, instead of being poor and
miserable and dependent as they now are, would
be happy and free and thrill with the joy of life.

There can be no question about the simple and
self-evident facts as here set forth :

First, here in the United States we live in as
rich a land as there is on earth.

Second, we have all the natural resources, all
the raw materials from which wealth is produced
in practically unlimited abundance.

Third, we have the most highly ef&cient pro-
ductive machinery in the world.

Fourth, we have millions of workers skilled
and unskilled not only ready, but eager, to apply
their labor to the industrial machinery and pro-
duce a sufficiency of all that is required to satisfy
the needs and wants of every man, woman and
child under a civilized standard of living.

Then why should millions be idle and suffering,
millions of others toiling for a pittance, and all
the victims of poverty, and of a bleak and barren
existence ?

The answer is, that capitalism under which we
now live has outlived its usefulness and is no
longer adapted to the social and economic con-
ditions that today confront the world. Profit has
precedence over life, and when profit cannot be
made, industry is paralyzed and the people starve.

Here let it be said again, and it cannot be re-

182 WALLS AND BAES

peated too often nor made too emphatic, that
poverty and ignorance, with which poverty goes
hand in hand, constitute the prolific source from
which flow in a steady and increasing stream
most of the evils which afflict mankind.

It is poverty from which the slums, the red
light district, the asylums, the jails and the pris-
ons are mainly recruited.

It was in the so-called panic of 1873, which
lasted ^ve years and during which millions were
in a state of enforced idleness due to *^over pro-
duction *', that the ^^ tramp '* made his appearance
in American life. The industrious working man,
turned by his employer into the street because he
had produced more goods than could be sold, be-
came a tramp; the tramp in some instances be-
came a beggar and in others a thief and criminal.
From that time to this the tramp has been a
fixed institution in American life, and epidemics
of crime are reported with regularity in the daily
press.

Poverty breeds misery and misery breeds
crime. It is thus the prison is populated and
made to prosper as a permanent and indispens-
able adjunct to our Christian civilization. The
most casual examination of the inmates of jails
and prisons shows the great majority of them at
a glance to be of the poorer classes.

When, perchance, some rich man goes to
prison the instance is so remarkable that it ex-
cites great curiosity and amazement. A rich man

POVERTY AND THE PEISON 183

does not fit in prison. The prison was not made
for him. He does not belong there and he does
not stay there. The rich man goes to prison only
as the exception to prove the rule.

The social system that condemns men, women
and children to poverty at the same time pro-
nounces upon many of them the sentence of the
law that makes them convicts. And this social
system in the United States rests on the founda-
tion of private ownership of the social means of
the common life.

Two per cent of the American people own
and control the principal industries and the great
bulk of the wealth of the nation. This interesting
and amazing fact lies at the bottom of the indus-
trial paralysis and the widespread protest and
discontent which prevail as these lines are writ-
ten. The daily papers are almost solid chroni-
cles of vice and immorality, of corruption and
crime.

In the City of Chicago the authorities frankly
admit being no longer able to cope with crime
and, happily, Judge W. M. Gammill, of that city,
comes to the rescue by recommending the re-
establishment of the whipping joost as a deterrant
for the crimes and misdemeanors committed by
the victims of a vicious social system which Judge
Gammill upholds. The distinguished judge's
Christian spirit as well as his judicial mind are
vindicated in his happy and thoughful suggestion
which is finding ready echo among ruling class

184 WALLS AND BARS

parasites and mercenaries who, no doubt, would
experience great delight in seeing the poor
wretches that are now only jailed for the crimes
that the injustice of society forces them to com-
mit, tied to a post and their flesh lacerated into
shreds by a whip in the hands of a brute.

Commenting upon Judge Gammill's advocacy
of the whipping post the Tribune of Terre Haute,
the city in which I live, has the following illum-
inating editorial in its columns dated April 12,
1922:

The Whipping Post.

**Eevival of the whipping post, Judge W. M.
Gammill, of Chicago, yesterday told the commit-
tee on law enforcement of the American Bar As-
sociation, would have a great effect on the reduc-
tion of crime. He cited examples where flogging
tended to reduce crime and presented figures
showing the number of murders in the large
cities. In 1921 his figures showed that St. Louis
had 26 murders; Philadelphia, 346; New York,
261; Chicago, 206; Boston, 102, and Washing-
ton, 69.

^' There is a good deal to this. Mushy senti-
ment regarding * honor system', and the soft
theories that criminals are not criminals but sick
men, and other things of this sort, have reduced
the fear of the law to a minimum and desperate
characters no longer hesitate at desperate
crimes.

** Half-baked minds will register horror at the

POVERTY AND THE PEISON 185

idea of restoring the whipping post. These will
cry that the world is ^returning to barbarism'.
The fact is that the world can return to ^bar-
barism' with the forces of law and order direct-
ing the ^return', or it can return to the bar-
barism of the criminal, where life and property
are held at naught, and rule is by the pistol,
black-jack and terrorism. The present crime
wave indicates that the world is well on its way to
return to the latter form of ^barbarism' and the
law-abiding jDeople of the world are getting very
much the worst of it. The general re-establish-
ment of the whipping post would stop the present
well advanced return to barbarism. The whip-
ping post should hold terror for but one class,
and the sooner this class is banished from our so-
ciety the better. No law abiding citizens should
have any apprehension over Judge GammilPs
suggestion''.

This editorial, reflecting as it does the en-
lightened opinion of the ruling class of which it
is a recognized organ in the community, is its own
sufficient commentary.

In the chapter which follows I shall show how
poverty as it now exists may be abolished, and
how in consequence of such an organic social
change the prison as such would no longer be
necessary.

For the present I feel impelled to emphasize
the fact that poverty is mainly responsible for
the prison and that, after all, it is poverty that

186 WALLS AND BARS

is penalized and imprisoned under the present
social order.

It is true that people may be poor and not go
to prison, but it is likewise true that most of those
who serve prison sentences do so as the result of
their poverty.

From the hour of my first imprisonment in a
filthy county jail I recognized the fact that the
prison was essentially an institution for the
punishment of the poor, and this is one of many
reasons why I abhor the prison, and why I recog-
nize it to be my duty to do all in my power to
humanize it as far as possible while it exists, and
at the same time to put forth all my efforts to
abolish the social system which makes the prison
necessary by creating the victims who rot behind
its ghastly walls.

CHAPTER XVI.

Socialism and the Prison.

Socialism and prison are antagonistic terms.

Socialism means freedom and when the people
are free they will not be under the necessity of
committing crime and going to prison. Such ex-
ceptional cases as there may be requiring
restraint for the protection of society will be
cared for in institutions and under conditions be-
tokening a civilization worthy of the name.

Socialism will abolish the prison by removing
its cause and putting an end to the vicious con-
ditions which make such a hideous thing as the
prison a necessity in the community life.

I am aware in advance that what is said here in
regard to abolishing the prison will be met with
incredulity, if not derision, and that the theory
and proposal I advance will be pronounced vis-
ionary, impractical and impossible. Neverthe-
less, my confidence remains unshaken that the
time will come when society will be so far ad-
vanced that it will be too civilized and too humane
to maintain a prison for the punishment of an
erring member, and that man will think too well
of himself to cage his brother as a brute, place
an armed brute over him, feed him as a brute,

188 WALLS AND BAES

treat him as a brute, and reduce him to the level
of a brute.

Socialism jDroposes that the people — all the
people — shall socially own the sources of wealth
and social means with which wealth is produced;
that the people, in other words, shall be the joint
proprietors upon equal terms of the industries of
the nation, that these shall be co-operatively
oiDerated and democratically managed; it pro-
poses that the people shall appropriate to them-
selves the whole of the wealth they create to
freely satisfy their normal wants instead of turn-
ing the bulk of that wealth over, as they now do,
to idlers, parasites and non-producers while they
suffer in poverty and want.

Wlien the community life is organized upon a
co-operative basis according to the socialistic
program every man and woman will have the in-
alienable right to work with the most improved
modem machinery and under the most favorable
possible conditions with the assurance that they
will receive in return the equivalent of their
product, and that they may enjoy in freedom and
peace the fruit of their labor.

In such a society there will be a mutuality of
interest and a fraternity of spirit that will pre-
clude the class antagonism and the hatred re-
sulting therefrom which now prevail, and men
and women will work together with joy, not as
wage slaves for a pittance, but in economic free-
dom and in an atmosphere of mutual goodwill

SOCIALISM AND THE PRISON 189

and peace. The machine will be the only slave,
the workday will be reduced in proportion as the
productive capacity is increased by improved ma-
chinery and methods, so that each life may be as-
sured sufficient leisure for its higher and nobler
development.

What incentive would there be for a man to
steal when he could acquire a happy living so
much more easily and reputably by doing his
share of the community work ? He would have to
be a perverted product of capitalism indeed who
would rather steal than serve in such a com-
munity. Men do not shrink from work, but from
slavery. The man who works primarily for the
benefit of another does so only under compulsion,
and work so done is the very essence of slavery.

Under Socialism no man will depend upon
another for a job, or upon the self-interest or
good will of another for a chance to earn bread
for his wife and child. No man will work to make
a profit for another, to enrich an idler, for the
idler will no longer own the means of life. No man
will be an economic dependent and no man need
feel the pinch of poverty that robs life of all joy
and ends finally in the county house, the prison
and pottersfield.

The healthy members of the community will all
be workers, and they will be rulers as well as
workers, for they will be their own masters and
freely determine the conditions under which they
shall work and live. There will be no arrog^ant

190 WALLS AND BARS

capitalists on the one hand demanding their
profits, nor upon the other cowering wage slaves
dependent upon paltry and insufficient wages.

Industrial self-government, social democracy,
will completely revolutionize the community life.
For the first time in history the people will be
truly free and rule themselves, and when this
comes to pass poverty will vanish like mist before
the sunrise. AVhen poverty goes out of the world
the prison will remain only as a monument to the
ages before light dawned upon darkness and
civilization came to mankind.

It is to inaugurate this world-wide organic so-
cial change that the workers in all lands and all
climes are marshaling their forces, recognizing
their kinship, and proclaiming their international
solidarity.

The world's workers are to become the world's
rulers. The great transformation is impending
and all the underlying laws of the social fabric
and all the irresis table forces of industrial and
social evolution are committed to its triumphant
consummation.

Capitalism has had its day and must go. The
capitalist cannot function as such in free society.
He will own no job except his own as a worker
and to hold that he must work for what he gets
the same as any other worker. No man has, or
ever did have, the right to live on the labor of
another; to make a profit out of another, to rob

SOCIALISM AND THE PRISON 191

another of the fruit of his toil, his liberty and his
life.

Capitalism is inherently a criminal system for
it is based upon the robbery of the working class
and corner-stoned in its slavery. The title-deed
held by the capitalist class to the tools used by
the working class is also the title-deed to their
liberty and their lives.

Economic slavery is at the foundation of every
other slavery of body, mind and soul. But the
capitalists rob not only the workers, but also
themselves in appropriating what is produced in
the sweat and misery of their toil. They lapse
into a state of parasitism that robs them of their
higher development, the intellectual and spiritual
estate to which all human beings are heirs who
live in accordance with the higher laws of their
being.

Often at night in my narrow prison quarters
when all about me was quiet I beheld as in a
vision the majestic march of events in the trans-
formation of the world.

I saw the working class in which I was bom
and reared, and to whom I owe my all, engaged in
the last great conflict to break the fetters that have
bound them for ages, and to stand forth at last,
emancipated from every form of servitude, the
sovereign rulers of the world.

It was this vision that sustained me in every
hour of my imprisonment, for I felt deep within
me, in a way that made it prophecy fulfilled, that

192 WALLS AND BABS

the long night was far spent and that the dawn of
the glad new day was near at hand.

In my prison life I saw in a way I never had
before the blighting, disfiguring, destroying
effects of capitalism. I saw here accentuated
and made more hideous and revolting than is
manifest in the outer world the effects of the
oppression and cruelty inflicted upon the victims
of this iniquitous system.

On the outside of the prison walls the wage
slave begs his master for a job; on the inside he
cowers before the club of his keeper. The entire
process is a degenerating one and robs the human
being, either as a wage slave walking the street
or as a convict crouching in a cell, of every at-
tribute of sovereignty and every quality that
dignifies his nature.

Socialism is the antithesis of capitalism. It
means nothing that capitalism means, and every-
thing that capitalism does not.

Capitalism means private ownership, compe-
tition, slavery and starvation.

Socialism means social ownership, co-opera-
tion, freedom and abundance for all.

Socialism is the spontaneous expression of
human nature in concrete social forms to meet the
demands and regulate the terms of the common
life.

The human being is a social being, and So-
cialism would organize his life in the social spirit,

SOCIALISM AND THE PRISON 193

under social conditions and along social lines of
advancement.

What more natural than that things of a social
nature in a community should be socially owned
and socially administered for the individual and
social well-being of all !

What more unnatural, what more antagonistic
to every social instinct, than the private owner-
ship of the social means of life !

Socialism is evolving every hour of the day
and night and all attempts to arrest its progress
but increase its power, accelerate its momentum
and insure its triumph for the liberation of
humanity throughout the world.

CHAPTER XVn.

Prison Labor, Its Effects on Industry

AND Trade.

(Address before Nineteenth Century Club at

Delmonieo 's, New York City, March

21st, 1899.)

In my early years I stood before the open door
of a blazing furnace and piled in the fuel to cre-
ate steam to speed a locomotive along the iron
track of progress and civilization. In the cos-
tume of my craft, through the grime of mingled
sweat and smoke and dust I was initiated into
the great brotherhood of labor. The locomotive
was my alma mater. I mastered the curriculum
and graduated with the degree of D. D., not, as
the lexicons interpret the letters, ^'Doctor of Di-
vinity'', but that better signification, ^*Do and
Dare'' — a higher degree than Aristotle conferred
in his Lyceum or Plato thundered from his
academy.

I am not in the habit of telling how little I
know about Latin to those who have slaked their
thirst for learning at the Pierian springs, but
there is a proverb that has come down to us from
the dim past which reads, ^^ Omnia vincit labor"
and which has been adopted as the shibboleth of
the American labor movement because, when re-

PEISON LAEOK, ITS EFFECTS ON Iin)USTEY 195

duced to English, it reads *^ Labor overcomes all
things *\ In a certain sense this is true. Labor
has built this great metropolis of the new world,
built it as coral insects build the foundations of
islands — build and die; build from the fathom-
less depths of the ocean until the mountain bil-
lows are dashed into spray as they beat against
the fortifications beneath which the builders are
forever entombed and forgotten.

Here in this proud city where wealth has built
its monuments grander and more imposing than
any of the seven wonders of the world named in
classic lore, if you will excavate for facts you
will find the remains, the bones of the toilers,
buried and embedded in their foundations. They
lived, they wrought, they died. In their time
they may have laughed and sung and danced to
the music of their clanking chains. They mar-
ried, propagated their species, and perpetuated
conditions which, growing steadily worse, are to-
day the foulest blot the imagination can conceive
upon our much vaunted civilization.

And from these conditions there flow a thou-
sand streams of vice and crime which have
broadened and deepened until they constitute a
perpetual menace to the peace and security of
society. Jails, work-houses, reformatories and
penitentiaries have been crowded with victims,
and the question how to control these institutions
and their unfortunate inmates is challenging the

196 WALLS AND BARS

most serious thought of the most advanced na-
tions on the globe.

The particular phase of this grave and mel-
ancholy question which we are to consider this
evening is embodied in the subject assigned the
speakers ^^ Prison Labor, Its Effect on Industry
and Trade ^\

I must confess that it would have suited my
purpose better had the subject been transposed
so as to read: ** Industry and Trade, Their Ef-
fect on Labor ' % for, as a Socialist, I am convinced
that the prison problem is rooted in the present
system of industry and trade, carried forward,
as it is, purely for private profit without the
slightest regard to the effect upon those engaged
in it, especially the men, women and children who
perform the useful, productive labor which has
created all wealth and all civilization.

Serious as is the problem presented in the sub-
ject of our discussion, it is yet insignificant when
compared with the vastly greater question of the
effect of our social and economic system upon in-
dustry and trade.

The pernicious effect of prison contract labor
upon **free labor", so-called, when brought into
competition with it in the open market, is uni-
versally conceded, but it should not be overlooked
that prison labor is itself an effect and not a
cause, and that convict labor is recruited almost
wholly from the propertyless, wage-working class
and that the inhuman system which has reduced

PRISON LAEOB, ITS EFFECTS ON INDUSTRY 197

a comparative few from enforced idleness to
crime, has smik the whole mass of labor to the
dead level of industrial servitude.

It is therefore the economic system, which is
responsible for, not only prison labor, but for the
gradual enslavement and degradation of all la-
bor, that we must deal before there can be any
solution of the prison labor problem or any per-
manent relief from its demoralizing influences.

But we will briefly consider the etf ects of prison
labor upon industry and then pass to the larger
question of the cause of prison labor and its ap-
palling increase, to which the discussion logically
leads.

From the earliest ages there has been a prison
problem. The ancients had their bastiles and
their dungeons. Most of the pioneers of prog-
ress, the haters of oppression, the lovers of lib-
erty, whose names now glorify the pantheon of
the world, made such institutions a necessity in
their day. But civilization advances, however
slowly, and there has been some progress.

It required five hundred years to travel from
the inquisition to the injunction.

In the earlier days punishment was the sole
purpose of imprisonment. Offenders against the
ruling class must pay the penalty in a prison cell,
which, not infrequently, was equipped with in-
struments of torture. With the civilizing process
came the idea of a reformation of the culprit,
and this idea prompts every investigation made

198 WALLS AND BAES

of the latter-day problem. Tlie inmates must be
set to work for their own good, no less than for
the good of the state.

It was at this point that the convict labor prob-
lem began and it has steadily expanded from that
time to this and while there have been some tem-
porary modifications of the evil, it is still an un-
mitigated curse from which there can be no escape
while an economic system endures in which labor,
that is to say the laborer, man, woman and child,
is sold to the lowest bidder in the markets of the
world.

More than thirty years ago Professor E. C.
Wines and Professor Theodore W. Dwight, then
commissioners of the Prison Association of New
York, made a report to the legislature of the
state on prison industry in which they said:

*^Upon the whole it is our settled conviction
that the contract system of convict labor, added
to the system of political appointments, which
necessarily involves a low grade of official quali-
fication and constant changes in the prison staff,
renders nugatory, to a great extent, the whole
theory of our penitentiary system. Inspection
may correct isolated abuses; philanthropy may
relieve isolated cases of distress; and religion
may effect isolated moral cures; but genuine,
radical, comprehensive, systematic improvement
is impossible. '*

The lapse of thirty years has not affected the
wisdom or logic of the conclusion. It is as true

PEISON LAEOB, ITS EFFECTS ON INDUSTRY 199

now as it was then. Considered in his most fa-
vorable light, the convict is a scourge to himself,
a menace to society and a burden to industry,
and whatever system of convict labor may be
tried, it will ultimately fail of its purpose at
reformation of the criminal or the relief of in-
dustry as long as thousands of ^^free laborers '',
who have committed no crime, are unable to get
work and make an honest living. Not long ago
I visited a penitentiary in which a convict ex-
pressed regret that his sentence was soon to ex-
pire, where was he to go or what was he to do?
And how long before he would be sentenced to a
longer term for a greater crime!

The commission which investigated the matter
in Ohio in 1877 reported to the legislature as
follows :

''The contract system interferes in an undue
manner with the honest industry of the state.
It has been the cause of crippling the business of
many of our manufacturers; it has been the
cause of driving many of them out of business;
it has been the cause of a large percentage of
reductions which have taken place in the wages
of our mechanics ; it has been the cause of pauper-
izing a large portion of our laborers and in in-
creasing crime in a corresponding degree ; it has
been no benefit to the state; as a reformatory
measure it has been a complete, total and mis-
erable failure; it has hardened more criminals
than any other cause; it has made total wrecks

200 WALLS AND BAKS

morally of thousands and thousands who would
have been reclaimed from the paths of vice and
crime under a proper system of prison manage-
ment, but who have resigned their fate to a life
of hopeless degradation ; it has not a single com-
mendable feature. Its tendency is pernicious in
the extreme. In short, it is an insurmountable
barrier in the way of the reformation of the un-
fortunates who are compelled to live and labor
under its evil influences ; it enables a class of men
to get rich out of the crimes committed by others ;
it leaves upon the fair escutcheon of the state a '
relic of the very worst form of human slavery;
it is a bone of ceaseless contention between the
state and its mechanical and industrial interests ;
it is abhorred by all and respected by none ex-
cept those, perhaps, who make profit and gain
out of it. It should be tolerated no longer but
abolished at once.*'

And yet this same system is still in effect in
many of the states in the Union. The most re-
volting outrages have been perpetrated upon
prison laborers under this diabolical system.
Read the official reports and stand aghast at the
atrocities committed against these morally de-
formed and perverted human creatures, your
brothers and my brothers, for the private profit
of capitalistic exploiters and the advancement of
Christian civilization.

What a commentary on the capitalistic com-
petitive system! First, men are forced into

PRISON LABOR, ITS EFFECTS ON INDUSTRY 201

idleness. Gradually they are driven to the ex-
tremity of begging or stealing. Having still a
spark of pride and self-respect they steal and
are sent to jail. The first sentence seals their
doom. The brand of Cain is upon them. They
are identified with the criminal class. Society,
whose victims they are, has exiled them forever,
and with this curse ringing in their ears they
proceed on their downward career, sounding
every note in the scale of depravity until at last,
having graduated in crime all the way from petit
larceny to homicide, their last despairing sigh
is wrung from them by the hangman's halter.
From first to last these unfortunptes, the victims
of social malformation, are made the subject of
speculation and traffic. The barbed iron of the
prison contractor is plunged into their quivering
hearts that their torture may be coined into
private profit for their exploiters.

In the investigation in South Carolina, where
the convicts have been leased to railroad com-
panies the most startling disclosures were made.
Out of 285 prisoners employed by one company,
128, or more than 40 per cent, died as the result,
largely, of brutal treatment.

It is popular to say that society must be pro-
tected against its criminals. I prefer to believe
that criminals should be protected against so-
ciety, at least while we live under a system that
makes the commission of crime necessary to se-
cure employment.

202 WALLS AND BARS

The Tennessee tragedy is still fresh in the pub-
lic memory. Here, as elsewhere, the convicts,
themselves brutally treated, were used as a
means of dragging the whole mine-working class
down to their crime-cursed condition. The Ten-
nessee Coal and Iron Company leased the con-
victs for the express purpose of forcing the
wages of miners down to the point of subsistence.
Says the official report : ^ ^ The miners were com-
pelled to work in competition with low-priced
convict labor, the presence of which was used by
the company as a scourge to force free laborers
to its terms''. Then the miners, locked out, their
families suffering, driven to desperation, ap-
pealed to force and in a twinkling the laws of the
state were trampled down, the authorities over-
powered and defied, and almost five hundred con-
victs set at liberty.

Fortunately the system of leasing and con-
tracting prison labor for private exploitation is
being exposed and its frightful iniquities laid
bare. Thanks to organized labor and to the spirit
of prison reform, this horrifying phase of the
evil is doomed to disappear before an enlightened
public sentiment.

The public account system, though subject to
serious criticism, is far less objectionable than
either the lease, the contract or the piece price
system. At least the prisoner's infirmities cease
to be the prey of speculative greed and con-
scienceless rapacity.

PEISON LAKOE^ ITS EFFECTS ON IXDUSTEY 203

Tte system of manufacturmg for the use of
state, county and municipal institutions, adopted
by the State of New York, is an improvement
upon those hitherto in effect, but it is certain to
develop serious objections in course of time.
AYith the use of modem machinery the limited de-
mand will soon be supplied and then what? It
may be in order to suggest that the prisoners
could be employed in making shoes and clothes
for the destitute poor and school books for their
children and many other articles which the poor
sorely need but are unable to buy.

Developing along this line it will be only a
question of time until the state would be manu-
facturing all things for the use of the people, and
then jDerhaps the inquiry would be pertinent: If
the state can give men steady employment after
they commit crime, and manufacturing can be
carried forward successfully by their labor, why
can it not give them employment before they are
driven to that extremity, thereby preventing
them from becoming criminals?

All useful labor is honest labor, even if per-
formed in a prison. Only the labor of exploiters,
such as speculators, stock-gamblers, beef-embalm-
ers and their mercenary politicians, lawyers and
other parasites — only such is dishonest labor. A
thief making shoes in a penitentiary is engaged
in more useful and therefore more honest labor
than a *^free'' stonemason at work on a palace
whose foundations are laid in the skulls and

204 WALLS AND BARS

bones, and cemented in the sweat and blood of
ten thousand victims of capitalistic exploitation.
In both cases the labor is compulsory. The stone-
mason would not work for the trust-magnate
were he not compelled to.

In ancient times only slaves labored. And as
a matter of fact only slaves labor now. The mil-
lions are made by the magic of manipulation.
The coal miners of West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Ohio, Indiana and Illinois receive an average
wage of less than seventy-five cents a day. They
perform the most useful and necessary labor,
without which your homes, if possible at all,
would be cheerless as caves and the great heart
of industry would cease to throb. Are they free
men, or are they slaves? And what is the effect
of their labor on trade and industry and upon
themselves and their families? Dante would
search the realms of inferno in vain for such pic-
tures of horror and despair as are to be found
in the mine regions of free America.

To the student of social science the haggard
fact stands forth that under the competitive sys-
tem of production and distribution the prison
problem will never be solved — and its effect upon
trade and industry will never be greatly modified.
The fact will remain that whatever labor is per-
formed by prison labor could and should be per-
formed by free labor, and when in the marcM
of economic progress the capitalist system of in-
dustry for private profit succumbs to the socialist

/

PRISON LAROR, ITS EFFECTS ON INDUSTRY 205

system of industry for human happiness, when
the factory, which is now a penitentiary crowded
with life convicts, among whom children often
constitute the majority — when this factory is
transformed into a temple of science, and the ma-
chine, myriad-armed and tireless, is the only
slave, there will be no prison labor and the prob-
lem will cease to vex the world, and to this it is
coming in obedience to the economic law, as un-
erring in its operation as the law of gravitation.

That prison labor, especially under the various
forms of the contract system, is demoralizing in
its effect on trade and industry whenever and
wherever brought into competition with outside
labor is, of course, conceded ; but that it has been,
or is at present, an especially effective factor in
such demoralization is not here admitted. There
is a tendency to exaggerate the blighting effect of
prison labor for the purpose of obscuring the one
overshadowing cause of demoralized trade and
impoverished industry.

Prison labor did not reduce the miner to a
walking hungerpang, his wife to a tear-stained
rag, and his home to a lair. Prison labor is not
responsible for the squares of squalor and the
miles of misery in New York, Chicago and all
other centers of population. Prison labor is not
chargeable with the sweating dens in which the
victims of capitalistic competition crouch in dread
and fear until death comes to their rescue.
Prison labor had no hand in Coeur d'Alene,

206 WALLS AND BAES

Tennesee, Homestead, Hazelton, Virdin, Pana,
that suburb of hell called Pullman and other en-
sanguined battlefields where thousands of work-
ingmen after being oppressed and robbed were im-
prisoned like felons, and shot down like vaga-
bond dogs; where venal judges issued infamous
injunctions and despotic orders at the behest of
their masters, enforcing them with deputy mar-
shals armed with pistols and clubs and supported
by troops with gleaming bayonets and shotted
guns to drain the veins of workingmen of blood,
but for whose labor this continent would still be
a wilderness. Only the tortures of hunger and
nakedness provoked protest, and this was silenced
by the bayonet and bullet; by the club and the
blood that followed the blow.

Prison labor is not accountable for the appall-
ing increase in insanity, in suicide, in murder, in
prostitution and a thousand other forms of vice
and crime which pollute every fountain and con-
taminate every stream designed to bless the
world.

Prison labor did not create our army of unem-
ployed, but has been recruited from its ranks,
and both owe their existence to the same social
and economic system.

Nor are the evil effects confined exclusively
to the poor working class. There is an aspect of
the case in which the rich are as unfortunate as
the poor. The destiny of the capitalist class is
irrevocably linked with the working class. Fichte,

PEISON lAEOE, ITS EFFECTS ON Iin)T7STEY 207

the great German philosopher, said, '* Wickedness
increases in proportion to the elevation of rank".

Prison labor is but one of the manifestations
of our economic development and indicates its
trend. The same cause that demoralized indus-.
try has crowded our prisons. Industry has not
been impoverished by prison labor, but prison
labor is the result of impoverished industry.
The limited time at my command will not permit
an analysis of the process.

The real question which confronts us is our
industrial system and its effects upon labor. One
of these effects is, as I have intimated, prison
labor. What is its cause? T\Tiat makes it nec-
essary? The answer is, the competitive system,
which creates wage-slavery, throws thousands out
of employment and reduces the wages of thou-
sands more to the point of bare subsistence.

Why is prison labor preferred to **free la-
bor?" Simply because it is cheaper; it yields
more profit to the man who buys, exploits and
sells it. But this has its limitations. Capitalist
competition that throngs the streets with idle
workers, capitalist production that reduces hu-
man labor to a commodity and ultimately to
crime — this system produces another kind of
prison labor in the form of child labor which is
being utilized more and more to complete the
subjugation of the working class. There is this
difference: The prison laborers are clothed and
housed and fed. The child laborers whose wage

208 WALLS AND BAES

is a dollar a week, or even less, must take care of
themselves.

Prison labor is preferred because it is cheap.
So with child labor. It is not a question of prison
labor, or child labor, but of cheap labor.

Tenement-house labor is another form of
prison labor.

The effects of cheap labor on trade and indus-
try must be the same, whether such labor is done
by prisoners, tenement house slaves, children or
starving ** hoboes''.

The prison laborer produces by machinery in
abundance but does not consume. The child like-
wise produces, but owing to its small wages, does
not consume. So with the vast army of workers
whose wage grows smaller as the productive ca-
pacity of labor increases, and then society is af-
flicted with overproduction, the result of under-
consumption. What follows? The panic. Fac-
tories close down, wage-workers are idle and
suffer, middle-class business men are forced into
bankruptcy, the army of tramps is increased,
vice and crime are rampant and prisons and
work-houses are filled to overflowing as are sew-
ers when the streets of cities are deluged with
floods.

Prison labor, like all cheap labor, is at first a
source of profit to the capitalist, but finally it
turns into a two-edged sword that cuts into and
destroys the system that produces it.

First, the capitalist pocket is filled by the em-

PEISON LAKOE, ITS EFFECTS ON INDUSTRY 209

ployment of cheap labor — and then the bottom
drops out of it.

In the cheapening process, the pauperized mass
have lost their consuming power.

The case may now be summed up as follows:

First. Prison labor is bad ; it has a demoraliz-
ing effect on capitalist trade and industry.

Second. Child labor, tenement house and every
other form of cheap labor is bad; it is destruc-
tive of trade and industry.

Third. Capitalist competition is bad; it cre-
ates a demand for cheap labor.

Fourth. Capitalist production is bad; it cre-
ates millionaires and mendicants, economic mas-
ters and slaves, thus intensifying the class strug-
gle.

This indicates that the present capitalist sys-
tem has outlived its usefulness, and that it is in
the throes of dissolution. Capitalism is but a
link in the chain of social and economic develop-
ment. Just as feudalism developed capitalism
and then disappeared, so capitalism is now de-
veloping socialism, and when the new social sys-
tem has been completely evolved the last vestige
of capitalism will fade into history.

The gigantic trust marks the change in produc-
tion. It is no longer competitive but co-opera-
tive. The same mode of distribution, which must
inevitably follow, will complete the process.

Co-operative labor will be the basis of the new
social system, and this wiU be for use and not

210 WALLS AND BAES

for profit. Labor will no longer be bought and
sold. Industrial slavery will cease. For every
man there will be the equal right to work with
every other man and each will receive the fruit
of his labor. Then we shall have economic equal-
ity. Involuntary idleness will be a horror of the
past. Poverty will relax its grasp. The army
of tramps will be disbanded because the prolific
womb which now warms these unfortunates into
life will become barren. Prisons will be depopu-
lated and the prison labor problem will be solved.

Each labor-saving machine will lighten the bur-
den and decrease the hours of toil. The soul will
no longer be subordinated to the stomach. Man
will live a complete life, and the march will then
begin to an ideal civilization.

There is another proverb which the Latin race
sent ringing down the centuries which reads,
^^ Omnia vincit amor'', or ^^Love conquers all
things". Love and labor in alliance, working
together, have transforming, redeeming and
emancipating power. Under their benign sway
the world can be made better and brighter.

Isaiah saw in prophetic vision a time when na-
tions should war no more — when swords should
be transformed into plowshares and spears into
pruning hooks. The fulfillment of the prophecy
only awaits an era when Love and Labor, in holy
alliance, shall solve the economic problem.

Here, on this occasion, in this great metropolis
with its thousand spires pointing heavenward,

PEISON LAEOE, ITS EFFECTS ON INDUSTKY 211

where opulence riots in luxury which challenges
hyperbole, and poverty rots in sweatshops which
only a Shakespeare or a Victor Hugo could de-
scribe, and the transfer to canvas would palsy
the hand of a Michael Angelo — here, where
wealth and want and woe bear irrefutable testi-
mony of deplorable conditions, I stand as a so-
cialist, protesting against the wrongs perpetrated
upon Les Miserables, and pleading as best I can
for a higher civilization.

The army of begging Lazaruses, with the dogs
licking their sores at the gates of palaces, where
the rich are clothed in purple and fine linen, with
their tables groaning beneath the luxuries of all
climes, make the palaces on the highlands where
fashion holds sway and music lends its charms,
a picture in the landscape which, in illustrating
disparity, brings into bolder relief the hut and
the hovel in the hollow where want, gaunt and
haggard, sits at the door and where light and
plenty, cheerfulness and hope are forever exiled
by the despotic decree of conditions as ciael as
when the Czar of Eussia orders to his penal
mines in Siberia the hapless subjects who dare
whisper the sacred word liberty — as cruel as
when this boasted land of freedom commands that
a far-away, innocent people shall be shot down
in jungle and lagoon, in their bamboo huts, be-
cause they dream of freedom and independence.

These conditions are as fruitful of danger to
the opulent as they are of degradation to the

212 WALLS AND BARS

poor. It is neither folly nor fanaticism to assert
that the country cannot exist under such condi-
tions. The higher law of righteousness, of love
and labor will prevail. It is a law which com-
mends itself to reasoning men, a primal law en-
acted long before Jehovah wrote the decalog
amidst the thunders and lightnings of Sinai. It
is a law written upon the tablets of every man's
heart and conscience. It is a law infinitely above
the creeds and dogmas and tangled disquisitions
of the churches — the one law which in its opera-
tions will level humanity upward until men, re-
deemed from greed and every debasing ambition,
shall obey its mandates and glory in its triumph.
Love and labor will give us the Socialist Ee-
public — the Industrial Democracy — the equal
rights of all men and women, and the emancipa-
tion of all from the cruel and debasing thraldoms
of past centuries.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Studies Behind Pkison Walls.

(Reproduced from the Century Magazine for
July, 1922, by Courtesy of Its Publishers.)
The prison has a place peculiarly and entirely
its own among the institutions of human society.
It is there that the human being is detached from
his former associations and isolated under rigor-
ous discipline to expiate his alleged offence
against society. It is the one place to which
men go only under compulsion and in humiliation
and shame.

When I was a boy the very word penitentiary
had a shocking effect upon my sensibilities, and
of course I did not dream that I would ever serve
a sentence as a convicted felon within its walls.
I had never seen a penitentiary, but I had seen
the filthy county jail in the town in which I
lived, and through its barred windows I saw the
imprisoned victims and heard their foul and
damning imprecations.

This gave me some idea of what the peniten-
tiary must be like and I wondered even then if
it were not possible to deal with our erring fel-
low men in a more humane way than by commit-
ting them into foul dungeons and treating them
as if they were beasts instead of human beings.

214 WALLS AND BARS

Later in life when I had become active in the
labor movement and had a part in the strikes and
other disturbances of organized workers, in the
course of which the leaders were not infrequent-
ly arrested and sent to jail, I came to realize that
the prison could be used for purposes other than
confining the criminal; used as a club to intimi-.
date working men and women after their leaders
had already been incarcerated ; used as a silencer
upon any expression of opinion that might not
happen to be in accord with the administrative
power.

So, I understood from the beginning that all
men who were sent to jails and penitentiaries
were not criminals ; indeed, I have often had cause
to think that the time may come in the life of any
man when he would consider it necessary to go
to prison if he would be true to the integrity of
his own soul, and loyal to his inherent, God-given
sovereignty as a human being. Such thoughts
would come to me after my many visits to jails
and penitentiaries to call upon friends and asso-
ciates in the labor struggle incarcerated there.

It was in the railroad strike of 1877 that I had
my first experience in seeing my associates in the
railroad union sent to jail, and I began to realize
that if I continued my activity I might some day
go there myself. Less than twenty years later
I had my first interior view of the jail as an in-
mate, and this experience awakened in me a keen
interest in the prison and its victims. The penal

STUDIES BEHIND PRISON WALLS 2l5

question has been to me an absorbing study ever
since.

The notorious old Cook County jail in Chicago,
for years the choicest picking for grafting poli-
ticians, reeking with vermin and infested with
sewer rats, comes vividly to memory as these lines
are written. It was there that I was initiated
into the moralities and mysteries of prison life.
I saw at a glance what that filthy pen meant to
the unfortunate creatures confined there, and at
once my sympathy was quickened, and I felt my-
self drawn to them by a fellow feeling which grew
stronger with the passing years.

Soon afterward I was sentenced to the Mc-
Henry County jail in Woodstock, Illinois, to serve
a term of six months upon the charge of con-
tempt of court for the violation of an injunction
issued by the federal court during the great Pull-
man strike in 1894. I had pleaded in vain for
a jury trial.

Fortunately for me and my convicted asso-
ciates of the American Kailway Union, the filthy
Cook County jail was over populated at the time
we were sentenced, in consequence of which we
were transferred to the county jail in Woodstock.
The farmers in that vicinity did not relish the
idea of my being ''boarded'' among them even
as an inmate of their jail. They had been read-
ing the daily newspapers and had concluded that
I was too dangerous a criminal to be permitted to
enter the county, and it was reported that they

216 WALLS AND BARS

would gather in numbers at the station on my
arrival and attempt to lynch me, or at least pre-
vent me from disembarking. When we arrived
at Woodstock a number of them were at the sta-
tion, but they had evidently been advised against
carrying out their enthusiastic program for they
made no hostile demonstration.

The jail at Woodstock was a small affair and
clean for a county lock-up. I soon had a satis-
factory understanding with the sheriff, a veteran
of the civil war, and got along without the least
trouble. During the latter period of my term I
conducted an evening school for the benefit of
the prisoners, and on my leaving they presented
me with a set of resolutions expressive of their
gratitude which is still a cherished testimonial in
my possession.

Some years later when I was touring the coun-
try as a presidential candidate I made a special
visit to Woodstock and received a great ovation
from the visiting farmers and the townspeople,
among whom was the sheriff who had been my
jailer and had become my friend. On another oc^
casion I was invited there to address a meeting
at the City Hall, the daughter of the sheriff, head
of the Eelief Corps of the G. A. E., having charge
of the arrangements.

Almost twenty-five years passed before I had
my next prison experience. The world war was
in progress and the excitement was intense. I
had my own views in regard to the war, and I

STUDIES BEHIND PRISON WALLS 217

knew in advance that an expression of what was
in my heart would invite a prison sentence under
the Espionage Law. I took my stand in accord-
ance with the dictates of my conscience, and was
prepared to accept the consequences without com-
plaint. The choice was deliberately made, and
there has never since been a moment of regret.
It was not because I yearned for imprisonment
that I took the position that human beings had
a higher call and a nobler purpose in life than
slaughtering each other and hating those they
could not kill, but simply because I could take no
other, although realizing fully that the choice led
through prison gates.

A sentence of ten years followed my trial at
Cleveland in which I permitted no witnesses to
testify in my behalf and no defense to be made.
When the government's attorneys were satisfied
that they had concluded their case against me, I
addressed the jury, not as a matter of defense
of the speech that had resulted in my arrest, trial
and conviction, but in an attempt to amplify and
supplement it so that there could be no possible
mistake as to my beliefs and opinions with re-
spect to the subject in controversy. It was an
unusual and surprising proceeding in a court-
room. I was entirely prepared to receive the
sentence of ten years pronounced by the judge. I
had stood upon my constitutional right of free
speech, and in this attitude I had the sanction

218 WALLS AND BAKS

and support of tens of thousands of people who
had no sympathy with my political views.

On the evening of April 13, 1919, I was deliv-
ered by United States Marshal Lap and his
deputies of Cleveland to Warden Joseph Z. Ter-
rell, of the West Virginia State Penitentiary at
Moundsville to enter upon my sentence. I was
permitted to serve but two months at Mounds-
ville when the order came from Washington for
my transfer to Atlanta Federal Prison. My
brief sojourn at Moundsville was entirely satis-
factory as a prison experience, for after my ar-
rival there I was introduced to the various offi-
cials and came into intimate and pleasant con-
tact with all the prisoners.

These experiences were preliminary to my ad-
venture at the United States Penitentiary in At-
lanta, where I was taken on June 14, 1919, and
served as an inmate until Christmas Day, 1921.

With this introductory sketch I shall now en-
ter upon the story of my actual prison life and
my study of the prison as an institution, the in-
mates confined there, the rules and conditions
under which they serve their terms, and the effect
of their prison experience upon their subsequent
lives.

Personally, I feel amply rewarded for the op-
portunity that was given me to see and know the
prison as it is, for while I was a prisoner at At-
lanta I learned more of a vital nature to me than
could have been taught me in any similar period

STUDIES BEHIND PKISON WALLS 219

in the classroom of any -university.

A prison is a wonderful place in the opportun-
ity afforded not only to study human nature in
the abstract, to examine the causes and currents
of motives and impulses, but also to see yourself
reflected in the caricatures of your fellow men.
It is also the one place, above all others, where
one comprehends the measureless extent of man^s
inhumanity to man.

I hate, I abominate the prison as it exists today
as the most loathsome and debasing of human
institutions.

Most prisons are physically as well as morally
tmclean. All of them are governed by rules and
maintained under conditions which fit them as
breeding places for the iniquities which they are
supposed to abate and stamp out.

When I entered the Atlanta Prison it was on a
common footing with all the rest of the prisoners.
I expected no favors and would accept no privi-
leges that were denied to others. From the mo-
ment I entered there I felt that I was among
friends, for the prisoners accorded me an en-
thusiastic welcome which I knew was genuine on
their part. I at once made up my mind that it
would be my constant endeavor to serve these
fellow prisoners of mine in every way that I could
and at every opportunity that presented itself. I
was not there long before I realized that my at-
titude toward the convicts was understood by
them and reciprocated in ways that shall always

220 WALLS AND BAES

remain in my memory in tender testimony of the
human fellowship that can blossom even in a
prison if nourished by kindness of heart.

When I was put into a second-hand prison suit
of blue denim I felt myself one with every pris-
oner in Atlanta. During the first two months I
was placed in a cell which was already inhabited
by ^ve other convicts, and these inmates did
everything that human beings could possibly do
to make me comfortable and my stay a pleasant
one. They were constantly seeking ways and
means to share with me whatever they had, and
from these simple souls I learned something
about unselfishness, and thoughtfulness, and re-
spect for another's feelings^ — qualities that are
not too common in the outer world where men
are more or less free to practice them without
being watched by brutal guards with clubs in
their hands eager to proclaim their authority
with the might of the bludgeon.

We sat side by side and ate the same wretched
food together, and after our evening meal in the
general mess we spent fourteen consecutive hours
together locked in a steel cage. I found my cell-
mates to be just as humane as any men I had
ever met in the outer world.

I have heard people refer to the *^ convict coun-
tenance". I never saw one. The rarest of hu-
man beings, the most cultured and refined
amongst us might in time become brutal by the
blighting and brutalizing influence of the prison

STUDIES BEHIND PEISON WALLS 221

if they should permit themselves to yield their
spirit to the degrading and debasing atmosphere
that permeates every penitentiary in the land.

By far the most of my fellow prisoners were
poor and uneducated men who never had a decent
chance in life to cultivate the higher arts of hu-
manity, but never in all the time I spent among
those more than 2,000 convicts did one of them
give me an unkind word.

There is infinite power in human kindness.
Every one of those convicts without a single ex-
ception responded in kindness to the touch of
kindness. I made it my especial duty to seek
out those who were regarded as the worst speci-
mens, but I never found one who failed to treat
me as decently as I treated him. My code of
conduct toward my fellow prisoners had the same
efficacy in prison that it had elsewhere. In deal-
ing with human beings I know no race, no color
and no creed. At the roots I think we are all
alike, governed by similar impulses that have
more or less the same results, depending upon
the circumstances in which we find ourselves
placed, and considering the conditions that at-
tend us. I judge not and I try to treat others
as I would be treated by them.

But in prison the human element is sadly dis-
counted and men are made by cruel and senseless
rules to fit into the criminal conceptions of them
which prevail under the prison regime.

The prison, above all others, should be the most

222 WALLS AND BARS

human of institutions. A great majority of the
inmates are there because of their poverty and
the direct or indirect results of poverty. Their
misfortune in life is penalized and they are
branded as convicts for the rest of their lives.

If an intelligent study could be made of each
individual case in a federal or state prison and
the result truthfully placed before the people the
nation would be horrified at the cruel injustice
which would be revealed. Most of the victims of
prison injustice are without friends of influence
to intercede in their behalf, and society in the
aggregate has no concern in them whatsoever.

The average prison is in the control of poli-
ticians who know little and care less about what
takes place behind the walls. Prison officials are
placed in responsible positions to reward them
for their political services and not with reference
to either their character or qualifications for the
office.

The warden and deputy warden of a prison
should have exceptional qualities to fit them for
the discharge of their important duties, and they
should be among the most humane of men.

One of the first things I discovered in Atlanta
prison was the wretched food provided for the
prisoners and the disgusting manner in which it
was cooked and served. The menu was confined
to a few poor articles which palled upon the ap-
petite and was the source of universal daily com-
plaint and dissatisfaction.

STUDIES BEHIND PRISON WALLS 223

Soon after I entered prison tlie question oc-
curred to me : why are men who work here not paid
for their labor? They are here mider punish-
ment for having stolen perhaps a few dollars and
promptly upon their incarceration the government
or the state jDroceeds to rob them of their daily
earnings, compelling them to work day after day
without a cent of compensation. The service
which the state exacts from a convict should be
paid for at the prevailing rate of wages to be
placed to his credit on the books, or shared with
his family, so that on leaving the prison he would
not have to face a hostile world in a shoddy suit
of clothes and $5.00 in his pocket as his sole capi-
tal with which to start life anew.

The clubs and guns in the hands of guards
present a picture well calculated to reveal the
true character of the prison as a humanizing and
redeeming institution.

As a matter of fact, the prison is simply a re-
flex of the sins which society commits against
itself. The most thorough study of prison in-
mates that I was able to make in the course of
my intimate daily and nightly contact with thou-
sands of them convinced me beyond all question
that they are in all essential respects the same
as the average run of people in the outer world.
I was unable to discover the criminal type or the
criminal element of which I had heard and read
so much before I had the opportunity to make
my own investigation. That there are moral and

/I

224 WALLS AND BARS

mental defectives in prison is of course admitted,
but the number is not greater, nor are the cases
more pronounced, than may be found outside of
prison walls.

However, in dealing with these imprisoned and
helpless beings in the prevailing prison spirit and
under the omnipresent iron clad regulations, they
must necessarily be regarded as a dangerous and
vicious aggregation in order to justify the brutal
and corrupt system which, under the pretense of
reformation, preys upon their misfortune. There
are many flagrant abuses and evils in the present
prison regime and these have their source and
incentive primarily in being in the control of
politicians who wax fat out of the misery of con-
victs by delivering them, in many states, to heart-
less contractors who in turn sweat and rob them,
not only of their labor but of their health and
very lives. The prison labor contractor is the
most merciless of slave-drivers.

I have seen enough of this shocking cruelty to
forever damn the institution in which such an
outrage upon unfortunates is practiced. In the
matter of convict labor the state virtually sells
its outcast citizens into abject slavery so that
thieving contractors, the pals of politicians who
control the prison, may fatten upon the pro-
ceeds of their crimes against so-called criminals.

Are the vultures who thus prey upon the help-
less, robed as they are in the soft raiment of re-
spectability, not actually lower morally than the

STUDIES BEHIND PEISON WALLS 225

victims of their inliumanity and piracy? And if
men should be sent to prison for robbery, are
not these official mercenaries the very creatures
who, instead of controlling the prison, should
themselves be imder its own brutal regulations?

That the vicious and corrupting abuses herein
set forth were recognized years ago by men who
honestly attempted to correct them is clearly
stated in a report to the New York State Legis-
lature issued more than half a century ago by
Professor E. C. Wines and Professor Theodore
W. Dwight, then Commissioners of the Prison As-
sociation of New York, from which I quote as
follows :

^^Upon the whole it is our settled conviction
that the contract system of convict labor, added
to the St/stem of political appointments, which
necessarily involves a low grade of official quali-
fication and constant changes in the prison staff,
renders nugatory, to a great extent, the whole
theory of our penitentiary system. Inspection
may correct isolated abuses; philanthropy may
relieve isolated cases of distress; and religion
may effect isolated moral cures; but genuine,
radical, comprehensive, systematic improvement
is impossible.^' (Italics are mine).

As long as the prison is in control of politicians
and under the supervision of their creatures, its
callous indifference to the inmates, its internal
vices and abuses, and its external reaction in fur-
nishing society with a steady stream of criminals

226 WATJiS AND BARS

trained in its own institution will continue, and
isolated instances of superficial improvement will
not materially reduce the evil and corrupting
power.

I am not at all inclined to exploit my personal
prison experience and should prefer to omit that
element entirely, were it not necessary to the pur-
pose of this article to include some reference to
it. It is to be doubted if there was ever before in
prison history a case parallel to my own in point
of experience and results issuing therefrom.

I had been four times the candidate for Presi-
dent of the United States of the party represent-
ing the class toiling in penury and suffering from
whose ranks are recruited, under the lash of
poverty and misery, with but few exceptions, the
victims of penal misrule. Since my early boy-
hood, and practically through my entire life, I
had been in intimate association with working
people and those who are generally regarded as
the ** lower class''. My understanding of their
conditions, my perception of the basic social
causes that had preceded their predicament, and
my sympathy with them even in their transgres-
sions, which is usually the result of their
wretched lot, had preceded my entrance through
the prison gates.

The entire prison seemed to join in the sym-
pathetic reception accorded me. The question
was frequently asked, sometimes sneeringly by
the guards, and sometimes in a spirit of wonder

STUDIES BEHIND PEISON WALLS 227

and admiration, by what magic I held the interest
of my fellow prisoners and won their affection
and devotion. The answer is a quite simple one.
I recognized in each of them my brother and
treated him accordingly. I did not moralize or
patronize my fellow convicts in the least. Men
who are caged and watched, spied npon and
hunted like animals develop certain latent in-
stincts that become amazingly keen and discern-
ing. Among these is the instinct to divine what
is in the heart of those who approach them.
They have been robbed of their respectability and
forever denied the chance to regain it, and, sen-
sitive as they surely are to this circumstance,
they are not apt to be impressed by those who
pose before them as their moral superiors.

They recognize no redeeming influence in
moralizing rebuke. They resent being patron-
ized, even the most ignorant of them, unless in
the prison atmosphere they have degenerated
into stool pigeons. No one who condescends to
serve these prisoners can win their graces or
exercise any salutary influence upon them. They
hunger for sympathy, but it must be genuine,
human, warm from the heart.

The late Father Michael J. Byrne, of the fed-
eral prison at Atlanta, was in all respects the
finest prison chaplain I have ever known. I had
no church affiliation, and for reasons of my own
I rarely attended devotional exercises at the
chapel, but I loved Father Byrne and we would

228 WALLS AND BAES

talk together many hours in my little room in
the prison hospital.

Devotional offerings in the name of the merci-
ful Jesus, who loved the poor and freely forgave
their sins, on an altar presided over by grim
visaged guards with clubs in their clutches ready
to fell the worshippers was not compatible with
my sense of religious worship. Before I entered
Atlanta prison attendance at chapel was com-
pulsory. Almost from the start I declined to
go myself, partly because of the hideous mock-
ery which the scene and setting made of sincere
worship, and I think that as a result of my reso-
lute protest the rule was modified and attendance
became voluntary, but the guards with clubs in
their fists remained.

Father Byrne ministered in the spirit of lov-
ing service to all alike, no matter how low some
might seem in the eyes of others, and that is why
he and I instantly became friends and co-oper^
ated with each other to the full extent that my
restrictions as a convict would allow. It may
seem strange, but it is nevertheless true, that
not only do the prison rules not counternance in-
mates being kind and helpful to each other, but
on the contrary, they forbid their being so, and
encourage their spying upon, betraying and hat-
ing one another so that all may the more readily
be kept in subjection.

In the prison hospital an inmate may be dying,
but the rules forbid him being visited by his fel-

STUDIES BEHIND PEISON WALLS 229

low prisoners ; each convict must keep to himself
no matter how great may be his desire to clasp
the hand of a fellow prisoner whose affection he
may have won in the course of their suffering
and struggling together against the cruel and
senseless regulations. This is one of the prison
rules that I confess violating with impunity. I
should have preferred going to the dungeon,
known in prison jDarlance as *'the hole", on
bread and water, rather than to have obeyed that
rule. As a matter of fact, nearly every prison
rule is violated by eveiy convict who stays any
length of time in prison. If he would remain
a human being he must of necessity break the
rules in order to live. Men cannot, and will not,
be unsocialized even in a prison whose rules at-
tempt to wreck and ruin human character and per-
sonality in the quickest possible time by the
harshest possible methods. But the group
l^sychology prevails, and the rules go by the
board, though often at the expense of great suf-
fering on the part of those who transgress them.
Almost every prisoner who came to the hos-
pital expressed an immediate desire to have me
come and see him. Invariably I did so as soon
as iDOssible. I was able in many ways by vol-
untary ministration to ease their suffering and
brio:hten their wret-ched davs. Father Bvme ob-
served a remarkable change in the moral atmos-
phere of the hospital after I entered there. Men
no longer used foul language or told smutty

230 WALLS AND BARS

stories. The relation between the guards and in-
mates had completely changed. It was as if the
hospital building was now occupied by a har-
monious human family instead of a lot of sullen
and incorrigible convicts.

Both the warden and his deputy commented on
the change which none appreciated more than
Father Byrne.

A visiting reporter once asked Father Byrne
how it was that I held such moral power over
the prisoners. His answer was : * * He just loves
them; he talks to them and then they're differ-
ent. There is something about him that wins
and changes them''. There is nothing mysterious
or occult about the ^^ something" to which Father
Byrne referred. It was merely an active mani-
festation of human kindness which all of us
possess, but which we are prone to smother be-
neath a crust of indifference to the suffering of
our fellow men.

The day before the death of this noble-spirited
chaplain he sent me a beautiful and touching
telegram congratulating me upon my release
from prison. The message read: ^^ Heartiest con-
gratulations and well wishes from your best
friend. God bless you. Michael J. Byrne,
Catholic Chaplain, U. S. Penitentiary." Father
Byrne is at rest. His memory will be cherished
by the thousands of convicts to whom he gave
himself as freely and ministered as lovingly as

STUDIES BEHIND PRISON WALLS 231

the Nazarene Himself might have done in his
place.

Love and service constitute the magical touch-
stone; they are, when fully developed and truly
expressed, one and inseparable, and more im-
peratively needed in prison than in any other
place on earth.

There is where Jesus Christ would be His per-
fect self in tender and sympathetic ministration,
and He would require neither guns nor clubs to
protect His person from insult or assault.

It is when men are most prosperous in their
individual pursuits that they are more apt to be
thoughtless and indifferent to the fate of others,
but when they are plunged into a common abyss
of misery and suffering they are likely to become
sympathetic and responsive to the touch of kind-
ness, and there is more redemptive influence in
a word of love and sympathy than in all the harsh
rules ever devised and all the brutal clubs ever
wielded to enforce them.

There was never a moment of mine in Atlanta
prison that was not mortgaged in advance. Many
of the prisoners could neither read nor write,
and they would come to me to have me read and
answer their letters, or to fill out their blanks
for pardon, parole or commutation, although
much of this had to be done by stealth as it was
in violation of the rules, and was several times
arbitrarily forbidden by the guards, especially
when prisoners were caught leaving my room. I

232 WALLS AND BAES

heard their sad stories, listened in sympathy to
their tragic appeals, placed my hand on their
shoulders and counselled them as an elder
brother, and while I was able to do but a mere
trifle of what my heart would have done for them,
I sensed the appreciation and gratitude that em-
braced the entire body of prisoners of all colors,
creeds and conditions.

The scene that occurred upon my release when
these 2,300 prison victims clothed as convicts,
yet with human hearts throbbing beneath their
tatters, spontaneously burst their bonds, as it
were, rushed to the fore of the prison on all three
of its floors and crowded all the barred window
spaces with their eager faces, cheering while the
tears trickled down their cheeks — this scene can
never be described in words, nor can it ever be
forgotten by those who witnessed that extraor-
dinary and unparalleled demonstration.

In that brief moment prison rules were
stripped of their restraining power, and men
though in prison fetters gave lusty expression to
their beautiful human impulses. It was the most
deeply touching and impressive moment and the
most profoundly dramatic incident of my life.
Men and women on the prison reserv^ation, in-
cluding the officials who bore witness to that un-
usual scene, stood mute in their bewilderment.
Never before had such a thing occurred, and
never in the wildest stretch would it have been
deemed possible.

STUDIES BEHIIH) PEISON WALLS 233

There was a reason for this unheard of dem-
onstration, and it was not all of a personal na-
ture. I arrogate to myself no importance what-
ever on account of having won the friendship of
these convicts. They did vastly more for me than
I was able to do for them, and the only point I
make in this connection is that if the prison were
conducted in the spirit and with the understand-
ing that we convicts had for each other the whole
penal system would at once be revolutionized;
instead of being a bastile for debasing and de-
stroying the unfortunate it would become in the
true sense a boon to society as a reclamatory and
redemptive institution.

The prison as a prison in the common accept-
ance of that term will always be a tragic failure.
It is not only anti-social, but anti-human, and at
best is bad enough to reflect the ignorance,
stupidity and inhumanity of the society it serves.
But this is not to say that improvement of the
prison while it lasts should be discouraged. On
the contrary, until the time comes when social
offenders are placed under scientific treatment
instead of being punished as criminals, every
effort should be put forth to improve the moral
and physical condition of our county jails, our
state prisons and our federal penitentiaries.

For myself, I heartily commend all that is
being done to arouse the people to a consciousness
of the festering evils which now thrive in these
places. There needs to be created a public senti-

234 WALLS AND BARS

ment that realizes that for its own self -protection
the community must clean up the prison as far as
that may be possible and make it a place where
criminal tendencies may be checked and over-
come instead of being encouraged and confirmed
as they now are to the ruin of their immediate
victims, and their increasing detriment to so-
ciety.

Space will not permit more than a brief sum-
mary of the fundamental changes required to
humanize the prison.

First of all, it should be taken out of the hands
of politicians and placed under the supervision
and direction of a board of the humanest of men
with vision and understanding. This board
should have absolute control, including the power
of pardon, parole and commutation. Such a
board as this would at all times be in immediate
touch with the prisoners and have intimate
knowledge of prison conditions and possibilities
for improvement.

The contract system, wherever it prevails, is
an unmitigated curse and should be summarily
abolished.

Prison inmates should be paid for their labor
at the prevailing rate of wages which should be
placed to their credit in the books of the institu-
tion or shared with their families so that when
the convict is released he will not have to return
to a sundered home and face a hostile world.

STUDIES BEHIND PRISON WALLS 235

Not a gun nor a club should be in evidence in-
side the walls.

The prisoners themselves, at least 75 per cent
of whom are dependable, as every honest warden
will admit, should be organized upon the basis
of self-government and have charge of the prison,
select their own subordinate officers, their own
guards, their shop and other foremen; establish
their own rules and regulate their own conduct
under the supervision of the prison board.

Under such an organization the morale of the
prison would at once improve, the spirit of the
prison would be humanized, there would be bet-
ter discipline, more incentive to work, and better
results in every way, and all at a greatly reduced
expense to the community.

There will be men to challenge these proposals
as visionary, if not vicious, but I would prefer
nothing more than the opportunity to vindicate
my faith in human nature by being permitted,
without any pecuniary compensation, to make
such a demonstration,

CHAPTER XIX.

Wasting Life.

(Reproduced from the World Forum for Au-
gust, 1922, by Courtesy of Its Publishers.)
If there is any surer way, any more effective
method of wrecking manhood and wasting human
life than our present penal system affords, the
Satanic thing has not come to my attention.

Six months have passed since I left that dismal
cemetery of the living dead, the United States
Penitentiary at Atlanta, and yet I see as vividly
and appealingly as they appeared the day of my
departure, the pallid faces of my fellow-prisoners
pressed wistfully against the steel-barred win-
dows of those gloomy catacombs.

The weary tramp of that mournful procession
of convicts marching silently, solemnly, inter-
minably, back and forth, back and forth, still
echoes dolefully in my ears and I shall hear, like
muffled drumbeats, the shuffling footfalls of that
spectral prison host to the last hours of my life.
What deliberate destruction, what senseless
sacrifice, what tragic and appalling waste of hu-
man life!

If life, human life, is the most precious thing
in the world, then the punitive prison pen is the
most wicked thing in the world, for it blasts and

WASTING LIFE 237

ruins, pollutes and destroys the lives that are
committed to its pestilential moral and physical
atmosphere.

I have seen boys in their teens confirmed per-
verts and degenerates after a few weeks in one
of those penal incubators of depravity and crime.

And I have concluded in the light of my per-
sonal observation of what the penitentiary does
to the young that I would rather plead guilty to
murder than to putting a boy in a penitentiary
for some trifling offence and branding him a con-
vict for life.

As a rule only the poor go to prison. The
rich control the courts and the poor populate the
prisons.

Morgan and Rockefeller are strictly law-abid-
ing. The hundreds of millions produced by
others flow into their coffers through legal chan-
nels. They would scorn to steal. They want
only what is coming to them and they and their
retainers and mercenaries see that they get it
and that it keeps coming. As good Christians
these eminent gentlemen believe the jail the
proper place for the wretch who steals rather
than starve at honest work or hunting a job.

The wholesale robber acts safely within the
law of his own making; the legalized looter is
eminently respectable, but the petty larceny thief
is a despised criminal and is properly sent to jail.

During the late war the government of the
United States was robbed openly, brazenly of

238 WALLS AND BARS

billions of dollars by the patriotic profiteers and
contractors who precipitated the war for the loot
it would yield them, but no one in his right mind
expects one of them to be sent to the penitentiary.

The combined stealings and robberies of all
the thieves, burglars, safe-blowers and highway-
men in the penitentiary at Atlanta would be but
a trifle compared to the loot of a single profiteer
and this explains why the former are convicted
felons and the latter eminent patriots and
philanthropists.

There is a strong incentive to steal in a system
in which the great fortunes are uniformly
achieved through monopolized privilege and
legalized spoliation while the hardest kind of use-
ful work yields but a wretched subsistence.

In this system almost anything pays better
than honest work and useful service, and what
more natural than that men should seek the
** easier way'' to get a living? And what more
inevitable than that the deluded victims should
land in a ghastly prison-house, caged like ani-
mals, for the ** protection of society*'?

If there is any one thing settled beyond ques-
tion in criminology it is that the criminal, so-
called, is the product of society, and in caging
him like a beast, society in its blindness and
brutality but bruises the body and scars the soul
of its ill-fated offspring in punishment for its
own sins.

In the nearly four years I spent among them

WASTING LIFE 239

as a fellow-convict I came to know the inmates of
prisons intimately enough to believe in them as
human beings; to be convinced that as a whole
they are far more sinned against than sinning,
and to be willing to cast my lot with them as
against the social cruelty and misunderstanding
of which they are the victims.

The following pregnant paragraph quoted from
Lascussagne denotes keen insight and scientific
understanding, and challenges serious considera-
tion:

^'The social environment is the cultural me-
dium of criminality ; the criminal is the microbe —
an element that becomes important only when it
finds a medium which will cause it to ferment.
EVERY SOCIETY HAS THE CRIMINALS IT
DESERVES''.

This means that society will have its criminals
to deal with, and that the evil will become more
and more costly and menacing, until society
ceases producing criminals.

The staggering cost and the appalling menace
to society from that source were set forth in
startling terms in a treatise on '^Crimes and
Criminals'' published by Dr. Lydston twelve
years ago. The following summary is taken from
a magazine review of that work by Charles Ers-
kine Scott Wood :

'* Probably the most astonishing conclusion
reached in the study of this book is that society
must alter its cold and brutal indifference to

240 WALLS AND BAKS

crime and criminals or it will be devoured by
criminals just as the invisible germ of consump-
tion devours the strong body. It is not so much
a matter of humanity and sentiment as it is one of
self-preservation. Dr. Lydston shows that
though the population of the United States in-
creased only 170 per cent from 1850 to 1890,
crime increased 450 per cent. After making al-
lowance for the tendency of legislatures to de-
clare more and more crimes there still remains a
vast increase of crime out of proportion to in-
creased population. Professor Charles J. Bush-
nell of Washington, D. C, says it is slowly driv-
ing us toward bankruptcy, and calculates that the
United States is spending as a people Six Billions
a Year in its wrestle with crime. Professor
Lydston puts it at only five billions. But ia.ve
billions on the machinery to cope with crime is
enough to make even the thoughtless think. Pro-
fessor Lydston admits, too, that the sum spent
in private detective and other unrecorded chan-
nels probably greatly swells the total. We are
crazy to spend billions on armies and navies — •
to encourage ourselves into war — ^but we give no
heed to the mortal disease in our midst. In war,
not criminals are killed off, but the flower of the
young men, leaving the degenerates in greater
proportion than ever".

This showing from an authoritative source
leaves no room for doubt that our method or lack
of method in dealing with crime and criminals is
not only an unmitigated failure but is itself a
crime that indicts our social system and im-

WASTING LIFE 241

peaches our civilization. And this is especially
true of the penitentiary in which society avenges
itself on its helpless victims by branding them as
convicts, ofttimes for trivial offences, shutting
them out from the world, locking them up in steel
cages at the mercy of brutal keepers with clubs
and guns to insult and intimidate them, to break
their spirit, and destroy their manhood and self-
respect.

At least seventy-five per cent of the inmates
of every prison are not criminals but have sim-
ply been unfortunate, and every decent warden
will admit that they would at once retrieve them-
selves if given their liberty and a fair chance to
make good in the world. But instead they are
held in deadening captivity year after year, cut
off from family and friends, branded and ostra-
cised, compelled to subsist upon wretched if not
rotten food, their natural instincts repressed,
their pride insulted, and outraged until they are
diseased, perverted, crazed, wrecked in body and
mind, and to what purpose that does not mock
and blaspheme the Author of their being?

I have made the statement and I repeat it here
that if every jail, every prison, every penitentiary
in the land had its doors flung wide open and
every inmate were given his liberty the harm that
would result to society would be vastly less than
the harm society now suffers in wasting the lives
of hundreds of thousands of unfortunate souls,
breaking up their homes, wrecking their families,

242 WALLS AND BARS

and launching upon itself the avenging crime
waves which threaten it with destruction.

It is a pity indeed that the judge who puts a
man in the penitentiary does not know what a
penitentiary is. No one knows or can know but
the inmate. See his crushed spirit, look into his
troubled heart, if you can, and you may have some
conception of what a penitentiary is, for there is
where it leaves its deadly and everlasting mark.

Some of the finest men I ever met are behind
the bars of the Moundsville prison and the At-
lanta penitentiary as convicted felons. The story
of each would make a volume of tragedy. The
fates conspired to place them where they are.
They are anything but criminals. I would rather
be in their rough prison shoes than in the polished
foot gear of the judges who sent them there.

In the years I spent in prison I associated
freely with all the inmates without regard to
color or condition. I made it a point to seek out
the ones known as the worst among them, and
never in a single instance in all that time was I
given the least offence or did I hear an unkind
word from their lips. I looked upon them all as
my brothers and fellow men and treated them ac-
cordingly, and they uniformly treated me in the
same way. The poorest among them were happy
to have me share whatever scanty favor was per-
mitted to come to them from the outside. I
never saw men more sympathetic and consid-
erate, and I know that many of them would have

WASTING LIFE 243

had their own sentences extended to see me givea
my liberty. Most of them, poor and hard-work-
ing, had been treated harshly all their days and
were strangers to kindness and to the touch of a
friendly hand. How quickly they responded to
the first word of greeting, how readily they un-
derstood, and how gladly they returned kindness
for kindness!

All these men want on earth, the great ma-
jority of them, is a decent chance to make their
way in the world. And that is precisely what
they are denied under the present savage system,
the punitive spirit of which still lurks in the dark
ages and disgraces our vaunted civilization.

This vast army of our fellow-beings, given
their liberty, a fair opportunity and the right
kind of encouragement, would at once retrieve
their standing, walk the streets good citizens, do
their share of useful work, support their families
and educate their children, but this will never be
until the people are awakened to the economic
cause of the prison problem and to the stupendous
waste of human life inherent in their blind and
stupid attempt at reformation.

The entire prison regime is rank with its own
innate putrescence. Graft permeates every pore
of the system and the greasy palm of ** political
pull" is everywhere in evidence.

The average jail is a filthy, unsanitary den,
in charge of a low grade politician, that would
hardly make a decent pigsty.

244 WALLS AND BAKS

The average prison is an unfit place for the
detention of any human being. The rules are
cruel and despotic, the food anything but
nourishing, and the general conditions inhuman
and demoralizing.

This does not appear in the report of the
prison inspection, of course, and I know nothing
in the way of farce that lays it over an average
prison inspection.

Society with its usual consistency puts a man
in prison for stealing and then proceeds promptly
to rob him in the most shameless manner of the
fruit of his labor for the benefit of some grafting
contractor, while allowing his family to face
starvation.

^Vhat right has the state to appropriate a
man's daily earnings? To compel him to work
without pay while his children are suffering for
bread?

The man in prison, however, is better off, after
all, than his dependent mother, wife and children.
It is the family the judge sentences when he sends
the man to prison.

Yes, it is the family that is penalized, punished
without mercy though innocent of offence, and
families without number all over this land are
thus broken up and their members torn asunder,
many of them to recruit the ranks of crime and
the houses of shame.

All of which attests in overwhelming terms the
frightful waste, the appalling destruction of

WASTING LIFE 245

human life in the present system of administer-
ing justice and dealing with offenders against the
social code.

As these lines are written the report comes of
a sensational scandal at my penal alma mater,
the United States Penitentiary at Atlanta. A
^'dope ring'' has been uncovered and a prison
physician and a number of guards are implicated.
Every effort is being made to suppress the
scandal. According to the reports the ''ring"
furnishing the inmates with "dope" at ex-
tortionate rates, pocketing thousands of dollars
for making "dope fiends" of young inmates who
had not before used the drug. Let it be under
stood that drug addicts in large numbers are
sentenced to the Atlanta penitentiary where they
are supposed to be reformed of the pernicious
habit. I am not surprised at the report. To make
drug addicts while professing to reform them
would be quite consistent with the whole abomni-
able prison scheme which makes criminals instead
of reforming them.

If I were inclined to lock a human being in a
steel cage under any circumstances I think I
should make it a penitentiary offence to send a
human being to a penitentiary. The man who
sends another there should know in justice to
both what it is himself.

In recalling some of my fellow-prisoners and
contemplating their excellent character and
human qualities I am reminded of a prison in-

246 WALLS AND BARS

cident that occurred eight years ago in which I
had an humble part. The noble character of a
convict revealed in this incident must be my
apology for placing it upon record here. There
are men without number in prison, to my per-
sonal knowledge, of the same lofty character and
tender sensibilities as this particular convict.

It was near the Christmas season, 1914. There
was an organization know as the ^'Good Fellow
Club" which provided toys and gifts to homeless
and friendless children. A convict in a state pris-
on at Jackson, Michigan, read of it and wrote the
Club as follows:

**I don't know whether I would be considered a
good fellow or not. Society has decreed that I
was a bad fellow and has segregated me for a
period. In spite of the fact that I transgressed
the law I am being clothed and fed and taken
care of while hundreds of people, especially chil-
dren whose only crime is poverty, are actually
suffering for bare necessities of life and through
no fault of theirs are facing the Christmas season
with scant hope of happiness. I am sendiag $2.00
which I hope you will be able to use to bring in
some small measure gladness to some little one.
You need have no fear of this money being
tainted, for it was honestly earned at 15 cents a
day. I have two little girls of my own and while
I am sending them their Christmas money, I am
sure they will be glad that I shared with some
others less fortunate.

Yours in Christmas spirit,

INMATE 9756''.

WASTING LIFE 247

The foregoing letter came Tinder my eye in the
press dispatches of a local paper whereupon I
wrote 9756 (a few years later I came near having
that very number myself) as follows:

Terre Haute, Ind., December 16th, 1914.
Inmate No. 9756, Jackson, Mich.

My dear Brother:

**I do not know who you are but I have read
your Christmas letter and I send you my greet-
ing with my heart in it. You may be a convict
but you are my brother and when your message
came to me I was touched to tears.

There is more of the real religion of Jesusi
Christ in the spirit you breathe out to the world
from behind your cruel prison bars than in all
the orthodox sermons ever preached. You love
the little children even as He loved them, and you
are in prison while He was crucified. It is well
that you are patient and forgiving. The world
moves slowly. It may still be said: ^They know
not what they do \

You had the misfortune to be bom in a world
not yet civilized. Jesus loved the erring into
righteousness. His professed followers shut
them out from God's sunlight and torture them
into degeneracy and crime. The erring did not
make themselves. God made them. Let Him
judge them.

The society that sent you to prison devours its
own offspring. Thousands of little children are
starved, stunted and ground into dividends in the
mills of mammon. It is the Christian society's

248 WALLS AND BARS

homeless, neglected babes to whom yon, one of its
condemned convicts, feel moved to send the pen-
nies coined in your own blood and agony.

What a sermon and what a rebuke!

If you ought to be in the penitentiary I know not
one who ought to be out.

Believe me with heart and hand your brother
and fellow-man,

EUGENE V. DEBS''.

I did not know at the time this letter was writ-
ten that I should soon be a convicted and num-
bered felon myself. But I must have anticipated
my fate for I instinctively realized my kinship
with the men behind the bars.

In going to prison myself I came to know them
well and why they are there, and I came also to
realize the moral obligation resting upon me to
espouse their cause and to wage the war in their
behalf against the vicious system that robbed
them of their birthright, blasted their hopes and
utterly wasted their lives.