Alexander Berkman

“ I feel, I am convinced, that the future belongs to us—to us who strive to regenerate society, to abolish poverty, misery, war and 14crime, by doing away with the causes of these evils. And even in prison, where we cannot fight for liberty, we can always struggle for principle.
It is this attitude of the political prisoners in all prisons that makes their lot even harder than that of the average prisoner. It is time the United States Government should take its head out of the bushes and recognize the existence of political prisoners in this country. ”

“ Prison cannot crush their spirit, nor iron bars and brutality change their conscience. Their love of humanity transcends the fear of punishment or death. There are times when the scaffold is the most elevated position for an honest man. Ideals cannot be imprisoned, nor can the eternal spirit of liberty be exterminated by shutting up its champions in dungeons or deporting men and women out of the United States. ”

“ The steelworkers’ strike is merely one of the symptoms of the social evolutionary process that may in the near future culminate in revolution. The sources of labor discontent in this country are identical with those in every other land of our so-called civilization. The working masses are not satisfied any more with empty political democracy; they demand a share in the products of their industry, and the opportunity to live, to enjoy life. Industrial slavery, perhaps more acute in the United States than anywhere else, is on its death-bed. ”

“ The American junkers and plutocrats are swamping the country with propaganda for a strong militarism. Our industrial autocrats see the handwriting on the wall and hope to crush the gathering forces of labor by the bayonet and the machine gun. The voice of liberty is being stifled in the prisons. Our jails and penitentiaries are full of political and industrial prisoners who have dared to hold an opinion of their own and to express it. Men like Debs and others are immured behind iron bars because they love liberty more than they do patrioteering. ”

“ When will people realize that the criminal is a man more sinned against than sinning, a victim of our unjust social and economic arrangements? But after all, prisons and their methods are a reflex of the conditions in the world outside. With so much injustice, strife and brutality in the world at large, it is no wonder that prison life mirrors the same spirit. When we become civilized enough to abolish human slaughter in the larger prison called society, when we reorganize life on the basis of human brotherhood and co-operation, we will have no use for prisons.
Atlanta, Ga. ”

“ Deprived of his liberty, his rights, and the enjoyment of life; all his natural impulses, good and bad alike, suppressed; subjected to indignities and disciplined by harsh and often most inhumane methods, generally maltreated and abused by official brutes whom he despises and hates, the prisoner comes to curse the fact of his birth, the woman that bore him, and all those responsible, in his eyes, for his misery. He is brutalized by the treatment he receives, and by the revolting sights he is forced to witness in prison. What manhood he may have possessed is soon eradicated by the “discipline.” ”

“ A prison is the last place in the world, even at its best, to improve a man. But the Atlanta Prison tends chiefly to dehumanize the prisoners and to crush the last vestige of their manhood and self-respect. It is the Deputy Warden who is mainly responsible for the inhumanities and outrages practiced in the Federal Prison. He encourages the most brutal tendencies of the guards, and even frequently protests and nullifies the Warden’s more humane attitude. The Deputy Warden is the most hated man in the prison. The inmates regard him as a religious hypocrite, insincere and mean-spirited. ”

“ I deny the right of any one—individually or collectively—to set up an inquisition of thought. Thought is, or should be, free. My social views and political opinions are my personal concern. I owe no one responsibility for them. ”

“ Yet common sense and all human experience prove that the criminal is no more responsible for crime than the crazy man for his insanity. The pseudo-scientific theories of the Lombrosos in regard to crime and criminals have been thoroughly exploded and proven utterly fallacious. Even if the Lombroso myth that the criminal is born were true, what good would it do to punish him? There might be some social justification for his isolation, but how could the criminal, if born such, be held accountable for his criminality? ”

“ As a matter of fact, I came to this country about 32 years ago, a mere boy of 17, at which time I had never heard the word Anarchist, nor knew its meaning. I became an Anarchist in this country, and it was just such methods as used by Deputy Warden Girardeau—the methods of tyranny, oppression and persecution, practiced not only in penitentiaries, but also in the larger prison called the world—that made me an Anarchist who seeks more humane forms of social life. ”

“ But as a matter of fact—as modern criminology has proven beyond all dispute—the criminal is made, not born. He is the product of his environment, a child of poverty and desperation, of misery, greed, and ambition. He is at the same time the symbol and the proof of a diseased social condition, the miscarriage of perverted economic arrangements. Fully 97 per cent. of all crime is due directly to our economic institutions. ”

“ They are sick of the high-sounding phrases about political democracy and self-determination that are in practice like so many scraps of paper. It is industrial autocracy that the workers of the world seek to destroy. This country, the alleged champion of democracy, is being daily changed more and more into the régime of Prussian militarism. The Government of the United States has taken advantage of the alleged necessities of the war to crush the spirit of liberty and to deprive the people of the last vestige of freedom. ”

“ In a forthcoming book I shall analyze more thoroughly the sources and the psychology of crime, and write of the unique and interesting prison types and characters I have met.
For the present it is sufficient to emphasize that our whole social attitude toward the criminal is fundamentally wrong. It is the attitude of barbaric stupidity that seeks to hide its own shame and its mistakes behind prison bars. It has neither understanding of human motives nor sympathy with human weaknesses. ”

“ Why try to mislead the public? Most intelligent men know that there are terrible abuses practiced in penal institutions. There are several investigations of penitentiaries and insane asylums going on at this very moment. The Federal Prison at Atlanta is no exception, and my attack is not directed against any particular individual, but against the system of tyranny, injustice and brutality inside our prisons, as well as outside. ”

“ No visitors, except government officials, or personal friends of the prison authorities, are ever permitted even a glance into this dark dungeon.
Can Warden Zerbst successfully deny the above facts? Even a most superficial investigation would bear me out. Can the Warden contradict my charges that prisoners are strung up by the wrists for 8 to 12 hours at a stretch, for 5 to 10 consecutive days? In his statement in the “Constitution” the Warden fails to deny that men are frequently clubbed, nor does he even refer to the unprovoked murder of “Kid” Smith by Officer Dean on February 21, 1919. ”

“ They have learned the most important lesson of all, and that is that labor has an invincible weapon in solidarity. That is also the lesson that is being impressed on American labor today by the workers of England. Soon the American Federation of Labor will realize that it is folly to call a strike of steel workers, without at the same time securing the solidaric support of all the other key industries—the railway men and the miners, for instance. As long as the workers in those industries strike separately, at different times, they run the risk of defeat. ”

“ His hate toward the persons directly responsible, in his estimation, for his misfortune—the arresting officer, the jailer, the prosecuting attorney, judge and jury—gradually widens in scope, and the poor unfortunate becomes an enemy of society as a whole. Thus, while our penal institutions are supposed to protect society from the prisoner so long as he remains one, they cultivate in him the germs of social hatred and enmity. ”

“ Under the mask of the same Anti-Anarchist law every criticism of a corrupt administration, every attack on Governmental abuse, every manifestation of sympathy with the struggling of another country in the pangs of a new birth—in short, every free expression of untrammeled thought may be suppressed utterly, without even the semblance of an unprejudiced hearing or a fair trial. ”

“ Even in Czarist Russia the political prisoner was recognized as a man suffering for his ideals. Benighted America still considers the political just the same as the so-called common criminal. In the Atlanta Federal Prison the politicals fare even worse than the average prisoner. A banker who got away with the savings of poor widows and orphans receives the highest consideration, while the man who loves humanity more than his own safety is subjected to special persecution and discrimination. ”

“ The Missouri State Penitentiary has the merit system, which is only another method of pressing out more labor from its victims. Those who can stand the nerve-tearing speed and get into Class A, the highest class, have their time reduced almost in half. Therefore many of the women work beyond their limit of physical capacity to get out of the hell hole, even at the expense of their health. However, only State prisoners benefit by this merit system. Not so the Federal prisoners. They are forced to make the task every day, though their time is in no way affected. ”

“ Civilization claims to have advanced, and in no country do we hear so much about prison reform as in our own. Yet what can we say for the State of Missouri, when at the head of their female department is a woman in charge of ninety women prisoners who has control over their life and death?
8 9This woman, Lilah Smith, has been employed in penal institutions since her fifteenth year, and has, therefore, little education or training. She is a believer in rigid discipline and punishment. She is really a neurotic, who has no control over her temper. ”

“ There exists no other institution among the diversified “achievements” of modern society which, while assuming a most important role in the destinies of mankind, has proven a more reprehensible failure. ”

“ He does not exist. Crime is simply misdirected energy, effort applied wrongly. The average criminal is just the average man, generally speaking. If in any sense he may be considered a “variation,” it is only because of his frequently superior initiative, daring and intelligence. His often anti-social activity is conditioned by his unconventional vocation, not by any inherent criminal or anti-social tendencies. I am not speaking of congenital criminal degenerates whose number is infinitesimal, and who belong in the care of the alienist. ”

“ No understanding for human variations, no consideration for mental or physical limitations, except for a few favorites of the prison officials, those who are usually the most worthless. The shop foreman in charge is a boy of twenty-one, who took up the art of slave-driving at the age of sixteen. He bullies and terrorizes the women, holding the threat of the blind cell and the bread-and-water diet over them. ”

“ In other words, the guards are paid $76.00 per month, and I leave it to the readers to judge what “high degree of qualification” $76.00-dollar-a-month men possess, in these days of high cost of living.
I emphatically challenge the Warden’s statement that visitors are admitted to the punishment cells I described as filthy. There are in the Atlanta Federal Prison two kinds of punishment cells, known respectively as the “dark hole” and the “light hole.” The difference between the two is extreme. The “light hole” is a comparatively large cell with a window admitting some light and air. ”

“ His impotent rage and bitterness are turned into hatred toward everything and everybody, the feeling growing in intensity as the years of misery come and go. He broods over his troubles, and the desire to revenge himself grows on him. ”

“ Libraries are filled with works on the origin and causes of crime, on the futility of punishment as a corrective of crime. More and more frequently modern writers have pointed out that crimes are related to social conditions, and that brutal treatment of prisoners makes them become more hardened and anti-social. ”

“ The next step in the social life of the world is the taking over of all industry by the workers, both manual and mental, to be managed and operated by themselves, for the benefit of the producers instead of for the profit of our industrial and financial Kaisers. ”

“ Unlike most similar institutions our isolation building, in which are confined men who can not be brought in any other way to respect the rights of others and the rules of the institution, is open to the public. ”

“ The vast majority of the so-called criminal class are thoroughly normal human beings, if the term may be applied to the type of man produced by modern civilization. I have had scores and hundreds of professional criminals, young and old, tell me again and again, “The only hope and ambition of my life is just to get a little pile, so that I can feel secure from want. ”