Julian Hawthorne

“ In attempting thus selfishly to extirpate crime, we commit the crime least of all forgivable—the denial of human brotherhood and responsibility. For that crime, no law sends us to prison; yet it is no sentimental notion, but the truth, that it is a crime worse than those for which we imprison men. Prisons are brimful of men less guilty before God than is the society that condemned them. You and I are not excused because we are not society—we are society. Society is not numbers but an idea—a mutual relation; we cannot shift our blame to people in the next street. ”

“ You have not been convicted by a court, but your own secret self-knowledge convicts you. When the prison doors close upon you, you will discover that you have suffered an injustice—that you are the victim of a blind stupidity. Not in this way can you be reformed. All genuine reformation must proceed from within you—it cannot be compelled by locks and bars; freedom is essential to it. Locks and bars arouse only the impulse to break through them, and this primal and righteous impulse leaves you no leisure to think of relieving your soul from stains of guilt. ”

“ Prisons are hell because convicts are punished for trivial and whimsical reasons as much as for serious ones; and whether or not the punishment involve actual physical torture, the insolence, disgrace and injustice of it remain. Prisons are hell intrinsically, and always will be; and whoever doubts it has only to commit a crime and be sent to prison; that is the end of doubts.
Let every judge, attorney general, district attorney, and juryman at a trial spend a bona fide term in jail, and there would be no more convictions—prisons would end. ”

“ These things which I now say to you, I said first to myself, sitting in my cell, or watching the endless gray-blue files shuffle past me on their way to and from meals. It was of small help or significance that I claimed innocence of the particular offense that happened to be charged against me; I was as indistinguishable from these men in heart as I was in outward garb and rating. And I had manhood enough to feel glad that, since they had to be here, I was here with them. The burden of the scapegoat has its compensations. ”

“ Unpaid convict labor for the state, as on roads and so forth, is better than private contract labor, but is also a disgrace to the employer—a contemptible saving of pennies at the cost of human souls. Honest work is a manly thing, and those who do it should be treated like men, and as laborers worthy of their hire. Because we have rendered them helpless to demand their rights is no excuse for denying them. It is cheap, but shameful, and can only teach them that the community can be as dishonest as the veriest thief of them all. ”

“ Can it be credited that a convict in his cell, with perhaps years of living death before him,—you do not yet know what that means, but if I live to tell this story, you will be able to guess at its significance before we part—will refuse the opportunity offered to end it at once in return for merely speaking one or two names?—a convict—a creature outlawed, crushed, damned, dehumanized, despised,—can we look from him for a heroism, a martyrdom, which might shed fresh honor on the highest name in the community? ”

“ Accompanied by three deputies, but free of the Henkel handcuffs, we passed the gates and trod the sunny pavements. Not a cloud in the blue sky, nor a taint upon the pure wings of the free air. None that saw us pass suspected our invisible fetters. Yet to me at least the thought that had ministered to me in the actual courtroom and prison, that the fetters were a dream and freedom the reality, was not accessible then. The absence of physical bonds seemed to render the imprisonment more, not less undeniable. ”

“ We have succumbed to the disease which has been called legalism—the persuasion that the craving for individual initiative born of the unsettling of old faiths and the opening of new horizons, as well as the consequences of poverty, misery, ignorance, and hereditary incompetence—that this vast turning of the human tide, manifesting itself in many forms, some benign, many evil—that this broad and profound phenomenon can be met and controlled only by force, suppression, punishment, the infliction of physical pain and moral humiliation. ”

“ Or would you stare out upon the world into which you were contemptuously tossed with dull, hating, revengeful eyes, suspicious of all men, hopeless of good, but resolved to get even, so far as you might, by plying the evil trades which your life of slavery had taught you? Would you behave like Christ upon the Cross, or like an ordinary man? Convicts are ordinary men, except that they are often, to begin with, diseased men, or hemmed in by conditions so untoward as to make an honest life ten or a hundred times harder than it ever was for you. ”

“ All crime is hateful; but I came to the conclusion that there is only one crime which prompts us to hate the criminal as well as his crime itself. For this crime is one which originates in our heart; it is not forced upon us by need or passion or heredity. Therefore, it permeates every fiber of our being, every thought of our mind, every impulse of our soul; and we cannot say of it, this is one thing and we are another. It is an unhuman crime; and yet there is no punishment for it among human laws ”

“ With a guard acting as cowboy, shepherd dog, or convict compeller, we shuffled in a continuous line down the iron stairways and across the hall into the dining room, a cement-floored barred-window desert sown with tables in rows, seating eight men each; guards with clubs standing at coigns of vantage or pacing up and down the aisles, and in one window, commanding the whole room, a guard with a loaded rifle, licensed to shoot down any misbehaver. At no time and in no part of this model jail are you out of range of a loaded rifle, in the hands of men quick and skilful in their use. ”

“ It is surely not life: nor is it death—Oh, death would be welcome! For death means either (as you may imagine you believe) total extinction, or it means increased life, free from material trammels. But death in life is a monstrous thing; life, for example, spent in a chair in a squalid tailor's shop, doing over and over again the same piece of squalid, meaningless work, with ever another squalid year stretching out its length before you when the last one has been completed. Is life so endured life—the sacred Creative gift, imparted to all things, conscious or unconscious, without restriction? ”

“ We must always bear in mind the abnormal conditions in a prison—the misery of it, the dearth of variety and relaxation, the terrible yearning for some form, any form, of distraction and amusement. The male is parted from the female, and from the resource of children; his nerves are on edge, his natural propensities starved, his thoughts wandering and embittered; he finds no good anywhere, nor any hope of it. He will seize upon any means of abating or dulling his cravings. The negro is pliant, unmoral, free from the restraints of white civilization. ”

“ There is a sense of brotherhood, long since unfamiliar to human intercourse under usual conditions, but welcome even at the cost of conditions such as these. The truth gradually emerges to our consciousness—it is not the evil in us that kills brotherhood, but the vain, unending effort to make the evil seem good. Now our eyes meet one another's frankly; the skilfullest counterfeit was worse than the worst reality. There is nothing in us to be proud of, but something to be thankful for. Society has done its worst to us ”

“ The foremost citizens of the nation would not be too good for the job, and we content ourselves with ward heelers and rough-necks, who undertake it not for the salary, but for the graft that goes with it and exceeds it. Politics and graft sit in the warden's office, and walk the ranges in guards' uniform, and crush the manhood out of our brothers for money, and out of sheer wanton inhumanity. ”

“ Life, the mystery, which we are impotent to bestow, and which even death, self-inflicted or inflicted by others, cannot take away; which one thing only can take away—the death-in-life of penal imprisonment; is it not a formidable thought that we have incurred the burden of this crime, which does not transfer life from one phase to another, but seeks to annihilate it absolutely? ”

“ You cannot quite bring yourself to believe that your entire earthly future is to be passed in a prison cell. Some event will occur, some beneficent freak of destiny, some earthquake or lightning bolt, some national revolution or catastrophe, some belated sense of humanity in your brother man, some new law repealing the impious cruelty of the old law, that will break your bars before the end can come. You cannot believe that you will actually live and die in jail. ”

“ Yet, knowing as we do that it is perpetrated upon the human beings in our prisons, we sit supine and acquiescent, and thereby make the crime our own.
Have you not imagination enough to put yourself for a moment in the predicament of the prisoner? There you sit in the narrow gloom of your cell, or you toil in the stifling confinement of your work room, and such is not only your state to-day, but for years to come it will be unchanged. You are isolated from sight of and association with every man and woman in the world who cares for you or thinks kindly of you ”

“ Until about eighteen months ago, however, severe restrictions were in vogue, and the warden declared that it was his belief and policy that men in prison should be taught by precept and illustration to regard themselves as dead to the world; that they should be held practically incommunicado, no visitors, letters at most but once a month, no conversation between prisoners—silence, solitude, suffocation in this terrible quicksand of jail for months, years, or a lifetime, at the mercy of men to whom mercy is a jest. ”

“ The boy, in more than fifteen years, had never done anything in prison that called for discipline; but because some self-constituted and arbitrary psychologist chose to believe, or to say, that his temper was not under full control, he was doomed to spend the rest of his life in a cell. This prisoner knows, of course, that he has been wronged, but he does not know how much; he does not know what life in a world of free men is. But he, after being kept for half of his lifetime under duress, must submit to the caprice of a man to whom the country has entrusted absolute power. ”

“ When our neighbor steals or murders, we give him the jail or the chair; but when you and I are charged with such deeds and see the prison or the chair in our near foreground, we discover ourselves to be less convinced than we had imagined of the rectitude of our penal system. Of course, then, the faster we make laws to punish crime, and the more we punish criminals, the more criminals are there to punish. Our hypocrisy gradually is revenged upon us, one after another; one by one we fall into the pit so virtuously digged for others. ”

“ He was dressed in a neat business suit of his own—not a prison-made monstrosity. He was clean and smooth and bright, and tremulous with excitement. He signed his papers with a shaking hand, he took up and put down again his well packed gripsack, he shook hands with a sort of clinging, appealing grasp, as if he were afraid of being left alone, he giggled and looked profoundly solemn by turns. The officials stood about, indifferent and contemptuous, the men who had been hard and cruel to him, and those who had not been so hard. ”

“ Not ten percent of men in jail would regard such a killing as unjustifiable. We were taught in school that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God, and many who had disobeyed God in other ways would gladly obey Him in this. I speak not merely of "ignorant and brutal" convicts, but of educated and intelligent men like you and me. Even a sensitive conscience may condone the killing of a tyrant who is slowly and surely destroying you, body and soul, under sanction of law. But we punish convicts who fight for revenge or liberty, and protect the officials who taunt and torture them into doing it. ”

“ You have no friends; on the contrary, every eye you meet is hostile. You have no money to hire a lawyer, for that five dollars had gone before you had mustered courage to ask for the job that got you into this trouble. And above all, your spirit is cowed and prostrate from years in prison; you have known the long, sterile bitterness of penal servitude, and you have no stomach for a fight. No, you will not fight—you cannot. ”