The Man Behind the Bars. Winifred Louise Taylor
words.
"Don't let that boy go to the reform school," he began earnestly. "The reform school is the very hotbed of crime for a boy like that. Save him if you can. Save him from a life like mine. Put him on a farm. Get him into the country, away from temptation."
"But the sheriff tells me he is such a liar and swears so that no decent people would keep him," I replied.
"I'll break him of swearing," said the man impetuously, "and I'll try to break him of lying. Can't he see what I am? Can't he see what he'll come to if he doesn't brace up? I'm a living argument—a living example of the folly and degradation of stealing and lying. I can't ever be anything but what I am now, but there's hope for that boy if some one will only give him a chance, and I want you to help him."
The force of his appeal was not to be resisted, and I agreed to follow his lead in an effort to save his fellow prisoner from destruction. As I stood there in the twilight beside this man reaching out from the wreck and ruin of his own life to lend a hand in the rescue of this boy, if only the "good people" would do their part, I hoped that Saint Peter and the Recording Angel were looking down. And as I said good night—with a hand-clasp—I felt that I had touched a human soul.
The man kept his word, the boy gave up swearing and braced up generally, and I kept my part of the agreement; but I do not know if our combined efforts had a lasting effect on the young culprit.
As time passed many of these men were sent from the jail to the State penitentiary, and often a wife or family was left in destitution; and the destitution of a prisoner's wife means not only poverty but heart-break, disgrace, and despair. Never shall I forget the first time I saw the parting of a wife from her husband the morning he was taken to prison. A sensitive, high-strung, fragile creature she was; and going out in the bitter cold of December, carrying a heavy boy of eighteen months and followed by an older girl, she seemed the very embodiment of desolation. I have been told by those who do not know the poor that they do not feel as we do, that their sensibilities are blunted, their imagination torpid. Could we but know! Could we but know, we should not be so insensate to their sufferings. It is we who are dull. To that prisoner's wife that morning life was one quivering torture, with absolutely no escape from agonizing thoughts. Her "home" to which I went that afternoon was a cabin in which there was one fire, but scant food, and no stock of clothing; the woman was ignorant of charitable societies and shrinking from the shame of exposing her needs as a convict's wife.
It is not difficult to make things happen in small towns when people know each other and live within easy distances. In less time, really less actual time than it would have taken to write a paper for the Woman's Club on "The Problems of Poverty," this prisoner's wife was relieved from immediate want. To tell her story to half a dozen acquaintances who had children and superfluous clothing, to secure a certain monthly help from the city, was a simple matter; and in a few months the woman was taking in sewing—and doing good work—for a reliable class of patrons.
I have not found the poor ungrateful; twenty years afterward this woman came to me in prosperity from another town, where she had been a successful dressmaker, to express once more her gratitude for the friendship given in her time of need. Almost without exception with my prisoners and with their families I have found gratitude and loyalty unbounded.
When the men sent from the jail to the penitentiary had no family they naturally wrote to me. Sometimes they learned to write while in jail or after they reached the prison just for the pleasure of interchanging letters with some one. All prison correspondence is censored by some official; and as my letters soon revealed my disinterested relation to the prisoners, the warden, R. W. McClaughrey, now of national fame, sent me an invitation to spend several days as his guest, and thus to become acquainted with the institution.
It was a great experience, an overwhelming experience when first I realized the meaning of prison life. I seemed to be taken right into the heart of it at once. The monstrous unnaturalness of it all appalled me. The great gangs of creatures in stripes moving in the lock-step like huge serpents were all so unhuman. Their dumb silence—for even the eyes of a prisoner must be dumb—was oppressive as a nightmare. The hopeless misery of the men there for life; already entombed, however long the years might stretch out before them, and the wild entreaty in the eyes of those dying in the hospital—for the eyes of the dying break all bonds—these things haunted my dreams long afterward. Later I learned that even in prison there are lights among the shadows, and that sunny hearts may still have their gleams of sunshine breaking through the darkness of their fate; but my first impression was one of unmitigated gloom. When I expressed something of this to the warden his response was: "Yes, every life here represents a tragedy—a tragedy if the man is guilty, and scarcely less a tragedy if he is innocent."
As the guest of the warden I remained at the penitentiary for several days and received a most cordial standing invitation to the institution, with the privilege of talking with any prisoner without the presence of an officer. The unspeakable luxury to those men of a visit without the presence of a guard! Some of the men with whom I talked had been in prison for ten years or more with never a visitor from the living world and only an occasional letter.
My visits to the penitentiary were never oftener than twice a year, and I usually limited the list of my interviews to twenty-five. With whatever store of cheerfulness and vitality I began these interviews, by the time I had entered into the lives of that number of convicts I was so submerged in the prison atmosphere, and the demand upon my sympathy had been so exhausting, that I could give no more for the time. I found that the shortest and the surest way for me to release myself from the prison influence was to hear fine stirring music after a visit to the penitentiary. But for years I kept my list up to twenty-five, making new acquaintances as the men whom I knew were released. Prisoners whom I did not know would write me requesting interviews, and the men whom I knew often asked me to see their cell-mates, and I had a touch-and-go acquaintance with a number of prisoners not on my lists.
Thus my circle gradually widened to include hundreds of convicts and ex-convicts of all grades, from university men to men who could not read; however, it was the men who had no friends who always held the first claim on my sympathy; and as the years went on I came more and more in contact with the "habitual criminals," the hopeless cases, the left-over and forgotten men; some of them beyond the pale of interest even of the ordinary chaplain—for there are chaplains and chaplains, as well as convicts and convicts.
I suppose it was the very desolation of these men that caused their quick response to any evidence of human interest. In their eagerness to grasp the friendship of any one who remembered that they were still men—not convicts only—these prisoners would often frankly tell the stories of their lives; admitting guilt without attempt at extenuation. No doubt it was an immense relief to them to make a clean breast of their past to one who could understand and make allowance.
This was not always so; some men lied to me and simply passed out of my remembrance; but I early learned to suspend judgment, and when I saw that a man was lying through the instinct of self-defence, because he did not trust me, I gave him a chance to "size me up," and reassure himself as to my trustworthiness. "Why, I just couldn't go on lying to you after I saw that you were ready to believe in me," was the candid admission of one who never lied to me again.
Among these convicts I encountered some unmistakable degenerates. The most optimistic humanitarian cannot deny that in all classes of life we find instances of moral degeneracy. This fact has been clearly demonstrated by sons of some of our multimillionaires. And human nature does not seem to be able to stand the strain of extreme poverty any better than it stands the plethora caused by excessive riches. The true degenerate, however, is usually the result of causes too complicated or remote to be clearly traced. But throughout my long experience with convicts I have known not more than a dozen who seemed to me black-hearted, deliberate criminals; and among these, as it happened, but one was of criminal parentage. Crime is not a disease; but there's no doubt that disease often leads to crime. Of the defective, the feeble-minded, the half-insane, and the epileptic there are too many in every prison; one is too many; but they can be counted by the hundreds in our aggregate of prisons. Often warm-hearted, often with strong religious tendencies, they are deficient in judgment or in moral backbone.