Prison Facts
NOVEMBER, 1921
BY FRANK TANNENBAUM
I
‘THIS is a very nice view, is n’t it?' The warden was speaking — a tall broad-shouldered man in the early forties, with a rugged complexion, powerfully thick hands, and an open face with twinkling eyes. A self-made man, who had risen from the rank of a guard to his present position of responsibility in one of the largest prisons in the country. He had taken me to the old prison, and pointed to the place on the wall where, twenty years before, he had started his career, pacing the wall with a rifle on his shoulder. He was proud of his newly won responsibility and conscious of it — it was a new thing.
We sat on the porch facing the prison. A broad, quiet river flowed by the house, with a distant range of low hills, green and bright. It was a wonderful summer morning! The sun barely rising above the tree-tops, the dew still glistening in the shade, the birds singing in their varied, joyful, and madly hilarious moods, all gave the setting a cheerful atmosphere that filled every fibre with the love of life. In front of us was the prison — long gray walls partly covered with ivy, the ground round about planted with flowers, and the green grass neatly kept. The sun, driving the shadowed curtain of early dawn from the upper turrets of the inside building, made everything vibrant and happy.
We were sitting in soft chairs, smoking our pipes, looking at the prison, and talking about its manifold problems. The warden was a very good fellow, kind-hearted and well-intentioned. He was, however, a man of no learning, almost illiterate. His whole training was the training he had received in the prison; his equipment was that which the prison environment provided. A varied contact with many men who had come under his observation, combined with a natural exuberance and intelligence, with a background of good-will that had remarkably well escaped the corroding influence of the prison atmosphere, had given him a really unusual personal equipment and power. He was telling me that he had been trained under the greatest of prison men, and considered himself a good disciple. ‘These men can only be treated in one way — that is, strict and steady discipline. Always be just to the men, but punish them quick and sharp when they break the rules.’ This completed his philosophy of life—strictness, justness, treat all men alike, and let punishment follow the breaking of a rule as the night follows the day — without exception, without fuss, constant and inevitable. He liked to talk about himself, his experiences, t he men he had met, the characters he had handled, and was proud beyond words that the men considered him ‘square.’
We sped the rising sun into the upper sky by exchanging stories and adventures. Once, years ago, he had visited New York City, and the marvel of it still dwelt with him. He told me how he had been taken down the subway, had watched the crowds on Broadway, and stood bewildered before the ‘crazy, shrieking, hair-tearing lunatics’ in front of the Stock Exchange. The tall buildings impressed him, and the rumbling Elevated; but, most of all, the crowded East Side. ‘ I did n’t tell my wife and children half that I saw, because they would n’t have believed me anyway; and would you think that people would live like a lot of pigs, when they could come out here in the open and free West? But man is a funny creature, ain’t he? and there is no explaining him.’
It was Sunday, and chapel-time came. He turned us — my wife and me — over to the assistant warden, with instructions to take us to chapel.
The assistant warden was a smaller man, stocky, a little gray, quiet, answering questions in monosyllables, and watchful. As the gates swung open, we followed him into the prison. This is one of the new structures, a model of the Auburn type—probably the best of its kind in the world. Everything was spick and span: the yard, the buildings, the halls, the brass, the marble floor — all looked shiny. It would have been difficult to find a speck of dust. In answer to a question, the assistant warden said, ‘We make ’em spruce ’er up.’ The halls were strangely silent. We could hear the echo of our steps go rumbling down the line. Nothing was visible but an occasional guard in his blue uniform and yellow buttons, standing in a corner, and saluting with his club as we went by.
The chapel, a half-circular room with something like fifteen hundred seats, was empty when we walked in and seated ourselves in the last row, the assistant warden standing at our back. The stained windows with their steel bars, the gray walls, heavy and barren, gave the whole chapel a sombre and dull setting. After a few silent and restless moments, a door opened. The assistant warden nodded his head, and a second later a brazen gong struck upon the air. Suddenly, we heard the shuffling tramp, tramp, tramp of a thousand prison feet, marching on us from all sides. They came down four aisles — in single file, dressed in gray suits, their heads bare, their arms folded, shoulders stooping, bodies bent a little forward as if they were falling into the chapel rather than walking, eyes to the ground and faces turning neither to the right nor to the left. There was a listless weariness about these spiritless men, a kind of hopeless resignation, an acceptance of an unrelenting fate and a broken submission, that made the metaphor of ‘ being broken on the wheel ’ seem a real, stalking, ghost-like apparition. About every twenty feet a guard in blue uniform and Sunday suit, with shoes nice and shiny, and armed with a heavy loaded cane, kept company.
As they reached the end of the aisle, the guard struck the marble floor with his loaded ‘butt,’ and the men turned half around, and filed in front of their seats. He struck the ground again, and they faced the platform. .Another rap from the stick, and this sound seated the men. This continued row after row, until all the men were in their seats. When the doors were closed, the guards placed at their proper distances, facing the men, with their sticks in front of them, another rap on the ground and the hands of the men dropped to their sides. In ali this time not a head had been turned, not a sound, not a whisper, not a word, nothing — not even a verbal command — had escaped the thousand men in the room. Nothing but the tramping, shuffling feet, the iron clang against the marble floor—and the stooping forms dressed in gray.
A few minutes later, a signal from the watchful master of ceremonies at our back, and a side door on the stage opened. A man dressed in black was ushered on to the platform. He was a little man, bald-headed, with thick eyeglasses and a red puggy face. As he crept across the platform, he kept pushing his hands into his pockets, pulled out a yellow paper folded many times, and began to open it. He placed the paper on the speaker’s desk in front of the platform, pulled out a red handkerchief, mopped his face, cleaned and adjusted his thick glasses, hemmed and coughed a few times, stuck the paper against his nose, and began to read. He had a thin, squeaking voice, which did not reach half across the room.
It is difficult to describe the setting and the bearing of the spiritual leader of this silent and subdued flock without seeming unkind and ungenerous. I write without prejudice and without bias— but one must tell the truth. He was an ignorant man. He stumbled over the big words, would get half-way through them, only to turn back for another start. There was nothing inspiring about him, nothing cheerful, nothing interesting. It was dull, stupid, insipid. The men could not hear what he read as lie read to himself, and could not understand him as he swallowed his words. The whole performance lasted some fifteen minutes, including a few prayers; and then the little man on the platform folded his yellow paper and scuttled off through the side door,
As the door closed, the first sound of the keeper’s stick against the marble floor roused the men in the last row. They stood up, folded their arms, faced half-about and began to shuffle out, followed by the next row and the next, and so until the end. Each movement was determined by the sound of the keeper’s stick.
As they came out, we got a better look at the men. Most of them were young and tall, broad of shoulder and well built — men reared in the West, on farms, who had come into the cities and been dragged into the whirlpool of undercurrents that brought them to prison. Their faces were gray, their eyes sunken, dim, dull, and moody. As they noticed us sitting in the last row, their eyes shifted a little in startled surprise, — it was unusual for visitors to be seen downstairs in the chapel, — but hastily, fearfully, their eyes turned to the ground again when they noticed the little silent and grim figure at our back.
The tramp, tramp, tramp of the men could be heard as they crept down the distant halls. Silence fell upon the chapel — a hard silence, a feeling of horror, suppression, and distortion pervaded the air and filled it with something of infinite sadness. I turned my head to look at my wife, and the tears were running down her checks — tears that would not be controlled. When the last sound had died down, a keeper appeared at one of the doors, nodded his head, and the guardian at our back said, ‘We can go now.’ I asked if the men had to attend chapel. He said, ‘Yes, prayers is good for them.’ I have been haunted by the chapel service. Never before had I seen anything quite so humiliating, inhuman, and sterile.
Is this a typical Sunday morning service? No, I have seen others more cheerful, less grim— places where laughter and applause could be heard, where prayers were intermingled with other things. I have seen services where there was some eloquence and a manly voice; but this picture is typical of the spiritual stagnation in prison. It. is typical of the order and the discipline in prison — of the system, regularity, formalism, and, too frequently, of the silence. There is no spiritual life in the average American prison. There is no hope, no inspiration, no stimulus, no compulsion of the soul to better things. It is hard, cold, frozen, dead. This is so true, so general, so all-pervading, that one might describe the whole prison system in these few words — and I say this after seeing something like seventy penal institutions this summer.
II
The little Ford engine labored mightily as we barely climbed the steep hill to the State Reformatory at Y—. As the car reached the top of the hill, I could see, about a quarter of a mile away, a massive building with many towers, surrounded by most beautiful grounds. An uninitiated person would have taken this for some strange medieval castle magically transplanted to this most favored spot, set off against many hills, with a clear blue sky above and mile upon mile of smiling rich fertile farm-lands below. This, however, was no castle of an ancient knight — it was the stony home of many a poor lad who had been placed there for the good of his soul and the safety of the community. This, at least, is what the kindly people would have said. This was a reformatory to make bad boys good.
As I rang the bell and presented my credentials to the keeper, he looked at me doubtfully. ‘Whom do you want?’ said he, with the sharpness of a rasped temper.
‘ The warden,’ said I.
‘The warden is busy.’
‘Yes, I know he is busy; but as I shall have to see him before I leave, you had better take these in to him now.’
After a while I was presented to the warden — a tall, bony, straight-backed old man, of about sixty-five or seventy; gray, thin-lipped, sullen, and obviously displeased. As I came in, he motioned me to a chair and then turned suddenly on me. Pointing a long sharp finger in my face, he said: ‘ I know you. You are from one of them damned reform committees who believe in coddling the prisoners. Well, I don’t. I have been in this business forty years, and know what I am talking about. You can’t coddle these fellows — you can’t do it. Let me tell you. I don’t like these sniffling committees that come around and investigate—that come around and tell a man like me, who has been in this business forty years, how to run his prison. It is just like telling a general how to run his army. But I don’t care; I will show you everything. [I was shown the sum total of nothing. But in his blustering way, he told me everything I wanted to know.] I have nothing to hide. I treat the men right;they can learn a trade, and if they are willing workers, they can earn some money— and work is good for them. This is not a bad prison. Men who are here from other prisons always tell me this is better than most. But I run this prison. No rough-neck can come here and think he is going to rough-house it. If he tries to, I fix him. I fix him. This is my job. A little while ago they transferred a fellow in here who said that this place was like a kindergarten, and that he would show everybody how to eat out of his hand. Well, I fixed him. He started by getting into a fight with one of my officers. I took him out into the yard, put him over a barrel, stripped him the way his father used to do, and put the cane to him — I have a good birch cane. I fixed him good and fine. No bones broken, no rough stuff, no permanent marks. It will wear off in good time. And when I had given him plenty, I riveted a seventy-pound ball and chain round his ankle and put him back in the shop from which he came. It did n’t take long, only a little longer than it does to tell. But I fixed him. He has been a good dog ever since.'
The warden stopped; his face relaxed a little, he looked at me as if he were well pleased, wiped his thin lips with the back of his hand, reflected a minute, and then said, ‘Would you believe it — I told this story to a bunch of women the other day when they asked me to speak, and they hissed me for it.’
He was sincerely perplexed, and naively thought that the women must either have been ‘crazy,’ or affected by the ‘new-fangled’ ideas.
III
This story brings me straight to the question of prison discipline in the United States. There has been so much agitation about this particular question, — and it is a crucial question, — that a survey of how things stand at present is bound to be of interest as well as significant. I must begin by saying that the agitation has mainly been outside of prison — that those affected by it were mostly people who have little or nothing to do with the prison situation. There are a few exceptions, a few indications that all the agitation has not been entirely in vain: a few changes in method, a possible reduction in the number of men punished, a relaxing of the rules a little in regard to talking and the lock-step, the abolition of such things as the strait-jacket (I am not so sure about this: rumors of its existence reached me in more than one place, but I did not actually see it), and the abolition of what was once a common practice, of hanging men up by their wrists and swinging their bodies off the floor.
Let me introduce into this discussion of the situation the following quotation from the Detroit News of January 27, 1920: —
‘Harry L. Hulburt, warden of the prison, explained to the committee how the flogging apparatus is worked. The man to be flogged is blindfolded, handcuffed, and shackled at the ankles. Then he is stretched out on a long ladder, which is made to fit snugly over a barrel. The prisoner is blindfolded, the warden said, so that he will not sec who is flogging him. [The warden told me, when I visited the institution, that he did it himself, as he thought that no one else should be allowed to do it.] His back is bared and a piece of stout linen cloth is placed over the bare spot. The instrument used in the paddling is a heavy strap about four inches in width, punched with small holes about an inch apart and fastened to a handle. The strap is soaked in water, according to the warden, till it becomes pliable; Dr. Robert McGregor [one of the best and most conscientious prison doctors that I met on the trip], prison physician, holds the pulse of the man being flogged and gives the signal for the flogger to stop.’
The article then goes on to detail three different cases of flogging. We will quote only the first.
‘Thomas Shultz, boy of twenty-one years old, seven months after being sent from the insane asylum, was given 181 lashes and kept in the dungeon during the period of the flogging for nine days and fed on bread and water. . . . Nov. 3, assaulted guard. For this and other minor offenses, none of them serious, he was sentenced to receive 181 lashes. Nov. 4, he received 40 lashes. . . , Nov. 5, he received 35 lashes. Nov. 6, he received 26 lashes. Nov, 9, he received 40 lashes. Nov. 13, he received 40 lashes. Total, 181 lashes.’
Now Jackson, to which this refers, is a comparatively decent prison (I had started to use the word good; but there are no good prisons, any more than there are good diseases). If I were asked to pick the least objectionable prisons in the United States, after seeing something like seventy, I should have to include Jackson among the first ten, or possibly even among the first halfdozen. The warden is unusually intelligent, interested in his job, an advocate of the honor system, who also practises it on a large scale. He is certainly among the most humane of the wardens in the country; and, by and large, his prisoners have more freedom inside the walls than is common. I do not repeat this quotation to give it extra publicity. I repeat it to show what happens even in those prisons which are least antiquarian and hide-bound. This does not mean that all prisons have whipping. A large number still do, — more than I expected, — but old methods of punishment are still prevalent in practically all prisons.
There is hardly a prison where solitary confinement is not practised. In some cases solitary confinement is for a few months, in some cases for a few years; and in not a few there is such a thing as permanent solitary. Some prisons have a few men put away; some have as many as twenty; and in one case there are about fifty men placed in solitary for shorter or longer periods.
Why do the wardens do it? Well, they do not know what else to do. They run to the end of their ingenuity, and do that as a last resort — that is, the best of them. Some do it as a matter of common policy. I recall climbing a flight of stairs with a good-natured warden in a Western prison, and being shown a specially built courtyard with some dozen solitary cells. There were four men put away there permanently — one had been there for three years. They were not even allowed to exercise. They were not allowed to talk, they had no reading-matter, they could not smoke. There had at one time been only one man in the place, and the warden permitted him to smoke; but when the others were put in, he told him not to pass any tobacco to them. This is, of course, an impossible demand. The insistence for a share of that mighty joy in solitary — a smoke — is irresistible. He did what was inevitable, — passed his tobacco and a ‘puff,’ to the other fellows, — and the warden deprived him of the privilege. ‘He should have obeyed what I told him if he wanted to hold on to his privilege,’ was the reason given.
What is true of solitary confinement is true also of the dark cell. Practically all prisons have and use dark cells. It is common to find from one to a dozen men put away in the dark cells, kept on bread and water — that means a little bread and about a gill of water every twenty-four hours. In most prisons — about ninety per cent — this punishment is added to by handcuffing the man to the wall or the bars of the door during the day, that is, for a period of ten to twelve hours each day that he is in punishment — the time varying from a few days to more than two weeks. In some institutions the handcuffs have been abolished and replaced by an iron cage made to fit the human form, which, in some cases, can be extended or contracted by the turning of a handle. A man put in the dark cell has this cage placed about him and made to fit his particular form — and it is usually made so ‘snug’ that he has to stand straight up in the cage. He cannot bend his knees, he cannot lean against the bars, he cannot turn round; his hands are held tight against the sides of his body, and he stands straight, like a post, for a full day, on a little bread and water — and for as many days as the warden or the deputy sees fit. I was always asked to observe that they did not use handcuffs: this was the reform. Remember, a dark, pitch-black cell, with your hands pinned against your sides, your feet straight all day, unable to move or shift your ground, for ten and twelve hours a day, on bread and water, is the reform!
In one or two institutions where the cage is used, but is not adjustable, — the man having to squeeze into the flat space as best he can, — they added the handcuffs. In one institution, — a commendable institution, as such things go, in some ways, — in one of the states that has always prided itself on being progressive, I found that they added to the dark cell the handcuffing of the man while he slept. In the particular institution I have in mind the arrangement was as follows. A bar was attached to one of the walls, and slanted down until it reached within about three inches of the floor. On this bar was a ring. At night, the board on which the man slept was placed near this slanting bar; one pair of handcuffs was put on the prisoner’s wrists, another pair connected with his hands was attached to the ring on the slanting iron bar. This means that he had to lie on one side all night long, handcuffed and pressing on this board, which served him as a bed.
This does not complete the list of prison punishments as they are now practised. The underground cell is still in existence — probably not in many prisons, but I saw it in at least two different institutions. In one state prison, — an old prison, dark and damp inside, — I found a punishment cell in the cell-block. It was built underground. In the centre of the hall there is an iron door, flat on the ground, which one lifts sideways — like an old-type country cellar-door. It creaks on its rusty iron hinges. I climbed down a narrow flight of rickety stairs. When I got to the bottom, I had to bend double to creep into a long narrow passage. It was walled about with stone, covered with a rusty tin covering. It was not high enough to stand up in, hardly high enough for a good-sized man to sit up in. The warden above closed the door on me. I was in an absolutely pitchblack hole — long, narrow, damp, unventilated, dirty (there must be rats and vermin in it); and one has to keep a bucket for toilet purposes in that little black hole. As I came out, the warden said naïvely, ‘When I put a man in here, I keep him thirty days.’ Let the reader imagine what that means to human flesh and blood.
I do not want to make this a paper of horrors. Just one more case. On my way back I stopped off at a certain very well-known prison that I had heard about since childhood. For the last ten years it has been famous as one of the great reform prisons of the country. I remember seeing pictures of the warden with prisoners out on a road-gang. The article in which these pictures appeared gave a glowing account of the freedom these men had — they guarded themselves away from the prison proper, out in the hills, building roads. The state in which this prison is situated has constructed many miles of prison-built road — and in fact it. was one of the first in the country to undertake to build roads wit h convict labor, without guards. When I knocked on its gates, I thrilled with expectancy. Here, at least, would I find a model prison, unique, exceptional, a pride to the state and an honor to the man who was responsible for it . In fact, I had heard that the warden was being considered for political advancement to the office of governor because of his remarkable prison record. I found a remarkable institution — remarkable for its backwardness and brutality.
The first thing that I saw as I entered the prison yard was a strange and unbelievable thing. Nine men kept going round in a circle, wheeling wheelbarrows, while a heavy chain dangled from each man’s ankle. As I came nearer, I noticed in each wheelbarrow a heavy iron ball attached to the chain. In the centre stood a guard; and the men kept circling about him all day long, wheeling the iron ball in their barrows, their bodies bent over, their faces sullen, their feet dragging. They did that for ninety days each, I was told by my guide. At night they carried the ball to their cells, and in the morning they carried it to the dining-room. For three months this iron ball and chain stayed riveted about their ankles — a constant companion and, I suppose, from the warden’s point of view, a stimulus to better things — one of the ways of making ‘bad’ men ‘good.’
There, too, I found all the other characteristics of the average prison — dark cells, bread and water, solitary, handcuffs, and, in addition, a hired colored man to do whipping when that was called for — as no one else could be got to do it. This negro was never permitted in the prison yard for fear that the men might kill him. The report that I sent to the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor, for which I was traveling, reads as follows: —
I have just visited the famous reform prison at C—and this is what I found: —
Nine men going around a circle, wheeling ball and chain.
Whipping-post, with special colored man to do the task.
Dark cells.
Solitary.
Men handcuffed to the doors.
Bread and water.
No work for the men.
In addition to loss of privileges and good time, which is usual as a means of discipline.
A traveling prison chaplain had visited the institution the Sunday before I came, and made a speech to the men. In beginning his speech, he remarked upon the fame of the warden with the world abroad, and upon the fortune of the men for being under such humane treatment. Some of the men hissed. For that the moving-picture machine had been torn out from its place in the chapel, and the men were to be deprived of their weekly prison ‘movie.’ I was told also that Sunday yard-privileges had been rescinded. In telling me about it, one of the guards remarked: ‘We will show them [the prisoners] that this can be a real prison.’ I wonder what they think it is now — and what else they can add to make it one. Let this conclude the description of current disciplinary methods.
IV
The use of man by man is the basic test in the evaluation of any institution, especially one designed to make the ‘bad’ ‘good,’ the ‘hard’ ‘soft,’ and the ‘unsocial’ ‘social.’ The test of a penal institution is its disciplinary methods.
The picture I have drawn is onesided and not sufficiently comprehensive. If one desires to secure a general view of the technique of penal administration as it is at present practised, he must look at other elements of the picture. There is the problem of labor. The opportunity to keep busy during the day, — to do something that will hasten the passing hours, that will give a sense of contact with the world of reality, that will exercise one’s fingers and use one’s body, — this simple craving of the human organism is denied on a much larger scale than one can imagine unless he is actually brought in contact with the fact. I should say that at least one third of the prisoners in the American state prisons are unemployed. That means that in some prisons all men are working, in some practically none, and in others only a part.
The warden was an aggressive, opinionated, ignorant, and coarse individual. He had grown stout, his lower lip had hardened, his jaw jammed against his upper teeth as he talked, and at every second sentence he banged the table for emphasis, stopped, looked at you to see if you agreed with him, and if t here was any doubt in his mind about this, he repeated what he had said, adding, ‘ I am talking straight fact.'
I first saw him in the evening, swinging in a soft hanging rocker on the porch, supported by small couch cushions, dressed in an immaculate white suit, with a silk handkerchief in his coat-pocket, and smoking a big cigar tilted at the proper ’politician’s’ angle. He was round-headed, his face shiny and smooth-shaven. I felt uncomfortable sitting there in front of him and talking about the men inside. A feeling of disgust crept over me, as if he were some fat over-dressed pig — and selfassertive.
’I run this prison by psychology; if you want a lecture on psychology I will give it to you; it is all in psychology,’he told me.
I begged to be excused that night. I was tired. I had driven all day; and perhaps I would enjoy it better after I saw how he managed the prison.
‘All right; but remember the whole trick is psychology — it is as simple as that.’
It was a typical prison — only it. had an ‘idle-house.’ The ‘idle-house’ is so called because it houses the idle men — men who do nothing all day long but sit on benches, crowded together, all day, every day of the week, every week of the year, and every year of their prison term — a term that may range from one year to a lifetime. It is a large bare loft. There I found four hundred men, dressed in their prison suits, sitting, all facing one way. Around the room there were keepers, seated on high stools, watching these idle men. In the morning after breakfast the men were marched to this idle-house. At noon they were taken to the dining-room; after lunch they were marched back to the idle-house. They were being made good by sitting. This is better than in some prisons, where the men who have nothing to do are kept in their cells. And yet — how little ingenuity it would have taken to put most of these men to work at something useful, if not remunerative. It would not have been difficult to find enough public-spirited citizens who would have provided a dozen old and broken-down automobiles and typewriters, and thus put a number of them to work taking them apart and putting them together — learning something and keeping busy, doing something. It would not have been difficult to put a number of these to studying Spanish, French, Italian — every large prison has men who would like to teach those languages and others who would like to learn them. There are a hundred ways in which these men could — at least, most of them could — have been occupied in doing something: learning how to draw, to box, to play an instrument, to typewrite—anything that would have taken the burden of eternal idleness off their hands. All it needed was a couple of days’ use of the imagination. But the warden lacked the imagination. He was not really vividly conscious of the problem. When I had seen the prison and was ready to go, I asked him if he would give me that lecture on psychology, and he said with an emphatic bang on the table, ‘My boy, psychology is common sense.’ What is true of work is true of other things. There is no imagination in the American prison field — or so little that one has to look far and wide to find it. Take the question of housing. Practically all American prisons are built on the same plan. That is the Auburn type. The best way to describe it is to begin from the outside. The first thing is the high stone wall. After you get into the prison yard made by this wall you come face to face with a large square building about five stories high. It has narrow windows, heavily barred — in some cases these windows are so narrow that it would not be possible for a man to get through them. When you enter the stone building, you find another building inside. This inside building is the cell-block, a square stone structure standing four stories high. Each tier, or floor, is divided into a large number of little cells — each cell looks like every other. Each floor is like the one below it. The cells vary in size, but not much. In the older prisons — and most of the prisons are old — the cells are about three and a half feet wide, seven feet long, and seven feet high. Some, as in Sing Sing prison, are even smaller. In the newer prisons they are larger — in some cases more than twice this size. The cells are set back to back.
The space of a cell is so small that it is inconceivable for one who has not been in it. You cannot spread your hands, you cannot lift your hand above your head, you cannot take more than three steps without hitting your toe against the wall. A cell is not larger than a good-sized grave stood on end. It is dark, half-dark, all the time. There is no window in the cell. The windows are in the outer wall and the cell is set about thirty feet away from the outer wall. The windows in this wall are generally narrow, and are always heavily barred. The sun must first get into the prison before it can get into the cell. But the cell is not made to receive the sun. In the older prisons one half of the front facing the window is walled up. The other half has a door. In the very worst prisons, this door is completely closed at the bottom —*• that is, the lower half is made of solid steel. To get around this, as in Sing Sing, they have drilled holes in that part. The upper half is closely netted with heavy bars, in some cases leaving only little square holes for the sun and air to get through after it finds its way into the prison. In the older cell-blocks these cells have no internal ventilation at all! All the air must come in and out through the limited space of the front door. In others, more modern, there is a ventilator in the cell — a hole going up through the wall, about six inches square. In all the old prisons the cells have no toilet system; buckets are used for toilet purposes. These buckets are generally numbered, so that each man can get his own back; but not always. As the men are put into their cells at about five in the afternoon, and taken out again at about six in the next, morning they are in this cell-block for at least thirteen hours. Think of what it means to have eighteen hundred men in a prison under such conditions. Think of a hot July night, and picture the air on the top tier. No words can describe the pollution of the air under these conditions. Add to this the fact that, in most prisons, the men are kept in practically all day Sunday, half a day Saturday, and, if Monday happens to be a holiday, all day Monday, and you will have a sense of the torture that life under these conditions imposes upon the sensitive, and of the callousness it implies in those who have ceased to be sensitive.
This, however, is not all. The prisons cannot be kept clean, — certainly not the old prisons, — even if there were consciousness that this ought to be done. These old stone structures, standing in half-darkness for a hundred years, never having proper ventilation, never proper airing, are infected with bugs and vermin. In my own case — and this is typical of the old prison — the old cell-block in Blackwell’s Island was bug-ridden. In my day there were thousands of bugs in my cell. I struggled valiantly, constantly, and industriously. But it was a hopeless fight. I had some books, and the bugs made nests in them. They crept over me when I slept — they made life miserable. I am not blaming the warden for this. I am describing a fact that we might as well face. But the sense of sanitation is not very keen among prison officials taken as a whole. There are a few exceptions, mostly in the new prisons.
The meaning of cell-life under these conditions cannot be conceived. I recall the day when I was first put in a cell. I stepped into a little yellow space — the walls seemed drawn together, and I halted at the door. A little yellow half-burned bulb was stuck up in the corner; there was a narrow iron cot against the wall. I heard the door behind me slam, and I felt myself cramped for space, for air, for movement. I turned quickly after the retreating officer, and called him back.
‘What do you want?’
‘Will — will I have to stay in this place all night?’
He laughed. ‘You will get used to it soon enough.'
I turned back to my cell. The walls slowly retreated and made more room for me, so that I crept in and away from the door. The yellow glimmering light hurt my eyes. It was fully half an hour before I adjusted myself to the fact that I was there for the night. On my little narrow iron cot, I found two dirty blankets. I rolled them up, shoved them against the wall beneath the light, and took out a little book that I had with me.
When I came into the prison that morning, I had some books, but they were taken away. I protested that I had to have something to read — I simply had to have something. The keeper objected that it was against the rules, He looked at my books carefully, and then picked out a little paper-covered volume, which he gave me with the remark, ‘You can have this. We permit men to bring in anything that is religious.’ It was William Morris’s News from Nowhere. The little glimmering light on the yellow page, and in a few minutes I was off in dreamland — I followed Morris’s idyllic picture and perfect beings into a world where there were no prisons and no unemployed.
This happy setting was interrupted by the sobs of a boy next to my cell — he too was a newcomer. He sobbed hysterically, ‘My God, what shall I do? What shall I do ? ’ I climbed down from my cot, knocked on the wall of his cell, and tried to talk to him. But he paid no attention to me. He just sobbed and cried like a child torn from its mother, as if his heart would break.
Finding no response, I clambered back to my place, and was soon off in dreamland again. I did not wake until the lights were turned out at nine o’clock. I looked out of my cell and saw, through the far-off window in the outer wall, a star glimmering; then, without undressing, straightening my blankets, I fell asleep and, in my sleep, dreamed of the free fields of early childhood.
I mentioned the dirty blankets on the cot. I used that word deliberately. It is not uncommon for the blankets which a man gets in prison to be dirty. They are rarely cleaned or fumigated. One man goes out and another goes in — receiving the blankets the other used, without any attempt to clean or wash them; and of course there are no sheets. I have seen blankets so dirty that the dust actually fell out of them when you moved them. This is not true of all prisons, but is of many.
It is not uncommon to find a prison where the men have not their own individual underwear. The underwear is sent to the laundry, and a man gets what luck will bring him: some is too long, some too short; some has been used by healthy men, some by men who were sick with contagious diseases. In some prisons the small cells have two men to a cell. There are two cots, one above the other; and these men live in this narrow cramped place — and at times the health of the men so crowded is not examined. They use the same bucket and drink out of the same cup.
Practically none of the prisons pay the men for their work. A few places make it possible for a few men to earn what might be considered a fair wage, but the mass of the prisoners earn little, in many cases nothing. Justat random: New York pays its prisoners one cent and a half a day; California and Massachusetts pay them nothing. And yet, it is asked why the men are not interested and ambitious!
Practically none of the prisons make a serious attempt to educate their prisoners. The eight grades for illiterates are in use in places — but as a rule they amount to little, both the system and the method being antiquated and the spirit poor. In only one or two places is there a real attempt to use for educational purposes the extraordinary advantages of time and control which prisons imply. San Quentin is conspicuous by the fact that it is making a real attempt in that direction. What I have said about education is true of health. Health is neglected. Here and there the fact that crime and health, both physical and mental, have a relation to each other, is gradually being recognized, but not as much or as fully as one would expect.
This rather sketchy description of American penal conditions is unfair to the exceptions — but the exceptions are few and far between. There is not a prison in the country, in so far as I have seen them, that does not fall into this general picture in one or more of its phases. Of the worst prisons, all that I have said is true. Of the better ones, some of t he things I have said are true. For the casual visitor, who is taken around by a guard or by the warden, who is told all the good things and not permitted to see the bad ones, whom lack of experience and knowledge makes gullible, this may seem a startling story. If it is startling, it is not more so than the facts are.
There are other things about the prison — developments of parole, education, self-government, farm-labor — which arc more hopeful than the picture painted here. These, however, must be left over for another time. I have separated the hopeful things in the prison situation from the outstanding shortcomings, deliberately. To combine them is to give the optimist — and we are all ready to hang our optimism to the most fleeting excuse — an opportunity to rationalize and escape the burden of present evil. The present prison system is bad. I have hardly described all its evils. Some cannot be written about without greater finesse and literary subtlety than I possess. Others were hidden from me. There are indications of a possible way out, of better things, of more hopeful use of human intelligence; but to date, all of these are negligible and limited, even if a significant contribution to penal methods.