Prison Music

I

SHORTLY after the San Francisco fire and earthquake, the State of California created a new department in one of the two reform schools in the state — a department for the teaching of singing. The department was to be an experiment. Its object was to find out whether vocal music could have a reforming effect on the young criminal. I was appointed to conduct this experiment.

As an experienced concert singer, vocal instructor, and choral director, I was expected to teach five hundred boy criminals the elements and meaning of song, and to form, if possible, a body among them capable of partsinging in harmony. For two years I spent two days of each week at the reform school.

The superintendent introduced me to the boys one Sunday afternoon, at chapel service. They were dressed in gray trousers with a black stripe, soft shirts, and postmen’s caps, and they ranged in years from fourteen to thirtyfive. The older ones had been sent to the reform school through political influence to escape the rigors of state’s prison. Their scale of height began at about four feet seven and climbed to six feet three. Some were misshapen; some were superbly formed. Some had heads like sugar loaves; others were conspicuous for hydrocephalous front; still others had no back of the head at all — just a straight line. Some had ‘cauliflower’ ears and undershot jaws. Some had short teeth. Many had the typical pale silver eye of the criminal. There were negroes and Spaniards and Mexicans, French, Italians, Danes, Germans, and Russians, English and Welsh and Jews, a Chinese and two Japanese, and a Mormon from Salt Lake City. They were segregated into ‘companies’ according to height alone. Thus a tall lad of seventeen years, whose only transgression was violation of the curfew law of his home town by staying out of doors after nine o’clock at night, was placed in a company of hardened, mature criminals, owing simply to the accident of his stature.

The boys looked me over. I was a tall, thin, wide-shouldered man with a pince-nez, ‘dressed like a dude,’ as some of the boys told me afterward. The pince-nez drew a broadside of grins and smothered snorts. For my part, I saw as choice a collection of young criminality as could probably be found anywhere, favoring me with a regard compounded of truculence and a sardonic humor that was not all mirth. But, if I was dismayed, I was not going to show it, as I had made up my mind that the experiment should be a success. I had read a lot about criminology, and had Lombroso and Hollander and Havelock Ellis and Ferri and Aschaffenburg and a host of others at my finger tips, and I was sincerely interested in the experiment.

My first duty was to try the voice of every boy in the school, and the trials took place in the great assembly hall. After trying two or three voices in the presence of all the other boys, I saw that I must find another plan. The tests must not be made an opportunity for uproarious mirth at the expense of the singers. So I had the room cleared and received only one boy at a time in the otherwise empty hall.

I now put into practice a device which I had long used in my private teaching, and which, so far as I know, was peculiarly my own. It was this. I sat on a low seat at the piano, my body turned sideways. The young criminal stood above me and rather close. I asked him to sing ah on one note only, striking the note loudly and singing the ah myself to encourage him. The thing being novel to him, he watched my mouth attentively (for curiosity is one of the strongest traits of the criminal make-up), and when he started to sing his own ah he still watched my mouth to see if he were properly following the pattern. At that instant I smiled broadly. With the involuntary reflex action of unconscious imitation, his mouth also formed itself into the mechanical position of a smile. Startled at this new sensation, his eyes leaped to mine and found another smile there, the heartiest I could summon. And in that instant I won a genuine and sincere smile from the boy. The most hardened and ‘hardboiled’ succumbed to the formula as malleably as the others. I met only one failure in the five hundred tests. That smile, together with a good, deep look, laid the foundation of my success in the school.

I selected one hundred and fifty boys whose voices I thought good enough for my purpose. (I found no exceptional voices either then or later, as the criminal is a defective and rarely exhibits a talent or gift to be counted as truly extraordinary.) We met in the large assembly hall, and armed guards sat about the walls. This meant, compelling the obedience of the prisoners to my wishes through fear of consequences. I saw in the first two meetings that this condition must be changed if I were to make any real headway with the boys, and I asked permission of the superintendent to drill my chorus without the presence of the guards. He said I might try it.

It seemed fitting next to hold a little talk with my hundred and fifty. I learned that the school body was divided into two main parties — the ‘round guys’ and the ‘square guys.’ The square guys were those rebellious spirits arrayed against the school law and all law. They comprised 95 per cent of the five hundred inmates. The round guys curried favor with the institution officers by ‘snitching,’ or talebearing. They pretended to be loyal square guys, and were seldom found out. The square guys hated them with every hatred known in Hell.

The reform school was ruled by three of the inmates, called “kings,’ who controlled the internal life of the prison with deadly finality. The officers of the school believed their own rules to be the law of the young criminals they guarded; but the mainsprings of action and volition of the five hundred lay in t he hands of the three kings. Their ‘monikers’ (professional names) were Fish-Mouth Hogan, Frisco Fat, and the Cincy Kid. It was of the first importance to win these three kings to my side, and one day I had a private talk with them, not wholly unlike the talk I gave the hundred and fifty. I won them. How, I do not know, nor can I remember just what I said; but I won them.

With the help, unobtrusive but powerful, of the three kings, I taught that school of criminals to sing. I taught them the slow, deep breathing of the great singers. I taught them to realize the meaning of the words they sang as well as that of the music, and to sing them with feeling; I taught them to count time and to read music at sight.

Then I began to organize my chorus. Not one of the boys knew a note of music, and not one of them knew anything whatsoever about singing. Yet in a little over six months they were able to sing such music as ‘The Soldiers’ Chorus’ from Faust; John Hyatt Brewer’s arrangement of ‘The Lost Chord’; Arthur Sullivan’s ‘The Long Day Closes’; Dudley Buck’s harmonization, in contrary motion, of ‘Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep’; ‘The Heart Bowed Down’; and eight other numbers, in perfect harmony, time, and tune. I also selected a semichorus of thirty-six voices which sang the same things and a few others, in a style creditable to an organization of greater pretensions.

And they loved it!

We devoted a half hour weekly to popular sentimental songs and jazz songs; and at the end of the third month the boys voluntarily asked that the ‘cheap stuff’ be cut out. They knew all about that ‘hokum.’ All the underworld sang that stuff. But the choral music was different; they could not express the difference they felt in it, but they knew that they liked it better. It was not the words that caught them; it was the music. They could be heard singing and whistling the choral music all the rest of the week during my absence, so the officers told me.

II

These boys became my friends as I tried to be their friend. As the terms of some of them expired I did my little best to help them in the world outside. News of these efforts came back to the school on the lips of the newcomers who flowed in constantly. (This constant fluctuation caused more than a thousand young criminals to pass through my hands.) I became of good report. And I was adopted by my boys as much as anyone not of their world could be adopted. I talked to them at odd times, trying to win my way inside their mental barriers. ‘Look here, fellows, why do you keep on with this stuff after you get out of here? Don’t you know you can’t get away with it? Don’t you know that you are bound to end up in the Big House [state’s prison]? Why do you do it, anyhow?’

Sheepish grins. Silence.

‘Is it because of the excitement you get out of it?’

‘Sure! That’s it, Professor!’ Lying cordially.

No. That door was closed. They could not have told me if they had wanted to, any more than a wolf can tell a man why he loves fresh blood.

But not all the prisoners in this reform school were criminals. Many of them were boys from good families, who had been sent to the institution for the most trivial offenses. A boy was generally committed to the school until he was twenty-one years of age. Thus, if a boy of sixteen was sentenced for that standard term, he had to remain in the closest possible contact with calloused criminals of the most dangerous type for five years. And this generally meant, in the majority of cases, that the innocent newcomer became as ‘tough’ a citizen as any of the others.

This was due to the standards of those in the boy’s new environment. The criminal is a hero worshiper, but his hero must be measured by the standards that compel respect in the criminal mind. In the social world, physical courage is generally the hall mark of the hero. In the criminal world, it is not; for the majority of criminals are cowardly at heart, as is sufficiently exemplified by the manner and character of their procedure. Many of them have brute courage of a sort, but it lacks the twin fibre of moral courage which more often complements the physical courage of social man. And it is probably this lack which causes the criminal to hold physical courage in negligible esteem. No. His standards arc of a different sort. The greater the criminal deed, the greater the hero who commits it.

The murderer is first. King of the underworld, set apart in a strange aura, he moves aloof, silent, amid whispers, furtive glances, and cringing treachery. The ‘big-job’ cracksman is next. Then the hold-up man, the burglar, and so on down to the humble ‘dip,’ or pickpocket. But the standard of desperate deeds is ever before the mental eye of every criminal. He is always ambitious. He dreams by night of feats which shall place him high in the estimation of his world. By day his thoughts and his talk revolve about little else. Fame is the criminal’s only ambition — fame among his fellows. Wealth means nothing to him; nor do any of the other rewards which inspire social man. But the great criminal deed! For this he lives, and for this he would die, if it were not for that inconvenient lack of moral fibre. And the criminal’s standard never changes. It has never changed in all history.

But the standards of social man sometimes do change. And so the innocent boy who comes fresh from a sheltered home to the poisoned air of this new association is almost invariably changed by it. When he emerges again to freedom, he joins the underworld. Such a boy might be termed a ‘made’ criminal.

Born criminals, or boys and men who had grown up in the criminal atmosphere, environment, and thought from early youth, formed the bulk of the prisoners in this particular reform school. I am perfectly aware that Aschaffenburg and Sernoff and Baer and many others vehemently deny the contention of Lombroso and his school that criminals arc born, or that heredity has any place in the study of crime. These questions have never been settled. Yet I found some of the Lombroso stigmata present in nearly every boy with a criminal record — the prognathous jaw, the pale eye, the bulging forehead, the outstanding ears, the scanty beard, the short teeth and the long gums. Lombroso says that all these stigmata must be present in one person to prove the criminal type; but any experienced officer will tell you to look out for the fellow who has one or two of them.

An interesting point for the criminologist, just here, is the experience I had in regard to malformation of the roof of the mouth. Some alienists and criminologists claim that defective dentition in early youth makes for a malformed change in the shape of the roof of the mouth, and a consequent abnormal pressure on the brain space; and they believe that this pressure is responsible for criminal motivation. However that may be, I was interested in the theory, and took occasion to examine the vault of each prisoner’s mouth as I tried his voice. A majority of the mouths were malformed, showing the most grotesque and shocking distortions. But the point is this: some years later I took charge of the singing at a branch of the state university, where I had to try the voices of some two thousand youths of normal parentage and environment, and I found not a dozen malformed buccal arches in the whole number!

III

When I had learned this much about a strangely complex situation, I was not long in perceiving the necessity of learning more if I hoped to make a complete success of this unique experiment. First and most important, I became conscious of a barrier of secret understanding existing among the entire body of the criminal inmates. Everyone outside that barrier was thereby thrust away to some nethermost pole, to an antipode so distant that the gulf could never be bridged. It was not a clannish or a class distinction, as might perhaps exist between the working and the leisured classes; or a group distinction, as among taxi drivers or I. W. W.’s; or a distinction between races — Americans and Chinese, for example. It was something more than that. It was a deeper rift, I found, than between any other two aspects of human relationship. It was more like the separation that lies between man and the other animals. A man cannot think as a cat thinks, or as a wolf thinks; and between the criminal mind and the mind that functions under the laws of civilization there has always been and is to-day a separation as distinct as that between a man’s thoughts and the thoughts of a wolf. And it is because of this fixed mental separation that all society’s efforts to bridge the gulf have failed.

There are many who would resent such a statement. They would point to the work being done in prisons by ministers, by the churches, by the laity; to the charities; to the wellorganized work outside the prisons when the criminal has been released, and has, supposedly, entered on a new and better life; to the juvenile courts; to the welfare societies; to every branch of endeavor that has for its object the reclaiming of the criminal. And one cannot decry these efforts, for they arc founded, it must be believed, upon sincere and well-meaning motives. Nevertheless they do not, unfortunately, answer the question, ‘Is the criminal reformed?’ in the affirmative. There can be but one answer; there never has been but one answer. The criminal is not reformed. Punishment has never deterred crime, nor moved the phlegm of the criminal. Kindness and consideration may move him emotionally, as the murderer in the theatre gallery hisses the villain and sobs when the heroine is driven out into the snowstorm; but emotion does not cure him of the urge to commit more crime, any more than it prevents the murderer from going forth and again taking human life.

Religion has done its best by crime, but a pathetically ineffective best it has been. Crime is to-day as it was on the day that society was established to control it. The criminal still follows with joy the mysterious voices within. If there is hope for an amelioration of crime through breaking down the barriers between social man and the unsocial criminal, then the first and most important step must be for the social man to face the facts as they are, and to cease glozing over the social ulcer. The point which must be understood is that what is done inside the prison toward reformation is futile unless the criminal changes his life after he has left the prison.

The reform school does not reform. It teaches useful trades—tailoring, shoemaking, brickmaking and masonry, carpentry, blacksmithing, mechanics, band-instrument playing — and gives the boys common-school education. Very often its officers are kind, and have perhaps evolved little systems of helpfulness and fair dealing in their relation to the inmates. Ministers and social-service workers expend their most devoted and untiring labors here, year in and year out. Systems of self-government have been tried, and physical punishment has been tried.

The measure of all reformatory efforts is the measure of the criminal’s conduct after he has left the prison. It is difficult to keep a record of that conduct, for the criminal tries to cover his trail from the prison doors. His main desire is to escape notice until he is safely back among his kind. Even then he trusts no one, for criminals are notable informers. Generally he seeks new fields and new companionship. And it is because of this that statistical data on the individual criminal after he has been released from prison must of necessity be meagre. The statistical limit for tracing his movements is three years.

I went about the school, into the carpenter shop, the tailor shop, the shoemaker’s shop, into the brickyard, the blacksmith’s shop, the electrician’s shop, and the band room. I talked with the officers of these departments and I talked to the imprisoned workmen. Some of the officers had theories — one favored rewards, another favored punishments. One officer had been nicknamed ‘Fifty’ by his squad of workers, because he gave fifty demerits for any infraction of rules, where other officers gave but ten. (In the rules of the school, ten credits or demerits stood for one full day added to or subtracted from a prisoner’s term of confinement.) This officer believed in punishing infrequently, but making it jolt when he did punish. Other officers believed in greater degrees of tolerance. Still others believed in the ‘paddle’ as the only sure means of enforcing discipline.

The paddle is like a tennis racket in shape, but longer. The oval, a solid piece of leather half an inch thick, is allowed to soak in water until it becomes like iron. Its first stroke brings the blood roaring to the surface; the second or third starts the skin; the fourth takes it off. With the sixth and seventh the flesh begins to give way in little lumps. Fainting spells generally follow the tenth stroke. After the first faint, a bucket of water used to be clashed over the victim, and the paddling continued until his spirit was broken. I was told that some boys had received over one hundred strokes — and spent weeks in the hospital afterward.

I do not know whether paddling is an illegal procedure; I do know, however, that it was most cautiously referred to by t he officers, who seemed to be fearful of losing their positions if they were quoted as admitting that the punishment existed. That it did exist I did not positively know for some time, although I was morally certain of its practice through the guarded talk of the officers and the entirely frank accounts of it by the boys in my class, many of whom had undergone its rigors. It was not until the second of the two superintendents under whom I served had taken office that I actually witnessed a paddling. The affair took place in a sort of subcellar whence no sound could penetrate. The paddle was wielded by a powerful officer, who swung the thing with both hands like a baseball bat.

Some officers took the law literally into their own hands and ‘beat up’ their charges. One day one of my singers came into my class after several weeks’ absence. He was one of the three kings of the school. His eyes peered painfully out of a purple mask (it was no longer a face), every feature beaten flat. Tears came to my eyes when I looked at that pitiable sight.

The prisoners were hard to handle. All prisoners are. Cut off from liberty, sex, drink, dope, tobacco, and amusements, man quickly throws back to the savage. He becomes sullen and dangerous. He broods over the slightest, fancied wrong. Finally he strikes back. Then punishment of some sort must follow if discipline is to be maintained; and maintained it must be among criminals. Yet I gave not one demerit, nor did I have a single boy punished during the twenty-two months I spent at that school. It was not wholly that I was liked by the boys. Other officers were liked fully as much. Why was it, then? Frankly, I was never able to understand the reason.

Whatever it was, its effect came out notably in one instance. After a year’s drilling of these boys I broached to the superintendent the idea of taking my chorus to Sacramento to sing at the yearly State Fair. I had expected an explosion, but, owing possibly to my success in being left alone with my hundred and fifty prisoners every week for so long a period, he merely remarked that my idea was impossible. He pointed out that the fixed idea of every prisoner in the institution was to escape; all other thoughts were swallowed up in that — day and night they planned for it. To take one hundred and fifty prisoners many miles by train to open grounds in a public exhibition park, to house them precariously in tents overnight, where there was little to prevent their escaping, seemed indeed an absurd project.

But we went. And we sang. And it was capital singing, too. We made a tremendous hit.

How was it done? The three kings did it for me.

I had called them into conference before my talk with the superintendent and had asked their advice and help. They assured me that the plan could be carried out, solely on account of the rule of fear which they exercised over every prisoner in the school. That their confidence in their power was justified, the result showed plainly enough.

One incident of the journey will illustrate how thorough and far-reaching that power really was. The chorus traveled in a special car. It was hot, and I had discarded my coat and waistcoat. Like every smoker who ‘rolled his own,’ I carried my sack of tobacco in a back pocket of my trousers, with the string and round tag of the sack hanging out of the pocket. Presently I missed my tobacco. I was not going to say anything about it, as I was far from grudging the boys a chance to smoke. But one of the kings had seen me reach for the tobacco, and noticed that my hand came back empty. Instantly he asked me, with some appearance of anxiety, if I had lost my tobacco. When I told him I had, he explained that it must be recovered at once, as it would permanently undermine the authority of the three kings to allow a thief to go unscathed on this journey. He asked me to turn my back and look out of the window. I did so, and in less than two minutes the sack of tobacco was in my hands. How the magic was worked I could not pretend to say; but the great point was this: its power was enough to overcome one of the strongest impulses in the breasts of these wild, unruly spirits. Every one of those hundred and fifty prisoners came back to the reform school the next day without one attempt at escape.

IV

The young criminal of to-day is in every essential the counterpart of the young criminal of sixteen years ago, when my work in the California reform school came to an end. Whatever conditions applied to the men and boys with whom I dealt at that time, and whatever conditions have applied to those men and boys since that time, will just as fitly apply to the young criminal of to-day.

Since I left that school there have been, so far as I have been able to learn, less than 10 per cent of my singing criminals who have got into trouble again — that is, who have committed crime and been sentenced to prison for it.

On the other hand, during those sixteen years I have had letters innumerable from these boys (long after the ihree-year statistical tracing limit), telling of honest, useful lives in jobs here and there all over the country. I have met these boys by the score on the street, on the automobile highway, on trains, in theatres, on street cars, on ocean liners; I even encountered some of them in London and others in Paris. All whom I met had led the plain, uneventful life of the honest social man. Each told me news of scores of others of whom I had lost track. They were scattered all over the world — in Texas, Maine, Florida, New York, in Canada, France, Germany, South America, Africa. They were all ‘out’ (not in jail). They had nearly all been out ever since they had left the reform school where I taught them to sing. Scores of others have come to see me over the years, just in friendship, and to tell me of other plain, uneventful lives.

But since they had left that California reform school, 90 per cent of those erstwhile criminals had been singing! Some of them sang in cafes; some of them in vaudeville; some few in churches; most of them only in their homes and in their families (for many of them now have families); but they had all been singing somewhere. And they had not gone back to criminality or to prison for sixteen years.

Is there the germ of an idea in this account of the experiment in a California reform school? If there is, might it not deserve a measure of consideration in the task of solving the problem of youthful criminality?