Chapter 4. Initiation

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_ CHAPTER IV. INITIATION

"Put the fear of God in his heart!"

This phrase, impious and ironic, is used by officials in prisons, and repeated by prisoners. It has no religious import. The naming of God in that connection reminds me of a remark I heard from a moonshiner--as the distillers of illicit whiskey in the mountain regions of the South are called--who had lately arrived at the penitentiary. He said, "I allus thought this here Jesus Christ was a cuss-word; but these folks say he was some religious guy!" His enlightenment was doubtless due to the first aid to the unregenerate administered by our chaplain.

To "put the fear of God in a man's heart" means to break his spirit, to cow him, to make him, from a man, a servile sneak; and this is effected not by encouraging him to remember his Creator, but by instilling into him dread of the club, the dungeon, and the bullet. He must learn to fear not God, but the warden, the captain and the guard. He is to be hustled about, cuffed, shoved, kicked, put in the hole, punished for not comprehending surly and half inarticulate orders, or for not understanding gestures without words; all of which encouragements to obedience are, indeed, specifically forbidden by the rules which were formulated in Washington and disseminated for the information of the investigation committees and of the public, but which are disregarded nevertheless by the prison authorities from the highest to the lowest. For they risk nothing by disregarding them; there is no one except prisoners to complain of illegal treatment, and there is no one for them to complain to except the very persons who are guilty of the illegalities; and the warden at Atlanta, at any rate, has repeatedly stated that he would not accept the oaths of any number of prisoners against the unsupported denial of a single guard. To do otherwise would be to "destroy discipline." Moreover, these unverified complaints--such is their inevitable category in the circumstances--are themselves fresh causes of offense, and productive of the severest punishments--not only clubbing and close confinement, often in the dark hole, but loss of good time, which of course is more dreaded than anything else.

But may not the prisoners complain to the committees or inspectors, appointed precisely to enquire into and relieve abuses of this sort?

I shall have a good deal to say about these agents of humanity presently. I will only say here that no prisoner who cares whether he lives or dies, or who possesses common sense or the smallest smattering of experience of prison affairs, ever is so reckless as to impart any facts to the persons in question. If he accuses any guard or other official of cruelty, the entire force of prison keepers can and will be at need marshaled to deny point-blank that any such thing occurred, or, if any did, it was because the accused official was at the time quelling a dangerous revolt, and deemed his own life in peril. If this evidence be insufficient, it is a pathetic truth that some prisoners can always be found so debased by terror and abject as to perjure themselves against their comrades. It is among negro prisoners that such traitors are commonly sought and found. White men uniformly have a sense of honor--thieves' honor, if you please--which keeps them loyal. There are exceptions to this rule, and there are also exceptions to the rule that negroes betray. I have the pleasure and the honor of the acquaintance of some negro prisoners at Atlanta who would sooner die than ingratiate themselves with the officials by a falsehood.

Accordingly, complaints of brutal treatment at Atlanta are not frequent, either to the officials or to investigators; otherwise, I need not tax your imagination to picture what happens to the complainants after the investigators have departed.

Order and discipline--as appertaining to prisoners, not to officials--must be preserved; of course they must, if we are to have any prisons at all. And since there is no way for the prisoners to compel the guards to keep within the license accorded to them, we must compel the prisoners to accept whatever injustice or outrage the unrestrained despots of the ranges have the whim to inflict upon them. There are desperate revolts at times--desperate in the literal sense, since they have no hope of relief in them, but only the tragic rage against tyranny which will sometimes blaze up in victims--and on the other hand there are officials who will resign their positions rather than connive at abuses. But every means is taken to avert this last; for guards know things, and the System could be shaken by men who not only know, but, unlike prisoners, have a chance to make what they know believed.

All this time we have been waiting just inside the prison gates. The difference between just inside and just outside is important; for nine convicted men out of ten, it would be punishment for their misdeeds more than sufficient to be taken no further on the way to retribution than that. Whatever humiliation and disgrace they are capable of feeling or have cause to feel is at that first moment at its height; it strikes upon them unaccustomed and defenseless--never so acutely sensitive as then. Afterward, familiarity with misery and shame renders them progressively more and more callous, without adding one jot to the public odium of their position. They can never forget that first clang of the closing gates in their ears; the whole significance of penal imprisonment is in that. Many a man, the moment after that experience, might turn round and go forth a free man, yet with a soul charged with all the mortal burden that man-devised penalties can inflict upon him. Moreover, not having been unmanned and his nature violated by physical insults and outrages, he might find strength and spirit to begin and pursue a better life thereafter. The "lesson" (word which our shallow and officious moralists roll so sweetly under their tongues) would have been taught him to the last tittle, and withal enough of the man remain to profit by it. Whereas, under the existing conditions, no more than four or five years in jail destroy any possibility of future usefulness in most men; they have been hammered into something helpless, dazed, or monstrous; and even if they have courage to attempt to take hold of life again, they are defeated by the unremitting pursuit of our spy system, which depends for the main part of its livelihood upon getting ex-convicts back to jail--whether on sound or on perjured evidence is all one to the spies. So, as I said some time ago, most prison sentences are life sentences, to all practical intents. To the manhood of the man, prison means death.

Do some of the above statements appear extreme? Read on, and decide. Meanwhile I will observe that so long as prisons endure, such abuses as have been hinted at must persist. Whatever reforms have in special instances ameliorated them, have in so far only gone to show that the whole system is vicious and irrational.

My friend and I looked at our new masters with curiosity; they looked at us with what might be termed arch amusement. With such a look do small boys regard the beetles, kittens, or other animals, power to torment whom has been given them. It was after prison hours--the men had been already locked in their cells, and the warden and deputy had gone home. It was left to the subordinates to put the fear of God in our hearts; we could only surmise how far they would go in that instruction. We did not then know that their power was limited only by their good pleasure. But it is an accepted and reasonable principle with them that the sooner one begins to take the nonsense out a prisoner, the better. The strangeness of his surroundings intimidates him at the start, and he more readily realizes that he has no friends and that he is in prison--not (as one of the guards afterward took occasion to remark) in a "sanitarium for decayed crooks." A good scare thrown into him now will bring forth more fruit than greater pains taken--and inflicted--hereafter.

Our anticipations, however, were the less formidable, because we had been exhaustively assured during the past ten days that Atlanta Penitentiary was not so much a penitentiary as a sort of gentlemen's summer resort and club, where conditions were ideal and treatment almost foolishly humane and tender. This information came not only from all court officials with whom we had held communion on the subject, but from our own counsel at the trial; the judge himself seemed to believe it, and if you ask the prison authorities at Atlanta, they will earnestly assure you that prisoners there are treated like gentlemen, are given every material comfort consistent with their being prisoners at all, are sumptuously fed and housed, and are helped in all ways to build up their manhood, maintain their self-respect, and prepare themselves for a career, after liberation, as valuable and industrious citizens. We were naturally disposed to credit assertions so emphatically and variously made,--some basis for them there must be. And it was obvious, at a glance, that the corridor in which we stood was spacious and airy, with a clean limestone pavement; that the disorder and shiftlessness of the Tombs was absent here. The guards who attended us wore neat dark uniforms of military cut; and if their caps were tilted back on their heads, or cocked on the northeast corner, that was a pardonable expression of their authority and importance. I saw no firearms and no blood, nor were the groans of tortured convicts audible. I remembered the flowers in the garden outside, and was prone to think that things might have been very much worse; they were certainly better, at a first glance, than at Sing Sing, which I had visited on a newspaper assignment about fifteen years before. I had resolved beforehand to make the best of everything, and it seemed already possible that I might not have to make believe very much to do so.

No resolve, however, could overcome the influence of that locked and barred gate, nor the realization that I was a convict, and that nobody inside the penitentiary had any doubt that I was justly convicted. Friends were remote and helpless; the support of former good repute was annulled; I stood there impotent, one man against the Federal Government, with nothing to aid me but the weight of my personal equation (whatever that might be worth) and my private attitude on the question of my guilt, which the trial had not modified, but which could be of no practical benefit to me here. The sensation of confronting everywhere a settled and hostile skepticism as to one's integrity was novel, and hard to meet with a firm countenance. And I felt how easily this sensation might crush the courage of one who was conscious of being justly condemned. How many men must be sitting yonder in those cells who lacked the moral consolations that I had! The thought sharpened my perception of the horror of all imprisonment, but at the same time stiffened my fortitude; for if these men could live through their ordeal, how much more could I!

Meanwhile we were being hurried through the handsome corridor, and down a flight of iron steps to a less presentable region. There was no aggressive brutality, only a peremptory curtness, entirely proper in the circumstances. Our only defense against physical severity was a bearing of cheerful but not overdone courtesy, and we gave that what play we might. I could not foretell how I might behave under a clubbing, and would not bring the thing to a test, if I could decently avoid it. In a long, low, shabby, ill-lighted room we were lined up against a counter, on the other side of which were two or three of our fellow prisoners--the first we had seen--whose function it was to fit us with prison suits. They consisted of a sack coat and trousers of gray-blue cloth--rather heavy goods, for the warm season had not yet begun--and this was obviously far from being their first appearance on a convict; suits are handed down from one generation of prisoners to another until they are entirely worn out; my own was of an ancient vintage and a good deal defaced, but I had no ambition to be a glass of fashion in jail. Of course I could only conjecture what diseases previous wearers of it might have suffered from; but I hoped for the best. Every new arrival at the penitentiary is presumed to be dirty until he is proved clean, and the only way for him to prove his bodily purity is to submit to a bath. The regulation is commendable, and was welcome to us after our day and night in the train; but a comrade of mine from the mountain wildernesses of South Carolina, where bathing is still regarded as a degrading innovation, described to me long afterward what a sturdy battle he had put up against the disgrace, and being a lusty youth, it had taken the best efforts of several guards to hold him under the spout long enough to wet him--and themselves into the bargain. Though this was the first time since infancy that I had bathed under compulsion, I complied very readily, and even said to my friend, "This isn't so bad!" It is not permitted, under the law, to give out any news about prisoners to the world without, after they have once passed the portals; nevertheless, this memorable remark of mine was printed next day in the New York newspapers, together with the scarlet hue of my necktie, and some other details,--my registered prison number among them, my own first knowledge of which was derived from the published paragraph. It was my first intimation of a fact which afterward exercised no small influence on my destiny in the prison--that I was a "distinguished," or at least a notorious prisoner. This influence had its good as well as its bad aspect, in the long run, but the latter was in the beginning the more conspicuous. The unidentified press-agent who disseminated to an eager world the news about the bath and the necktie, continued to be active during our stay in Atlanta, but his other communications were not even approximately so accurate as the first one, and nearly all of them were children of his imagination exclusively, and were more likely to be gratifying to the officials than to my fellow prisoner and myself.

From the bath to the bedchamber. Up the darksome stairs again into the stately corridor; through an inner gateway, and into a wide hall which communicated to right and left, through small steel doors, with the west and east ranges (dormitories). The west door was unlocked, and we were pushed into a huge room, about two hundred feet by a hundred and twenty, with tall barred windows along each side. Inside this space had been constructed a sort of inner house of steel, seven or eight stories in height, with zig-zag stairways at either end, leading to narrow platforms that opened on the individual cell doors. These doors were barred, and were locked by throwing a switch at the near end of the ranges; but any particular door could also be opened by a key. The cell doors of the inner structure were at a distance of some twenty feet from the walls and windows of the outer shell, and got what light and air they had from these--none too much of course. Also, the guard on duty in the range, if the weather be chilly, will close the windows, against the protests of the prisoners, and against the regulations too; but most of the guards are thin-blooded Southerners, and diseased into the bargain, and do not like cold air. The consequence is that the four hundred pairs of lungs in each range soon vitiate the atmosphere; the prisoners turn and toss in their cots, have bad dreams, and rise in the morning with a headache.

We mounted three or four flights of iron steps, and were introduced into a cell near the corner. It was, like all the others, a steel box about eight feet long by five wide, and seven or eight high. On one side, two cots two feet wide were hinged against the wall, one above another; they reduced the living space to a breadth of three feet. The wall opposite was made of plain plates of steel, and so was the inner end of the cell, but in this, at a man's height from the floor, was a round hole an inch in diameter. That was a part of the spy system; for between the two rows of cells is a narrow passage, in which the guard can walk, and, himself unseen and unheard, spy upon the prisoners and listen to their conversation. All prisoners are at all times of the day and night under observation. This seems a slight thing; but the cumulative effect of it upon men's minds is disintegrating. At no moment of their lives can they command the slightest privacy. And what right to privacy, you ask, has a prisoner? Would he not use it to cut his way through the chilled steel walls with his teeth and nails, or to plot revolt with his cellmate?--Possibly; but even a beast seeks privacy at certain junctures; and to deny all privacy tends to bestialize human beings. It is a part of the "put-the-fear-of-God-in-his-heart" principle--to break, humiliate, degrade the man, and render him unfit for human association. There are a washbasin and a toilet seat at the foot of the cot, facing the barred door. What difference can it make to a convict if the guard, or any other passer-by, watches him while he uses them?

There had been issued to us sheets, a pillowcase, and a gray blanket of the army sort; our first duty was to make our beds. Mattress and pillow were stuffed stiff with what felt like wood chips, and was probably straw and corn-husks; the pillow was cylindrical; the mattress was hillocked and hollowed by the uneasy struggles with insomnia of countless former users. There was a campstool whose luxuries we might share. We had, each, a prison toothbrush, and a comb. In the ceiling of the cell, beyond reach of an outstretched arm, was an electric bulb which would be darkened at nine o'clock. But all this was welcome; I had often roughed it in conditions quite as severe; my spirits could not be dashed by mere hardships or inconveniences. We put our domestic menage in order cheerfully, glad that we had been celled together, instead of doubling up with strangers. Nor would it have discouraged us to know that the west range was the one occupied by negroes and dangerous characters. The place was silent; none of the demoniac chantings and hyena laughter of the Tombs. We had our little jests and chucklings as we made our arrangements; Courage, Comrade! the period of suspense and anticipation is passed; we are at grips with the reality now!

Moreover--"Every prisoner, on installation in his cell, is supplied with rolls and hot coffee, and with pipe and tobacco!" Thus would the statement run in the report to the Department. What if the bread be uneatable, the coffee undrinkable, and the tobacco unsmokable? The mere idea of such things is something; besides, prisoners do contrive, being hard put to it, to consume them. We ourselves at least tried all three; if it proved easier to be abstinent than self-indulgent, that was our own affair. Meanwhile, our mental appetites were appeased by a little gray pamphlet, containing the rules governing the conduct of convicts in the penitentiary. There were a great many of them, and not a few required thought to penetrate their significance. Why, for instance, should special emphasis be laid upon the injunction to rest one's shoes against the bars of the door upon retiring? We were never informed; but I presume it must have been to prevent a man being tempted to reach out an arm a hundred feet long through his bars, throw the switch, steal along the platform, open the steel door, unbar the two outer gates, climb over the thirty-four foot wall, and escape--all the while avoiding the notice of the range guard, of the guards in the corridors, and of the watchman on the tower outside, all of whom were armed with magazine rifles and were yearning for an opportunity to use them. Of course, he would want to have on his shoes for such an enterprise, so that if the shoes were visible inside his door, it was prima facie evidence that he himself was also within. Another rule was italicized--"_Do not try to escape--you might get hurt!_" I refrained from testing the validity of either prohibition.

In the midst of our perusal, we were interrupted by the arrival of a visitor. He was a slight-built, slope-shouldered young fellow, in prison garb, with a meager visage heavily furrowed with sickness and suffering--he had tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, and the indigestion with which all prisoners who eat the regular prison fare are afflicted. Not that Ned (as I will call him, since it was not his name) mentioned his condition; it was determined long afterward by the diagnosis of my friend; Ned's object in visiting us was not to air his own troubles, but to assuage, so far as he might, the gloom and uneasiness of the new arrivals. In his haggard face shone a pair of very intelligent and kindly gray eyes, and above them rose a compact, well-filled forehead. I was fortunate enough to keep in touch with this young man during my stay, and I found no more lovable nature in the penitentiary. He made no secret of the fact that he had been guilty of a Federal offense, and he never expressed contrition for it; "I made a mistake in taking another man in with me," he remarked; "you are never safe unless you go it alone." He had not been systematically educated, but he had read widely and judiciously, talked correctly, though with occasional colloquial idioms thrown in, and he was a concentrated and original thinker. His opinions were bold, independent, and sound, his insight was very penetrating, and his knowledge of matters of criminal procedure and of prison conditions was accurate and ample. Facts which I afterward learned for myself were never out of accord with information he had given me; and the sanity and clarity of his judgments were refreshing and remarkable. His courage was undemonstrative but indomitable; he never complained of his own condition and experiences, but was instant in his sympathy with the misfortunes of others. No more welcome and valuable counselor than he could have come to us in those first hours of our durance.

That he was able to visit us was due to his being a "runner," as those prisoners are termed who are assigned to carrying messages and doing odd jobs in the ranges. He leaned against the bars and spoke manfully and pungently, with touches of gay humor now and then; advised us to our conduct--what to do and what to avoid; and when he noticed the little gray pamphlet, said scornfully, "Don't muss up your ideas with that! There's a hundred rules there, and every one of 'em is broken every day. Those rules are for show; what happens to you depends on who the guard is, and how he happens to be feeling. You can go as far as you like sometimes, and other times you'll get hauled up if you turn your head sideways. The screw" (guard) "on this range is decent; he won't crowd you too much. Keep quiet, and do what they tell you, and the odds are you'll get by all right. Of course, if some fellow gets a grudge against you, he's liable to hammer you like hell; there are some prisoners here that get on the wrong side of a screw, and--well, it goes hard with 'em! But if you're a little careful, I guess you'll get through all right.

"I've read all about your case in the papers, and I know you oughtn't to be here; and Bill" (the Warden) "likely knows it too, and as folks on the outside are on the watch for what happens to you, he'll think twice how he treats you. Bill is a cunning one; he keeps his ear to the ground; when he sees that the reform people are going to put something across, he backs it up, and gives out that he suggested it himself; but up to a year or two ago, he did the worst sort of things to the men; even in his early reports and addresses he advocated treatment that he'd never dare stand for now--except on the quiet! He gets himself written up in the local papers here as the model warden--warm-hearted and broad-minded, and all that flap-doodle! But if he had his way, you'd think you were back in the dark ages in this penitentiary. Wickersham threw a bit of a scare into him a couple of years back; and there have been others; but most of the inspectors that are sent here stand in with him; he gives them good feeds in his house, and takes them out in his auto, and fills 'em up with soft talk--about 'his boys,' and his fatherly interest in 'em, and all that--but he keeps the dark cells and the rest of the dirty work out of their sight, and of course none of the men dares say anything to 'em--it would be all day with them if they did--as soon as the inspector turned his back. That's what gets the men's goat--that he puts up such a humane front, and all the while hammers them on the sly. They'd prefer being told at the start they were going to get hell, and then getting it; but it goes against their grain to get it, and meantime have folks outside believe they're in a gentlemen's country club!"

Ned imparted his information by fits and starts; ever and anon he would break off abruptly and walk off down the range, to give the guard the idea that he was about his ordinary business; then he would return, squat down on his hams beside the door, and murmur along in his rapid, distinct tones. All that he said was abundantly confirmed later.

Finally--"Good night--sleep well--they'll put you on some job in a few days; it's the first days that go hardest with most men, but you'll get used to it; you might get out on parole, too--but don't count on it; of all the frauds in this prison, parole is the worst! And if they ever pass that 'Indeterminate Sentence' law--good-by! Imagine Bill with that thing to use as a club over us! He'd make every other man here a lifer!"

He laughed in the prison way--silently, in his throat--and went away, after warning us that it was near nine o'clock. Our watches had been taken away from us; no doubt, a prisoner might commit suicide by sticking his watch in his windpipe, or he could bribe a guard with it to bring him cigarette papers, or "dope." Besides, what has a man in jail to do with time? Our warm-hearted and fatherly masters desire their charges to exist so far as practical in a dead, unmeasured monotony, where a minute may seem to prolong itself to the dimensions of an hour; to feel themselves utterly severed from the world they have annoyed or injured. That is the penitentiary ideal; but it has of late become impossible fully to realize it. A prison will always be a prison; but at any rate, light shall be let in on it.

Meanwhile, our cell light went out; and we waited for the dawn. _

Read next: Chapter 5. Routine

Read previous: Chapter 3. The Road To Oblivion

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