Home > Authors Index > Julian Hawthorne > Subterranean Brotherhood > This page
The Subterranean Brotherhood, a non-fiction book by Julian Hawthorne |
||
Chapter 10. Our Brother's Keeper |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ CHAPTER X. OUR BROTHER'S KEEPER Tigers love their cubs, hens their chickens, dogs love their masters and all these will fight and die in defense of what they love. Human mothers generally love their offspring. Love in the common sense is common or instinctive, and involves no moral quality. It is love of one's own, and contains a better form of self love. But mercy is of higher birth. Animals know nothing of it; savages and the lower types of man ignore it. We ascribe a divine source to it when we pray God to have mercy on us; we do not ask Him to love us. All higher religions enjoin it. Mercy is love purified from self, or wholly altruistic. It is a man loving another not because of blood relationship, or because of expected benefits, or even because of benefits bestowed, but on the simple ground that he is his human brother, child of the same Divine Father. It is purer than the racial feeling, and it includes the animal creation outside humanity in its scope--as the Bible puts it, "the merciful man is merciful to his beast." It is the Golden Rule in manifestation; we see in the one to whom we are merciful ourself in another form, under different conditions, and we do to him as we would have him do to us. It seems to require a certain maturity of mind, acquired or inherited; children below puberty seldom have it. It is easily forfeited, and indifference to the suffering of others is readily established. It is to be guarded and developed as a sacred possession of man at his highest, and constantly nourished by thought and deed. And no man is so high and strong but he may and does need the mercy of some being loftier and more powerful than himself, which he cannot claim if he have not himself done mercifully to those below him.
Unlimited power is a trust too arduous for any mortal, for it should presuppose perfect knowledge, all-penetrating intelligence, boundless experience, and the mercy which is born of these--for there is a bastard brother of mercy which is of the parentage of ignorance and cowardice, which shrinks from the sight of suffering from mere pusillanimity of the nerves, and does not recognize that suffering may be mercifully inflicted or permitted and beneficently endured. But the community does not select its prison officials on the basis above indicated; it is satisfied if they be competent to "handle men," have a sagacious familiarity with human depravity, will tolerate no nonsense, can indict plausible reports for the Department, and show a good balance at the end of the fiscal year, or, as guards and under-strappers, keep the men submissive and orderly and allow no outbreaks. As for knowledge, a public school education is ample, with such intelligence as may be supposed to go with it; and the experience of a ward heeler or a thug will ordinarily suffice to pass a candidate. As a matter of fact, the community never knows anything about its prison officials until some special scandal transpires under their administration, or unless some heaven-sent phoenix of a warden unaccountably manifests humane and enlightened tendencies. Their appointment is left to the political machine, which hands it out on the principle of what is he, or was he worth to us? As for justice and mercy--my good sir, you seem to forget we are talking of convicted criminals! I affirm, however, that justice--which is intelligent mercy--is required nowhere so urgently as with convicts; that any punishment which aims at more than restraining convicts from practises calculated to injure their own best interests, is a crime; and that cruelty to persons imprisoned and helpless, be the plea in extenuation of it what it may, is damnable and unpardonable wickedness. Meanwhile, there is not and has never been in the United States a jail in which revengeful, malicious and unjustifiable punishments have not been inflicted, and in which cruelty does not stain the record of each year and day. There have appeared lately in the newspapers stories of enormities perpetrated in Russian prisons. Terrible barbarians, those Russians! Yet, barring one feature of them only, they can be paralleled by what is currently done in prisons here. This one feature, is the absence in the Russian infernos of all hypocritical protestations to the public of humane treatment and of aversion from severities. The Russian cannot do more than beat, torture and kill his prisoners; but we do the same. It is done at Blackwell's Island, at Sing Sing, at Auburn, at Jefferson City, at Leavenworth (until the other day at least), in San Quentin, and countless others, including my own Atlanta: only, there, the policy of suppression of news and promulgation of falsehood is perhaps carried to a more nearly perfect extreme than in most other prisons. A few years ago, but under the present regimen at Atlanta, the workers in the stone shed there were pursuing their occupation in the torrid heat of a summer day, when one of them, a young man named Ed Richmond, asked the guard on duty for leave to retire for a few moments. Such requests must of course often be made. But Richmond was a man who had not been lucky enough to win the favor of the higher officials in the prison, and this was known to the guards, who felt that they might with impunity treat him harshly. Richmond had been a good deal abused, and his mind had become somewhat unbalanced; he would sometimes talk incoherently and act oddly. It had been noticed that the stone shed guard "had it in for Ed," as the prisoners say; but nothing very serious was looked for. Be that as it may, something serious was about to occur. Five or six years after this day, I was walking, under convoy of the Deputy Warden, in the prison grounds that lie outside the walls, when we stumbled upon the prison graveyard. It lay at the crest of some rising ground, partly overshadowed by second growth timber, and was merely an unenclosed clearing in the rough undergrowth with rows of headstones standing one behind the other, each with a name and date on it. But under all of them lay all that remained on earth of prison tragedies; for even if a prisoner die a natural death in prison, he dies with a broken heart and poisoned mind, abandoned, in gray despair, friendless, shut out from sky and freedom, hearing with dulled ears the clanging of steel gates, seeing the blank walls, deprived of the sympathetic words and glances of friends--a miserable, unknown death. Silence and obliteration close over him; and here he lies. On one of the headstones I read the name of Ed Richmond, and the date of his end. He had not died a natural death, but there was nothing on his tombstone to show it. I already knew his story, having heard it from several eyewitnesses. On the day above mentioned, the guard had granted his request; but after the man had been absent a few minutes, he called to him to come out. Richmond did not at once respond. The guard called to him again, more peremptorily, and advanced toward the place where he was, outside the stone shed building. Richmond, as the guard came nearer, mumbled something; the guard seemed angered, and stepped up to him, raising his club to strike. Richmond instinctively put up an arm to ward the blow, and as it descended he caught the end of the club in his hand. This was the head and front of his offending, and for this he was to die. The guard dropped the club, drew his revolver, and shot Richmond four times in the body. He also fired another shot, the bullet going through a wooden partition into a part of the shed where some prisoners were working, barely missing one of them. Richmond slowly dropped where he stood and lay huddled on the ground; the guard stood looking coolly at him. One of the prisoners, a negro, ran up and took the dying man's head on his knee; others looked on. After awhile an official came up and ordered the man taken to the hospital. But his hurts were mortal, and in a few minutes he was dead. The men in the stone shed continued their work. An investigation within the walls was held, the guard was exonerated, and was still on duty when I was in the prison. The officials who had disliked Richmond were relieved of the annoyance of his presence. There were no inconvenient newspaper reporters about. If the dead man had friends outside, they never were able to do anything. It seems unlikely that the guard who killed him would have done it had he not felt confident that the higher officials would condone the deed. Perhaps, had he been arrested and indicted, he might have uttered some names; but he was exonerated, and he has kept his mouth shut. This happened before the date of Attorney-General Wickersham's visit to the prison, and therefore before the change in Warden Moyer's ideas as to the expediency of severe measures in the handling of convicts. Were the thing to be done again to-day, it would probably not occur out in the open air and sunshine, with persons looking on, but under circumstances of decent seclusion. The outside public is becoming a little squeamish about prison killing. But in Russia there is no public opinion, or none that is audible, and the prison guards there are not hampered in their work by the necessity of doing it under cover, as they are here. It is a question which method is preferable. I believe some of our prisoners would vote for the open way of killing and torturing. It is exasperating to be "done up" in secret, in the dark, stifled and gagged, with no chance to die fighting. I have no comparative statistics as between us and Russia, but it would not be surprising if our record of men beaten, starved, poisoned, hung up in chains in dark cells, and killed by neglect and cruelties, were to size up fairly well against what Russia has to show. Considering the restrictions put upon them, our prison autocrats certainly do well. Some doubt has been created in the public mind as to whether there really are dark cells in the Atlanta Penitentiary, or, if there be, whether their use has not been long discontinued. I never heard any categorical statement in denial of it from any of the officials, though I have read something to that effect in local newspapers. Visitors never see them, and I know of no prison inspectors who have done so; they are shown instead the light cells on an upper floor, which are habitable enough, with windows admitting daylight, and a cot bed. But the dark cells are another story altogether, and their existence can no more be denied successfully than that of the prison itself. A man named H.B. Rich was employed in the prison for nine years as foreman of the blacksmith's shop; he says that he helped build two dark cells in the basement, and often riveted chains on convicts there. "They were chained to the door," he goes on, "hanging by their hands, sometimes for twenty-four hours. Often they were thus chained up during the day, but at night the chain attached to the frame of the door was loosened; the other chain was attached to a vertical rod, the ring sliding up and down, so that the man was able to lie on the bare cement floor. There were no cots. The food was generally one slice of bread and a cup of water a day, sometimes two or three. Men were often kept thus for weeks at a time, and would come out so pallid and weak that they could scarcely walk, and blinded from long confinement in darkness. A convict named S. was kept in the dark hole two weeks; I was often called to chain him, as he was a powerful man; but when he would come out, he was so weakened that he could scarcely move." I may add here that I have often talked with the convict here mentioned, and he told me details of his experiences. I would print his name and story, but he is still in confinement--he has lived two and twenty continuous years in prison--and he might be made to suffer for his revelations. Among other things, he said that he had been in the punishment cells, in the aggregate, eight years! If he were not a lion of strength and courage, he would have been dead long since. The Atlanta penitentiary claims to be the most humane in the world. But eight years in chains and darkness seems a long time, even taken in instalments. A man lately released has this to say: "The administration of the penitentiary is a sham and pretense. 'Reform' is a show, for the benefit of government inspectors and visitors, with, underneath, a callous and brutal disregard for the welfare of the convicts moral and physical. No tortures? I was trussed up, face to wall, with arms outstretched, for ten hours. When loosed, I just dropped to the floor from exhaustion, and did not rise till the next morning. That was during the present administration. When visitors and newspaper reporters go through the prison, 'there isn't any hole'; but the prisoner who thoughtlessly infracts a rule knows that there is one! "In the Isolation Building there is a number of three-cornered cells where men are chained to the doors; they have little cots; these cells are shown. But down beneath there is the real hole. These underground cells have no cots; when a man drops, he drops on the cement floor. If they wish severely to discipline a man, they can make these cells practically airtight, and then turn on the steam through the pipes." Let us have more testimony as to the dark hole. "The hole," writes another inmate, "is not a hole in the wall or in the ground, but it is a place to turn a man's cheeks white and to make his knees shake and his lips tremble, when, for some infraction of very strict rules, he is ordered to the hole. It is a row of holes; far down in the bottom of the big bastile is a row of little cells, six feet wide, nine feet long, and perhaps ten feet high. Solid concrete, with iron grating in the narrow door. Absolutely dark. Furniture, one iron rod, one blanket. The man is handcuffed between the rod and the wall, hands apart as far as he can hold them; at night the wall fastening is loosed, and he can lie down sliding the ring of his handcuff down the rod. No mattress or bed--just floor. Food, three ounces of bread and a glass of water at noon. The rules are said to be less severe than formerly; but two half-breed Indians, former friends, recognizing each other in Sunday school, ventured to whisper a greeting; they were put in the hole two days and nights, and one of them, a stout hardy boy, came out trembling and shaking as with mortal illness." A man who served as guard in the prison under the present warden, but left in 1907, affirms that barbarities were not the exception at that time, but the "horrible custom. The dark hole is a reality; men were kept there weeks at a time, to my certain knowledge, within stifling walls, chained standing for intolerable periods, with great suffering. The public understands 'solitary confinement' to mean a cell by one's self; but this cell is a dark dungeon below earth level. One convict had to be brought out on a litter, his legs swollen to a frightful size; he could not stand erect. I was reprimanded for entering his cell and helping him to sit up. A man named L. who had drawn back his hammer threateningly when a guard advanced upon him armed with a 'square,' but who ceased to resist when the guard drew his revolver, was sentenced to one hundred and forty-five days in the dungeon, with three slices of bread, with water, per day. Christian Endeavorers," this witness adds, "never have an opportunity to observe the real conditions. No outsider comes in contact with things as they are. No outsider in Atlanta has ever seen the dungeons." G.W., formerly employed in the prison, says that "the hole near the plumber's shop was built while Morse, the banker, was in the prison, for I helped build it, and the warden, with another official, was down to see it at ten in the morning." Speaking of the statement that the dark hole was no longer in use, he adds, in his letter to me, "You know of the hanging up in the dark cell of the old Englishman, in October"--the month I left the penitentiary. I do know of it; the fight of this stubborn old fellow against the oppression of the prison authorities was the talk of the ranges just before my departure; he had done nothing worse than to use bad language; he would not give in; and I believe that it was found advisable at last to release him. The case of poor little B. had a less agreeable sequel. He was dying of diabetes during the latter months of his confinement; he was an incorrigible little thief, a man of extraordinarily acute mind, and a sort of saturnine humorist withal. He had been repeatedly convicted and imprisoned, but "I can't let it alone," he would say. He was plump and flabby, ghastly pale, with protruding eyes, very clear and penetrating. He was ridiculously impudent, but being so soon to die, as he himself well knew, none of the prisoners bore him a grudge. The authorities, however, thought it well to discipline him, and he was so repeatedly maltreated by them, and put in the dark hole, that his disease was greatly inflamed and the end hastened. I said something designed to be encouraging to him shortly before I left; but he fixed me with those singular eyes, and said, "I am doomed!" The last I heard of B. was in a letter from a lady who has done much to help and relieve the sufferings and wrongs of prisoners in the jail. "B. is in a dying condition," she writes; "he was severely punished while suffering from his disease. W.," she goes on, "died three days after a ten-days' punishment. He had to be lifted from the dark cell and carried to the hospital by attendants." Upon the whole, one has grounds for believing that the dark hole is not a fairy tale, and that it still exists and is at work in Atlanta Penitentiary, in spite of the impression to the contrary of the humane warden and his officials. The geography of the places is, however, obscure, and is known to the elect only; it is said by inmates of old standing that underground passages connect the prison buildings and lead from one dungeon to another. This sounds romantic, but would be obviously useful in practise. A map of the premises, surface and subterranean, would be interesting, and may hereafter be achieved by some inspection which really inspects. I have not spoken of some features of the dark cells, as described by men who have experienced them, because they are so revolting that editors of newspapers would decline to print them. Human beings are compelled to endure many things which the fastidiousness of other human beings cannot tolerate even the hearing of. A prisoner named Keegan was killed at Atlanta not long before I was released, not by a guard's bullet, but by means as sure though slower and more cruel. We were all conversant with his case at the time, but I will quote the man who knew him and his sufferings most intimately. Here is his crude narrative written to me on prison paper. "William Keegan died in August of this year (1913) at the Pen. He was first taken sick with pains in the legs, hands and arms, and went to morning sick call, but could never get anything done, because he was a little deaf and could not hear what the doctor said, and so could explain no further, and he was in a very bad fix. They did nothing for him, and he was afraid to see the doctor, because he would have been impatient, and would have sent him to the hole, and then he would lose time. But he did go up to see him after the pains got into his back also, and he told him he would like to get out of the stone shed; and the doctor told him there was nothing the matter with him, but he was only faking and trying to get out of work--which I know and can swear to as being true. "If ever there was a sick man, Keegan was him. He told M. the foreman about it one day, who told him to have the doctor look him over, and sent him up one afternoon; the doctor looked him over and told him he was only a crank--nothing at all the matter with him. Soon after he was taken very sick, and one night I called the prison nurse to his cell, and he had him taken to the hospital, where he stayed some time, but it did him no good, for he came back to the cell house in just as bad a fix as before. Then they put him to work in the paint-house, and after he had been there about a week, they said he was crazy, and put him in the hole. He was treated shamefully in the hole, for the prison nurse even told me so. Then he was taken again to the hospital, and he never came out of it, for he died there, and the prison nurse told me he suffered terribly before his death. This I will swear is true before God. "Very near every man in the Pen had a bad stomach, and could get nothing for it, for if you went to the doctor, he would tell you you ate too much, and give you a big dose of salts, and if you did not take them, he would put you in the hole, and then you would lose good time. But if a man had a pull, he would get along right enough. There was A., a bank wrecker, he was clerk in the stone shed, and I have seen him have eggs right in the kitchen, when we had only rice to eat with cold water and bread which was sour. If he didn't want to work he didn't have to, for when I worked as runner for the plumber I have seen A. lying down and smoking and reading or pretty near anything he wanted to do; but if other men had done less than half the things he did, they would have been put in the hole and lost good time also. Things should be looked into, for it is sure run shamefully." Readers would perhaps like to know more of the doctor, whose professional activities are so engagingly described in the above statement. He is a medical graduate of recent vintage, poor but aristocratic, engaged to attend four hours a day at the penitentiary at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year. "I need the money," he once admitted to a colleague in the prison. Keegan, as we have seen, was under his penetrating eye for months, and he died a few days after the young gentleman had assured him that there was nothing the matter with him. The doctor dresses well, and has an air; he has the use of an automobile, and sometimes escorts good looking young nurses, or other young ladies, about the prison grounds. He has a knack at surgical operations, and urges prisoners to be operated upon; they sometimes recover, and sometimes do not. His use of drugs in his practise seems to have been mainly restricted to prescribing salts, and the hole, both effective in their way, but not always happy in their application to the cases under consideration. He was always civil to me, and put me under the obligation of saving my life, for he ordered me a milk diet when I was succumbing to the influences of prison hash and "hot dog." It was part of his duty to visit the dining room every day--or was it every other day?--and inspect the food served to the prisoners. During my six months' stay, he appeared twice in the doorway, where he exchanged amenities with the guard; and once he traversed the aisle between my row of tables and the next, accompanied by some very nice looking girls. He had other duties, which he discharged with similar punctuality and fervor. And all for fifteen hundred a year. There was a hearty, full-blooded, good natured young fellow, with red hair, who worked in the blacksmith's shop, and worked well. His overseer was a negro--this often happens in Atlanta Penitentiary. The heat in the forge room during summer was intense, and the red haired boy used to get rush of blood to the head, and finally asked a high official for leave to step out in the open air occasionally and cool off. It was granted. But on one of these outings his negro master ordered him to go back and do a job of work for him; the other quoted his official permission; there was a wrangle, ending in an appeal to a higher official still. The latter, in the face of the lower official's testimony that he had authorized the recess, supported the negro, and the young blacksmith was sentenced to five days in the dark cell and thirty days' loss of good time. Discipline must be preserved. Are such conditions as I have described general? The newspapers during my stay at Atlanta described a discussion in local prison circles as to the propriety or expediency of whipping female prisoners in the Georgia female prison (not connected with the federal penitentiary), and confining them in the dark hole. The warden of the prison, a gentleman named Mitchell, and his guards, said that women did not mind confinement in the dark hole, and got no harm from it--though it was shown that after being so confined for a day or two, they were scarce able to stand and wholly unfit for work. The guards declared that the women could not be effectively disciplined except by flogging, and threatened to quit in a body if the practise were disallowed. Dr. MacDonald, of the prison, testified that although some wardens might abuse the power of flogging, and had lashed women on the bare back instead of over covering of one garment, as prescribed by the rules, still he favored whipping for them; he said the use of the "leather" was really more humane than the dungeon. Secretary Yancey, of the Prison Commission, also favored the lash. On the other hand, State Representative Blackburn said that it was "a dangerous policy to give such wide discretionary powers to wardens scattered about the state. It would give rise to terrible abuses and mistreatment. The sovereign power of the state should not be delegated to individuals only remotely accountable. The punitive system should be carefully guarded, and the line of punishment mapped out, otherwise evils will creep in; no corrective measures that border upon cruelty should be used." Representative Smith added that if we "put the power to use the whip on women in the hands of brutal and incompetent wardens, the same cruelties and atrocities which have shocked the civilized world will be repeated. Wardens, drunk with power, abuse their positions; they are appointees of a system, inexperienced and incompetent in many cases; chosen, not because of their fitness, but more likely to repay some political favor. When a good warden is found, it is more or less an accident. Give permission to whip, and the public would be horrified at the result, if ever they should learn the circumstances." That is fine; but the concluding words mean more than they say. How is the public to know? If you had a mother or a sister or daughter in that jail, would you feel entirely reassured by the declamations in the legislature of these kindly gentlemen? Would it not occur to you that, when this little flurry had blown over, the warden and his guards might possibly, and as quietly as might be, revert to what they held to be the only effective means of keeping order? It is easy, in a prison, to gag a woman so that she cannot scream, and to take her down to a secluded place, and there to lay on the leather heartily, with or without first removing the inner garment. Who is to know, or to tell? We are not Russians, to boast of these things openly. At the turpentine camp at Atmore, Alabama, thirty-five convicts whose contract had been annulled by Governor O'Neal, were brought to Mobile October 10th, 1913, and placed in the county jail. All but fourteen had been whipped with heavy straps loaded with lead, and affidavits were offered showing that two of them had been whipped to death. But Superintendent of Prisons Riley of New York, in a letter to Warden Rattigan of Auburn prison, writes: "I do not believe that any one was ever reformed by physical torture." This was not the view taken, apparently, in Jefferson City (Mo.) prison, for there, a few weeks ago, a negro was given a very hard task each day (says the _Post-Dispatch_ of St. Louis), more than he could perform. At evening he would be taken out, strapped to a post and beaten with a heavy strap. There were cuts and sores all over his body. Favored prisoners were allowed to break rules, while others were severely punished for the same thing. The penitentiary there is described as a "small hell entirely surrounded by masonry and incompetent officials." Dozens of men were brutally whipped for minor offenses. We have all heard about Blackwell's Island, New York City, where "beatings by officials, and much worse, resulted in the death of a man." Trustee Hurd found two men in dark cells, one stupefied, the other hysterical and sobbing. They had been punished for whispering. The dark cells had been ordered discontinued some weeks before. Warden Hayes, on being asked by the official why he had permitted them to be used, replied, "Well, the fact is, I've been so busy I haven't had time to get round to it!" What is his business? In Atlanta we do not use the leather; we find the club handier, and some guards are skilful in so applying it to the bodies of their patients that, while the external evidences are negligible, it occasions internal troubles which can be ascribed to "natural" causes. And there are indications that we do use the dark cell, described by Dr. MacDonald, above, as more inhumane than the lash. If this expert be correct, he gives us a standard whereby to measure how inhumane they must be. I cannot go on, though I have used only a fraction of my notebook. Moreover, I am inclined to think that the physical punishments I have instanced are not the worst that are administered in Atlanta and perhaps in other prisons. Great ingenuity is shown in the application of mental tortures, which have their outcome in insanity, but which never can be investigated by commissions and inspectors. An insane man is as safe as a dead man--if he tells tales, no one will pay attention to him. The cat-and-mouse game is a favorite with the inhumane type of wardens. Give your man alternations of hope and despair, and the results will soon reward your pains. Then there are the insults, the gibes and threats, the obscure forms of tyranny and outrage, the degradation of manhood--there are a hundred subtle ways of destroying and corrupting the spirit of a man. To be compelled to occupy the same cell with certain types of criminals is a most successful form of inhumanity; and when, as often happens, one of the two is a comparatively innocent boy, the results are awful. "Insufficient number of cells" is the explanation given; and at Atlanta at least there are the unfinished cell houses, which might have been finished years ago, had the appropriations been properly applied. "Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner!" we pray in our churches. But He says, "With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you again." We do not set the Lord a good example of mercy in our prisons. _ |
||