Death would be welcome; the infliction of it can find forgiveness; but how can we forgive the infliction of death-in-life? How can G.o.d forgive it, this profane meddling with sacred and fathomless life? Will He accept the plea that we did it "for the protection of society?--for the man"s own good?--or a warning to others?" In that day of questioning, I would rather take my chances with the man sitting in the chair in the prison tailor"s shop for seven years, a "lifer"! Infinite mercy may find means to compensate him for what we robbed him of; but what can it do with us, the robbers?
In the Federal prison there were a score or more of lifers, with some of whom it was my fortune to become acquainted. I stood in a sort of awe of them; the thought of their fate was so overwhelming that my mind could not compa.s.s it, though my heart might approach some conception of it through obscure channels of intuition. Their treatment by the prison officials was not ordinarily severe; even a warden or a guard could feel that clubbing and dark-celling would be a kind of anticlimax for a man sentenced for life. Some of them--usually negroes--would be given easy jobs, and not held too strictly to the petty regulations whose special object is to humiliate the ordinary prisoner, under guise of disciplining and reforming him. Nothing was to be gained by disciplining or reforming a "lifer." Others, however, in whom despair had taken the expression of obstinacy or savagery, were savagely handled; one of them bears terrible scars from a shooting by one of the guards, and he told me that, out of the twenty-two years he had already served, eight had been spent in the punishment cells. Others are maltreated for a while, experimentally, or to "put the fear of G.o.d in their hearts," and afterward let alone. But as a rule, there is not much fun to be got out of a "lifer" by the prison keepers, and they prefer to ignore him.
The introduction of the law allowing the privilege of applying for parole, did, to be sure, place in the hands of the authorities a weapon with which they could "get beneath the hide" (as they might term it) of these obdurate subjects. Needless to say, this measure, which provides that "lifers" may be paroled (at the discretion of the parole board) after having served fifteen years with a good prison record, did not contemplate introducing thereby a new element of misery into their lives. But the men to whose hands the "lifer" is entrusted found in it a means of making him more readily amenable to discipline by holding over him the threat of an adverse report should he prove intractable. They could keep him indefinitely in that state of torturing suspense as to his fate, which is perhaps the worst of all tortures, by withholding from him all information as to whether or not his appeal was likely to succeed.
Several cases of this kind came under my observation. In one, the release came before the man had collapsed; in others, too late. In only one or two that I know of was there any pretext that his conduct during imprisonment had been unsatisfactory. The delay was never explained; it was due to wilful or careless neglect. Two men were carried out feet foremost in a deal box after they had endured suspense up to the extreme limit of mortal capacity. They died of broken hearts--gradually broken through long months of hope slowly fading into despair.
The warden sat serene in his office, attending to business as a good official should, writing reports to the Department which testified to his efficiency and economy, welcoming visitors with his genial smile, occasionally reading encomiums upon himself in a local newspaper, written and inserted there by somebody; the guards sauntered jauntily about, c.o.c.king their caps and making their clubs dance at the end of the cords; eight hundred unsightly felons, who had once been men like you and me, filed drearily in to their meals, and out again, the worse for the experience; and all the while, from morning till night, Dennis sat on the corner of his cot in the hospital room, waiting for the news of his release. He felt, and said, at first, that it was sure to come; it would come in a day or two, or at the end of the week anyway; or at the beginning of the week after. He knew his application had been accepted; of course, those big officials had lots to do, and could not be expected to attend to him at once; but they would not forget him.
For several weeks--a month or two--Dennis kept up his spirits well; he had been in prison many years, more than the number required for parole, and he had no bad marks against him. His wife and two daughters were still living, however, and he was full of plans for his future life with them; what he would do, where he would live, how happy they all would be together, after that separation. But one day as he sat on his cot, or paced slowly up and down the hospital chamber, news was brought to him, bad news, news that his wife had died unexpectedly.
He survived it; some men survive miraculously in prison, and some die easily. Dennis had his daughters left to him still; and the release was sure to come now--they would not surely delay it any longer. He had been a tall, powerful mulatto when he first came to prison; he was a gaunt, bent skeleton of a man now, with great, bony, strengthless hands, that closed round mine with a sort of appealing, lingering pressure when we met, as if he feared to let go his hold upon a man who was sorry for him. The doctor knew--any competent physician, at least, might have known--that he could not last much longer; but the doctor said nothing and did nothing. Then--for the stars in their courses seemed to fight against Dennie--came another piece of news for him; not news of parole, but news that his daughters, both of them, had followed their mother; they too were dead. Dennis, who had begun to plan out a life with them, to be father and mother both to them, to comfort them and work for them, and to die at last with their love and companionship comforting him, was now alone in the world, and still in prison.
Time had gone by; it was six months since he had begun to look for freedom. What would freedom mean for him now, with no one in the world to go to or to be with? Probably he gave up looking for it at this point; at any rate, he spoke of it no more. He spoke very little after that, and he very seldom rose from his seat on the corner of his cot, or took notice of any one or of anything in the hospital room. He sat there, day after day, all day long, with his eyes fixed upon a certain point of vacancy; what he saw, what he thought, no one knew. His hands lay before him on his bony knees, lax and inert. Half a lifetime in prison, and now he was nearing the end, mute and motionless, making no complaint or protest--the power for that had gone by. He no longer spoke of parole; and no parole came. No doubt, the great officials were busy, and what was Dennis that they should remember him, and draw out that paper from its pigeonhole, and sign it, and send it to him? The world could get along without Dennis.
So, one day, Dennis died; and after his body had been laid in its box, the old market wagon, with the old mule between the shafts, was backed up to the door, and the box with the gray old corpse in it was shoved in and driven round to the prison burying ground and dumped into its red clay hole. There it lies; but I am not sure that that is the end of Dennis. A time may be coming, after this earthly show is over, when persons who were so much pressed for time that they could find no moment to sign a paper to save a fellow man"s life, may see him again under awkward circ.u.mstances, and be asked to explain. Justice, after all, is an Immortal, and belongs to eternity. We should beware of measuring, by the apparent slowness of her movements on this lower plane, the likelihood of her final victory.
If you have some imagination to spare, put yourself in the place of a convict who finds himself, to-day, facing a sentence of imprisonment for life. The imagination of it, even, is so appalling that you will need more than common courage to picture it to yourself. What, then, must the reality of it be? It is hard to understand how any human heart and brain can withstand the prospect of it. If it has not stopped your heart at once--if your brain has not immediately collapsed under the shock--you will think of suicide. But, perhaps, before you can find means or resolution to seek that escape, you will become conscious, in the background of your mind, of a stirring of that almost ineradicable thing that we call hope. You cannot quite bring yourself to believe that your entire earthly future is to be pa.s.sed in a prison cell. Some event will occur, some beneficent freak of destiny, some earthquake or lightning bolt, some national revolution or catastrophe, some belated sense of humanity in your brother man, some new law repealing the impious cruelty of the old law, that will break your bars before the end can come. You cannot believe that you will actually live and die in jail.
Thus you are tided over your first hours and days, and with each new day that you survive the chances of your surviving altogether increase. By and by, you fall into the prison routine, and your existence becomes mechanical and automatic. There will be occasional flamings-out of rage and despair, but they pa.s.s, and become progressively more infrequent.
You have slipped down into a merely animal stratum of existence; you live to-day because you lived yesterday, and you do not forecast to-morrow. Perhaps you learn to a.s.suage and deceive the hunger of your immortal soul by forcing your attention upon the petty ripple of daily events and duties, until you present, to the outsider, the appearance of a commonplace, non-tragic person, bearing no noticeable scars of the crime which society perpetrated on you. You perhaps lose, at last, the realization of your own inhuman plight, and are received, unawares, into the gray prison protoplasm, no longer really sensitive to impressions, though presenting the semblance of human reactions. You drift down the stream, pa.s.sive, in a sort of ghastly contentment. You have forgotten that you ever were a man.
But I am merely speculating in the direction of truths that I do not know and cannot reach. The lifers themselves whom I knew could tell me nothing; they were less demonstrative than the men of five or ten years"
sentence. We can never fathom the dealings of the Almighty with His creatures, and they, perhaps, can fathom them as little as we can. In ways inconceivable to us, they are supported.
There was a little old man known as Uncle Billy. If the parole board has kept faith with him, he should have been set free the 23rd of December.
Uncle Billy"s right arm had been amputated at the shoulder, the result of a shot through the arm from his own gun while he was getting out of a buggy. He lived in Oklahoma, Indian Territory, at the time of his story.
Billy was married to a woman who must have had some attractiveness, for a journeying pedler, who periodically pa.s.sed through the region, formed a liaison with her. There was at that time a daughter, who had just reached marriageable age. The pedler was wont practically to put Billy out of his own house during his sojourns, and usurped his place as master of the household. At one time he secured Billy"s conviction on some minor offense, and had him jailed for six months. What Billy thought of the situation I don"t know; he was a small, slight man, under five foot three, and of an intellectual cast. But he seems not to have attempted active measures, until one day he discovered that the pedler, not satisfied with the wife, was attempting the seduction of the daughter likewise.
Then, one night, Billy came to his house, and found that going on which his patience could not tolerate. He got hold of an ax, and, stealing into the room, struck the pedler, as he lay in bed, with his one arm, and split his head open. What pa.s.sed then between him and his wife is not known. Billy, I believe, was for giving himself up to the authorities at once; but the woman prevailed upon him to conceal the deed. She tied the body to the tail of the horse, and dragged it across the fields to a ditch, where she covered it with dirt and rubbish. There it lay for some weeks, until a couple of men out hunting saw an end of a suspender sticking out of the ground, and pulling at it, discovered the murdered corpse. Billy confessed, and he and his wife were lodged in jail pending their trial. The woman died there; but Billy was tried and convicted, and in consideration of the peculiar circ.u.mstances, was "let off" with a life sentence. When I knew him, he had been in a cell nearly fifteen years.
The weather was chilly; some of the prisoners were let out in the yard every day at one o"clock, to pace round in a ring for forty minutes. I saw the little, bent, thin old man, with one arm, hobbling round and round with his cane. Conversation was not permitted under the rules, but the rule was often overlooked. After I had gained an outline of his story from some old timers, I spoke to him, and he looked up at me with a pair of singularly intelligent brown eyes, and with a kindly expression of his meager little face. We conversed a little on general subjects, and I found him well educated, observant, thoughtful, with a distinct vein of subdued humor. Afterward I saw him in his cell, though there was a rule against that, too; but the guard was tolerant.
He had a violin there which he had made himself, his tools being a knife made out of a nail hammered flat and the edge sharpened, and a piece of broken gla.s.s. It was admirably fashioned, and except that it was not varnished, would have been taken for such an instrument as you buy in a shop; its tone, too, was pleasing, and Billy could discourse excellent music on it. It was in the manufacture of these fiddles that his time was pa.s.sed; the fact that he had but one hand to work with did not embarra.s.s him. His contrivance for playing on the instrument was as remarkable as the instrument itself; he had rigged up a sort of jury arm of wood and metal, with an elbow to it, and a grip to lay hold of the bow. Persons who play on violins will doubtless be more puzzled than I was to conceive how he could do it; but he did it. And for aught I could see, he was content with his singular industry; it gave him constant occupation and enabled him, I suppose, to keep thoughts of other things out of the way. Otherwise, he was utterly un.o.btrusive, almost invisible, and the guards let him alone. But the government of the United States had kept him there for fifteen years, as a menace to society. You can see him in fancy, had he been set free for doing what most human beings must have done, ranging up and down the country, dealing out terror and slaughter. Such wild beasts must be restrained. They must be disciplined and reformed, and jail is the way to do it.
Just before I left the jail, I spoke to Billy about his parole. "You and I will get out almost together," I said. "No, no," he replied, with his curious little humorous smile, "they can"t get rid of me as easy as that; I"ve got three months yet, and I"m going to stick it out to the end." I have not heard the sequel; but I can hardly believe that the authorities mean to play the cat-and-mouse game with him.
I have perhaps mentioned John Ross, who died, under promise of parole, after thirty-three years behind the bars. And there was Thomas Bram, a prisoner hardly less remarkable, freed on parole after seventeen years"
confinement. He had persistently a.s.serted his innocence from the first, and n.o.body so far as I know doubted his a.s.sertion. The evidence against him was entirely circ.u.mstantial, and there was another man in the case who seemed, to judge by the reports of the trial, to have been at least as likely to be guilty. Bram"s record in prison was wholly blameless, and though there was some opposition to freeing him, it sufficed only to obtain a delay of a few weeks beyond the date set for his release. But during those few weeks, his sufferings were trying to witness, and he was near collapse before the end came. He told me that the Attorney-General had personally promised him freedom two years before, but had done nothing toward keeping his promise. "It wasn"t right, Mr.
Hawthorne," was all the comment he allowed himself to make. Bram"s self-control was great, and his manner always soft and ingratiating; he was politic and prudent, and had probably resolved from the outset of his prison career to obtain pardon or mitigation if good conduct and unfaltering adherence to his plea of innocence could compa.s.s it. He was given a job which procured him some indulgences, and was never punished.
But if a life sentence for a guilty man be intolerable, what shall be said if he were guiltless? Think it over in your leisure moments.
I find my list is far too long to be dismissed in one chapter; and in cases where the men are still in confinement, discussion of them might prove injurious. There was a young fellow there who looked like a slender boy of seventeen; he was really over thirty years of age. But he had been imprisoned since his fifteenth year, and his face since then had not developed or taken the contours of manhood; and his manner was boyish. He was well educated in the grammar school sense, however, though I believe he had picked up most of what he knew in prison. He had a distinct, emphatic way of speaking, and believed, I fancy, that he was quite a man of the world, though, of course, he was almost totally devoid of other than prison experience. He would have been an interesting study, had not the pathos of his condition, of which he was himself unaware, made one shrink from probing it.
He had killed a man at the instigation of and under the influence of a step-father, who wished the man removed for ends of his own, and forced the child (he was nothing else) to take the job off his hands, and the law of Indian Territory, which was the scene of the affair, condemned him for life. After serving fifteen years, he applied for his parole under the law; there appeared to be no grounds so far as his prison record went for denying it; nevertheless, he was rejected. He asked the reason, and was told that it was not considered safe to set him at liberty; he had a "bad temper"--that was, I think, the explanation.
Psychological insight is a good thing in its way and place, but it may be carried too far, or employed amiss; and this looks like an ill.u.s.tration. The boy, in more than fifteen years, had never done anything in prison that called for discipline; but because some self-const.i.tuted and arbitrary psychologist chose to believe, or to say, that his temper was not under full control, he was doomed to spend the rest of his life in a cell. This prisoner knows, of course, that he has been wronged, but he does not know how much; he does not know what life in a world of free men is. But he, after being kept for half of his lifetime under duress, must submit to the caprice of a man to whom the country has entrusted absolute power. No man is qualified to exercise absolute power; no man is justified in accepting it; but we bestow it upon every chance political appointee, and what he does with it puts us to shame, whether or not we can as yet realize it.
There was at least one life prisoner in Atlanta who merits a chapter to himself; but I cannot speak of him now. He is one of the unreconciled, and his horoscope is still too cloudy to make it safe to tell his story.
A desperate criminal, he would be termed by prison experts. In truth, he is a warm-hearted, generous, high minded man, sentenced to death in his boyhood for a deed which would have been properly punished by a few months in a reformatory, afterward obtaining a commutation to life imprisonment, and now a man of more than forty years, bearing upon his body terrible scars of severities practised upon him for trying to resist wrongs which no manly man could tamely endure. A Balzac might find in him a more human and lovable _Vautrin_; a Victor Hugo could make him the hero of another _Les Miserables_; a Charles Reade could win new renown by summoning us to put ourselves in his place. But the best service I can do him now is to give him silence. He is not quite desperate yet; should he become so, the world will know his history.
IX
THE TOIL OF SLAVERY
Before the Civil War there were some millions of negro slaves in the South, whom to set free we spent some billions of dollars and several hundred thousand lives. It was held that the result was worth the cost.
But to-day we are creating some five hundred thousand slaves, white and black, each year--or that is about the number of made slaves each year in the United States; it costs us several millions to keep them in an enslaved condition, and their depredations upon society, before and after slavery, amount to several millions more. I have not the precise data, but the figures hazarded are not excessive. A sound statistician would make a more sensational showing; and when he proceeded to cast up his account for the aggregate of the years since the war, and of the estimated amounts for the coming fifty years, the bill would look large even with a hundred million paymasters to foot it.
In that bill, probably the smallest item would be the cost of crime itself--the actual loss caused to the community by the thieving of thieves,--of the thieves, that is, who have been convicted and condemned as such; for there is no way of figuring on how much the undetected thieves steal. Every time we shake the social body, in this or that spasm of probing and reform, hundreds drop out, like moths from an unprotected garment; so that at last we are p.r.o.ne to suspect that the thief, overt or covert, is more the rule than the exception, and that a good part of the cash in circulation was more or less dishonestly come by. But, leaving this aside, the money or values appropriated by thieves accredited as such and sent to jail, is an amount relatively inconsiderable, and by no means enough to pay the expenses of their apprehension, trial, and prison sojourn. It is, then, politically uneconomical to imprison them.
The reply to this is, of course, that penal slavery is preventive of crime; that if we did not prosecute malefactors, crime would multiply and abound, like weeds in a neglected garden. Perhaps it would; but the point is, that it multiplies and abounds even in the teeth of prosecutions; every year the number of convictions is greater, and the jails are already cracking their seams to contain the convicts. One might almost conclude that prisons, as now administered, stimulate crime instead of preventing it, and that we are in the predicament of Hercules in the fable, who, as fast as he cut off a head of the hydra, saw two others sprout in its place. At which rate, we might be led on to the surmise that it would be financially cheaper to let crime run on; the cost of our futile efforts to stop it would be saved, and might be set over against the loss from the increased annual depredations.
But finance is not the whole story; what about morality? and who can forecast the ruin of anarchy? The problem cannot be so crudely solved.
Crime must be prevented; doubtless nine-tenths even of the men in jail would agree to that proposition. The question is, can the jail system prevent it? and the answer is that, judged by long experience--the experience of thousands of years--it cannot. There are several reasons why it cannot, into some of which we may enquire later; but the objection to the jail system which I wish to emphasize just now is, that it not only makes slaves of convicts, but, unlike the more reasonable southern negro slavery, it makes them unproductive slaves. Either it withholds this vast body of men from production altogether, or else it forces them to toil under conditions which bring forth results the smallest possible and the most unsatisfactory. The men are not paid for what they do. Whatever profit (in "contract" prisons) accrues from their toil goes into the pockets of the contractors, or, perhaps, is used to defray the cost of their keep to the community. Or, again, if it is made to appear to go into the prisoners" pockets, it is deftly taken out again the next moment by an ingenious system of fines, which no prisoner can escape.
In short, prison labor is slave labor, and slave labor of a worse kind than was ever practised in negro slavery times. For on southern plantations, though slaves were not paid wages, they got wages" worth in good food and lodging, and (uniformly) in humane treatment, including, above all, the companionship of their wives and families; and they were able, in many instances, to buy themselves into freedom. Most of the negroes, moreover, had never known what it was to be free; their race, for generations unknown, had been slaves in their own country; they had never been free citizens of the United States, never had education, were unconscious of any disgrace in their condition, and were as happy as ever in their lives they had been or were capable of being--happier, indeed, than most negroes are in the community to-day. In all respects their condition compares favorably with that of our half million annual prison slaves, manufactured deliberately out of our own flesh and blood.
I used to contemplate the population in the Atlanta Penitentiary--the eight hundred of us--and then look at the construction work, the gardening, the tailoring, the carpentering, the product of the forge, the farming in the prison grounds outside the walls, and the work of clearing and grading on the area which the walls enclosed, and I marveled at the disproportion. Eight hundred men, many of them skilled in this or that industrial employment, most of them physically capable of active labor, and almost all of them eager to work if given intelligent and useful work to do; not a few, too, intellectually and educationally equipped to plan and direct industrial operations; and yet, with all this great potential force at command, all that was actually accomplished might have been done as well or better by a corporal"s guard of willing and well managed men. The mere economic waste of such material was criminal, without regard to the evil effect of inadequate or misapplied labor upon the men"s moral and mental state.
Can it be, I asked myself, that this extravagant idleness is forced upon the prisoners as part, and not the least evil part of their punishment?
Or is it the result of ignorance, incompetence, or indifference on the part of those appointed and paid to take care of men sentenced to "hard labor"?
That the men suffer from it is beyond question. And I cannot find that the law provides or intends that their suffering shall be of this kind.
Much of the insanity in the prison is due to the way they are made, or made not, to work. There is a legend of a warden who, being unable to keep his prisoners otherwise busy, set them to piling up paving stones on one side of the yard, and then taking down the pile and repiling it on the other side. After a week of this, most of them were maniacs. It was not the severity of the labor that destroyed their minds, but the uselessness and objectlessness of it. Sane men require reasonable employment; idleness, or irrational work disintegrates their minds. They want to see and to foresee intelligible results from their toil; mere toil without such results is maddening, or it rots men"s minds as scurvy rots their bodies. The reason is, that the men are human; and if you have hitherto supposed that convicts are not human, the insanity which so constantly follows upon prison idleness or mis-employment should correct you.
Others may describe the horrors, almost indescribable, of contract labor in prisons; I saw nothing of that at Atlanta--type of another widespread system of prison work--though I heard enough about it from men who had undergone it in state prisons. But during the few first days of my imprisonment, I saw a building gang at work (to call it work) upon a new wing destined to contain dormitories for the inmates. It was to be a seemly structure of granite, ma.s.sive and well proportioned. But after three days, work on it was stopped, and was not resumed until a week or so before I left this prison, six months later. Meanwhile, I read in the _Congressional Record_ the report of a debate in the House, in which, on the authority of a Texas representative, charges of graft or waste were laid against persons concerned in the erection of this building which seemed incredible, but of which I was able to find no refutation. The hospital building is open to the same criticism, and another, which I believe is designed to be the laundry, had got no further, at the date of my arrival, than a square hole in the ground, and when I left had been furthered by a single course of stone or cement laid round the hole. A New York contractor, graft or no graft, would have had all three of them finished and in commission in the same time, and with no better material in the way of laborers than our prison could supply.
The thirty-four foot wall surrounding the buildings, a mile in circuit, built of cement, had been completed before my time. I read in a report of the warden"s that its existence was due to his enterprise, and that he looked upon it as a worthy monument to his activity and intelligence.
At every hundred yards or so of its length it was strengthened by a tower, containing accommodations for a guard, day and night, who watches with his rifle in hand, ready to shoot down any prisoner who seems to be acting suspiciously. No such shooting by a tower guard has as yet taken place to my knowledge, and none ever will on the pretext suggested; for the wall is absolutely unscalable; being five or six feet thick, it is impenetrable, and its foundations going down six or eight feet below ground, it cannot be beaten by tunneling; yet the towers and the guards are there.
But the point is that the wall itself is quite preposterous and unnecessary. Escape for prisoners was quite as difficult before it was built as after. There are a hundred guards in the penitentiary--one for every eight prisoners--all armed and eager for action; every article of a prisoner"s clothing bears the prison mark; and the population outside the walls is penetrated with the idea that the apprehension of escaping prisoners is morally as well as financially profitable. Every prisoner knows that an attempt to escape would be suicide--"you might get hurt,"
as the prison rule book euphemistically phrases it--and they generally prefer suicide in some other form.
The wall, then, is superfluous; a fence of electrified wire would have served as good a purpose at about one-thousandth of one per cent. of the cost. And what did the wall cost? Let the prison archives declare. And then, perhaps, it would be interesting to investigate the discrepancy, if any exist, between the price which the United States paid for the work, and the actual cost of erecting it.
The wall was some time in the building, but it seems to have been the only thing built in the prison, work upon which was continuous and energetic. And it was a useless work, better left undone. The warden was proud of it, however, and there it stands.
As for the twenty-seven acre enclosure, in which the prison buildings are, which is--according to official prognostics--to be graded, leveled, drained, cultivated and planted till it looks like a private millionaire"s park, it is a raw, rough unsightly waste of red clay and weeds, gouged out here and there with random and meaningless excavations, heaped up in other places with piles of earth; diversified in one quarter with some forlorn chicken coops and fences, made by the voluntary and unskilled labor of one of the convicts; and adjoining these, with the Tuberculosis Camp, a row of a dozen or more tents mounted on wooden platforms, with little flower beds in front and behind, and a pigeon house at one end. The only part of these grounds on which any visible thought and labor has been expended is the baseball diamond, adjoining the northeast corner of the wall. Here, the ground has been leveled and smoothed over a s.p.a.ce sufficient to include the diamond itself, and a few yards on its south and north sides; beyond that is waste ground, and along the northern boundary is a parapet of earth five or six feet high, presumably made of the material sc.r.a.ped off the diamond. A ball vigorously struck by a batter either goes over this parapet into the swamp ground beyond, or sails away toward the Tuberculosis Camp, to be retrieved from the weeds and rubbish in that vicinity.
There are some forty score men behind the bars who would rejoice to be allowed to put these grounds in order, and who, under proper guidance, could do the job in a month. It would be a useful work, it would benefit the men both in the doing and in the accomplishment, and it would be an excellent advertis.e.m.e.nt of the penitentiary for the visitors who daily stroll about the enclosure; yet months and years go by and nothing whatever is changed.
One day, in midsummer, I saw a gang of negroes digging a trench in front of the southern gate, and cutting out a heavy growth of weeds and underbrush on the slope above. Drain pipes were carted out and dumped in the vicinity of the trench, and three or four of them were laid down in it. This went on for three or four days, the whole gang of ten or a dozen men not achieving in that period more than one or two capable Irish or Italian navvies would have done in the same time. Then the gang disappeared; the open trench and the pipes remained in statu quo, and the weeds gradually resumed their ancient sway. So far as I know, work has not been resumed there since.
It is a typical example; even such work as is done, is done in such a discontinuous and futile way that it is impossible for any one doing it to feel any interest in it, or stimulus to do it well. Time, toil and money are frittered away, with nothing definite or substantial to show for it. Intermittent and barren tasks are doubly onerous. The overseers may not be to blame; they may be incompetent; they may be hampered by the ignorance, incompetence or voluntary policy of the prison authorities; the consequences, at all events, are disastrous. If a handful of hearty, clever, driving men were given control of the various industrial operations in the prison, the results would seem magical.