Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PRISONS: A SOCIAL CRIME AND FAILURE
IN 1849 Feodor Dostoyevsky wrote on the wall of his prison cell the following story of The Priest and
the Devil:
"'Hello, you little fat father!' the devil said to the priest. 'What made you lie so to those poor,
misled people? What tortures of hell did you depict? Don't you know they are already suffering
the tortures of hell in their earthly lives? Don't you know that you and the authorities of the
State are my representatives on earth? It is you that make them suffer the pains of hell with
which you threaten them. Don't you know this? Well, then, come with me!'
The devil grabbed the priest by the collar, lifted him high in the air, and carried him to a factory,
to an iron foundry. He saw the workmen there running and hurrying to and fro, and toiling in
the scorching heat. Very soon the thick, heavy air and the heat are too much for the priest. With
tears in his eyes, he pleads with the devil: 'Let me go! Let me leave this hell!'
'Oh, my dear friend, I must show you many more places.' The devil gets hold of him again and
drags him off to a farm. There he sees workmen threshing the grain. The dust and heat are
insufferable. The overseer carries a knout, and unmercifully beats anyone who falls to the
ground overcome by hard toil or hunger.
Next the priest is taken to the huts where these same workers live with their families--dirty,
cold, smoky, ill-smelling holes. The devil grins. He points out the poverty and hardships which
are at home here.
'Well, isn't this enough?' he asks. And it seems as if even he, the devil, pities the people. The
pious servant of God can hardly bear it. With uplifted hands he begs: 'Let me go away from
here. Yes, yes! This is hell on earth!'
'Well, then, you see. And you still promise them another hell. You torment them, torture them to
death mentally when they are already all but dead physically! Come on! I will show you one
more hell--one more, the very worst.'
He took him to a prison and showed him a dungeon, with its foul air and the many human
forms, robbed of all health and energy, lying on the floor, covered with vermin that were
devouring their poor, naked, emaciated bodies.
'Take off your silken clothes,' said the devil to the priest, 'put on your ankles heavy chains such
as these unfortunates wear; lie down on the cold and filthy floor--and then talk to them about a
hell that still awaits them!'
'No, no!' answered the priest, 'I cannot think of anything more dreadful than this. I entreat you,
let me go away from here!'
'Yes, this is hell. There can be no worse hell than this. Did you not know it? Did you not know
that these men and women whom you are frightening with the picture of a hell hereafter--did
you not know that they are in hell right here, before they die?"
This was written fifty years ago in dark Russia, on the wall of one of the most horrible prisons. Yet who
can deny that the same applies with equal force to the present time, even to American prisons?
With all our boasted reforms, our great social changes, and our far-reaching discoveries, human beings
continue to be sent to the worst of hells, wherein they are outraged, degraded, and tortured, that society
may be "protected" from the phantoms of its own making.
Prison, a social protection? What monstrous mind ever conceived such an idea? Just as well say that
health can be promoted by a widespread contagion.
After eighteen months of horror in an English prison, Oscar Wilde gave to the world his great
masterpiece, The Ballad of Reading Goal:
The vilest deeds, like poison weeds,
Bloom well in prison air;
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there.
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.
Society goes on perpetuating this poisonous air, not realizing that out of it can come naught but the most
poisonous results.
We are spending at the present $3,500,000 per day, $1,000,095,000 per year, to maintain prison
institutions, and that in a democratic country,--a sum almost as large as the combined output of wheat,
valued at $750,000,000, and the output of coal, valued at $350,000,000. Professor Bushnell of
Washington, D.C., estimates the cost of prisons at $6,000,000,000 annually, and Dr. G. Frank Lydston,
an eminent American writer on crime, gives $5,000,000,000 annually as a reasonable figure. Such
unheard-of expenditure for the purpose of maintaining vast armies of human beings caged up like wild
beasts! 1
Yet crimes are on the increase. Thus we learn that in America there are four and a half times as many
crimes to every million population today as there were twenty years ago.
The most horrible aspect is that our national crime is murder, not robbery, embezzlement, or rape, as in
the South. London is five times as large as Chicago, yet there are one hundred and eighteen murders
annually in the latter city, while only twenty in London. Nor is Chicago the leading city in crime, since it
is only seventh on the list, which is headed by four Southern cities, and San Francisco and Los Angeles.
In view of such a terrible condition of affairs, it seems ridiculous to prate of the protection society
derives from its prisons.
The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized
institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest
must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past when we can be content with our social fabric
merely because it is "ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law.
The widespread prison investigations, agitation, and education during the last few years are conclusive
proof that men are learning to dig deep into the very bottom of society, down to the causes of the terrible
discrepancy between social and individual life.
Why, then, are prisons a social crime and a failure? To answer this vital question it behooves us to seek
the nature and cause of crimes, the methods employed in coping with them, and the effects these
methods produce in ridding society of the curse and horror of crimes.
First, as to the nature of crime:
Havelock Ellis divides crime into four phases, the political, the passional, the insane, and the occasional.
He says that the political criminal is the victim of an attempt of a more or less despotic government to
preserve its own stability. He is not necessarily guilty of an unsocial offense; he simply tries to overturn a
certain political order which may itself be anti-social. This truth is recognized all over the world, except
in America where the foolish notion still prevails that in a Democracy there is no place for political
criminals. Yet John Brown was a political criminal; so were the Chicago Anarchists; so is every striker.
Consequently, says Havelock Ellis, the political criminal of our time or place may be the hero, martyr,
saint of another age. Lombroso calls the political criminal the true precursor of the progressive
movement of humanity.
"The criminal by passion is usually a man of wholesome birth and honest life, who under the stress of
some great, unmerited wrong has wrought justice for himself." 2
Mr. Hugh C. Weir, in The Menace of the Police, cites the case of Jim Flaherty, a criminal by passion,
who, instead of being saved by society, is turned into a drunkard and a recidivist, with a ruined and
poverty-stricken family as the result.
A more pathetic type is Archie, the victim in Brand Whitlock's novel, The Turn of the Balance, the
greatest American expos of crime in the making. Archie, even more than Flaherty, was driven to crime
and death by the cruel inhumanity of his surroundings, and by the unscrupulous hounding of the
machinery of the law. Archie and Flaherty are but the types of many thousands, demonstrating how the
legal aspects of crime, and the methods of dealing with it, help to create the disease which is
undermining our entire social life.
"The insane criminal really can no more be considered a criminal than a child, since he is mentally in the
same condition as an infant or an animal." 3
The law already recognizes that, but only in rare cases of a very flagrant nature, or when the culprit's
wealth permits the luxury of criminal insanity. It has become quite fashionable to be the victim of
paranoia. But on the whole the "sovereignty of justice" still continues to punish criminally insane with
the whole severity of its power. Thus Mr. Ellis quotes from Dr. Richter's statistics showing that in
Germany one hundred and six madmen, out of one hundred and forty-four criminally insane, were
condemned to severe punishment.
The occasional criminal "represents by far the largest class of our prison population, hence is the greatest
menace to social well-being." What is the cause that compels a vast army of the human family to take to
crime, to prefer the hideous life within prison walls to the life outside? Certainly that cause must be an
iron master, who leaves its victims no avenue of escape, for the most depraved human being loves
liberty.
This terrific force is conditioned in our cruel social and economic arrangement. I do not mean to deny
the biologic, physiologic, or psychologic factors in creating crime; but there is hardly an advanced
criminologist who will not concede that the social and economic influences are the most relentless, the
most poisonous germs of crime. Granted even that there are innate criminal tendencies, it is none the less
true that these tendencies find rich nutrition in our social environment.
There is close relation, says Havelock Ellis, between crimes against the person and the price of alcohol,
between crimes against property and the price of wheat. He quotes Quetelet and Lacassagne, the former
looking upon society as the preparer of crime, and the criminals as instruments that execute them. The
latter find that "the social environment is the cultivation medium of criminality; that the criminal is the
microbe, an element which only becomes important when it finds the medium which causes it to
ferment; every society has the criminals it deserves.4
The most "prosperous" industrial period makes it impossible for the worker to earn enough to keep up
health and vigor. And as prosperity is, at best, an imaginary condition, thousands of people are
constantly added to the host of the unemployed. From East to West, from South to North, this vast army
tramps in search of work or food, and all they find is the workhouse or the slums. Those who have a
spark of self-respect left, prefer open defiance, prefer crime to the emaciated, degraded position of
poverty.
Edward Carpenter estimates that five-sixths of indictable crimes consist in some violation of property
rights; but that is too low a figure. A thorough investigation would prove that nine crimes out of ten
could be traced, directly or indirectly, to our economic and social iniquities, to our system of remorseless
exploitation and robbery. There is no criminal so stupid but recognizes this terrible fact, though he may
not be able to account for it.
A collection of criminal philosophy, which Havelock Ellis, Lombroso, and other eminent men have
compiled, shows that the criminal feels only too keenly that it is society that drives him to crime. A
Milanese thief said to Lombroso: "I do not rob, I merely take from the rich their superfluities; besides,
do not advocates and merchants rob?" A murderer wrote: "Knowing that three-fourths of the social
virtues are cowardly vices, I thought an open assault on a rich man would be less ignoble than the
cautious combination of fraud." Another wrote: "I am imprisoned for stealing a half dozen eggs.
Ministers who rob millions are honored. Poor Italy!" An educated convict said to Mr. Davitt: "The laws
of society are framed for the purpose of securing the wealth of the world to power and calculation,
thereby depriving the larger portion of mankind of its rights and chances. Why should they punish me
for taking by somewhat similar means from those who have taken more than they had a right to?" The
same man added: "Religion robs the soul of its independence; patriotism is the stupid worship of the
world for which the well-being and the peace of the inhabitants were sacrificed by those who profit by
it, while the laws of the land, in restraining natural desires, were waging war on the manifest spirit of the
law of our beings. Compared with this," he concluded, "thieving is an honorable pursuit." 5
Verily, there is greater truth in this philosophy than in all the law-and-moral books of society.
The economic, political, moral, and physical factors being the microbes of crime, how does society meet
the situation?
The methods of coping with crime have no doubt undergone several changes, but mainly in a theoretic
sense. In practice, society has retained the primitive motive in dealing with the offender; that is, revenge.
It has also adopted the theologic idea; namely, punishment; while the legal and "civilized" methods
consist of deterrence or terror, and reform. We shall presently see that all four modes have failed utterly,
and that we are today no nearer a solution than in the dark ages.
The natural impulse of the primitive man to strike back, to avenge a wrong, is out of date. Instead, the
civilized man, stripped of courage and daring, has delegated to an organized machinery the duty of
avenging his wrongs, in the foolish belief that the State is justified in doing what he no longer has the
manhood or consistency to do. The "majesty of the law" is a reasoning thing; it would not stoop to
primitive instincts. Its mission is of a "higher" nature. True, it is still steeped in the theologic muddle,
which proclaims punishment as a means of purification, or the vicarious atonement of sin. But legally
and socially the statute exercises punishment, not merely as an infliction of pain upon the offender, but
also for its terrifying effect upon others.
What is the real basis of punishment, however? The notion of a free will, the idea that man is at all times
a free agent for good or evil; if he chooses the latter, he must be made to pay the price. Although this
theory has long been exploded, and thrown upon the dustheap, it continues to be applied daily by the
entire machinery of government, turning it into the most cruel and brutal tormentor of human life. The
only reason for its continuance is the still more cruel notion that the greater the terror punishment
spreads, the more certain its preventative effect.
Society is using the most drastic methods in dealing with the social offender. Why do they not deter?
Although in America a man is supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty, the instruments
of law, the police, carry on a reign of terror, making indiscriminate arrests, beating, clubbing, bullying
people, using the barbarous method of the "third degree," subjecting their unfortunate victims to the foul
air of the station house, and the still fouler language of its guardians. Yet crimes are rapidly multiplying,
and society is paying the price. On the other hand, it is an open secret that when the unfortunate citizen
has been given the full "mercy" of the law, and for the sake of safety is hidden in the worst of hells, his
real Calvary begins. Robbed of his rights as a human being, degraded to a mere automaton without will
or feeling, dependent entirely upon the mercy of brutal keepers, he daily goes through a process of
dehumanization, compared with which savage revenge was mere child's play.
There is not a single penal institution or reformatory in the United States where men are not tortured "to
be made good," by means of the black-jack, the club, the strait-jacket, the water-cure, the "humming
bird" (an electrical contrivance run along the human body), the solitary, the bull-ring, and starvation
diet. In these institutions his will is broken, his soul degraded, his spirit subdued by the deadly
monotony and routine of prison life. In Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and in the South, these
horrors have become so flagrant as to reach the outside world, while in most other prisons the same
Christian methods still prevail. But prison walls rarely allow the agonized shrieks of the victims to
escape--prison walls are thick, they dull the sound. Society might with greater immunity abolish all
prisons at once, than to hope for protection from these twentieth-century chambers of horrors.
Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world an emaciated, deformed, will-less,
ship-wrecked crew of humanity, with the Cain mark on their foreheads, their hopes crushed, all their
natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but hunger and inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon
sink back into crime as the only possibility of existence. It is not at all an unusual thing to find men and
women who have spent half their lives--nay, almost their entire existence--in prison. I know a woman
on Blackwell's Island, who had been in and out thirty-eight times; and through a friend I learn that a
young boy of seventeen, whom he had nursed and cared for in the Pittsburg penitentiary, had never
known the meaning of liberty. From the reformatory to the penitentiary had been the path of this boy's
life, until, broken in body, he died a victim of social revenge. These personal experiences are
substantiated by extensive data giving overwhelming proof of the utter futility of prisons as a means of
deterrence or reform.
Well-meaning persons are now working for a new departure in the prison question,--reclamation, to
restore once more to the prisoner the possibility of becoming a human being. Commendable as this is, I
fear it is impossible to hope for good results from pouring good wine into a musty bottle. Nothing short
of a complete reconstruction of society will deliver mankind from the cancer of crime. Still, if the dull
edge of our social conscience would be sharpened, the penal institutions might be given a new coat of
varnish. But the first step to be taken is the renovation of the social consciousness, which is in a rather
dilapidated condition. It is sadly in need to be awakened to the fact that crime is a question of degree,
that we all have the rudiments of crime in us, more or less, according to our mental, physical, and social
environment; and that the individual criminal is merely a reflex of the tendencies of the aggregate.
With the social consciousness wakened, the average individual may learn to refuse the "honor" of being
the bloodhound of the law. He may cease to persecute, despise, and mistrust the social offender, and
give him a chance to live and breathe among his fellows. Institutions are, of course, harder to reach.
They are cold, impenetrable, and cruel; still, with the social consciousness quickened, it might be
possible to free the prison victims from the brutality of prison officials, guards, and keepers. Public
opinion is a powerful weapon; keepers of human prey, even, are afraid of it. They may be taught a little
humanity, especially if they realize that their jobs depend upon it.
But the most important step is to demand for the prisoner the right to work while in prison, with some
monetary recompense that would enable him to lay aside a little for the day of his release, the beginning
of a new life.
It is almost ridiculous to hope much from present society when we consider that workingmen,
wage-slaves themselves, object to convict labor. I shall not go into the cruelty of this objection, but
merely consider the impracticability of it. To begin with, the opposition so far raised by organized labor
has been directed against windmills. Prisoners have always worked; only the State has been their
exploiter, even as the individual employer has been the robber of organized labor. The States have either
set the convicts to work for the government, or they have farmed convict labor to private individuals.
Twenty-nine of the States pursue the latter plan. The Federal government and seventeen States have
discarded it, as have the leading nations of Europe, since it leads to hideous overworking and abuse of
prisoners, and to endless graft.
"Rhode Island, the State dominated by Aldrich, offers perhaps the worst example. Under a five-year
contract, dated July 7th, 1906, and renewable for five years more at the option of private contractors, the
labor of the inmates of the Rhode Island Penitentiary and the Providence County Jail is sold to the
Reliance-Sterling Mfg. Co. at the rate of a trifle less than 25 cents a day per man. This Company is really
a gigantic Prison Labor Trust, for it also leases the convict labor of Connecticut, Michigan, Indiana,
Nebraska, and South Dakota penitentiaries, and the reformatories of New Jersey, Indiana, Illinois, and
Wisconsin, eleven establishments in all.
"The enormity of the graft under the Rhode Island contract may be estimated from the fact that this same
Company pays 62 1/2 cents a day in Nebraska for the convict's labor, and that Tennessee, for example,
gets $1.10 a day for a convict's work from the Gray-Dudley Hardware Co.; Missouri gets 70 cents a day
from the Star Overall Mfg. Co.; West Virginia 65 cents a day from the Kraft Mfg. Co., and Maryland 55
cents a day from Oppenheim, Oberndorf & Co., shirt manufacturers. The very difference in prices
points to enormous graft. For example, the Reliance-Sterling Mfg. Co. manufactures shirts, the cost of
free labor being not less than $1.20 per dozen, while it pays Rhode Island thirty cents a dozen.
Furthermore, the State charges this Trust no rent for the use of its huge factory, charges nothing for
power, heat, light, or even drainage, and exacts no taxes. What graft!" 6
It is estimated that more than twelve million dollars' worth of workingmen's shirts and overalls is
produced annually in this country by prison labor. It is a woman's industry, and the first reflection that
arises is that an immense amount of free female labor is thus displaced. The second consideration is that
male convicts, who should be learning trades that would give them some chance of being
self-supporting after their release, are kept at this work at which they can not possibly make a dollar.
This is the more serious when we consider that much of this labor is done in reformatories, which so
loudly profess to be training their inmates to become useful citizens.
The third, and most important, consideration is that the enormous profits thus wrung from convict labor
are a constant incentive to the contractors to exact from their unhappy victims tasks altogether beyond
their strength, and to punish them cruelly when their work does not come up to the excessive demands
made.
Another word on the condemnation of convicts to tasks at which they cannot hope to make a living after
release. Indiana, for example, is a State that has made a great splurge over being in the front rank of
modern penological improvements. Yet, according to the report rendered in 1908 by the training school
of its "reformatory," 135 were engaged in the manufacture of chains, 207 in that of shirts, and 255 in the
foundry--a total of 597 in three occupations. But at this so-called reformatory 59 occupations were
represented by the inmates, 39 of which were connected with country pursuits. Indiana, like other States,
professes to be training the inmates of her reformatory to occupations by which they will be able to
make their living when released. She actually sets them to work making chains, shirts, and brooms, the
latter for the benefit of the Louisville Fancy Grocery Co. Broom-making is a trade largely monopolized
by the blind, shirt-making is done by women, and there is only one free chain-factory in the State, and at
that a released convict can not hope to get employment. The whole thing is a cruel farce.
If, then, the States can be instrumental in robbing their helpless victims of such tremendous profits is it
not high time for organized labor to stop its idle howl, and to insist on decent remuneration for the
convict, even as labor organizations claim for themselves? In that way workingmen would kill the germ
which makes of the prisoner an enemy to the interests of labor. I have said elsewhere that thousands of
convicts, incompetent and without a trade, without means of subsistence, are yearly turned back into the
social fold. These men and women must live, for even an ex-convict has needs. Prison life has made
them anti-social beings, and the rigidly closed doors that meet them on their release are not likely to
decrease their bitterness. The inevitable result is that they form a favorable nucleus out of which scabs,
black-legs, detectives, and policemen are drawn, only too willing to do the master's bidding. Thus
organized labor, by its foolish opposition to work in prison, defeats its own ends. It helps to create
poisonous fumes that stifle every attempt for economic betterment. If the workingman wants to avoid
these effects, he should insist on the right of the convict to work, he should meet him as a brother, take
him into his organization, and with his aid turn against the system which grinds them both.
Last, but not least, is the growing realization of the barbarity and the inadequacy of the definite sentence.
Those who believe in, and earnestly aim at, a change are fast coming to the conclusion that man must be
given an opportunity to make good. And how is he to do it with ten, fifteen, or twenty years'
imprisonment before him? The hope of liberty and of opportunity is the only incentive to life, especially
the prisoner's life. Society has sinned so long against him--it ought at least to leave him that. I am not
very sanguine that it will, or that any real change in that direction can take place until the conditions that
breed both the prisoner and the jailer will be forever abolished.
Out of his mouth a red, red rose!
Out of his heart a white!
For who can say by what strange way
Christ brings his will to light,
Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore
Bloomed in the great Pope's sight.
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