Chain Gangs, As They
Are Now Conducted, Must Go. . . Our Present System of Punishment Must be
Supplanted by a Real Effort to Re-Make Prisoners
By Observer
An acquaintance told me a very interesting story the other
day. It was that of a young man, named Frank, who was sent to the prison at
Blackwell’s Island, New York, for 12 months. He was under 20 years of age and
his offense was that he had lead a riotous group of men in some kind of radical
movement and was sentenced for disturbing the peace. Blackwell’s Island is the
city prison, and is referred to tersely in New York as “The Island.” Sing Sing,
the State prison on the Hudson above New York, is in police and criminal
parlance, “Up the River.” The Tombs, another famous place for incarceration in
New York, is the place where the city prisoners are put when first arrested and
are waiting trial. Frank was a young fellow of great vitality, and a natural
leader of men. He had known nothing to make him a leader in the better sense,
and having observed certain things that he considered wrong, he took the way
that most appealed to him for action and led a large crowd on a rampage. The
police of course ran him in as they should have done; the courts found him
guilty, and away he went to the Island and was forgotten. But he was an unusual
fellow, bubbling over with life, with a sense of injustice somewhere, and a
spirit of resentfulness that would have been commended under other
circumstances. It was natural that he should get into trouble with the stolid
oppressiveness of prison life. Nobody had taken the trouble to try to find out
anything about the real inner life and thoughts of the young man. It was nobody’s
business to try under the peculiarly foolish system which we have. The court
was not to blame because nobody expected it to do anything but decide whether
the prisoner was guilty and then decide how long he should serve, and this is
did.
But fortunately for Frank and for the good of society, a man
happened to come in contact with him who had other ideas. He saw something in Frank
and knew something of his point of view. He became acquainted with him and showed
himself a real not by giving him cigarettes and handing him some good tracts to
read, but by trying to, and succeeding in, understanding him. He saw the latent
power of good and the wonderful ability of leadership, and decided that the
sensible thing to do was to try to enlist these abilities for the good of
society instead of letting the prison experience turn them more strongly into
enmity and bad leadership. He got the boy interested in study, and being
connected with Columbia University, helped arrange for him to begin to study
certain courses on the outside, and the same time getting him into a position where
he could begin to learn an expert trade. In the meantime, working and studying,
Frank got married. His wife happened to be made of the right stuff. The war
came on. Frank refused to accept exemption either on the ground that he had
been in prison or that he had a wife to support, either of which would have
kept him out. “I want to go,” he said, “for if I die it will be in a good
cause.” He went into the army and was prevented from going over only by the
signing of the armistice. He came back and took up his work and kept up his
studies and has already taken one degree from Columbia and is about to win a
higher one.
The friend from New York who told me the story and who knows
Frank, concluded by saying: “Get the April number of The Atlantic and you will
see an article on the psychology of prison cruelty by Frank Tannenbaum. He is
the young Frank of Blackwell’s Island.” So I have just got the magazine, that
staid old publication that for nearly a hundred years has been the best
exponent of American thought in the land. The article is one that any student
of the human mind and human conduct might well be proud to have written. It is
as clear an analysis of mental action and reaction as I have ever read. It lays
bare the cause of the failure of prisons to make men better and shows beyond
all doubt that the prison system we now have makes men worse and can not help
having this result. It is philosophical, not bitter. It blames no individual,
but shows that prison keepers are what they are because they can’t help it, and
that prisoners do those things which they do because they must do them, not
because they wish to be bad. I have read many an article on psychology, but
never one which laid the axe more nearly to the tap root of human actions in
certain lines than this. For years the best students of the subject know that
prisons have been a failure in their purpose to reform men, but they have never
seemed to fully understand why. The whole attitude of society towards offenders
has been of doubtful standing for many years and even now are we beginning to
know why. In his immortal book, Les
Miserables, written in the sixties by Victor Hugo, gave in the history of
his great hero, Jean Valjean, the cruel results always to be obtained from a
malicious attitude on the part of society towards those persons who are called
criminals.
I have been lead to tell this story not only because of its own
interest and value, but because of a resolution passed at the State Social
Service’ Conference lately held at Goldsboro. That resolution declared that to
make money out of the labor of prisoners beyond the cost of their keep was
indefensible, that punishment for the sake of punishment—that is, as a mere
expression of cruelty and revengefulness—must be supplanted by a real effort to
help and remake the prisoner and turn out a good member of society instead of a
hardened and revengeful man, and that chain gangs as now conducted in the State
must eventually go out of business. There are wise acres who will sneer at this
resolution as the product of dreamers because they are perfectly ignorant of
what they are talking about, because they do not know what the real analysists
of the human mind are saying, because they are unable to distinguish between a
dislike for a wrong act and hatred for the man who has committed it, because
they do not know that in many respects we are yet living under the rule of
ideas that obtaining in the middle ages, in short, because they do not
understand and prefer to be ignorant. Such people will say that all this is “nutty”
and that you propose to “turn loose all the criminals and pin a badge of honor
upon them.” But they say this also because they do not know and do not care and
enjoy vindictiveness and self-righteousness more than they care to understand fellow
human beings. It is all very interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment