16

How about these youngsters who get in trouble? How about the ones who go through a period of probation, get in trouble again, and finally are sent to the penitentiary? What about our penitentiaries themselves?

Here is where the average citizen entertains the most alarmingly erroneous concept of crime.

The average citizen thinks that the penitentiary is the place that criminals go to.

Actually the penitentiary is the place that criminals come from.

Another error in public thinking is that prison inmates are all classed as a unit.

Men who go to prison are of many sorts. Some of them are viciously depraved. Some of them are killers. Some of them are psychopathic misfits. Some of them are weaklings. Some of them are all right when they are sober, but get into trouble when they start drinking. Some of them are just plain habitual criminals.

Yet when these men come out, so far as the public is concerned, they are all the same. “Ex-convicts.”

It is to be borne in mind that nearly all of these men do come out. Some of them are in there two years, some five, some ten, some only for one year, some are in there for twenty years and up. Some of them, of course, die in prison. But far better than ninety percent of the inmates of almost any penal institution are discharged back into society.

Quite obviously society should be greatly concerned with the attitude, the aptitude and the capabilities of the man when he emerges from the front door of a penitentiary to become once more a member of society.

Actually nothing could be farther from the truth. Society wants to dismiss the whole problem of crime and particularly the problem of prisons.

Because a prison is a high-security unit, with guards at the towers, walls surrounding the yards, an elaborate system of locks, guards and turnkeys, the average citizen thinks that the prison inmate has been “put out of the way.”

It happens that I’m quite friendly with the warden of a certain penitentiary. That penitentiary is now being occupied by approximately thirty percent more inmates than the number for which it was designed. That represents the capacity of that prison to its point of complete saturation.

Yet every year the courts of the state send to that prison as much as seventy percent of the total maximum prison population!

What does that mean?

It means that something has to be done with the men who are already in that prison.

This state, in common with most other states, is having its own financial problems. An attempt is being made to provide facilities to a constantly increasing population. As every citizen knows, taxation has reached a point where it can only go higher at the expense of diminishing returns. All bills to increase facilities at the prison so as to provide additional prison space have been pigeonholed by the state legislature.

“This is no time to add to prison costs,” the backers are told. “The state has no money to ‘waste’ on prisoners.”

That is in keeping with the thinking of the average citizen. He doesn’t know anything about penitentiaries in the first place, and he wants to forget them in the second place. The criminals are “out of the way.” Let them stay there.

“Rehabilitation?

“Oh, I guess so. It’s all right if you can do it, but why waste time with those guys?… Oh, sure, go ahead. Rehabilitate them if you want to, but don’t bother me with it.”

Rehabilitation costs money. Any type of constructive prison work costs money. Taxpayers’ money. Taxpayers don’t want to put out that money. Taxpayers don’t want to be reminded of the penitentiaries. They know the penitentiaries are there and they want the problems kept shut away behind those same walls.

The governor appoints a warden. He hopes he is getting a good man, but his definition of a good man is one who can keep the penitentiary out of the newspapers for the governor’s term of office. Just let him and his administration forget there is a penitentiary and that warden has done a swell job. Let something happen that puts the penitentiary in the headlines, a riot, an escape, a plea for improved facilities, for more funds, for better pay for prison guards, and the administration is “embarrassed.”

Every day from every prison in the country, there is a trickle of ex-convicts which must be absorbed by society. Society knows nothing about it. It wants to know nothing about it. It knows nothing about the attitude of the men who come out to join society, and it cares less.

That trickle shouldn’t be a muddy stream of contaminated human beings. It should be an influx of men who have made mistakes, have paid for those mistakes, are ready to “begin over” and have the facilities for a new start.

Of course that’s an idealistic, Utopian, impractical view. But with a little money, a little change in thinking, a little human consideration, that muddy stream could be segregated. Some of it could become good, clear water. The rest of it, hopelessly muddy, would need to be put into settling tanks.

Some day we won’t have such a horribly large percent of hopelessly muddy water. We must learn how to keep the mud out of the water so far as possible, how to handle the polluted stream once it does become contaminated.

But if we are going to keep mud from the stream we must start with the young man who has become too “tough” for the juvenile authorities, who has passed the statutory age limit during which some form of consideration is mandatory and keeps getting into trouble. The exasperated judge, who has found this boy a recurrent problem, decides to “teach him a lesson.” He sends the young man to the penitentiary.

What happens?

All too frequently he has taught the young man a lesson, but it’s the wrong lesson.

The young man has been callow, surly, defiant, impudent. He goes to the penitentiary and he starts to get vicious, hard and bitter.

In too many instances penitentiaries, particularly when they are run under an old-time regime, are nothing but the finishing schools of the underworld.

He comes out with ten or twenty dollars, a prison-made suit of clothes, a prison haircut, and prison shoes.

He is called on to find a job and re-establish himself in a society which sent him to a penitentiary to “teach him a lesson” and which utterly ignored him while he was there.

He is a young man with all the surcharged energy of youth. For a period of years now he has been deprived of women—not of sex—you can’t deprive a man of sex. You can deprive him of women. That’s a “punishment.”

That’s all very fine as a punishment. It’s a grim punishment. What does it do to the individual?

Ask authorities on penology what it does.

It’s a subject they don’t like to discuss. They avoid it wherever possible. They close their eyes to it as much as they can. It’s a problem of penology that even the penologists try to “forget” and solve by ignoring it.

Yet that is one of the factors that must be taken into consideration in determining what has happened to our surly, defiant, uncooperative juvenile, who was “taught a lesson” by society.

Let any average individual who is capable of adjusting himself to a normal society put on a prison suit of clothes, a prison pair of shoes, and, with a prison haircut, go out and try to get a job.

Suppose you should try it. Just put yourself in the shoes of a discharged inmate—prison shoes.

You don’t dare tell where you have been for the past three years. If you tell the truth the police will suggest you had “better leave town.” If you try to lie, you have to make a good job of lying otherwise someone is going to catch up with you.

Suppose you got out with twenty dollars in your pocket. Your tendency is to get rather far away from the penitentiary, and as a rule the penitentiary is located rather far away from the principal cities in the state.

You get to a strange town. You want to look for employment. You have to eat. You have to have a place to sleep. You need a razor, a shaving kit, numerous personal belongings.

How long is your twenty dollars going to last?

So you try to get a job. It certainly won’t be a very choice job. It’s a job that the average worker doesn’t want, therefore the employer can’t afford to be too discriminating.

And you have to be lucky to get this job. Suppose you do get it within two or three days of the time you leave the penitentiary. How are you going to finance yourself until payday?

And you’re going to be very, very lucky indeed if you can find such a job before your money runs out.

What are you going to do then?

Now remember that this problem involves you. A man who has always been able to integrate himself in society, a man who has been living a normal life for the past few years. But suppose you were not a normal individual. Suppose you hadn’t been able to integrate yourself in society. Suppose for the past few years you had been living a life where you had been completely deprived of women. Suppose you had been living a regimented life, where what you did and the time you did it, what you ate and the time you ate it, and everything about that life was worked out and regimented.

You suddenly find yourself in the midst of a society that is strange, and which you regard as hostile. Your own friends have turned their backs on you. In place of those friends you have picked up a whole new circle of friends at the penitentiary. You probably know a few hundred men who have “gone out” since you made their acquaintance. You know some who are located in the city.

What are you going to do for friendship? What are you going to do for companionship? You’re naturally going to look up some of those friends.

There are other aspects of the situation. You get a job. In some places if you have been convicted of a certain type of crime the law requires that you register with the chief of police. In any event, the police are pretty apt to know where you are.

You get the job. You try to work. You’re making good. It’s not much of a job but you’re doing all right.

A crime is committed somewhere in the locality.

The police have no clues but there is a public demand that they do something, that they get busy and track down the culprit.

So what do the police do?

They “round up” all of the questionable characters in the neighborhood.

You’re a questionable character. You’re an “ex-convict.” You’ve served a prison sentence. You really don’t have any rights any more. The police come down and “pick you up.” It’s “only for questioning,” but you go up to the jail and into the tank, and when you don’t show up for work the next morning your employer knows why you didn’t show up and all about your past record.

By the time the police have finished their questioning and released you, you find you don’t have any job to go back to.

Moreover, the heat is on and you don’t dare to be hanging around the neighborhood where the crime has been committed. You’d better go some place else.

How?

Once more the question arises, What are you going to use for money?

So that’s what happened when an irate judge decided that it was time to “teach the young man a lesson.”

The only change in that callow youth is that he’s become hard, bitter, and stir-smart. He’s been exposed to years of perversion and degeneracy. He’s lost the perspective of a man who has been permitted to make his own decisions and stand or fall on the consequences.

Now society doesn’t have a surly, defiant youth. It has a shrewd “ex-con.”

But what could the judge have done? All the juvenile controls had produced no effect. Lectures, probation and restrictions had rolled off this young man like water off a duck’s back.

There isn’t any easy answer, but undoubtedly there is an answer somewhere. To find it will take thought, planning, sympathy, understanding and work.

In this connection I have recently enjoyed a very interesting experience.

I was invited to spend a day at a “ranch” in Southern California where an attempt is being made to solve the problems of tough juveniles.

It’s an interesting experiment, and the significant thing is that it is paying tremendous dividends in the realm of character rehabilitation.

The young men who go there are fellows who have been too tough for the ordinary juvenile procedure. Probation doesn’t work with them. They’re on the road to becoming vicious, depraved criminals.

They are sent to this “ranch,” not for any fixed term. They are simply sent there.

Now there’s a good deal of corn and showmanship in the operation of that ranch, but apparently that’s what is needed. Every youngster has a certain amount of make-believe in his system, a certain something that can be reached by showmanship, or, if you want to so label it, just plain corn.

You see a reflection of this in the heroes who are popular in the comic strips, in a certain type of motion picture, in some of the Western fiction that is devoured by the teen-ager.

The juvenile delinquent who is a candidate for this ranch is loaded into an automobile. He’s taken over mountain roads until he comes to a wild, secluded section of Western country where sagebrush and pine trees are mingled on the edge of a mountain slope. He’s a tough kid, hard, surly, defiant. He’s fighting the law. The law and the officers are enemies.

Then the car in which he is riding comes to a stop. He sees a gate, and over the gate is the legend “Howdy, Pardner.”

A big man in a Western sombrero, driving a buckboard, to which are hitched two pinto ponies, comes jogging along a winding mountain road. Behind the buckboard are two outriders, young men sitting in graceful ease on spirited Western horses.

There’s an element of dust and sweat, the outdoors, the creak of saddle leather, the big hats of Westerners, and there’s something in the easy carriage of those two young men, who sit so expertly on their spirited horses, that makes the young delinquent subconsciously want to be like that himself.

The big man shakes hands, says, “Get in, pardner.”

The automobile with the law enforcement officer drives off. The juvenile finds himself seated in the buckboard, which is turned expertly and starts up a mountain road—narrow, hairpin turns, steep grades, a scenic road which runs through wild Western scenery.

The man introduces himself. He’s Ralph Johnson who runs the “ranch.” He casually explains to the juvenile during the ride to the ranch headquarters that he can escape any time he wants to. There aren’t any restrictions. All he has to do is walk off. But if he walks off he forfeits the privilege of ever coming back.

That’s the keynote of the conversation. It’s subtly suggested that it’s a privilege to be there—and it really is.

Johnson points out to this boy that he’ll have his own horse and saddle, that he’ll have an opportunity to become a part of the camp, that that’s going to be his home, that before he graduates he’ll be like these outriders who are jogging along behind the buckboard, in fact, he may even have the job of being one of those outriders.

Johnson goes on to tell him there aren’t even any rules in the place.—That’s right, not a single rule.—“But we do have traditions and we try to live up to those traditions.”

It isn’t as though the young man were ushered into an office and had someone lay down a lot of rules that he had to observe—or else. He’s given a ride in a buckboard over an exciting road that makes him hang on to the side of the seat. He is given an entirely new outlook on life, an entirely new set of goals. There aren’t any rules for him to memorize and abide by—only traditions.

And those traditions really exist.

They exist because Johnson has that rare gift that enables him to get the confidence of young men and to hold and maintain that confidence. That means that ninety percent, or perhaps a hundred percent of the boys who are there are for Johnson and for the traditions.

It’s mighty hard to cram rules down the throat of a defiant young man. It’s mighty hard to think up any form of punishment that will force him to abide by those rules. But when he becomes one of a gang, and the gang has traditions, it’s very easy for him to fall in with those traditions.

Johnson and his wife try to see that the traditions are wholesome, that they appeal to the imagination of a boy, that they are the type that will build character.

The young man has left all of his outside life behind him. He’s there in ranch surroundings, where everything is of the outdoors and of the West. He starts work. That’s one of the “traditions” of the place.

There is a certain amount of schooling (the place is an accredited high school and furnishes a high grade of education). There’s a certain amount of manual labor. Johnson keeps that manual labor interesting. Whenever a task threatens to become a chore, he alternates it with something that is interesting. He keeps his boys interested in what they are doing. They can see a purpose in it.

The boys live clean lives and they lead active lives. They’re so busy every minute of the time with something that keeps them interested they don’t have any time to think of any deviltry.

And when finally Johnson feels that the camp has done its job and that it is time for the boy to go out, there’s no such crude thing as announcing that a “sentence has expired.”—The boy is “ready to graduate.”

Those graduation exercises are impressive.

When it comes time for a boy to graduate, he starts out on his favorite horse and rides alone over the mountain trails that he has learned to love. To the accompaniment of creaking saddle leather, the boy has an opportunity to think about the past and to contemplate the future.

Then he returns to camp after a couple of hours of solitude and the graduation exercises are under way.

They’re inspirational. They’re filled with pageantry and showmanship. At last the boy has achieved recognition. It’s his big day. He’s achieved a great honor. He’s going to the outside world to “carry on the traditions” of the camp.

Does he do it?

He does.

The statistics show that. The camp hasn’t been in operation long enough to show all that it can do, but it has been in operation long enough to show that it is highly successful. Boys with a new education, with a new concept of life, with a new quota of traditions, go out into a friendly world.

We need more camps of this sort for the juveniles, and we need something of the sort for men. Personally I don’t think you can take anyone, except a weakling, and club him into such submission that he is going to be worth a damn when the club is removed. I think you have to give him a set of traditions to live up to, and in order to do that you have to have bona fide traditions. You can’t have purely synthetic “rules.”

The only persons who can really make traditions are one’s companions. You have to sell them on the idea before you can sell anyone else. That means that traditions have to be good, they have to be wholesome, and they have to appeal to the imagination. They have to be really inspirational.

Mind you, I’m talking now about trying to keep the mud out of the stream in the first place.

After a man has served one or two terms in a penitentiary I think there is only one force on earth that can rehabilitate him and that is something within himself, and altogether too few of those people feel the urge for rehabilitation.

We can, I think, improve the administration of our penitentiaries enormously, but the penitentiary itself is an archaic, outmoded, unsuccessful method of coping with a crime problem that continues to get bigger and bigger. The penitentiary is not a cure. It’s a punishment.

Personally, I don’t think you can mix punishment and rehabilitation any more than you can mix oil and water. Punishment makes a person bitter or else it breaks his spirit. Theoretically it’s a deterrent. Actually it’s proving otherwise.

I’m not a penologist. I’m just an observer. But I’ve seen a lot, and the more I see the more I wonder.

This much I do know. I know there aren’t any easy answers. I know that you can’t just pass a law or advocate a theory and solve the crime problem.

The crime problem is just as tough, just as vicious, and just as hard-boiled as the men who make up our professional criminal population, and there are a lot more of these men than the average citizen realizes.

Then there are men of unstable emotions subject to psychic storms, who had virtually no control over what they did until after the law had been violated. There are men who became involved in the complexities of our civilization and made mistakes. There are, in fact, all sorts of men.

What are we going to do with them?

What are they going to do with us?

It’s high time society woke up to a realization and an intelligent consideration of this problem. You can’t evolve a solution just by ignoring the problem any more than you can cure a malignant sore by covering it up with a piece of adhesive tape and pretending it doesn’t exist.

Here again society needs quick, alert minds—men who have imagination, vision and daring, who are willing to try and find the causes and to experiment with solutions.

Here again society erects an automatic screen. The men who could do this work and who should be doing it, are virtually forced to turn to something else, some more dignified and remunerative profession. They don’t want to get into a work where political control and inadequate compensation represent the rewards for original thought, faithful service and painstaking research.

It’s an interesting problem. It’s a challenging problem. It’s one that society may well solve some day, but it’s going to take work to solve it, and it will never be solved until society wakes up to the problem and is willing to face it intelligently.