17

No people need fairness and justice more than those who have been segregated in prisons for violating the laws. If these men are to be rehabilitated they must learn to respect law and justice. And much of this work must be done within prison walls. So it is important for all of us to know more about prisons, their personnel, their inmates, and the peculiar problems in human behavior which are produced by confinement.

Penitentiaries are, for the most part, a strange conglomerate of human beings who are thrown together in overcrowded conditions and in the closest possible physical association.

When you build a house you consider the basic costs of construction. Any good contractor will tell you that no matter how you figure, no matter how you skimp, how ingenious you try to make your construction, any really first-class construction is going to cost you a minimum of so much per square foot of floor space.

The same is true of any jail, penitentiary or other high-security unit, except that there the costs mount astronomically as plans call for the installation of concrete and steel, locks and corridors, safety devices and cells.

The result is that virtually nowhere has any state said, “We are up against overcrowding in our penitentiaries. We’re going to have to do something about it. The history of penology shows that prisons are habitually overcrowded. Also that crime is on the increase. So let’s look ahead and build a penitentiary that will be adequate for the needs of the community for ten, fifteen or twenty years to come.”

Rather, the position seems to be that since it is finally, absolutely necessary to spend some money on new construction, the money spent should be limited to the lowest possible amount, and the construction only sufficient to relieve the congestion. That means within a few months there is again the problem of congestion and overcrowding, but nothing will be done for years because, “We’ve just finished digging down into our pockets to modernize the prisons. What do these convicts want—a clubhouse?”

In many of the larger states an attempt is made to segregate the inmates in different types of prisons. There will be one high-security prison for repeaters. One for first offenders. One for men who do not need the restrictions of the high-security unit.

This works out very well in theory, and would work out in practice were it not for the constant problem of overcrowding.

Quite obviously when a man who is sent up for the first time comes in contact with hardened criminals, close association is going to bring about a deterioration of the new inmate’s moral fiber far, far more rapidly than the unsophisticated outlook of the new inmate will rehabilitate the character of the “four-time loser.”

In short, where prisons are crowded there is a tendency for new offenders to come out just that much worse than when they went in.

Quite obviously that is a suicidal mistake on the part of society.

If society couldn’t afford to have that man in its midst when he went into the penitentiary, it certainly cannot afford to have him in its midst when he comes out more hardened, more embittered, more desperate, and with less opportunity to get legitimate work.

The picture would be hopelessly discouraging were it not for one fact. That is the inherent desire on the part of most men to better themselves and to build their own characters.

Sometimes it seems almost impossible that any man could be subjected to the environment of some of these prisons, be released with his prison clothes and his conventional ten or twenty dollars in his pocket, manage to find employment, and then go straight.

The surprising thing, the encouraging thing, is that so many of them do just this. A big percentage of the men who leave prison are determined to go straight. They want no more of disciplinary institutions. They want to be self-respecting citizens. They try, but the cards are stacked against them. The system is against them. The percentages are against them. Society itself is against them.

There is, of course, the minority, the hard-bitten men who make their livings by stick-ups and murder. They have underworld connections, and within a matter of hours after they get out they’re planning some new job, desperate to get a stake and determined this time to avoid the mistakes which resulted in their previous arrest and conviction.

What are we going to do with those men?

The easy answer is, shut them up and keep them shut up for the rest of their lives.

That’s another thing that simply doesn’t work out in practice.

I have always been opposed to capital punishment. I used to talk about giving a man a life term and having it mean life.

Those were in the days when I thought I knew what should be done, when I thought I knew the answers, and before I knew anything about prisons. Now I don’t know what the answer is except that I do feel pretty certain that life imprisonment isn’t the answer.

There are several reasons against it.

One of them is that when you take hope away from a man you make that man unbelievably desperate. The other is that when a criminal knows he has a life sentence to look forward to in the event he is arrested, he’ll kill rather than surrender.

Take away hope of release and you can count on building up a surly, defiant, desperate class of potential murderers.

The uninformed man says, “Well, that’s all right. Let them be desperate. Let them be tough. Just keep them shut up.”

How?

As things are right now, a term of life imprisonment means different things in different states. In some states it means a minimum of twenty years. In some states it means virtually life imprisonment. In some states it means about seven and a half to ten years.

The man in the penitentiary is a human being. He is a thinking human being. When he has leisure time which he can spend in brooding, thinking and planning, he becomes diabolically ingenious.

Up in the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla, there was a hard-bitten core of desperate criminals serving life sentences, who had little hope of getting out by any legitimate means because life imprisonment meant just that. A man sentenced to life for rape or first-degree murder was not eligible for parole.

The institution had a prison library. From time to time a Catholic organization loaned books to this library. A shipment of books would be sent in, kept for a certain time and then taken back.

One of the priests who was very much interested in the reading habits of convicts took occasion to examine a shipment of books which had just been returned.

To his surprise he found that a certain book on African travel gave evidence of having been exceedingly popular. He wondered what in the world the inmates of a state prison at Walla Walla, Washington, would find in a book of African travel that was so absorbingly interesting that they had all but worn the book out.

He balanced the book in his hand and then gently released his fingers so that the book would open at the place where the binding had been the most worn. Invariably the book opened to a certain page. That page dealt with travels in the Pygmy country.

The priest couldn’t understand it.

A day or so later he happened to see the warden and mentioned the peculiar phenomenon to him.

The warden said, “There’s my car. Jump in it. Go get that book just as fast as you can and bring it back to me.”

The puzzled priest did so.

The warden studied the chapter on the Pygmies. It told about the telepathic means of communication by which they were able to anticipate the arrival of travelers. It told about their uncanny skill as woodsmen, their ability to hide in trees and make themselves invisible. It told about how they could drift into the forest and become a part of the shadow, entirely disappearing from sight. And it told about their blowguns.

After a moment the warden decided that the blowguns represented the source of prisoner interest.

He sewed up the prison. All men were confined to quarters. All unnecessary movement of prisoners was restricted. They tore the prison apart.

Eventually they found two blowguns.

At one time I was friendly with a man who had been a champion archer. Then he had his right elbow severely injured in an automobile accident. For months he couldn’t use his right arm. He couldn’t pull a bow. He liked to hunt small game with primitive silent weapons, so he started experimenting with blowguns, using the best of modern equipment. He’d prepare feathered, well-balanced darts which he placed in a blowgun and aimed with his left arm.

The man became startlingly accurate and I was amazed to learn the power that there was in a blowgun.

For instance, he would take a magazine such as The Saturday Evening Post. He would have me hold it up and he would take a blunt dart—a blunt-nosed dart, mind you—and he would shoot it through the magazine. It would hit the paper with an explosive crack, go clean through and come out the other side. I have seen him do this time and time again.

You can imagine therefore something of the power of a modern blowgun activated not by human breath but by compressed air.

That was what the inmates had done at the Washington State Penitentiary. They had manufactured the blowguns and then they had disconnected the air tanks from the sprayguns which were used to spray paint in the institution. They had connected these air tanks to tubes by means of a unique trigger device, and they were able to shoot ten-penny nails through thin sheet steel.

I have seen those blowguns. One of the inmates told me that the whole thing was grossly exaggerated, that the inmates had made them only for the purpose of shooting birds and monkeying around. But the warden found “proving grounds” where they had tested the penetrating powers of the missiles, and he was quite confident that these guns were intended to blast the guards out of one of the towers some night as efficiently as could have been done with gunfire, but without any noise and without any flash.

Perhaps the warden was wrong. I don’t know. I only know that those blowguns existed and that they were capable of sending a ten-penny nail through thin sheet steel.

That was only a mild case of desperation. Here’s another.

One day the warden, looking through the books, found an order for cyanide of potassium, one of the quickest and most deadly poisons known. It was used in the prison blacksmith shop for hardening metal.

He started checking, and found some of the powder had already been used.

He confiscated what was left and weighed it. Some was missing.

Again the prison was sewed up. Again there was a search. Eventually they found the missing powder and learned the whole story.

Guards in the prison towers had a midnight lunch of sandwiches and coffee made in the prison kitchen and delivered by other guards to the men in the towers.

Some of the inmates had planned a party for the guards. One night they were all to be served cyanide sandwiches. The whole prison would fall apart. Fifteen hundred desperate men could go over the walls without any alarm.

Those are some of the things that happen when you take hope away from men and try to make life imprisonment mean life imprisonment.

That’s the type of thing which inevitably follows an attempt to get tough with prisoners and make then do “hard time.”

Washington found that the answer wasn’t to get tough with prisoners. That was really the cause of the trouble.

So Washington listened to some of the men who knew their way around and who understood professional penology. The laws were changed so that after twenty years of confinement even a life termer sent up for murder would be eligible for parole if his record over the twenty years was such as to indicate reform.

The things that men can do when they have plenty of time to think are such as to challenge human imagination.

There is, of course, an enormous amount of surreptitious cooperation on the part of prison inmates. There is a prison grapevine and a co-ordination of effort that would be remarkable if it could be used for better purpose.

For instance, I have among my souvenirs a letter which was received by the warden of one of the state prisons. That letter came through the mail and purportedly was from the California Adult Authority (a board which is somewhat the equivalent of the Board of Pardon and Parole in many states), stating that California held a detainer on a prisoner who was shortly to be released from that institution.

A detainer is a hold order which one state places on a prisoner in another state. For instance, if John Doe is wanted for robbery in California but is arrested in Idaho, convicted on another charge of robbery and sentenced to a five-year term, California will file a detainer with Idaho. The effect of this detainer is that as soon as John Doe is released from Idaho he will find a representative of the State of California waiting to take him back to California where he will be tried on the California offense.

The letter the warden received was on high-grade stationery. It was engraved with the great seal of the State of California. It bore the title of the California Adult Authority. It seemed official in every respect, and it advised the warden to vacate the California detainer against the particular prisoner and release him, warning the prisoner, however, that he must keep out of the State of California, otherwise he would be prosecuted under the old charge.

There was something peculiar about that letter. For the moment the warden didn’t realize what it was. It just didn’t look right. So he went to the files and picked out some other letters he had received from the office of the California Adult Authority. Then the incongruity became apparent.

The printing on the letterhead he had just received was in a type entirely different from the lettering on all of the other letterheads of the California Adult Authority.

That started an investigation. It turned out that the letter was a forgery.

The surprising part of it is that that forgery had been made in the prison.

Here was an inmate who was not supposed to have access to certain types of tools, who was not supposed to be able to do any printing, particularly any printing that would be in the nature of a forgery of an official letterhead. Yet with a patience and ingenuity that can only be surmised, and a surreptitious co-operation which must have existed between this inmate and other inmates, that letterhead had been forged. The great seal of the State of California, which required an intricate amount of engraving, had been forged so carefully and so perfectly that it was impossible to detect the forgery. In fact, the whole thing had been done so neatly that had it not been for this different style of type the warden would have been fooled.

Those are some of the things a warden has to contend with. He must be on guard against surprise. He must carefully plan his every bit of prison routine so that there are no weak points.

His first responsibility is that of security.

Men are sent to his institution because they are supposed to remain there until they are released. That’s his primary responsibility—to see that they do remain.

He is usually appointed by the governor. The governor nearly always has political adversaries who worked against him at the time of his election, who are now waiting for the next election, intent upon making capital out of anything that will disparage the administration.

A prison break or a prison riot is duck soup. Those things are always newsworthy and can be counted upon to cause the administration embarrassment. The governor knows that. The warden knows that. Therefore, one of the warden’s duties is to prevent escapes and riots, to keep his prison off the front pages.

But the warden also knows that there is nearly always digging going on.

One of the more interesting cases of escape by digging occurred in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. It illustrates the almost incredible ingenuity, resourcefulness and patience of convicts intent on escape.

This prison is an old, old prison, going back for Lord knows how many years. The cells are cement lined and grimly efficient, but convicts are persistent and resourceful. Some of them started poking and experimenting, and finally decided, probably by means of sounding, that back of one of the areas of cement in the side of the cell was a weak point in the structure. (Actually, as I remember it, there had at one time been a fireplace at that point.)

Anyway, these men carefully worked along the seams of this cement until they had loosened the connecting bond and were able to lift out an entire section. Sure enough, they found behind a hollow and some good old Pennsylvania dirt.

That was all they needed.

They snitched spoons from the prison table and right away were in business.

That tunnel took considerably more than a year to construct. It ran for more than ninety-seven feet underground. There were two convicts in the cell. They would take turns. One of them would rig up a dummy, the other one would stay there to keep watch and allay the suspicions of any guard who happened to glance in.

The other inmate would descend into the tunnel, scratch away with his teaspoon, fill up his pockets with dirt, come back to the cell, sift the gravel out from the dirt, flush the dirt down the toilet, stash the small pebbles in the pockets of his prison suit. That operation would keep up at intervals all night.

The next day, during exercise periods, these convicts would walk out in the yard, put their hands in their pockets, lounge against the wall, squat down on the gravel while they talked. Surreptitiously they’d deposit the contents of their pockets, a few pebbles at a time, on the gravel of the exercise yard.

That’s the way a long tunnel was built, week in, week out, month in, month out, with the aid of two spoons and the dirt that could be carried out in a man’s pocket.

The cement slab that covered the opening to the tunnel had to be lifted carefully back into position so that the seam wouldn’t be disclosed by a jail inspection. In all probability it was put back into place after one of the convicts had gone to work in the tunnel. The other convict was on the alert to allay the suspicions of any guard who might stop by to look in and make sure both men were in the cell and sleeping. That meant a dummy had to be rigged up every time one of the men went into the tunnel.

When it came time to screen the pebbles from the dirt and flush it down the toilet, both men must have worked feverishly.

When, after many months, the tunnel was completed, these convicts did escape. But their engineering had been bad. Their exit outside the prison walls came up at a point almost directly under a guard tower. So they were caught immediately and returned to prison.

One of the most famous escape artists among modern criminals is Willie Sutton. Sutton, it will be remembered, escaped from a good many institutions, including New York’s Sing Sing. He enjoys the distinction of being the only inmate ever to escape from Holmesburg, which is considered the Alcatraz of Pennsylvania.

When he was transferred to Holmesburg, they called him into the office and explained to him that he was his own worst enemy. In place of trying to cooperate, he had been trying to escape. Now he had been transferred to a prison from which there was no possible hope of escape. He’d brought it on himself.

The prison is at present conducted by Dr. Frederick S. Baldi, an M.D. who, on a board of health, found that he had a penchant for organization and executive control, and eventually became Superintendent of Pennsylvania’s escape-proof prison.

That prison is really escape proof.

In the first place, there is a big wall, some thirty feet in height, surrounding an enclosure.

Within this enclosure, but at no place coming anywhere near the wall, are structures laid out around a central hub, very much like the spokes of a wheel. Each one of these corridors is lined with cells. The hub is an office, which is separated from the corridors by barred steel doors. Two guards, sitting in this hub, can see everything that goes on down the long corridors. Even if prisoners could get out of their cells, through their individual cell doors, and into the corridors, they couldn’t get to the hub because the guards in the hub are isolated behind locked doors with bars of steel. The guards can see through them but no inmate could get through them.

Any inmates in the corridors would instantly be seen and reported. They couldn’t even get to the corridors unless they could open the individual steel-barred doors which lock them in their cells. Even if they could find some way of getting into the hub, they still couldn’t get to the yard because the corridor doors leading to the yard are locked and barred behind the guards who are in the hub. Even if they got into the yard, they couldn’t escape because there they would then be confronted with a sheer thirty-foot wall, which is kept perpetually illuminated, surmounted by towers in which guards with rifles are waiting to shoot any prisoner who appears in the yard except during carefully restricted periods of exercise.

Dr. Baldi told me about his interview with Willie Sutton. He said, “Now I’ll tell you, Mr. Gardner, Willie was sitting in that chair, right where you’re sitting. I was standing here. I said to him, ‘Willie, you were sent here because you were always trying to escape. Now you can forget it because you can’t escape from here. No one ever has and no one ever will. I’m not going to hold your past record against you. All you have to do is conform to the rules of the institution and I’ll treat you just like any other inmate. I’m not going to make it tough for you.’

“And Willie looked up at me and grinned and said nothing.

“I said, ‘Now, Willie, I’m going to tell you about the rules of this institution so you can conform to them.’

“And Willie, keeping that grin, said, ‘Never mind the rules, Doc, I won’t be here long enough to bother with them.’”

Dr. Baldi’s hands are powerful, thick-fingered hands. As he told me about that interview the fingers doubled over, the hands clenched into fists. The skin was tight over the knuckles.

Dr. Baldi doesn’t like to think about Willie (The Actor) Sutton.

Willie Sutton escaped from that prison. He’s the only man in history who ever escaped from it, and probably no one else will ever have the temerity, the daring, the resourcefulness, the shrewd knowledge of human nature that will enable him to puzzle out all of the different combinations and work them into a winning gambit.

The reason I cite the case of Willie Sutton is because it illustrates the responsibilities of a warden, and the ingenuity of prison inmates. Per thousand prisoners a warden will have a few who want to become Willie Suttons. He’ll have some incipient Dillingers. He’ll have some green kids. He’ll have a few who shouldn’t be there at all, but were sent up because some irascible judge happened to be out of patience that morning, or through some blunder in penal administration.

He’ll have some psychopathic personalities who should be confined in hospitals for the criminally insane. He’ll have some weak chaps who committed a crime under stress of circumstances, or as the result of some emotional storm which shook their stability to its foundations. Those people probably shouldn’t be there either.

A warden, who doesn’t want his name mentioned, told me at one time, “Imprisonment shouldn’t be for any fixed term. It varies entirely with the individual.

“In almost every instance there comes a time when the inmate feels truly repentant for what he’s done, and feels that if he can have another chance he’s going to make good. That’s not just a period of wishful thinking. It’s a period when the punishment has taken hold just enough and remorse has taken hold just enough, and when there’s been just enough meditation over what has happened to convince him that crime doesn’t pay and that what he wants to do primarily for the rest of his life is to keep out of prison.

“That’s the time to turn that man loose on parole. That’s the time to take a chance on him.

“It seldom happens that you can catch things that way. The parole boards make careful studies. They rotate the inmates so they come up at intervals which are rather far apart.

“You leave that man there too long and the punishment begins to sink in. A certain amount of bitterness begins to develop. You let him out too soon and he thinks he got away with something, that doing time isn’t so bad after all. Or perhaps you let him out when he just thinks he’s repentant, but really hasn’t had an opportunity to let the experience germinate, ferment and sink into his soul.”

That, of course, brings up the whole problem of parole.

It is better to parole a man out of a penitentiary before his term is served than to wait until he has served the full time. That is true no matter how bad a moral risk that man may be.

The reason for this is obvious.

No matter how vicious a man is, no matter how much trouble you expect you’re going to have with him, it’s better to release him on parole while you can have some supervision over his activities at the cost of chopping a year or two off his sentence. Once his sentence has expired, and he can move out of the place a free man, society has lost its control.

That’s where the newspapers and, above all, the newspaper-reading public don’t give parole boards a fair break.

Parole boards understand the necessity of releasing even the tough ones so that they can try to rehabilitate them into society. Penologists understand it. Probably newspaper reporters do. But the newspaper readers don’t.

So when a crook murders someone in a stick-up, and the newspaper reporters find the man had been released on parole, the headlines almost invariably scream:

“PAROLEE MURDERS LIQUOR STORE DEALER IN HOLDUP”

No one says very much about the benefits that our parole system is accomplishing day in and day out. There’s nothing dramatic about it. It isn’t news.

No one bothers to point out that the parolee who commits a crime would have been released because his sentence had expired if he hadn’t been placed on parole. The insinuation is that some dumb parole board turned a murderer loose on the community.

That gives the parole system a bad name, a black eye, and causes it to miss out on a whole lot of co-operation from the citizen.

Not that our parole boards are perfect.

Here again we have all sorts of conditions to contend with. There are some parole boards who bitterly resent a person making an application for pardon, on the theory that that person is “trying to go over our heads.” There are some members of parole boards whose sole qualification for the job was the fact that they were able to pick the right gubernatorial candidate prior to the time of election and render valuable political service. They have no desire to improve penal institutions. Their sole desire is to pick a political plum.

Prison inmates who are without recourse, who have no means of arousing public attention, or even reaching the public, bear the brunt of these mens’ prejudices, ignorance, arrogance and self-importance. The public, of course, isn’t the least bit interested. The governor has paid off a political debt.

Fortunately, these appointments are a lot less common nowadays than they used to be. It’s getting so most governors try to make a good job of prison administration.

If the public would only take a little more interest, if we could have a few more men of the right caliber embarking upon a career of professional penology, we’d have an enormous improvement in conditions.

Society should extend a helping hand before the man walks down the front steps. That’s the best time to condition men’s thinking.

There again we run into a snag.

Someone invented the phrase “coddling criminals.” It has become a very popular catch phrase.

Time after time prison officials are reminded that men are sent to prison as a “punishment.” The idea is that inmates must first be punished and then perhaps they can be rehabilitated.

It’s difficult to mix punishment and rehabilitation. Wardens are ready to do what the public wants them to. The trouble is that society wants to send men to prison to be “punished” and then have the inmates turn to model citizens the moment they walk out the front door.

That’s like telling a man to stand on his head to eat dinner and then it won’t make him fat.

Lots of men in prison could be rehabilitated if we were in a position to devote more attention to rehabilitation and less to security.

My friend Art Bernard, Warden of the Nevada State Penitentiary at Carson City, has a rather unique system.

I don’t know whether he is working under a particularly understanding governor, or whether he is just enough of a two-fisted fighter to stand by his principles without giving a hoot as to what happens.—Of course, he is in an exceedingly fortunate position because Nevada is a state of large area but small population, and Bernard only has a few hundred prisoners to supervise. That gives him an opportunity to get pretty well acquainted with each man.

But when the court sends up some young fellow who has been in trouble yet who isn’t a vicious enemy of society, Art Bernard throws security to the winds. The boy doesn’t ever get thrown into the yard with the tough men who look on organized society as their enemy.

That boy starts almost immediately on one of the prison farms.

Art Bernard talks to him. He gives him one chance and that’s all. Bernard says, “I’m going to give you a chance to make good. Don’t muff it. I don’t like alibis. I don’t like excuses. I like results. They hold me responsible for results, and that’s what I’m holding you responsible for. If you’re man enough to go out there and make good, that’s fine. If you double-cross me that means you’re going behind the walls, and, so help me, you’re going to stay behind the walls.”

Bernard is a peculiar combination of a gentle man and a tough man.

He isn’t a career penologist. He was appointed to the job without any previous experience, except some experience in handling men—quite a bit of experience, and Bernard is a fighter. Few men can stand up to him. Few men want to.

He’s not only a physical fighter, he’s a mental fighter.

Shortly after he entered the prison, the convicts decided they were going to riot. They’d take Bernard hostage if they could. If they couldn’t, they’d take some of the guards. They’d smash up the tables and the chairs and burn them. They’d smash all the dishes. The prison kitchen and dining room are on an upper floor and they decided they’d take the kitchen range to pieces and throw the pieces out in the warden’s front yard.

It wasn’t one of those spontaneous riots. It was a deliberately planned affair. They were going to put the prison on the front page. They were going to take the measure of the new warden.

One of the anxious guards found out about the plot. He came to Bernard and told him about it, told him that those riots had happened before, that the prison was tough, that the only thing to do was to keep out of the way until the riot subsided, not let the men get hold of any guard as a hostage, and, above all, not to let them get the warden.

Bernard thought things over a bit and said, “Tell me if you can find out exactly when this riot is going to take place.”

The guard, who had, of course, an informer who was keeping him posted, learned that the riot was to take place on a certain night immediately after supper. The prisoners would get their bellies full and then go on a tear.

The guards were conspicuous by their absence.

Bernard walked unarmed to the dining room, putting himself at the mercy of the rioters. He made them a nice little speech.

He said, “I’m trying to run this prison on a decent basis. I’m trying to give you men a break. You weren’t sent here as a tourist being sent to a resort. You aren’t here because you want to be here. You were sent here as inmates because you violated the laws.

“Now, I’m going to tell you sons-of-bitches something. While you’re here, you’re going to conform to the rules. They tell me you’re planning a riot. They tell me you intend to take hostages. You intend to smash up the tables. You intend to break the dishes. You intend to take the stove to pieces and throw it out in the warden’s front yard.

“I don’t know as there’s anything I can do to stop you. I don’t know as I intend to try. I’m just going to tell you this. You can smash up all the dishes you want to. You can burn up all the tables you want to. Those are things that are furnished by the taxpayers for your convenience. If you don’t want them you don’t have to use them.

“We have a cement floor here. I don’t think you can smash that, and I know damn well you can’t burn it. Now then, if you don’t want to eat off dishes, sitting at tables, you just show me that you don’t by smashing them up. I’ll put you fellows to work cleaning up the mess, and after we get it cleaned up you’ll scrub these cement floors until they shine. We’ll have them just as clean as you can get them, and we’ll serve the food right on the cement floor. If you boys don’t want tables you can eat on your hands and knees. Nobody’s going to starve to death. The food will be there. It’ll be the same type of food you’re getting now.

“But don’t think for one minute that I’m going to let you fellows smash up all the dishes and tables and then go to the taxpayers and ask them to replace the stuff that you’ve smashed up. They’ve furnished the tables. They’ve furnished the benches. They’ve furnished the plates. They’ve furnished the knives and forks. It’s good stuff, but I’m not going to force you to use them. There’s the floor. If you want to eat off the floor, you go right ahead.

“Now then, I’m just going to tell you something else. I’m new here, and probably some of you fellows would like to find out just how far you can go. You’d like to find just how tough I am. I’m putting myself on record. If anyone backs up it won’t be me. Now then, all you fellows have got to do is start something. I’m going to be here to finish it. Just help yourselves, boys.”

And Bernard turned and walked out.

There hasn’t been a riot in that prison from that day on.

That, of course, is one advantage a good, two-fisted man has over a career penologist. The career penologist doesn’t dare to make a bad mistake. He’s making his living out of penology and he has to consider the temperament of the taxpayers.

Bernard simply doesn’t give a damn. He’s in there to do a job and he’s going to do the best job he can while he’s in there. Any time they want him out, that’s okay by him. He made a living without knuckling down to any man before he became warden and he can make a living without knuckling down to any man after he ceases to be warden. While he’s warden he’s going to call the turns.

Some political appointees make pretty sorry wardens. Some of them don’t. I’ve known some good ones. After all, it depends on the man.

Within the limits of what he can do, Art Bernard is fighting for the prison inmates. He’s trying to get them the best food he can, the best conditions, the best treatment. He expects co-operation in return. If he gets it, everything’s fine. If he doesn’t get it, he can be just about the roughest, toughest, two-fisted fighter in the country.

The interesting thing is that his personality is colorful enough and his ideas are fresh enough so that the citizens, in place of getting shocked, have begun to take an interest.

That’s probably one of the things we need most in penology today. If we had the real interest of an enlightened group of citizens who would take the trouble to study the problem, the strides that could be made in the work of rehabilitation would be enormous.

Of course, one of the black blotches on prison administration is the rioting that took place in the State Prison of Southern Michigan at Jackson.

The history of those riots was written up in The Saturday Evening Post, and anyone who is interested in the problem of prison administration should read the history of what happened.

When it came to a showdown, in order to save the lives of guards who were hostages to a crowd of prisoners, the leaders of whom were felt to be completely insane, one of the deputies waved an olive branch all over the place, and even went so far as to give the rioters a verbal pat on the back, following which they were ushered into the prison dining room for a banquet of beefsteak and ice cream.

That may have saved the lives of some guards—just what it accomplished is controversial, but one thing it certainly did accomplish was to instill prison inmates everywhere with the idea that they might—just might—get the upper hand and win sweeping reforms and a change in administrative personnel if they became desperate enough.

As it happened, I had been in that prison several times and had talked with some of the men. It had the unenviable distinction of being the country’s largest prison from the standpoint of population, and anyone who knew anything at all about prisons knew that putting so many thousand men of all types together, in such a small space, under such crowded conditions, was like playing Russian roulette. You can win so many times and then the time comes when your luck runs out.

I haven’t had a chance to talk with Warden Frisbie since the riots took place, but he is reported to have blurted out at about the time of the riots, “This is what comes of trying to run a prison without any money.”

Society has tried just about everything as far as crime punishment is concerned. We’ve gone through a period when stealing a loaf of bread was punishable by hanging. We’ve had enough capital punishment so we certainly should be beginning to realize that it doesn’t work, at least not in the way its proponents hope and intend.

Regardless of whether the severity of the punishment acts as a deterrent (and most penologists feel that it is the certainty rather than the severity of punishment that is the only deterrent), capital punishment has probably resulted in releasing more murderers on society than any other single factor.

When a man charged with a capital crime comes into the courtroom he’s making a last-ditch fight for life. That’s always dramatic, and because it’s dramatic it attracts public attention. The attorney for the defense is able to dangle the death penalty in front of the jury, and even after the man is convicted the fact that he is facing death does a lot to arouse public sympathy.

On the other hand, I am among the first to admit that where capital punishment has been abolished without at the same time making sweeping reforms in penal administration, it hasn’t been so good.

I am in the peculiar position of opposing capital punishment, and, at the same time, opposing the abolition of capital punishment without at the same time making sweeping reforms.

I think if we’d study the problem, I think if we could give our professional penologists the right kind of public interest, co-operation and support, we could abolish capital punishment, and, by investing a few million dollars in prison administration, could save a good many million dollars and quite a few lives, including the lives of children, of holdup victims, and of conscientious cops who are trying to do their duty.—And always remember this, regardless of how you may feel when you read about police corruption and the fact that gamblers and prostitutes have taken over and are running wide open, you don’t often read about a cop who sticks his hands up during a holdup.

That’s a tradition of the force. It’s a splendid thing, and by the same token it’s a dangerous thing. When a mobster in a stick-up, “going it blind,” finds that there’s a cop or an ex-cop in the place, he knows he’s up against a showdown. Words aren’t going to count. He either has to kill the cop, or the cop’s going to kill him.

Strangely enough, injustice is one of the greatest factors in perpetuating crime in this country and molding the habitual criminal.

We have, for instance, known some men whom we were convinced were innocent of the crime for which they had been convicted. Our polygraph tests have completely convinced Alex Gregory of the innocence of these men; our investigations have confirmed Gregory’s findings. For one reason or other, the circumstances surrounding these cases are such that there’s nothing we can get hold of, no way that we can reopen the case.

It is, of course, instantly apparent that we can’t go into a state and say, in effect, “We’ve examined the evidence in this case, the same evidence that the jury had before it. We don’t agree with the verdict of the jury. We think this man is innocent. We’ve given him a lie detector test, and that indicates he’s innocent. Therefore we want him released.”

Even as it is, we have all too frequently run up against newspaper editorials somewhat along these lines:

John Doe was fairly convicted in this state by our esteemed contemporary, the able District Attorney of Whosis County. His guilt was passed upon by a jury of twelve reputable citizens of this community, men of judgment and integrity.

Who are these outsiders to come stalking into our community and tell us how to run our business, to set aside the verdicts of our jurors, to insinuate that our courts were incompetent or corrupt, and, above all, to try to smirch the splendid record of our popular District Attorney?

As one newspaper put it, in quoting an irate prosecutor, after Tom Smith and I had been investigating a case, “What right have two men, one an ex-superintendent of a small penitentiary, and the other an author of cheap, twenty-five cent mystery fiction, to set themselves up as a court of last resort in our sovereign state?”

So what about these men who are innocent yet for whom we can do nothing, at least at this time, without jeopardizing our whole work and sacrificing the advantages we have so far gained.

In at least one instance I can recall offhand, one of these men went up before a parole board. According to the story we have, and we have it on pretty good authority; the board was all set to release the man on parole. One of the board asked him if he was now properly repentant. The man told him that he was sorry, but he couldn’t be repentant for something he hadn’t done, that he had been wrongfully convicted.

According to our story, which came from the grapevine but from sources which we consider thoroughly reliable, the board promptly tore up the man’s parole papers and sent him back to prison on the ground that his attitude was “still antisocial.”

Just let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that those facts are all true. One can well imagine how such a man would feel at being sent back to prison, knowing that he could have been released if he had told a lie.

Then, of course, there is the question of varying sentences.

Some men can commit a crime in one state, or even in one county of one state, and the judge, who is noted for his intolerance, will “throw the book at him.”

Another person can commit exactly the same crime even under conditions that make it many times more flagrant, but simply by being in another political subdivision, and coming up before another judge, receive a rather short sentence.

These men rub elbows in a penitentiary. One of them surrendered to impulse and committed a crime. He’s up for a long period of years. The other one is an habitual criminal who intends to return to a career of crime as soon as he can get out, and he was sent up for a short term.

The Indeterminate Sentence Act is supposed to take care of situations of this sort, and to some extent it does.

But here again we’re up against a problem.

A lot was expected of the Habitual Criminal Act. We were going to take the men who had previously been convicted of three major felonies and put them out of circulation. They were going up for life.

What happened?

It all depends on the temperament of the district attorney and on the political expediencies of the situation.

There are some men in prison today who have criminal records as long as your arm, and they’re going to get out within a few months. There are other men in the same institution who have committed three crimes, none of which is any more serious than the long list of crimes committed by the other men, and they’re branded as habitual criminals and sent up for life.

How does this happen?

It can be as simple as the case of the overworked district attorney. He’s trying to get away on a vacation. His office is crowded. He has a weak case against a desperate individual. The police have tried to get the evidence that is necessary to convict. They’ve only managed to amass enough evidence so that the district attorney doesn’t dare dismiss the case. He realizes, however, there’s a fatal weakness in it. The attorney for the defense is going to give him a bad time with one of his witnesses.

The district attorney passes the word down to the man in prison. “All right, my friend, if you want to go ahead and fight this case I’ll amend the information and plead your prior convictions. Then, in case you’re sent up, you’ll be sent up for life as a habitual criminal. But if you want to cooperate with me, if you’re willing to come in and plead guilty, I’ll not plead your prior offenses. In fact, I’ll even reduce the charge.”

That’s done every day.

In a good many states the prosecutors deliberately use this Habitual Criminal Act as a lever or a club, depending upon how you happen to want to look at it.

I am reminded of a case in Washington not long ago. A man pleaded guilty to the charge of forging a check. He was sent to prison for a term of years.

The forgery was not isolated. It was part of a string of forgeries carried on with a certain well-defined modus operandi. The forgeries continued after the supposed culprit had pleaded guilty, been sentenced, and incarcerated in prison.

Eventually the right man was apprehended. There could be no question but what he was the one who had perpetrated the string of forgeries.

The prison board sent for the man who had pleaded guilty and said, “What on earth ever possessed you to plead guilty to a charge of which you were so manifestly innocent?”

He twisted his face in a cynical grin. “Because I was smart,” he said.

They asked him to explain.

“The D.A. came to me and said, ‘I’ve got you dead to rights. If I put you on trial you’re going to be convicted. If you stand trial I’ll plead your priors and you’ll go up for life as a habitual criminal.’ That way I never would have stood any chance of getting out. This way I stood a chance after five years of getting out on parole. What would you have done?”