18

There is one other point which should be considered in connection with this subject of prisons and prison inmates.

I have mentioned the advantage a good, two-fisted, appointed warden has if he enjoys the confidence of the governor and if he also happens to be fearless and willing to fight for his convictions.

It is, of course, a temporary advantage. Sooner or later the governor, who is his friend, is going to be out of office, and a new governor coming in will say, “So-and-so is the political appointee of my vanquished opponent and I see no reason for continuing him in the job.”

But what if that warden is a career penologist?

Some of these men have acquired a great deal of scientific and empirical knowledge about prisons and prison administration. Some of these men are employed as wardens of penal institutions. Some of them are on parole boards. They are respected everywhere in the country by their fellow workers. If anybody ever comes up with the correct answers to our crime problem it will probably be these men.

But these men are laboring under enormous handicaps.

They suffer from lack of operating funds, lack of adequate personnel, overcrowding of prison space. But their greatest handicap is the attitude of the public.

The public simply doesn’t know anything about the problems of handling prisons. The public doesn’t want to learn. It doesn’t want to be bothered. Yet—and this is a paradoxical condition—whenever the public does become aroused it promptly proceeds to undermine the efficiency of the career penologist by interfering with his work.

Because the public has little knowledge of what goes on in prisons, because it has a very limited knowledge of the thoughts, the problems and the psychology of prison inmates, it clings to the old vindictive attitude that the sure way to cure crime is by punishment. If crime is on the increase, according to the reasoning of the general public, it stands to reason that our laws are too lax. We need to put teeth in them. We need to increase the punishment, to make penalties more severe. That will teach these men a lesson.

So what does the public do?

Let us suppose there have been an unusual number of service station holdups. The citizens don’t like that. They are angry. They are resentful. They want to “do something about it.”

So some legislator, who is going to be a candidate for reelection and is looking for a popular issue which he can champion, comes out with a bill providing that any person caught robbing or attempting to rob a service station shall be sentenced for a minimum period of ten years in the state penitentiary, that there shall be no probation and no parole for the minimum of ten years; that any person who has previously robbed a service station and then been caught robbing another service station must serve a minimum of fifteen years without parole, etc., etc., etc.

That looks good to the citizen. The candidate for legislative office comes out and announces that this is his platform. He reads the statistics on service station holdups. He cites the number of citizens who have been killed in such holdups.

His audience bursts into enthusiastic applause. “Attaboy! That’s the spirit! Show ’em who’s running this country. Put those crooks where they belong and keep them there.”

Unfortunately the answer isn’t that simple. The penologist knows it, but he is hardly in a position to risk public disapproval by saying so in a very loud tone of voice. He’s willing to give his opinion if he’s asked, but his opinion isn’t asked. The public tells him what to do. It doesn’t ask him what he thinks should be done. After all, the public is the boss. The penologist is the servant of the public.

Suppose we had an epidemic of polio in a community. People who are shocked by the twisted, deformed bodies of children, by the pain and suffering, want to do something about it. That’s perfectly natural and very commendable. However, the public wouldn’t think of passing a law telling the physician what type of treatment he should use, what drugs he should rely upon, or how many days he should keep the patient in bed.

Yet that’s what the public does in effect when it starts telling the penologists how to do their job.

Penology isn’t an exact science, but it is an exacting science. The career penologists are groping their way toward a solution. If they had more public understanding and more public co-operation they might be able to do a good deal, but from time to time the public steps in and ties the hands of the penologists.

By this time, crime being on the increase the way it is, it should be pretty apparent that the old-fashioned concept of curing criminals by punishment isn’t particularly effective. Yet whenever the public becomes angered and embittered over an outbreak of crime it immediately resorts to the old formula. It acts upon the assumption that parole boards have too been lenient, that punishment has been too light, and so it starts “putting teeth in the laws.”

In a way it’s like the story that a Western guide told me about a big bear who was running around a tree. The tree was smaller in diameter than the bear thought it was, and as he saw his own tail ahead of him he thought it was another bear. So he bit at what he thought was the other bear. He immediately felt the stab of pain and assumed the other bear had bitten him, so he really went to work on the other bear, running around and around the tree.

The Western guide looked at me with mournful solemnity and shook his head. “You know,” he said, “that goldanged bear ate himself up as far as the shoulders before he found out who he was.”

In many ways that’s what the public is doing when it interferes with career penologists and starts “putting teeth” in the laws.

Right now citizens are shocked at disclosures of dope sales to school children. There is much talk of passing a law providing life imprisonment without possibility of parole for dope peddlers.

How much good will that do?

A little later on I want to discuss some of the facts concerning this dope problem, but at the moment I want to point out that people aren’t asking the professional penologists what to do about dope. They are listening to legislators who are advocating the age-old remedy of punishment. That remedy has been in effect for hundreds of years and all it has done is increase the number of criminals to a point where our prisons are bulging.

Quite obviously it would seem that some day the public would say to itself, “We’ve been trying this particular form of remedy for a couple of hundred years and we aren’t getting anywhere. We aren’t even holding our own. How about trying something else?”

Once a career penologist loses his job because of public repudiation he has lost his entire profession. Therefore he doesn’t dare to experiment the way he would like to. He doesn’t dare to try out new ideas, at least to the extent that he would like to try them. He doesn’t dare to institute reforms until he is sure the public is willing to ride along.

I have talked with many career penologists who have had good sound ideas that certainly seem logical. I have wanted to publish these ideas, but in every instance the penologist has thrown up his hands in horror. “No, no!” he exclaims. “Don’t quote me.”

During the past two decades we have taken great strides in almost every branch of science. The automobile of today, for instance, is a far cry from the machine of twenty years ago. In fact, I can remember when the goal of the industry was to have an automobile that was capable of a sustained speed of thirty-five miles an hour. How far would the automobile industry have progressed if there hadn’t been research work, experimentation and the exploration of new ideas?

If the public would only co-operate by getting the best penologists it could possibly find, giving them a relatively free hand and letting the penologists tell the public what should be done to cope with the crime problem instead of insisting on telling the penologists what they must do, the public could reasonably hope for some improvement.

The probabilities are that the conventional type of penitentiary is hopelessly obsolete. The greatest disservice that society can do itself is to confine the ordinary law violator in the present conventional type of penitentiary.

What would take its place? I don’t know. I am not a penologist. But I know that there are penologists who are giving the subject very careful attention. Some of their ideas are revolutionary. They hesitate to advocate them for fear that the public is not yet ready to accept new concepts.

Gradually, however, bit by bit, quietly and unostentatiously, professional penologists are exploring the possibility of a new type of prison wherein the average, non-vicious offender can be given more space, more latitude, more freedom.

Take the men’s prison at Chino, California, for instance. There inmates’ families may come for informal visits. There the men enjoy relative freedom. That experiment is paying off in a big way.

One warden told me he was convinced that the big percentage of his inmates didn’t even need a wall or a cell. If they knew that they could escape at any time, but that if they escaped they would be brought back with added time on their sentence and less privileges, closer confinement and closer surveillance, the men could be confined in relatively inexpensive, light, airy barracks, and the results, so far as inmate rehabilitation was concerned, would be correspondingly improved.

However, these prisoners have been branded as felons. The conventional concept requires that they be housed in buildings of concrete with barred windows and steel doors, that the prison be surrounded by a wall with guards, rifles and machine guns. This means added costs. Added costs mean less space. The whole program means overcrowding,’ with all of the vicious problems of perversion and mass regulations.

It is to be remembered that prison inmates have been taken out of society because they couldn’t exercise their own free will without endangering society. After they are sentenced, in place of being taught how to exercise free will and independent judgment so that they can be released without endangering society, they are deprived of all opportunities to exercise any free will or any judgment. Their lives are completely regimented.

Then they are released.

What happens?

Take, for instance, the cases of innocent men who have been released, men who had committed no crime at all. We have watched some of these men gropingly trying to readjust themselves to society after being released, trying to get so they dared to cross the street of their own volition without being afraid.

If character deterioration can happen to innocent men who are confined in prison, what is the effect upon guilty men who were sent there for some actual crime?

Penology is a profession. It would be a better profession if the public would give it greater encouragement, greater recognition and more respect. If the men who are recognized in the profession itself as outstanding penologists were given greater opportunity to study and to experiment, I think we would be on our way to a big decrease in crime.

The first move is to unshackle the hands of penologists and let them try to do the job and report to the public.

That’s only a first step but it’s a constructive step.

Right now the biggest obstacle in the way of solving the crime problem is the attitude of the public.