I have often been asked: "How did you come to be interested in prisoners in the first place?"

It all came about simply and naturally. I think it was W. F. Robertson who first made clear to me the truth that what we put into life is of far more importance than what we get out of it. Later I learned that life is very generous in its returns for what we put into it.

In a quiet hour one day it happened that I realized that my life was out of balance; that more than my share of things worth having were coming to me, and that I was not passing them on; nor did I see any channel for the passing on just at hand.

The one thing that occurred to me was to offer my services as teacher in a Sunday-school. Now, I chanced to be a member of an Episcopal church and their Sunday-school was held at an hour [Pg 4]inconvenient for my attendance; however, in our neighborhood was a Methodist church, and as I had little regard for dividing lines among Christians I offered my services the next Sunday to this Methodist Sunday-school. My preference was for a class of young girls, but I was assigned as teacher to a class of ten young men, of ages ranging between eighteen and twenty years, and having the reputation of decided inclination toward the pomps and the vanities so alluring to youth.

It was the season of revival meetings, and within a month every member of my class was vibrating under the wave of religious excitement, and each one in turn announced his "conversion." I hardly knew how to handle the situation, for I was still in my twenties, and as an Episcopalian I had never experienced these storm periods of religious enthusiasm. So while the recent converts were rejoicing in the newly found grace, I was considering six months later when a reaction might set in.

Toward the close of the revival one of the class said to me: "I don\'t know what we\'re going to do with our evenings when the prayer-meetings are over, for there\'s no place open every[Pg 5] evening to the men in this town except the saloons."

"We must make a place where you boys can go," was my reply.

What the class proceeded to do, then and there, was to form a club and attractively furnish a large, cheerful room, to which each member had a pass-key; and to start a small circulating library, at one stroke meeting their own need and beginning to work outward for the good of the community.

The first contribution toward this movement was from a Unitarian friend. Later, Doctor Robert Collyer—then preaching in Chicago—and Doctor E. E. Hale, of Boston, each gave a lecture for the benefit of our infant library. Thus from the start we were untrammelled by sectarianism, and in three months a library was founded destined to become the nucleus of a flourishing public library, now established in a beautiful Carnegie building, and extending its beneficent influence throughout the homes, the schools, and the workshops of the city.

Of course I was immensely interested in the class, and in the success of their library venture, and as we had no money to pay for the services[Pg 6] of a regular librarian the boys volunteered their services for two evenings in the week, while I took charge on Saturday afternoons. This library was the doorway through which I entered the prison life.

One Saturday a little boy came into the library and handed me the charming Quaker love story, "Dorothy Fox," saying: "This book was taken out by a man who is in jail, and he wants you to send him another book."

Now, I had passed that county jail almost every day for years; its rough stone walls and narrow barred windows were so familiar that they no longer made any impression upon me; but it had not occurred to me that inside those walls were human beings whose thoughts were as my thoughts, and who might like a good story, even a refined story, as much as I did, and that a man should pay money that he had stolen for three months\' subscription to a library seemed to me most incongruous.

It transpired that the prisoner was a Scotch boy of nineteen, who, being out of work, had stolen thirty-five dollars; taking small amounts as he needed them. According to the law of the State the penalty for stealing any amount under[Pg 7] the value of fifteen dollars was a sentence to the county jail, for a period usually of sixty days; while the theft of fifteen dollars or more was a penitentiary offence, and the sentence never for less than one year. I quote the statement of the case of this Scotch boy as it was given me by a man who happened to be in the library and who knew all the circumstances.

"The boy was arrested on the charge of having taken ten dollars—all they could prove against him; and he would have got off with a jail sentence, but the fool made a clean breast of the matter, and now he has to lie in jail for six months till court is in session, and then he will be sent to the penitentiary on his own confession."

Two questions arose in my mind: Was it only "the fool" who had made a clean breast of the case? And if the boy was to go to prison on his own confession, was it not an outrage that he should be kept in jail for six months awaiting the formalities of the next session of the circuit court? I did not then think of the taxpayers, forced to support this boy in idleness for six months.

That night I did not sleep very well; the Scotch boy was on my mind, all the more vividly [Pg 8]because my only brother was of the same age, and then, too, the words, "I was in prison and ye visited me not," repeated themselves with insistent persistence until I was forced to meet the question, "Did these words really mean anything for to-day and now?"

Next morning I asked my father if any one would be allowed to talk with a prisoner in our jail. My father said: "Yes, but what would you have to say to a prisoner?" "I could at least ask him what books he would like from the library," I replied. But I could not bring my courage to the point of going to the jail; it seemed a most formidable venture. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday passed, and still I held back; on Wednesday I was driving with my brother, and when very near the jail the spring of the carriage broke, and my brother told me that I would have to fill in time somewhere until the break was repaired. I realized that the moment for decision had come; and with a wildly beating heart I took the decisive step, little dreaming when I entered the door of that jail that I was committing myself to prison for life.

But we all take life one day, one hour, at a time; and five minutes later when my hand was[Pg 9] clasped through the grated door, and two big gray eyes were looking straight into mine, I had forgotten everything else in my interest in the boy. I asked him why he told that he had taken thirty-five dollars when accused only of having taken ten, and he simply said: "Because when I realized that I had become a thief I wanted to become an honest man and I thought that was the place to begin."

Had I known anything of the law and its processes I should doubtless have said: "Well, there\'s nothing for you to do now but to brace up and meet your fate. There\'s nothing I can do to help you out of this trouble." But in my fortunate ignorance of obstacles I said: "I\'ll see what I can do to help you." I had only one thought—to save that young man from the penitentiary and give him a fresh start in life.

I began with the person nearest at hand, the sheriff\'s wife, and she secured the sheriff as my first adviser; then I went to the wife of the prosecuting attorney for the State, and she won her husband over to my cause. One after another the legal difficulties were overcome, and this was the way the matter was settled: I secured a good situation for Willy in case of his release; Willy[Pg 10] gave the man from whom he had taken the money a note for the full amount payable in ninety days—the note signed by my father and another responsible citizen; the case was given a rehearing on the original charge of ten dollars, and Willy\'s sentence was ten days in the county jail; and this fortunate settlement of the affair was celebrated with a treat of oranges and peanuts for Willy and his fellow prisoners. A good part of that ten days Willy spent in reading aloud to the other men. Immediately after release he went to work and before the expiration of the ninety days the note for thirty-five dollars was paid in full. Now, this was the sensible, fair, and human way of righting a wrong. Nevertheless, we had all joined hands in "compounding a felony."

With Willy\'s release I supposed my acquaintance with the jail was at an end, but the boy had become interested in his companions in misery and on his first visit to me he said: "If you could know what your visits were to me you would never give up going to the jail as long as you live." And then I gave him my promise. "Be to others what you have been to me," has been the message given to me by more than one of these men.

[Pg 11]

While a prisoner Willy had made no complaint of the condition of things in the jail, but after paying the note of his indebtedness, he proceeded to buy straw and ticking for mattresses, which were made and sent up to the jail for the other prisoners, while I furthered his efforts to make the existence of those men more endurable by contributing various "exterminators" calculated to reduce the number of superfluous inhabitants in the cells.

At the time I supposed that Willy was an exception, morally, to the usual material from which criminals are made. I do not think so now, after twenty-five years of friendships with criminals; of study of the men themselves and of the conditions and circumstances which led to their being imprisoned.

Willy\'s was a kindly nature, responsive, yielding readily to surrounding influences, not so much lacking in honesty as in the power of resistance. Had he been subjected to the disgrace, the humiliation, and the associations of a term in the penitentiary, where the first requirement of the discipline is non-resistance, he might easily have slipped into the ranks of the "habitual" criminal, from which it is so difficult to find an exit. I am[Pg 12] not sure that Willy was never dishonest again; but I am sure of his purpose to be honest; and the last that I knew of him, after several years of correspondence, he was doing well, running a cigar-stand and small circulating library in a Western town.

From that beginning I continued my visits to the jail, usually going on Sunday mornings when other visitors were not admitted. And on Sunday mornings when the church-bells were calling, the prisoners seemed to be—doubtless were—in a mood different from that of the week-days. There\'s no doubt of the mission of the church-bells, ringing clear above the tumult of the world, greeting us on Sunday mornings from the cradle to the grave.

I did not hold any religious services. I did not venture to prescribe until I had found out what was the matter. It was almost always books that opened the new acquaintances, for through the library I was able to supply the prisoners with entertaining reading. They made their own selections from our printed lists, and I was surprised to find these selections averaging favorably with the choice of books among good citizens of the same grade of education. There certainly[Pg 13] was some incongruity between the broken head, all bandages, the ragged apparel, and the literary taste of the man who asked me for "something by George Eliot or Thackeray."

A short story read aloud was always a pleasure to the men behind the bars; more than once I have been able to form correct conclusions as to the guilt or the innocence of a prisoner by the expression of his face when I was reading something that touched the deeper springs of human nature. And my sense of humor stood me in good stead with these men; for there\'s no freemasonry like that of the spontaneous smile that springs from the heart; and after we had once smiled together we were no longer strangers.

One early incident among my jail experiences left a vivid impression with me. A boy of some thirteen summers, accused of stealing, was detained in jail several weeks awaiting trial, with the prospect of the reform school later. In appearance he was attractive, and his youth appealed to one\'s sympathy. Believing that he ought to be given a better chance for the future than our reform schools then offered, I tried to induce the sheriff to ask some farmer to take him in hand. The sheriff demurred, saying that no[Pg 14] farmer would want the boy in his family, as he was a liar and very profane, and consequently I dropped the subject.

In the jail at the same time was a man of forty or over who frankly told me that he had been a criminal and a tramp since boyhood, that he had thrown away all chances in life and lost all self-respect forever. I took him at his own valuation and he really seemed about as hopeless a case as I have ever encountered. One lovely June evening when I went into the corridor of the jail to leave a book, this old criminal called me beside his cell for a few words.

"Don\'t let that boy go to the reform school," he began earnestly. "The reform school is the very hotbed of crime for a boy like that. Save him if you can. Save him from a life like mine. Put him on a farm. Get him into the country, away from temptation."

"But the sheriff tells me he is such a liar and swears so that no decent people would keep him," I replied.

"I\'ll break him of swearing," said the man impetuously, "and I\'ll try to break him of lying. Can\'t he see what I am? Can\'t he see what he\'ll come to if he doesn\'t brace up? I\'m a living[Pg 15] argument—a living example of the folly and degradation of stealing and lying. I can\'t ever be anything but what I am now, but there\'s hope for that boy if some one will only give him a chance, and I want you to help him."

The force of his appeal was not to be resisted, and I agreed to follow his lead in an effort to save his fellow prisoner from destruction. As I stood there in the twilight beside this man reaching out from the wreck and ruin of his own life to lend a hand in the rescue of this boy, if only the "good people" would do their part, I hoped that Saint Peter and the Recording Angel were looking down. And as I said good night—with a hand-clasp—I felt that I had touched a human soul.

The man kept his word, the boy gave up swearing and braced up generally, and I kept my part of the agreement; but I do not know if our combined efforts had a lasting effect on the young culprit.

As time passed many of these men were sent from the jail to the State penitentiary, and often a wife or family was left in destitution; and the destitution of a prisoner\'s wife means not only poverty but heart-break, disgrace, and despair.[Pg 16] Never shall I forget the first time I saw the parting of a wife from her husband the morning he was taken to prison. A sensitive, high-strung, fragile creature she was; and going out in the bitter cold of December, carrying a heavy boy of eighteen months and followed by an older girl, she seemed the very embodiment of desolation. I have been told by those who do not know the poor that they do not feel as we do, that their sensibilities are blunted, their imagination torpid. Could we but know! Could we but know, we should not be so insensate to their sufferings. It is we who are dull. To that prisoner\'s wife that morning life was one quivering torture, with absolutely no escape from agonizing thoughts. Her "home" to which I went that afternoon was a cabin in which there was one fire, but scant food, and no stock of clothing; the woman was ignorant of charitable societies and shrinking from the shame of exposing her needs as a convict\'s wife.

It is not difficult to make things happen in small towns when people know each other and live within easy distances. In less time, really less actual time than it would have taken to write a paper for the Woman\'s Club on "The Problems[Pg 17] of Poverty," this prisoner\'s wife was relieved from immediate want. To tell her story to half a dozen acquaintances who had children and superfluous clothing, to secure a certain monthly help from the city, was a simple matter; and in a few months the woman was taking in sewing—and doing good work—for a reliable class of patrons.

I have not found the poor ungrateful; twenty years afterward this woman came to me in prosperity from another town, where she had been a successful dressmaker, to express once more her gratitude for the friendship given in her time of need. Almost without exception with my prisoners and with their families I have found gratitude and loyalty unbounded.

When the men sent from the jail to the penitentiary had no family they naturally wrote to me. Sometimes they learned to write while in jail or after they reached the prison just for the pleasure of interchanging letters with some one. All prison correspondence is censored by some official; and as my letters soon revealed my disinterested relation to the prisoners, the warden, R. W. McClaughrey, now of national fame, sent me an invitation to spend several days as his[Pg 18] guest, and thus to become acquainted with the institution.

It was a great experience, an overwhelming experience when first I realized the meaning of prison life. I seemed to be taken right into the heart of it at once. The monstrous unnaturalness of it all appalled me. The great gangs of creatures in stripes moving in the lock-step like huge serpents were all so unhuman. Their dumb silence—for even the eyes of a prisoner must be dumb—was oppressive as a nightmare. The hopeless misery of the men there for life; already entombed, however long the years might stretch out before them, and the wild entreaty in the eyes of those dying in the hospital—for the eyes of the dying break all bonds—these things haunted my dreams long afterward. Later I learned that even in prison there are lights among the shadows, and that sunny hearts may still have their gleams of sunshine breaking through the darkness of their fate; but my first impression was one of unmitigated gloom. When I expressed something of this to the warden his response was: "Yes, every life here represents a tragedy—a tragedy if the man is guilty, and scarcely less a tragedy if he is innocent."

[Pg 19]

As the guest of the warden I remained at the penitentiary for several days and received a most cordial standing invitation to the institution, with the privilege of talking with any prisoner without the presence of an officer. The unspeakable luxury to those men of a visit without the presence of a guard! Some of the men with whom I talked had been in prison for ten years or more with never a visitor from the living world and only an occasional letter.

My visits to the penitentiary were never oftener than twice a year, and I usually limited the list of my interviews to twenty-five. With whatever store of cheerfulness and vitality I began these interviews, by the time I had entered into the lives of that number of convicts I was so submerged in the prison atmosphere, and the demand upon my sympathy had been so exhausting, that I could give no more for the time. I found that the shortest and the surest way for me to release myself from the prison influence was to hear fine stirring music after a visit to the penitentiary. But for years I kept my list up to twenty-five, making new acquaintances as the men whom I knew were released. Prisoners whom I did not know would write me requesting interviews, and[Pg 20] the men whom I knew often asked me to see their cell-mates, and I had a touch-and-go acquaintance with a number of prisoners not on my lists.

Thus my circle gradually widened to include hundreds of convicts and ex-convicts of all grades, from university men to men who could not read; however, it was the men who had no friends who always held the first claim on my sympathy; and as the years went on I came more and more in contact with the "habitual criminals," the hopeless cases, the left-over and forgotten men; some of them beyond the pale of interest even of the ordinary chaplain—for there are chaplains and chaplains, as well as convicts and convicts.

I suppose it was the very desolation of these men that caused their quick response to any evidence of human interest. In their eagerness to grasp the friendship of any one who remembered that they were still men—not convicts only—these prisoners would often frankly tell the stories of their lives; admitting guilt without attempt at extenuation. No doubt it was an immense relief to them to make a clean breast of their past to one who could understand and make allowance.

This was not always so; some men lied to me[Pg 21] and simply passed out of my remembrance; but I early learned to suspend judgment, and when I saw that a man was lying through the instinct of self-defence, because he did not trust me, I gave him a chance to "size me up," and reassure himself as to my trustworthiness. "Why, I just couldn\'t go on lying to you after I saw that you were ready to believe in me," was the candid admission of one who never lied to me again.

Among these convicts I encountered some unmistakable degenerates. The most optimistic humanitarian cannot deny that in all classes of life we find instances of moral degeneracy. This fact has been clearly demonstrated by sons of some of our multimillionaires. And human nature does not seem to be able to stand the strain of extreme poverty any better than it stands the plethora caused by excessive riches. The true degenerate, however, is usually the result of causes too complicated or remote to be clearly traced. But throughout my long experience with convicts I have known not more than a dozen who seemed to me black-hearted, deliberate criminals; and among these, as it happened, but one was of criminal parentage. Crime is not a disease; but there\'s no doubt that disease often[Pg 22] leads to crime. Of the defective, the feeble-minded, the half-insane, and the epileptic there are too many in every prison; one is too many; but they can be counted by the hundreds in our aggregate of prisons. Often warm-hearted, often with strong religious tendencies, they are deficient in judgment or in moral backbone. The screw loose somewhere in the mental or physical make-up of these men makes the tragedies, the practically hopeless tragedies of their lives; though there may never have been one hour when they were criminal through deliberate intention. Then there are those whose crimes are simply the result of circumstances, and of circumstances not of their own making. Others are prisoners unjustly convicted, innocent of any crime; but every convict is classed as a criminal, as is inevitable; and under the Bertillon method of identification his very person is indissolubly connected with the criminal records. Even in this twentieth century, in so many directions an age of marvellous progress, there is a menacing tendency among legislators to enlarge the borders of life sentences—not according to the number of crimes a man may have committed, but according to the number of times a man has been convicted in courts [Pg 23]notoriously indifferent to justice; too often according to the number of times the man has been "the victim of our penal machinery."

I well remember a man three times sent from my own county to the penitentiary for thefts committed during the brain disturbance preceding epileptic convulsions. On one occasion, between arrest and conviction, I saw the man in an unconscious state and in such violent convulsions that it was necessary to bind him to the iron bedstead on which he lay. I knew but little of physiological psychology then; and no one connected the outbreaks of theft with the outbreaks of epilepsy. And the man, industrious and honest when well, was in consequence of epileptic mental disturbance convicted of crime and sent to the penitentiary, and owing to previous convictions from the same cause was classed as an "habitual criminal."

Like instances of injustice resulting from ignorance are constantly occurring. In our large cities where "railroading" men to prison is purely a matter of business, no consideration is given to the individual accused, he is no longer a human being, he is simply "a case." A very able and successful prosecuting attorney—success [Pg 24]estimated by the number of "cases" convicted—once said to me: "I have nothing to do with the innocence of the man: I\'m here to convict."

By far the most brutal man whom I have ever personally encountered was a modern prototype of the English judge, Lord George Jeffreys—a judge in one of our large cities, who had held in his unholy hands the fate of many an accused person. However, with this one exception, in my experience with judges I have found them courteous, fair-minded, and glad to assist me when convinced that a convict had not been accorded justice.

We find in the prisons the same human nature as in the churches; far differently developed and manifested; but not so different after all, as we should expect, remembering the contrast between the home influence, the education, environment, and opportunity of the inmates of our prisons with that of the representatives of our churches. In our prisons we find cowardice, brutality, dishonesty, and selfishness. Are our church memberships altogether free from these defects? Surely, unquestionably, in our churches we do find the highest virtues: love, courage, fortitude, tenderness, faithfulness, unselfishness. And in[Pg 25] every prison in this land these same virtues—love, tenderness, courage, fortitude, faithfulness, unselfishness—are to be found; often hidden in the silence of the heart, but living sparks of the divine life which is our birthright. And yet between these prisons and the churches there has long existed an almost impassable barrier of distrust, equally strong on both sides.

I once called with a friend upon the wife of a convict who, relating an incident in which she had received great kindness from a certain lady very prominent in church circles, said: "I was so surprised: I could not understand her being so kind—for she was a Christian." "Why, there\'s nothing strange in the kindness of a Christian," said my friend. "Miss Taylor and I are both Christians." The prisoner\'s wife paused a moment, then said, with slow emphasis: "That is impossible."

We all have our standards and ideals, not by which we live but by which we judge one another. This woman knew the sweat-shops and she knew that Christian as well as Jew lived in luxury from the profits derived from the labor of the sweat-shops, and of the underpaid shop-girls. To her the great city churches meant oppression and[Pg 26] selfishness, power and wealth, arrayed against poverty and weakness, against fair pay and fair play. Her own actual personal experience with some persons classed as Christians had been bitter and cruel; thus her vision was warped and her judgment misled. Much of the same feeling had prevailed through the prisons; and I know that one reason why so many of "the incorrigibles" gave me their confidence was owing to the word passed round among them: "You can trust her; she is no Christian."

This has a strange sound to us. But it does not sound strange at all when we hear from the other side: "You can\'t trust that man—he\'s been a convict."

Through the genius, the energy, the spiritual enthusiasm of that remarkable woman known among prisoners as "The Little Mother," the barrier between the churches and the prisons is recently and for the time giving way on the one side. The chaplains are taken for granted as part of the prison equipment, and their preaching on Sunday as the work for which they are paid. But "The Little Mother" comes from the outside, literally giving her life to secure a chance for ex-convicts in this world. She brings to the prisons[Pg 27] a fresh interpretation of the Christian religion, as help for the helpless, as a friend to the friendless. In her they find at once their ideal of human goodness and a lovely womanhood, and through her they are beginning to understand what the Christian churches intend to stand for. But to undermine the barrier on the side of society—to bring about a better understanding of the individuals confined behind the walls which society still believes necessary in self-protection—is, in the very nature of the case, a far more difficult undertaking. Almost inaccessible to the outsider is the heart of a convict, or the criminal\'s point of view of life. In fact their hearts and their points of view differ according to their natures and experiences. But to think of our prisoners in the mass—the thousand or two thousand men cut off from the world and immured in each of our great penitentiaries—is to think of them as the Inarticulate. The repression of their lives has been fearful. All that was required of them was to be part of the machinery of the prison system; to work, to obey, to maintain discipline. Absolutely nothing was done to develop the individual. The mental and psychic influence of the prison has been indescribably stifling and[Pg 28] deadening. Every instinctive impulse of movement, the glance of the eye, the smile of understanding, the stretch of weary muscles, the turning of the head, all must be guarded or repressed. The whole tendency of prison discipline has been to detach the individual from his fellow man; at all costs to prevent communication between convicts; and to stifle all expression of individuality except between cell-mates when the day\'s work was over. And companionship of cell-mates is likely to pall when the same two men are confined in a seven-by-four cell for three hundred and sixty-five evenings in a year. Gradually but inevitably the mind dulls; mental impressions lose their clear outlines and the faculties become atrophied. I have seen this happen over and over again.

When first the drama of prison life began to unfold before me I looked for some prisoner to tell the story; he only could know what it really meant. But the desire to forget, to shake off all association, even the very thought of having been connected with convict life, has been the instinctive aim of the average man seeking reinstatement in society. Occasionally a human document from the pen of an ex-convict appeared[Pg 29] in print, but few of them were convincing. The writer\'s own consciousness of having been a convict may have prevented him from striking out from the shoulder, from speaking as man to man, or something in the mind of the reader may have discounted the value of the statement coming from an ex-convict; more likely than either the spirit was so gone out of the man before his release that he had no heart or courage to grapple with the subject; and he, too, shared the popular belief that prisons are necessary—for others.

It was the poet and the artist in Oscar Wilde that made it possible—perhaps inevitable—for him to rend the veil that hides the convict prison execution, and to etch the horror in all its blackness—a scaffold silhouetted against the sky—in "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." The picture is a masterpiece, and it is the naked truth; more effective with the general reader than his "De Profundis," which is no less remarkable as literature but is more exclusively an analysis of Oscar Wilde\'s own spiritual development during his prison experience. The Russian writer Dostoyevski, also with pen dipped in the tears and blood of actual experience, has given scenes of Russian convict life so terrible and intense that[Pg 30] the mind of the reader recoils with horror, scoring one more black mark against Russia and thanking God that in our dealings with convicts we are not as these other men. But not long ago a cry from the inside penetrated the walls of a Western prison in "Con Sordini," a poem of remarkable power, written by a young poet-musician who, held by the clutches of the law, was suffering an injustice which a Russian would be slow to indorse. No doubt other gifted spirits will have their messages. But in the mind of the public, genius seemed to lift these men out of the convict into the literary class, and their most human documents were too likely to be regarded only as literature.[1]

Genius is rare in all classes of life and my prison friends were of the common clay. The rank and file of our convicts are almost as inarticulate as dumb, driven cattle, many of them incapable of tracing the steps by which they fell into crime or of analyzing the effects of imprisonment. Some of them have not learned how to[Pg 31] handle words and find difficulty in expressing thoughts or feelings; especially is this true of the ignorant foreigners.

One of the men whom I knew, not a foreigner, but absolutely illiterate, early fell into criminal life, and before he was twenty years old was serving a sentence of life imprisonment. After a period of unspeakable loneliness and mental misery he was allowed attendance at the prison evening school. He told me that he could not sleep for joy and excitement when first he realized that through printed and written words he could come into communication with other minds, find companionship, gain information, and come in touch with the great free world on the outside.[2]

As I look back through my twenty-five years of prison friendship it is like looking through a long portrait-gallery, only the faces are living faces and the lips unite in the one message: "We, too, are human beings of like nature with yourselves." To me, however, each face brings its own special message, for each one in turn has been my teacher[Pg 32] in the book of life. And now for their sakes I am going to break the seal of my prison friendships, and to let some of these convicts open their hearts to the world as they have been opened to me, and to give their vision of human life; to draw the picture as they have seen it. Some of them bear the brand of murderer, others belong to the class which the law denominated as "incorrigible." I believe I had the reputation of knowing the very worst men in the prison, "the old-timers." It could not have been true that my friends were among the worst men there, for my prison friendships, like all friendships, were founded upon mutual confidence; and never once did one of these men betray my trust.
FOOTNOTES:

[1] Recent periodicals have given many disclosures convincing to the public from men who know only too well the cruel and barbarous conditions of convict life. I have long held that no judge should be authorized to sentence a man to prison until the judge knew by experience what prison life really was. And now we are having authentic reports from those in authority who have taken a voluntary experience of convict life.

[2] In 1913 an Intra-Mural School was started in the Maryland penitentiary, and the story of its effect on the minds and the conduct of the thirty per cent of illiterate individuals in that prison is most interesting. It unquestionably confirms my statement that the rank and file of our convicts are inarticulate.