The basic principle of reform in those who prey upon society is the changing of energies destructive into energies constructive. It is the opening of fresh channels for human forces. Change of environment, the breaking of every association connected with criminal pursuits, life in the open in contrast with the tainted atmosphere of crowded tenements and dance halls—all this has a healthful, liberating influence on the mind; abnormal obsessions are relaxed, different brain-cells become active, and the moral fibre of the man as well as his physical being absorbs vital elements. That the laborer is entitled to a share in the fruits of his labor is true the world over, and industry and efficiency are stimulated by recognition of the relation of achievement to reward.
Strict repressive discipline applied to organized enslavement of labor is in direct violation of all these principles. The penal colony seems a rational method of dealing with those whose [Pg 283]permanent removal from our midst is deemed necessary. Time and again have penal colonies given satisfactory solution to the criminal problem. Virginia and Maryland absorbed the human exports from English courts, and their descendants joined in the building of a great nation; while the penal colony in Australia resulted in a civilization of the first rank. While the deportation of our criminals to-day may be neither practicable nor desirable, the establishment of industrial penal communities in every State, on a profit-sharing basis, is both practicable and desirable, and would unquestionably result in the permanent reform of many who are now a menace to public safety.
Notwithstanding that progressive wardens are accomplishing all-important changes in their domains, permanent reform work for convicts demands a number of concessions in legislation. Until the contract system is wholly and finally abolished in favor of the state-use system the power of even the best warden will be limited. With the state-use system and the prison farm the prisoners have a variety in opportunity of industrial training almost as great as that offered on the outside.
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That the earnings of prisoners, beyond the cost of their maintenance, should either be credited to the man himself or sent to the family dependent upon him is but fair to the prisoner, and would relieve the county from which he is sent from taxation toward the support of the man\'s family. This is so obvious that it is now widely advocated for both economic and humanitarian reasons, and in several States has already been adopted.
Another concession is of still greater importance, since its neglect has been in direct violation not only of every principle of justice but of common every-day honesty. This concession is the recognition of the duty of the state to make what reparation is possible to the man who has suffered imprisonment for a crime of which he was innocent.
Years ago, during one of my visits to our penitentiary, a lawyer of wide experience made the remark: "From what I know of court proceedings I suppose twenty per cent of these convicts are innocent of the charge for which they are here." I did not credit that statement, and afterward repeated it to another lawyer, who said: "I should estimate the percentage even higher."[Pg 285] I did not believe that estimate either; nor do I now believe it. But having worked up the cases and secured the pardons of two innocent men, and having personally known two other men imprisoned for crimes in which they took no part, I know that innocent men are sent to prison. Lawyers are prone to dispose of such instances with the offhand remark, "Well, they might not have been guilty of that particular act, but no doubt they had committed crimes for which they escaped punishment." I have positive knowledge of only those four cases, but in none of them was the convicted man from the criminal class. Another remark which I have met is this: "Doubtless there are innocent men in prison, but there are more guilty ones who escape," which reminds one of Charles Lamb\'s admission: "Yes, I am often late to business in the morning, but then I always go home early in the afternoon." Plausible as the excuse sounds, it but aggravates the admission.
It happened some years ago in my own State that a working man was convicted of killing another. Henry Briggs asserted his innocence, but a network of plausible evidence was drawn about him and he was sent to prison for life.[Pg 286] His widowed mother had faith in his innocence and paid two thousand dollars to lawyers, who promised to secure her son\'s pardon but accomplished nothing in that direction. Briggs had been in prison some ten years when he told his story to me and I believed that he told the truth. His home town was across the State from me, but I wrote the ex-sheriff, who was supposed to know all about the case, that the prisoner\'s mother would give another thousand dollars to him if he could secure evidence of Henry\'s innocence and obtain his pardon. A long and interesting correspondence followed, and at the end of two years evidence of the man\'s innocence was secured and Henry Briggs was a free man. In his last letter the sheriff wrote me: "To think that all these twelve years that convicted man had been telling the absolute truth and it never occurred to any one to believe him until you heard his story." But that ex-sheriff, who had collected his sheriff\'s fees and mileage for taking an innocent man to prison—he was really indebted to the prisoner for a neat little sum paid by the county—yet that sheriff had no scruples in taking the thousand dollars from Mrs. Briggs for righting a wrong which, he frankly admitted to me, he[Pg 287] had taken part in perpetrating. Now, in common honesty, in dollars and cents, the county from which Henry was sent owed the Briggs mother and son at least ten thousand dollars; instead of which the mother was left an impoverished widow, while the son, with youth and health gone, had to begin life over again.
When men are maimed for life in a railroad accident the owners of the road are obliged to pay a good round sum in compensation. The employer is liable for damages when an employee is injured by defective machinery; but to the victims of our penal machinery no compensation is made by the state, at whose hands the outrage was committed. It is true that the injured party is at liberty to bring suit against the individual who charged him with the crime, but as the burned child dreads the fire so the innocent man convicted of a crime dreads the courts.
But we are waking up to a sense of this most cruel robbery; the robbery of a man\'s liberty, his earnings, his reputation, and too often his health; and we are coming to see that compensation from the state, on receiving convincing evidence of the man\'s innocence, is only the man\'s just due—is even far less than fair play.
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To Wisconsin belongs the honor of taking the lead in this most important reform, since in 1913 Wisconsin passed a law insuring compensation in money from the State in every case where proof could be furnished that one was not guilty of the crime for which he had suffered imprisonment. A more just and righteous law was never passed. Money alone can never compensate for unjust imprisonment, but the only atonement possible is financial compensation and public vindication.
The measures so far considered are all remedial; but while we have recently made rapid progress in measures applied after men have been sent to prison we have thought little of preventive measures. And just here we face again the spirit of the times.
All along the latter half of the nineteenth century men of science—chemists, biologists, physicians—were studying preventive measures to stem the tide of evil in the form of disease. Previously medical science had been directed chiefly to battling with diseased conditions already developed; but under the leadership of Pasteur and Lord Lister the medical world was aroused to the fact that it was possible to avert the terrible ravages[Pg 289] of many of the diseases which fifty years earlier had been accepted as visitations from Providence. Henceforth "preventive measures" became watchwords among men devoting themselves to the physical welfare of the race; and "preventive measures" have also a most important relation to the moral welfare of the community, and the way is opening for their application.
For instance, the imprisonment of innocent men would be largely prevented by the abolition of all fees in connection with arrests and convictions. The system of rewards for arrests and convictions is absolutely demoralizing to justice; for as long as the whole battalion of men employed to protect the public have a direct financial interest in the increase of crime it is unreasonable to expect decrease in the number of men confined in our jails and prisons. An official inspector of jails and police stations in my own State reports that she has frequently had police officers admit to her that it was a great temptation to arrest some poor devil, since the city paid fees for such arrests; and she further states that in Chicago the entire basis of the city penal administration is fees, and she adds: "What better inducement could be offered to officials to penalize some unoffending[Pg 290] stranger looking for work?" All the evils arising from this abominable and indefensible arrangement would be in a measure decreased by the simple process of abolishing fees and increasing salaries. This has already been done in some localities; and doubtless the coming generation will wonder how the feeing system could ever have been adopted or tolerated.
The most impregnable stronghold of inhumanity in dealing with persons suspected of connection with crime is our police stations; especially is this so in our larger cities. The police station and the feeing system are the parent of one most barbarous custom; an evil most elusive, its roots, like the roots of the vicious bindweed, so far underground, with such complicated entanglement of relationships, as to be almost ineradicable, involving in some instances State attorneys of good standing, detectives, policemen, sheriffs—in fact, more or less involving the whole force of agents supposed to be protectors of the public. This abuse is called the third degree, or the sweat-box.
A man is arrested, accused of a crime or of knowledge of a crime. Before he is given any trial in any court unscrupulous means are resorted[Pg 291] to in order to extort an admission of crime or complicity in crime—or even of knowledge connected with a crime.
A physician who knew all the circumstances recently called my attention to the case of a woman supposed to have some knowledge that might implicate her husband in a burglary. The woman was an invalid. After being kept for forty-eight hours without food or water, forced to walk when she seemed likely to fall asleep from exhaustion, she was told that her husband had deserted her, taken her child, and gone off with another woman. She was by this time in a frantic condition, and when told that her torture would cease with her admission of her husband\'s guilt, too distracted to question his desertion of her, she gave false evidence against her husband and was set free.
The husband was in no way implicated in the crime, but the consequences of the affair were disastrous to his business. He had never thought of deserting his wife, but it was part of the scheme of the third degree to keep the husband and the lawyer whom he had engaged from seeing the woman until the end sought was accomplished.
A young lawyer told me of a most revolting[Pg 292] third degree scene witnessed by him, and he told me the story as an instance of the cleverness which devised a terrible nervous shock in order to throw a supposedly guilty woman off her guard; the shock was enough to have driven the woman raving insane.
Whenever I have spoken of this subject to those familiar with sweat-box methods, the evil has been frankly admitted and unhesitatingly condemned, but I hear always the same thing: "Yes, we know that it is a terrible abuse, but we have not been able to prevent it." It is simply a public crime that such a system should be tolerated for one day. Mr. W. D. Howells has well said: "The law and order which defy justice and humanity are merely organized anarchy."............