Meanwhile, it is for persons of intelligence and good will to consider whether, aside from physical penalties or jailing, we possess means for inducing criminals to abstain from crime. Let us leave abstract arguments and come to facts.
My license to speak in the premises is due to my being an ex-convict, sentenced to Atlanta Penitentiary for a year and a day, but recently released on "good time." I shall first give you a notion of what jail is, and of what is done and suffered there; then consider what has hitherto been done to alleviate prison conditions and abuses; and end with inquiring whether these measures, actively prosecuted, will prove adequate to the need, or whether something else and more is demanded. If so--_what_?
Purgatory is usually understood to be--as its etymology indicates--a place where persons encumbered with evil accretions may have them purged out of them, or stripped off from them, and so be fitted for the purity and innocence of Heaven. It is therefore a beneficent institution. Hell, on the other hand, was the inheritance of those whose evil is ingrowing and cannot be removed--a place where they may live out their diabolical or satanic natures and be punished and tortured by those of like nature with themselves.
Our prisons were, in the beginning, frankly hellish in their object; men who had incurred personal or society hostility were put in them to be tormented from motives of hate and revenge. But during the last few generations the humanitarian idea has come into being and has not only ameliorated prison conditions in some prisons and to some extent, but has caused prisons in general to cease being frank and to become hypocritical--to pretend that they are purgatories, aiming not at revenge but at reform. This pretense has been so industriously and sagaciously put forward that ninety-nine outsiders out of a hundred are misled by it, and believe that prisons are not, still, administered for the destruction of their inmates, physical, mental and moral, with such circumstances of cruelty and brutality as happen to suit the humor of the arbitrary and irresponsible guards and wardens; but that they are uniformly conducted with an eye to wooing away prisoners from sin and crime, and persuading them of the beauty and policy of honesty, gentleness and goodness. In fact it is probable that almost everybody believes this, except the wardens and guards, and the prisoners themselves--and a few Thomas Mott Osbornes and other prison workers who have had an amateur peep inside the walls and caught a fleeting glimpse of a horror or two before the discreet managers could get the door shut.