FullReads

But you will be more interested in these facts:

There is a great chapel–BUT NO CONVICT IS COMPELLED TO ATTEND.

There is a huge wash room–fitted with showers for the hardy, with porcelain tubs for the old and crippled–AND EVERY MAN IS COMPELLED TO TAKE HIS BATH.

How much of progress, how much that is hopeful for humanity, is told in those words!

Religious services are optional–no more compulsion of man’s soul or of his belief.

Bathing IS COMPULSORY. Truly, we progress, and the prison rules prove it.

There were showers in every prison and in every insane asylum one hundred years ago–but those showers were used only to torture the criminal or the lunatic. He was doused with cold water until senseless.

There were chapels in the old-time prisons, and all were forced to accept and profess such views as the majority or the ruler chose to profess.

That prison at Auburn is a monument to humanity’s sorrows and weaknesses. But it tells in every department of human decency and of a constant striving by those who are fortunate to help others.

In the prison yard a squad of convicts are marching. The lock-step is there no longer. Prison reform has ended that. The convict is no longer forced into a gait which stamps him ever after.

There are electric lights in the hundreds of cells–and there is absolute cleanliness throughout the vast structure. No hotel is cleaner, if any be as clean.

The convicts get their letters twice a week. They have pictures in their cells–and they may have musical instruments if they wish; and many a man, beside his narrow plank bed, has a strip of rag carpet made at home. Their lives are horrible–for confinement kills men’s souls; and one has said who knew prison life:

“It is only what is GOOD in man
That wastes and withers there;
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.” —-

While you go through the prison you see the things mentioned–electric lights, clean halls, bathing apparatus, and the rest. But you STUDY the human beings working at their fixed tasks, or moving about in their dismal, heavy suits of stripes.

Just as many kinds of faces as you see in a city street you see in that prison–but there you see more than elsewhere the failures, the human weeds.

But at least there is a striving to make things better. Society no longer willingly tortures its failures. It controls, punishes, but does not hate them. There are no beatings, no tortures, no close-cropped heads, even, for the convict may grow his hair as he chooses.

Every man who knows no trade is taught one. There is a feeling of moral responsibility to the criminal, and a desire at least to make him NO WORSE.

The prisoners are divided into two classes: those whose faces and skulls tell of evil birth and predestined failure, and those who are simply like others–average men, victims of chance, of temptation, of ability ill-balanced, of ignorance, of drink, or even of accident.

In one great room the convicts are weaving–working at hand looms. The work is desperately hard. Both hands and both feet are going constantly. Human power is used, that the greatest amount of labor and least competition with the outside working world may be simultaneously achieved.

At one loom sits a poor creature, a dismal human failure. His forehead is half an inch high and a bony ridge-telling of unfortunate prenatal influence–runs high along the top of his head. His small eyes are close together. His exaggerated chin protrudes; only a cunning look directed now and then toward the watchful warden tells that any thinking goes on in that miserable being. His best place, perhaps, is there. He is protected against himself, and society has no other way of taking care of him.