Love Can Open Prison Doors

by Starr Daily

Brave conquerors! For so you are
Who war against your own affections
And the huge army of the world's desires,
-Shakespeare.

We of today recognize the great English playwright's genius, but what was taken for wisdom in his day we've found to be false in ours.

We know now that war in any form has never solved a human problem. We know that to declare a state of war between us and our desires does not eradicate those desires, but rather intensifies them in proportion as our war-like wills appear victorious and strong.

When I came out of the dungeon and had again resumed my routine duties, I was in possession of an idea that had worked a seeming miracle in my behalf. But while I had a recognition of this idea, I did not have the sense of illumination, the feeling of ecstasy that had been born to me as a result of it there. Too, although I realized the idea to be a medium through which I could contact creative power, I didn't know how to go about applying the medium to my problems now.

These problems were many and life-long duration. They began immediately to present themselves to me for consideration the same day I had my release from punishment; for that day there was established in me an intense desire for a new deal of livingness.

Therefore, I sat down one evening to list my mental, moral and physical assets and liabilities. I discovered that I had shelter, food and clothing, such as they were. I was able to read, write and cipher a little. Against these things the list of my liabilities ran into interminable lengths.

The problem appeared simple under such circumstances. I would simply start from scratch, and declare war on my physical ill health, replace my negative attitude with a positive attitude, substitute optimism for pessimism, and presto, all would be hunky-dory.

The thoughtful reader, however, will see that I had set a mighty big order for myself. In fact, what I desired to accomplish meant a complete right-about-face from all the destructive habits I had acquired and nurtured through the years. My intention was to go to war against them and slay them in one fell blow with the rapier of my will. My intentions were excellent; however, I hadn't reckoned on the strength of the enemy. My effort, though heroic, was short-lived and ended in dismal and mind-tormenting failure.

The more I tried to war against my habits, the more persistently they pressed their claims upon me. I grew melancholy under the strain. A sense of weakness and hopelessness took hold of me, which defied constructive thinking, which defied thinking of any kind, except thoughts of impotence and misery.

The desire for the things I had lived became more and more intense, until reason warned me that a compromise would have to be made, and compromise was the first step to failure. From it the plunge back down would be swift and certain.

But the worst of all, my health instead of improving under the ordeal, took an opposite turn. I soon learned that willpower was one thing, and that to use it constructively against life-long habits was another.

It seemed that all the legions of hell had turned out to concentrate their fire upon me alone. If I decided to miss a meal out of regard for my health, that particular meal would be certain to contain seldom-served items that I especially liked. Every time I picked up a magazine or newspaper, I would be sure to find some brilliant, logical attack up on the virtues I had set before me. Things occurred that I had never known to occur before to test my resolve. For instance, I had been an inveterate user of profanity. And being profane, I had not noticed it being used by others so much. But no sooner had I resolved to stop its use, I began to notice that every one seemed to use it. Books that contained it were thrust in my way. An essay by a popular author on the use of profanity was given to me. The author argued that those who did not curse had no strength of character. Men who couldn't say damn once in a while had lost all claim to masculinity. They were unpardonable sissies; and he clinched his argument with a long list of leaders in American history, including the father of his country, who had cursed their way to fame and victory over insurmountable odds.

Profanity was a vigorous mode of expression that fitted perfectly into all occasions requiring force and vigor.
I had a habit of chewing tobacco, which, for me in prison, had been an expensive one to gratify. To obtain chewing tobacco had been a constant struggle. But now that I had resolved to give the habit up, the weed was forced upon me from all manner of sources without one single effort on my part to acquire it.

My strongest mental habit had been intolerance of other persons' opinions, which had, all my life, kept me in hot water, fights and squabbles. Of course, this habit headed my list. I determined I would look at the other fellow's viewpoint and respect it even if I couldn't agree with it. I would refuse to argue with anyone, taking the stand that fools argued and wise men discussed. But again this good intention was easier resolved than carried out. It seemed that those with whom I came in contact would be pacified with nothing short of hot words. And the more I tried to force my resolution by sheer will-power the more easily irritated I seemed to become.

I had always thought I possessed courage. I had no fear of physical pain. I had been clubbed by policemen into states of insensibility. I had faced death many times while pulling off burglaries; I would fight any man at the drop of a hat. Then one day, after I had made my resolution to be broad and tolerant, a fellow told me I was yellow; that I didn't know what courage was. I was on my feet in an instant. But I steeled myself, gulped down the old impulse to do battle, and listened while he brutally continued his accusation.

"I'll tell you what courage is," he said. "You've never known what the word meant. Everybody in this joint knows you've always been hard-boiled. You've preached tooth and fang sermons around here for years. Now you've decided you were all wet and wrong. You've gone wishy-washy. All right, if you've got courage you'll go up on the chapel platform the next day we have open forum and tell all your old friends all about it. Preach us a sermon about your grand and glorious reformation. That'll take the kind of courage you ain't got."

Strangely enough I hadn't thought of that particular kind of courage before. But now I realized that bullets and blackjacks were easier to face than the ridicule of one's cynical fellows en masse. As I pondered on such a predicament, I could visualize an audience of sneering faces; I could hear their cat-calls and boos ; their hisses, and their innuendoes of turn-tail, yaller-cur, long-tailed rat, and a hundred other savage aspersions.

I didn't have the courage to face a thing of this kind, but I forced my will to accept the challenge. I made a prepared talk and committed it to memory. Then I sent my name and desire to the open forum director. I lived a million years of emotional agony between that day and the day I was billed to speak. When the day finally came I was almost a complete invalid. As I sat on the platform trying to pretend poise as the lines filed into the auditorium, the pit of my stomach was churning like a ball of red-hot vacuum without a mooring. As I was being introduced, a wave of nausea swept over me and I began to tremble from head to feet. As I rose, I was met with a roar of ridicule; tide after tide of it broke over me as I stood there waiting for it to subside. I felt as though I was losing consciousness. Then came a dead hush, in which I imagined one might hear a feather fall above the mad pumping of my heart. I started out to speak; my lips quivered open, but not a syllable issued forth. If ever self styled hero made an inglorious retreat that hero was me. I slunk from the auditorium amid the wildest surge of abuse I've ever heard before or since. Right there and then I decided to scuttle all my fine resolutions. But Providence once more came to my rescue, this time in a wholly different manner.

I was to occupy that same platform many times after this frightful fizzle. I was to debate my newfound philosophy of behavior with some of the most brilliant forum minds. I was to hear cheers and applause, where I had once heard only sneers and guffaws. But I didn't achieve these things by the war process against my habits and weaknesses. I achieved then not by trying new habits that transcended the old. To war against a thing is to hate that thing. To sublimate a condition is to employ the medium of love. The one compresses the condition into a more intensified circumference, the other expands it until it has no circumference left.

It so happened, and how fortunate it was for me, that just after I reached this crisis, I was transferred to a different cell! The man with whom I was to share this latter cell was a life-termer well along in years.

His name was Dad Trueblood, but he was often referred to as The Old Stir Bug. Ordinarily this name was applied in an uncharitable sense to those prisoners who had attracted it through odd or queer quirks in their mental characters. But in the case of Dad Trueblood it was untouched by the critical or opprobrious. For this old fellow was the most beloved man who had ever done time in this particular prison. He was loved by both prisoners and officials alike, a combination rarely found behind stone walls.

Dad was one of those exceptional persons the most chary could trust; one of those singular individuals who, without uttering a word, broke down the strongest restraint in others and set them to blabbing their troubles in his ear as naively as a child goes running with its troubles to its mother. He was one of those occasional men who could win another's confidence without effort, and with just as little effort keep that confidence strictly inviolable.

Had Dad wished to turn informer, he could have sent scores of his confidants to longer prison terms, and many to the electric chair. But Dad was not an informer, and although this prison, like all other prisons, was managed after the stool-pigeon system, no official ever thought of offending Dad's sensibilities by offering him special privileges in return for tainted favors.

The odd twist that gave Dad the name Stir Bug occurred because he had refused a pardon after having served twenty-seven years. His reason for such an unheard-of act was strange and yet wholly consistent with his character. When the warden asked him why he preferred to remain voluntarily in prison, he said that he was getting old; that he no longer had any friends or relatives on the outside; and that he thought he could be of more service in prison than out.

"But don't you want your freedom?" the warden had asked incredulously.

"I'm always free,'' the old lifer had replied. "It doesn't make any difference where you are on the face of the earth, warden. If your thoughts are free you're free. And there's no one can imprison your thoughts but yourself."
And so Dad Trueblood had been permitted the privilege of remaining a number instead of going out and once more becoming a name.

When I moved my belongings into his cell he was lying on his bunk. He welcomed me casually in a friendly manner. He knew, of course, of my reputation as a bad actor. There were few words passed between us until we had been locked in for the evening. Then I asked him if he dad seen my fade-away in the chapel. Yes, he had been there that day. He thought most any one else would hade done likewise under similar circumstances. But he asked no curious questions about it.

Finally, I related my experience in the dungeon; and of my desires after coming out; of terrific willpower battle to overcome my old habits; of my pitiful failure to do anything in that direction. "But after that chapel deal," I finished, "I got wise to myself in a jiffy."

"How do you mean?" he asked in an off-hand way.

"I mean this virtue stuff is all the bunk," I said.

"Then what does that make the other stuff? The stuff you've been living before ?"

"There are some pretty wise men who have taken the gold out of the Golden Rule, and have made that rule look pretty small, at least on paper," I replied evasively.

"That doesn't seem important, son, in your case," Dad said. "You've been following another rule. The important thing is, what has it got you? Critics and logicians deal with the trees in a forest, without ever seeing the forest itself. That's what you should be looking at now -- not the too logical details, not what the other fellow has done with your old philosophy, but what you have done with it. If you're satisfied with the results, then your rule has worked out, if not, then the sensible thing to do is to stick to your guns and try another way."

But I've tried that and failed," I said hopelessly.

"No, you haven't," he said, "you've just gone at it wrong. For instance, if you wanted to become a cannibal right quick, where before you'd only been a moderate eater of meat, why just force yourself to break off with meat by using your will and nothing else. No, son, the easiest and safest way to rid yourself of many bad habits is to recondition yourself to one good habit. Once you have it established, the others will have disappeared without much strain."
What he did was to show me how to apply the idea I had discovered in solitary confinement, or rather the idea that had been discovered for me, and turned to my account in spite of me.

First I was to forget all about my notion of going to war with my habits. I was just to assume that nothing had happened to me; that my attitude was the same as it had always been; that I was not to make any attempt to force a change in my custom of living; but that whenever and wherever I could do it without strain or pressure, to do something constructively creative; a quiet thought, an encouraging word to some one at the right time, a stimulating hint to another, a constructive action, either selfish or unselfish.

I was to read, as I had always read, books that appealed to the negative side of my life. But as I read I was to try to build in something positive between the lines, whenever I could appear to do it without too much labor.
"Make it a game, son," he said, "and not a task. Let it be a challenge but not a command."

Guided safely by the unerring knowledge Dad had of sublimation, I entered into the spirit of the game and found it not only profitable but pleasurable. It was accepted as a novelty, a plaything, something, with which to while away the time; and the joy of which depended upon the game itself, and not upon the results to be accomplished.

During the day at my machine I made a game of sewing garments. Each one I finished had in it an effort to make it better than its predecessor. This part of the game alone relieved me entirely of the burden my labor had always had for me before. As a I continued to play it, I soon found it becoming a fascinating habit. Time that had always dragged heavily with each begrudging stitch, now flew by on wings of tirelessness. I won privileges on my workmanship, and many compliments from the superintendent of the shop. But the surprising thing about it all was that I not only made better garments, but I was able to complete my task in much less time than when I had been fighting the sewing machine every minute and turning out slipshod material; where I had been constantly jerking at my cloth and breaking my thread, thus wasting time rethreading my needle, I now worked more smoothly and consequently with little lost motion. One of my best games was to see how many completed garments I could make without an accidental breaking of my thread. On several occasions I finished the whole task, twelve garments, without a mishap.

This game was taken up by those around me, and eventually spread over the entire shop. The superintendent was amazed at the results. He made it a competitive game and offered prizes for the winners. Not only were the garments made better; but there was a great saving accomplished by eliminating wastage, garments too hastily thrown together that later had to be discarded and new ones made to replace them.

And all the while I would be working away at my task, I also played a game with my thoughts. I would analyze them as they drifted through my mind. I would label each as it came along. If it was destructive, I would counter with a constructive one deliberately created for the purpose, and vice versa. As I continued to play, I soon became conscious of a subtle, but definite drawing away of the destructive thoughts. The constructive ones came more and more unbidden, until finally I was aware that whole sequences of them would pass through my mind without being broken by one negation. Too, I found it becoming increasingly repugnant to deliberately create a destructive thought to carry out my game of counter-action.

Then when my task had been completed, I hatched up another game. I called it the game of constructive deeds. Each day I tried to increase the number of little unobtrusive things I could do for my fellows. I would hold loving thoughts toward men who had always been my avowed enemies. Many of them I had bloody encounters with and hadn't spoken to since. Without fitting any other action to these thoughts, I watched and waited, and in every case was rewarded by seeing the iceberg melt that had stood between us, and it wasn't long until I had no enemies left.

This game by itself did something psychic to me. I didn't know what it was at the time. But it was an expanding something that drew men closer to me, even while I drew farther away from the life or the type of livingness they stood for. I didn't know why men distrusted the pious and self righteous sort of comradeship and fellowship; nor exactly what the difference was between that sort and the sort that I was expressing; but I knew there was a difference because the results were different. What that difference was didn't seem to matter. I was becoming more and more result-conscious, and this in itself was an excellent sign.

And then at night in my cell I would take up a book that I had always looked upon as my Bible. It was Schopenhauer's Studies in Pessimism. With this book I now made another fascinating game. I went through it thought for thought, translating it in long-hand on pieces of wrapping paper. My translation of the title was Studies In Positiveness. For each negative thought given by the author, I wrote down its best positive opposite.

Nor did one of the author's negations defy translation, indeed I invariably found many positive thoughts in one of his negative ones, from which I would choose the strongest. Sometimes it took me an entire evening to get over one page; other times I would do as many as five pages. Only once did I ask Dad to help me, and then he shook his wise old head.

"Solitaire is a one man game," he said, "and you're doing fine. Keep right after it until you win on your own efforts."
That enormous bundle of manuscript was destroyed. I've often wished I had preserved it. There was a certain sentiment attached to it, I suppose. It was something tangible that stood for something much greater, though intangible, the beginning of a slow but steady bulge upward. But after all, though the manuscript was destroyed, its effect on me is still alive and will remain so until the end of my days. The effects of constructive building are eternal: destructive building leads to limitation and death. But of all my early games with the implements of life, I believe this one, in its cumulative results, had the greatest influence for good.

The translating of this book gave me an intense interest m the positive side of life. It led me smoothly into an examination of the Old and New Scriptures, and of other literature that stressed the positive along with the negative in human behavior.

However, in this prison at that time, true positive literature was a scarce article. One day I picked up a magazine of the kind that had been nearly worn out from much reading and had been discarded by its last reader. With great enthusiasm, I went through it from cover to cover. When I had finished I decided I would have a friend subscribe for it in my name and number.

The subscription was entered and I waited eagerly for my first copy. I waited several weeks. Then I had my friend write the publisher to find out about the delay. A reply informed me that the magazine, along with other printed matter from the same publisher, had been coming to me regularly. A little private investigation turned up the information that our chaplain, who was also our literary censor, had disapproved of the reading material presented through this publishing house.

My first impulse was to fly into a good old-fashioned fit of rebellion and write the chaplain a vituperative note of denunciation. In fact I did talk to Dad in no uncertain terms as to what I thought of a chaplain who would permit every deadening and salacious book and magazine printed to come in to us, and then set his objection on a magazine that didn't carry a single article or item not calculated to lift the consciousness of its readers.

The old man listened patiently until I had spent myself. Then he said: "All true, and heroically put, son. It's pleasing to unburden ourselves sometimes of what has all the earmarks of justifiable indignation. But the trouble with it in this case is that it only makes bad matters worse. Remember the little game you're playing ? Well, it's a broad game. Any situation can be fitted into it. But not with hate and criticism; that is, if you expect to win."

"But how in this case?" I asked him.

"How did you break down enmity over in the shop?" He said no more. But his suggestion was enough.
I set about to formulate a new game around the chaplain. First I studied him and got to the bottom of his reasons for withholding my literature. I couldn't agree with those reasons. They seemed narrow and unreasonable to me. But I did grant him the right to entertain them, even though they had appearance of injury to me. I told myself that since the material printed in this magazine was in conflict with the religious creed held by the chaplain he was actuated by that consideration alone, and that he was honestly sincere in his belief that such reading matter would do harm to those who read it.

As I reasoned thus, I could not help but feel sorry for a man laboring under such rigid limitations. And this emotion, although it is not true love, is mighty close to compassion. At any rate, I soon found myself creating genuinely loving thoughts toward my censor. I began visualizing him as I thought the Master might visualize him. And the more I played at the game the more I thought of him as an EXPRESSION OF GOD and the less I thought of him as an expression of limitation.

Besides, I found a way of doing a few little services for him without his finding out who did them. For instance, I pointed out to my warder that three sun-shades would greatly improve the looks of the administration building. The warder agreed with me and said he would point the same thing out to the warden. As a result I was permitted to make the shades as well as the pattern. I made them as attractive as I possibly could; and they did improve the looks of that part of the building. But the one most pleased with the innovation was the chaplin, because it was the windows to his study they shaded against the afternoon sun.

On another occasion I was able to acquire a red-lettered student's Bible, a beautiful book, and have it placed on the chaplin's desk in his absence. On the first flyleaf I had written, "With the compliments of a friend."

In the meantime I spoke no word to him. I attended his services and found him saying things that were illuminating and admirable -- thing that I had formerly closed my mind against with a door of indifference and prejudice. With this door now opened the effect was exhilarating. I seemed to lose all interest in his human faults and shortcoming, particularly as they affected me. I began to think of him in terms of brotherly love and to feel what I thought intensely.
Then one noon day he came down the gallery and stopped in front of our cell. He carried under his arm several magazines and pamphlets that had been sent to me. He told me that he had seen fit to censor them because they dealt with pantheism; [the doctrine identifying God with the various forces and workings of nature] a dangerous doctrine. Recently, however, he had changed his mind and decided to allow me to have books, providing I would promise not to pass them on to others. I made no such promise; nor did he seem insistent on that point. I thanked him, and we talked for quite some time in a real get-acquainted fashion, and a friendship was there established between us that was active until the day I bade him goodbye.

This demonstration, and it was a demonstration, of the power of love to use creative principle effectively against adverse conditions, not only helped me in this particular, but it helped scores of my fellows, because shortly after it the chaplain lifted his ban on the literature of this publishing house and this prison became one among many into which this house sent free reading matter to the inmates.

Obviously, love can open prison doors-all manner of prison doors. But of all the doors most important to open, none is more important than the door of self. Self conquest through sublimation is the key to the fullest realm of livingness.
I do not presume to say that I had conquered myself. But I have traveled a piece of the way, and I am moving in the right direction. Looking down the list on the liability side of my ledger, I can see many items that have undergone a process of transformation and now adorn the side on which I've written down my assets. This side of my list is longer than the liability side, much longer. Many little victories have made it so, and each one of those small victories carried with it its own particular thrill. The game has been pleasurable and there is still much room for play. My asset list is only partially complete. I shall probably never complete it in my remaining lifetime, but I'll have a lot of fun playing the game to that end.

It will be recalled that at the time my list was made I suffered from many physical ills. These have all vanished without my being aware of the reconditioning process. Wholesome, constructive thinking did the trick, reflecting in my physical organism that which I held in my mind.

Since that time, and it has been several years, I've suffered very few physical indispositions. My body converts food into energy almost instantly now. I follow sane health rules, of course, for they are constructive and it pays to follow them. With excellent elimination and excellent assimilation, I am no longer a sufferer of that powerful physical enemy of man, inertia. [resistance to change]. I can work long hours without feeling fatigue. I can induce sleep within a moment and rest, perfectly relaxed for six hours, undisturbed by dreams or noise. All of which is something. Or at least to me it has been worth gaining, especially since the method used to gain it was a joy in itself. Cheerfulness to me now is a habit I seldom feel moved to break. Those long periods of hopelessness, indecision, worry, fear and lassitude are all over.

My greatest joy is obtained from playing my little game of deeds, of finding something I can do for others in a helpful constructive way. And although the joy is found in the doing, somehow these services have never failed to return good for good, in the same coin, only with multiplied interest, in the manner they were sent out.

As one of numerous instances of this kind, the case of Paul Harding comes easily to my mind. Paul was one of those many thoughtful, retiring boys who are frequently misunderstood, even by members of their own families, and who, as a consequence of this misunderstanding, often get off on the wrong foot for a start in life.

When I first knew Paul, I found him striving desperately to conceal his strong emotional life behind a front of callous pretense, sophistication, indifference, boredom. His efforts were pathetic. I saw behind these efforts the soul of a poet. And when I had broken away his false restraints, he admitted that as long as he could remember he had wanted to write verse. However, his early family life had not been conducive to or sympathetic with his ambition. Instead of constructive praise for his embryonic attempts, he had received ridicule, and this above all other forms of discouragement, is positively murder to a sensitive soul.

I promptly responded to his ambition and asked him to let me see some of his poems. He hadn't written any since he had been in prison, but with the interest I showed in his ability to do so, he produced a little poem in his cell that night, and strangely enough it displayed nothing of his pretense or the effects of his environment. It was a crude piece. Even I could see that. But the potential poet was there just the same. The theme of it was Pollyannaish. I advised him not to show it to any one else ; for I well knew how it would be received and I also knew what such a reception would do for him. Instead, I encouraged him and set him to work writing more of them. And that was about the extent of my ability to help him. I knew nothing about the technique of verse-making.

When I told Dad about my predicament he laughed. "Well, you've got your foot in it," he said. "So you may just as well get a book on poetry and learn to write it yourself. That's the only you can go any farther toward helping the boy."
And that is what I did. Paul and I studied verse-making together. And by and by we entered into a sort of competitive race. The idea was to see who would have his first poem published. Paul beat me with a fine little poem which was printed in his county newspaper. From then on he was a regular contributor to this paper, and later, before he left prison, a volume of his poems was brought out.

Now here is the way I profited through this bit of service. First, it was great fun. Second, I learned enough about it to be able to write topical verses and humorous verses, which I sold to magazines and newspapers under all kinds of names, and with the money acquired in this way, I was able to employ a lawyer for a friend who was innocent of the charge against him, a fact which was fully and completely established when his lawyer obtained a new trial for him.
This money was later returned by my friend with an additional sum and was promptly used over again towards the purchase of a community radio, the first one to be put into this prison for our sole benefit. And what a boon it was! Especially during the baseball season when we could get the returns of our favorite team play by play, instead of having to wait until the next day to read it all through stale news accounts.

I have said nothing about the real value of this poetry game as that value affected the life of Paul Harding. Need I say more than this: he gave up crime for poetry; he has prospered and so has society.

CHAPTER IV - LOVE VERSUS PRISON DOOR OF IGNORANCE

A boy is better unborn than untaught.
-Gascoigne.

There is one curse to which nearly all prisoners are subject, incomplete education or no education at all.

It seems almost inconceivable that only a few years ago a great institution such as the one in which I was incarcerated could have been without educational facilities for its wards. But such was the condition. Not only was it a condition, but it was a condition enforced by prison law. You were allowed to read such books as the library afforded; but to be discovered with a pencil or writing paper in your possession was equivalent to many days in solitary on bread and water.

One of the reasons institutional education was discouraged in this prison was because of an inferiority complex on the part of its officials. Under the prevailing wage scale for officials at that time, only a brutal and ignorant type of man could be induced to take these jobs; and these men found a mutual interest in ignorant prisoners ; but in prisoners superior to them in education, they found a deep and abiding resentment. They were bitterly opposed to all forms of learning for prisoners that, by contrast, would tend to emphasize their own lack of learning. If a prisoner had been fortunate enough to have had the advantages of an education, he soon discovered after entering the prison that he was in for hell, unless he was shrewd enough at the outset to conceal his educational assets by assuming a pose of ignorance. This was very often resorted to by educated prisoners.

Today this same prison has one of the finest educational systems in operation that has ever been established in any prison. (or it did have when I left there a few years ago). This school was functioning in conjunction with many big correspondence schools throughout the country. After the grades had been passed, the prison scholar could then avail himself of correspondence school training, which embraced everything in the way of vocation, and profession, from the arts and languages to business and the trades. Training was made compulsory up to the fourth grade; beyond that it was optional with the prisoner. It was a sight for earnest eyes to go into the big school room and see old men sitting side by side with youngsters mastering their A B Cs. And in another section of the room, to see eager hands trying to gain speed and efficiency on the typewriter; and in still other sections, to see competent inmate teachers patiently but effectively instructing their classes in all manner of specialities.

I do not say that this school is the finished result of any of my own efforts; but I can and do say proudly that because I had learned about the power of love to contact creative principle I was privileged to furnish the incentive or the nucleus around which the idea speedily grew.

Imagine if you can, an institution that for almost a hundred years had been managed on a system that exalted ignorance and low-rated knowledge. You would say that such a habit of management, ingrained by a century of unrelieved custom could hardly be uprooted in the course of a few months. That nevertheless, is exactly what occurred.

Moreover, a college professor, a man of tremendous ability, was appointed to organize and superintend the difficult undertaking. He not only established the school, but he convinced those in power that a new school library was a necessary adjunct to a school of this kind, and thus for the first time in the prison's history the inmates could secure books of real educational value.

Of course, the idea first met with strong opposition both political and non-political. It required considerable money to promote and realize an educational institution so broad in scope as this one. There were those who argued that education, instead of tending to correct criminals, would tend only to make of them a greater menace to society. A slow-witted criminal had little chance against the well organized forces of the law; but a criminal whose brain had been stimulated and developed through the process of education would be vastly more competent in the commission of crime. His imaginative faculties would become broader and more original; where he had once been dull, he would become clever; his ability to look ahead would be greatly enhanced, and thus he would be able to plan his crimes more efficaciously, eliminating the weak spots in his programme of attack; where he had once blundered into his crimes blindly, without considering the most important feature in crime commission, the get-away, he would now be able to reason backward from a well-planned get-away to the crime's commission, a process of thought beyond the capacity of an ignorant criminal, but wholly within the powers of one whose mind had been trained in the difficult art of coherent, analytical thinking.

Students of penology watched the prison school system with much interest and speculation. Most of them were in accord with the movement. Most of them believed that the surest way to convince a man that crime was a losing game in the long run was to educate him to the point where he could see and understand this maxim for himself; and that the best way to create a potential good citizen out of a potential bad one, was first to arouse within him an intelligent self interest, and then place before him the means to cultivate that interest along constructive lines that entailed a knowledge of good citizenship and a desire to become a good citizen if for no other reason than the one based upon self preservation, that it paid to conform to existing social standards, even though to do so might often prove tedious and unprofitable.

Whether or not this controversy was ever settled I do not know. But this I do know, in my experience I observed more than a hundred confirmed criminals who, because of this prison educational system, left prison to fill honest occupations that had before been beyond their reach. Nor did I observe one among them who returned to prison for committing another crime.

It is my honest belief that if it is possible to reform a person of anti-social tendencies, there is no surer method to that end in existence than to turn constructively such a person, through education, away from the old tendencies by giving him new and more appealing ones to follow. There is a sense of ought in the most hardened criminal. Ought I to pull this job, or oughtn't I ? These are the preliminary questions to every crime committed. And constructive education gives the constructive answer to them more influence over the individual by making that answer more reasonable and consequently more appealing. I believe penology's strongest weapon is education.

In this prison I was the first man ever to be permitted the unheard-of privilege of taking a correspondence course of study. At the time I had no idea how far-reaching the results of this privilege would be. And the warden, who granted me the privilege, of course established a precedent in doing so, and thus unwittingly let the bars down for an avalanche of similar requests, which he could not refuse, and which absolutely snowed him under.

He was bewildered when he called me into his office. "I've made a mistake in letting you have that course," he said. And then he pointed to a ten-inch stack of requests. "They're all the same. Fellows wanting to order courses. We have no mailing facilities here for handling so much of this type of stuff. I'm afraid I've got my foot in it. I didn't know there was such a craze in the world for education. God only knows how I'll ever get out of it."

I knew, of course, that one of his ideas for getting out was to backtrack on the original privilege granted me. I had to think fast in order to forestall this action. So I said:

"Warden, here's your chance to contribute a real service to society. It'll never pass your way again. If you seize the opportunity now, your name will go down as one of the outstanding prison executives of the world; but if you let the opportunity slip you'll pass out with the next change of administration, just another prison warden who served his time and drew his pay as wardens have done before him. Why don't you put in a school ? Get a good man in charge of it and let him handle it in his own way. In that manner the problem will solve itself so far as you're concerned."

"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "That's an idea. I anticipate a fight. But I'm ready to go to the bat."

And with that vigorous statement a hastily formulated dream of mine had its first push forward toward fruition.
When I first thought of asking the warden for the privilege of taking a course of study, I was fully aware that such a request, under ordinary circumstances, would he briefly received and flatly rejected. Dad Trueblood and I talked the matter over, and as always, Dad had only one method for attacking all problems -- the method of contacting creative principle through the intermediary of love.

"But how am I going to reach the warden ? How am I going to make my love known to him?"

"Love," he said, "needs no advance agent. When it's purely conceived and powerfully felt, it will find its objective. It does not follow you: you follow it. First you love, and then you act."

"You mean I can prepare the warden in advance so that he will receive my request with favor?"

"Not you. But love expressing through you will prepare him."

"Without any effort on my part?"

"None but love. In fact, you need not go about him at all. Say, that's an inspiration. Instead of you making the request of the warden, let your friend on the outside do it, by mail."

Contrary to general opinion, it isn't so difficult to evoke a feeling of love even for one's jailer. You can reason yourself into this emotion. That is what I did in this case. And it worked out perfectly.

After all, I said to myself, prisons were a necessary evil in a civilization that harbored the type of preying animal I had been. And if prisons were necessary, so were wardens to manage them. This warden was merely filling an inevitable duty, and if it wasn't him then it would be someone else. Despite the disagreeable position he held, he was a man for all that, with the same God-given spark that I possessed, the same potentialities for good and evil. We were brothers under the skin. We were both headed in the same direction, although our paths had not always run parallel. He had his troubles the same as I. His faults were no worse than mine. In a word, he, as every mortal born to struggle up through trial and error, was more entitled to love and understanding than to censure. Who was I to sit in judgment? Had not the Master of men said, "Woman where are thine accusers?" And refused to judge her Himself when He noted all had slunk away.

In this manner of reasoning one unavoidably comes to the place where censorship ends, and where censorship ends true love begins. [Judgement centered in Love is for correction (probation) not damnation - God's fire is the purging process of bring forth perfection].

It took me only a very short while to arouse within me a deep responsive feeling of love for the warden, and it grew and grew as I continued to search his inner being for the Christ-like traits that were the heritage of every human being.

Finally I began to visualize him in all manner of constructive, humanitarian activities. I saw him courageously doing the right thing, although he well knew that the right thing was not the popular thing for him to do. I saw him with my request in his hand; I sympathized with him when he passed through a wavering period of indecision; I bowed in inward gratitude when his eyes took on the light of victory over self and indecision fell away from him as he determined to do the constructive thing and allow me to have my course of study.

In the meantime I had written to my friend explaining my desire and asking her to inform me of the exact hour and date her letter to the warden was to go forward. In this manner I was able to arrive at the date and hour the letter would reach the warden's desk. Through another source I found out the exact time the warden sat down to examine his mail. And thus at this time I visualized him with my friend's letter in his hand. As I watched him reading it, I let my love close in around him until he seemed to be completely enveloped in it to the exclusion of every other vibratory influence. [Daily evokes a scripture, not from the reading, but from the Spirit; calleth those which be not as though they were - Romans 4:17].

I would not say this was scientific procedure. Some of you may even laugh it off as being the antics of a simpleton. I wouldn't presume to state that such an effort on my part had anything to do with the warden's decision. But I do say that his decision was made precisely as I wanted him to make it.

Through this course of study I was able to prepare myself for an honest, constructive future. I left prison at a time when the depression had just reached its peak, when competition in the labor market was as great as it ever has become. It might be that without this preparatory work I could have gone out in the world and competed successfully with skilled and unskilled millions. It might be that my prison and criminal record, all that I possessed in the way of reference, would have offered no handicap to me in my effort to secure a place in the world of honest endeavor.
But in the event the situation had not panned out in this manner, which would have been at least quite possible -- what then?

Maud Ballington Booth once wrote a book under the title After Prison, What ? A man may go out of prison with the very best of intentions, but if he is unprepared, if he is worse off than when he entered prison, his intentions are likely to meet with opposition too strong to be endured. Nothing will so take the starch from an ex-prisoner's stiff resolutions like rebuff and indifference. As soon as he becomes thoroughly convinced that he is not wanted, the step between that point and his old life becomes a mighty easy one to take.

I remember a resolution I once made of the kind as I was leaving prison after serving my first term. I had been given a parole. The town I went to on parole had a shoe factory in it, and by telling a few skillful lies I managed to get a job in this factory. It was a good job, too. It paid excellent wages on a piece work basis. And the novelty of earning an honest living had a certain appeal about it, which I responded to with considerable satisfaction.

In the evening after a good bath and hearty supper I would stretch out an my bed and declare to myself, "By golly, this is not so bad." There was a definite lift to this business of achieving a laudable day's work; a decided sense of security about it that was wholly new and tremendously gratifying. If the thing hadn't happened that did happen shortly afterwards, I might have, then and there, reconditioned myself to honest habits of a lasting nature.

But one noon-day, as I hurried up the street from the factor on my way to a restaurant, someone hailed me from across the street, using a name of mine that sent a tremor of fear through me. No one in this town knew me by that name, or so I thought. Turning I saw a detective coming across the street to greet me. It had been he who had arrested me for the crime I had just finished a prison term to expiate. His face was aglow with a broad smile. His hand was extended in friendship.

"Glad to see you out," he exclaimed. "When did it happen? What are you doing?"

I explained I had been out several weeks; that I w as on probation, that I was working down at the shoe factory.
"Fine," he said. "I for one am with you one hundred percent. I want to see you make good. Listen, just lay off the pool halls and other joints around here, and you'll pull the grade. I'm here now. I'm with the railroad. Dammit, if the sledding gets tough, come out to my house. We'll make you acquainted with the right sort of people. There's no need for you to get lonesome."

I was amazed at the man's attitude. I wondered if I had previously misjudged him. I returned to the factor feeling a little relieved but shaky in the region of my solar plexus. I had been at work about an hour when I was notified the superintendent wished to see me in his office. I felt the old sardonic sneer welling up in me. I remember saying to the floor boss who conveyed the message to me, "Well, I guess this is the end of a perfect day. A minute later, I was asked if I had ever served time in prison. Of course, I well knew who had informed on me. The detective had gone straight from his Judas kiss to the superintendent and advised him that an ex-convict was in his employ.
I admitted the fact with a sarcastic barb at the whole world. The superintendent was sorry that the rules of the company forbade, and so forth.

"You needn't be, " I told him. "I'm out of place here anyway. I'm glad I got by long enough to buy a good gun. That's my racket. It's all I know. Give me my check and I'll be out on my way in a jiffy."

I walked away from that job with a poisoned heart and a bitter resolution eating into my brain like a cancer. It took some time to dull the edge of that mood. In the meantime I did some reckless things against the social order before I finally stopped with another prison sentence.

I have said elsewhere that reformation to be effective and permanent must be accomplished by transcending old habits; by reconditioning one's self to new habits of thought and behavior.

To this end the average prisoner will neither respond to reason nor persuasion, harsh treatment nor kind. But, quite to the contrary, he will readily respond to an educational program with an inspirational tone to it, the quality that arouses self interest, and offers a positive means to a broader mode of living for him. When such a program fails, the man is hopeless so far as human influence is concerned. Nothing save an act of Providence can swerve him from his downward path.

As an illustration of what education can accomplish where all other methods have failed, I wish to recount, briefly, the cases of two men, not because I was privileged to play a minor part in their salvation, but more to show that even the worst of human timber can be salvaged from the gulf of destruction and rendered useful to society when the educational method has been made available to them.

Spider Ross was young in years, but old in experience. He was one of those borderline cases the criminologists like to study. That he was criminally insane the doctors had no doubt. But always convictions for crime and sentences in Spider's many mishaps sent him to prison instead of the criminal insane asylum.

Spider was one of those shifty-eyed, loose-lipped, pasty-faced crooks of the petty variety. A kleptomaniac, I believe they call them in professional terminology. He could neither read nor write his own name. He walked with the swaggering defiance of ignorance, and so far as any one could judge from mere observation, he possessed nothing but a surface, and a shallow surface at that. Apparently his only ambition was to live his own life and be allowed to brag about it as he liked.

When the prison school was established, Spider of course became what they called a "list man," that is, his name was on the list of those to whom training was made compulsory. I worked beside Spider, and when he heard they were going to force him to attend school, he promptly revolted. "I'll go," he told me, "but they can't make me learn anything."

It didn't take me long to realize that the school could be of little service to Spider so long as he held this attitude. I took his problem to the school superintendent and asked him to allow me to handle Spider's case. He agreed to my request, and I thereupon removed Spider's name from the list. When the list-bearers made the round to notify the others the day school was to start, Spider was passed up. Though he said nothing, it was plain he had taken the event as a slight and was very much disappointed. He wanted to tell the list-bearer a mouthful, as he put it.
The school was a roaring success from the start. In the shop there was no other topic of conversation. Enthusiasm ran riot. Spelling matches were begun; arithmetic problems were pondered over and solved. Every one had a stack of school-books he carried back and forth. The more literate prisoners turned from topics of crime to topics of history, government, economics, and so on. World's Almanacs were borrowed from the new library with which to settle disputes. Spider found himself completely disassociated from his fellows. Everywhere he went the conversation had to do with school subjects. After the tasks were all in, the prisoners would form groups, each on its own intellectual level, and get off in a private place to discuss their next day's assignments. If Spider approached one of these groups he would remain only a moment, because he had no mutual interest there. It was practically a case of unintentional ostracism.

Spider was in the position where "a feller needs a friend." And his extremity proved my opportunity. When he could talk to no one else, I talked to him as we worked. I talked to him about the thrill one got from trying to learn things. Slowly but surely, his interest rose. Then one day he asked me why they had left his name off the school list. I replied by suggesting that he must have requested it. He was vigorous in his denial of this.

"Well, I guess they figured you weren't interested in school," I countered.

"I don't see why," he said, "I didn't say so."

"But maybe they figured you thought so. Actions speak louder than words sometimes, you know."

He wondered if it was too late to get in. I thought I could arrange it for him. But he would have to study hard in order to catch up with the rest.

And so Spider Ross the next day found himself for the first time in his life on the inside of a class room. No doubt he was an exception, but once he was started and had mastered the first difficult steps, after he had learned to read a little, his thirst for more knowledge became an exaggerated mania, the talk of the prison. In two school terms he absorbed what was equivalent to an eighth grade education. Every one was amazed at his capacity to assimilate complicated subjects. He was never without a book within his reach. As he operated his machine the book stood propped open before him.

At the beginning of this third school term, he took up business, shorthand and typing in conjunction with a correspondence course in salesmanship. At the close of the term he was placed in one of the most difficult steno graphical positions in the prison where question and answer dictation had to be taken with the speed of a court reporter. While holding down this job, he found time to continue his studies, to invent a dozen or so different kinds of gadgets, which he planned to copyright later, and to write two excellent books on salesmanship, one under the title The Psychology of Depression and the other, Depression Salesmanship.

Spider left prison in the midst of the depression. His methods for making personal capital out of national hard times were all set forth practicality and convincingly in his books. That he demonstrated his theories, I haven't the slightest doubt in the world, although I heard nothing more of him after he had taken his departure.

I reiterate, his was doubtless an exceptional case. When a man can start from the lowest level of ignorance and criminal insanity, and in three years' time win a place of position of trust within his prison, and prepare himself as he did for a position of trust outside his prison, such an achievement is not only exceptional, it is phenomenal.

The important thing is, however, that he did it. The important thing to society. Institutional education had taken an obvious social menace in Spider Ross and transformed him into a social servant. Thus I have found it: education lifts the consciousness of the prisoner it touches, instead of contributing to the furtherance of his criminal tendencies.

And again we see in Spider's case, how first there was developed an intense thirst or love for knowledge, which set the creative principle to building in an opposite direction. Before his love medium had been for destructive things and such things had been created through him. With the love medium reversed, the creative principle could do nothing else but create in the new direction. As the love medium tends the creative law inclines.

The case of Harry Simmons was quite different from that of Spider Ross in one way, but the result was similar in that through the prison school both had been able to find themselves and their particular niches in life.

Harry had attended college, was an excellent scholar and possessed a high standard of taste toward the cultural things. He could discuss academics with a glib and perfect accent. He was typically a young intellectual, a trifle egotistical, somewhat snobbish, and vastly intolerant toward those whose frontal bones failed to measure up to the lofty dimensions of his own.

At some point in his educational career he had come under the influence of a certain German philosopher. This philosopher propounded a super-man doctrine which, in the hands of a person more impressionable than stable, held a dangerous interpretation, an interpretation altogether ruthless and inhuman. Indeed, it was Harry Simmons' misinterpretation of a brainy man's philosophical doctrines that paved the way for his pride to prison.

"Live hard and dangerously," was the credo this philosopher laid down for the guidance of the super-man. Meaning, of course, that it was the duty of the super-man to dare the faggots of ignorance by living and teaching in advance of his time. Poor Harry thought the philosopher meant that the super-man, being so brilliant as to appreciate the shortness of mortal life, should crowd into it as much vice and merry-making as he possibly could.

So he became a hard and dangerous liver. He naturally found such living expensive. At first he gambled for the wherewithal; and later he tried forgery. After his parents had bankrupted themselves trying to keep him out of prison over a period of several years, they were finally obliged to stand aside and see their prodigal take it on the chin for a five years' stretch.

Harry had what they called a political job in our shop. He wore a white shirt instead of the regulation hickory. He was a garment checker and shipping clerk. He was not liked because of his highbrow attitude and he was difficult to reach because of the thick veneer of know-it-all-ness he had drawn about him.

At any rate, I decided that Harry had too good a start in life to let himself drift down the purple tide and wind up in his old age a doddering prison lag, sitting around in the idle house of his final prison home spinning yarns about his many exploits, and comparing the conditions in this prison to the conditions in that one. But while I made up my mind to attack him with the weapon of love, I decided at the same time to use argument, since he loved to argue above any other pastime.

I crossed verbal swords with him one day with an introductory remark that set his blood boiling.

"Say," I said, most unexpectedly to him, "what do they teach guys like you in college ?"

"To mind their own business for one thing," he shot back.

"Oh, I thought they taught them to write checks on the old folks' bank account."

"Is that so! Well, get an earful of this. They also teach them how to use their fists, if you happen to think you're lucky."
"I don't resort to violence," I said with a broad grin on my face. He promptly thawed out, and we were soon talking about his favorite topic, the philosophy of the super-man. We argued off and on for several days before he was willing to accede to my constantly reiterated point that any philosophy was a failure, unless the person embracing it could show that it had done him good instead of harm.

After drawing this admission from him, I pointed out that the same thing could be said of a college education; that although college men had a great advantage over non-college men, the latter by making opportunity out of the little they had, often succeeded in life, while the college man who refused to see the opportunity in the much possessed, failed in the practical business of life, that of growing and getting ahead.

These discussions, carried on at odd times daily, created a mutual bond between us, a thing that I had been working for, because I wanted to touch upon a most delicate subject later on, one that only friendship could take without resentment. I wanted to show him and make him realize what he had done to his parents, especially his mother, by dragging down the many excellent opportunities they had made possible for him.

He told me later that I was the only person on earth who could have brought these things home to him without giving offence. He was glad I had done it. Also, for the first time, our discussions made him conscious of the fact that, instead of copying his favorite philosopher's virtues, he had been twisting those virtues into vices and copying them.
As you probably have already divined, Harry Simmons had scoffed at the idea of a prison school for convicts. He had said that ninety per cent of the guys in this prison were too dumb to learn anything if they were kept in school a million years. He had evinced a great pity for the poor boobs who would have to act as teachers. He had also said that was one job he would not do under any inducement or pressure. He preferred the dungeon to such a job.

But Harry Simmons did become a teacher in the prison school. He sought the job, and he filled it in an exemplary manner. He had a Spanish and English class that positively worshiped him. He became the professor's most valuable assistant and he, more than any one else, was responsible for some of the finest features that the school possessed. In a word, he became a prison school enthusiast, and served the cause early and late to make it an outstanding success, and in this way squelch the criticism that still rumbled ominously here and there.

On commencement days, held in the big auditorium, with many noted educators from various places present to study the effects of the system, it was Harry's privilege to make the address which outlined the accomplishments of that semester and voiced the hopes of the one immediately to follow, for this school had only a very short holiday period.
How different was the philosophy this boy propounded in these addresses to that which he had brought with him to prison! He was like a new creature. As he would warm with enthusiasm, he was like a man who had caught a powerful vision, and was eager to convey the inspiration of it to those who were still floundering about in search of themselves, as he had been.

Harry was not a pupil in this prison school seeking an education, but he got about as much out of it as any pupil there. It was not education he obtained, but re-education.

Harry was still there when I pulled out. But he's gone by this time, and I would be willing to wager a goodly fortune that he'll never go back to that prison or any other.

One of the best debates the forum ever promoted was between Harry and an equally brilliant fellow on the philosopher Nietzsche. As I sat and listened I glowed inwardly with gratitude when the youngster revealed to me he had at last gotten close to the real Nietzsche and had reasoned away the shadow he had been following of that greatest of all original thinkers.

Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25

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