My Life in Prison

I was broke. I had not eaten for three days. I had walked the streets for three nights. Every fibre of my being, every precept of my home training protested against and would not permit my begging. I saw persons all about me spending money for trifles, or luxuries. I envied the ragged street urchin as he took a nickel in exchange for a newspaper and ran expectantly to the next pedestrian. But I was broke and utterly miserable. Have you ever been broke? Have you ever been hungry and miserable, not knowing when or where you were going to get your next meal, nor where you were going to spend your next night? Have you ever tramped holes in your shoes in a tiresome, discouraging effort to get work, meeting rebuff and insults in return for your earnestness and sincerity, and encountering an utter lack of an understanding of your crying necessity in those with whom you have pleaded for a chance? Have you ever felt as though the world itself were against you and that a mistake had been made by Nature in inflicting you with life? If you have not felt each and all of these things it will, perhaps, be futile for you to read what they brought to one who has felt them, and it will be difficult for you to tolerate any thought of extenuation for what happened. Thousands of persons have felt these thoughts, have suffered these experiences, but very few have done what I did; at all events, very few have done what I did and then told about it, as I am going to tell. Few crimes are committed from choice. The number of professional criminals is small, amazingly small, in comparison with the number who are criminals of circumstance. But society makes no distinction; the man who steals because he is hungry, and too proud or squeamish to beg, is classed with the thug who waylays you at night and takes your money by persuasion of an ugly .44-caliber "smoke-wagon" held within an inch of your brain, and with money jingling in his own pocket at the moment. The first is an unfortunate human being driven to commit an act which he abhors; the second a dangerous menace to humankind and organized society. I belonged to the unprofessional class. And despite a long term in prison, I am not yet a criminal. Every atom of my body, each vibration of my mind, revolts at the thought of crime. Yet I committed burglary; also I have a big, warm tolerance for other men who have committed burglary, or other crimes, no matter who they may be. Do not mistake me-I am not seeking to apotheosize the offender against the law; far from it. But I know that all men are human-even the men in convict stripes and shaven heads. Why shouldn't I know? Haven't I been one of them? Didn't I violate the sacredness of a home in the dead of night, and didn't I spend long years in the penitentiary? Who knows if I don't? As I look back I wonder what has been accomplished by my imprisonment. Perhaps before this series of sketches is done some of you may discover what has been accomplished in my individual case. But what is being accomplished in the thousands of other and more unconscionable cases? Perhaps you do not care; possibly you may feel that it is none of your concern; that you pay taxes for protection, and that you cannot be held accountable for the shortcomings of others or for the inhuman and illogical system that enhances the certainty of still greater violation of man-made laws. Be that as it may, you are still responsible; and you are not protected. I was broke and utterly miserable. True, there were thousands of others just as miserable-I realized that -but I was myself, I was no one else save myself, and I had a nickel with a hole in it in my pocket. Never mutilate a coin of the realm. It may fall into the hands of a starving man or woman and prove the last argument in favor of crime-or suicide. It was nearing midnight and the possibility of escaping another night in the streets growing slimmer with each passing moment. Somehow I felt that something....