The Washington herald. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1906-1939, 1916-04-01
Prison Ghosts.


4 Several times during my wanderings in great
prison recently, had curious feeling that the
/ place was peopled with ghosts. Surely the many
thousands of prisoners who had spent years of
tanguish there and departed must have left some
i thing of themselves behind Often their thoughts.
perhaps their souls, must have returned to these
scenes
/ And yet, l knew that once out of the confines
of the prison, many prisoners acted as they had
not known the place. Even with the friends they
/ had made there and with those of the officials
who had been particularly kind to them, they
never communicated again.
! For such seeming ingratitude can one really
/ blame them? -
On the other hand, there were those who,
sense of comradcship. Perhaps they were the
wisest. Perhaps in their frank acceptance OF their
prison experience as a part of their life, part
they could never get away from, but must recon
cle themselves to- they showed wisdom. For the
things that we hide in our consciousness are the
things that in the end nearly always cause us the
greatest harm
Occasionally, I was told, prisoner after
serving his term would devote large part of
his time to helping other prisoners.
Surely this kind of prisoner might be said to
triumph over his punishment.
| Then there the memories that must
haunt that place, memories of the causes that led
to the presence of the men here, and back of
these causes, those other far-reaching causes
which prepared the WI y Some of these causes
reached back to the sins of the fathers and of
the fathers fathers to be visited on the children
in the form of criminal instincts to be punished
| by society. In such where could justice
! be? In some instances the men could not re-
member the circumstances associated with their
| crimes. These crimes committed when
they were insane with drink or with drugs. In
some other instances, however, there was not
only deliberate intention to do wrong, but the
wful persistence in wrongdoing after re-
peated warnings. These included the cyclists
| in crime the who thought OF themselves
| alone, who bent self-gratihcation, who
took a kind of pride in their power to secure
advantage others. Theirs must have been
the greatest humiliation, measured by the length
| of their fall
And there were still other ghosts, vast multi
tude, the ghosts of the for whose sake
men had been led into crime. l wondered if
they blamed themselves, if they sus-
! pected that they, too, belong in prison perhaps
| by a greater right than many of the men they
had led into crime.
Then there were the ghosts of those who, far
! away perhaps, in the prison in spirit, suf-
fering with the prisoners perhaps, in some
cases, with greater intensity, those who
loved the imprisoned men, the fathers and
mothers, the sweethearts and wives, the brothers
and the sisters.
And for the prisoners themselves the thought
of those sufferers must have caused some of the
cluelest torture. Even in the comfort that
came from their visits there must have been pain.
heard of several cases where men refused to
allow certain of their relatives to visit them.
Often fathers, serving long terms would deny
themselves the comfort of seeing their children
so that the children might be spared the memory
of such interviews In many the relatives
and friends far away. And here, too, was
some consolation And in other the men
were hiding under assumed names so that those
dear to them should not know They preferred
to disappear from the world for years, per-
haps for the rest Of their lives, rather than
reveal their shame.
Most startling OF all the ghosts of those
who helped to make and to sustain the cond,
tons in the world outside that encouraged the
strong to prey the weak.
We are all over there, you and I. And we
are in the prisons scattered over the world.
Shall we ever realize that we arc there?
And realizing, shall we ever have the initiative
and the courage and the patience to work to-
gethcr to create conditions that shall make
prisons iInpossibleo