"
Duration of confinement does not modify this attitude; the man of ten
years says the same as the man of ten months, except--and the exception
is worth noting--that the former's moral sense, whatever he originally
had of it, has been blunted or discouraged, and he has conceived a
settled animosity against human authority, and disbelief in the justice
and sincerity of its administrators. He has been the subject, during his
incarceration, of such numberless acts of gratuitous tyranny, outrage
and cruelty, and has seen so much of "the way things go," in general,
that though he may concede that honesty is the best policy, he can find
no other recommendation for it, and is prone to the secret conviction
that honesty itself is somehow only a cleverer way of cheating.
Such a state of mind is bred by prison experience--not otherwise. Prison
obstructs or altogether closes every door to genuine moral reform in
prisoners.
A few larger souls overcome the obstructions; for example, our John
Ross, who more than thirty-three years ago, in the blindness of a
drunken spree in Yokahoma, killed a shipmate who angered him. He died in
jail last June (1913). He was sentenced to death, but got commutation to
life imprisonment. He was a fine type of man, physically and mentally.
His spirit was never broken by what he endured, and some years before
being transferred to Atlanta, he became, in a simple, non-sensational,
but profound way, religious.
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