these classified animals stood listening. How should we like such an
experience? What thoughts passed through those minds, what fierce hate,
what hopeless despair may not have swept over them as they listened to
the summing up of their case?
Prison communities come from no uncivilized island where they form
a different species of the human family nor are they drawn from one
section of the population confined to the slums. They are from the
great, wide world at large. Some have had homes of ease and comfort
and have been educated in our finest colleges and schools. Society
gives its quota, so does the great world of the common people, while
yet others come from homes of poverty and some from no homes at all.
There are the educated and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, the
industrious and the idle, the brilliant and the poorly endowed. In
fact our audiences in Prison are much like the audiences that we meet
in the free world, save that their hearts are sore and sensitive and
that that great shadow of suffering, the awful loss of liberty, has
brought anguish, despair and shame to quicken every feeling. Nowhere
have I found audiences more attentive, earnest and intelligent than
in prison and I find all who have had any experience will compare
them most favorably with those of the outside. One thing is very
evident--superficiality, seeming and artificiality have been swept away
by the close and bitter contact with life, hence the real man is easier
to recognize and reach. They in their turn are quick to read and judge
the speaker behind the subject, the faith behind the doctrine.
Another gross misconception is the belief that all men in prison are
dishonest. People forget how many and devious are the causes for which
men can be imprisoned. Sometimes when I have asked a business man to
employ one of our "boys" the answer has been, "I am in sympathy with
your work and pity these poor fellows, but in my business I dare not
do it as there would be opportunities to steal and it would not be
right to those whose interests I must protect." This has shown me how
constantly the thought of theft and robbery is associated with all
who come from prison. There are many within the walls who have never
misappropriated a cent. This does not mean they are guiltless, for
their crime may have very justly brought them to conviction but there
is no reason to imagine that because of that punishment they must be
ranked as dishonest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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