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Title: Confession of a Convict Author: Alexander Berkman Date: 1913 Language: en Topics: autobiography Source: Online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=1246, retrieved on November 18, 2020.
(The 19^(th) of December, 1913, was “confession evening” at the
“Twilight Club”, New York, among whose members are the “best” people,
supreme court judges, and other pillars of society. “Confessions” were
made by a drunkard, a dope fiend, an actress, a labor agitator, a
convict, etc., some of whom spoke in complete darkness, to hide their
identity.)
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This is an evening of confession, and I therefore at once confess myself
a lawbreaker, a criminal — if you will — and a convict.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentleman, I beg your kind indulgence, for the
convict’s manner is uncouth, his speech ragged, his thoughts indecently
naked. For only the convict, the outcast from the fold of commonplace
respectability and dull conformity, can afford the luxury of frank,
honest expression. And I should be honest with you — not only because of
my lack of respect for that which is respected but the general consensus
of stupidity, but rather because I hold in high respect my fellow
convicts the world over, and — myself.
And I make my confession, not in the protecting shadow of cowardly
darkness, but in the full glare of the challenging light which defies
all sham and hypocrisy, however generally revered, and which is neither
afraid nor ashamed of anything that is human.
And the convict, the criminal, Ladies and Gentlemen, is human. So human,
indeed, that one of your great ethical teachers was compelled to cry
out: “I have within me the capacity for every crime”. Nor do I believe
that Emerson merely said this is an abandonment of generosity, with the
desire of uttering something a great and leveling. I think he meant
exactly what he said. For I believe that “within every bit of human
flesh and spirit that has ever crossed the enigma bridge of life, from
the prehistoric racial morning until now, all crime and all virtue were
germinal.” Out of the same stuff are we sprung, you and I and all of us,
and if perchance in you the virtue has grown and not the vise, do not
therefore conclude that you are essential different from him whom you
have helped to put in stripes and behind bars. Your balance may be more
even, you may be mixed in smaller proportions, or the outside temptation
has not come upon you.
But has virtue really grown in you, and not vise? If the most respected
and righteous among us, if our holiest and purist and better-than-thou
pillars of church and state and society were for once to enter this
confessional, in the frank abandon of their naked souls, would there be
a single one left to cast and the first stone at the criminal and
convict? Would there be any essential difference between the trust
magnate and pick-pocket, except in the size of the booty they have
stolen? Would there be any real difference between the great general or
the judges on the criminal bench, and the ordinary murderer, except in
the number of their victims? Would there be any difference between the
employer of cheap labor or the Christian proprietor of a large
department store, and the despicable creature we know has the cadet,
except in the number of the girls they have forced into prostitution?
And whose crime is the greater — that of the man who steals my
pocketbook or that of respected captains of industry who weave the very
flesh and blood of their starving slaves into the luxury and license of
the master’s life?
Who is the real criminal, Ladies and Gentlemen? Is it the starveling who
occasionally steals a loaf of bread or burglarizes my house or is it he
who is the eternal vampire on the body of labor, forever feeding on the
bone and marrow of the worker, exploiting and oppressing him, always
keeping him on the verge of starvation that he may exercise his
benevolent charity upon him, and ultimately degrading him to the lowest
depths.
Thus is society organized, you’ll say. Yes, thus: that a handful of the
masters of life vampire upon the whole people. And therefore I indict
modern society, this unholy union of authority and capital; I indict
society as the greatest — aye, the only Criminal, the great universal
crime that breeds and feeds the swamp of our whole social life with all
its misery and degradation, all its evil and crimes.
For what is ordinarily called crime is but starvation. Ninety percent.
Of all lawbreaking is of an economic nature. But it is not lawbreaking
that makes the criminal. For as Oscar Wilde aptly said, “You may keep
the law, and yet be worthless. You may break the law and yet be fine.”
It is starvation that fills our prisons. It is our wrong and unjust
economic conditions that are the source of fully nine-tenths of all
crime. And as to the other tenth, — though a crime may not be against
property, it may spring from misery and rage and depression produced by
our perverted social conditions. Jealousy, itself, an extraordinary
source of crime in modern life, is an emotion closely bound up with our
conceptions of property. Abolish private property and the social robbery
it involves, and you will have abolished the chief fountainhead of all
crime and the spirit that generates it in human society.
And now, as to the criminal in our prisons and penitentiaries. Why, do
you know, he is not to be found there. There you will indeed find men
convicted of offenses against the law; but the real, bigger criminals, —
they are the large fish that break through the net of the law which is
built to catch only the little fry.
The species “criminal” is a fiction of uncritical prejudice that deals
only with theories, with imaginary abnormalities and aberrations.
Through the obscure spectacles of preconceived notion and stubborn
narrow-mindedness, men of the Lombroso stamp see only the “criminal
species”, entirely blind to the conception of crime as a social
phenomenon, blind to the fact that the criminal, as an individual, is a
unit of the larger species Man. The so-called criminal is not a little
drop outside the ocean of life. He is one of us; his crime but the
feverish pulse-beat of our sick social body.
The theory of the criminal species is at best but a cheap salve for the
guilty social conscience. I suspect that if a good many respectable,
decent, never-did-a-wrong-thing-in-their-lives people were to undergo
the measurement test offered to the so-called “born criminal”, malformed
ears and disproportionately long thumbs would be equally found among
them, if they took the precaution to represent themselves as criminals
first.
I speak from experience. In my close association with criminals during
fourteen years, in daily and hourly contact, not as an outsider, but as
an equal — I have come to know them well and intimately. When I first
came in touch with them, I entertained the idea of the criminal type,
the species “criminal”, a classification very much beloved by our prison
reformists and criminologists. But closer contact and better
understanding dispelled the fiction of the species and revealed the man,
the individual, behind the convict.
There is no criminal type. In fact, the so-called criminal and convict
is far more individualized, far more of a distinct personality than the
average stupid citizen. He possesses a certain amount of initiative,
considerable daring and independence of thought and action — traits,
which, you will agree with me, are not the common earmarks of the
average man. I have found no criminal type, but what I did find is that
there are two classes of victims — the accidental and the professional.
The accidental victim is the criminal by accident, one who has committed
a crime as a result of some unusual combination of circumstances. The
professional, on the other hand, is the one who follows crime as the
ordinary pursuit of his life, similarly as the business man follows his
profession of “stealing an honest living.”
The line between these two classes is not drawn sharply nor is it a
definite one. Very often the accidental victim, because of his prison
experience and all it involves, is forced into the ranks of the
professional. Now, what happens to the men who get into prison? What do
we do to them? Do we try to call out their better nature by humane and
kind treatment? Oh, no! My time is too limited to permit me to dwell on
this matter, but everyone even slightly familiar with conditions in our
penal institutions is aware that the whole system is built on the
principle of revenge, of brutal humiliation and barbarous punishment. I
need only refer to the blackjack, the dungeon, the bullring, the water
cure, to give you an idea of the spirit dominant in those institutions.
And no wonder. For the prison in the last analysis is the mirror of
society at large, the perfect model of our social arrangement whose
cornerstone is hypocrisy, deceit, oppression and injustice. Punishment
is degrading, even more to the one wielding the whip than to his victim.
The history of crime clearly demonstrates that the more punishment is
inflicted, the more crime is produced. And after you have tortured the
poor convict for several years, degraded him to the lowest, broken him
in body and spirit, you turn him out into a cold world without money or
friends, and with the stigma of “convict” burned into his very soul.
Having embittered and demoralized him to the verge of desperation, you
demand that he become a good and useful citizen.
Is it any wonder, then, that your prisons have proved to be veritable
hot-houses of crime — for what is the ex-convict to do, with every one
an Ishmael against him?
Your good police and detective departments will see to it that the
ex-convict shall get no show. He will be speedily arrested on one
pretext or another, and a kind Christian judge will decree that he be
put away for a long term of years, for is it not his second offense?
Let us be done with all this sham and hypocrisy. Let us admit once for
all that crime is social; that our wrong economic conditions, by
enriching the few at the cost of the many, are the true and only sources
of crime. And let us emancipate ourselves from the stupid notion that
the criminal is a being different or apart from the rest of us. There is
no need of holding our skirts that he may not contaminate us. Indeed it
is we who contaminate the criminal; it is we, society at large, that are
guilty of far greater and more terrible crimes against the criminal than
he has ever committed against us. In justice to him, and to ourselves,
primarily, let us be honest, and brave enough to look the facts in the
face; and if we are sincere in this matter, if we really and truly want
to do away with the criminal and the convict, let us eradicate the
causes of crime, rather than try hypocritically to patch up and hide our
social sores.
The first step in reforming the criminal is to reform ourselves, for he
is our brother, of the same blood and flesh. A more enlightened social
attitude toward crime and criminals will serve to humanize, to some
extent, our penal institutions, and will inject a little of the milk of
kindness into the bitter cup of the convict. And the next step is to
treat the cause instead of the effect. When you cease to justify and
maintain present conditions of capitalistic exploitation and
governmental oppression, and all other institutions based upon man’s
inhumanity to man, when honest men will realize their solidarity with
the aspirations of labor for complete emancipation from all bondage,
when M A N will at last awaken from his nightmare of private ownership,
of punishment and authority, then will crime and criminals forever
disappear and make this earth fit for decent men and women to live in.