This wording has been retained in Section 37 of the chapter on penitentiaries of our revised statutes up to the present time.

THE ABUSE OF THE PUNISHMENT OF SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

Although the Legislature authorized the punishment of solitary confinement, we believe the solitary confinement as now imposed at Joliet, or what the prisoners term "stringing up," is improperly inflicted. There the practice has prevailed of compelling recalcitrant men to stand often for twelve hours a day with intervals of a half hour for meals with their hands projecting through the bars of the cell securely bound, and in some instances this punishment has been continued for as long as thirty days. That this is a cruel punishment there can be no question, and though there has always been some dispute as to what the term "cruel or unusual" as used in our statutes and in our constitutions really means, we have no doubt that it would be considered cruel and unusual by the Supreme Court of Illinois. The purpose of the punishment, it is candidly stated, is "to break" the prisoner and it certainly accomplishes the result if long continued. It leaves to be returned once more to society at the end of his sentence a crippled and brutalized man. There is no man living who can stand erect, under the conditions described, for even ten days without serious injury to his physical condition, to say nothing of the deleterious effect upon his mind.

There can be no doubt that in the original statutes the Legislature spoke of solitary confinement in the then generally and accepted sense of the term which was isolation merely, unaccompanied by torture. It expressly stated what should be the other elements of discomfort, and these were confinement in a dark cell and deprivation of food except bread and water.

It is true that the statutes of 1867 were amended by the Act of July 1, 1871, in which nothing was said concerning solitary confinement, and the Legislature was content to provide in Section 37 that

"It shall not be lawful in said penitentiary to use any cruel or unusual mode of punishment or to punish any convict by whipping whatever."

The Act of 1871 must be construed, however, in the light of what happened before. It prohibited cruel or unusual modes of punishment, and since prior to 1871 "stringing up" had not been authorized and had been considered as cruel, it must be considered as cruel or unusual under the later statutes.

In any event we do not believe that such a practice results in furthering prison discipline. There is a sense of fair play and sympathy for the under dog which, even in the minds of convicts, makes a martyr and not a culprit of a man whom they believe to have been mistreated. Furthermore, we have not in all instances been sufficiently judicious in the selection of our prison guards and our prison wardens, and we have too often placed our convicts at the mercy of

ignorant and brutalized men. Prison punishments are usually inflicted because of the complaint of a guard. It is, in fact, often considered ruinous to discipline not to uphold and substantiate the guard and not to place full credence in his complaint. Too often the complaints against prisoners are made from mere personal vindictiveness or from the desire to exercise and to manifest authority which is the prevailing vice of the ignorant man. We realize, of course, that many of the prisoners are desperate characters and have to be dealt with as such. There is reason, however, in all things. That such treatment is effective as a punishment, there can be no question, but of its efficacy as a means of reformation and as applied to a person who must inevitably sooner or later be returned to the community either as a parolee or at the expiration of his sentence, there is, at least, some doubt. On this subject let an ex-convict, Jack Black, who had been subjected to the punishment of the lash in a Canadian prison and to that of the strait-jacket at San Quentin, speak. He says:

"I've heard a lot about the humiliation and degradation of flogging. If anybody was humbled and degraded in my case it was not I. It may sound strange when I say I am glad now, and was glad then, that they lashed me. It did me good. Not in the way it was intended to, of course, but in a better way. I went away from the tripod with fresh confidence, with my head up, with a clear eye and mind, and sustained with a thought from the German Nietzche, 'What does not kill me strengthens me.'

"To make an unpleasant story short, I will say he beat me like a balky horse, and I took it like one-with my ears laid back and my teeth bared. All the philosophy and logic and clear reasoning I had got out of books and meditation in my two years were beaten out of me in thirty seconds, and I went out of that room foolishly hating everything a foot high. I had a chance to cool off during the remaining week of my time, and the day of my relase found me halfway rational again.

"I don't know to this day whether the law contemplates flogging as punishment, as a deterrent measure, or partly both. As a punishment, it's a success; as a deterrent it's a failure; if it's half and half one offsets the other and there's nothing gained. The truth is I wouldn't have quit, no matter how I was treated. The flogging just hardened me more, that's all. I found myself somewhat more determined, more confident, and with a feeling that I would play this game of violence to the finish. I have taken everything they had in the way of violence and could take it again. Instead of going away in fear, I found my fears removed. The whipping post is a strange place to gather fresh confidence and courage, yet that's what it gave me, and in that dark cell I left behind many fears and misgivings."1

And again in relation to the strait-jacket, he says:

"When I got out I held up my hand and swore I would never make another friend or do another decent thing. I borrowed a gun and got money. I returned to Folsom by stealth and flooded the place with hop. I went about the country for months with but one thing in my mind, a sort of vicious hatred of everything and everybody.

"My prison experiences began with a sentence of two years and thirty lashes in a Canadian prison. I could not see that I deserved this flogging, 1 Jack Black, You Can't Win, pp. 277-78.

and it seemed when I got it that all the cruelty in the world was visited on me all the brutality, all the violence. There was a lesson in cruelty I have never forgotten. Fortunately, I had a disposition that hardened with the flogging instead of breaking under it.

"I proved an incorrigible prisoner while there. I broke the rules many, many times in a small way-nothing violent, nothing desperate, but I would talk, laugh, whistle and sing, and that outraged the silence of the system then in vogue.

"I was punished repeatedly on bread and water, the dark cell. The warden was a hard, stern man. His motto was-'break them first and make them after.'

"Then came the day for my second installment of my flogging and my discharge from prison. I went out with the skin on my back blistered and broken and my mind bent on revenge. I went out of there with a hatred for law and order, society and justice, discipline and restraint, and everything that was orderly and systematic. I had a hatred for courts, jailers, prison keepers, and wardens. I hated policemen, prosecutors, judges and jurors.

"If I had reasoned right, I might have made a better start than I did. But I had no experience to guide me. I planned for revenge and I turned on society to get it, because society furnishes the judges, the jurors, the policemen, the prosecutors. Before I got fairly started on my career of revenge I was back in prison.

"When I went back I learned more brutality and violence. I knew the bread and water punishment, the dark cell, the strait-jacket and the water cure. I thought violent thoughts, I planned violent plans, but I executed those plans as best I could as soon as I got outside. I suppose a man's actions are the creatures of his thought, and his thoughts are naturally the products of his environment and the conditions under which he is forced to live." 2

2 Ibid., pp. 365, 382-83, 273, 272, 383-84.

CHAPTER IX

THE GOOD-TIME ALLOWANCE

By an Act passed February 23, 1863, allowances for good time were provided for by the Legislature, and this policy was continued in an Act of March 19, 1872, and remained a part of the law of Illinois until July 1, 1925. The allowances provided for by the Act of 1872 were as follows:

By an Act approved June 26, 1925, however, the Act of 1872 was substantially repealed and in its place was substituted a provision that

"The Department of Public Welfare is authorized and directed to prescribe reasonable rules and regulations for diminution of sentences on account of good conduct of persons heretofore and hereafter convicted of crime who are confined in the state penal and reformatory institutions."

Under this provision the members of the Board of Parole, who have now succeeded to the powers of the Department of Public Welfare, have adopted a regulation in which they have substantially approved of the policy of the statute of 1872. In this practice we believe the Board has acted wisely. There can indeed be no doubt that the hope of a good-time allowance does much toward maintaining the morale of the prisoner and in making him subservient to prison discipline. Even at a time when the flat-sentence method prevailed in Illinois, we are prepared to believe that in many instances the penalties were excessive. Under the indeterminate-sentence law when a man is sentenced to a term of from one to ten or one to twenty years, as the case may be, and the actual period of his incarceration is to be determined by the Board of Parole, no harm whatever can come from letting him believe that good behavior on his part may induce the Board to consider his parole at an earlier period than they would if he should be refractory.