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FIGHTING FOR RUEF'S PAROLE

HEN I finished telling Lawlor the Helms story, he started with, "If Burns did that-"

He got no further. In a frenzy, I shrieked at him, "How dare you say 'If Burns did that!' How dare you question what I am telling you occurred in this room? Further than this, you committed perjury yourself when you made an affidavit that you were impartial and could give Ruef a fair trial. Only a short time before you made the affidavit you told me in your room at the Family Club that the dirty blankety-blank should be made to crawl down on his hands and knees from the county jail and be put on trial on one of the big indictments. I think I agreed with you at the time and rejoiced in your attitude, but I see it differently now that I have had time to reflect."

My voice carried far out into the local room and alarmed the reporters.

Of course, I was soon sorry for what I had said, and it is humiliating to tell it, but it is necessary in order to make clear the meaning I wish this story to have.

Lawlor left my room with foam on his lips. He has never forgiven me.

I went on with my efforts to accomplish the parole of Ruef, but owing to Governor Johnson's attitude toward him I could make no headway. I criticised the Board of Prison Directors for nullifying the statute that provided for the parole of any first offender who received less than a life sentence at the end of one year. The board had made this law inoperative by passing a rule that each prisoner must serve half of his net sentence before his petition for parole would be given a hearing. Prior to my efforts in Ruef's behalf this rule had been frequently broken, but as soon as I tried to make it apply to Ruef the board endeavored to live up to the letter of their rule, and only in rare instances violated it. The power against me was too great to overcome. The Governor insisted that Ruef should serve half of his "net" sentence, four years and five months. Not a day was subtracted. The fight to free him was long and bitter. In the midst of it I was invited to address the Jewish Council of Women. Having nothing in my mind but the Ruef case, I chose that as my subject, hoping against

hope that I could yet accomplish Ruef's release. My talk before the Jewish women was rather in the nature of a confession. In it I said:

"I shall never forget the morning that Ruef started for the penitentiary. All the bitterness and hatred of all the years of pursuit came into my mind to reproach me. I thought, 'Is this success, or is it utter failure? Is this a real victory or an appalling defeat? After all the years of mad pursuit, is this the harvest? The imprisonment and branding of one poor, miserable, helpless human being.'

"In imagination I followed Ruef on his journey to the prison. I saw him being shaved, and photographed and striped and numbered, and degraded and humiliated. I thought of his tears, and of his suffering, and of those who were near and dear to him. And then it dawned upon me for the first time that my life, too, had been filled with evil; that I had done many cruel things; that I had at no time been fully fair to him, or to the others who were caught with him; that I had been striving, as he had, for success, that I had been hunting others in order to make money out of a successful newspaper; that I had been printing stories that made others suffer that I might profit; pandering to many low instincts in man in order to sell newspapers; that I had told many half truths and let many lies go undenied. And when I thought of all that Ruef had done and of all that I had done, I could not see that I had been any better than Ruef, and so I asked for and pleaded for mercy for him with the best arguments that I could command. I asked for his parole at the end of one year. I urged it on the ground that it was a legal thing to do, that the State's statute provided for the parole at the end of one year. In making the plea I encountered a rule of the prison board which forbade any prisoner applying for parole until he had served half of his net sentence. That, according to my view, nullified the spirit of the law, and was, therefore, illegal and wrong. The campaign went on for his parole. I was met on every hand with protests and objections, expressions of hatred, and at best this, 'He is not repentant. Why doesn't he repent?"'

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"I wonder if any of us has repented. What is repentance? Certainly no man can fully repent in prison. Repentance must be free and voluntary. The state can not force it by locking a man up in a cell for a term of years. It can make him suffer; it can make him weep; it can make him a craven; or it can make him bitter and resentful and vicious, and make him desirous of wreaking vengeance upon society that is wreaking vengeance upon him. But it can not give him humility, which is the essence of true repentance. I wonder how many of those who are hating Ruef and who are

opposing his parole have repented. How many have that rare quality, humility? And how many are there who know that mercy is beautiful and precious, and even practical? We, who consider that we are good, can, of course, easily forgive the little evil we see in ourselves. And if we can do this much in our own case, why can we not extend this forgiveness to the greater evil we think we see in Ruef? I have tried to repent for the bitterness of spirit, the ignorance I displayed in pursuing the man Ruef, instead of attacking the wrong standard of society and a system which makes Ruefs inevitable. I may not have entirely succeeded, but at least I have reached the point where I can see the good in the so-called bad people, and can forgive and plead that mercy be shown to Abraham Ruef.

"You can imagine how Ruef and the other men who were indicted with him viewed us, who were in hot pursuit. You can imagine that they knew enough of us to know that we were not what we pretended to be; that we were not fit to preach to them from a pedestal. They knew that we were full of evil, too. They knew that our lives had not been perfect and you can well understand how deeply they resented our self-righteous attitude toward them, and our abuse of them, and our hatred of them, and our intemperate invective and relentless warfare upon them. They knew us because they knew we were human, and that it is human to err. They knew that we were no better, and no worse, than the average human being, and while they perhaps were conscious that they had done wrong, they knew we were bad, too; but we had not been found out. Perhaps our misdeeds may not have involved the breaking of the Penal Code. But perhaps they had, and we had escaped detection.

"Ruef and the others had merely been found out and caught. Being found out was Ruef's chief crime. I feel sure that if he had escaped detection, even though we were possessed of a general knowledge of all that he had done, he would still be honored and respected in this community. So Ruef, after all, was punished for his failure, not for what he did."

A

PAT SULLIVAN'S STORY

FTER Ruef and I became friends, I used frequently to to go to prison to see him. On one of my visits, I had to wait a little while for Ruef, and while I was waiting Warden Hoyle handed me a typewritten article to read. It was about the indeterminate sentence.

I read it through with great interest and asked him who wrote it. He said it was written by a prisoner named Donald Lowrie, who had written many other things that were quite good.

At once I became interested in Lowrie. I asked to see him. The warden called him in from an adjoining office, where he was acting as bookkeeper. He was in stripes. I told him that I had read his article and thought he had great possibilities as a writer. I said: "If you could get out of here I would take you on The Bulletin."

His face brightened. "If you can get me out on parole, I will be glad to try writing," he said.

I appealed to the Board of Prison Directors and they said they would be glad to parole him. Thereupon, I visited Lowrie and told him he was going to be paroled, and I thought the best thing for him to do was to write an honest, straightforward story of his life in prison.

He said that he would be glad to do it, except that his mother would object; that she was conventionally minded and thought that the family had been disgraced by his misconduct.

I told him to suit himself about that, but that I thought he could get rid of the stigma of the prison immediately if he were frank about himself. Otherwise, he would continually be pointed out as an ex-convict.

He finally decided to write the story, under his own name, and when he came out of prison he had already written the first two chapters of his now famous book, "My Life in Prison." I started the story as a serial in The Bulletin, and it made an instantaneous sensation.

Within two weeks after it started, Lowrie was the speaker before the Commonwealth Club at the Palace Hotel, and from that time he was in great demand all over California, speaking before women's clubs, in high schools and in churches. His story was largely responsible for the prison reforms in California and also for the great changes in Sing

Osborne

Sing prison, brought about by Tom Osborne. gives credit to Lowrie's book for awakening his interest in prisons, and when Osborne was made warden of Sing-Sing he sent for Lowrie to act as his secretary.

My faith in Lowrie recalled and reawakened an old interest I once had in prisoners. Many years before when I was a police reporter on one of the city papers a patient in the Emergency Hospital asked me to write a letter for him to his wife. The man was Pat Sullivan. He was recovering from an attack of delirium tremens. He was one of the strongest men physically I had ever seen. frame, broad shoulders and a thick neck. and his eyes were small. His face was became interested in the story he told me.

He had a massive His brow was low unpleasant, but I

He was born in Ireland and when quite young came to America and became a stoker in the American Navy. For many years he held this job and when he quit in San Francisco, he had saved $7000. He wanted to go into business for himself, and being attracted by the red lights, he bought a dive on the Barbary Coast. Women had never come into his life up to this time, but in the saloon he had bought there was a woman hanging around attracting other men. was 35, divorced, with a son 10 years old. The court in granting the divorce had given the child to the father on account of the loose habits of the mother.

She was a dream of loveliness to Sullivan. He fell in love with her at first sight, married her and established a little home of his own.

She drank a great deal and ran about with other men. Sullivan took to drink and he soon lost his saloon. He went to work as a laborer, still trying to cling to the woman he loved. Frequently, she would disappear while Sullivan was at work. He would come home at night, find her gone, the few sticks of furniture sold, the house empty and deserted. Then he, too, would get drunk, lose his job, hunt her up, take her back and try it again.

It was after one of these disasters that I found him in the city prison. In the letter I wrote for him he pleaded with her to brace up. He would get another job and they would again try to be happy together. As the case interested me, and as I had a little influence with the Republican boss, I got Sullivan a job as a coal heaver on the State tug. He went to work, rigged up a flat, got his wife back and tried it again. In a few months, another crash came. The woman was back "cruising" on the Coast, and Sullivan was in the gutter.

Coming down town one morning on the dummy of the California street car, the gripman said cheerily, “Good morn

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