Walls and Bars: Prisons and Prison Life in the Land of the Free

by Eugene V. Debs

Few are aware that Eugene Debs (1855-1927), the best loved socialist agitator of his time, wrote one of the most insightful books on prisons. Debs's only full-length book, WALLS & BARS is a lively memoir as well as a stirring critique, drawing on his own prison experiences.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Biography, United States, Classics

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Eugene Victor Debs was an American union leader, a founding member of the International Labor Union & the Industrial Workers of the World, as well as candidate for President as a member of the Social Democratic Party in 1900.

In 1855, labor leader, reformer and socialist Eugene V. Debs was born in Terre Haute, Ind. He was not baptized by his formerly Catholic mother. The family living room contained busts of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. When a teacher gave Debs a bible as an academic award, inscribing it, "Read and obey," Debs later called, "I never did either." (New York Call interviews with David Karsner). He dropped out of high school at age 14 to work. By 1870 he had become a fireman on the railroad, attending evening classes at a business college. His labor activism began in 1875. As president of the Occidental Literary Club of Terre Haute, Debs brought "the Great Agnostic" Col. Robert Ingersoll, whom he always revered despite political differences, Susan B. Anthony and other famous speakers to town. He was elected state representative to the Indiana General Assembly as a Democrat in 1884, while continuing his labor activities. As editor of the Locomotive Firemen's journal for many years, Debs routinely attacked the church, promoted women's and racial equality, and promoted justice for the poor. "If I were hungry and friendless today, I would rather take my chances with a saloon-keeper than with the average preacher," Debs once said (cited in Eugene V. Debs: A Man Unafraid, 1930, by McAlister Coleman). He saved his strongest denunciations for the Roman Catholic Church, for being an anti-democratic, anti-family, authoritarian "political machine."

In June 1893, Debs organized the first industrial union in the United States, the American Railway Union in Chicago, which held a successful 18-day strike against Great Northern Railway the next year. Debs and leaders of the union were arrested during the Pullman Boycott and Strike of 1894, and were sent to jail for contempt of court for 6 months in 1895. An inspired campaigner, Debs ran for president as a candidate of the Socialist Party in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920, employing the "Red Special" train to visit America during his 1908 campaign. The irreligious Debs was beloved by many. He was associate editor from 1907-1912 of the Appeal to Reason, a popular weekly published by freethinker E. Haldeman-Julius in Girard, Kansas. In 1918, Debs delivered his famed anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, in protest of WWI, and was arrested and convicted in federal court under the wartime espionage law. His appeals to the jury and to the court before sentencing went into legal history. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison and was disenfranchised for life, losing citizenship. While in prison, he was nominated to run for president and conducted his last campaign, winning nearly a million votes. His opponent, Warren G. Harding, commuted Debs' sentence and released him on Dec. 25, 1921. Debs was welcomed by 1,000 fellow Terre Hauteans upon his return. His health broken by his imprisonment, he died at a sanitarium. The Terre Haute home he built with his wife in 1890 is today a National Historic Landmark of the National Parks Department and a museum. D. 1926.

More: http://debsfoundation.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V...

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

http://www.biography.com/people/eugen...

http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wilson/p...

http://www.ushistory.org/us/37e.asp

http://www.history.com/topics/eugene-...

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was purchased as a gift for me at the Heartland Cafe store in the East Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago's north side. The Heartland, operated by Michael James and Katie Hogan, is a little bit of San Francisco in the Midwest, their store offering an ever-changing variety of products from around the world, including progressive books and magazines.

Eugene Victor Debs was, with Norman Thomas a generation later, the persona of American socialism. A founding member both of the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World, he held together and articulated the various elements of progressivism: Christian utopianism, Marxism, Syndicalism, Anarchism--a combination which, with a strong dose of Jeffersonian populism, offered a chance for the United States to democratically evolve into a humane social democracy until the first world war and the red scare engineered by Wilson, Palmer and Hoover effectively crushed the movement by wholesale intimidation, imprisonments and deportations.

While I grew up revering Norman Thomas, Dad's choice for President in 1948, I later learned about his even more morally impressive predecessor, Eugene Debs, Grandfather's hero at the beginning of the century, and proceeded to read the standard biographies and histories. Once I even met an elderly woman who had herself met Debs as a young woman--my only living contact with the man.

'Walls and Bars' is Debs' account of his second, much lengthier, prison sentence. While it gives some information about his own personal experiences in jail, the emphasis is on prisons and prisoners in general and the relationships between the crimes that lead to incarceration and those which lead to success under capitalism.

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walls and Bars is a memoir and commentary written by Eugene V. Debs after his release from federal prison. For violating the Espionage Act during World War I for making a speech denouncing the Great War and the atrocities it commits, Debs was sentenced to serve a 10-year stint in federal prison, which he served a short portion of it in West Virginia before serving the bulk of his sentence in Atlanta. This book chronicles his time in these facilities, and, in small part, time he spent in other county jails earlier in his life. Primarily, Debs reviews the human condition of his fellow prisoners and how imprisonment affects not only the lives of the imprisoned but their families. He also examines the abysmal conditions of the prisons themselves and how prison rules and these conditions debase those incarcerated into becoming prisoners all of their lives.

While not hard on statistics, Debs provides a strong first-hand account of late 19th- and early 20th-century prison life and conditions. Debs is a Socialist, which was back before Senator Joe McCarthy turned it into a dirty word in the United States, and this book has a lot of democratic socialism rhetoric in it. Debs also proposes a lot of prison reforms in his book, and many of these are common standards today but were absent during his time.

Much of this book repeats itself: Debs tells and retells the story that sent him to prison as much as he tells, summarizes, and repeats the plight of prisoners and prisons; he extolls the virtues of a socialist world and how it would eliminate prisons entirely. Sometimes one could feel this repetition was ad nauseum, and other times one could feel that the repetition was meant to drive home the points about how bad prison conditions were at the time. It was, really, the only quibble I had with reading this book.

Hans Mattick, who writes the introduction to this edition, provides useful context and encapsulation of this book before the reader launches into Debs writing. This book is useful reading not only for fans of history but for those who make a study of prisons and their relationship to society.

[Marv · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeremy Bentham for theory of incarceration int the use of the Panopticon. Foucault for theory and history of discipline and punishment. 'Walls & Bars' by Debs for the results of the evolution to the worlds greatest and largest prison industry. A timeless work on the absurdity of the prison system in the United States.

[Beth Campbell-Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this as part of some research for a book I'm planning to write. It's an excellent book for anyone interested in prison reform. What's amazing to me is that although this book was written nearly a hundred years ago, practically everything he says about the prison system still holds true today.

[Clif · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this time of rudeness and incivility, it is good to read the work of a decent man, Eugene Debs, who was given a sentence of ten years for speaking against WW1. He was convicted of treason and after three years was pardoned by President Harding.

There was speculation about Donald Trump. Would he be eligible to run for the presidency if he was behind bars? The answer is yes, that is exactly what happened with Debs. Four times he was nominated by the Socialist Party to be their candidate for president. The last time, Debs was in prison, and he tells of it in this book. When the eligibility of Trump was being discussed, I do not recall a single mention of Debs case. History does not exist for Americans, certainly it is not presented to them by mainstream media.

Standing out in this work is Debs humanity, very much in the manner of Lincoln. He easily related to all the prisoners he encountered, becoming a friend and earning the name "Mr. Debs" from them of their own accord. He repeatedly states that the prisoners are fully respectable human beings that in most cases, apart from mental illness, had been driven to crime by the capitalist system that discards the poor to survive in any way they can. He also insisted that he not be given any special treatment.

Debs wrote this book because he felt that his personal experience in prison along with the fact that he was a famous man would allow him to describe to the receptive public the many problems with incarceration in America. The sad fact is that almost all of what he describes (1920) is still a problem now. The best that can be said is that the food has improved and there are no longer rats the size of cats running free through the cells. Sexual predation, violence by guards, release with no preparation into the outside world, bonds set higher than the poor can afford resulting in their imprisonment before they are tried (no habeas corpus) all remain with us. Most of all, only the poor go to prison as legal help must be purchased. The wealthy easily buy the best lawyers and, thereby, the law.

Any reader will be awed by the account of Debs' release. Walking away from the penitentiary with two men who came to get him, the three are astounded as the entire prison population breaks into cheers for Debs in a sustained roar that can be heard a quarter mile away. Needless to say, Debs tears up and feels a tinge of regret that he is leaving all his friends behind.

Debs demonstrates the power of the mind to determine the way circumstances are viewed. He never feels despair, but takes every day as it comes and finds pleasure in interacting with his fellow prisoners as they come to him to share letters received from home or simply seek his advice when they are low. Jesus comes to mind, though Debs is not religious. He is rightly outraged at mandatory chapel attendance with guards with clubs glowering over the prisoners.

I recommend this book to anyone of any age. If I had to choose a word under which Walls and Bars would be filed, it would be "character".

[Kristofer Carlson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The home of the free has the largest prison population in the world, and the highest per capita incarceration rate. We've made it a crime to be poor; we've penalized poverty, imposed fines upon it, and incarcerated those unable to pay. We've created an underclass who turn to crime to feed their families. Then we take the family breadwinner away, creating the next generation of poverty. We provide the poor with inferior education, then blame them for lacking the abilities that a good education would have provided them. We take society's most vulnerable and lock them away in terrible sanitary conditions, feed them substandard food, provide them with sub-standard health care, and put bullies in charge of them. We brutalize them and wonder why they seem brutish. If I had my way, I would eliminate the death penalty, eliminate life sentences without the possibility of parole, require pre-trial detention to count as part of the sentence, require all sentences to be served concurrently, release nearly every non-violent offender, eliminate nearly all pre-trial detention, and adopt the Scandinavian prison model.

Prison should not be the punishment. Going to prison should be the punishment.

[David Kirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

First published in 1927, this book is still relevant today to those who wish to study and know more about our penal system, and our country's history. Much of it is still relevant to today's prison. It also teaches us about Socialism somewhat. The book is definitely worth your time.

[Braden Domier · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've ever read. A strong moral argument - should be required reading in America.

[Mike Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Series of articles Debs wrote for newspapers (censored in part) which detail his experience in the federal prison system, after his arrest under the Espionage Act for anticorporate speeches and organizing mine workers. The last couple articles are my favorite: a pair of blazing anticapitalist manifestos which the newspapers called propaganda and refused to print.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the original 1920s edition and therefore missed Dellinger's introduction which I am sure is apt.