Behind the Walls of the Raml Prison

What lies behind those bare walls standing erect upon the sands of Beirut?

It is a constructive talk that Miss "Nahla Marwa" offers the readers of "The Woman's Voice," aiming through it at the building of a reform institution in which criminal passions and appetites may be brought under discipline—above all among the young, whom the crushing circumstances of life force into crime.

And Miss Marwa has a blessed hand with these juveniles, for she builds them up, as working hands build at their best, into a beautiful and splendid structure.

And these small stones, these bricks, which Miss Marwa is preparing at the elementary school of the American University, will remember tomorrow this devoted hand that polished and refined them to be a pillar in the great edifice. God willing.

I had never before visited the Raml Prison, and my first look at the place where it stands and the buildings of which it is composed did nothing but make me feel that it had been prepared to be a prison. The windows and the doors speak to you from outside, telling you the tale of those who have vanished behind its deaf walls... and oh, the horror of what they tell...

Here we are in the outer building, part of which has been set aside for the office of the prison director and his assistants, and in which reception rooms for the prisoners have also been prepared. We passed through into a large open space on which stood five massive buildings. Everything outside is clean; calm and stillness brood over the place. The lieutenant who received us led us to the first building, pointing out that it had been prepared as a quarantine station ("karantina") where the prisoner stays eight days before being given his own place. After that period he is examined by the prison doctor, he bathes, his clothes are fumigated, and he is moved to the second building—the building of those awaiting trial.

We numbered about forty, and anxiety began to gnaw at me out of pity for those wretched prisoners, for there was no doubt we would disturb their rest by coming in upon them in such great numbers. But the matter grew lighter for me when I saw that a single room of middling size holds more than fifty prisoners!

As for the second building, it is the juveniles' building, part of it set aside for those awaiting trial. The state of things in this building is wretched indeed. A small room has been set aside for the juveniles whose ages range between eleven and fifteen—there were twenty-eight of them on the day we visited the prison—and another like it for those between fifteen and eighteen years of age, and these numbered fifty-two boys. Arrangement by age is a commendable thing—but how are fifty juveniles to live in a single room, with no work for the whole term of their stay there? And that term may stretch out to several years. What are we to expect of them when they go out once more into society? Have the responsible authorities thought about that?

I talked with these juvenile prisoners—most of them had been thrown into prison for a theft or an incident of pickpocketing—and it became clear to me that most of them belong to the class of ka'k venders, shoeshine boys, and newspaper sellers, and that they are in truth poor wretches deserving of mercy: the mercy of the society that cast them out and flung them into prison for one aberrant act they committed. I do not mean by mercy, here, pardoning them or releasing them from prison before their term is done—no; I mean reform and correction, so that when this boy prisoner returns to society he finds within himself a restraint to hold him back from returning to crime—crime which costs him no more than the passing of a few numbered months within the walls of a room he has grown practiced at living in, and which perhaps has even come to suit him. From this we see that this imprisoned boy, if he does not die or fall ill with tuberculosis, is changed by prison not at all; it may even make his condition worse.

We did not enter the third and fourth buildings, but we learned that they have been prepared for convicted men; and it is no hard matter for one to picture the condition of these as well, for it obviously does not differ from the condition we saw in the juveniles' building, allowing for what the difference of age imposes.

And here is the fifth building. It differs somewhat from the preceding buildings, for it is the prison hospital; and in this hospital the conditions of cleanliness, order, and comfort have been provided, and in it is no small number of sick prisoners...

A few meters from the hospital a sixth building came into our view. The lieutenant led us toward it, saying: "Let us go to the workshop now." He said this after the many remarks the visiting ladies had made about the prisoners' not being given work with which to kill the time.

It is no secret how great an importance the presence of work has in a prison. Here is a motorcar driver who entered the prison two years ago and is sentenced to three. He learned carpentry in prison, and now, after a year, he has become a skilled carpenter who forgets the crime he committed through devotion to his work; he has come to love the saw and the plane, for they are his only solace. Here is a wardrobe of his making, on the point of being finished; and there a chair whose making he has completed and which will soon be sold. In this way the prisoner fills his time, keeps away from idleness and chatter with his fellows, and earns a few coins, since he is given fifty percent of the price of what he produces.

In the prison there are more than a thousand men and juveniles, and I am sorry to say that those in the workshop number no more than twenty. The lieutenant sensed our astonishment at how few were working, and he showed his own regret in turn, saying that the place is small and cannot hold more than these. He is right—but would it not be possible to add a room to the workshop building each year?

Before we left the prison we paid a visit to the kitchen, and I found that the food is clean and sufficient, and varied as well. A weekly program of dishes has been drawn up, and a fixed quantity of food has been allotted to each prisoner, so that it is distributed equally. Beside the kitchen stands a special store from which those prisoners who have the means may buy.

I came out of the prison deeply moved by the condition of those poor souls who wait to return once more to society. This visit made me forget the gushing springs of woe that pour from our poor society! I forgot the beggar in this street, the blind man at that corner, the cripple by the tram station. These tragedies, which had pained me, seemed slight before my eyes only because a tragedy greater than they is played out far from people's eyes—one that took up a great part of my thoughts.

Will our government, then, work to lighten this tragedy by making of the prison a reform institution, and not a mere pen in which thousands of the sons of our society kill time—our society, which stands in need of so much work of reform, refinement, and correction???

It is a wish—and may its fate be better than the fate of so many wishes in this country, afflicted as it is with the disease of neglect and indifference!...