Part 29 (1/2)

Will you, if it is within your power, attempt to have her recognized as a political prisoner, and relieve the severity of the treatment she is receiving for obeying this impulse born of her love of liberty and the dictates of her conscience?

I have, Excellency, the honor to be,

Respectfully, your countrywoman,

(Signed) VERA SAMARODIN, Baltimore, Maryland.

Another Russian, Maria Moravsky, author and poet, who had herself been imprisoned in Czarist Russia and who was touring America at the time of this controversy, expressed her surprise that our suffrage prisoners should be treated as common criminals. She wrote:[1] ”I have been twice in the Russian prison; life in the solitary cell was not sweet; but I can a.s.sure you it was better than that which American women suffragists must bear.

”We were permitted to read and write; we wore our own clothes; we were not forced to mix with the criminals; we did no work. (Only a few women exiled to Siberia for extremely serious political crimes were compelled to work.) And our guardians and even judges respected us; they felt we were victims, because we struggled for liberty.”

The Commissioners, who bad to bear the responsibility of an answer to these protests and to the demand of the prisoners, contended to all alike that political prisoners did not exist.

”We shall be happy to establish a precedent,” said the women.

”But in America,” stammered the Commissioners, ”there is no need for such a thing as political prisoners.”

[1]Reprinted from The Suffragist, Feb. 8, 1919.

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”The very fact that we can be sentenced to such long terms for a political offense shows that there does exist, in fact, a group of people who have come into conflict with state power for dissenting from the prevailing political system,” our representatives answered.

We cited definitions of political offenses by eminent criminologists, penologists, sociologists, statesmen and historians. We declared that all authorities on political crime sustained our contention and that we clearly came under the category of political, if any crime. We pointed as proof to James Bryce, George Sigerson, Maurice Parmelee and even to Clemenceau, who defined the distinction between political offenses and common law crimes thus: ” . . . theoretically a crime committed in the interest of the criminal is a common law crime, while an offense committed in the public interest is a political crime.”[1]

We called to their attention the established custom of special treatment of political prisoners in Russia, France, Italy and even Turkey.[2]

We told them that as early as 18'72 the International Prison Congress meeting in London recommended a distinction in the treatment of political and common law criminals and the resolution of recommendation was ”agreed upon by the representatives of all the Powers of Europe and America-with the tacit concurrence of British and Irish officials.”[3]

Mr. John Koren, International Prison Commissioner[4] for the United States, was throughout this agitation making a study of this very problem. As chairman of a Special Commit-

[1]Speech before the French Chamber of Deputies May 16, 1876, advocating amnesty for those who partic.i.p.ated in the Commune of 1871. From the Annales de la Chambre des Deputes, 1876, v. 2, pp.

44-48.

[2]Those interested in the question of political prisoners and their treatment abroad may want to read Concerning Political Prisoners, Appendix 6.

[3]Siegerson, Political Prisoners at Home and Abroad, p. 10.

[4]Appointed and sponsored by the Department of State as delegate to the International Prison Congress.

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tee of the American Prison a.s.sociation, empowered to investi- gate the problem of political prisoners for America, he made a report at the annual meeting of the American Prison a.s.soci- ation in New York, October, 1919, ent.i.tled ”The Political Of fenders and their Status in Prison”[1] in which he says:

”The political offender . . . must be measured by a different rule, and . . . is a creature of extraordinary and temporary conditions . . . .

”There are times in which the tactics used in the pursuit of political recognition may result in a technical violation of the law for which imprisonment ensues, as witness the suffragist cases in Was.h.i.+ngton . . . . These militants were completely out of place in a workhouse, . . . they could not be made to submit to discipline fas.h.i.+oned to meet the needs of the derelicts of society, and . . . they therefore destroyed it for the entire inst.i.tution.”

There was no doubt in the official mind but that our claim was just. But the Administration would not grant this demand, as such, of political prisoners. It must continue to persuade public opinion that our offense was not of a political nature; that it was nothing more than unpleasant and unfortunate riotous conduct in the capital. The legend of ”a few slightly mad women seeking notoriety” must be sustained. Our demand was never granted, but it was kept up until the last imprisonment and was soon reinforced by additional protest tactics. Our suffrage prisoners, however, made an important contribution toward establis.h.i.+ng this reform which others will consummate. They were the first in America to organize and sustain this demand over a long period of time. In America we maintain a most backward policy in dealing with political prisoners. We have neither regulation nor precedent for special treatment of them. Nor have we official flexibility.

[1]Mr. Koren discusses the political offender from the penological, not the social, point of view.