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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 56728 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A MODERN PURGATORY
+
+
+_By CARLO DE FORNARO_
+
+
+_CARRANZA AND MEXICO_
+_A MODERN PURGATORY_
+
+
+
+
+A MODERN PURGATORY
+
+BY
+CARLO DE FORNARO
+
+
+[Illustration: Logo]
+
+
+NEW YORK
+MITCHELL KENNERLEY
+1917
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
+CARLO DE FORNARO
+
+
+PRINTED IN AMERICA
+
+
+TO
+M. L. R.
+
+
+"_It is believed in this country that a poor man has less chance to get
+justice administered to him than a rich man._"
+
+_--Woodrow Wilson, in a speech in Chicago, January 11, 1913._
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+This book is a record of the prison experiences of Carlo de Fornaro,
+artist, writer, editor, revolutionary. It is a record of experiences in
+the famous Tombs Prison, in New York City, and in the New York City
+penitentiary on Blackwell's Island--a record of the daily happenings of
+life in a prison, of brutalities and stupidities and abominations; a
+sordid record, from the pages of which gleam many fine human things, the
+sympathies and kindnesses and sacrifices of men thrust by society into
+the dark of prison because society was afraid of them.
+
+The book begins with the author's imprisonment, and ends with his
+release or discharge from prison. It is the tale of his punishment, but
+it tells nothing of the "crime" that brought the punishment upon him.
+
+It is a strange story, that of the circumstances that brought him to
+prison and an unprecedented proceeding in the United States, a
+prosecution for libelling an official of a foreign government.
+
+Carlo de Fornaro came to America when he was a young man. He was born
+in Calcutta, British India, in 1871, of Swiss-Italian parents; and,
+determined to be an artist, he studied, first architecture in Zurich,
+then painting in Munich. But when he came to America he found a dearth
+of art, and when his talent for caricature was recognized, he turned to
+a newspaper career.
+
+He began in Chicago, with the old _Times-Herald_, but the greatest part
+of his work was done in New York, on the _Herald_, the _Telegraph_, the
+_World_ and the _Evening Sun_. In 1906 he went to Mexico to visit a
+friend--and he stayed three years.
+
+Mexico first interested him--the people, the problems, the smouldering
+fire of revolution--and then absorbed him. Porfirio Diaz was President
+of Mexico, and approaching the end of his long reign of power. Fornaro,
+always a revolutionary, became interested in politics--a dangerous
+interest, especially for a radical opposed to the Diaz régime.
+Assassination and murder and life imprisonment in dungeons immured from
+the world were commonplace methods used in that day to defeat the
+purposes of the opposition to the undermined Diaz dynasty.
+
+But Fornaro, undeterred, went into politics. He chose the way best
+known to him; he organized a company and established a daily newspaper
+in Mexico City, of which he was Director. This was late in 1906. He
+continued with this newspaper for over two years, doing his share of
+fomenting the revolution that brought the Diaz government to its fall a
+few years later. Then, in 1909, he came back to New York, to continue
+the work in another form.
+
+He wrote, and early in 1909 had published in New York, a book entitled
+"Diaz, Czar of Mexico." It was translated into Spanish, and thousands of
+copies were smuggled across the border into Mexico. It created an
+immediate sensation; it was forbidden and interdicted; copies of it were
+confiscated and destroyed; people selling it, distributing it, giving it
+away, or having it in their possession, were subject to punishment. But
+in the face of this it was widely distributed; it was passed from hand
+to hand, secretly, clandestinely; and the demand for it was so great,
+and the interest in it so intense, that in many cases where it was
+difficult to procure it, single copies were sold for as much as five
+dollars and ten dollars.
+
+When the efforts to stop its distribution among the people of Mexico
+failed, other measures were tried. Agents of the Diaz government came
+to New York; they sent messages to Fornaro; they came finally to see
+him; and they offered him $50,000 for the entire edition and to suppress
+all future editions. But they were true to the practices of the system
+that had so long exacted tribute from the people of Mexico. They knew
+the amount of money that would be paid to suppress Fornaro's book--and a
+proposition was made to Fornaro offering him $50,000, and asking him to
+sign a receipt for $150,000.
+
+They failed. Fornaro told them the book was not for sale except for
+distribution; it would not be suppressed for any price.
+
+It took these agents of the Diaz government some time to realize this
+fact. They could not believe there was a thing their money could not
+buy. But when they realized it they gave up and departed. And then other
+tactics were begun, and this time they were more effective.
+
+Fornaro was indicted for criminal libel. This was a logical proceeding,
+and not unexpected. Agents of the Diaz government, acting ostensibly for
+Rafael Reyes Espindola, a Mexican Congressman, and Editor of the
+government paper _El Imparcial_, presented complaints to the Grand
+Jury. Grand Jury proceedings are secret, and Fornaro, of course, had no
+opportunity to present his case before that tribunal. It was set forth
+that in his book, "Diaz, Czar of Mexico," Carlo de Fornaro had
+criminally libeled Rafael Reyes Espindola, and Fornaro was duly
+indicted. One of the accusations brought against Espindola in the book
+was that as Editor he used the government paper with impunity to murder
+reputations.
+
+Fornaro was arrested on April 23, 1909. He pleaded justification. He was
+admitted to bail in the sum of $1,000. On June 21, 1909, a postponement
+of the trial was granted, to permit the defendant in support of his plea
+to secure, by Rogatory Letters, or Depositions, the testimony of
+witnesses in Mexico as to the truth of the allegations against Espindola
+contained in the book and complained against.
+
+Some of the most prominent men in Mexico were among those Fornaro sought
+as witnesses to prove his cause. There were Francisco I. Madero, who led
+the revolution against Diaz, became President of Mexico and was killed
+when Victoriano Huerta assumed the Dictatorship of Mexico; F. Iglesias
+Calderon, the head of a political party, for thirty-five years a
+consistent opponent of the Diaz system, and the man who had furnished
+most of the material for Fornaro's book; Heriberto Barron, a member of
+the Mexican congress and a prominent journalist in Mexico City, and
+during the latter part of the Diaz régime an exile from Mexico; and
+others of equal prominence.
+
+But the plan to secure this evidence failed. The witnesses in Mexico
+were "not allowed" to testify in Fornaro's favor; there was no
+opportunity to secure the testimony required by Fornaro, or, even if it
+had been secured, to get it out of Mexico; and his witnesses were
+threatened with punishment and retaliation if even by speaking the truth
+they gave aid to Fornaro.
+
+What testimony was offered in his behalf from witnesses in Mexico was
+not allowed; his lawyer in Mexico City, Diodoro Battalla, a Mexican who
+had offered to take this case at the risk of his life, was not permitted
+to represent him. But a representative of the District Attorney of New
+York was sent to Mexico, and he was permitted to represent the state of
+New York in such hearings as were had in Mexico City in an endeavor to
+secure the evidence necessary to establish Fornaro's guilt.
+
+On October 27, 1909, Fornaro was put on trial. The result was
+inevitable. Fornaro was convicted. On November 9 he was sentenced to one
+year at hard labor in the city penitentiary on Blackwell's Island.
+
+After his conviction, Fornaro was held for five weeks in the Tombs
+prison, first awaiting his sentence, and after his sentence, during a
+stay pending a decision on his application for a Certificate of
+Reasonable Doubt, which was denied; and on December 4, 1909, he was
+taken to the penitentiary on Blackwell's Island to begin serving his
+term.
+
+Two weeks later, when the news of the sentence had reached Mexico,
+Rafael Reyes Espindola went to a bull fight. As soon as he was seen
+entering the stands there was a great outcry against him from the
+spectators--there were over twenty-five thousand of them; they were
+calling him "Assassin of reputations." They pelted him with missiles and
+drove him out of the bull ring in confusion and ignominy. The Mexican
+newspapers, commenting on the incident, called it "Brutal Justice."
+
+On October 3, 1910, Fornaro was discharged. He had served ten months in
+prison, which was the full term of his sentence, except for two months
+off for good behavior, which is provided by the laws of New York.
+
+Within a few weeks after Fornaro's discharge from prison, after the
+revolution against Diaz broke out in Mexico, on November 20, 1910,
+Fornaro was offered $25,000 to leave the United States if there was an
+investigation of the manner in which evidence in his behalf was
+suppressed or kept from the court.
+
+Fornaro refused it, as he refused the bribe for suppressing his book,
+and as he refused a pardon which he was told would be granted him
+unconditionally after his appeal to the Supreme Court had been lost.
+There never was any investigation into his case.
+
+But the book that caused all the trouble went on. The first edition of
+"Diaz, Czar of Mexico" had been exhausted, and a second edition was
+printed. The revolutionists in Mexico still say that this book, in
+conjunction with Francisco I. Madero's "The Presidential Succession in
+1910," were the greatest influences in bringing about the fall of
+Porfirio Diaz.
+
+
+
+
+A MODERN PURGATORY
+
+
+
+
+THE TRIAL
+
+
+It is the second day of my trial. The whole performance is tiresome and
+monotonous in the extreme. On one side--the side of the prosecution, the
+side against me--the case is legally perfect, on my side there is
+practically no defense; and surrounded as I am by powerful and subtle
+political influences, I have come to the conclusion that I have as much
+chance of success--or escape--as the proverbial snowball in Hades.
+
+Considering my hopeless predicament and my helplessness, I am astonished
+at the sneering and insulting manner of the prosecuting attorney. Why
+this unseemly desire to swat as insignificant a gnat as I?[1] During
+lunch at recess I hear that my victim and accuser is very much
+embarrassed and annoyed at the pertinent questions asked by the
+prosecutor and translated by an interpreter.
+
+"Are you a picaroon?" queried the District Attorney.
+
+"No," protested the blushing Mexican, "I am only a congressman."
+
+Insults are sometimes the making of a man's reputation, but ridicule
+always kills, as my Mexican opponent confessed to me once in Mexico
+City, adding that he never paid the slightest attention to insults or
+libelous attacks of the Mexican press. In this case they made him change
+his mind and he was sent twice three thousand miles from Mexico to
+prosecute as libel that which he could not even read.
+
+Finally the case is concluded and I am led through a maze into the
+Tombs prison to await the deliberation of the jury.
+
+The keepers inquire as to the real meaning and equivalent in slang of
+the word "picaroon," and they seem disappointed at its commonplace
+meaning as compared to the phonetic redundance of a word which promised
+so much. All seem quite certain the jury won't convict, but I am of a
+different opinion.
+
+After waiting more than two hours I am brought back to court to hear the
+decision of the jury. I notice the foreman, a gray-haired, lean person
+with a long neck two sizes smaller than his collar. He is speaking in a
+low voice. I cannot hear what he says, but when he stops, and I see two
+Mexican friends and refugees come towards me with tears in their eyes,
+then I know my fate. They pat me on the back and say encouraging things
+as to the effect the publicity of this conviction will have on the cause
+of liberal Mexico. Newspapermen and friends surround me. An adverse
+verdict was expected; nevertheless I am somewhat dazed. They ask for a
+declaration, but adequate words fail me. I can only smile and say
+awkwardly: "It's all in the day's work. I believe what is to be, will
+be." And the keepers lead me through the bridge of sighs.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] In justice to the Prosecuting Attorney it must be added that over
+two years after the trial he apologized to the writer in the presence of
+Judge John J. Freschi, at the Press Club.
+
+
+
+
+THE TOMBS PRISON
+
+
+The next thing I remember is being "frisked," as they say in prison
+parlance, when the keeper looks through the prisoner's pockets for
+contraband.
+
+They lead me to my cell and the iron doors clang behind me. A deep sigh
+of relief escapes me. The terrific mental strain of the last ten months,
+the long and sleepless nights of vigil, the knowledge of impending
+danger, have been blown away like an unhealthy mist, and I feel calm,
+secure, safely barred beyond the reach of the Mexican Czar's sicarii and
+thugs.
+
+The necessary things for comfort are sent by kind friends, and I inspect
+my future abode.
+
+The cell is spacious, enclosed on three sides by solid steel; air, light
+and ventilation come through the bars; two iron beds are attached to
+chains on one side and let down at night; there is running water for
+washing, drinking and sanitary purposes. An electric bulb and a small
+wooden bench complete the furniture.
+
+
+The first thing in the morning I make the acquaintance of a prisoner who
+eagerly offers to become my guide and monitor.
+
+We walk around the spacious corridor which surrounds the prison proper
+like an ellipse, and by a connecting gallery cuts it in half like number
+8. Three tiers of steel cages go up to the ceiling and can be observed
+by standing close to the wall opposite our cells.
+
+The men in the tiers above us walk around, some one way, others the
+opposite, like restless animals in captivity. Some young prisoners hang
+on to the bars and make faces at us downstairs, reminding us of monkeys
+in a gigantic cage.
+
+Side by side with tough "mugs" and countenances worthy of the gallows,
+we notice the apparently refined and well-mannered aristocrats of crime,
+dissipated looking boys, confidence men in pious demeanour, election
+repeaters, dandified "cadets" and "sissies." There are also sturdy
+looking laborers, a few black handers, a tramp or two, several negroes,
+two Chinamen.
+
+A chauffeur with leggings, cap and automobile suit, tramps around with a
+dapper young pickpocket. They shout, laugh, talk, sing, whistle; and
+above all is heard the shuffling of several hundred feet walking,
+walking unceasingly.
+
+A look upward to the superposed steel cages suggests their similarity to
+the circles in Dante's Inferno; the picture is completed by comparing my
+mentor to Virgil, but the sarcasm is lost on him, as he is only a very
+prosaic forger.
+
+He informs me that the circle above contains the murderers, awaiting
+trial; higher up those on charges of grand larceny; and then follow the
+petty larceny men, and so on.
+
+We who are on the ground floor have more walking space than those above
+us. The side walls have four rows of barred windows which give poor
+ventilation and poorer light. The air has a pungent, mouldy smell. The
+rumbling noise of the city traffic on the Centre Street side is heard
+plainly through the din in the prison.
+
+My companion is a voluble and incessant gossip; his knowledge of jails,
+penitentiaries, and court procedure is amazing; he is a perfect walking
+prison encyclopedia. Nearly forty years old, he has passed twenty years
+behind the bars, either in Sing Sing, the Island Penitentiary or the
+Tombs. Very pale, clean shaven, rather plump, he speaks in a harsh
+whisper which gives a disagreeable impression of his uncanny knowledge;
+when he inquires or talks about the outside world he is like a child
+seeking knowledge about a strange, far-away land.
+
+My next door neighbor is a southerner. He shot a man who cheated him
+out of all his money, and he spent several months in Sing Sing; now he
+has been brought back to the Tombs for retrial. Dark, with passionate
+eyes, black hair and sallow complexion, thin, calm, deliberate in manner
+and speech, he tells me of his case, and what led to his murderous
+assault, which he claims was done in self-defense. When I asked if he
+was resigned to return to Sing Sing, he answered with gleaming eyes:
+"I'll kill myself before I'll go back to that hell hole."
+
+
+I
+
+As we are forbidden to keep knives or razors in our possession, those
+who require a daily shave climb to the circle above to the barber shop.
+
+On the waiting line there is a familiar face, a young man who had been a
+waiter in a Broadway café. He has not lost his red cheeks and boyish
+manner while awaiting trial on the charge of seduction.
+
+Those who can afford it and cannot eat the common prison fare have their
+meals ordered from outside restaurants. A young man with a capacious
+basket offers us our breakfast in the shape of bread, pies, coffee; and
+he also sells cigars, cigarettes, writing paper, stamps and various
+knickknacks.
+
+About nine A. M. we are locked in and are allowed to buy newspapers from
+a boy. I scan the daily papers and notice that they are beginning to pay
+attention to this libel case. There are several editorials, one signed
+by William Randolph Hearst, whose championship in my case was a brave
+act, as it endangered his interests in Mexico. The mail is voluminous;
+scores of clippings come in from out of town papers. An unknown doctor
+in California sends a check, a laboring man in St. Louis sends a dollar
+bill, to help in the fight.
+
+My first visitor appeared to me like a vision from a strange planet. I
+felt clumsy and impatient behind the cold and angular bars.
+
+I am informed that two witnesses saw the president's brother and a
+prominent Mexican lawyer waiting for my verdict on the ground floor of
+the Criminal Court building. Those two lawyers were the king pins
+working the wires behind the scenes, and when the glad tidings were
+brought they hastened to telegraph it to Mexico.
+
+After the visit we are let out of our cells for exercise, which takes
+place three times a day, morning, noon and evening.
+
+All visitors are permitted to see the prisoners, but not twice in the
+same day. Keepers and matrons search the visitors, and I hear repeated
+complaints of the arrogant and rough behaviour of these men who seem to
+have no power of discrimination; they treat everybody on equal terms of
+brutality and incivility--those found guilty by the courts, those
+awaiting trial and the innocent visitors.
+
+Newspapermen are almost daily visitors.
+
+My friend and lawyer, K----, visits me every day in the barred chamber
+set apart for that purpose. As I descend to see him some one points out
+to me a special room wherein I recognize the banker Morse conferring
+with his lawyers. My friends on the _New York World_ send an ambassador,
+in the person of a reporter, offering their good will and assistance. I
+am touched by their kindness and loyalty.
+
+
+The days pass swiftly as if on wings while waiting for the sentence. My
+trial-lawyer, J----, visits me one evening and informs me that somebody
+has told the judge that I had boasted that I would get off with a fine.
+A strenuous denial is made, but the futility of the protest is apparent.
+The purpose of these underhand tactics is to prevent the imposition of
+a fine which could be paid by friends.
+
+Criminal libel is a misdemeanor, and the limit or maximum sentence is
+one year in the penitentiary or a fine of $500, or both.
+
+The prosecuting lawyers hope, by the imposition of a prison sentence, to
+frighten me into accepting either a pardon or a commutation of the
+sentence, thus forcing me to accept their favors and preventing further
+investigation into certain proceedings.
+
+A suggestion is made to enter a protest with my ambassador. Such a
+procedure would empower the judge to offer me the choice between going
+back to Europe or serving one year in the penitentiary. The Mexican
+government would prefer to get rid of my agitation in this country and
+does not relish the idea of assisting the publicity of a willing martyr.
+
+My suspicion of these tactics is aroused when I learn of the case of a
+young cockney valet who stole from his employer, and who was offered
+the alternative, when the judge sentenced him, of going back to England
+or serving five years in Sing Sing. The young valet took great pains to
+inform me of his case and the advantage to be derived from accepting the
+lesser of two evils. I mused over the incident, and wondered if the
+valet's case was not a gentle hint emanating from the Machiavellian
+brains interested in my case. The trial lawyer, J----, suggested the
+advisability of appealing to the governor for clemency in case of loss
+of the appeal. A protest to the ambassador was also proposed. I declined
+both suggestions.
+
+
+II
+
+I have become acquainted with a prisoner a few doors from my cell, next
+to the shower baths. Small of stature, almost a boy, deathly pale, dark,
+with strong features, this young English pickpocket is a new type in my
+limited experience with criminals.
+
+Every afternoon we sit together at a five o'clock tea in his model
+cell. The walls are covered with half-tone pictures of famous stage
+beauties. He offers me the place of honor, which is an old, rickety, but
+comfortable armchair which belonged to Harry Thaw.
+
+The bed, the bench, everything, is decorated with paper, cut out with
+infinite pains. The tea is excellent and there are also condensed milk,
+Huntley & Palmer's biscuits, butter and orange marmalade. Mine host
+seldom talks to prisoners; he says the place is filled with stool
+pigeons. When asked if he does not suspect me, he smiles and remarks
+that in his profession a deep and varied familiarity with human nature
+is necessary, as well as a cool head, an impassive mask, and great
+dexterity with hands and fingers.
+
+Very good-naturedly he answers my questions as to his early life and the
+influences of which brought him to steal; he tells me also of his
+philosophy of life. His father and mother were both thieves, and he was
+taught to steal as soon as he could walk. The whole of Europe was the
+field of his operations.
+
+Soon after he came to New York he was arrested, and although the
+detectives could not find any stolen goods on him, nevertheless he was
+sentenced to seven years in Sing Sing on his past criminal record, which
+was sent over by Scotland Yard.
+
+Considering this man's record and nationality, the question comes to
+mind as to why he was not sent back to England, instead of burdening the
+taxpayers of the state of New York with his maintenance for seven years.
+
+
+III
+
+In the evening I was interrupted in my conversation with a confidence
+man by the entrance of Lupo and some of his black hand confederates.
+Standing against the wall while being searched he refused to answer any
+questions either in English or in Italian.
+
+A dark mustache aggravated his villainous look, while his black,
+restless eyes surveyed his surroundings. One of his cronies muttered
+something, but he only growled, lifting the corners of his mouth and
+baring his teeth in angry contempt. Verily he gave the impression of a
+wolf caught in a trap, but still defiant and ferocious.
+
+We stop at the cell of a poor German who is locked up on the charge of
+attempted suicide. He weeps disconsolately, like a child, the tears
+running down his haggard and gentle face. His clothes and linen are poor
+and as dirty as his face; his hair is unkempt. He wrings his hands in
+despair and moans: "Why did they not let me die in peace?" He was out of
+a job, friendless and penniless in a foreign country, and when he tried
+to end his misery they put him in jail. It seems a hopeless task to try
+and cheer him up.
+
+A harmless looking old man with white hair and beard attracts every
+one's attention by the ferocity of his deed. He has killed his own
+daughter, a school teacher, as she was coming out of school surrounded
+by her young pupils. Nobody seems to know the reason for his act. The
+judge has just sentenced him to the electric chair, and he appears the
+least concerned of all as they search his cell for hidden weapons and
+put an extra guard to watch him for the night. An Italian priest hears
+his confession in his cell. When asked the reason for his inconceivable
+act he answers slowly that he prefers his daughter's death to her life
+as a prostitute. "My life is in the hands of God," he whispers, as he
+folds his hands in prayer. In the morning he will be taken to Sing Sing.
+
+
+IV
+
+The trusties who clean up the floor and the cells and make up our beds
+are mostly short term prisoners from the penitentiary. In spite of his
+stripes, one of them looks like a Greek athlete; his dark, curly hair,
+powerful chin, strong nose, the muscles showing through the striped
+shirt at the neck and arms, excite the respect and admiration of his
+fellow prisoners.
+
+My trusty is a weak-faced individual, who is always fawning for a tip
+with which to gamble with his companions upstairs. His wife had him
+arrested for non-support. Although quite competent to make a living and
+to support his wife and three children, he confesses himself unable to
+resist the lure of the games of chance. Imprisonment has not reformed
+him in the least; on the contrary, indeed, for now he can gamble to his
+heart's content!
+
+The detective who arrested me on a warrant asks to speak to me, and
+gives as a pretext his friendship for me. He feels neither rebuked nor
+offended when he is told that I am careful to choose my friends among my
+equals. Quite modestly he admits being only a petty larceny detective,
+but he is now anxious to discover who and what is behind the political
+game played in my case. He leaves in disgust when advised to adopt
+Sherlock Holmes's method of deduction.
+
+
+V
+
+Next morning, handcuffed to a young prisoner and accompanied by a score
+of men, I am taken to a pen. The place cannot be described in decent
+writing, but I can safely assert that a more filthy, disgusting place
+does not exist in New York. The stench is so sickening that I suffer the
+rest of the day from a splitting headache.
+
+After an hour's wait I am brought into the presence of a kindly faced
+probationary officer who asks me for addresses of friends who might
+write to the judge, and inquires for certain facts concerning my case
+which did not come out during my trial. She also begs me to write a
+letter giving these facts, so that she can show it to the judge before
+sentence is passed on me. The result is negative, as the judge has
+already made up his mind about my case.
+
+The young man who was handcuffed to my wrist goes into court to get his
+sentence. He returns, pale, trembling, almost fainting, and can only
+whisper hoarsely that he is going to state's prison in the morning for
+four years.
+
+Another companion in misery is an Italian waiting for trial. He is
+indignant, even furious, at his treatment by the District Attorney. His
+case is a record breaker; he has been brought up for the two hundredth
+time without being tried. This is done to wear him out and force him to
+plead guilty.
+
+A lean, dark-haired, young man with unpleasant features, suspected of
+having murdered a pal, tells a story of a third degree at headquarters.
+
+After two days and nights, passed in a cell without food and water, he
+says he was brought in to the presence of several masked detectives.
+Stripped to his bare skin, he was forced to stand on a metal rack with
+burning hot points until he attempted to jump off, when the whole gang
+of sleuths assaulted him, beat and kicked him, and forced him back.
+
+Without rest or halt, questions were yelled at him in quick succession;
+when the answers did not come fast enough, they battered him
+unmercifully with their fists; when the answers were unsatisfactory, the
+vilest and foulest of insults were shouted at him, tauntingly,
+sneeringly, to arouse his anger and loosen his tongue.
+
+No opportunity was given him to concentrate his mind. He was racked by
+a gnawing hunger, a parched throat, a delirious thirst; by painful
+stinging wounds of cut lips, bleeding teeth, two half closed black eyes
+and a constant hopping on the radiator to keep the soles of his feet
+from burning.
+
+Then they tempted him by bringing a table covered with luscious,
+steaming food, sparkling drinks and expensive cigars. Like Tantalus, he
+was intercepted and derided when he attempted to partake of the food or
+the drink. Meanwhile the detectives ate and drank with relish almost
+under his nose; they drank to his health, and blew into his face the
+fragrant smoke of their cigars.
+
+They continued this torture for several hours, until his body and mind
+could bear the strain no longer; and then he fell to the floor in a dead
+faint.
+
+
+VI
+
+At last I am told to appear before the judge who is to pass sentence on
+me. They handcuff me to a negro and we climb into the "Black Maria," an
+omnibus with facing seats, tightly locked, and with small holes for
+ventilation. A mob collects in the streets to witness our humiliation.
+The room in the court house is crowded with people. Several men are
+sentenced, one after another, in rotation. I espy some of my loyal
+friends there; they look pale and uncomfortable.
+
+My name is called. I am freed of my handcuffs and I stand at the bar,
+facing the judge.
+
+Instead of listening to the learned judge deliver his wise sentence, I
+am watching intently a lonesome fly buzzing in a vibrating aureole
+frantically round the top of his head. I am wondering what the judge had
+for luncheon. My absurd cogitations are suddenly interrupted by a phrase
+spoken in a louder tone than the rest of the sentence.
+
+" ... Fornaro, that you be imprisoned for one year at hard labor in the
+penitentiary...." The fly stopped buzzing as the judge lifted his head
+to look at me.
+
+
+My lawyer, K----, runs out. He is to try to get a certificate of
+reasonable doubt, which acts as a stay of sentence; otherwise I would be
+taken early in the morning to the penitentiary.
+
+While these proceedings are going on, I am temporarily transferred to
+the old prison, which is full of crawling parasites. Luckily, however,
+in a few hours I am returned to my cell in the Tombs to wait until the
+certificate is either granted or denied. But the certificate is refused,
+of course, as I knew it would be, and as I think my lawyer knew it would
+be. It was a forlorn hope.
+
+In the evening a letter is brought to me and I am asked to sign for it.
+It is written in Spanish and is an attack on Vice-President Corral of
+Mexico, who is accused of having furnished me with money to publish
+"Diaz, Czar of Mexico," and then of leaving me in the lurch. This piece
+of Spanish fiction is inspired by a bitter enemy of Corral in the hope
+of eliminating Corral as a Vice-Presidential candidate. But I refuse to
+sign the letter.
+
+Another fairy tale comes directly from the District Attorney's office; I
+am told that they know that President Cabrera of Guatemala, a bitter
+enemy of Porfirio Diaz, has furnished me with $5,000 to publish my
+libelous pamphlet.
+
+A friend arrives from Mexico and brings an oral message from Ramon
+Corral, who inquires if I have empowered an agent to negotiate the sale
+of my book for $50,000, as he doubts the statement. A letter is written
+advising the Vice-President that he is right in his surmise, and that
+the alleged agent is only trying to get money under false pretences.
+
+A labor leader visits me offering financial help in my fight. As money
+will not be needed in the penitentiary, I suggest that an investigation
+might be started in Congress into the persecutions of Mexican liberals
+by American officials in this country. The promise is made and fulfilled
+seven months later.
+
+
+VII
+
+Two sisters of mercy come to see the prisoners during the hours of
+exercise; they distribute fruit, and walk freely and unconcerned among
+the men, who seem to think a great deal of them. One of them has kindly
+and intelligent looking eyes behind large, gold-rimmed spectacles, and
+speaks in the well modulated and authoritative voice of the woman of the
+world. Unlike other prison missionaries, they do not make religious
+propaganda by distributing tracts and pamphlets; their attitude is one
+of charity, humility and usefulness.
+
+Protestant clergymen, rabbis, and even a theosophist, come to save us
+in spite of ourselves. Their attitude is one of aggressive virtue and
+militant religious contention--or contagion. A certain missionary is
+very indignant because I refuse to look at his tracts or listen to his
+childish twaddle; and finally becomes so arrogant and insulting that I
+have to order him away from my cell door.
+
+
+
+
+THE PENITENTIARY
+
+_"As long as a nation harbors a body of men authorized to inflict
+punishment, as long as there are prisons in which such a body can carry
+out these punishments, that nation cannot call itself civilized."_
+
+_Message written on his prison wall, by Francisco Ferrer._
+
+
+It was a clear December morning when, from the little boat which carried
+me across the river, I spied the outline of the penitentiary squatting
+on the lower end of Blackwell's Island. It was my first view of it and
+the impression made on my mind was so ominous and sinister that my heart
+almost sank within me as I entered the fateful gates.
+
+"Hey, there! Where do you t'ink you are? Take dem gloves off!" shouted a
+tough, strong voice as I stood waiting in front of the office window,
+recounting my pedigree and giving up my private belongings for safe
+keeping. In the old prison, I found six new prisoners waiting in line.
+
+Our hair was clipped by a convict barber, and we were ordered to divest
+ourselves of our civilian clothes and take a shower bath. While we were
+trying to dry ourselves with two small hand towels, prison underwear and
+striped suits were thrown at our feet.
+
+The trousers were decidedly too long, the coat, and the rag--unjustly
+named a vest--both too short; a cap which came down to my eyebrows made
+up this uniform of degradation and infamy. Harlequin's costume never
+looked more ridiculous than our own, which was mended, patched and
+repatched from long use by generations of long-suffering convicts.
+
+The prison authorities, I suppose, are to be commended for their thrift;
+but I cannot help feeling that by putting on those frayed and wornout
+caricatures of uniforms we are endangering our health.
+
+In the photographer's house behind the shower baths we are "mugged"; our
+Bertillon measurements are taken, even to "beauty spots" and pimples, by
+a red-haired, freckled-faced young man. A sign twelve inches long,
+black, with white numerals, is hung round my neck over a black cotton
+coat, and I am told to look pleasant until the camera has focussed my
+profile and full face.
+
+Sitting on benches, waiting for their turn, are a dozen prisoners. They
+are all old, white-haired, naked and shivering; old offenders,
+recidivists, tramps, bums, drunken louts; lean, pale, bruised, with
+anemic, unhealthy skins, red noses, fishy eyes, bloated faces, large
+hands, knotty, ungainly feet, purple with the cold.
+
+A very old man attracts my attention by his immobility, his general
+paleness, and his extraordinary gauntness, which shows the perfect
+outline of his muscles, and reminds me of the statue representing San
+Bartolommeo in the cathedral of Milan, holding his whole skin over his
+arm like a bath robe.
+
+Squint-eyed and almost blind, this old man, of more than the allotted
+span of seventy years, seems unable to recollect his name, occupation or
+social status.
+
+"A bum, I guess," remarks the keeper.
+
+It appears that he is deaf, and his neighbour nudges him with an elbow
+and shouts in his ear:
+
+"Say yes!"
+
+"Yes, sir!" hastily answers the old man.
+
+These derelicts of society are going to the workhouse on Monday.
+
+
+Later we are ordered to clean and wash the small glass panes in the
+windows of the main prison. Trusties in smart, new, striped clothes,
+with creased pants and caps, rushed by eyeing us with curiosity.
+"Whatcheh in fer?" "What did the judge hand yeh?" are the leading
+whispered queries.
+
+A pungent, musty, sickening smell pervades the old prison, which is
+barely lighted by a dismal and gray reflection filtering through the
+small windows. An inscription on the wall shows the date of construction
+to be 1864. The cell where Boss Tweed died is pointed out to me.
+
+Suddenly the electric lights are switched on and a bell starts ringing
+in a loud, metallic, persistent note, not unlike the subway starting
+bells. A heavy, automatic, dull noise in the distance announces the
+approaching footsteps of the convicts returning from work. In measured
+step, each gang followed by its keeper, more than a thousand men march
+past the head keeper's desk.
+
+All the varieties of ages, figures, physiognomies, expressions, are
+illustrated to my astonished eyes. Young men with red cheeks and simple
+faces; strong men with bullet heads, broad shouldered, surly or
+impassive; fat men with wabbling bellies and cheerful faces; old men
+bent and hoary with age; slow and listless young men with effeminate
+gestures; a few cripples on sticks or crutches, and wobbling along
+behind the lines, a paralytic led by a companion. They all file by,
+stamping their feet in German military fashion.
+
+At moments the order is given to slow up or stop, and the convicts
+continue to move the legs in rhythmic step, their bodies almost
+touching, and giving the appearance of an enormous centipede dancing a
+gruesome, macabre saraband.
+
+Finely shaped heads are rare; it looks as if an almighty sculptor had
+left his handiwork unfinished, or purposely kept it in rude outline.
+Foreheads are either too bulging or too retreating, eyes too sunken or
+too protruding, noses too large or too small, mouths too sensual or too
+cruel, chins too powerful or too weak.
+
+Smiling or frowning, aggressive or indifferent, surly or pleasant, all
+the different expressions and gestures are sketched out in violent
+chiaroscuro, and compose a cartoon worthy of a Frans Hals or a
+Michelangelo.
+
+My eyes absorb the kaleidoscopic, ignoble, unbelievable pageant. As an
+artist I am fascinated, hypnotized by this fantastic procession of human
+zebras, slashed with broad stripes of gray and black, with the four
+prison tiers as a background, and the dark blue uniforms and gold
+buttons of the keepers adding a touch of color.
+
+As a human being I am shocked and repelled by this grotesque, degrading
+parade.
+
+Is this really the Inferno or only the last Judgment, I ask myself?
+
+"Get in line, you loafer!" shouts a red-faced keeper, shaking his stick
+at me. Thus I am awakened from my dreams.
+
+
+I
+
+I am locked in the old prison for the night--my first night in the
+penitentiary.
+
+A bed made of an iron frame with coarse canvas stretched across it, two
+cheap cotton blankets, a straw pillow, a large covered pail and a
+drinking cup, complete the total of my furniture. It is the simple life
+with a vengeance. The bed takes up the whole length of the cell; there
+is no room for walking except sideways from the bucket to the cell door.
+Sitting in a lateral position on the couch, with my back touching the
+wall, I can place my legs on the opposite wall only in a bended posture.
+
+A tier man comes to the cell shouting "Water." While pouring it into my
+cup from a large can I peer at his face through the bars. His pale
+features, beaked nose, cruel mouth and yellow eyes make him seem like
+some tropical carrion-eating bird. I am so fascinated by his depraved
+and satanic look that I allow water from the cup to drop onto the
+floor.
+
+He utters curses, "not loud, but deep," and returns to mop the floor.
+
+I try to interest myself in an old magazine, but my mind seems unable to
+concentrate in a continued effort; I read, but my imagination wanders
+away in an interminable circle without beginning or end.
+
+The cold is intense; the blankets, thin and gray, afford no protection.
+My whole body is shivering and shaking uncontrollably as if in high
+fever, my teeth rattle like castanets accompanying a Spanish fandango. I
+light a cigar and watch the smoke curl slowly, lazily across the cell
+until it appears like a veil between the ceiling and the floor and
+finally settles over my couch like a pale, transparent shroud.
+
+Evidently there is no ventilation, but I continue to puff away, hoping
+to fumigate and kill the fetid odor in the cell.
+
+Everything is still except for the occasional moaning of a sick man.
+Finally the electric light at the foot of the bed is extinguished, and I
+am left in the dark.
+
+I turn into bed with all my clothes, including cap and shoes, trusting
+in this manner to warm myself and in the hope of forgetting my troubles
+in blissful sleep.
+
+But there seems to be no rest for me.
+
+As soon as a little heat radiates from my body, scores of bedbugs are
+attracted and start a vicious, incessant campaign. When I am deceived
+into sleep by a lessening of their attacks, I am awakened by the cold
+air under the canvas, which freezes my back and forces me to shift my
+position.
+
+Horrible nightmares shake me with a start as soon as I am lulled into
+slumber. My throat is parched as if sand had been my last meal, and I
+pick up the tin cup to get a drink; to my intense despair the rusty,
+filthy cup has a leak, and all the water has trickled to the floor.
+
+I dream that the cell, with its massive walls reeking with stench and
+humidity, is growing smaller, closing upon me like an accordeon, until
+the cell door is as small as a keyhole from which I get the last gasp of
+air; then instead of air, an endless cool, refreshing flow of water runs
+down my throat. But, unluckily, my intense thirst awakens me and I start
+toward the cell door calling for water in a faint, hoarse whisper.
+
+A keeper silences me with a gruff, impatient voice: "Where in hell do
+you think I can get it?"
+
+And I can hear the water dripping lustily from a faucet into a full
+barrel on the ground floor!
+
+I try philosophically to force my thoughts into past and pleasant
+memories, but the present distress is so tyrannical and overpowering
+that all the physical, moral and intellectual suffering of the world
+seems to be centered within the few square feet of this dungeon. My via
+crucis has begun. I reflect with terror that my mind may not withstand
+the strain of uninterrupted agony, and suicide appears as an easy
+solution.
+
+The absurdity of the impulse is evident, for my death in this filthy
+cell, like a rat in a hole, would delight those responsible for my
+presence here; and furthermore it would shock and sadden those dearest
+to me.
+
+What is all my fortitude and philosophy worth if it cannot steady and
+concentrate my will at the most crucial, heart racking and desperate
+moment of my life?
+
+Why should my trained mind crumble like a match box and be destroyed
+under physical torture, mental distress and moral humiliation?
+
+Is not suffering the greatest of all tests, necessary, purifying and
+regenerating? Why not wait patiently and courageously for the day of
+reckoning, worthy of the gods on Olympus?
+
+I count my heart-beats to get an idea of the passing of time. The
+minutes seem to have frozen on the fountain of time; they drip
+laboriously as if each and every one of them represented eons of
+memories and experiences; as if each was attempting to demonstrate that
+in the accounting of eternity they were as significant as centuries. In
+a supreme physical effort of my will I grip the bars and grit my teeth
+to stop the impending and foolish disintegration of my mind. The waves
+of despair, the racking pain, the insane delirium are slowly beaten back
+into submission, like a defeated army. The imagination is disciplined,
+the will has thrown the switch and illuminated the real inward self, as
+I stand watching, through the steel bars, the windows on the opposite
+wall. I feel calm, serene and strong.
+
+Of a sudden, as if to illustrate my state of mind, out of the gray, blue
+mist, a large, luminous, rose disk slowly arises beyond the opening.
+
+The sun, the glorious sun! Silently it looms up, magnificent through the
+haze, like a mirage announcing the advent of better things and more
+hopeful days.
+
+The same sun I had seen arise in India, Egypt, Italy, Mexico, in many
+frames of classical and tropical beauty; but never has it seemed to me
+so divine, so perfect, so precious as on that awful morning.
+
+
+II
+
+At 6 A. M. a quick, metallic carol announces a new day--and a Sunday.
+With a clanking noise and in swift succession the cell doors are
+unlocked and on every tier the whole line of convicts walks along the
+galleries and down to the ground floor, to a long iron sink, divided
+into small dirty tubs that are filled with murky water.
+
+Our ablutions are performed in rapid military style; those not strong or
+nimble enough to get near the crowded trough, before the command, "Back
+out," is shouted, have to return to their cells half-washed or dirty.
+Sometimes a laggard insists on finishing his washing; and then an angry
+voice assails him rudely: "Come on, you God damn bum, didn't yeh hear
+me? Back out!" And a guard "fans" him over the back with a club, pushing
+and shoving him all the way to the galleries, as a reminder to quicker
+obedience.
+
+Back at the cells, every man stands at attention behind the door with
+hands on the bars, waiting for the keeper to count the men until he
+orders, "Close," and with a deafening noise every iron door bangs in
+unison. Then after a short rest the bell rings for breakfast, and we
+march into the mess hall.
+
+What a depressing, fantastic assemblage there unfolded itself before my
+eyes! Row after row of cropped gray heads, the black and gray stripes,
+moving unceasingly in a rippling pattern, giving the semblance of an
+enormous, ghostly, shivering tiger skin. The faint light from the barred
+windows forces the tonality to a low pitch and adds to the vagueness,
+uneasiness and consternation of my mind.
+
+The benches and narrow tables seat fifteen to twenty in a row; and the
+two mess halls over a thousand convicts.
+
+Breakfast is served in dented low pans, filled with potato and corn beef
+hash, alternating every other day with oatmeal and syrup. The rusty tin
+cups are half filled with an unsweetened, brownish, transparent
+concoction called coffee, which the convicts long ago nicknamed
+"bootleg."
+
+But the bread, made of wheat and cornmeal, is very good. The raising of
+the hand is the signal for an additional slice of bread, which is
+distributed by a convict, and when it reaches you it has usually been
+handled by ten or fifteen different, not to say unclean, hands.
+
+The men eat voraciously and in great haste, coughing, chewing, smacking
+their lips; grunting and snorting like pigs with their snouts in the
+trough. My poor appetite is not improved by their disconcerting
+exhibition, and my portion is quickly swallowed by my neighbours.
+
+On both sides of the hall we are watched by keepers standing against the
+wall, or perched on high stools, swinging their sticks.
+
+On my right there is a goodnatured-looking keeper with a bullet head and
+sleepy eyes; on the other hand a small, wiry, thin-faced, long-nosed,
+white-mustached keeper, with wicked eagle eyes, who uses not only the
+foulest of language, but also his stick, on the slightest provocation.
+
+After the "feed" comes the bucket parade. Each man carries his own
+bucket into the yard behind the prison building, facing the Brooklyn
+side. The Queensboro bridge on the north, with two feet on the island
+uniting Brooklyn and New York, appears gigantic on the horizon.
+
+The air is cold, crisp, exhilarating, after the oppressive night. The
+whole prison is marching line after line to a well-shaped opening,
+wherein the dirty water and excreta are dumped in succession by the men,
+while an old convict belabors its interior with a long pole to prevent
+the opening being clogged. The clear morning air cannot blow away the
+overpowering stench of a thousand dirty buckets, intensified by the
+acrid smell of chloride of lime which is thrown into the hastily washed
+pails.
+
+
+III
+
+The resting day without reading or occupation or exercise of any sort is
+agonizing; intolerable in the extreme.
+
+From four o'clock on Saturday afternoon until Monday morning at eight,
+except for the short freedom for meals, we are locked up in our cells.
+There is no exercise, no work, for almost forty hours. Most of the cases
+of insanity in prison are due to this enforced inaction, and the
+accumulation of foul air in the cells. Even the keepers who have to
+inspect the top tiers run swiftly along the galleries with their noses
+closed tight.
+
+Hoping to break up this dreadful monotony, I attend the Catholic mass in
+the morning and the Protestant service in the afternoon. The one
+delightful and exquisite balm to our jaded minds is the music of the
+organs, which accompanies the singing of hymns by convicts.
+
+The chapel on the second floor is crowded with prisoners; and on one
+side there are a few women, with large poke bonnets covering their faces
+to prevent their flirting with the men.
+
+A convict informs me that I would have been punished "against the wall"
+if I had been caught going to the two services. At the slightest
+infraction of the rules, I learn, the offender is dragged towards the
+main prison and kept standing, facing the wall, sometimes all day
+without food or water--and there is no way of finding out what and how
+many rules there are.
+
+On week days the warden stops to inquire and punishes according to the
+state of his mind or his stomach, or perhaps the weather.
+
+The dinner consists of a soup of beans, carrots, lentils or potatoes;
+meat with vegetables, or cornbeef and cabbage; and "bootleg." For supper
+there is unsweetened tea, bologna sausage or red gelatine with bread.
+
+The anticipation of another night like the last one fills my mind with
+uneasiness and dread and fright. The memory of it is burned forever into
+my consciousness. But fortunately it was not so full of terror. It was
+bad; but no other night ever could be as horrible as the first night I
+spent in that place.
+
+
+IV
+
+In the morning we are ordered into the new section of the prison. The
+old bums go to the workhouse, and we await our turn to be placed in the
+shops, according to our sentences and our work or profession. The
+distribution of labor among us is strange and mysterious. A butcher, for
+instance, is sent to work in the stone quarry, a smuggler into the
+kitchen gang, a lawyer in the "skin gang," a "sissy" into the coal gang,
+a waiter into the garden; a burglar is sent to make socks, and I am sent
+into the tailor shop.
+
+In this simple distribution of labor we shall learn many things which
+will be highly useful and remunerative when we go out into the world
+again.
+
+I am finally alone in my new cell, which is spacious, clean, airy. I can
+walk seven or eight paces up and down, like an animal in a cage.
+
+The steel beds are chained to the walls; instead of the filthy canvas, a
+steel wire is stretched across the frame, but there is no mattress or
+sheets as there were in the Tombs. There is also a covered bucket in
+the lower corner, and a tin cup. The bars are strong, but nevertheless
+plenty of air and light come in from the large windows opposite our
+cells. Two small hand towels and a piece of scrubbing soap are added to
+our simple belongings.
+
+The number of my cell is 23, the last one in our row, and on the second
+tier, which contains men who work in the tailor shop. The shops stand
+together, in a separate building between the prison and the river, on
+the Brooklyn side. The shops where they make brushes, shoes, beds, and
+the tailor and repair shops, are under one roof, and under the control
+of a contractor. In the shops all kinds of work are performed:
+repairing, cutting and making clothes for outgoing prisoners; there are
+machines turning out underwear and socks; mattresses are made, stuffed
+and sewn up. At one end of the large room a keeper sits on a platform,
+while another surveys it from the other end.
+
+Although the prisoners are forbidden to talk, nevertheless they
+communicate as freely as if the rule did not exist. When I attempted to
+ask my neighbour a question, he hushed me up with a hissing noise--but
+he answered my question. His lips did not move, but I could hear him
+talk in a faint murmur which would have been inaudible ten paces away.
+
+It is very hard at first to follow this new method of carrying on
+conversation, as in everyday life one is used to watching a man's eyes
+and lips while listening to his voice. But after a while the hearing
+becomes used to it and is trained to listen and catch these slightest
+sounds, which escape the untrained ear of the keeper.
+
+The convicts never glance into the speaker's face or at his lips; they
+look straight ahead and talk in the manner of ventriloquists, but
+instead of using a loud and clear tone they whisper in a low murmur. Men
+who have passed years in jail can always be recognized by their
+monotonous, whispering manner and their almost expressionless faces.
+This form of speech is necessary in order to avoid punishment.
+
+Under the pretext of helping me, a young convict comes over to my side
+of the shop. He shows me the intricate workings of the machine which
+turns out the uncut cloth for the prisoners. Later it is cut and
+fashioned into prison underwear.
+
+On top of the machine the spools feed the thread incessantly. Care has
+to be taken not to use "sabotage" methods, as punishment is meted out
+unmercifully by the contractor, who seems to have as much power over us
+as the warden.
+
+My other companion is a young Russian sailor, healthy looking, fair and
+quite peaceful when let alone. He warns me that my anxious instructor is
+a "stool pigeon," who proves his status by giving me very detailed
+instructions as to how to manage to escape successfully.
+
+I ask why he has not put his own methods into practice; and he gives as
+an excuse that he is going to be released in a few days.
+
+Then he furnishes me with paper, pencil, and soap; and he even offers to
+send out letters for me. When I answer that I have no letters to write
+he recites an endless list of rules, and tells me how to evade them, and
+how to keep the friendship of the keepers.
+
+He reveals to my astonished ears the underground system of communication
+with the outer world. With money and friends a convict can get all the
+contraband he desires: dope, newspapers, matches, letters--coming in and
+going out--whiskey, writing paper and pens, stamps, delicacies, tobacco.
+My mentor has passed a year in the penitentiary for the offense of
+"repeating," or of voting many times on election day. The gang leader
+who paid him for his work is looking out for him from his Brooklyn
+haunts.
+
+Facing us there is a long table at which old convicts are sitting,
+without making a pretence at working. As long as they keep quiet nobody
+notices them. Some of them look over seventy years old; sad-faced,
+pallid, curved, almost venerable in their old age. They are mostly old
+sneak thieves and pickpockets, the wrecks and failures of their
+profession. They sit like graven images, silently, patiently, hour after
+hour, year in and year out, until some fine day one of them will be
+found rigid in his cell, and then four striped convicts and a keeper
+acting as a pallbearer will carry him away in a large black coffin to
+the morgue.
+
+To-day for the first time since my incarceration I beheld the reflection
+of my face in a mirror. The sight was humiliating and shocking in the
+extreme. My keen sense of caricature lowered my well fed conceit half
+way down the ladder of vanity.
+
+Then I consoled myself by thinking of all the good-looking, impressive,
+well-groomed men friends, enemies and acquaintances of mine; and I
+tried to imagine them with clipped hair, togged out in ill-fitting,
+patched, striped garments and cap; collarless and tieless; with a week's
+growth of beard on their cheeks--and the comparison made me laugh and
+cheered me up considerably.
+
+The Deputy Warden comes in on his daily visit. His approach has been
+telegraphed in some mysterious manner and the whole shop takes on a
+lively bustling appearance. Second in rank as an officer of the
+penitentiary, the "Dep," a tall, good-looking man, strides into the room
+like a Prussian officer. He is not disliked by the convicts, as he seems
+just in his dealings with them.
+
+Going back from work through the yards, a fat German convict who had
+been working in the brush shops, broke away from the line and, before he
+could be stopped, jumped into the river in an attempt to drown himself.
+A few shots were fired. A negro and two white convicts jumped in after
+him, and with the help of a keeper who patrols the island in a row boat,
+they fished him out. They laid him flat on the ground and worked to
+revive him.
+
+His fat belly stuck out like a barrel, his face was livid, his lips
+purple. Finally he opened his eyes, and sputtered and murmured: "Let me
+die! Let me die!" "Shut up, you s----!" yelled an angry keeper, and he
+was dragged feet first to the hospital.
+
+
+V
+
+My skin has been itching for two days, and I attribute it to the coarse
+underwear and ill-fitting clothes. In my cell after the day's work I
+make a careful inspection and am quite frightened to find my whole body
+covered with red spots. Evidently I have caught some skin disease from
+those tattered old rags which have been worn by generations of unclean
+and diseased convicts. The thought of having to pass a year in a prison
+hospital is anything but cheerful.
+
+I turn my thoughts to other things by trying to read a novel from the
+prison library. A slip had been left in the cell to be filled out with
+the name of any book that I might desire to read. In my innocence I put
+down "Shakespeare's plays or the Bible." A novel entitled "Truthful
+Jane" was left in their stead.
+
+But I cannot read. And so I start instead to inspect my surroundings.
+The new cells compare very favorably with the cells of the old prison,
+which are really holes in the wall and reeking with the mysterious
+unwholesome smell of rat holes and graveyards.
+
+At one end of the cell opposite the door are two small openings for
+ventilation; one at the top on the right hand side and the other at the
+bottom on the left. In trying to find out the depth and direction of the
+holes I plunge my arm into the opening, and my hand feels a square
+object. It is a small bible! I am delighted by the discovery. On the fly
+leaf there is some handwriting in pencil in a careful, intelligent hand:
+"To my successor: May this book while away your long and weary hours and
+make you forget your troubles and worries as it did to me. Don't forget
+to replace the book where you found it when you leave."
+
+A tier man comes to the cells with a light for those who care to smoke.
+He is a pleasant-faced individual, quite polite and ready to do any
+small services within his limited powers. I find out that he has been
+condemned to a year for keeping back mail in the post office. The tier
+man who had made such a disagreeable impression on me that first night
+in the old prison, is a church thief.
+
+My battered and rusty cup has been filled up with water. I am afraid to
+drink from it, as it might have been used by some consumptive or
+syphilitic convict. Necessity being a great inventor, I press some
+paper to the rim of the cup to prevent my lips from touching it.
+
+As I walk up and down the cell I am always unconsciously trying to put
+my cold hands in my trousers pockets, only to discover over and over
+again that there are no pockets there, only one on the inside of the
+coat.
+
+The clipping of my hair so close to the skin at the height of the cold
+season has brought a cold in the head. I have no handkerchief, and shall
+have to wait a whole month until they allow me to write to have a few
+sent by mail.
+
+These apparent trifles, and all the nagging, idiotic rules, invented by
+senile commissions and wardens to torment the helpless captives of
+society, are always magnified by men brooding in the solitude of cells.
+But I have made up my mind not to permit anything to ruffle my
+equanimity, so I pick up some letters from friends and read and reread
+their cheering contents. If people who write to their unfortunate
+friends in prison only guessed how they yearned to receive those
+familiar scrawls, and how they are treasured and memorized, they would
+write oftener.
+
+A night keeper walks by like a shadow, flashing a bull's eye lamp into
+the cells to catch us in any infringements of the rules.
+
+There is only one rule tacked up on the walls, but the other 999 we have
+to guess or learn from fellow convicts. The list of rules which we have
+to find out at our own expense or from wiser convicts would fill up a
+small volume.
+
+As there are no written rules, and nobody informs us of all the
+unwritten rules on our entrance here, as is done in Sing Sing, the
+thought comes to my mind that this apparent forgetfulness is really
+meant to give the warden and the keepers an unchallenged power of
+persecution over suspected and unruly convicts.
+
+Most of the punishments inflicted by the warden are for infractions of
+rules which the newcomers are in entire ignorance of, and these
+infractions occur no matter how obedient and willing the new arrivals
+may be to keep within bounds of the prison laws. The foreigners,
+Italians, Slavs and Teutons, all those who do not know English and who
+cannot learn the rules from their fellow prisoners, are the greatest
+sufferers from this carelessness, whether it is intentional or
+otherwise.
+
+
+VI
+
+After breakfast I was watching from my cell some sparrows that had
+nested inside the prison walls, high up on top of the large windows
+facing the tiers. I dropped some bread crumbs on the floor of the
+gallery, and some on my cell floor, to induce the little birds to come
+in.
+
+At first they were afraid to trust themselves inside the bars of my
+cell; but they kept fluttering about nervously outside, keeping up an
+incessant twitter and chatter that sounded quite musical to my ears.
+
+Finally they grew bolder, and recklessly they flew into my cell, first
+peeping at me, with bended heads as if they would ask: "Are we really
+safe here from capture or treachery of any kind?" And hastily picking up
+the crumbs, they flew out to inform their companions of the god-send of
+fat bread crumbs in a large, barred room, instead of the poor hunting in
+the prison courtyard.
+
+Then they came back fearlessly, and thanked me with quick little nods of
+their pretty heads, and sidelong trusting looks from their black beads
+of eyes; with low, graceful courtesies and a cheerful piping song.
+
+And then one morning a keeper who had been attracted by the noise,
+shooed the birds away and swore in a gruff voice, warning me that it was
+against the rules to throw crumbs on the floor, as well as to keep
+bread in my pockets or in my cell.
+
+
+Once a week the prisoners are privileged to wait in line to see the
+warden, to protest against any injustice, to recount a grievance, or to
+ask a favor.
+
+Like a dozen or more I stood waiting for the quick-lunch justice of the
+Czar of the penitentiary. After a while he appeared, accompanied by a
+tall young secretary who jotted down our names and the details of the
+business on hand. Walking slowly, with bent shoulders, hands behind his
+back, the warden seemed to be about seventy-five years old. His face was
+furrowed with irregular, meaningless wrinkles, and he had small shifty
+eyes, with white hair and a white beard. He had a habit of staring at
+the convict who was speaking to him, and suddenly bending one ear toward
+the speaker as if he were partially deaf.
+
+The warden's answers came quickly, in the jerky, high pitched voice of
+the Sistine Chapel cantors, and often breaking under the strain of
+anger. A convict suffering from locomotor ataxia, leaning on a walking
+stick, hanging on to a companion, begged for permission to get a pair of
+crutches ... his mother would get them for him.
+
+"What for?" queried the warden, innocently.
+
+"Because I can't walk with this stick," answered the convict.
+
+"Then why don't you get a cab!" said the warden. And he snickered and
+then coarsely guffawed.
+
+Again he furiously upbraided another petitioner.
+
+"Where do you think you are? At the Waldorf-Astoria? Next thing they'll
+be asking me to get them flowers, candy and theatre tickets. I am here
+to see that you are punished. See?"
+
+After having thus vented his spleen he uttered some alleged witticism at
+the expense of the helpless convict, and showed a great appreciation of
+his own humor, uncovering a row of yellow, brown, half-decayed teeth in
+a sneering grin most unpleasant to behold.
+
+My turn came, and I asked for an extra blanket, as the cold was intense
+and the metal springs of the bed offered no protection against it. This
+it seemed was also against the rules. When I suggested that as he was
+the warden he could make and unmake the rules, he did not answer, but
+asked irrelevantly how I liked his hotel?
+
+I answered that it was preferable to the castle of San Juan de Ulloa in
+Vera Cruz.
+
+He looked puzzled, then he smiled as if he saw the point.
+
+"We'll take care of you," he repeated twice, waving a thin, wrinkled,
+old hand.
+
+
+VII
+
+At lunch time the sick convicts ask their keepers for permission to see
+the doctor. They are kept waiting in line near the head keeper's desk.
+The head keeper is a person of great power in the prison, only third in
+importance of rank, but as he comes in daily contact with the convicts,
+his good or ill will is felt more keenly than the warden's. The
+discipline of the prison, the distribution of the mails, of the clothes,
+underwear, shoes, all the details of management, are carried on through
+him.
+
+As we were waiting for the doctor, the head keeper came along to look us
+over. He had a big brown face, and a large mustache covered his mouth;
+two piercing gray eyes gave the impression of an unlimited reserve of
+pent-up bile, anger and contempt, which at times flowed in a torrent of
+choice and rare blasphemies.
+
+"Damn you, wop! I'll cure you! You s----!" he shouted, and with both
+hands he clutched the neck of an Italian, and shook him as savagely as a
+terrier shakes a rat. His face red and with sickness in his eyes, the
+unfortunate man tried to explain that he had a sore throat and a fever;
+but without success. He only aroused another fit of anger.
+
+"You're a faker, that's what you are! You're all fakers, every one of
+you!" he yelled at us, and finished up by spitting on the floor. The
+next moment he punished a convict for doing the selfsame thing.
+
+A young doctor hardly out of his teens entered the old prison, escorted
+by a convict carrying a tray filled with medicine bottles.
+
+Sick prisoners are cured in the simple, old-fashioned way of having
+mixtures administered to them, the medicine bottles being labeled
+according to the contents, and the most prevalent ailments, which do not
+require the remanding of the sick man to the hospital. Cough mixture
+seemed to be quite popular, fever mixture less so, then followed
+constipation and diarrhoea mixture, toothache mixture, court-plaster,
+some pills, and various ingredients for venereal diseases, some cotton
+gauze, and the indispensable large bottles containing salts and codliver
+oil.
+
+The visit did not take long. Those who had come twice on the line
+without having been found sick were punished "against the wall."
+
+After a short inspection the doctor ordered me to the hospital, without
+allaying my fears by any diagnosis or declaration of a disease, but
+cautioned me to take a hot bath every day, and to rub the skin with
+sulphur ointment.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOSPITAL
+
+
+The hospital is situated on top of the chapel, over the main entrance
+and hall of the prison.
+
+Two spacious rooms are dedicated to that purpose. The smaller one with a
+bathroom faces the Brooklyn side and overlooks the mess hall, the
+keepers' dining room and kitchen, and is usually kept apart for the
+consumptives. The larger room, also with a bathroom, contains a dozen
+beds, a closet for underwear and clothes, another for the crockery, two
+tables, two medicine closets, chairs, and some small tables for patients
+near each bed.
+
+Six windows face towards East 55th Street on the Manhattan side. Two
+higher windows look over the roof of the prison, across the Queensboro
+bridge. The hardwood flooring, the small hospital cots, with
+mattresses, white pillows and spreads, all spotlessly clean, made the
+place look quite cheerful and sunny. Every opening was heavily barred. A
+spacious, clean and airy prison, but still a prison, with a tantalizing
+outlook towards New York, which seemed so near that one could discern
+people on the other side of the river.
+
+
+I
+
+There are five sick men, plus three consumptives, in the two rooms; and
+our large room looks deserted.
+
+The patients wear a cheap, white shirt, instead of the striped one, and
+slippers instead of shoes.
+
+A bald-headed man with small, kindly gray eyes and a close-cropped
+mustache, keeps perfect discipline without raising his voice, using
+profane language, or bullying the patients. In character, breeding,
+morals, education, he is superior to the warden and to most of the
+keepers. His name is Charles Noonan.
+
+Between the hours of eight o'clock in the morning and four in the
+afternoon a uniformed hospital orderly attends to the distribution of
+medicine, takes temperatures, and reports to the doctor. At night
+another orderly takes his place.
+
+The cleanliness of the two hospitals, the distribution of bedding,
+laundry and food, is in the hands of a convict, usually a patient; all
+the unpleasant tasks and irksome duties which the orderly is too proud
+or too lazy to perform the trusty is obliged to do.
+
+Servant and boss, scullion and diplomat, doctor's help and sick man,
+waiter and majordomo, the convict orderly is the last buffer in the line
+of authority, the expiatory goat of the penitentiary hospital, a
+suffering soul in a modern purgatory.
+
+When a criticism drops from the lips of the supreme Prison Commissioner,
+the Warden passes it along to the "Dep," who calls down the hospital
+keeper, who in his turn upbraids the orderly, who in the end roasts the
+trusty.
+
+The present trusty is an old man suffering from an eczema on his fat
+legs. Tall, bloated, gray, pale, he is despised by the convicts for his
+avariciousness, his gluttony, his arrogant attitude. They suspect him of
+being a stool pigeon, and they revenge themselves by making his life
+miserable through a series of cruel persecutions.
+
+Another trusty who sleeps in a cell downstairs, and eats in the keeper's
+kitchen, is a famous pickpocket.
+
+Like all or nearly all the old timers, Ed, as he is called, never
+gossips about his private affairs; he may joke and talk about other
+prisoners, but never does he say a word about his life outside. He is an
+old offender, but obedient, useful and energetic; and he is always
+welcomed back as a trusty or a tier man.
+
+Once inadvertently I asked him: "What do you do outside for a living,
+Ed?" His laconic answer was, "Oh, everybody!"
+
+But one evening several weeks later, when we had become quite chummy, at
+the psychological moment when even the most silent and sullen crooks
+will sometimes confess and bare their hearts, he unfolded his life, his
+methods, his cynicism and his mental make-up.
+
+It was an amazing story, interspersed with slang, picturesque phrases,
+and a callous, sordid philosophy. Later, the testimony of other thieves
+proved that his story was true.
+
+As he told his story, it seems that clever thieves organize themselves
+into trusts, or what they call "mobs," frequent the same "joints" and
+"hang-outs," and work in co-operation with detectives. When a fair, a
+holiday, or any extraordinary event is announced in any part of the
+state--or anywhere in the world, for that matter--they are "tipped off,"
+or told about it by the "bulls."
+
+Then when the event "comes off," and a great crowd is gathered, a whole
+gang of pickpockets, two or three score of them, arrive on the spot.
+
+To save time one after another is sent to the fair authorities to inform
+them of the presence of pickpockets, and an official jumps on a platform
+or soap box, and shouts a warning to the crowd against thieves; and
+while this is going on the keen-eyed "dips" watch the astonished and
+frightened people place their hands on the pocket or the region which
+contains their valuables. With this knowledge they can work without
+blundering, and in teams of three or four, by rubbing or jostling
+against their victims, they soon relieve them of their money or jewelry.
+
+Watches are seldom stolen, as they are too easy of identification. Often
+a prominent "sucker" discovers his loss before he leaves the fair, and
+starts kicking up a row. At once a detective offers to find and return
+the stolen goods for a reward.
+
+Then, after it is over, the result of the day's work is divided between
+the "bulls" and the "dips."
+
+Ed became a pickpocket right after he left school. From the reform
+school to the house of refuge, from the house of refuge to the state
+reformatory, from the reformatory to the penitentiary, he has climbed
+all the rungs of the ladder of crime.
+
+He soon discovered that "lonesome," single-handed thieves were crushed
+in the struggle, so he joined the Benevolent Association for Mutual
+Protection of "dips" and "guns," paid his dues, and then when he was
+caught, he got off with a light sentence. His return to prison was part
+of the game; he came back philosophically, as a travelling salesman
+returns to his favorite hostelry, as an intermittent but familiar
+visitor, recognized by the keepers and convicts, and knowing all the
+ropes along the prison line of least resistance.
+
+Ed barely looks his age, although his face bears the stamp of his
+dissipated life and the mannerisms peculiar to his breed. He is a
+perfect fruit of the criminal system. Sodden with all the sexual
+perversities acquired in prison, he has finally caught the white plague,
+is afflicted with several venereal diseases, and has become an
+inveterate dope fiend. Although keen of intelligence, he seems to be
+without moral prop or ideal of any kind; coldly and cynically he surveys
+society as his natural prey, his rightful enemy, and an object of his
+revenge.
+
+Morally, intellectually and physically as crooked and shifty as a
+mountain trail, he seems utterly beyond redemption, human or divine.
+
+
+II
+
+The view from the hospital window shows the bridge on the right; in
+front, the row of cheap tenement houses and streets abutting on the
+river front from the forties to the sixties; and on the left, looming
+out of the city-scape, appears the Metropolitan tower. Behind the
+innumerable painted signs on the river front, the Cathedral on Fifth
+Avenue, the Plaza Hotel and the St. Regis can be seen distinctly; the
+Times Building is also vaguely outlined. In the daytime the sight is
+commonplace; but after the sun, like an enormous ball of fire, has
+dipped behind the city line back of the streets in the fifties, the
+scene becomes inspiring to a painter.
+
+The shadows, full of greens and purples, cover as with a charitable veil
+all the ugly details of the river front; the skyline becomes darker, as
+if cut out with monster scissors; the sky appears more resplendent and
+luminous with gorgeous tints, until the fiery blaze slowly dies out,
+and bluish tints, gray and purple predominate; and then the city lights,
+those on the bridge and in the Metropolitan tower, shimmer like
+innumerable stars.
+
+Sometimes with a clear sky, sometimes in fog, in a snow storm, in rain
+or in clear moonlight, every night for ten months I have watched an ever
+recurring picturesque metamorphosis.
+
+Through the north window I have watched the dawn come up behind the
+Queensboro bridge, and seen the sun appear like an enormous Japanese
+lantern of pure vermilion--a sight to gladden the heart of a Claude
+Monet.
+
+Boats pass constantly by, day and night; they are the one great source
+of amusement of the patients. The little, swift-sailing tug-boats
+announce their passage by angry and piercing whistles; the graceful
+yachts of the multi-millionaires sound melodious notes; the large
+excursion boats announce themselves by their stronger and more ringing
+whistlings; the largest ones, on their way to Portland, are heard in the
+distance grunting like sonorous leviathans.
+
+But the most amusing of all is the tiny boat that plies between the dock
+of the penitentiary and the foot of 54th Street. The distance is about
+two or three minutes, but this diminutive craft goes two or three blocks
+up the river and comes back down the same number of blocks, to show that
+if it tried it really could navigate on the high seas.
+
+Should any vessel larger than this microcosm be seen from a distance
+trying to pass our little boat, it would start a series of angry,
+piercing toots, repeated in quick succession. We used to wonder and
+laugh--oh, we laugh, even in prison; how else could we live?--at the
+impertinence of this minnow of the river of New York, until we
+discovered that after a large boat like the _Yale_ passed by, the waves
+left in its wake almost upset the little craft, and it took all the
+efforts of the brave pilot to bring it tossing like a champagne cork on
+top of the waves, back safe to the dock.
+
+In summer time the excursion boats, returning home with crowded decks,
+with all the lights lit, and the band playing and the passengers
+singing, "The Island of Blackwell," make us home-sick and pensive with
+longing for life and the world we are shut away from.
+
+
+III
+
+The trusty in charge of the hospital is getting nervous as the day of
+his release approaches. A week before the release, no matter how
+disciplined and peaceful the prisoner may have been, he starts getting
+cranky and impertinent to the keepers. He acts like a man under great
+stress, and when he is disturbed he turns savagely round like an angry
+dog.
+
+The old trusty acted like a drunkard, talking and laughing incessantly,
+and we thought it was for joy at the thought of his near release. But
+the real reason was soon discovered. The old thief, Fritz, had been
+operated on, and when the night orderly was ordered by the doctor to
+change the sick man's bandages every fifteen minutes, he bribed the old
+trusty with a long drink of whiskey to do the work for him.
+
+The spectacle of the official orderly trying to do his duty was
+intensely amusing. In all the years of his work he had slept and snored
+peacefully and undisturbed. When the time came to change the bandages,
+he uncovered the patient and began gingerly removing the soaked
+bandages, holding them with two fingers, at a safe distance, and walking
+on tiptoe, as if expecting the whole thing to explode. When he saw the
+terrible, gaping wound he dropped everything back, saying: "I can't do
+it, it makes me sick!" and woke up the trusty to do the work for him.
+The next day he reported sick, and he never showed up again until he
+heard that the patient was dead.
+
+In the meanwhile the old trusty left and I had to attend to the sick
+man. Every fifteen minutes of twenty interminable days and nights I had
+to watch, and nurse, and answer the calls of that cranky old man. The
+wound was ghastly. The surgeons had made an incision twelve inches long
+right down into the bladder, wherein they had stuck a thick rubber tube.
+
+The sight was sickening, the work exhausting and thankless, and if I had
+not known that the patient had only a few days to live, I think I would
+have applied for a job in the coal gang.
+
+On the twentieth night, at about twelve o'clock, I was awakened by the
+moans of the dying man, who was calling in a faint voice. His face was
+flushed and it seemed as if all the blood had gone to his head; but he
+seemed suddenly to turn deadly white, and he lay back still.
+
+A young boy sleeping next to him hid his head under the bed clothes in
+fright. I was sent to notify the doctor upstairs.
+
+The young doctor declared him dead, and turning to me ordered me to
+dress him.
+
+I looked at him puzzled and asked: "Dress him up in his striped suit?"
+
+"No," answered the doctor, smiling, "put the shroud on and make him
+ready for the morgue."
+
+"But I have never dressed a corpse in my life and would not know how to
+go about it," I protested. So the doctor kindly volunteered to teach me.
+
+First he closed the dead man's eyes; then we put on the shroud, which
+looked like a night-shirt with frills at the sleeves, and attached to it
+a conical fool's cap to cover his head; then his hands and feet were
+tied separately.
+
+When we had done, we laid the body on an empty bed in the smaller
+hospital, very much to the dismay and terror of the three consumptives
+who slept there. But they kicked up such a row that they were allowed to
+sleep in our section.
+
+The next morning when I went on an errand into the next room I stopped
+to gaze on the body of Fritz. The change that had taken place was
+startling. During the few months that Fritz had passed in the hospital,
+although disciplined and silent like most old convicts, he always wore a
+peculiarly shifty, sneering expression on his reddish face. Now it was
+wax white, the eyelids had opened, and the pale blue eyes were staring
+at me with a peaceful, angelic expression. For an instant I gasped at
+the thought that he might have come back to life, and I called out:
+"Fritz! Fritz!" but no answer came, and only the gentle, inscrutable
+smile persisted. I touched his cheek. It was cold and hard. But I could
+not explain the almost miraculous change in the expression of the face.
+Suddenly it dawned upon me that death had released the unclean spirit,
+and left the body to go back to mother earth as clean as it had been
+conceived.
+
+Soon four convicts came into the room; one, a gangster, with a broken
+nose, and beady, black eyes, asked me: "Where is the stiff?" As in
+prison language "stiff" is also the name used for newspapers, I looked
+at him foolishly and answered that I had none. He added in explanation:
+"I mean the guy that croaked last night."
+
+Neither the keeper nor the convicts relished the post-prandial
+funeral.... Death had come so suddenly and informally, and had left his
+victim in the enemy's camp, to be carried to the morgue, and later to be
+buried on a convict's island without benefit of clergy.
+
+
+IV
+
+Before the old thief died the old trusty had gone, and I had to take his
+place. I did so only with great reluctance, and with many misgivings as
+to my peace of mind and body.
+
+I had noticed how the convicts nagged and harassed the old trusty with
+insults and petty, malicious persecutions to revenge themselves for his
+greed and his authoritative, arrogant manner towards them.
+
+I realized that life might be made unbearable for me, and that I might
+be forced to go downstairs to the cells before I had completed my cure.
+
+When the old trusty received fruit he had sold it promptly to the
+convicts for money. He asked five cents for an apple, ten cents for an
+orange, so much for tobacco or for a pipe, another price for suspenders,
+handkerchiefs, or whatever he might have to sell or barter.
+
+After his release the Italian consumptive said that he had got only half
+portions of his special food that had been sent in for him, as the
+trusty cut the portions in half in order to sell the remainder to
+others.
+
+I unconsciously sensed that the only successful method of taming the
+ferocious, revengeful natures of the convicts was by kindness and
+patience; by treating them as friends in misfortune, and not as enemies
+or inferiors.
+
+When I received tobacco or fruit I divided it among the men who seldom
+if ever had any visits or mail; the magazines were distributed among
+them and later were carried downstairs from cell to cell, until the
+whole prison had read them. To my intense surprise, English, German,
+Italian--even "high brow" magazines like the _Mercure de France_ and _La
+Revue_ were eagerly demanded and read by some of these strangely
+intellectual convicts.
+
+The men who had considered me an aristocrat, and nicknamed me "The
+Count," soon began to discover that my sympathy was for their troubles,
+their unhappiness, their helplessness, and not for the warden and the
+keepers.
+
+I was fully repaid for my attitude. I was made their confidant, their
+confessor, the judge of their squabbles, a peacemaker and a go-between;
+when trouble and punishment were in sight, when some particularly
+unclean and revolting duty was to be performed, the convicts always
+asked to relieve me of it; and it came to pass that after a while I
+could devote most of my time to reading, and only attended to the less
+manual work, such as acting as assistant to the doctor.
+
+Among the patients there was a one-legged negro who was suffering from a
+painful and unmentionable disease. His big lips, square jaw and scowling
+countenance made him resemble a big, black bull-dog. Even the keepers
+were in awe of him. In a fit of danger one day before the old trusty
+left he very nearly smashed the old man's skull with his crutch.
+
+The first morning that I was left in charge of the hospital I felt some
+trepidation as to the outcome of my policy of kindness.
+
+The test came quickly. During lunch the negro ordered me, in a loud,
+angry voice, to bring him something. I went over to his bed and told him
+gently I was surprised that he had forgotten his good manners; that he
+had evidently made a mistake in thinking that I was either his keeper or
+his valet; that we were both convicts, both in trouble, and should treat
+each other like self-respecting men, helpfully and considerately.
+
+He looked at me with a frown on his face, as he was not quite certain
+whether I was deriding him; but soon the frown disappeared, and then I
+said to him: "Now, Davis, what can I do for you?" He answered in a
+gentle and friendly voice: "Excuse me, mister. I always been treated
+like a dog. Will you please bring me a spoon?"
+
+From that day on he was tamed; he became more talkative, and even
+polite. During the long winter evenings he broke the morose silences to
+tell us of his adventures, and to relate the story of his tragic and
+terrible life.
+
+He had lost his leg in a railroad accident; and then he had spent
+several years in hospitals and more years in legal fights to try to
+collect a few hundred dollars which were never paid. Then, jobless,
+hungry, destitute, desperate, he had begun to steal. Always unlucky and
+awkward, he was invariably caught, arrested, and sentenced to jail.
+Twenty years of his life he had spent in jails and prisons all over the
+country, and he had even had a taste of the horrible chain gangs of
+Georgia. He described the punishments he had to undergo because of his
+inability to work in prison shops; the weeks passed in the "coolers";
+the beatings, the tortures he had undergone at the hands of savage,
+ruthless wardens.
+
+It was an awful, an almost incredible story! It seemed somehow
+impossible that a human being could go through such an ordeal, such
+harrowing brutalities, and come out alive and tell the story.
+
+One day he said, "I ain't no good since my accident. Never had a chance
+to learn a trade or be honest. If I don't come across to the 'bulls'
+they send me back to the 'pen' for a year. I'm sick of this life. Next
+time I'll do something that'll send me to Sing Sing for life. This dump
+is rotten. I'd rather go up the river for two years than stay in here
+for six months."
+
+
+V
+
+The orderly asks me to attend to the consumptive, as he hates to do it
+himself. I have to bring him his food, I have to clean the cup which he
+uses as a cuspidor, and be careful to wash it in a solution of carbolic
+acid, and wash my hands each time afterwards.
+
+The poor boy flies into uncontrollable fits of anger over trifles; then
+his face becomes almost a livid green, and he seems to be foaming at the
+mouth--little flecks of foam and saliva--like a vicious horned toad.
+When in that state I usually speak to him in a low, monotonous voice,
+hoping to quiet him; and after a while he becomes calmer, his features
+relax, his body slowly unbends, and he finally slips under the bed
+sheets, going to sleep as if the effort had completely exhausted him.
+
+It used to remind me of the snake charmers in India, taming angry and
+hissing cobras by the monotonous sound of a flute. Suddenly the hoods
+would fold, the terrible fanged mouths close, and the snakes would wag
+their heads slowly to and fro, with little red tongues playfully
+wiggling in sign of delight until placed, harmless and hypnotized, in a
+capacious basket.
+
+I do not know if it was my arguments or my voice that attained the
+object with my consumptive patient, but the result was evident after I
+had talked to the poor boy for a few minutes.
+
+In great excitement he confessed to me one morning that he had made up
+his mind to commit suicide if his fine was not remitted, and he was not
+released after his one year term. I told the Sister of Mercy of his
+threat and she promised to see to it that the judge would remit the
+fine. When the day of his release came, much to my relief, he was freed.
+
+
+I have reached some interesting conclusions as a result of my
+observations of the ways of the convicts and their attitudes towards one
+another.
+
+Life in a prison, under ignorant and often vicious wardens and keepers,
+although seemingly leveling the men's standard to the most degrading and
+contemptible measure allowed by law, does not eradicate the convict's
+idea of class. A class, or perhaps it would be better to say a caste
+system, exists here, as in all the jails all over the world, as well and
+as subtly graded as social life in Manhattan, London, or Benares.
+
+The Camorra, of Naples, originated in the jails of the old kingdom of
+Naples during the rule of the Spaniards and Bourbons, being invented by
+the convicts to protect themselves against the greed of the prison
+authorities. Later it branched out and was organized outside. The same
+holds true in America, in the sense that convicts in prison plot and
+plan crimes before their release, and agree to continue their
+acquaintance and work on the outside. Boys and young men serving their
+first term are easy prey for older and wiser criminals.
+
+Although the ideas of caste in prison are not the same, and are not
+formulated according to religious, financial, intellectual or
+aristocratic standards, nevertheless the principle is the same. In most
+societies the leaders are people with "blood," money, or privileges of
+some sort. In India the high caste Brahmin is born to his station, and
+no amount of money or intellectual attainment can make one if he is not
+born to it.
+
+In prison the ethical standard is as simple as the cave dweller's, or as
+that of savage tribes. Caste among convicts is a sop to their vanity, to
+their outraged and primitive sense of justice; society made them
+outcasts, and they retaliate by creating a society of outcasts wherein
+they strive to become the leaders, the greatest, the bravest, the
+cleverest among the Pariahs; and like the Pariahs they consider other
+castes outside as lower than their own.
+
+Convicts admire physical prowess and brute strength, fearlessness,
+"nerve"; they look up to those who commit deeds of violence, such as
+gang men, bandits, burglars; men who will take their chances at killing
+or being killed rather than be arrested.
+
+Next to these in the order of caste come the more intelligent but less
+courageous types of crooks, such as confidence men, forgers, gamblers,
+dishonest bankers, embezzlers, lawyers, politicians. They represent the
+intellectual aristocracy of crime, to be approved of but not to be put
+on the same plane as the former.
+
+To the third caste, even less brave, less cunning, belong the sneak
+thieves, the pickpockets, repeaters, bums; marking the border line on
+its downward course with such types as wife beaters, wandering tramps,
+bums, and dope fiends who steal only to satisfy their irresistible
+cravings for drugs. Those individuals who live on white slavery,
+professional degenerates, and their like, are ridiculed and nagged by
+the upper castes; the effeminate "sissies" are also a constant butt for
+the jests and abuse not only of convicts, but of keepers as well.
+
+On the lowest rung of the social ladder stand the stool pigeons and the
+detectives who are so unlucky as to be sent to prison. These latter are
+hated, abominated, despised, by their fellow prisoners with all the
+intensity, ferocity, and implacable hatred of which such men are
+capable. It sometimes happens, in spite of the vigilance of the keepers,
+that they are murdered in prison. In the minds of the other convicts
+these stool pigeons and detectives are their most dangerous foes,
+because of the intimate knowledge they possess of the technique of
+crime, and because of the similarity of their ways of living.
+
+
+VI
+
+The one-legged, bull-faced negro in the hospital was watching my
+assistant, who, of his own volition, and without being ordered to do it,
+was laboriously polishing the brass chandeliers hanging from the
+ceiling.
+
+"That boy ain't no thief," he remarked philosophically. "A thief is a
+thief 'cause he won't work, in or out of jail."
+
+A crook will waste many days, nay, sometimes weeks and months, and take
+infinite pains to plan a robbery, the result of which he imagines is
+getting something for nothing. Sometimes the prize is nothing, sometimes
+it is considerable; and then it is dissipated in gambling, dope, and
+riotous living. The fruit of legitimate work he considers a meagre
+result of foolish painstaking effort.
+
+The mental calibre of these men is similar to that of naughty,
+precocious children, or of savages; they have streaks of yellow and
+streaks of insanity; they often have a strong will, but no morality; a
+keen intelligence, but no principle; a purpose, but no good or
+high-minded ambition. Almost without exception they are gamblers; they
+lack imagination, but they are possessed of an over-weening, childish
+vanity; they have great stubbornnesses, but no sense of proportion or
+responsibility.
+
+Their ideals are wholly physical; they love fine clothes, jewelry, good
+food; they admire the fair sex, they crave money for all the physical
+results it will bring. They are very proud of their criminal successes,
+of their reputations as "tough guys," bad men with terrible records,
+fierce and relentless in their loathing for "squealers" and "bulls."
+
+They consider their gallery of Immortals as unique, and never
+sufficiently appreciated by those outside their world of life.
+
+A complete lack of imagination prevents them from foreseeing the
+futility and the inevitable result of their lonesome battle against the
+united forces of society.
+
+An almost unanimous characteristic is their cheap sentimentality, but at
+bottom they are nearly always kind hearted. They have, too, a keen sense
+of justice, and often they are willing to admit that they deserve their
+punishment; but they rebel savagely against the injustices, the inhuman
+treatment, the tortures, inflicted by prison authorities. It is the
+helplessness of these prisoners, and the indifference of the public
+towards them and their fate, that make prison authorities so cowardly
+and brutal. A healthy publicity in prison matters, and a more charitable
+and sympathetic attitude on the part of the public, would very soon
+change the attitude of the wardens and the keepers.
+
+
+VII
+
+In the beginning the reticence of the convicts puzzled me, even after I
+knew that they regarded me as a political prisoner and not as a stool
+pigeon. Only after a long acquaintance, and then unwillingly, would they
+admit shamefacedly that their living was acquired by criminal methods.
+More than any other argument this proved to me that their criminal pride
+is only a bluff, their pose as "tough guys" only a pretence, and the
+supposed excitement of their profession only a misdirected and false
+energy. Their vainglorious, strutting behaviour is really the result of
+the insulting, demoralizing, contemptuous attitude of the prison
+authorities, which seems to say: "We are virtuous men; you are only
+crooks and bums. We are paid by the authorities and the state to punish
+you and to break your spirit."
+
+The convicts believe that few of the keepers are virtuous or honest men,
+and the constant revelations of prison graft only arouse their envy, and
+the galling thought that they are the helpless victims of a higher type
+of crooks. In seeming self-defense, therefore, they assume their
+attitude of revenge toward society, of stubbornness and pride and
+defiance toward the keepers. They soon discover, if they have not
+already learned, that humanity, charity, and justice are not to be
+expected from their oppressors; and that our justice is not Christian,
+nor scientific nor human; but only vindictive, wasteful, idiotic and
+indeed blind. And so in despair these misguided men become more vicious,
+hardened and corrupt than they were before prison took a hand in their
+shaping.
+
+A prison term, which is supposed to reform them and to break their
+wills, is only a school for criminality, a higher school or university
+for the underworld, where confidences are exchanged, new alliances are
+formed, diseases and homosexual habits contracted. The spirit is
+tempered for future criminal records, instead of being broken, and the
+body strengthened for coming excesses.
+
+The line of convicts which upon their release streams out of our
+prisons, is like a large sewer emptying its filth back into society;
+slowly corrupting, demoralizing and polluting everything it touches.
+
+
+The stool pigeons are feared by the convicts as well as by the keepers.
+They keep the warden informed of the mysterious happenings, among the
+prisoners, and the illicit relations between the keepers and the
+convicts. In their turn the stool pigeons are rewarded with privileges,
+such for instance as not being punished for infractions of the rules,
+which would mean the terrible "cooler" to the ordinary convict. The
+wardens' greatest fear is that letters written by convicts relating some
+of the outrageous occurrences of every day in prison may reach the
+columns of a newspaper and bring about unpleasant notoriety, and even a
+more disagreeable investigation.
+
+On very rare occasions some angry convict will write to a newspaper
+relating his unpleasant experiences, but the rule is that the sooner one
+forgets having been behind the bars the better it is.
+
+A prisoner caught sending communications to the outside world by
+underground methods, without having his message read by the office, is
+punished with a few days in the dreaded "cooler."
+
+This is what the "cooler" is: The convict is divested of all clothes
+except his underwear, and he is then taken to a cell which contains only
+a bucket and a wooden plank on the floor as a place of rest and sleep.
+The cell is hermetically closed by a door which keeps out all light and
+air. A little ventilation, just enough to keep him from suffocation,
+comes through a small hole in the wall. The darkness is like a solid
+mass; it is so intense that the prisoner cannot see his hand near his
+face. Every twenty-four hours the cell is opened and the convict is
+given a thin slice of bread and about a thimble full of water, just
+enough to keep him alive. This performance is repeated according to the
+length of the punishment, that is to say, the door is opened only once
+in twenty-four hours, to permit the giving of food and water and the
+emptying of the bucket, whether the prisoner stays in that awful place
+one day or twenty-one. Many prisoners have been known to stay in the
+cooler for weeks at a time.
+
+After having lived in complete darkness for a long time, coming out into
+broad daylight causes untold agonies, and very often has tragic effects
+upon the eyes and eyesight of the prisoner; usually they have to be sent
+to the hospital to be treated for inflammation of the eyes or for
+partial blindness. Men kept long in the cooler sometimes become
+driveling idiots; others go violently insane and have to be sent to
+Matteawan for life.
+
+The punishments are all inflicted by the warden, on the word of a stool
+pigeon, of a keeper, or of a man in charge of the workshops who seems to
+be a contractor of almost unlimited power in the prison, second only to
+the warden.
+
+
+VIII
+
+The prison authorities are not supposed to abuse, vilify or use
+blasphemous language towards the prisoners; it is forbidden under
+penalty of the law.
+
+Of course, as far as the convict is concerned, such a law or rule is a
+dead letter. Should a prisoner protest to the warden against
+vilification or profanity, he would only be laughed at; and should he
+insist on making his complaint to the prison commissioner, his letter
+would never be sent, and his persecution would begin at once.
+
+The other day a quarrel broke out between two prisoners. A keeper tried
+to stop it by hitting one of the offenders with his stick, and at the
+same time calling him an unmentionable name. The convict retaliated with
+a punch on the jaw that floored the keeper.
+
+The convict was punished with two days in the "cooler," but the
+offending keeper was not reprimanded by the warden. And when the man
+came out of the "cooler," the doctor found him suffering from an
+inflammation of the eyes which kept him in the hospital for two months.
+
+When he asked for writing materials he was told that the punishment
+meted out to him automatically eliminated all the privileges of a
+convict; and he was not permitted to write home or to receive visitors
+for two months. The electric light in his cell was cut off and he was
+not allowed to read books or magazines, newspapers being always barred.
+
+In the beginning of my stay in prison the use of profane language was,
+to put it mildly, quite prevalent; but it became rare soon after the
+election of Mayor Gaynor. Even their sticks were taken away from the
+keepers for a while. And it was discovered that discipline did not
+suffer in the least from the lack either of foul language or the stick.
+
+
+IX
+
+The food, brought up by a convict from the keepers' kitchen to the
+hospital, is distributed by us thrice a day, on a long table covered by
+white linoleum and standing in the middle of the room.
+
+We have to clean the bathroom and the spittoons, sweep the floor, empty
+the garbage can, get the ice, make the beds, give the medicine, take the
+temperatures, mark the charts, help the doctor, besides giving and
+receiving the laundry--in short, the immediate and dirty work of the
+hospital is in our hands. The one happy hour of the day is at nine in
+the morning, when we are privileged to empty the garbage can at the
+docks on the Brooklyn side or go to a nearby oven to burn its contents.
+
+For a few minutes, while filling a pail with water from the river to
+wash out the empty garbage can, we watch the tug boats, the canal boats,
+passenger boats or yachts pass by, and the people on board always greet
+us with a wave of the hand or a merry shout. But never have the
+passengers of the aristocratic yachts even condescended to look at us.
+
+No matter if it rains or snows, or if fog hangs over the whole
+landscape, the few minutes alone, untrammelled by the presence of a
+keeper or the crisscross pattern of the bars, make us feel as if we were
+really free men; then we march reluctantly towards the ice house to the
+big chest containing the supply of ice for the different departments.
+The ice is cut and put into the empty and clean garbage can. When there
+are no keepers around we linger to talk to the "skin" gang, which is
+composed of a few convicts whose duty it is to peel potatoes, onions,
+carrots and cabbage for the kitchen.
+
+It is a great place for the exchange of news of the day--of the gossip
+of new arrivals, the punishments, the petty incidents or the headliners
+of the most important events, the opinions of the convicts about the
+goodness or badness of the keepers; in short it is a sort of clearing
+house for information as to whatever is happening in the penitentiary.
+
+One of the men in charge of the gang is a blond, powerful, fine-looking
+convict of German parentage. He belongs to the high caste among the
+prisoners, and shows it by his manner toward the lesser castes.
+
+In the beginning he answered my questions in monosyllables, but after
+several months of daily intercourse, when he had thoroughly satisfied
+himself of my status, my attitude, and my antecedents, and when he
+learned that I was an aristocrat only in thought but a democrat in
+manners, he became talkative, and piece by piece, incident by incident,
+he told me of his life, until I was able to construct it almost as a
+whole.
+
+He was the son of honest parents, who had started him in life as a
+skilled workingman. He lost his position during a strike, and one of his
+children died of starvation. Fearing that his other child would meet a
+similar fate, and seeing no prospect of another job, he started on his
+career as a burglar. Being a skilled mechanic, he found it easy to
+fashion tools for his trade, which, as he claimed, brought immediate and
+satisfactory results.
+
+
+X
+
+One morning as a young convict was walking on an errand towards the
+shops, a letter dropped from his coat onto the ground in the yard. The
+warden, who was walking in the same direction, not far behind, picked up
+the letter and shouted to the man to stop. The convict turned back and
+appeared confused when he saw the warden with his letter in his hands.
+The warden flayed him with his heavy sarcasm, upbraided him for
+violating the rules about writing letters, and leered at him in
+malicious anticipation of the punishment to come. Finally he
+condescended to read the letter, so as to fit the punishment with a few
+quotations from the letter.
+
+But strange to relate, after he had read the letter, his frown
+disappeared, and with it his terrible anger. In a voice which had turned
+from a broken falsetto of anger to a gentle, low pitch, he inquired
+where the young man was working, how many more months he had yet to
+serve, and finally asked if he had a preference for any other place
+besides his present assignment. The young convict reluctantly admitted
+that he would prefer to work in the keeper's kitchen.
+
+The same day he was transferred to his new duties, which are considered
+privileged by convicts because of the liberty and the better food they
+afford. The young convict, being disgusted with the prison fare, and the
+monotonous, unhealthy work in his shop, with a cunning almost
+Machiavellian, had hit upon the original and brilliant idea of writing a
+letter to an imaginary friend in which he praised the penitentiary and
+lauded the warden in fulsome, enthusiastic, unstinted praise. He dropped
+the letter purposely, knowing that the warden was only a few paces
+behind him. The acting was done to perfection, the trick worked without
+a hitch, and our youthful Ulysses got his job for a laudatory song.
+
+The tale went round the prison, and although it made the warden the
+laughing stock of the penitentiary, he never discovered the deception.
+
+The warden, unlike the deputy warden, is very much disliked by the
+convicts. Among themselves they call him the "old hyena." Convicts as
+well as visitors all seem to be united in accusing him of brutality,
+coarseness, and intemperance of speech. Visitors who have to support
+themselves with their daily work find that all kinds of difficulties are
+put in their way. They have to get a card at the commissioner's office
+at 20th Street, then they must take a special boat, and when they arrive
+at the prison they are forced to wait an hour before they are searched.
+
+Thus nearly a whole day, from nine in the morning till two in the
+afternoon, is given just to see the object of all the trouble, and then,
+separated by a thick screen of wire, they are allowed only fifteen
+minutes.
+
+Under the rules visitors are permitted only once a month, but twice by
+a card from the prison commissioner.
+
+
+XI
+
+One day a poor Italian woman, after overcoming all the difficulties in
+actually getting to the gates of the prison, happened to arrive a few
+minutes late. The iron gates were banged in her face and she was ordered
+away.
+
+She had come a long way to see her son, and she could not tear herself
+away from the neighborhood of the prison. She was poorly dressed,
+without even a hat. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. In her
+ignorance she looked up to the barred windows of our hospital imagining
+that it contained her son. She waved her hand, smiling through her
+tears, hoping--perhaps thinking--that she could communicate to him that
+little, distant greeting. Then a keeper came out, shook a stick at her
+and ordered her away.
+
+She went back to the docks and onto the little boat that was to carry
+her back to New York. As the boat moved away she continued to wave a red
+bandanna handkerchief until she disappeared from view.
+
+Miss M---- came to see me one day but she was refused admittance because
+I had had another visitor in the same month. The warden asked her: "What
+do you want to see him for? Are you his wife?" "No," answered Miss
+M----, "I wouldn't visit him if he was my husband."
+
+The warden is very punctilious and severe towards infractions of the
+rules relating to visits and visitors. His strict regard for the rules,
+however, did not deter him from allowing two detectives, sent by agents
+of the Mexican government, to visit me without my permission; he even
+placed another detective on the line next to another visitor so that he
+could overhear our conversation.
+
+I had written to a friend that, as it was not only unwise, but
+impossible in my situation to put on paper certain matters of importance
+and of grave concern to me, I would wait for the day of his visit to
+communicate it orally.
+
+On that day a red-headed detective was placed next in line to my
+visitor, ostensibly to talk to a convict; but the prisoner told me
+afterwards that he did not know the alleged visitor and that he had
+never seen him before.
+
+I had to whisper my message in French so as to prevent the spy from
+overhearing and understanding it.
+
+This proved to me that my letters were copied by somebody in the
+Warden's office, and communicated to the American lawyers representing
+the Mexican government; and also that somebody was powerful enough
+politically to give orders in the Commissioner's office, which in its
+turn placed the detective at my visitor's side.
+
+But when two newspaper men asked permission to see me I was informed
+that I would not be permitted to stay in the hospital if I allowed
+reporters to visit me.
+
+One day I heard the warden upbraid a girl who had come for the first
+time to see her brother. Not being used to such ill-mannered treatment
+she began to weep, and that of course only made matters worse.
+
+Half an hour later the Commissioner of Prisons arrived on a visit of
+inspection. In the hospital he called the warden to task for
+something--but the warden was as mute as an oyster. Together they went
+into the consumptive ward, where the warden began extolling the quality
+and quantity of the fresh air circulating in the room. The commissioner
+turned round and snapped impatiently: "And that's about all they ever
+get!" But the warden never said a word. This man, this mighty czar of
+the penitentiary, who is so brutal and so insolent to the convicts, so
+arrogant to the keepers, and so uncouth to the visitors, in the
+presence of the man who could take his good job away from him, was as
+meek as a lamb.
+
+A keeper who knew the warden well remarked: "He has the soul of a valet,
+insulting to his inferiors and fawning to his superiors."
+
+
+XII
+
+About a dozen women convicts come twice a week to scrub the hardwood
+floor of the hospital. The majority of them are colored; the white women
+are either old and faded, or young and dissipated-looking. Very few of
+them are either refined or good-looking. Petty larceny is the crime for
+which most of them are sent to the prison.
+
+Two negro women, young and rather tough-looking, are scrubbing the
+floor. They are in prison for having held up and robbed a man in the
+streets of New York. The man never recovered his $800.
+
+As the convicts always attempt to joke and to flirt with the scrubbing
+women, they are usually ordered into the bathroom until the work is
+done, with the exception of the bedridden patients.
+
+I discovered that quite a correspondence goes on between the men and
+women convicts. A young convict became quite enamored of a blonde,
+sporty-looking girl, and they took great risks to communicate their love
+notes. I was made the confidante in their love affair. Some of the
+passages read thus: "I love you, I love you, where did youse put the
+tobacco?" ... "I dreams of you day and night.... Get me some butter."
+... "You was the best looker I ever seen.... Don't forget to put the
+matches at the foot of the stairs."
+
+The women do not get the weekly ration of tobacco allowed to the men,
+and as a consequence they must beg tobacco and matches from the men.
+
+All the house work, such as making beds, sweeping, cooking and waiting
+on table, in the house of the warden, in the apartment of the deputy
+warden, and in the dormitories of the keepers and matrons, is performed
+by the women convicts.
+
+An old Irish woman while in prison took such loving care of the children
+of a former warden that whenever her time was up and she was discharged,
+her weakness was encouraged, and she was even purposely made drunk, then
+arrested and sentenced to the penitentiary again as an old offender,
+year after year, until the children of the warden grew big enough to
+take care of themselves.
+
+Before the present system of having a physician live in the prison came
+into vogue, doctors visited the patients once a day; the surgeons came
+over only for the operations. The operating room is always shown with
+great pride to visitors, but never the "cooler."
+
+'Twas told that one night, in the earlier period, when there was no
+resident physician, a woman convict startled the prison with piercing
+cries. She was in the throes of child-birth. The doctor and the warden
+being absent, the matrons did not dare to open the cell. Later a young
+doctor from the city hospital was called in. He peered through the bars,
+then turned and declared that the woman would be all right in the
+morning. When the cell door was opened next day the woman was found
+unconscious and the child was dead, strangled or suffocated.
+
+The other day I went for the first time into the women's section to take
+some medicines and carry away our laundry. The women's section is under
+the same roof as the old prison wherein I passed the first two nights. A
+wall divides them, but the cells and the system of tiers are the same.
+
+The cells measure about 3 by 7 feet, with gray, damp, greasy, massive
+walls, without any ventilation.
+
+As I was looking around I noticed many women sitting in their cells,
+some working outside, sewing or knitting, others sweeping or mopping
+the tiers or the floor.
+
+My attention was attracted by two women with babies in their arms. A
+third, a young, quite delicate, fine-looking girl convict, was sitting
+on a chair sewing. Near her, as if afraid to move, stood a little girl
+three or four years old, with dark, curly hair, red cheeks, and big,
+black serious eyes. She looked at me with the sad, wistful smile of some
+of Da Vinci's women.
+
+My imagination carried me back to the trial room where the little girl
+had stood near her mother to hear the sentence; I thought of how she had
+shared with her the cell in the Tombs; how she had been carried to the
+penitentiary in the "Black Maria," with her mother shackled to another
+convict; how every night she slept in the narrow, dark, foul cell,
+barred and locked; how she ate the prison food, and remained all day
+behind gray walls, without seeing the sun or the sky or any
+flowers--only striped convicts, matrons and steel bars.
+
+The innocent child must have seen all these strange happenings, and
+wondered what it all meant. And some day, when she is grown to
+womanhood, or motherhood, she will remember it all, she will know that
+she lived with her mother in a prison. She will recall the infamy, the
+degradation--and the shame of it will be branded on her soul as long as
+she lives.
+
+
+XIII
+
+Never a month passes but some convict is brought up to the hospital to
+be kept under observation to determine whether he is insane or faking
+insanity.
+
+The warden and the keepers always suspect prisoners of faking sickness
+or feigning insanity. As a rule the convicts do not like to stay very
+long in the hospital, as they are not allowed to smoke, and the time is
+very slow and tedious without any kind of work.
+
+A small, stocky, bearded, wild-looking Italian was brought over from the
+Tombs before his trial. He would not touch food, and the Tombs keepers
+were afraid that he might die on their hands.
+
+It took six men and one doctor, sitting on his arms, legs and stomach,
+to feed him a glass of milk by a rubber tube through his nostrils. It
+was a nauseating performance, and luckily it was not repeated.
+
+We have to dress and undress him every morning and night. About six
+o'clock every morning he starts walking up and down from the bathroom to
+the bay window, a distance of about twenty-five paces; and he continues
+it all day long, without rest or pause, until nine o'clock at night.
+Every fifteen minutes or so he calls out in a sing-song, southern
+dialect: "Oh! Giorgio Washington! Warden of this great prison! My dear
+wife! My beautiful little children!" And then he looks up at the clock
+and adds: "And the Holy Ghost of the clock!"
+
+After he has been put to bed he covers his head with the bed sheets, but
+every hour he sticks his head out and like a cuckoo bird in a Swiss
+clock he repeats his monotonous story.
+
+Everybody is kept awake, the patients as well as the keepers. The first
+night an old keeper who was on watch tried to hush him up, but without
+success; so he stood at the head of the bed watching for the moment when
+the man would uncover his head again and sing out.
+
+We waited breathlessly, looking forward to the expected minute. Suddenly
+the head appeared and the old keeper swiftly hit it a stinging whack
+with a wet towel, which cut the "Giorgio Washington" in two; the head
+went right back under the bed sheets for the rest of the night.
+
+After two weeks the man was finally sent back to the Tombs. Although he
+had eaten only once in that time, it took half a dozen sturdy men to
+dress him up and turn him over to the sheriff.
+
+Once in a moment of lucidity he asked me to get him some food, for which
+he was willing to pay. Then he begged me to write to his wife, and when
+the letter was written and addressed, he became mad again and tore it to
+little bits, and resumed his peripatetic, insane round.
+
+
+A young Pole, about twenty-five years old, is brought over from the
+workhouse. His face is blue and his lips are bleeding from blows. We
+have to dress and undress him also like a child. Whenever food is
+brought, and he is told to eat, he weeps; whenever anybody speaks to him
+he weeps; and he whines and carries on like a frightened baby in a
+strange place. He has the body of a powerful longshoreman and the
+mentality of a new born baby.
+
+There is a convict here afflicted with suicidal mania. Those in the
+hospital who are not insane have been told to watch him and prevent him
+from harming himself. He is the same man who tried to drown himself by
+jumping into the river. We have to keep the medicine closet locked and
+the bread knife hidden.
+
+One night he waited until everybody was asleep, then, sneaking into the
+bathroom, he took a bottle of medicine which had been left standing on
+top of the ice box, and gulped a great quantity before the bottle was
+torn from his lips. He was quite sick for two days. Luckily the bottle
+only contained "Cascara Sagrada," a powerful cathartic.
+
+Another time he tried even to push the razor into his throat while a
+convict barber was shaving him. And yet, every time the barred door is
+locked or unlocked, he seems to be in mortal fear that somebody is
+coming to shoot him.
+
+The other evening he sat near me while I was reading and suddenly he
+leaned over and, with quivering nostrils and in a hoarse terrified
+whisper, asked me, in German, if I was his friend.
+
+"Certainly," I answered. "What can I do for you?"
+
+"They are going to shoot me to-night!" he said. "Get me the bread knife
+so that I can cut my throat, or some poison to kill myself."
+
+I tried to pacify him, but he was in a state of abject terror. So,
+thinking it best to do so, I offered him what he imagined to be poison.
+He drank it quickly and with great relish, waiting impatiently, with
+gleaming eyes and a sickly, malicious grin, for the death that was to
+come. But death did not come; the medicine was only a strong dose of
+salts. This second cathartic potion cured him effectively of his
+suicidal mania, for thus he came finally to the conclusion that all the
+alleged poisons in the hospital were only snares and delusions.
+
+After a few months two men with papers came over from the asylum of
+Matteawan and plied him with questions, his answers to which one of the
+men wrote down. The poor German cobbler was scared stiff, answering the
+queries as if his life depended on his replies.
+
+Among other things, he was asked why he had jumped into the river.
+
+"To learn shwimming," was his quick retort.
+
+While we were getting him ready to be taken to the insane asylum he was
+blubbering and sputtering, frightened and inarticulate; and the tears
+streamed down his round, fat, childish face.
+
+
+XIV
+
+The hospital has become a sort of observatory for the insane. But all
+the convicts who show signs of insanity are not brought up to the
+hospital.
+
+Confinement in the cells without work or exercise from Saturday
+afternoon to Monday morning, and the punishment in the "cooler," are
+responsible for most of the cases of insanity.
+
+When the supposedly insane convicts do not try to commit suicide, or do
+not keep the prison section awake at night by their yells, they are
+usually kept in solitary confinement in a cell, sometimes for weeks at a
+time, until at last they are visited by doctors and declared insane.
+
+An Italian peddler who claimed to have been sentenced unjustly for
+buying stolen copper wire, was found within a few weeks after his
+arrival at the island with two tin cups in his cell. One cup had been
+left behind by a released convict, the other belonged to him. Although
+he could not have known of the infraction of the rules, he was dragged
+to the wall by a keeper. When the warden came to dispense "justice," he
+heard the keeper's story and then asked the prisoner to explain. The man
+tried to explain in his broken English that he had found the cup in his
+cell; but the warden cut the gordian knot impatiently by saying: "None
+of your damned excuses! Two days in the cooler!"
+
+The result can be imagined. The unfortunate peddler, frantic already
+from the idea of having been unjustly sentenced, and worried sick over
+the fate of his helpless wife and children, could not stand this other
+bolt from the sky; this punishment for something he did not understand,
+in the form of terrible torture in a pitch dark cell, without food or
+water, for an infraction of unknown rules; and he broke down completely
+under the strain. When he came out of the "cooler" he was, as the keeper
+declared, "completely bug-house."
+
+For some time we were kept busy watching the peddler; even his shoes had
+to be taken from under his bed as he tried to knock the heels into his
+skull.
+
+Much to my dismay, I was put to sleep near his bed. Half a dozen times
+he tried to strangle himself, and on the morning of his release, while
+I was asleep with my back to him, he jumped on my bed like a cat, and
+with his two powerful hands tried to choke me to death. Convicts came to
+my rescue; and when he was asked the reason for his attempt on my life,
+he calmly declared that it was because I had signed the warrant for his
+death at nine o'clock in the morning.
+
+When we took him downstairs later, he refused to change his striped suit
+for his street clothes, and shouted that he had made up his mind to die
+in the "cooler" at nine o'clock. His wife had to be brought over from
+the 54th Street side, and she induced him to dress and go home.
+
+A religious maniac was put under our care a week before his release. His
+particular delusion was that he was preaching in the desert. When a
+keeper approached to silence him, he lifted his right arm and, with eyes
+popping out of their sockets and a terrified look on his face, he
+shouted in a stentorian voice: "Vade retro satanas!" ("Get thee behind
+me, Satan!") "I say, for it is written, thou shalt worship the Lord thy
+God, and Him only shalt thou serve!"
+
+In his sane moments he was silent and morose; and when told about his
+strange behaviour, he answered that he knew by the sudden rising of heat
+to his head when a fit was coming.
+
+His religious sermons, which kept us awake several hours in the night,
+were interrupted by excursions under beds and tables, while he barked
+like a dog at any one who tried to stop him. He was then impersonating
+the champion bulldog, Rodney Stone.
+
+Another addition to our collection of the insane was a giant negro; but
+fortunately the expression of his derangement was only before meals,
+when he knelt at the table, saying grace, but refusing all food.
+
+Even Matteawan sent us a man who was supposed to be cured. He was a
+muscular, low-browed German sailor who spoke bad, ungrammatical German
+and worse English. An accident to his leg brought him upstairs, and when
+the doctor undressed him we saw that his whole body was covered with
+blue and red tattoos, primitive and childish drawings of nude figures,
+which reminded me of some of Matisse's masterpieces.
+
+He asked us every few hours in a terrified whisper if we did not see the
+furniture and the walls rock as if in an earthquake. At night he would
+point a long finger to the ceiling, where he claimed to see a small
+opening out of which a keeper thrust his head, abusing him with vile
+names, and shouting that in a short time he would be electrocuted.
+
+Otherwise he was inoffensive; and sometimes he would amuse us by
+relating his adventures with the women in Matteawan.
+
+Like most insane men, he slept very little, sitting up in his bed all
+night, holding two crutches tightly clutched, on the alert for the
+keeper who was going to electrocute him.
+
+But an unwise threat to brain Richard, the assistant, deprived him of
+the necessary but dangerous crutches.
+
+
+XV
+
+Another patient was sent up by the doctor. He seemed so sick and weak it
+appeared a wonder that he could still walk. He was a poor Jew, suffering
+from stomach trouble. Emaciated, yellow, with an expression of intense
+suffering on his face, which was deeply furrowed by wrinkles, with a
+beard a week old, and his long, pointed nose, he looked like a sick
+vulture.
+
+When he begged for special food, the orderly sarcastically offered him
+the choice between filet mignon with potatoes, or cutlets with French
+peas. The doctor, however, realized that unless he was put on a special
+diet, the man would die on his hands.
+
+He had been sentenced to two months in the penitentiary for stealing
+two packages of cigarettes, and the judge did not realize that it was
+his death sentence. The tenacity of the man in clinging to life was
+amazing; it exemplified anew the remarkable vitality of his race.
+
+He was always disobeying the doctor's orders. He tried to get up from
+his bed one afternoon, but he fell, and the bed pan, with all its
+contents, emptied over him and all over the floor. I ran to assist him,
+but--I was never well in prison--the stench was so overpowering that I
+became sick and hesitated for a moment, and had to turn away. Two
+convicts who had joined me saw my sickly face and smilingly said: "Never
+mind, boss; you go to the window to get some fresh air. We'll clean up
+the mess for you."
+
+Everybody wondered how the poor man had managed to keep a flicker of
+life in a body which was mere bone and skin.
+
+One night in my sleep I imagined that I had heard him call. As I sat up
+in my cot I heard his rattling, hoarse whisper calling the night
+orderly: "Oh, Mr----, please give me some water! A glass of water! I am
+dying!"
+
+The orderly, who had been sleeping with his feet on the desk, woke up,
+looked towards the patient, changed the position of his feet, and
+shouted: "Ah, shut up, you kike!"
+
+I got up and brought him a glass of water. He thanked me, and whispered:
+"I am dying! I don't want to die in jail!"
+
+I tried to cheer him up with the thought that he would be released in
+two weeks; but he shook his head. Terror was written on his ghastly
+features. "Please, I don't want to die in jail," he said.
+
+They were his last words.
+
+
+XVI
+
+A boy with blond hair, blue eyes, pink and white as a girl, modest as a
+nun, gentlemanly and soft spoken as Lord Fauntleroy, came upstairs to be
+operated on for a tumor. A sentence of two and a half years had been
+inflicted on him for selling cocaine. This deadly drug was furnished to
+him by a friend once when he was suffering from a cold. He did not know
+what it was, but he felt a wonderful exhilaration and a new strength
+come upon him, so that his illness seemed to vanish. The reaction was
+terrific, but he became addicted to the drug; and as he could not afford
+to buy the stuff, he began selling it, both for the profit and to be
+able to acquire it. His youth, and his already weak will, made him an
+easy prey to the evil company into which he was soon thrown. His father
+and mother and sisters were respectable and law abiding people of the
+middle class, but they did not seem able to cope with the peculiar
+conditions into which he had fallen.
+
+Now that he is behind the bars he seems to realize the danger of his
+weakness, and he speaks of going back home to work among his own people.
+
+After he was well again they sent him downstairs to work in the machine
+shop. Within two months he was back again in the hospital to be operated
+on for another tumor.
+
+What a transformation! Instead of the gentle, well-mannered, repentant
+young sinner, we found a pale-faced young tough, with a sneering grin,
+walking with stooped shoulders, chin forward, arms curved, closed fists,
+in imitation of "gorillas" looking for trouble.
+
+In his speech there was also a great change. Where there had been little
+personality or color, there was now a picturesque wealth of blasphemies;
+names and adjectives and punctuation were expressed by short but
+intensely vile words.
+
+When we remarked at the astonishing change, he answered, speaking
+through one side of his mouth: "Ah, quit your kiddin'! You talk like a
+preacher. I ain't no sissy no more. When I gets out o' here I'll pull
+something big that'll knock you stiff. You get me?" And he spat sideways
+on the floor in supreme contempt. But when we laughed at his pretence
+and strutting, he blushed in anger and disappointment.
+
+It seems that when he was sent downstairs after his first operation he
+was "doubled up" with a notorious burglar, who undertook to educate him
+and train him, with a view to using the lad to assist him in his work
+after his release. A few weeks later his mentor joined him in the
+hospital, but unlike his talkative pupil, who was quickly ordered to
+"shut his mug," he was reserved and secretive as to his life and plans.
+
+But one evening at dusk, as we were both watching the New York skyline
+from the barred windows, the reserve gave way, and the cracksman told
+me of his life.
+
+It was one of those rare moments when even a strong and evil spirit will
+waver and doubt; when his heart will overflow with disgust and the
+hopelessness of his earthly quest. The attitude of contrition dissipated
+like smoke when he was asked if it was not possible to make a living in
+an honest way.
+
+"Nothing doing," he said. "The bulls won't give me a chance. They'll
+spot me and job me if I don't put up the dough. It's a fight to a
+finish. At the other end there is either Sing Sing or the death chair.
+There ain't no hope. I'll live and die a crook."
+
+Two years later I read that my friend the cracksman and his pals had
+been caught trying to blow up a safe in a most daring and scientific
+manner. And the whole gang was sentenced to Sing Sing for a long term.
+
+
+XVII
+
+A Jewish pickpocket is one of the patients who is under suspicion of
+faking. The young doctor suggested my watching him, and when I reported,
+he declared that he was satisfied in his suspicion, but did not send him
+to his cell at once, as he would have been punished.
+
+Meanwhile he helps and amuses us with stories of his checkered career.
+At first I could not make out what was the matter with him. He couldn't
+walk any distance without jerking his head backwards. I thought he
+suffered from some peculiar nervous trouble in the muscles of the neck.
+When I asked him about it he confessed that it was a habit formed by
+years of unconscious but very useful watching to see if he was followed
+by detectives. Even in the hospital, when he knew that he was not
+followed, he would throw his head in quick glances backwards.
+
+He told us that the last time he had been caught by the detectives he
+was taken to headquarters and given a taste of the third degree. As he
+wouldn't confess, the brave detectives, wearing masks, beat him until he
+was insensible, and even broke two of his front teeth. The generous head
+of the detectives promised that if he did not make a complaint to the
+newspapers he would see to it that he would be sent for only a year to
+the penitentiary instead of up the river for several years.
+
+We have several pickpockets in the hospital. One of them has grown a
+beard; he is a Jew, tall, thin but muscular, and when he walks to the
+bathroom in his night shirt, he seems like a caricature of one of the
+prophets of his faith.
+
+He volunteered to rub sulphur ointment on my body as the doctor had
+ordered. The strength of his muscles, and the vise-like grip of his
+hands, was almost beyond belief. When he took hold of my arm to massage
+it I felt that he could easily have broken it with a quick blow; but he
+was very gentle and kind withal.
+
+A red-headed consumptive, who killed his wife and child in a fit of
+anger and jealousy, was sent over from the Tombs while waiting for
+trial. He ordered me in a peremptory manner to do something for him. I
+repeated to him the lecture I had read to the bulldog negro, but he lost
+his temper, and began foaming at the mouth and abusing me in a violent
+and insane fit of anger.
+
+I did not answer, as I felt that he was not responsible for his actions;
+and left him alone. Fifteen minutes later he came into the bathroom,
+where I was cleaning some medicine bottles. I fully expected to have to
+defend myself against an attack. Instead of that, however, he began
+apologizing for his unwarranted behaviour, adding that when he lost his
+temper he did not know what he was saying or doing; that anger went to
+his head like poison and completely overcame his reason. He begged me
+to forgive him and accept his apology.
+
+This is the third time that a convict has offered an apology for having
+lost his temper and used profane language to me.
+
+I asked one of the convicts who had apologized if he thought I had kept
+silent because I was afraid of him. "No," he said. "The man who loses
+his temper is the one who is afraid. The one who never becomes angry is
+never afraid; he is the better man of the two."
+
+
+XVIII
+
+I had been three months in the hospital before I began to suspect that I
+would never get over my skin disease so long as I wore the tattered and
+patched striped trousers which had been handed to me on my arrival.
+Therefore I begged the hospital keeper for permission to get a new or at
+least a clean pair. He told me to go downstairs to the head keeper's
+desk. The reception I got from the head keeper was not surprising, but
+his sudden burst of anger and his intemperate language puzzled me not a
+little. As soon as I approached him he turned around sharply and
+shouted: "What the h---- do _you_ want?"
+
+Before I had time to complete my request he interrupted me, and shaking
+his fist at me, yelled: "A pair of trousers! What do you think of that
+dude in the hospital wanting a new pair of trousers! Go on back to your
+hospital, you dirty bum. You ----! Get out!"
+
+I turned back slowly without answering, trying meanwhile to puzzle out
+how I could represent two such different social extremes in the mind of
+the irate keeper--a dude and a dirty bum!
+
+When I related the incident to my hospital keeper, he shook his head and
+declared the head keeper an uncouth, stupid animal, and promised to
+speak about it to the Deputy. Next day a runner brought me a brand new
+pair of striped trousers, which looked quite becoming and a good fit
+after the rags I had worn for so long.
+
+
+XIX
+
+A great many doctors come to visit the hospital. Sometimes the young
+students from the city hospital, then the aristocratic and famous
+surgeons who operate on desperate cases, specialists, all grades and
+classes of physicians, enter accompanied by the little doctor who lives
+upstairs on the top floor. His name is B. Davidson. He is so small that
+he seems almost a schoolboy; his eye-glasses are the only elderly thing
+about him. But he is very efficient, scrupulous and--a marvelous thing
+in prison--humane in his treatment of the convicts.
+
+The warden and the keepers hamper him continually in his work, as he
+will not listen to their opinion about convicts who, according to them,
+are all fakers. They have the temerity to place their ignorance, and
+their hatred of the prisoners, against the professional knowledge and
+humanity of the doctor.
+
+The boy who had a tumor on his back was kept a week locked in a cell,
+and was not allowed to see a doctor, because the keeper claimed that he
+was faking. The doctor laughed when he related the story. "Imagine
+anybody faking a tumor the size of a cocoanut!"
+
+
+In the opinion of most prison keepers, every man who reports on the sick
+list is an incipient faker. The sick man has to inform his own keeper
+and he is then reported to the head keeper. Should they diagnose the
+case as a fake, then the prisoner is shoved back gently to the line; but
+should the convict in spite of their verdict insist that he is sick, he
+is locked up in a cell to get well without a doctor, or to rot in it,
+until even the doctor's help is of no avail.
+
+Most cases of consumption, paralysis, insanity, or any internal
+disorder, are considered fake cases. Only when a man breaks a limb or
+splits his head open, or when some disease "breaks out" on him, is he
+believed to be sincere.
+
+The sturdy young sailor who had worked at my side in the tailor shop was
+brought to the hospital. He was so changed that I hardly recognized him.
+I had to ask him his name, and if he remembered having worked in the
+same shop with me, before I became convinced that he was the same man.
+
+They kept him locked up in a cell a whole week before the doctor was
+permitted to visit him, and then they discovered that he was suffering
+from typhoid fever. Meanwhile he had been eating food from tin plates
+which were washed in the kitchen.
+
+A convict who was in perfect agony from neuralgia of the teeth was
+visited twice. As no cavity could be discovered, they punished him by
+extracting forcibly three perfectly healthy teeth from his jaw.
+
+This incident was related as a great joke by a young assistant to a
+doctor, to two companions who were preparing a patient for an operation.
+
+
+A pair of prison-made shoes, with a nail sticking up inside the heel,
+was forced on a new-comer by the head keeper. When he protested, he was
+abused, insulted and threatened with punishment if he did not put on
+that particular pair of shoes. For two days the unfortunate man hobbled
+about, working in the kitchen, trying as best he could to ease the
+intense pain on his heel inflicted by a rusty nail. His foot began
+swelling and, made desperate by the pain, he finally refused to work
+until he had seen a doctor. When the doctor examined him, he discovered
+that he was suffering from blood poisoning of the foot, and he had to
+be kept over two months in the hospital.
+
+A boy was discovered, by accident, working in the bakery suffering from
+a loathsome venereal disease.
+
+The young doctor could not stand the persecution of the system, and he
+left in disgust.
+
+The new doctor is a sallow-faced, green-eyed individual, evidently a
+dope fiend. He leaves morphine hypodermic syringes lying all over the
+place; and any one who wants an injection can have it for the asking.
+Luckily for us, he did not stay very long.
+
+One night we were kept awake by heart-rending, piercing howls, which
+came from the apartment occupied by the doctor on the top floor. He had,
+as we found out later, taken an overdose of morphine.
+
+Next day he appeared in the hospital, staggering sideways, breathing
+heavily and with a hollow sound, like a damaged bellows. His body shook
+as if with the palsy, his hands trembled as they groped for support;
+and all the while he was moaning, whining, grunting. He fell into a
+sitting posture on the floor, and began catching imaginary flies on his
+sleeves.
+
+We had to carry him upstairs and put him to bed. He went away the next
+day.
+
+The doctor who succeeded him is a young man who seems sympathetic and
+efficient, but he has to keep his job, and so he takes orders from the
+consulting keepers, who diagnose cases before he is allowed to see them
+or to send them to the hospital.
+
+
+XX
+
+The conversation at our meals in the hospital table d'hôte, although
+carried on in an undertone, is very often amusing and enlivened by quite
+witty repartee. The table manners of the men are not as bad as might be
+expected from the motley crowd which adorns our board. All the
+nationalities and races and classes of this wide world have been waited
+upon by us: negroes, Chinamen, Mexicans, Slavs, Italians, Jews,
+Hungarians, Arabs, Syrians, Hindus; members of all the different
+professions, such as waiters, lawyers, hold-up men, capitalists, fortune
+tellers, doctors, sneak thieves, bankers, bums, dentists, burglars, "sky
+pilots," grafters, butchers, gamblers, street car conductors, confidence
+men, tailors, insane men, tramps, crooks, horse poisoners, saloon
+keepers--everybody and everything!
+
+In a restaurant, in a public café, in a barroom, one meets or sees many
+people whose profession or real status is a mystery, and often a secret;
+but here everybody's profession, character, antecedents, sentence,
+criminal record, are known, judged and commented upon. Here nobody can
+put on airs because he has a fat bank account, finer clothes, more
+expensive jewelry, better family connections, or greater political
+influence. A man is judged by his character, his personality, his
+attitude toward the prisoners and the keepers. This is one place where
+fine feathers do not make fine birds.
+
+The appetite of the men, with the exception of the sick, is always of
+the best. They are very particular about the quantity as well as the
+quality of the food. There is no reason to complain about it, except the
+coffee, which is served downstairs, and which is no coffee at all, but
+roasted bread crust which spoils the water in which it is soaked. Many a
+man would prefer pure water to the unsweetened, light-brown mixture,
+called "bootleg." It isn't even near coffee, but it is insidiously named
+"coffee," so as to prove to the public that the convicts are pampered
+and spoiled.
+
+One day a member of the Prison Commission who was visiting the
+penitentiary picked up a tin cup of "coffee" which was standing in the
+mess hall, where the convicts were watching the visitors testing the
+food which had been picked out for that purpose. The Commissioner drank
+half a mouthful of the "bootleg," and then, with a wry face, swiftly
+spat it on the floor. The convicts did not laugh; they were too well
+disciplined for that; but an almost imperceptible whispering titter
+swept all over the mess hall like a June breeze wafting over a wheat
+field.
+
+
+XXI
+
+The other day a man was brought up to the hospital to have his broken
+arm bandaged. He had got up in the mess hall and started to voice a
+protest against the rotten meat. Two keepers jumped on him with their
+sticks and beat him until he was insensible. Later the "Dep" came
+upstairs to look him over, and said: "So you think you are a tough guy!"
+The man kept silent; but later he was sent to the "cooler."
+
+There is an old Italian tailor in the hospital who has become popular
+because he mends our socks and makes pockets in our trousers. He eats
+enormous quantities of food, and after he is through he wipes his mouth
+with the crust of bread which does service for him as a napkin!
+
+A dope fiend, who had kept us awake five nights: in succession, was
+allowed to sit at the table after he had broken his fast with milk. He
+was warned to eat sparingly. One Friday, as fish was served and I knew
+only two pieces had been eaten, I was wondering where it all had gone
+when I emptied the dishes in the garbage can. Out of sixteen pieces of
+fish that had been served, only two could be accounted for. I turned to
+look over the room, and I noticed our dope fiend still chewing away at
+something. Then I noticed the shirt round his belt bulging in an unusual
+fashion across his very lean body; and I was surprised to discover what
+had happened to the missing portions of fish.
+
+Not satisfied with having eaten two pieces of fish, our dope fiend had
+stuffed the other fourteen pieces inside his shirt, so as to make sure
+that he would have enough food to last him through the night.
+
+For five consecutive nights he had kept us awake with his moaning and
+raving, sitting upright in his bed, swinging his body back and forth
+pendulum fashion. He could not keep anything in his stomach, either food
+or water. He begged piteously for an injection of morphine, but the new
+doctor was obdurate; he said that it was either cure or kill. When the
+morphine was eliminated he became himself again, and he was cured of his
+habit. Some morphine fiends die from the stoppage of the supply, but
+many of them are effectively cured.
+
+A bald-headed, consumptive negro keeps us in constant laughter--when
+prison lets us laugh--with wonderful and never ending stories of his
+adventurous life. Even the doctor will stand by the hour listening to
+his quaint speech and stories. Although he is an old rascal and an old
+offender, one cannot help liking him for his cheerful, gay attitude
+towards life.
+
+He related how one time, after serving a term in the reformatory, he
+went back to his wife in New York. She lived in an apartment on the
+ground floor, and she seemed to be happy to see him again. She inquired
+about his health and asked about his future prospects. While they were
+talking he heard somebody opening the front door with a latch key. He
+became quite nervous, and asked his wife who it was that dared to come
+in without ringing the bell. "Dat's de husband I'se married while you
+was in jail; and he's a big black coon," she said.
+
+He jumped hastily through the window, he confessed to us, so as not to
+embarrass husband number two, and leaving behind a grip with his
+clothes. He came back next night to get his belongings, and he used the
+window this time as a means of entrance. But fate was against him. As
+he emerged from the window again he fell into the arms of a watchful
+policeman, who promptly arrested him. Being an ex-convict, he was
+sentenced to a year in the penitentiary, as he said, for stealing his
+own pants!
+
+
+A tall, blond Pole behaved in such a disgusting manner at the table that
+the keeper ordered him back to his bed.
+
+The first two weeks that he was in bed we could not induce him to get up
+to perform the most normal animal functions. But, as there did not seem
+to be anything the matter with him, he was finally forced to get up and
+go to the bathroom.
+
+For more than two weeks we had plied him with questions--myself, the
+doctors, and all the convicts who knew different languages. He looked at
+us with his big, blue eyes, shaking his head as if he did not understand
+what we were talking about. We finally came to the conclusion that he
+either spoke some unknown language, or that maybe he was deaf and mute.
+
+One day Richard, the young assistant, made him get up, but instead of
+walking, he crept on all fours to the bathroom. Then he got up like a
+human being and started drinking water from the faucet. Richard took him
+to task for his uncleanliness. He said to him: "Wash your face, you
+dirty pig!" And to the utter amazement of Richard, the supposed deaf
+mute turned round angrily and said, in perfect English: "You go to hell,
+will you!" A few weeks later he was taken to Matteawan.
+
+Later I gathered from another Pole who had talked to him and succeeded
+in making him answer, that he had been a petty officer in the Russian
+navy, and that he had mutinied, and later had succeeded in escaping to
+America.
+
+He had hit upon the idea of feigning insanity in order to foil the
+vigilant Russian secret service agents, who would be on the lookout for
+him upon his release from the Island; he feared that they would create
+an opportunity to "shanghai" him on board a Russian ship, and he knew
+that they would hang him if he ever was returned to the fatherland. He
+had been sentenced to sixty days on the Island for vagrancy.
+
+
+XXII
+
+Protestant clergymen, Catholic priests, Rabbis, Sisters of Mercy,
+missionaries and even a Theosophist preacher, visit the prison and the
+hospital regularly. Saturday afternoon is a very busy time for the "sky
+pilots."
+
+One "sky pilot" comes only during the lunch hour and, walking to the
+busy table, invariably asks: "Well, boys, how goes it?" He has never
+been known to change his query in years--and that is the only service he
+has ever done for the souls of the convicts.
+
+A tall, thin, spectacled, Protestant missionary devotes a great deal of
+his time to what he calls "saving souls from eternal damnation"; his way
+of doing this mysterious thing is by leaving tracts on our beds. They
+contain startling headlines, such, for instance, as this: "Be with
+Jesus. He is your only pal!"
+
+When I laughed at one of his quotations from the Bible, which I claimed
+was incorrect, he retorted by saying that my spirit was full of unclean
+devils. I answered by saying that I would rather be a real devil than a
+false saint of his type, and he at once proved the truth of my assertion
+by calling me unseemly and unchristian epithets, greatly to the
+merriment of the listening convicts and the keeper. I told him to go
+away from me and let me alone, but fifteen minutes later he came back
+and apologized for his offensive and undignified behaviour, adding that
+he had looked up the quotation in a Bible at the keeper's desk and to
+his great astonishment found that he had been mistaken.
+
+Although I am not of his faith, the Rabbi comes to speak to me every
+week. He has taken a great interest in my case, and he offers his
+services to get me a pardon, deploring my attitude in wasting time
+behind the bars and in the vain hope that my appeal will be successful.
+
+But he is surprised when I inform him that I do not expect to succeed in
+my appeal, and that I have made up my mind not to accept any favors from
+the parties who were responsible for my prosecution and imprisonment, so
+that I can keep my hands free to act in case there are further
+revelations.
+
+A few weeks later another Rabbi takes his place. A kinder and gentler
+soul it would be difficult to meet.
+
+The Sisters of Mercy appear every month or so; they are loved and
+venerated by the convicts. I have noticed that, unlike the other
+missionaries who take care of our spiritual welfare, the Sisters never
+ask a convict: "What crime did you commit?" but always: "How long must
+you serve?" "Have you mother, sister, wife, or children?" "What can we
+do to help them?"
+
+The Sisters never argue, discuss or theorize about religion, but they
+help the convicts in the only practical, useful and efficient ways; they
+visit and appeal to judges and District Attorneys; they call on the
+families of the convicts and their friends; they furnish money to needy
+relatives and to the men themselves when they come penniless out of
+prison.
+
+The Protestant clergymen, the Catholic priests, the Rabbis, the
+missionaries, as a rule talk only to the men of their own faith. But the
+Sisters of Mercy speak to everybody, no matter to what race or faith
+they may belong. They never inquire into a man's crimes; all they ask is
+to be told of his troubles and worries and to be allowed to do what they
+can to relieve them.
+
+One of the Sisters is said to be responsible for the elimination of
+stripes in Sing Sing.
+
+
+XXIII
+
+Convicts have a cunning and peculiar way of revenging themselves on bad
+and cruel keepers. When one of that type is put on night duty, following
+a prearranged sign the whole section suddenly starts a tremendous
+hullabaloo. Several hundred convicts, acting in unison, begin yelling,
+cat-calling, grunting, roaring, whistling, stamping their feet, beating
+the bars of their cages with tin cups and pail covers. The enraged
+keeper jumps up and down the tiers in a vain effort to catch the arch
+offenders, but on his coming a signal is passed to the whole tier, which
+suddenly becomes silent, the other sections in the meanwhile increasing
+the noise and disturbance until the warden appears. His presence seems
+only to put more zest, energy and lung power into the demonstration.
+Revolvers are fired to intimidate the men and they are threatened with
+dire punishment, but nothing seems to be able to quell the rebellion,
+and it is continued every night until the offending keeper is shifted.
+
+These prearranged, noisy riots are rare and as a rule they occur only in
+cases when bad food or a series of persecutions have goaded the
+prisoners to the only real expression of protest which can be effective.
+
+One night during the Hudson-Fulton celebration in New York, when all the
+city was gaily illuminated, and all the bridges were picked out in
+electric lights, and music and shouts could be heard in the distance, a
+rumpus started on a magnificent scale after the convicts had been locked
+up in their cells.
+
+The whole prison seemed literally to have gone insane. The pandemonium
+let loose was so terrific that it could be heard both from the New York
+and the Brooklyn sides of the river. The warden and the keepers were
+perfectly helpless; they could not subdue the prisoners, who kept up
+their infernal racket for hour after hour, and stopped only from
+exhaustion, when there was no more lung power to draw on. This noisy and
+turbulent protest of a whole prison defying one of the strictest rules
+of jail law was a strange psychological curiosity; a mad, reckless,
+stentorian rebellion against the rules of silence when the great
+metropolis was heard noisily rejoicing across the river.
+
+
+Prisoners are very quick to find out a bad or a good keeper, an honest
+or a grafting keeper.
+
+Humane keepers always and invariably get the best results. They maintain
+discipline with very little effort, and the prisoners themselves see to
+it that the attitude of such keepers is not changed or embittered by
+malicious and silly conduct on their part or that of their companions.
+The foul-mouthed, brutal keeper never seems to be able to maintain
+discipline, and when he revenges himself by inflicting unjust
+punishments the men retaliate by all kinds of persecutions.
+
+An unjust and exceedingly brutal keeper was waylaid one night on his way
+home by some released convicts, who "beat him up" in such a manner that
+he was sent to a hospital for almost a month.
+
+The Jewish and Italian convicts are often victims of the persecutions of
+some keepers, who heap ridicule and injustice and punishment upon them.
+The "guineas," the "wops," the "sheenies" and "kikes," find no mercy at
+the hands of these keepers, who consider men of these races as inferior,
+fit only to be brutalized, slowly but surely, into superior races.
+
+An Irish keeper said jokingly to an Italian convict who could not
+understand something in connection with his work:
+
+"Let an Irishman show you. You dagoes don't know nothing. How does it
+come that they pick Popes from among the wops, I wonder?"
+
+"Yes, sir," answered the Italian, "and never in two thousand years did
+they pick out an Irish Pope."
+
+
+XXIV
+
+The outlook from the windows of our hospital is a source of never ending
+interest.
+
+We can watch the grass grow and the trees, the birds hunting for food,
+the hospital cat waiting patiently under a bush for a stray sparrow, the
+orderly of the warden, haughty and always in a hurry, followed by a
+yellow dog. Another orderly is a red-headed young man who is called a
+"sugar man." He and two other men are the "goats" for the higher
+officials of the Sugar Trust.
+
+We watch the visitors come in from the boats; the doctors, the
+officials, the prisoners arriving escorted by the sheriffs. The average
+prisoner is well dressed; some of them are quite dandified in their
+appearance, while others are poorly dressed, some of them even without
+an overcoat in winter time. One day a bum came, escorted by a sheriff,
+all alone, with a straw hat, at the height of the winter season.
+
+The other morning a big, square-shouldered tramp was following the
+sheriff in a lazy, shuffling manner. There was no hat on his long,
+dishevelled mop of reddish hair; his beard was of enormous proportions;
+his face was brick red, as well as the hands, from dirt and exposure to
+the air. A coat and trousers which almost dropped from his body, so
+ragged were they; no shirt, no underwear, and a pair of shoes through
+which his toes peeped smilingly, completed his wardrobe. A sudden gust
+of wind would have divested him of all covering.
+
+Half an hour later I happened to pass near the head keeper's desk, and I
+could hardly believe my eyes when I beheld that tramp. In his case the
+transformation was highly creditable to prison methods. They had clipped
+his hair, cut his beard, given him a bath, covered him with a striped
+shirt and a striped suit, and he was standing in brand-new, prison-made
+shoes. He looked indeed like a gentleman as compared with his former
+wild, dirty, disreputable and pitiful appearance.
+
+On Sunday droves of visitors come to the island on the 23rd Street boat.
+The women are more numerous than the men; poorly dressed women are in
+the majority; often flashily dressed women with expensive fur coats and
+stylish hats are seen elbowing old and homely women wearing shawls and
+with babies on their arms. Almost everybody carries packages of fruit to
+the inmates. Little boys and girls often accompany the women, and
+handkerchiefs are often raised to wipe away tears. It is a tragic,
+fateful, unhappy procession.
+
+
+XXV
+
+The first and the last week seem longest in the term of imprisonment.
+During the rest of the time the hours pass in swift succession, as the
+work and the regular hours help to shorten the time; there is a spirit
+of patience, and the mind becomes more and more introspective and
+philosophical.
+
+But in the last week all the thoughts, the plans, the ambitions, the
+discoveries of a new future, seem to be concentrated. The minutes drag
+by with a laborious and torpid slowness, and there is an intensity of
+time which seems to crowd sixty hours into one single hour by the clock.
+The ordinary patient, often of a cheerful habit of mind, is of a sudden
+transformed into a cranky, impatient, unruly, violent attitude.
+
+During that last week I very nearly got into trouble, for the first time
+in my ten months of imprisonment "with good behaviour;" and this when an
+impertinent answer might have kept me two months longer within this
+barred prison.
+
+A keeper known and hated for his brutal and insulting attitude towards
+the prisoners was relieving our own hospital keeper during the lunch
+hour. He was watching the prisoners file into the room at the opposite
+end of the hospital to wait for the arrival of the dentist. A belated
+man came in holding a handkerchief close to his mouth as if he were
+suffering from an agonizing toothache.
+
+The keeper spoke: "Who is that dirty bum?"
+
+"What do you mean?" I said.
+
+"I mean who is that dirty bum who just came in?" he repeated.
+
+"I don't understand you," I rejoined, angry at his remark.
+
+"I see you're rather particular about expressions," he said in a
+surprised tone.
+
+"Yes," I retorted, "and I don't see what right you have to call an
+inoffensive convict a dirty bum, when if it wasn't for us dirty bums
+you wouldn't be sitting here now."
+
+The situation was saved by an old Irish keeper who added laughingly,
+"That's right, you wouldn't be getting twenty-five per a week to keep a
+chair from flying out of a window, if it wasn't for those dirty bums."
+
+
+XXVI
+
+Only after a long while did the influence, the pernicious influx of the
+thought waves emanating from hundreds of convict minds, begin to play on
+my mind. I never imagined that convict habits and thoughts could touch
+me or have any effect on my inmost thoughts, my better self. During the
+day, in fact, when the conscious mind was active, nothing seemed to
+effect my habitual, set and crystallized character, my old trend of
+mental, moral and intellectual associations.
+
+Only in the last month, during my sleep or half-sleep, did I recognize
+the ascendency of the magnetic, unhealthy, collective thoughts of the
+prison. They arose slowly, like poisonous miasmas, insidious and
+permeating, with a persistency that amazed my startled and thoroughly
+alarmed consciousness.
+
+Thoughts, images, desires, which I had been used from my youth and all
+through my life to consider unhealthy, degenerate or simply unworthy of
+my attention, came sneaking into my subconscious mind, in the form of
+disgusting, appalling, terrifying dreams. The back yard of my mind had
+begun to register and absorb all the wretched, unclean, monstrous,
+unmentionable yearnings, desires and actions of the collective prison
+dreams; it was inhaling the moral stench which arose as from a "cloaca
+maxima."
+
+I thought of all the weak, unbalanced, receptive young minds which must
+have been corrupted by this intangible, powerful magnetism; and of how
+this unnatural, abnormal, degrading prison life began in any absorbent
+or indifferent temperament a slow corrosion and led to a complete and
+effective disruption and destruction of all moral and intellectual
+integrity.
+
+I felt as if hundreds of unspeakable and undreamed of sins, taking shape
+of gliding snakes, noiseless and black, with glittering eyes and fiery
+tongues, were descending upon me, winding round my body and my legs and
+arms, fastening their pin-like fangs in my flesh to poison my brain and
+body.
+
+And I thanked my stars and my fate and my power of will when the last
+night of my sentence arrived to relieve me of an oppressive, suffocating
+succession of nightmares.
+
+I did not sleep one solitary wink, but how rosy, exquisite,
+exhilarating, radiant, were the thoughts that filled me on that prison
+cot, how transparent those bars seemed on that last night, never to be
+forgotten, like the first night I spent in that horrible dungeon.
+
+
+XXVII
+
+I am finally called downstairs. The sun streaming through the narrow
+bars gives the gloomy prison almost a bright appearance. Hastily I put
+on my street clothes. I feel like a man putting on a strange, exotic
+costume for a fancy dress ball; the collar and necktie seem to choke me
+with a kind of joy and affection. Accompanied by my lawyer, I walk out
+of the fateful gates, and then I turn to look back, and to glance
+upwards to the hospital windows where the patients and the old keeper
+wave a friendly salute and farewell.
+
+Friends are waiting to greet me at the other side of the river. I look
+in wonder and amaze at the people in the streets. Everything is so
+interesting; the most commonplace and sordid sights are delightful and
+picturesque. The men; the women, with their wonderful clothes; the sky,
+the houses, the cars, the signs, everything, seem so novel, so friendly;
+every minute so precious, so full of surprises and possibilities.
+
+I have grown fat and pale in prison, but my spirit is as light and quick
+as the spirit of a humming bird. Everybody greets me as a traveller
+returned from a strange, unknown, and very distant land--and yet all the
+while I have been living in the very heart of the metropolis. Everybody
+seems to realize and to reassure me that the acceptance of a pardon
+would have been a grievous mistake. To refuse it meant a great
+sacrifice, but making that sacrifice has confirmed a general suspicion
+that unfair methods, dangerous to American traditions, have been used
+against me.
+
+The day of reckoning will come in time. Meanwhile, how beautiful,
+perfect, intoxicating is the sense of untrammelled liberty! It repays me
+for many a dark, tragic hour.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Modern Purgatory, by Carlo de Fornaro
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 56728 ***