Our watches had been
taken away from us; no doubt, a prisoner might commit suicide by
sticking his watch in his windpipe, or he could bribe a guard with it to
bring him cigarette papers, or "dope." Besides, what has a man in jail
to do with time? Our warm-hearted and fatherly masters desire their
charges to exist so far as practical in a dead, unmeasured monotony,
where a minute may seem to prolong itself to the dimensions of an hour;
to feel themselves utterly severed from the world they have annoyed or
injured. That is the penitentiary ideal; but it has of late become
impossible fully to realize it. A prison will always be a prison; but at
any rate, light shall be let in on it.
Meanwhile, our cell light went out; and we waited for the dawn.
V
ROUTINE
I lay in the upper bunk. It was a six-foot drop to the cement floor
below. The mattress, though irregularly dented and bulged, was upon the
whole convex, and not over two feet wide. A vertical fence or bastion,
six or eight inches high, along the outer brink of this precipice would
have averted the danger of rolling off in the night; but nothing of the
sort had been provided. One must remember not to roll, even in the
nightmare. Convicts educate the subliminal self to a surprising degree,
and do not fall victims to this trap as often as one would expect; but
occasionally one of them forgets, and down he comes, sometimes getting
bruised only, but generally with a broken bone or so.
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