A prison is a prison, not a sanitarium for
diseased crooks. But if the world could hear those footfalls, and
interpret their significance, how long would prisons last? A jail at
night is a strange place--eight hundred men packed in together, each
terrifyingly alone!
Some of the earlier workers had been roused at six or five o'clock or
earlier; but for the majority the six-thirty bell was the reveille. It
screeched violently and was silent. The watching devils or the guardian
angels of the night vanished, and up got the eight hundred members of
the Gentlemen's Country Club, to live as best they might through one day
more; coughing, hawking, spitting, murmuring--but all with a sense of
repression in it, the life-sapping drug of fear in its origin, but long
since become a mechanical habit with most of them. Eight hundred
criminals, herded beneath one roof to be cured of their crimes by
indifferent or threatening and hostile task-masters and irresponsible
discipline-mongers, and by association with one another--a regimen of
hell to extirpate deviltry! The twentieth century solution of the
problem of evil, unaltered in principle after thousands of years!
Civilization has progressed wonderfully, but always with this
death-house on its back. And the death-house gets bigger and more
populous every year. Reformers, exhorters, Christian Endeavorers,
humanitarians, Salvation Armies, social reformers, penologists,
scientific experimentalists with surgical apparatus, together with
parole laws, indeterminate sentences, commutations, pardons, not to
speak of a good warden here and there and a kind guard--all toiling and
tinkering to make prisons better, to sweep them, to air them, to instil
religion and education, to supply work and exercise and to pay
wages--and all the while the tide of criminals gets larger and the
accommodations for them less adequate.
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