Yet these poor
wretches--they are mostly negroes--sell their brethren for a mess of
pottage of secret favors and immunities; none save the most abject would
accept such employment. Could any inspiration or procedure be more
insecure? Yet it is an essential factor in the present principle of
prison management.
The guards are, with some exceptions, such a body of men as might be
expected from their salary--seventy dollars a month, with no raise for
length of service or meritorious conduct. They cannot be rated as high
as the average police officer, and the conditions amid which they live
are so unfavorable to manly development that it is small wonder they
grow worse as they grow older in service. They either dislike the men
and use them accordingly, or they make secret compacts with them for
surreptitious favors, which undermine discipline and corrupt such morals
as prisoners may be supposed to possess. Often, however, they will
solicit favors from prisoners, and, when the latter seek some
accommodation in return, grin in their face, or austerely threaten to
report them. Their brutality is sometimes quite whimsical and
unexpected,--the outcome of some personal dislike, without bearing on
the prisoner's conduct,--though they are voluble in assigning some
alleged infraction of the rules, should a superior happen to call them
to account.
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