And I cannot find that
the law provides or intends that their suffering shall be of this kind.
Much of the insanity in the prison is due to the way they are made, or
made not, to work. There is a legend of a warden who, being unable to
keep his prisoners otherwise busy, set them to piling up paving stones
on one side of the yard, and then taking down the pile and repiling it
on the other side. After a week of this, most of them were maniacs. It
was not the severity of the labor that destroyed their minds, but the
uselessness and objectlessness of it. Sane men require reasonable
employment; idleness, or irrational work disintegrates their minds. They
want to see and to foresee intelligible results from their toil; mere
toil without such results is maddening, or it rots men's minds as scurvy
rots their bodies. The reason is, that the men are human; and if you
have hitherto supposed that convicts are not human, the insanity which
so constantly follows upon prison idleness or mis-employment should
correct you.
Others may describe the horrors, almost indescribable, of contract labor
in prisons; I saw nothing of that at Atlanta--type of another widespread
system of prison work--though I heard enough about it from men who had
undergone it in state prisons. But during the few first days of my
imprisonment, I saw a building gang at work (to call it work) upon a new
wing destined to contain dormitories for the inmates.
Pages:
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164