The wall was some time in the building, but it seems to have been the
only thing built in the prison, work upon which was continuous and
energetic. And it was a useless work, better left undone. The warden was
proud of it, however, and there it stands.
As for the twenty-seven acre enclosure, in which the prison buildings
are, which is--according to official prognostics--to be graded, leveled,
drained, cultivated and planted till it looks like a private
millionaire's park, it is a raw, rough unsightly waste of red clay and
weeds, gouged out here and there with random and meaningless
excavations, heaped up in other places with piles of earth; diversified
in one quarter with some forlorn chicken coops and fences, made by the
voluntary and unskilled labor of one of the convicts; and adjoining
these, with the Tuberculosis Camp, a row of a dozen or more tents
mounted on wooden platforms, with little flower beds in front and
behind, and a pigeon house at one end. The only part of these grounds on
which any visible thought and labor has been expended is the baseball
diamond, adjoining the northeast corner of the wall. Here, the ground
has been leveled and smoothed over a space sufficient to include the
diamond itself, and a few yards on its south and north sides; beyond
that is waste ground, and along the northern boundary is a parapet of
earth five or six feet high, presumably made of the material scraped off
the diamond.
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