As a matter of fact, the community never knows anything about its prison
officials until some special scandal transpires under their
administration, or unless some heaven-sent phoenix of a warden
unaccountably manifests humane and enlightened tendencies. Their
appointment is left to the political machine, which hands it out on the
principle of what is he, or was he worth to us? As for justice and
mercy--my good sir, you seem to forget we are talking of convicted
criminals!
I affirm, however, that justice--which is intelligent mercy--is required
nowhere so urgently as with convicts; that any punishment which aims at
more than restraining convicts from practises calculated to injure their
own best interests, is a crime; and that cruelty to persons imprisoned
and helpless, be the plea in extenuation of it what it may, is damnable
and unpardonable wickedness. Meanwhile, there is not and has never been
in the United States a jail in which revengeful, malicious and
unjustifiable punishments have not been inflicted, and in which cruelty
does not stain the record of each year and day.
There have appeared lately in the newspapers stories of enormities
perpetrated in Russian prisons. Terrible barbarians, those Russians!
Yet, barring one feature of them only, they can be paralleled by what is
currently done in prisons here. This one feature, is the absence in the
Russian infernos of all hypocritical protestations to the public of
humane treatment and of aversion from severities.
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