I had money of my
own to do this with; most ex-prisoners, of course, have not. But the
sacrifice was avoided by the circumstance that Mr. Moyer, the warden,
was absent at the moment in Indianapolis, and the deputy incautiously
let me out an hour or more before my train started. I lost no time in
meeting my reporter, and during the next forty minutes, in an automobile
provided for the occasion, we drove about the streets of Atlanta, while
I imparted to his astonished ears my reasons for thinking that the
penitentiary was not the paradise on earth that it had hitherto been
believed to be. He brought me to the railway station in season for my
train, and I got safely away, leaving mischief behind me.
That was my good luck. On the other hand, a friend of mine recently
released told me that the warden had called him into his office at the
last moment, and had extracted from him a promise not to talk to any
reporter in the town before leaving. That is the usual way; but it is
the exception, sometimes, that counts.
Let us return to our average convict, just out, and with the world
before him, where to choose to display his prison-made garments and to
spend his five dollars. It not seldom happens, to begin with, that he is
not so much out as he had imagined. Our present method with convicts has
peculiarities. Here is a common example.
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