"I
wish some doctor would examine me and tell me what is the matter with
me," he remarked to me once. "Maybe I'm crazy!"
After all, the world, in its way, is as hard a place for ex-convicts as
a jail; more cruel, perhaps, inasmuch as it seems to offer hopes that
jails deny. But can a world be called civilized that is satisfied with
that arraignment?
XII
THE PRISON SILENCE
How many convicts, during the past twenty years, have served their terms
and been released? and yet what does the public know of the real inside
of prisons? This used to perplex me at first. My fellow prisoners with
whom I talked were bitter and voluble enough in denouncing the
conditions; but no sooner had they passed the gates to freedom than they
became strangely silent. Some of them even were quoted in the local
papers as praising and upholding what they had just before condemned.
There was a Japanese prisoner, for example, the only man of his nation
there, I think, who gained attention by copies of well-known pictures
which he made, to be hung on the walls of the chapel, and by designing
back and side scenes for the stage. I never talked personally with him,
or saw him but at a distance, as he hastened along the corridor; but men
who knew him said that he was especially savage in his diatribes against
the prison and its keepers, and had promised, as soon as he was freed,
to make numerous ugly disclosures to the world.
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