Men competent to make them purgatories are not to be
had at Government prices; no duties more onerous than those of a fit
conscientious warden exist under the state; and how can we look for such
a man at a four or five thousand dollar salary? Twenty-five or even
fifty thousand would be moderate, and the men who are worth that are in
some other business. The foremost citizens of the nation would not be
too good for the job, and we content ourselves with ward heelers and
rough-necks, who undertake it not for the salary, but for the graft that
goes with it and exceeds it. Politics and graft sit in the warden's
office, and walk the ranges in guards' uniform, and crush the manhood
out of our brothers for money, and out of sheer wanton inhumanity. Of
all the inmates of the jail, these men are the veritable and
incorrigible and unpardonable criminals; for they were not driven to
crime by passion, hunger, drink or ignorance, they have not been reduced
to the state of desperate pariahs, outcasts and scapegoats of the race,
but they willingly embrace the function entrusted to them--the
Government license to steal, bully, torture and murder--with a grotesque
sanctimonious leer for the public, and for the convicts--what! The
regimen of hell!
This writer's statements seem a trifle emphatic, do they not? May we not
surmise that they are motived by some personal grudge? have we not heard
an old adage--"No thief e'er felt the halter draw with good opinion of
the law?" Would it not be prudent to take all this with a grain of salt?
Shall we be driven to rash measures by the objurgations of an
ex-convict?
Of the right or wrong of my conviction and sentence I am not to speak
here, nor do they specially interest me now, except as illustrations of
the working of the machine.
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