In my cell, later Wednesday evening, October 2.

Upon arriving back here this afternoon, and before sitting down to my usual supper of bread and water, I shave leisurely. In spite of the jar of hot water which George has kindly brought to the cell before I am locked in for the night, my toilet arrangements leave much to be desired. It is true I have shaved at times under greater disadvantages. As, for instance, in camp, when I have had to use the inside of my watch-cover for a mirror. Here in prison I have at least a real mirror, such as it is.

My toilet completed, I make as much of a meal as I can of bread and water. Then I take up my journal to chronicle the events of the day.

The twenty minutes of musical pandemonium come and go, the violinist as usual being the first to begin. Perhaps he may be the fortunate possessor of a watch. Then, also as usual, a silence follows, rendered all the more profound by reason of the previous discord. The cell-house has settled down for the night. Only a few muffled sounds make the stillness more distinctly felt. Then——

Suddenly the unearthly quiet is shattered by a terrifying uproar.

It is too far away to hear at first anything with distinctness; it is all a confused and hideous mass of shouting—a shouting first of a few, then of more, then of many voices. I have never heard anything more dreadful—in the full meaning of the word—full of dread. My heart is thumping like a trip hammer, and the cold shivers run up and down my back.

I jump to the door of the cell, pressing my ear close against the cold iron bars. Then I can distinguish a few words sounding against the background of the confused outcry. “Stop that!” “Leave him alone!” “Damn you, stop that!” Then some dull thuds; I even fancy that I hear something like a groan, along with the continued confused and violent shouting.

What can it be?

While I am perfectly aware that I am not in the least likely to be harmed, I am shivering with something close akin to a chill of actual terror. If anyone near at hand were to give vent to a sudden yell, I feel as if I might easily lose my self-control and shout and bang my door with the rest of them.

The cries continue, accompanied with other noises that I cannot make out. Then my attention is attracted by whispering down at one of the lower windows in the outer wall of the corridor opposite my cell. It is so dark outside that I can see nothing, not even the dim shapes of the whisperers; but apparently there are two of them, and they are looking in and commenting on the disturbance. Their sinister whispering is very unpleasant. I wonder if they can see what is going on. I feel inclined to call out and ask them, but I do not know who they are; and I do know that such an act would be entirely against the rules and liable to provoke severe punishment, and I am not yet ready to be sent to the jail.

The shouts die down. There are a few more vague and uncertain sounds—all the more dreadful for being uncertain; somewhere an iron door clangs! then stillness follows, like that of the grave.

It is useless—I can make nothing of it all; so I sit down again and try to compose my mind to write, but the effort is not very successful. Presently, just after the bell at the City Hall has given its eight o’clock stroke, the Warden appears quietly at the opening of my cell.

“Something has happened,” I begin breathlessly, “I don’t know what it is, but it ought to be looked into——”

I come to an abrupt stop, for I am suddenly aware of the figure of a man standing in the shadow just behind the Warden.

“Who is that?” I ask, and he steps farther along the gallery, but not where the light from the cell can strike him.

“Only the night officer,” answers the Warden.

That is all very well; but why was the night officer lurking in the dark behind the Warden? I decide to ask him a plain, direct question; for he has already heard what is uppermost in my mind.

“Captain,” I say, politely, “what was that noise I heard a short while ago?”

The officer, pretending that he has not heard my question, turns to the Warden with some perfectly irrelevant remark, and moves off, along the gallery.

It strikes me as a curious proceeding.

“Warden,” I begin again, after waiting until the man must be out of hearing, “I heard shouting off in the corridor somewhere, not very long ago; and I am afraid something bad has happened. Would it not be well to find out about it?”

This the Warden promises to do, so I stifle my fears as best I can and turn to the events of the day. I report progress; and we again debate whether or not I had better make a change of occupation. Last evening we decided that I should remain still another day in the basket-shop; for it seemed as if I were getting as much out of my experience there as I could anywhere. The Warden is inclined to agree with me that we have been singularly fortunate so far, in the working out of our plans, and that it might be a mistake to change. Jack Murphy, when I talked with him about it to-day, said, “What good would it do you, to go and work in a shop where you can’t talk? You can learn everything there is to know about such a shop by spending ten minutes there, any time.” Then he added, with a smile, “You know, Brown, we don’t want to lose you here.” I hope this last is true, and I think it is; but, aside from that, his reasoning impresses me as good.

So the Warden and I agree that I am to stay in the basket-shop at least another day, and he leaves me to my thoughts and my fears.

I shall now put away this journal, and prepare my bed for the night. I fear that my sleep will be haunted by echoes of those dreadful sounds.

It may be well to interrupt my journal here, and explain the noises of Wednesday evening. As will be seen in Thursday’s journal, I heard many of the details the next day, but it was some time before I learned the whole story. I have examined personally several eye-witnesses of the occurrences and am convinced that the following statement is accurate.

There had lately been sent up from Sing Sing a young prisoner named Lavinsky. He is physically a weak youth; pale, thin, and undersized. His weight is about one hundred and twenty pounds; his age, twenty-one. On the charge of being impertinent to the officer of his shop, he was sent down to the jail, as the punishment cells are called, and kept there for five days in the dark on bread and water. Then he was allowed to go back to work. He did so, but was of course utterly unfit for work. The next day he was ill and remained in his cell, which was on the fourth tier on the south side of the north wing. This was on the opposite side of the cell-block from where I locked in, and a considerable distance down toward the western end of the wing; which accounts for my not hearing more distinctly the sounds which aroused in me such feelings of terror.

The day that Lavinsky returned to work was Tuesday, my second day in prison. On Wednesday he was afflicted with severe diarrhea all day, but for some reason, in spite of his repeated requests, the doctor was not summoned. The reason probably was that Lavinsky was in the state known in prison as bughouse—that is to say, at least flighty if not temporarily out of his mind. He himself, as I have subsequently found in talking with him, has no very distinct recollection of the events of that Wednesday evening. If not out of his mind, he was certainly not fully possessed of it.

In the evening, after his failure to get the doctor, Lavinsky created some disturbance by calling out remarks which violated the quiet of the cell-block. I understand that the form this took was something of this sort: “If you want to kill me, why don’t you do it at once, and not torture me to death?” He seemed to be possessed with the idea that his life was in danger. I do not know in what condition he was when first placed in jail, but I do know that the time he spent down in that hellhole, five days, was quite sufficient to account for his mental condition when he came out.

Now here was a young man, hardly more than a lad, in a sick and nervous condition that had produced temporary derangement of mind. What course did the System take in dealing with that suffering human being? Two keepers opened his cell, made a rush for him, and knocked him down. One eye-witness says that they black-jacked him, that is, rendered him unconscious by striking him on the head with the instrument of that name. During the brief scuffle in the cell the iron pail and the bucket were overturned. Then, after being handcuffed, the unresisting if not unconscious youth was flung out of his cell with such violence that, if it had not been for a convict trusty who stood by, he would have slipped under the rail of the gallery and fallen to the stone floor of the corridor four stories below, and been either killed or crippled for life.

Then the two keepers, being reinforced by a third, dragged their victim roughly downstairs, partly on his back, kicked and beat him on the way, and carried him before the Principal Keeper, who promptly sent him down to the jail again.

Let it be remembered that this poor fellow is a slight, undersized, feeble specimen of humanity, whom one able-bodied man ought to have had little trouble in handling—even if any use of force were necessary.

This scene of violence could not pass unnoticed; and the loud protests and outcries of the prisoners whose cells were near by, as they heard and saw the treatment accorded to their helpless comrade, were the sounds I heard far away in my cell. One of the trusties who, having the freedom of the corridors, was enabled to see most of the occurrence, so far forgot his position as to venture the opinion that it was a “pretty raw deal.” This remark was overheard by an officer; and the trusty at once received the warning that he had better keep his mouth shut and not talk about what didn’t concern him.

If it is realized that these officers have what almost amounts to the power of life and death over the convicts, it can be understood that such a warning was not one to be lightly disregarded.

Lavinsky, having been landed again in the jail, was kept there from Wednesday evening until Saturday afternoon. What special care or attention was given him during that time I am unable to state, but there is no reason to suppose that any exception was made in his case. Like the other denizens of the jail, he was fed only on bread and a very insufficient quantity of water—three gills in twenty-four hours—and also experienced the intolerable conditions of that vile place.

On Saturday afternoon, three days later, he was still down there, and still bughouse. Then as there was a disturbing rumor among the officials that I was planning to be sent to the jail, he was taken away about an hour before my arrival. His cell was the very one which I occupied, after it had been thoroughly cleaned.

He was removed from the jail to a special cell, where his case was taken up personally by the Warden, and where the poor youth was at last put under the care of the doctor, and received some humane and sensible treatment. When I first saw him, some three weeks after my term had ended, he had not become entirely rational, although he has since recovered himself. As I have already said, he had at first no clear recollection of the brutal treatment of which he had been the victim, nor in fact of anything that occurred at the time. Perhaps it was all the better that this was so.

An exceptionally intelligent convict, whose term expired soon after these events, and who could have had no earthly object in misrepresenting the matter, described to me after his release the episode in detail. He had been an eye-witness of the entire occurrence, as he was standing on the gallery where he could see everything that happened. He summed it up in these exact words: “Mr. Osborn, it was one of the most brutal things that I have ever seen, in all my experience in prison.”

His story is fully corroborated by what I have learned, upon careful inquiry from other men.

Doubtless some will say that the statements of convicts are not to be believed. That touches upon one of the very worst features of the situation. No discrimination is ever made. It is not admitted that, while one convict may be a liar, another may be entirely truthful; that men differ in prison exactly as in the world outside. It is held, quite as a matter of course, that they are all liars, and an officer’s word will be taken against that of a convict or any number of convicts. The result is that the officers feel themselves practically immune from any evil consequences to them from their own acts of injustice or violence. What follows from this is inevitable. Our prisons have often been the scenes of intolerable brutality, for which it has been useless for the victims to seek redress. They can only cower and endure in silence; or be driven into insanity by a hopeless revolt against the System.

Not so very long ago one of the prisoners at Auburn, on a hot night in summer, as an officer was shutting the windows in the corridor outside, called out from his cell, “Oh, Captain, can’t you let us have a little more air?”

The officer promptly went to the tier of cells whence the voice came and made a chalk-mark around the keyhole of one of the locks. When a man is “round-chalked” he is not released when the rest of the prisoners are let out of their cells, but reserved for punishment. In this case the officer mistook the cell from which the voice had come, and round-chalked the prisoner who was locked in next to the one who had dared to ask for more air.

The next morning, finding that his neighbor was about to receive the punishment intended for himself, the culprit promptly told the officer that he was the guilty party, and if anyone was to be punished, he ought to be. This honorable action was allowed no weight. He had some of his hard-earned money taken away from him, three days of his commutation cancelled, and the disc removed from his sleeve as a mark of disgrace; in short, he was severely punished—as his innocent neighbor would have been, had he not prevented it by taking the punishment upon himself.

The point is this: that no convict has any rights—not even the right to be believed; not even the right to reasonably considerate treatment. He is exposed without safeguard of any sort to whatever outrage an inconsiderate or brutal keeper may choose to inflict upon him; and you cannot under the present system guard against such inconsiderate and brutal treatment.

I should not like to be understood as asserting that all keepers are brutal, or even a majority of them. I hope and believe that by far the greater number of the officers serving in our prisons are naturally honorable and kindly men, but so were the slave-owners before the Civil War. And just as it was perfectly fair to judge of the right and wrong of slavery not by any question of the fair treatment of the majority of slaves, but by the hideous possibilities which frequently became no less hideous facts, so we must recognize, in dealing with our Prison System, that many really well-meaning men will operate a system in which the brutality of an officer goes unpunished, often in a brutal manner.

The reason of this is not far to seek—a reason which also obtained in the slave system. The most common and powerful impulse that drives an ordinary, well-meaning man to brutality is fear. Raise the cry of “Fire” in a crowded place, and many an excellent person will discard in the frantic moment every vestige of civilization. The elemental brute will emerge, and he will trample down women and children, will perform almost any crime in the calendar in his mad rush for safety. The truth of this has been demonstrated many times.

In prison, where each officer believes that his life is in constant danger, the keeper tends to become callous, the sense of that danger blunts his higher qualities. He comes to regard with mingled contempt and fear those dumb, gray creatures over whom he has such irresponsible power—creatures who can at any moment rise in revolt and give him the death blow. And as they undoubtedly possess that power, he is always fearful that they may use it, for are they not dangerous “criminals”? And undoubtedly there is basis for his fear, for some of those men are dangerous, rendered more so by the nerve-racking System.

I can conceive no more terribly disintegrating moral experience than that of being a keeper over convicts. However much I pity the prisoners, I think that spiritually their position is far preferable to that of their guards. These latter are placed in an impossible position; for they are not to blame for the System under which their finer qualities have so few chances of being exercised.

But I have been betrayed into rather more of a discussion than I intended, a discussion out of place in this chronicle of facts. I have inserted so much by way of explanation both of what I have narrated in the foregoing chapter and of what I shall have to tell in those that are to come.

Since the above was written I have run across a passage in a book on English prisons which confirms so strikingly one of the statements just expressed that room must be made for it. “The real atmosphere of Dartmoor,” says the author, Mr. Albert Paterson, writing of Dartmoor Prison, “so far as the men responsible for its well-being and discipline are concerned, is that of a handful of whites on the American frontier among ten times their number of Apache Indians. ‘We stand on a volcano,’ an officer said to the writer in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘If our convicts here had opportunity to combine and could trust one another, the place would be wrecked in an hour.’”

Aside from the author’s ridiculously belated simile of the American frontier, we have here an accurate and forcible statement of the prison keeper’s constant nervous apprehension of danger and the necessity of being prepared at any moment to sell his life as dearly as possible. And, of course, this feeling of the keeper increases his severity and the severity increases the danger, and so we have the vicious circle complete.

I am not now in any way disputing the necessity of a keeper being constantly on his guard, I am not saying whether this view of things is right or wrong, and when I use the word fear I do not mean cowardice—a very different thing, for a brave man can feel fear. I am simply trying to point out that in prison, as elsewhere, when men are dominated by fear, brutality is the inevitable result.