In the beginning the reticence of the convicts puzzled me, even after I
knew that they regarded me as a political prisoner and not as a stool
pigeon. Only after a long acquaintance, and then unwillingly, would they
admit shamefacedly that their living was acquired by criminal methods.
More than any other argument this proved to me that their criminal pride
is only a bluff, their pose as "tough guys" only a pretence, and the
supposed excitement of their profession only a misdirected and false
energy. Their vainglorious, strutting behaviour is really the result of
the insulting, demoralizing, contemptuous attitude of the prison
authorities, which seems to say: "We are virtuous men; you are only
crooks and bums. We are paid by the authorities and the state to punish
you and to break your spirit."
The convicts believe that few of the keepers are virtuous or honest men,
and the constant revelations of prison graft only arouse their envy, and
the galling thought that they are the helpless victims of a higher type
of crooks. In seeming self-defense, therefore, they assume their
attitude of revenge toward society, of stubbornness and pride and
defiance toward the keepers. They soon discover, if they have not
already learned, that humanity, charity, and justice are not to be
expected from their oppressors; and that our justice is not Christian,
nor scientific nor human; but only vindictive, wasteful, idiotic and
indeed blind. And so in despair these misguided men become more vicious,
hardened and corrupt than they were before prison took a hand in their
shaping.
A prison term, which is supposed to reform them and to break their
wills, is only a school for criminality, a higher school or university
for the underworld, where confidences are exchanged, new alliances are
formed, diseases and homosexual habits contracted. The spirit is
tempered for future criminal records, instead of being broken, and the
body strengthened for coming excesses.
The line of convicts which upon their release streams out of our
prisons, is like a large sewer emptying its filth back into society;
slowly corrupting, demoralizing and polluting everything it touches.
The stool pigeons are feared by the convicts as well as by the keepers.
They keep the warden informed of the mysterious happenings, among the
prisoners, and the illicit relations between the keepers and the
convicts. In their turn the stool pigeons are rewarded with privileges,
such for instance as not being punished for infractions of the rules,
which would mean the terrible "cooler" to the ordinary convict. The
wardens' greatest fear is that letters written by convicts relating some
of the outrageous occurrences of every day in prison may reach the
columns of a newspaper and bring about unpleasant notoriety, and even a
more disagreeable investigation.
On very rare occasions some angry convict will write to a newspaper
relating his unpleasant experiences, but the rule is that the sooner one
forgets having been behind the bars the better it is.
A prisoner caught sending communications to the outside world by
underground methods, without having his message read by the office, is
punished with a few days in the dreaded "cooler."
This is what the "cooler" is: The convict is divested of all clothes
except his underwear, and he is then taken to a cell which contains only
a bucket and a wooden plank on the floor as a place of rest and sleep.
The cell is hermetically closed by a door which keeps out all light and
air. A little ventilation, just enough to keep him from suffocation,
comes through a small hole in the wall. The darkness is like a solid
mass; it is so intense that the prisoner cannot see his hand near his
face. Every twenty-four hours the cell is opened and the convict is
given a thin slice of bread and about a thimble full of water, just
enough to keep him alive. This performance is repeated according to the
length of the punishment, that is to say, the door is opened only once
in twenty-four hours, to permit the giving of food and water and the
emptying of the bucket, whether the prisoner stays in that awful place
one day or twenty-one. Many prisoners have been known to stay in the
cooler for weeks at a time.
After having lived in complete darkness for a long time, coming out into
broad daylight causes untold agonies, and very often has tragic effects
upon the eyes and eyesight of the prisoner; usually they have to be sent
to the hospital to be treated for inflammation of the eyes or for
partial blindness. Men kept long in the cooler sometimes become
driveling idiots; others go violently insane and have to be sent to
Matteawan for life.
The punishments are all inflicted by the warden, on the word of a stool
pigeon, of a keeper, or of a man in charge of the workshops who seems to
be a contractor of almost unlimited power in the prison, second only to
the warden.