Convicts have a cunning and peculiar way of revenging themselves on bad
and cruel keepers. When one of that type is put on night duty, following
a prearranged sign the whole section suddenly starts a tremendous
hullabaloo. Several hundred convicts, acting in unison, begin yelling,
cat-calling, grunting, roaring, whistling, stamping their feet, beating
the bars of their cages with tin cups and pail covers. The enraged
keeper jumps up and down the tiers in a vain effort to catch the arch
offenders, but on his coming a signal is passed to the whole tier, which
suddenly becomes silent, the other sections in the meanwhile increasing
the noise and disturbance until the warden appears. His presence seems
only to put more zest, energy and lung power into the demonstration.
Revolvers are fired to intimidate the men and they are threatened with
dire punishment, but nothing seems to be able to quell the rebellion,
and it is continued every night until the offending keeper is shifted.
These prearranged, noisy riots are rare and as a rule they occur only in
cases when bad food or a series of persecutions have goaded the
prisoners to the only real expression of protest which can be effective.
One night during the Hudson-Fulton celebration in New York, when all the
city was gaily illuminated, and all the bridges were picked out in
electric lights, and music and shouts could be heard in the distance, a
rumpus started on a magnificent scale after the convicts had been locked
up in their cells.
The whole prison seemed literally to have gone insane. The pandemonium
let loose was so terrific that it could be heard both from the New York
and the Brooklyn sides of the river. The warden and the keepers were
perfectly helpless; they could not subdue the prisoners, who kept up
their infernal racket for hour after hour, and stopped only from
exhaustion, when there was no more lung power to draw on. This noisy and
turbulent protest of a whole prison defying one of the strictest rules
of jail law was a strange psychological curiosity; a mad, reckless,
stentorian rebellion against the rules of silence when the great
metropolis was heard noisily rejoicing across the river.
Prisoners are very quick to find out a bad or a good keeper, an honest
or a grafting keeper.
Humane keepers always and invariably get the best results. They maintain
discipline with very little effort, and the prisoners themselves see to
it that the attitude of such keepers is not changed or embittered by
malicious and silly conduct on their part or that of their companions.
The foul-mouthed, brutal keeper never seems to be able to maintain
discipline, and when he revenges himself by inflicting unjust
punishments the men retaliate by all kinds of persecutions.
An unjust and exceedingly brutal keeper was waylaid one night on his way
home by some released convicts, who "beat him up" in such a manner that
he was sent to a hospital for almost a month.
The Jewish and Italian convicts are often victims of the persecutions of
some keepers, who heap ridicule and injustice and punishment upon them.
The "guineas," the "wops," the "sheenies" and "kikes," find no mercy at
the hands of these keepers, who consider men of these races as inferior,
fit only to be brutalized, slowly but surely, into superior races.
An Irish keeper said jokingly to an Italian convict who could not
understand something in connection with his work:
"Let an Irishman show you. You dagoes don't know nothing. How does it
come that they pick Popes from among the wops, I wonder?"
"Yes, sir," answered the Italian, "and never in two thousand years did
they pick out an Irish Pope."