CONCERNING PRISON MANAGEMENT
During my career as a yegg I was arrested four times and stood trial
in two of the cases and “beat” (was acquitted in) both. One case never
came to trial, the other one brought me a State prison sentence of
fifteen years. The crime was blowing open a safe from which we failed
to secure a single penny. Such is the life of a yegg. I heard that
sentence of fifteen years pronounced upon me with a feeling mixed with
contempt and hatred. I hated society, I was antagonistic to religion,
and the sentence of fifteen years but aggravated both. I pictured the
bank thief, the respectable crook getting away with the savings of
widows and children, with his paltry three years’ punishment. I saw
the seducer of chaste women come off the stand with a mere sentence
of months. The pictures intensified my hatred and I entered prison to
begin my sentence, a criminal in mind and nature.
Dante once wrote that he found this inscription over the doors of
hell: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” This describes to a nicety
the prison in which I was confined for nearly eight years. Over the
thousand and one prisoners, a warden of the old school of penology
presided. He was one who believed in and practiced the adage, “An eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Yes, he even went further than that.
He was a man of undoubted executive ability. He would have made an
ideal head of some corporation where the question of men’s souls and
bodies never entered into consideration. You could have searched the
world to find one less worthy to be at the head of an institution of
this kind.
A saloon keeper, he had found the friendship of one politically high
and secured the position. With the odor of his calling still upon him
he came from behind his bar to sit in the office of the warden. He had
the life and liberty, the responsibility of a thousand men under his
care. For over twenty years he guarded the destiny of this institution.
He was the enemy of every reform ever initiated. He refused to let
outside men or women interest themselves in the cause of the prisoner.
He made rules of unusual severity and punished cruelly any infraction.
In this prison the contract system of employing prisoners was in use,
and the warden was ever the friend of the contractor. He was eventually
found guilty of grafting by a committee of investigation, and shortly
before the verdict of these men resigned his office.