After I have finished my supper of apples, bread and water, one of the trusties comes to the front of the cell, and I have a long talk with him. He grows confidential, and tells me his story. It is a mournful but perfectly natural one. An active boy, inclined to wildness; bad companions; a father whose business called him from home; a mother unable to cope with her wilful son; a life of dissipation; a picnic and drinking; a row with some other toughs; a handy pistol and an unpremeditated murder. Then comes the punishment which falls upon him, although others are equally to blame.
What surprises me about this, like other tales that have reached me, is the frank acknowledgment of the sin. There is usually an admission that punishment was deserved, occasionally an admission that on the whole prison has been useful--"I've learned my lesson"; but along with any such acknowledgment, an expression of intense resentment at unintelligent treatment and unnecessary brutality.
The tales of this brutality are almost beyond belief. They do not come out directly, put forward to arouse sympathy; very far from that. They crop out incidentally in the course of conversation and are only related when I ply the prisoner with questions. One man tells of being sent to a dark cell because he would not reveal to the warden something he did not know, and therefore could not reveal, about one of his fellow prisoners.
"Didn't you really know, or wouldn't you be a stool-pigeon?" is my natural question.
"I really didn't know," replies the trusty.
But the warden chose to think that the poor fellow did know, and sent him to the dark cell on bread and water for eight days. Then he was brought up, more dead than alive, given a single meal, and sent back to the dark cell for twelve days more.
Twenty days in darkness--on bread and water--for withholding information which he did not possess.
(It should be added that this did not happen under any warden now holding office.)
What are men made of who can treat human beings like that? I supposed that the Middle Ages were safely passed; but here is the medieval idea of the torture chamber to extract information right over again.
Then there is that other story of the man who committed suicide in the jail. This is what is told to me: