This was malicious. But some of the things done by prison authorities are apparently due to sheer stupidity and ignorance. For example, there were some cows belonging to Atlanta prison, and some of them calved. So there were half a dozen calves more or less, with prospects of more to come. The authorities decided that the expense of rearing these innocents was not justifiable; there was nothing in the rule book about it; besides, the jail was not designed to harbor innocent creatures. The minutes of the conference were not given out, and we can judge of what passed only by the results. The order went forth that the calves be killed; and the killing was actually perpetrated, and the bodies were buried somewhere in the prison grounds. The story seems incredible, but it was corroborated by several men cognizant of the facts. Why not, at least, have turned them into veal?
I was speaking just now of the promiscuous herding together of prisoners in prisons generally. No effort is made to separate the old from the young, the educated from the ignorant; the hardened sinners from the impressionable youths or newcomers; or (at Atlanta, except in the cells), the negroes from the whites. Association of negroes with whites, on a footing of enforced outward equality, is bad for both; not because a bad white man is worse than a bad negro, but because the physical, mental and moral qualities of either react unfavorably upon the other. The negro, being the more ignorant as a rule, falls more readily into degraded vices; the white man, being as a rule the dominant element in the situation, masters the will of the negro, but cannot or at least does not erect barriers against the latter's subtle corruption.
We must always bear in mind the abnormal conditions in a prison--the misery of it, the dearth of variety and relaxation, the terrible yearning for some form, any form, of distraction and amusement. The male is parted from the female, and from the resource of children; his nerves are on edge, his natural propensities starved, his thoughts wandering and embittered; he finds no good anywhere, nor any hope of it. He will seize upon any means of abating or dulling his cravings. The negro is pliant, unmoral, free from the restraints of white civilization. In the South especially, his subordination to the white is almost a second nature; but he involuntarily avenges himself (as all lower races do upon the stronger) by that readiness to comply which flatters the sense of power and superiority in the other, and leads to evil.