My time on the second bit was drawing to a close. I was eager to get out, of course, but I knew way down in my mind, that it would be only to graft again. I made a resolution that I would regain my health and gather a little fall-money before I started in hard again on the Rocky Path.
On the day of my release, Warden Sage called me to his office and talked to me like a friend. He did not know that I was a second timer, or he might not have been so kind to me. He was a humane man, and in spite of his belief in the stool-pigeon system, he introduced good things into Sing Sing. He improved the condition of the cells and we were not confined there so much as we had been before he came. On my first term many a man staid for days in his cell without ever going out; one man was confined twenty-eight days on bread and water. But under Mr. Sage punishments were not so severe. He even used to send delicacies to men chained up in the Catholic Chapel.
I should like to say a good word for Head Keeper Connoughton, too. He was not generally liked, for he was a strict disciplinarian, but I think he was one of the best keepers in the country. He was stern, but not brutal, and when a convict was sick, Mr. Connoughton was very kind. He was not deceived by the fake lunatics, and used to say: "If you go to the mad-house, you are liable to become worse. If you are all right in the morning I will give you a job out in the air." Although Mr. Connoughton had had little schooling he was an intelligent man.
I believe the best thing the community can do to reform criminals is to have a more intelligent class of keepers. As a rule they are ignorant, brutal and stupid, under-paid and inefficient; yet what is more important for the State's welfare than an intelligent treatment of convicts? Short terms, too, are better than long ones, for when the criminal is broken down in health and made fearful, suspicious and revengeful, what can you expect from him? However, in the mood I was in at the end of my second term, I did not believe that anything was any good as a preventive of crime. I knew that when I got on the outside I wouldn't think of what might happen to me. I knew that I couldn't or wouldn't carry a hod. What ambition I had left was to become a more successful crook than I had ever been before.