I had a great deal more time for reading and meditation in my lonely cell than one would think by the above routine. I was put to work in the shop making chairs. It was the first time I had ever worked in my life, and I took my time about it. I felt no strong desire to work for the State. I was expected to cane a hundred chairs a day, but I usually caned about two. I did not believe in work. I felt at that time that New York State owed me a living. I was getting a living all right, but I was ungrateful. I did not thank them a wee bit. I must have been a bad example to other "cons," for they began to get as tired as myself. At any rate, I lost my job, and was sent back to my cell, where I stayed most of the time while at Sing Sing.
I worked, indeed, very little at any time during my three bits in the penitentiary. The prison at Sing Sing, during the nine months I was there on my first term, was very crowded, and there was not enough work to go round; and I was absolutely idle most of the time. When I had been drafted to Auburn I found more work to do, but still very little, for it was just then that the legislature had shut down on contract labor in the prisons. The outside merchants squealed because they could not compete with unpaid convict labor; and so the prison authorities had to shut down many of their shops, running only enough to supply the inside demand, which was slight. For eighteen months at Auburn I did not work a day. I think it was a very bad thing for the health of convicts when this law was passed; for certainly idleness is a very bad thing for most of them; and to be shut up nearly all the time in damp, unhealthy cells like those at Sing Sing, is a terrible strain on the human system.
Personally, however, I liked to be in my cell, especially during my first year of solitary confinement, before my health began to give way; for I had my books from the good prison libraries, my pipe or cigarettes, and last, but not least, I had a certain portion of opium that I used every day.
For me, prison life had one great advantage. It broke down my health and confirmed me for many years in the opium habit, as we shall see; but I educated myself while in stir. Previous to going to Sing Sing my education had been almost entirely in the line of graft; but in stir, I read the English classics and became familiar with philosophy and the science of medicine and learned something about chemistry.