A Modern Purgatory

by Carlo de Fornaro

VII

In the beginning the reticence of the convicts puzzled me, even after I knew that they regarded me as a political prisoner and not as a stool pigeon. Only after a long acquaintance, and then unwillingly, would they admit shamefacedly that their living was acquired by criminal methods. More than any other argument this proved to me that their criminal pride is only a bluff, their pose as "tough guys" only a pretence, and the supposed excitement of their profession only a misdirected and false energy. Their vainglorious, strutting behaviour is really the result of the insulting, demoralizing, contemptuous attitude of the prison authorities, which seems to say: "We are virtuous men; you are only crooks and bums. We are paid by the authorities and the state to punish you and to break your spirit."

The convicts believe that few of the keepers are virtuous or honest men, and the constant revelations of prison graft only arouse their envy, and the galling thought that they are the helpless victims of a higher type of crooks. In seeming self-defense, therefore, they assume their attitude of revenge toward society, of stubbornness and pride and defiance toward the keepers. They soon discover, if they have not already learned, that humanity, charity, and justice are not to be expected from their oppressors; and that our justice is not Christian, nor scientific nor human; but only vindictive, wasteful, idiotic and indeed blind. And so in despair these misguided men become more vicious, hardened and corrupt than they were before prison took a hand in their shaping.

A prison term, which is supposed to reform them and to break their wills, is only a school for criminality, a higher school or university for the underworld, where confidences are exchanged, new alliances are formed, diseases and homosexual habits contracted. The spirit is tempered for future criminal records, instead of being broken, and the body strengthened for coming excesses.

The line of convicts which upon their release streams out of our prisons, is like a large sewer emptying its filth back into society; slowly corrupting, demoralizing and polluting everything it touches.

The stool pigeons are feared by the convicts as well as by the keepers. They keep the warden informed of the mysterious happenings, among the prisoners, and the illicit relations between the keepers and the convicts. In their turn the stool pigeons are rewarded with privileges, such for instance as not being punished for infractions of the rules, which would mean the terrible "cooler" to the ordinary convict. The wardens' greatest fear is that letters written by convicts relating some of the outrageous occurrences of every day in prison may reach the columns of a newspaper and bring about unpleasant notoriety, and even a more disagreeable investigation.

On very rare occasions some angry convict will write to a newspaper relating his unpleasant experiences, but the rule is that the sooner one forgets having been behind the bars the better it is.

A prisoner caught sending communications to the outside world by underground methods, without having his message read by the office, is punished with a few days in the dreaded "cooler."

This is what the "cooler" is: The convict is divested of all clothes except his underwear, and he is then taken to a cell which contains only a bucket and a wooden plank on the floor as a place of rest and sleep. The cell is hermetically closed by a door which keeps out all light and air. A little ventilation, just enough to keep him from suffocation, comes through a small hole in the wall. The darkness is like a solid mass; it is so intense that the prisoner cannot see his hand near his face. Every twenty-four hours the cell is opened and the convict is given a thin slice of bread and about a thimble full of water, just enough to keep him alive. This performance is repeated according to the length of the punishment, that is to say, the door is opened only once in twenty-four hours, to permit the giving of food and water and the emptying of the bucket, whether the prisoner stays in that awful place one day or twenty-one. Many prisoners have been known to stay in the cooler for weeks at a time.

After having lived in complete darkness for a long time, coming out into broad daylight causes untold agonies, and very often has tragic effects upon the eyes and eyesight of the prisoner; usually they have to be sent to the hospital to be treated for inflammation of the eyes or for partial blindness. Men kept long in the cooler sometimes become driveling idiots; others go violently insane and have to be sent to Matteawan for life.

The punishments are all inflicted by the warden, on the word of a stool pigeon, of a keeper, or of a man in charge of the workshops who seems to be a contractor of almost unlimited power in the prison, second only to the warden.