A Modern Purgatory

by Carlo de Fornaro

My other companion is a young Russian sailor, healthy looking, fair and quite peaceful when let alone. He warns me that my anxious instructor is a "stool pigeon," who proves his status by giving me very detailed instructions as to how to manage to escape successfully.

I ask why he has not put his own methods into practice; and he gives as an excuse that he is going to be released in a few days.

Then he furnishes me with paper, pencil, and soap; and he even offers to send out letters for me. When I answer that I have no letters to write he recites an endless list of rules, and tells me how to evade them, and how to keep the friendship of the keepers.

He reveals to my astonished ears the underground system of communication with the outer world. With money and friends a convict can get all the contraband he desires: dope, newspapers, matches, letters—coming in and going out—whiskey, writing paper and pens, stamps, delicacies, tobacco. My mentor has passed a year in the penitentiary for the offense of "repeating," or of voting many times on election day. The gang leader who paid him for his work is looking out for him from his Brooklyn haunts.

Facing us there is a long table at which old convicts are sitting, without making a pretence at working. As long as they keep quiet nobody notices them. Some of them look over seventy years old; sad-faced, pallid, curved, almost venerable in their old age. They are mostly old sneak thieves and pickpockets, the wrecks and failures of their profession. They sit like graven images, silently, patiently, hour after hour, year in and year out, until some fine day one of them will be found rigid in his cell, and then four striped convicts and a keeper acting as a pallbearer will carry him away in a large black coffin to the morgue.

To-day for the first time since my incarceration I beheld the reflection of my face in a mirror. The sight was humiliating and shocking in the extreme. My keen sense of caricature lowered my well fed conceit half way down the ladder of vanity.

Then I consoled myself by thinking of all the good-looking, impressive, well-groomed men friends, enemies and acquaintances of mine; and I tried to imagine them with clipped hair, togged out in ill-fitting, patched, striped garments and cap; collarless and tieless; with a week's growth of beard on their cheeks—and the comparison made me laugh and cheered me up considerably.

The Deputy Warden comes in on his daily visit. His approach has been telegraphed in some mysterious manner and the whole shop takes on a lively bustling appearance. Second in rank as an officer of the penitentiary, the "Dep," a tall, good-looking man, strides into the room like a Prussian officer. He is not disliked by the convicts, as he seems just in his dealings with them.

Going back from work through the yards, a fat German convict who had been working in the brush shops, broke away from the line and, before he could be stopped, jumped into the river in an attempt to drown himself. A few shots were fired. A negro and two white convicts jumped in after him, and with the help of a keeper who patrols the island in a row boat, they fished him out. They laid him flat on the ground and worked to revive him.