Before the present system of having a physician live in the prison came into vogue, doctors visited the patients once a day; the surgeons came over only for the operations. The operating room is always shown with great pride to visitors, but never the "cooler."
'Twas told that one night, in the earlier period, when there was no resident physician, a woman convict startled the prison with piercing cries. She was in the throes of child-birth. The doctor and the warden being absent, the matrons did not dare to open the cell. Later a young doctor from the city hospital was called in. He peered through the bars, then turned and declared that the woman would be all right in the morning. When the cell door was opened next day the woman was found unconscious and the child was dead, strangled or suffocated.
The other day I went for the first time into the women's section to take some medicines and carry away our laundry. The women's section is under the same roof as the old prison wherein I passed the first two nights. A wall divides them, but the cells and the system of tiers are the same.
The cells measure about 3 by 7 feet, with gray, damp, greasy, massive walls, without any ventilation.
As I was looking around I noticed many women sitting in their cells, some working outside, sewing or knitting, others sweeping or mopping the tiers or the floor.
My attention was attracted by two women with babies in their arms. A third, a young, quite delicate, fine-looking girl convict, was sitting on a chair sewing. Near her, as if afraid to move, stood a little girl three or four years old, with dark, curly hair, red cheeks, and big, black serious eyes. She looked at me with the sad, wistful smile of some of Da Vinci's women.
My imagination carried me back to the trial room where the little girl had stood near her mother to hear the sentence; I thought of how she had shared with her the cell in the Tombs; how she had been carried to the penitentiary in the "Black Maria," with her mother shackled to another convict; how every night she slept in the narrow, dark, foul cell, barred and locked; how she ate the prison food, and remained all day behind gray walls, without seeing the sun or the sky or any flowers—only striped convicts, matrons and steel bars.
The innocent child must have seen all these strange happenings, and wondered what it all meant. And some day, when she is grown to womanhood, or motherhood, she will remember it all, she will know that she lived with her mother in a prison. She will recall the infamy, the degradation—and the shame of it will be branded on her soul as long as she lives.
XIII
Never a month passes but some convict is brought up to the hospital to be kept under observation to determine whether he is insane or faking insanity.