A Modern Purgatory

by Carlo de Fornaro

While we were getting him ready to be taken to the insane asylum he was blubbering and sputtering, frightened and inarticulate; and the tears streamed down his round, fat, childish face.

XIV

The hospital has become a sort of observatory for the insane. But all the convicts who show signs of insanity are not brought up to the hospital.

Confinement in the cells without work or exercise from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning, and the punishment in the "cooler," are responsible for most of the cases of insanity.

When the supposedly insane convicts do not try to commit suicide, or do not keep the prison section awake at night by their yells, they are usually kept in solitary confinement in a cell, sometimes for weeks at a time, until at last they are visited by doctors and declared insane.

An Italian peddler who claimed to have been sentenced unjustly for buying stolen copper wire, was found within a few weeks after his arrival at the island with two tin cups in his cell. One cup had been left behind by a released convict, the other belonged to him. Although he could not have known of the infraction of the rules, he was dragged to the wall by a keeper. When the warden came to dispense "justice," he heard the keeper's story and then asked the prisoner to explain. The man tried to explain in his broken English that he had found the cup in his cell; but the warden cut the gordian knot impatiently by saying: "None of your damned excuses! Two days in the cooler!"

The result can be imagined. The unfortunate peddler, frantic already from the idea of having been unjustly sentenced, and worried sick over the fate of his helpless wife and children, could not stand this other bolt from the sky; this punishment for something he did not understand, in the form of terrible torture in a pitch dark cell, without food or water, for an infraction of unknown rules; and he broke down completely under the strain. When he came out of the "cooler" he was, as the keeper declared, "completely bug-house."

For some time we were kept busy watching the peddler; even his shoes had to be taken from under his bed as he tried to knock the heels into his skull.

Much to my dismay, I was put to sleep near his bed. Half a dozen times he tried to strangle himself, and on the morning of his release, while I was asleep with my back to him, he jumped on my bed like a cat, and with his two powerful hands tried to choke me to death. Convicts came to my rescue; and when he was asked the reason for his attempt on my life, he calmly declared that it was because I had signed the warrant for his death at nine o'clock in the morning.

When we took him downstairs later, he refused to change his striped suit for his street clothes, and shouted that he had made up his mind to die in the "cooler" at nine o'clock. His wife had to be brought over from the 54th Street side, and she induced him to dress and go home.