Woman in Prison

by Caroline H. Woods

I did what I could for them. I asked the Deputy if he could not substitute flour bread for the brown which they refused. He answered,—

"No! They will come to it. The Master will not change the order."

They did not come to it. And day after day, as I saw them go breakfastless to their work, I wished,—was it wrong? perhaps so,—that the avenger might be on the track of that unfeeling Master, and that the day might come when he might be obliged to breakfast upon a quart of rye coffee and a slice of brown bread, instead of the steaks, and eggs, and toasts, and other delicacies that I saw carried to his room from the kitchen, as I passed through it to the officers' dining-room.

If it aroused such indignation to witness such cruelty, what must it do in the hearts of those who suffer from it! Does such correction of convicts tend to arouse better purposes in their hearts than those which brought them into prison? Such treatment aroused in them anger and revenge. When they dared, and in every way which they could invent without laying themselves liable to punishment, they gave expression to their feelings.

When they were dismissed from the prison, the officer usually remarked, "We shall have that boarder back again."

The answer that I should have made, had I spoken my thoughts, would have been—The whole tendency of their discipline here is to produce that end.

The first thing that I did, after breakfast was over, was to take the names of my six kitchen women, and learn, as nearly as I could, just what work belonged to each one of them.

There were two sink women, McMullins and Magill. Their work was to wash the dishes, keep the sink clean, and scrub about one quarter of the floor. The slide woman scrubbed the ration table, a certain portion of the floor, washed the quarts and piled them up, scrubbed the table in the centre of the room, took care of the flour bread when it came in, and the pieces that were left. At meal time she passed out the coffee, and put the potatoes in the ration pans.

The cook made the mush, which was boiled twice a day, the soup, and hash, and stewed the peas. She had a certain portion of the floor to scrub, and the room to keep tidy, as well as her boilers to wash.

The steam woman took care of the steam boiler, made the coffee, helped the cook slice the meat, and kept her portion of the floor clean. It was a part of her work to pile the ration pans in rows of pyramids on the centre table.