His front door opens on a corridor and is kept ajar on a heavy chain so the prison guards may watch him.
His back door opens on a plot of ground about 8×10 feet. It is surrounded and cut off from all communication from every living human being by a brick wall. Only the watchman in the central tower and the birds that wing their way over the prison can see him in his little yard. Robinson Crusoe on his deserted island could not be more utterly lonely.
In this tiny yard is a circular path worn smooth and pressed deep into the soil by the feet of despairing men—his predecessors.
The prisoner is forbidden even the negative pleasure of going out into this God-forsaken walled plot of bare ground except for one hour a day.
In his gloomy cell the prisoner drags out the "task" given him to escape insanity. He fears to be idle without the sound of a human voice in his ear or the sight of a human face to relieve his awful loneliness.
To lengthen these "tasks" the State of Pennsylvania has provided primitive hand-looms, some 100 years old, and other discarded makeshifts of man's industrial infancy.
Not for him has the world progressed beyond the caveman's day. Perhaps he is a skilled mechanic, a man accustomed to the swift play of machinery, the grip of tool on material. He is condemned to manufacture by primitive methods the clothes he wears to keep him from quite going mad.
Extreme Methods Faulty.
As between the abominable "contract" and "lease" systems and this reversion to blind seclusion, is there no human method to be found of apportioning the convict's labor?
Yet No. 99, locked away in his solitary cell in the Philadelphia prison, must toil laboriously, denying his brain and hand their cunning, with a pretense at occupation. He is not sharing in the world's work. He knows this child's play of making something that no one needs on an instrument left over from the twelfth century is futile and foolish.