The Autobiography of a Thief

by Hutchins Hapgood

"Billy," I proceeded, "what would you do if you were on the outside and she was in prison for six years?"

"Well," he replied, "I'd have to give myself some rope."

"Philosophers claim that it is just as hard for a woman to live alone as for a man," I said. "You're unreasonable, Billy. Surely you can't blame her."

Billy's case is an instance of how, when a convict has had bad food, bad air and an unnatural routine for some time, he begins to borrow trouble. He grows anæmic and then is on the road to insanity. If he has a wife he almost always grows suspicious of her, though he does not speak about it until he has been a certain number of years in prison. It was not long after the above conversation took place that Billy was sent to the insane asylum at Matteawan.

Sometimes, after a man has begun to grow insane, he will show it by reticence, rather than by talkativeness, according to his disposition. One of my intimate friends, in stir much longer than I, was like a ray of sunshine, witty and a good story teller. His laugh was contagious and we all liked to see him. He was one of the best night prowlers (burglars) in the profession, and had many other gifts. After he had been in stir, however, for a few years, he grew reticent and suspicious, thought that everybody was a stool-pigeon, and died a raving maniac a few years later at Matteawan.

Sometimes a convict will grow so nervous that he will attempt to escape, even when there is no chance, or will sham insanity. An acquaintance of mine, Louis, who had often grafted with me when we were on the outside, told me one day he did not expect to live his bit out. When confined a man generally thinks a lot about his condition, reads a book on medicine and imagines he has every disease the book describes. Louis was in this state, and he consulted me and two others as to whether he ought not to "shoot a bug" (sham insanity); and so get transferred to the hospital. One advised him to attack a keeper and demand his baby back. But as Billy had big, black eyes and a cadaverous face, I told him he'd better shoot the melancholy bug; for he could do that better. Accordingly in the morning when the men were to go to work in the stone yard, Billy appeared in the natural (naked). He had been stalled off by two friends until he had reached the yard. There the keepers saw him, and as they liked him, they gently took him to the hospital. He was pronounced incurably insane by two experts, and transferred to the madhouse. The change of air was so beneficial that Louis speedily recovered his senses. At least, the doctors thought so when he was discovered trying to make his elegant (escape); and he was sent back to stir.

As a rule, however, those who attempted to sham insanity failed. They were usually lacking in originality. At any hour of the day or night the whole prison might be aroused by some convict breaking up house, as it was called when a man tried to shoot the bug. He might break everything in his cell, and yell so loud that the other convicts in the cells near by would join in and make a horrible din. Some would curse, and some laugh or howl. If it was at night and they had been awakened out of an opium sleep, they would damn him a thousand miles deep. His friends, however, who knew that he was acting, would plug his game along by talking about his insanity in the presence of stool-pigeons. These latter would tell the keepers that he was buggy (insane), and, if there was not a blow, he might be sent to the hospital. Before that happened, however, he had generally demolished all his furniture. The guards would go to his cell, and chain him up in the Catholic chapel until he could be examined by the doctor. Warden Sage was a humane man, and used to go to the chapel himself and try to quiet the fake lunatic, and give him dainties from his own table. During the night the fake had historic company, for painted on the walls were, on one side of him, Jesus, and on the other, Judas and Mary Magdalene.

A favorite method of shooting the bug, and a rather difficult one for the doctors to detect, was that of hearing voices in one's cell. This is more dangerous for the convict than for anybody else, for when a fake tries to imagine he hears voices, he usually begins to really believe he does, and then from a fake he becomes a genuine freak. Another common fake is to tell the keeper that you have a snake in your arm, and then take a knife and try to cut it out; but it requires nerve to carry this fake through. Sometimes the man who wants to make the prison hospital merely fakes ordinary illness. If he has a screw or a doctor "right" he may stay for months in the comparatively healthy hospital at Sing Sing, where he can loaf all day, and get better food than at the public mess. It is as a rule only the experienced guns who are clever enough to work these little games.

For faking, conversing, loafing in the shop, and for many other forbidden things, we were often punished, though the screws as often winked at small misdemeanors. At Sing Sing they used to hang us up by the wrists sometimes until we fainted. Auburn had a jail, now used as the condemned cells, where there was no bed and no light. In this place the man to be punished would remain from four to ten days and live on ten ounces of bread and half a jug of water a day. In addition, the jail was very damp, worse even than the cells at Sing Sing, where I knew many convicts who contracted consumption of the lungs and various kidney complaints.

Indeed, a great deal of dying goes on in State's prison. During my first term it seemed as if three niggers died to every white man. A dozen of us working around the front would comment on the "stiffs" when they were carried out. One would ask, "Who's dead?" The reply might be, "Only a nigger." One day I was talking in the front with a hall-room man when a stiff was put in the wagon. "Who's dead?" I asked. The hall-man wanted to bet it was a nigger. I bet him a dollar it was a white man, and then asked the hospital nurse, who said it was not a nigger, but an old pal of mine, named Jerry Donovan. I felt sore and would not accept the money I had won. Poor Jerry and I did house-work together for three months, some of which I have told of, and he was a good fellow, and a sure and reliable grafter. And now he had "gone up the escape," and was being carried to the little graveyard on the side of the hill where only an iron tag would mark his place of repose.