Lucy Burns says in that complaint:
The hygienic conditions have been improved at Occoquan since a group of Suffragists were imprisoned there. But they are still bad. The water they drink is kept in an open pail, from which it is ladled into a drinking cup. The prisoners frequently dip the drinking cup directly into the pail.
The same piece of soap is used for every prisoner. As the prisoners in Occoquan are sometimes afflicted with disease, this practice is appallingly negligent.
Mrs. Bovee’s affidavit reads in part:
The blankets now being used in the prison have been in use since December without being washed or cleaned. Blankets are washed once a year. Officers are warned not to touch any of the bedding. The one officer who has to handle it is compelled by the regulations to wear rubber gloves while she does so. The sheets for the ordinary prisoners are not changed completely, even when one has gone and another takes her bed. Instead, the top sheet is put on the bottom, and one fresh sheet given them. I was not there when these Suffragists arrived, so I do not know how their bedding was arranged. I doubt whether the authorities would have dared to give them one soiled sheet.
The prisoners with diseases are not always isolated, by any means. In the colored dormitory there are now two women in advanced stages of consumption. Women suffering from syphilis, who have open sores, are put in the hospital. But those whose sores are temporarily healed are put in the same dormitory with the others. There have been several such in my dormitory.
When the prisoners come, they must undress and take a shower bath. For this they take a piece of soap from a bucket in the storeroom. When they have finished, they throw the soap back in the bucket. The Suffragists are permitted three showers a week, and have only these pieces of soap which are common to all inmates. There is no soap at all in the washrooms.
The beans, hominy, rice, corn meal (which is exceedingly coarse, like chicken feed), and cereal have all had worms in them. Sometimes the worms float on top of the soup. Often they are found in the corn bread. The first Suffragists sent the worms to Whittaker on a spoon. On the farm is a fine herd of Holsteins. The cream is made into butter, and sold to the tuberculosis hospital in Washington. At the officers’ table, we have very good milk. The prisoners do not have any butter, or sugar, and no milk except by order of the doctor.
As time went on and great numbers of pickets were arrested, more and more indignities were put on them. They were, in every sense, political prisoners, and were entitled to the privileges of political prisoners. In all countries distinction is made in the treatment of political prisoners. Of course, the hope of the Administration was that these degrading conditions would discourage the picketing, and, of course, the results were—as has happened in the fight for liberty during the whole history of mankind—that more and more women came forward and offered themselves.
In the Suffragist for October 13, 1917 (“From the Log of a Suffrage Picket”), Katherine Rolston Fisher writes the following: