Somehow, with the ingenuity born of necessity, these women also managed to have smuggled in to them occasional small news items. The first day one of the girls approached me and in a stage whisper demanded, “Cross your heart and hope to die you won’t tell.”
I crossed my heart and hoped to die.
She slipped into my hand a short clipping about my trial. Apparently others had been keeping up with events, because a few minutes later Lisa, a little colored girl, called out, “You’se eats, don’t yer?”
A third asked me to explain to them what “sex hygiene” was all about. Accordingly I sought permission of Mrs. Sullivan to be allowed in their corridor during her dinner hour.
“What for?”
“The girls want me to tell them about sex hygiene.”
“Ah, gwan wid ye,” she laughed. “They know bad enough already.”
Some of the most lovely-looking girls were drug addicts. It seemed monstrous that the State could take such liberties with human lives as to convict them as criminals and sentence them to as much as three years for something which should have been considered disease.
Other women were pickpockets, embezzlers, prostitutes, keepers of brothels, “Tiffany,” or high-class thieves, accomplices of safe blowers, and a few “transatlantic flyers,” who assisted in big hauls from Paris or London.
The class snobbishness among the offenders interested me beyond words. No one cared how or where another had been reared, what kind of family background or education she had; the nature of her offense was the key to her social position. The one who picked pockets was scorned by the girl who helped herself to pearl or diamond necklaces; the shoplifter did not “sell her body.”