Within Prison Walls / being a narrative during a week of voluntary confinement in the state prison at Auburn, New York

by Thomas Mott Osborne

My cell is exactly four feet wide by seven and a half feet long, measuring by my own feet, and about seven and a half feet high.[2] The iron bed is hooked to the wall and folds up against it; the mattress and blankets hang over it. The entire furniture consists of one stool, a shelf or table which drops down against the wall when not held up by hooks, an iron basin filled with water for washing purposes, a covered iron bucket for other purposes, a tin cup for drinking water which was filled shortly before noon by the convict orderly, and an old broom which stands in the corner. A small wooden locker with three shelves is fastened up in the farther left-hand corner. The pillow hangs in the opposite right-hand corner over the edge of the bed.

This is a cell in one of the oldest parts of the prison. It has a concrete floor and plastered walls and ceiling, and looks clean. From my grated door, being on the second tier, I can see diagonally out of four heavily barred windows in the outer wall, looking across about ten feet, over the open space which drops to the stone corridor below, and rises to the highest galleries. Through the two lower windows I catch glimpses of the ground, through the two upper, of leaves and branches and the sky. The daylight in the cell is enough at the present moment to read and write by, but none too good. Outside it is a very bright, sunny day. If it were a dark day I could not see much without a light. The electric bulb hangs from a hook in the center of the rounded ceiling and my head nearly touches it.

So much for my present surroundings; now let me begin the story of the day.

Upon arising this morning at home, the toothache, although I could still feel it grumbling, had so modified that I became convinced that it was largely imagination. As it has since disappeared it must have been entirely imagination. There seems to be no excuse whatever for not going ahead.

Having noticed yesterday that, although the prisoners are allowed to wear their hair as they please, their faces are all smooth shaven, I begin the day by the sacrifice of my mustache. I shave, dress, and eat as much breakfast as I can—which is not very much.

At nine o’clock I am at the railway station to say good-bye to the Warden, who has been called to Albany on business. After the train leaves at 9:30 I go to my office, where there are some last matters to attend to, bid farewell to the few friends who are about, and at ten o’clock present myself at the prison entrance.

The polite guard at the gate unlocks it, I enter, and the first barrier between me and the world shuts behind me. I mount the steps to the main building, and turn into the Warden’s office. I am dressed in old clothes, appropriate for the occasion, and have no valuables or money about my person.

In the Warden’s office a few last details are arranged with Grant, the Prison Superintendent of Industries, who is acting for the Warden; and my name and certain details of my family history and career of crime are taken down by the Warden’s clerk on a slip of paper, which is handed over to a good-looking, well-groomed young officer, to whom I am given in charge.

On Saturday, when writing out yesterday’s address, it occurred to me that it might be useful to take an alias. Such a notion doubtless seems a trifle foolish at first thought; considering that there is no secret of my identity, but I reasoned that if officers and prisoners always had my own name in mind or on tongue every time they looked at or addressed me, it would really make it more difficult to be accepted on the basis of an ordinary inmate. I decided, therefore, to take a name which would have no association whatever with the chairman of the Prison Reform Commission, yet would be somewhat in character. So on the records I am entered as Thomas Brown, No. 33,333x.

The young officer in his neat blue uniform, carrying his loaded stick, says briefly, “Step this way, Brown.” I am hazily aware of being a momentary object of interest to the men in the back office; a heavy iron door is unlocked at the head of a flight of iron stairs; and as the door clangs behind me and I hear the key turn in the lock, I begin to realize that I am a prisoner. I have made a bargain with myself to stay here a week, and I cannot leave sooner without serious loss of self-respect.