“The prison has been taken over under mutual agreement made between myself and Colonel Vigil, in charge, which agreement was signed and approved by Admiral Badger. There are in the prison 43 prisoners who have been sentenced for crime, 75 who have been accused of crime but have not been brought to trial and also 325 who have not been accused of any misdemeanor whatever. These 325 were arrested mostly within the last two months in order to be forced into the federal army and for no other reason. The above data were obtained from the officer in charge. The conditions in the prison under which the 325 men are living are described as frightful.”
Secretary Daniels directed the release of these 325 men, ordering that the seventy-five awaiting trial should be held pending investigation by the American authorities into the charges against them.
“No stage manager putting on ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ could imagine anything more creepy than the sight which met the eyes of the American officers when the keys were turned in the rusty locks and they entered the ancient vaults,” wrote an American newspaper man describing his visit to the prison.
In the grim, forbidding, gloomy pile of San Juan de Ulua the Spanish inquisitors found a building suited to the purposes and one which appealed to their torture-loving tastes. Only a fifteenth century Spaniard could have designed such a castle.
First Field Day at Auburn (N. Y.) Prison.—Despite several hundred light cases of Scarlet fever, at the century old prison at Auburn “on Memorial Day traditions were set aside when the 1,400 prisoners there were given three hours in which to loaf or play and enjoy themselves in the open air,” says the Poughkeepsie Press. “At two o’clock in the afternoon they were marched into the yard in their usual companies, and at a bugle signal they were disbanded. Then they played baseball, and participated in other outdoor sports. There were cheers for the winning contestants and a good time generally. At the end of the three hours the bugle sounded the recall, the companies were formed again, and when the men marched back into the prison there was not a prisoner missing, and there had not been a single infraction of discipline.
“In this instance the short outing was a complete success. It did not destroy discipline, nor will it tend to create the supposition that the men are pampered at Auburn.”
Road Making in New York.—In accordance with the policy of the State Prison Department and by means of an appropriation made at the last session of the legislature, the Department has placed groups of convicts from the various State prisons at work improving roads in different parts of the State. The plan will be extended as fast as possible with the available appropriation and it is hoped that some 500 miles of earth road will be improved during the summer.
At present there are five convict squads on the roads. Three squads have been sent out from Dannemora. They are all engaged in Clinton County one squad improving a bad stretch of the old military turnpike. Two more squads are out from Great Meadow, one working on the Comstock-Whitehall road and the other on the Ticonderoga-Schroon lake road in Warren county.