After three days further detention in the “jail” the prisoner was transferred to the hospital, where he received proper care, but “he had at first no clear recollection of the brutal treatment of which he had been the victim.”
An interesting side light is thrown upon the official side of prison life by an episode connected with this case of punishment. Immediately after the episode, Tom Brown questioned one of the officers who refused to answer the questions. On the following morning the same officer came to Tom Brown, who writes:
“This morning he is exceedingly bland.... He enters upon a long rigmarole, the gist of which is how necessary it is for a man to do his duty.... Then he casually turns the conversation around to show how closely connected he is to various admirers of my father and myself, and gracefully insinuates that he also shares these feelings.... It is borne in upon me that he not only knows all about last night’s disturbance, but that he was probably concerned in it, and is now deliberately trying to switch me off the track.”
Another side light upon the official side of prison life is that Tom Brown discovered that prisoners under punishment were never released from the jail on Sunday. When he made an appeal to the Principal Keeper to transfer the sick boy from the dark cell to the hospital, the Principal Keeper objected strenuously, but when the prison physician joined in the appeal, “finally the P. K. with an air of triumph brings out his last and conclusive argument. ‘There is a great deal in what you say, gentlemen, and I should like to oblige you, Mr. Osborne, but you see this is Sunday; and you know we never let ’em out of jail on Sunday.’ ... ‘Sunday!’ I exclaimed. ‘In Heaven’s name, P. K., what is Sunday? Isn’t it the Lord’s Day? Very well, then. Do you mean to tell me you actually think if you take a poor sick boy, with an open wound in his ear, out of a close, dirty, vermin-filled, dark cell, where he isn’t allowed to wash, and has but three gills of water a day ... and put him back into the hospital, where the Doctor says he belongs—do you really think that such an act of mercy would be displeasing to God?’ ‘Why,’ he gasps, ‘that’s true. I think you’re right. We put ’em in on Sunday; why shouldn’t we take ’em out?’”
Mr. Osborne certified that this story is fully corroborated by careful inquiry from different men and comments as follows:
“Doubtless some will say that the statements of convicts are not to be believed. That touches upon one of the very worst features of the situation. No discrimination is ever made. It is not admitted, that while one convict may be a liar, another may be entirely truthful; that men differ in prison exactly as in the world outside. It is held, quite as a matter of course, that they are all liars, and an officer’s word will be taken against that of a convict or any number of convicts. The result is that the officers feel themselves practically immune from any evil consequences to them from their own acts of injustice or violence. What follows this is inevitable. Our prisons have often been the scenes of intolerable brutality, for which it has been useless for the victims to seek redress. They can only cower and endure in silence; or be driven into insanity by a hopeless revolt against the System....
“The point is this: that no convict has any rights—not even the right to be believed; not even the right to reasonable considerate treatment. He is exposed without safeguard of any sort to whatever outrage and inconsiderate and brutal keeper may choose to inflict upon him; and you cannot under the present system guard against such inconsiderate and brutal treatment.
“I should not like to be understood as asserting that all keepers are brutal or even a majority of them.” ... But, “we must recognize, in dealing with our Prison System, that many really well-meaning men will operate a system, in which the brutality of an officer goes unpunished, in a brutal manner.
“The reason of this is not far to seek—a reason which also obtained in the slave system. The most common and powerful impulse that drives an ordinary, well-meaning man to brutality is fear.... In prison, where each officer believes that his life is in constant danger, the keeper tends to become callous; the sense of that danger blunts his higher qualities.... Undoubtedly there is basis for his fear, for some of those men are dangerous, rendered more so by the nerve-racking System. I can conceive no more terribly disintegrating moral experience than that of being a keeper over convicts.
“I am not now in any way disputing the necessity of a keeper being constantly on his guard; I am not saying whether this view of things is right or wrong; and when I use the word fear I do not mean cowardice—a very different thing, for a brave man can feel fear. I am simply trying to point out that in prison, as elsewhere, when men are dominated by fear, brutality is the evitable result.”