Suddenly the clear bugle notes of the “Retreat” sounded far down the yard, slowly and melodiously. Instantly the boys in gray began to fall into line at their appointed places. There was now silence where a moment before there had been bowling, baseball, running, dancing, piano, band, and the shouts of swarming inmates. Then came the first bars of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” played by the prison inmate band. Off came the caps, and down across the breast. The flag sank slowly, lowered from the tall pole by three inmates. The music ceased, the caps were again donned, and from the extreme end of the yard rose suddenly a cheer:
“Rah! Rah! Rah!
Rah! Rah! Rah!
South Wing! South Wing!
Rah! Rah! Rah!”
Then, preceded by the band and with banners flying, the victorious athletes of the South Wing marched up the center walk between the files of other prisoners, to receive the silver cup from the hands of the donor, Mr. Richard M. Hurd.
I wish I had the power to make the readers of The Outlook sense in full the enormous significance for both present and future of this recent Fourth of July in Auburn Prison. You have read in these recent months so often of the greatly increased liberties granted to prisoners that mere games or the unchecked intercourse of prisoners on holidays seems no epoch-making novelty.
But history was made at Auburn Prison on Independence Day. For the fourteen hundred men not only ran off their own sports during the afternoon, but they practically ran themselves, through their appointed “delegates,” chosen from among their own numbers by their own votes. And assuredly no more orderly group could have been found on that Fourth of July anywhere between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
A year ago Auburn Prison was austere indeed. The holidays and the Sundays were grievously dreaded by the inmates—dreaded as they had been for generations, because a Sunday or a holiday meant that the inmates had been locked into their miserable little cells at about five o’clock on the previous day, and that, except for a few brief hours for chapel or for an entertainment on holidays, they were locked in all through the holiday until the next morning, when work recommenced. Thirty-six hours, more or less, in a wretched little cell, hardly large enough to turn around in, with no modern conveniences of toilet or wash-basins—simply a hole in the solid masonry wall of a building ninety-eight years old, built at a time when prison meant physical torture and oblivion, and when prison architecture aided to the maximum that purpose.
Is it any wonder that a prisoner recently said to me, on a Sunday afternoon at Clinton Prison in New York State, where they still lock up their prisoners from Saturday until Monday, with the exceptions noted: “My God! It’s a wonder we don’t all go insane in here!” Is it any wonder that at Auburn Prison, according to the words of one of the leading prisoners, the inmates used to consider themselves supremely lucky if by some means they could get “dope” on Saturday, with which to “put a shot into themselves” on Sunday morning? Then they would lie befuddled and bevisioned during Sunday—the Lord’s Day! “And on Monday morning,” laconically said the prisoner, “we used to have the biggest number of fights in the shops of any day in the week. The effects of the drug were wearing off, you know.”