Referring to the women’s prison, Mr. MacChesney said, “I saw one case there that is most deplorable. It is that of a little girl but 17 years of age. She was sent to the institution after being convicted on a charge of vagrancy. She is there thrown among pickpockets and others who have committed serious crimes. Two of your own judges, who were with me, agreed that she should not have been sent there and that girls of that age should be segregated from older and hardened women.”
The men’s dormitories at the institution were also the object of severe criticism. The men’s cells, constructed before the civil war, with no sanitary arrangements at all, were termed barbaric, and, as one member said, “ought to be dynamited.”
While many Massachusetts newspapers expressed satisfaction that the conference had raised the Deer Island issue again, the self-satisfaction or complacency or resentfulness of some of the editorials showed that not all of the “cocksureness” of Puritan times regarding the high character of home habits and institutions has departed from the Bay State.
Jail Poetry.—Upton Sinclair recently “did” eighteen hours imprisonment in the New Castle (Del.) workhouse for violating a Sunday blue law. Seven hours of the time were spent on the stone-pile. The inside cells and the “doubling up” practices led to the following verse:
THE MENAGERIE.
Oh, come ye lords and ladies of the realm,
Come from your couches soft, your perfumed halls,
Come watch with me throughout the weary hours.
Here are there sounds to fill your jaded nerves,