Anna Alice Chapin

“ I LIKE to write detective and mystery stories, and am interested in crime and criminals, because, like Peter Pan, I have never grown up.
If this conjunction between crime and childhood strikes you as a shocking association of ideas, I am going to give you the stories of prisoners I know myself, to prove that many people never do grow up!
Grown-up people, like children, hate restraint whether they submit to it or not, and also, like children, are excited by trivial things. In a boring world people want their thrills. In a drearier prison cell convicts chafe madly for their freedom. ”

“ It is heart-breaking to write to life-termers, who contrive to fill their days with a thousand tasks and amusements after a fashion that every one who writes to them must find pathetic. There have been autobiographies smuggled to me out of penitentiaries, which were infinitely touching. ”

“ Our object, we prison-correspondents, is to get at the minds and hearts of the men in jail, and to find out just what brought them to the outlaw’s path. Hardship? Very seldom, I think; it is usually something more vivid and human than that.
Too much restraint breeds too much restlessness, as a matter of course. As a rule, a man put on parole doesn’t run away, because he can. ”