Sing Sing Prison

“ Neither do I consider the present system, as practised at Sing Sing, the state prison of New York, as tending to reform the offenders; it punishes them severely, but that is all. Where corporal punishment is resorted to, there always will be feelings of vindictiveness; and all the bad passions must be allowed to repose before the better can gain the ascendant.
The best system that is acted upon in the Penitentiary at Philadelphia, where there is solitary confinement, but with labour and exercise. ”

“ Up and down he padded; had he committed some ugly crime, for which he longed to atone—but prison is not atonement! Had his conviction been unjust, and was he raging impotently against injustice? Let him not rage too loudly, for there was a guard yonder, indifferent to tortured souls, but licensed to stop noises. A prison is a prison, not a sanitarium for diseased crooks. But if the world could hear those footfalls, and interpret their significance, how long would prisons last? A jail at night is a strange place—eight hundred men packed in together, each terrifyingly alone! ”

“ But that in room number 60 of the Viennese Military Jail I should fall right into the arms of Dušek, was one of the happiest chances which have occurred to me in the course of my misfortunes.
A man prepares and equips himself with good resolutions, with a heroic spirit, with a most firm will; he says to himself: Prison,—good; loss of liberty,—never mind; a jailer,—there must be one: a warder,—there must be one also,—but the reality comes and the prison turns out to be a military jail, a cold and dismal room; loss of liberty turns out to be a complete loss of your own personality ”

“ Come, let's away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness. ”

“ The prisoner’s quarters are in the wings, which extend from either side of the keeper’s quarters. In the gloomy office, men with that indescribable prison air all such officials bear, lounge about, and come and go on business. There is iron everywhere, from the huge bolts on the outer doors, and the door inside of them, to the barred windows and other doors beyond number, that open and shut with a sullen clangor that goes echoing through the stone passages as if it would never die away. The smell of the jail is as powerful in its way as these evidences of its actual strength. ”

“ In the darkness the lofty walls looked grimly frowning, and I imagined what feelings must possess the ordinary criminal who passes under their black shadow to his first night's taste of imprisonment. Another massive door was opened in the wall of Newgate, and we were ushered into what at first sight appeared a large hall. It was really the interior of the prison. Glancing up, I saw dimly-lighted corridors, running round tier on tier of cell-doors, and connected by light, graceful staircases; a clear view of every door being commanded from the office at the west end of the ground-floor. ”

“ Women too, under the same variety of circumstances. Every prisoner who comes into the jail comes at night; is put into a bath, and dressed in the prison-garb; and then a black hood is drawn over his face and head, and he is led to the cell from which he never stirs again until his whole period of confinement has expired. ”

“ Ashamed of my childish feeling of fear, I, that would stand alone and face a score of warriors and never quaver, as the sound of the feet approached, started to pace hurriedly the floor of my prison. As the causer of the sounds in the corridor reached my door he stopped, and I heard the key rattle, as he did insert it in the lock. I sat myself down upon my couch and tried, as best I could, to appear to be at mine ease when the jailer should enter. ”

“ From such freedom of communication on my jailer's part, I began to hope for additional information, which never came. It was in vain that I conjured her to tell me where my prison was situated, whether at the edge of the city, or far away in the country, or to suffer me to have a glimpse from a window of my vicinity. To all such entreaties she was pitiless, and I was left to that vague and vain conjecture which so wears the intellect. ”

“ It all had the appearance of a struggle for the possession of a chair, because Mr Verloc instantly took his wife’s place in it. Mr Verloc did not cover his face with his hands, but a sombre thoughtfulness veiled his features. A term of imprisonment could not be avoided. He did not wish now to avoid it. A prison was a place as safe from certain unlawful vengeances as the grave, with this advantage, that in a prison there is room for hope. ”

“ Sitting tonight in our lonesome cell, bounded on three sides by blank and barren walls of steel, through our two-by-six door, constructed of massive bars of iron, there comes to us the conversation of our fellow prisoners, as with head pressed close against the bars to catch the other fellow's words, we listen to the talk of the men "committed for crime"—men strong and healthy, who should be engaged in some honest labor, but, instead, are "doing time" for a broken law. ”

“ I have been in prison North, South, East and West, I have been in the dismal, solitary cell for one year, have been put in large tanks of ice water, have been punished over and over again, but it has always made me more of a demon. ”

“ Is a prison the fitting place? You wish to make me believe in splendor, and we are lying hidden in night; you boast of glory, and we are smothering our words in the curtains of this miserable bed; you give me glimpses of absolute power, and I hear the step of the jailer in the corridor—that step which, after all, makes you tremble more than it does me. To render me somewhat less incredulous, free me from the Bastille; let me breathe the fresh air; give me my spurs and trusty sword, then we shall begin to understand each other. ”

“ Beyond these pages the prison has no record of his existence; and though he live to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the building it is situated; what kind of men there are about him; whether in the long winter nights there are living people near, or he is in some lonely corner of the great gaol, with walls and passages, and iron doors between him and the nearest sharer in its solitary horrors. ”

“ It is perched, like a bird of ill omen, on a rocky ledge, where all might see it in passing over the high-road. Thus, in the early day, the traveler on entering the county town encountered, first, the stocks and whipping-post; continuing his route, he in due time came to the gallows, at the town's end. The exterior of the jail is not especially repulsive, now that it is no longer a prison; but the inside is a relic of barbarism—just such a place as I have often imagined the miserable witchcraft prisoners might have been confined in. The back wall is of stone. ”

“ The Jail I THE DAYS RING with noisy clamor. There is constant going and coming. The clatter of levers, the slamming of iron doors, continually reverberates through the corridors. The dull thud of a footfall in the cell above hammers on my head with maddening regularity. In my ears is the yelling and shouting of coarse voices. ”

“ One day the jailer permitted him to enter my prison, when he instantly ran to embrace my knees, actually uttering a cry of joy. I took him up in my arms, and he threw his little hands about my neck, and lavished on me the tenderest caresses. How much affection in his smile and manner! how eagerly I longed to have him to educate, raise him from his abject condition, and snatch him, perhaps, from utter ruin. I never even learnt his name; he did not himself know that he had one. ”

“ One may listen to high-pitched voices, plaintive and wailing, until the haunting melody will abide for days. The prisoners sing of every known experience from childhood and home to “hard luck in the family, sho’ God, fell on me.” One youngster about twenty-one years of age, periodic offender with experience on the chain gang and in jail, sang more than one hundred songs or fragments and the end was not yet. They cannot be described; selections are not representative. ”

“ On my way home I passed the police station and pictured in my mind the inferno inside—the big negro swinging his ladle above the snarling, cursing horde of half-starved prisoners in the stinking bowels of the city prison.
At Madam Singleton’s my boyish mind had not grasped the greater tragedy. Fresh air, light, meat, drink, and music—that was all I saw there then. But the tired women were prisoners more hopeless than the savage men fighting for food in the jail. The bodily comforts they had at Madam Singleton’s but served to tighten their shackles. ”

“ The system of the convict prison was enforced here, and with the same iron rigor. Strict silence was the rule along with the absolute exclusion of newspapers and all news of the outside world. The rules forbid any delicacy or books being furnished by one's friends from the outside. This iron system is as cruel as unphilosophical, for, pending trial, the inmates are more or less living in a perfect agony of mind, which drives many into insanity or to the verge of insanity, as it did me. ”

“ You accept imprisonment as the natural fortune of the season, or you brave the elements prepared to let them do their worst, while, if confined to house, you have that solace of snugness, that comfortable chimney-corner which somehow realises an immense amount of the joys we concentrate in the word ‘Home.’ It is in the want of this rallying-point, this little domestic altar, where all gather together in a common worship, that lies the dreary discomfort of being weather-bound in summer, and when the prison is some small village inn, noisy, disorderly, and dirty, the misery is complete. ”

“ There is a larger class of moutons known in prisons as the musique, composed of all who from the moment of arrest are prepared to confess their evil deeds, name their associates and reveal their whereabouts and how they might be taken. Often the musiciens are retained on the service of the police, and inhabit a prison for months together, or so long as they can be useful during a protracted trial. ”

“ The hand of the peer and the gipsy met in a strong clasp, but neither could speak.
And so they parted. The prison door closed between the convicted felon and his high-born friend. Did either dream how strangely they were destined to meet again? With his face shaded by his hand, the prisoner sat; that small white hand, delicate as a lady’s, doomed now to the unceasing labor of the convict, when a noise as of persons in altercation in the passage without met his ears. He raised his head to listen, and recognized the gruff, hoarse voice of his jailer; then the sharp, passionate voice of a woman ”

“ And such being the character of the inmates, their friends who visit them are naturally of the same type—the lowest outpourings of the slums; and it is not surprising to find that the arrangements of the prison are made to fit its ordinary inmates. The innocent man is a negligible quantity, and no arrangements are made for him or his visitors."
"But shall we not be taken to Reuben's cell?" asked Miss Gibson. ”

“ There is no march to the gibbet through a throng of spectators as in most of our own jails. The doomed man gets his last glimpse of the sky through a stone funnel down which no ray of sunlight ever finds its way. As far as I remember, from my London days, the only sign the outer world has of the work going on within the prison walls is the hoisting of a black flag over the lodge, and I know not if even this ceremonial is still observed. From the gallows to the grave in Newgate used to be but a step. ”

“ It would be true if a man were picked up on the street and taken directly to a penitentiary, but that isn’t done. He is first thrown into a dirty, lousy, foul-smelling cell in some city prison, sometimes with an awful beating in the bargain, and after two or three days of that nothing in the world can shock, stun, or humiliate him. He is actually happy to get removed to a county jail where he can perhaps get rid of the vermin and wash his body. ”

“ I can never forget my first day in a felon's cell. Of all my eventful life, into which many dark days have crowded themselves, my first day in prison was the darkest. After the "soaking season" is over, an officer advances to the dungeon, throws back the bolts, pulls open the door, and, in a harsh manner, commands the broken-hearted culprit to follow. He is conducted to an apartment, takes a bath, and dons the suit of stripes. Ye angels! did you ever behold such a sight? Is it not a travesty on every thing that is good to dress a human being in such a suit of clothes. ”

“ Truelove was indisposed to reveal the secrets of his prison-house out of a tender regard for my feelings, but seeing that I preferred to know the worst, he told me all about the felon's cell, the plank bed, the oakum picking, the wretched diet, and the horribly monotonous life. My chief feeling on hearing this sad tale was one of indignation at the thought that a man of honest convictions and blameless life should be subjected to such privations and indignities. ”

“ One man, lurching from a wineshop, cut at me aimlessly with a notched and bloody sabre; but I evaded him with ease, and he fell into the midst of the pursuers, retarding them a little. I reached the south-west angle of the prison, where the Place split up, like the blown corner of a flag, into many little crooked ribbons of streets, and amongst these I dived, racing haphazard, while the red-socks thudded in my wake and my heart in my ribs. ”

“ At length the silence which had hitherto reigned in our prison was broken by loud shouts and cries, which proceeded from the streets beyond us. That something extraordinary was taking place we had little doubt, yet what it was we of course could not divine. At length at the usual hour the jailer made his appearance with our provisions, which were, as he had promised, far better than the usual prison fare. The man’s countenance also showed us that something had happened. ”