Jail

“ The jail contains all arts in act and trust;
⁠Should you but hanker after surgeon's skill,
⁠'T will draw the spoiled blood from your veins adust.
Next there is something in itself that will
⁠Make you right eloquent, a bold brave spark,
⁠Big with high-soaring thoughts for good and ill.
Blessed is the man who lies in dungeon dark,
⁠Languishing many a month, then takes his flight
⁠Of war, truce, peace he knows, and tells the mark.
Needs be that all things turn to his delight;
⁠The jail has crammed his brains so full of wit,
⁠They'll dance no morris to upset the wight. ”

“ A less inviting, less inspiring, less home-like room for human habitation could scarce be found outside a jail. Perhaps this was the less inappropriate in that a jail it was, to a small party of its occupants—born and bred to better things.
The eye was grateful even for the note of cheer supplied by the red cylindrical valise on the shelf above each cot, and by the occasional scarlet tunic and stable-jacket. ”

“ If in the wisdom of the members of the legislature the crime calls for imprisonment in the penitentiary, then the ordinary sentences run one, two, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years, and life, according to the hazard of the legislature, the whim of the court, the gamble of the jury, or the feeling and means of expression of the unthinking and pitiless crowd who awe courts and juries with their cries for vengeance.
Neither does punishment affect any two alike; the sensitive and proud may suffer more from a day in jail or even from conviction than another would suffer from a year. ”

“ The very grave was not more still than the court as the officer of the jail, taking off the coat, ripped up the collar, and held up in his hand a small piece of tarnished corduroy.
“My Lord! my Lord! will you let a poor man's life be swore away—”
“Silence, sir,—be still, I say,” cried the prisoner's counsel, who saw the irremediable injury of these passionate appeals. “I am here to conduct your defence, and I will not be interfered with. ”

“ A prisoner who was an inmate of this jail several years ago recently found himself again an inmate, and expressed surprise at the changed tone, as it were, of the jail, and he laughingly asked if the world was getting better, for he said the men now in jail were more refined in their conversation, more unselfish in their actions toward each other, and of a higher moral tone generally. ”

“ So the guards carried him to the jail, thinking to lay him by the heels there for the night; but, when the warders saw his beauty and loveliness, they could not find it in their hearts to imprison him: they made him sit with them without the walls; and, when food came to them, he ate with them what sufficed him. ”

“ The night is warm, general. Don't over-exert yourself. The door is locked and the key is in my pocket, and besides, if I should let you out you would only fall into the hands of more of my men. Your outside guard is also bound and gagged, and reclining against the wall of the jail [Pg 258] in the shadow. The sentinels you saw on patrol when you approached the jail are my men. You see, there is no escape. ”

“ A prisoner of another jail may sing and dance in his two fetters, and fear not his feet for stumbling at a stone, while God's prisoner, who hath his one foot fettered with the gout, lieth groaning on a couch, and quaketh and crieth out if he fear that there would fall on his foot no more than a cushion. ”

“ The jail was one, for strength, that modern builders might copy with profit to governments. It was of granite walls, two feet thick, with double-barred windows and ponderous doors, well secured with massive locks. The main floor of the jail proper was used for small fry thieves and petty offenders, but the second floor contained three cells which were used for the safe keeping of those charged with murder and felony. Shinburn, Cummings, and I occupied these cells. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Walking down to the jail in the dusk of the evening, he explained to the prisoner that he was a very violent and wicked person, that he had now been confined a long time, as was hoped, to the reformation of his wicked ways ”

“ If the ninety strokes are received by a prisoner without his confessing, he is still, though against law, kept in jail on suspicion to the day of his death, which, as the jails are the foulest holes that can be imagined, generally occurs within a few months. ”

“ Wemmick, and affecting to consult my watch and to be surprised by the information I had received, accepted his offer.
We were at Newgate in a few minutes, and we passed through the lodge where some fetters were hanging up on the bare walls among the prison rules, into the interior of the jail. At that time, jails were much neglected, and the period of exaggerated reaction consequent on all public wrong-doing—and which is always its heaviest and longest punishment—was still far off. ”

“ FISHING FOR MEN.
Dear Brother Herr: We, as prisoners in the Jefferson County Jail, desire, for your encouragement, and because it is the spontaneous expression of our hearts, to thank you for your continued, untiring and unselfish devotion to our interests, spiritual and temporal. We desire in this manner to show you and the public that we thoroughly appreciate the efforts of those who try to draw us from the broad road of vice and crime into the narrow path of virtue where we are satisfied alone peace and happiness can be found. ”

“ Under these conditions the jail will become what it ought to be, a humane place of detention for persons awaiting trial, bearing in mind that such prisoners are presumed to be innocent in the eyes of the law until the courts find them guilty and determine the question of their subsequent treatment. ”

“ He had stood in danger of arrest; of bailiffs, and a jail—a vulgar jail, to which the common people with small incomes went. Gentlemen of ancient houses have no privilege of exemption from such cruel laws—unless they are of one great house, and then they have. ”

“ Pride in success leads to undertakings of difficulty, and he who enters a jail a “sneaking thief,” may be stimulated by professional emulation to advance in crime till he attains the dignity of a penitentiary cell for some boldly executed robbery, or some brilliant act of extensive forgery. ”

“ By the book was meant the log-book of the jail. In it the governor was required to report for the justices and the Home Office all jail events a little out of the usual routine. For instance, all punishments of prisoners, all considerable sicknesses, deaths and their supposed causes, etc., etc.
“This Josephs seems by the book to be an ill-conditioned fellow; he is often down for punishment.”
“Yes! he hates work. About Gillies, sir—ringing his bell and pretending it was an accident?” ”

“ They lie in this grim jail; and God alone knows when they will be suffered to come forth. But we heard that the prisoners here were harshly [Pg 322] treated, and had scarcely the necessaries of life supplied them. It was after hearing this that I went one day and craved speech of the Governor. I did first beg him to let me see my dear father; but that he might not permit. He said, however, that I might speak with the jailer who had charge of him, and obtain through him such things as we could make shift to purchase for him to lessen his privations and sufferings. ”

“ When you go to the city, boys, you better have the kale,† Or the law, they'll arrest you, and they'll put you in jail. The judge he'll fine you, they'll shake you down, If you haven't got the money, boys, you're jailhouse bound. Chorus: 7
If you got a good man, woman, you better keep him at home, For those city women won't leave him alone. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Swearing vengeance against the whole human race, I left the jail and went back to my father’s house, where I remained for a short time and then went to Lower Gloucester, where I went to work in a shoe manufactory, having learned that trade during my confinement in the Norwich jail. ”

“ There is another prison near New York which is a house of correction. The convicts labor in stone-quarries [343] near at hand, but the jail has no covered yards or shops, so that when the weather is wet (as it was when I was there) each man is shut up in his own little cell, all the live-long day. ”

“ Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or no any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet standing. I did not know, myself, until the sixth of this present month, when I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned here, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost. ”

“ Every custodian or jailer is required, without any order being able to dispense therewith, to present the person of the prisoner to the civil officer having the police of the jail, whenever it shall be required by him. ”

“ Penitentiary is better off without him. In the morning we will have several of our leading doctors exhume the body to verify the statement. I'll attend to it. Yes, sir. A certain form must be observed. A jury will be impaneled, the statement will be read, and the judge will, in a sort of a charge, declare that the prisoner is innocent. Some things are strange after all. A venomous scoundrel, but let him go. Yes, I'll attend to everything in the morning. You'd better sleep here."
"No, I'm going to the jail and then to the telegraph office." ”

“ It is far less costly to the State than keeping them in prison, and often leads to the establishment of an honest life. [4]
Jails and Prisons: Every community has some kind of jail for the detention of offenders. Those who come in contact with the law are often the poor and the friendless who cannot get bail. Even innocent persons may be held some time awaiting trial, or the action of the grand jury. Young girls are often detained, sometimes as witnesses, sometimes pending investigation of their own cases, sometimes as runaways from home. ”

“ It is clear that our forefathers did not go in for imprisoning to such a degree as to create a jail vocabulary, and when we were imprisoned, it had been created by a highly cultured nation, the Germans. We have jail traditions, it is true, and extensive ones, but we lack a terminology. ”

“ The mother having you for a son is to be pitied-you are to be pitied, too; but the jail is bankrupt, without a shilling to relieve you in the liquor line," interposes another, as one by one the prisoners begin to leave and seek their several retreats.
"That breath of yours," interrupts the vote-cribber, who, having returned, stands regarding the outcast man with singular interest, "would make drunk the whole jail. A week in 'Mount Rascal' The upper story used for the confinement of felons. will be necessary to transmute you, as they call it, into something Christian. ”

“ If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and promises not to run away during the year. ”

“ And be it likewise enacted, that every person who shall say or sing mass, being thereof lawfully convicted, shall forfeit the sum of two hundred marks, and be committed to prison in the next jail, there to remain by the space of one year, and from thenceforth till he have paid the said sum of two hundred marks. And that every person who shall willingly hear mass, shall forfeit the sum of one thousand marks, and suffer imprisonment for a year. ”

“ I tell you that the man in jail will be the most joyous person in this city on Sunday morning if Forder is still alive, and I understand his friends have bail ready, and that he will be out of jail first thing Monday morning. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No arrested man can be kept in confinement in any case in which the law permits remaining free under bail, if he gives sufficient bail.
13. No man, in a case in which his detention is authorised by law, can be brought to or confined anywhere except in the places legally and publicly designated to serve as jail, court house, or prison. ”

“ Like voluntary prisoners, they have vol- untarily shut themselves up in the jail of these in- hospitable walls. All that constitutes the joy of life, the smile of a house, they repress as some- thing superfluous. ”

“ 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. ”