In the prison yard a squad of convicts are marching. The
lock-step is there no longer. Prison reform has ended that. The
convict is no longer forced into a gait which stamps him ever
after.
There are electric lights in the hundreds of cells--and there is
absolute cleanliness throughout the vast structure. No hotel is
cleaner, if any be as clean.
The convicts get their letters twice a week. They have pictures
in their cells--and they may have musical instruments if they
wish; and many a man, beside his narrow plank bed, has a strip of
rag carpet made at home. Their lives are horrible--for
confinement kills men's souls; and one has said who knew prison
life:
"It is only what is GOOD in man
That wastes and withers there;
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair." ----
While you go through the prison you see the things
mentioned--electric lights, clean halls, bathing apparatus, and
the rest. But you STUDY the human beings working at their
fixed tasks, or moving about in their dismal, heavy suits of
stripes.
Just as many kinds of faces as you see in a city street you see
in that prison--but there you see more than elsewhere the
failures, the human weeds.
But at least there is a striving to make things better.
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