out necessity or authority, and that in some instances the guards have ridden over the prisoners with their horses and have set the dogs on them, inflicting serious and painful injuries." The guard's efforts to amuse himself run to the grotesque and the barbarous. One guard takes a picture of himself with his foot planted on a convict sprawling in the dust. In another place officers surround a poor prisoner who is being whipped. The prisoner has to count the number of licks he is receiving. The rules subscribe ten licks at one time, and the guards stand about and amuse themselves by disturbing and upsetting the poor fellow. He makes a mistake, and then has to begin the count over again. All of this is done in a hilarious, good-natured fashion. The guard must be sure of his authority,—at least he must feel that the prisoner is sure of it, and so in many, all too many, convict road camps a new prisoner is initiated in order to impress him with due reverence for his superiors. He is whipped as soon as he arrives at the camp and before he has had a chance to prove his pliancy. An official comment upon this is: "This form of humiliation often causes resentment among the men and is an unwarranted addition to the sentence of the court. The prisoners are punished by beating them, sometimes on the naked flesh with a piece of belting attached to a handle."

Not only does this habitual behavior harden and coarsen those in authority, but it deforms those whom they supervise. Think of the fine temper and self-restraint back of the following: "My spirit is broken, but I still have my honor. I have been treated like some brute, half naked and half fed;

have been made to get down on my knees and let some man beat me as though I were not a human being; have been made the fool's jest by guards. Rather than serve again at the state farm I would prefer the quickest possible death."

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It is difficult to write about Southern prisons in one article. When one deals with the penal institutions of the rest of the country, one thinks primarily of the prison, the huge central structure that houses fifteen or eighteen hundred men. In the South there is more diversity, the thing is more complicated, and the attempt to organize it into a single article is a more difficult undertaking. Instead of one penal system, there are at least three. There is the prison building that resembles that of the North. Then there is the county chain-gang in a number of Southern States; forty or fifty counties in each State working prisoners on the public roads, each county more or less having its own system and providing its own management. In addition, there is the stateprison farm, a huge tract of land employing hundreds of men and raising cotton, rice, or tobacco. In some of the States there are five, six, and in one as many as nine, different farms, distinct in management, in personnel, in types of discipline, and in physical conditions. To all of this one must add the coal-mines in one of the States, a system of penal administration all by itself, with the men leased out to a private concern, working for the profit of a large corporation that judges the efficiency of its management by the money made at the end of the year.

This diversity is still further com

plicated by the fact that the color line exists in the prison. The colored population of the Southern prison is predominant. The management is white. It has certain notions of discipline and control of the colored prisoner that come from experiences outside the prison walls. But the white prisoners do not escape the mood and the temper that the treatment of the colored generates, and so they suffer with their darker fellows.

There are two main types of chaingangs, those where the men live in cages set on wheels, and those where they live in tents set on the ground. The chain-gang is a peculiar institution. It is made up of chained men; that is, men upon whose ankles chains ranging in length from twelve to twenty-four inches are riveted. As soon as a man comes to a chain-camp he is shackled. That shackle generally stays as long as the man is there, and that may be for a lifetime. Each camp has a few trusties; not very many. Out of forty or fifty men there may be six, sometimes ten. Ten would be unusual. The chain riveted to both ankles tends to drag on the ground, and interferes with the working energy of the prisoner. There is therefore another and longer chain, a kind of cross chain linked at the middle of the one that is riveted to the ankles. That chain serves two purposes. It is used to lift the chain off the ground, when the man is working, by sticking the loose end through the belt and raising the riveted chain. Its other use is to chain the men together at night. A dozen men and more will be chained to one another when they are asleep in their beds. There will be a long chain running

m one end of the cage to the other.

To this chain all the men will be locked by slipping one end of the long chain through the loose end of the cross chain which each prisoner has in addition to the one riveted about his ankles. This limits the movement of the men to the length of their cross chain. Thus they sleep; thus they lie in their beds on Sundays. Frequently they are compelled to lie in that way when it rains, and that may be for two weeks together.

The typical cages are small, and stand on wheels. They range from 7x7x16 to 9x9x20. The typical cage has eighteen beds. There are nine beds on each side of the cage, three tiers of beds, three in a row. That makes the space between the beds very narrow. If the men were free to move about, they would have little room; but they are shackled. Even in the daytime they are often locked to one another. They lie on their beds, their faces almost touching the bed above them. The cage frequently has a tin roofing. On hot Sundays, Saturday afternoons, afternoons, and holidays the sun streams down on the cages and makes an oven of the place, and the human beings in it roast.

I shall ask to be excused throughout this essay for quoting heavily from official documents. I cannot ask the reader to believe the unbelievable. "The prisoners slept in a steel road cage similar to those used for circus animals, excepting that they did not have the privacy which would be given to respectable lion, tiger or bear." "At night the prisoners are fastened to a beam with a short chain and a heavy shackle. Men should not be compelled to wear three shackles in daylight (Sunday) and be unable to gather near the stove in winter or to

avoid the direct rays of the sun in the summer." "The men are often confined in the cages on rainy days and Sundays, without exercise and with scarcely enough room to do anything except lie in their bunks." "The walls of these cages are practically solid [that is not generally the case] and allow little fresh air to enter in. In one of them twelve men were sleeping in a space about 8x8x15. It must have caused suffocating heat in warm weather." "At the time of this visit 22 men were sleeping in a cage only 8x8x20. This cage contains but 18 bunks, so that eight of the men were sleeping double in a bunk of about two feet." The reader ought to be reminded here that they were also shackled to one another. "The night before this visit was made, 19 men slept in a cage only 7x7x16 ft. The bedding is badly torn and has not been washed in months. Flies are breeding in the sewage pit where the soil buckets are emptied." This official language is very dull. I could say that I have seen bedding of creeping straw and torn shreds; but, really, I have no words to describe the conditions.

The tent camps are probably a little better, but that depends on the camp. It is frequently bad enough. Here is a camp that may be used to describe a goodly number of tent camps in the South. "None of the tents have flies or second covers and must leak like sieves in rainy weather. The provisions are kept on the ground in a leaky tent, and consequently are often damaged by rain and surface water; the bedding is very soiled and is in disrepair; and a number of prisoners have neither beds nor cots, but sleep on boards laid on the ground. The method of disposing of the sewage

is most unsanitary. The night buckets are emptied just behind the tent in which the prisoners sleep. This practice exposes men to the unpleasant odors and the danger of contracting disease."

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The knowledge of sanitary practice is exceedingly circumscribed among officials in the Southern chain-gang camps. One cannot expect too much from the type of person who receives the job, and the many demands made on him are heavy and would tax the ingenuity of better-equipped men. But when I first came across the practice of bathing more than one man in the same tub of water, without regard as to whether they were diseased or not, I could not believe my eyes. It seemed impossible. I found later that it was not an uncommon practice. I also found that it was not confined to any one State. In all of the States where the chain-gang is found there will be found a number of gangs where this is the method of obeying the law for bathing the men once a week. Here are two official notices of the fact; "The practice of having two men wash in the same tub of water should be stopped." "The habit which is too common of allowing several men to use the same water is dangerous, filthy, and disgusting to any right thinking man. The man had better be allowed to go unwashed than to mix his dirt in a common tub, thus spreading any skin, eye, or venereal disease any one of them may have to the whole crowd using the common water." This negligence does not only extend to the washing and bathing of the men. It is a symptom of the state of knowledge and interest in the welfare of the men.