BY WINIFRED LOUISE TAYLOR NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1914 Copyright, 1914, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS ——— Published October, 1914 TO MY PRISON FRIENDS...

Lest any one may charge me with extravagant optimism in regard to convicts, or may think that to me every goose is a swan, I wish to say that I have written only of the men—among hundreds of convicts—who have most interested me; men whom I have known thoroughly and who never attempted to deceive me. Every writer's vision of life and of humanity is inevitably colored by his own personality, and I have pictured these men as I saw them; but I have also endeavored, in using so much from their letter

Not only did the prisoners whom I knew never betray my confidence, but ex-convicts who knew of me through others sometimes came to me for advice or assistance in getting work; and many an odd job about our place was well done by these men, who never gave us cause to regret our confidence in them. A stranger fresh out of jail applied to me one cold December day just before the holidays. I was in the high tide of preparations for Christmas, and to this young man I gladly intrusted the all-day work

An habitual criminal of the pronounced type was my friend Dick Mallory. I have no remembrance of our first meeting, but he must have been thirty years old at the time, was in the penitentiary for the third time, and serving a fourteen-year sentence. Early in our acquaintance I asked him to write for me a detailed account of his childhood and boyhood, the environment and influences which had made him what he was, and also his impression of the various reformatories and minor penal institutions of

Dick Mallory himself was given the maximum sentence of fourteen years for larceny under the habitual-criminal act; and he did not resent the sentence in his own case because he found life in the penitentiary on the whole as satisfactory as it had been on the outside; and when I met him he had become deeply interested in the other prisoners. But he resented the fact that the "habitual act" was applied without discrimination to any one convicted of a second offence. He was doing some study on his

At the time of my first visit to the penitentiary of my own State the warden surprised me by saying: "Among the very best men in the prison are the 'life' men, the men here for murder." How true this was I could not then realize, but as in time I came to know well so many of these men the words of the warden were fully confirmed. The law classes the killing of one person by another under three heads: murder in the first degree; murder in the second degree; and manslaughter. The murder deliberate

In another instance, with quite different threads, the hand of fate seemed to have woven the destiny of the man, but I was slow in perceiving that it was not merely the tragedy of the prison that was unfolding before me but the wider drama of life itself. Generally speaking, among my prison acquaintance there was some correspondence between the personality of the man and his history. The prisoner who said frankly to me, "I always cheat a man when I can, because I know he would cheat me if he had

There is another chapter to my experience with prisoners; it is the story of what they have done for me, for they have kept the balance of give and take very even between us. I have an odd collection of souvenirs and keepsakes, but, incongruous as the different articles are, one thread connects them all; from the coarse, stubby pair of little mittens suggesting the hand of a six-year-old country boy to the flask of rare Venetian glass in the dull Oriental tones dear to the æsthetic soul; from th

And the time came, in 1913, when the wave of revolution in prison methods struck the penitentiary which formed the background of the lives pictured within these pages. Back of all my friendships with these men had loomed the prison under the old methods, casting its dark shadow across their lives. Many of them died within the walls; others came out only to die in charity hospitals, or to take up the battle of life with enfeebled health and enfeebled powers of resistance and endurance. Almost as