As for my own experience, in all my twenty months of the closest contact with my fellow prisoners, I did not find one I could call depraved, cruel or hard. On the contrary, I know a “lifer” there who came to the penitentiary hardly more than a child. She has already served fifteen years. She is a most tender and devoted creature. She has one hold on life—a dog, whom she loves and tends with a mother’s devotion. Who is the true criminal—this poor heart-broken little woman or the officials who have the power to let her spend her remaining years in freedom, and yet keep her? Another woman, who has a fifteen-year sentence, is completely broken in health, and in constant physical misery. She is passionately devoted to her only child, a little boy. Is she the criminal or those who keep her there? Her offense was the result of a moment’s aberration; theirs is a cold-blooded, methodical and daily crime. Who is the greater criminal? Another woman, the mother of eight children, worked and starved half to death on a farm. She is thrown into prison for stealing a pig. Who is the greater criminal, this poor woman or the State which sent her there? I found no criminals among my fellow prisoners, only unfortunates—broken, helpless, hapless and hopeless human beings. How rich in comparison are we political prisoners! Kate Richards O’Hare, who has the gift of going into the life of every prisoner, soothing and comforting and sustaining her, and is herself sustained by the ideal and the love of thousands. Rare little Ella Antolini, with her marvelous stoicism, her splendid fortitude, and her great capacity for human sympathy. We politicals are rich, indeed. Rich in the love of our dear comrades, rich in our faith of the future, strong in our position. But the others? It is for them we plead, against the wrongs, the inhumanities committed against those in the prison we left behind. Indeed, in every prison in the land. EMMA GOLDMAN THE ATLANTA FEDERAL PENITENTIARY STATEMENT BY ALEXANDER BERKMAN Published in the Atlanta _Constitution_, October 1, 1919, on the day of his release from the Federal Penitentiary, Atlanta, Ga.