I then strolled up and paid a visit of inspection to the jail.
Reluctantly I was given an order by the police captain, directing the
turnkey to grant me the privilege of looking about. The place impressed
me with its cleanliness, its light and its good ventilation. He showed
me first its bull-pen, one huge cell of concrete and steel, absolutely
bare, where the inmates could only stand, lie down, or sit down on its
concrete floor, and I remarked, "You must have as many as twenty-five
in there at a time."
"Yes, seventy-five," he replied, and I saw again before me the vision
(though it was midday), of the midnight scene of that midnight hell.
Then I asked, "Where is the lodgers' cell?"
He looked at me a little quizzically for a moment, and then showed me
another cell about half as large as the bull-pen. "This is it," he said.
It contained, as I remember, six young men or boys, I judged in their
teens, and at that time of day I could not understand why they should
be locked in there if they were only lodgers. So I said, "Lodgers are
often forced into the bull-pen, too, are they not?" and he said, "Yes."
This lodgers' cell, as he called it, was also absolutely bare, a stone
floor the only rest for the man who must work or look for work on
the morrow. But there was the Associated Charities, and if the three
hundred shelterless in Seattle could have found it between nine and
five o'clock, they would have been given a bed no doubt. At least a bed
was offered me there.
Then my turnkey tapped slightly on a solid steel door of a solid steel
cell. The only possible means for the ingress and egress of air to this
dungeon was a small opening about half as large as an envelope. If I
am not mistaken there was a slide door on that opening which could be
closed, too, a device which is on all other similar torture chambers
I have seen. He lightly tapped on the door, in a subdued way, with
an expression as though he ought not to speak but must, and with an
assumed, non-consequential smile, he said scarcely above a whisper,
"There is a man in there."
"What is he in there for?" I asked.
"They are trying to make him tell something they think he knows."
Then he pointed to another one and said, "There is a man in that one
also."
"And what is he in there for?"
"I don't know."
"How long are they kept in there?"
"Ten days, sometimes."
I knew the rest. The people of Seattle know the rest, or if they do
not, they can learn it from the other stories of this book. There may
be laws governing these torture hells and other prison abuses, but any
government that allows them to exist is a government that will ignore
the existence of these laws. I found in Seattle, also, six boys held
for the Juvenile Court, locked in a cell in the county jail. I thought
of Denver and her beautiful Detention Home for such as these.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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