Prisons and Prayer; Or, a Labor of LoveWheaton, Elizabeth Ryder
Religion
Prisons and Prayer; Or, a Labor of Love
Wheaton, Elizabeth Ryder
Evangelistic work; Prisons
"According to the report M---- and his brother operate an
extensive camp in Lowndes County. Witnesses before the grand jury
testified that in the M---- camp the brutalities are such that it
is revolting to describe them. For the slightest offence, it is
alleged, prisoners are stripped and chained and unmercifully
lashed by the whipping bosses. It is also alleged that the M----
brothers go into counties adjoining Lowndes, pay the fines of
misdemeanor convicts, carry such convicts to their Ware County
(convict) camp and there keep them in serviture long after the
term for which the criminals were sentenced have expired.
"The grand jury claims that at least twenty citizens of Ware
County are held as slaves in M----'s camp although their terms
expired over a year ago. There men are kept in stockade about
which armed guards march in order to prevent an escape, and men
thus illegally detained who escaped have been chased by
bloodhounds and recaptured."
Official reports show that this class of convicts are guilty of
but trifling offences and some are vagrants. (For further
particulars see _Atlanta Journal_ May 5 and 11, 1903.)
The penitentiary convicts of Georgia are worked in coal mines and
are subject to the same treatment. An experienced penologist said
recently concerning convicts worked in the mines: "In the rooms
of the mines are perpetrated practices too horrible to mention.
They become the nesting places of a bestiality that in many cases
lead the liberated convict into that crime to punish which the
mob, the rope and the stake are ever ready." (See Atlanta
Constitution, May 14, 1903.)
Under the heading "Convict Camp Horrors," the editor of the
Memphis, Tennessee, _Commercial Appeal_ says in his paper, dated
April 11, 1903, concerning the facts recently brought out by the
legislative investigating committee: "The stories coming from
Brushy Mountain mines, with side lights from the state's convict
system, generally, furnish painful reading to the people of
Tennessee. When human beings who through fault or fortune's
untowardness are condemned to helpless and unresisting servitude
and who are subjected to torments and tortures, floggings and
flaggellations which are merciful only where they terminated in
speedy death, humanity is outraged and a sort of savagery in the
public cries out for speedy vengeance." Continuing the editor
says:
"Convicts have been whipped to death. Convicts have been whipped
into physical helplessness. Convicts have been whipped
sufficiently to keep them in bed for months and injure them
permanently. Torturing them in the prison or in the mine recesses
is a sin against high heaven." These are some of the facts
brought to light by the prison investigating committee.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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