“Let me say something else, too,” said another delegate. “There’s mighty little prison vice here now. You know what I mean. Formerly, when we were all locked up for sixteen hours a day, and hadn’t had any decent exercise, or anything to take our minds off of ourselves and our grievances, all sorts of bad things happened. That’s the curse of the old prison regime. It turned out, among other things, a lot of degenerates. Now--well, we get pretty well tired, and our mind’s taken off of ourselves, and we sleep. There’s a good deal, too, in having that sort of thing put under the ban by the fellows themselves.” One of us then asked, “How about the growing criticism that prisoners are getting to have too easy a time of it? When we tell the public in general about this Fourth of July celebration, many will say that the prisoners are having more fun and an easier time than the honest taxpayer.” The delegate, in answering, flared up. “Tell those people to try any prison for a while! What’s a prison for? To torture a man, and send him out hating society, and determined to get even for the years he’s spent as the old-line prison made him spend it? Nobody except the fellow that’s been through it knows what being in prison is. Does the public want us to go insane, get tuberculosis, contract wretched vices, rebel in mutinies, live sixteen hours out of twenty-four in a living tomb, and have day-in and day-out a miserable monotony of existence that dulls our minds and makes us hate the State that munificently pays us a cent and a half a day, and then often takes away the earnings of months in one single fine for some offense that the very manner of existence here almost forces us to commit? Why, what is this hour of recreation, anyway? It’s a health measure, a safety measure, a reformatory measure. “Do you think fellows would commit crime in order to get into prison to have this little pittance of pleasure? Let me tell you that the very people that talk so about putting the clamps on this giving of soft snaps to prisoners don’t know what that other system did to us. Why, there are a lot of fellows here that had made up their minds to pull off another trick just as soon as they got out. Why shouldn’t they? But now we have something else to work for.”