Mr. Osborne certified that this story is fully corroborated by careful inquiry from different men and comments as follows: “Doubtless some will say that the statements of convicts are not to be believed. That touches upon one of the very worst features of the situation. No discrimination is ever made. It is not admitted, that while one convict may be a liar, another may be entirely truthful; that men differ in prison exactly as in the world outside. It is held, quite as a matter of course, that they are all liars, and an officer’s word will be taken against that of a convict or any number of convicts. The result is that the officers feel themselves practically immune from any evil consequences to them from their own acts of injustice or violence. What follows this is inevitable. Our prisons have often been the scenes of intolerable brutality, for which it has been useless for the victims to seek redress. They can only cower and endure in silence; or be driven into insanity by a hopeless revolt against the System.... “The point is this: that no convict has any rights--not even the right to be believed; not even the right to reasonable considerate treatment. He is exposed without safeguard of any sort to whatever outrage and inconsiderate and brutal keeper may choose to inflict upon him; and you cannot under the present system guard against such inconsiderate and brutal treatment. “I should not like to be understood as asserting that all keepers are brutal or even a majority of them.” ... But, “we must recognize, in dealing with our Prison System, that many really well-meaning men will operate a system, in which the brutality of an officer goes unpunished, in a brutal manner. “The reason of this is not far to seek--a reason which also obtained in the slave system. The most common and powerful impulse that drives an ordinary, well-meaning man to brutality is fear.... In prison, where each officer believes that his life is in constant danger, the keeper tends to become callous; the sense of that danger blunts his higher qualities.... Undoubtedly there is basis for his fear, for some of those men are dangerous, rendered more so by the nerve-racking System. I can conceive no more terribly disintegrating moral experience than that of being a keeper over convicts. “I am not now in any way disputing the necessity of a keeper being constantly on his guard; I am not saying whether this view of things is right or wrong; and when I use the word fear I do not mean cowardice--a very different thing, for a brave man can feel fear. I am simply trying to point out that in prison, as elsewhere, when men are dominated by fear, brutality is the evitable result.”