The New York Tombs Inside and Out!: Scenes and Reminiscences Coming Down to the Present. A Story Stranger Than Fiction, with an Historic Account of America's Most Famous Prison.Munro, John Josiah
History
The New York Tombs Inside and Out!: Scenes and Reminiscences Coming Down to the Present. A Story Stranger Than Fiction, with an Historic Account of America's Most Famous Prison.
Munro, John Josiah
Crime -- New York (State) -- New York; Halls of Justice (New York, N.Y.)
When we think of the number of cold-blooded murderers, the burglars,
highwaymen, forgers, swindlers, gold-brick men, green-goods operators
and hundreds of others possessing dark criminal records, that have lain
here for many months, coming from every State and part of the globe, our
blood curdles within.
What hideous characters have domiciled in this prison during these two
generations, who afterwards paid the penalty of the law for their bloody
deeds! Think also of the conglomeration of forces that actuated and bore
them into their doom like driftwood going over a Niagara as merciless as
fate would have them!
Men and women that came from noble sires, scholars and specialists with
trained minds that would have shone in any department of life, lawyers,
teachers, business men, bankers, brokers and even men of letters, all
under the cruel hand of fate, succumbed to the tempter in a weak moment
and fell; alas! some never to rise again.
“Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years,
I am so weary of toil and tears.”
But, alas, it is too late. The die is cast forever!
Our young men and women should learn ere it is too late, or even before
they launch forth on a career of crime, that we cannot break the divine
law without punishment. “Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also
reap,” is a law that is as true in the moral world as it is in the realm
of nature. Our large cities are full of the whirlpools of vice that
carry multitudes swiftly over the rapids of destruction into the
maelstrom of eternal death.
The New City Prison
After many years of agitation the plans for the new Tombs Prison were
prepared and approved during the Strong administration, which went into
power on a reform wave in 1894.
The new City Prison contains three hundred and twenty steel cells
arranged in four tiers in the men’s and four in the boys’ prison, with
parallel corridors. There are forty large cells on each tier, arranged
back to back, with all the recent improvements, which consist of running
water, electric light, toilet, wash basin, hung table and cot. The new
building is said to have cost over one million dollars.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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