I knew a man in our prison who had been thirty-five years in confinement, with short intervals of liberty. The best favor he could ask was to be allowed to stay all day and all night in his cell, doing nothing. Year after year, nothing else than this appeared to him worth while. He was well educated, as prisoners go, quiet and inoffensive. "I wish some doctor would examine me and tell me what is the matter with me," he remarked to me once. "Maybe I'm crazy!" After all, the world, in its way, is as hard a place for ex-convicts as a jail; more cruel, perhaps, inasmuch as it seems to offer hopes that jails deny. But can a world be called civilized that is satisfied with that arraignment? XII THE PRISON SILENCE How many convicts, during the past twenty years, have served their terms and been released? and yet what does the public know of the real inside of prisons? This used to perplex me at first. My fellow prisoners with whom I talked were bitter and voluble enough in denouncing the conditions; but no sooner had they passed the gates to freedom than they became strangely silent. Some of them even were quoted in the local papers as praising and upholding what they had just before condemned. There was a Japanese prisoner, for example, the only man of his nation there, I think, who gained attention by copies of well-known pictures which he made, to be hung on the walls of the chapel, and by designing back and side scenes for the stage. I never talked personally with him, or saw him but at a distance, as he hastened along the corridor; but men who knew him said that he was especially savage in his diatribes against the prison and its keepers, and had promised, as soon as he was freed, to make numerous ugly disclosures to the world. But when we searched the local papers after his release, what we found was a hearty and explicit laudation of the prison and its officials. Had it been written by the warden himself, it could not have been more sunny and satisfied.