Prisons are not purgatories, nor gentlemen's clubs; they are just as much hell as they ever were, and as their managers can make them. Apart from any special leniency of local conditions, prisons are hell because they are prisons--because you are confined there and cannot get out; because you are a slave and have no redress; because your manhood is degraded; because despotic power is entrusted to the men who handle you, though they are never any better than you are, and are usually much worse, and regard you as an asset to make profit from, a thing to be driven and insulted to the last extremity and beyond it, and not as a human being. Prisons are hell because convicts are punished for trivial and whimsical reasons as much as for serious ones; and whether or not the punishment involve actual physical torture, the insolence, disgrace and injustice of it remain. Prisons are hell intrinsically, and always will be; and whoever doubts it has only to commit a crime and be sent to prison; that is the end of doubts. Let every judge, attorney general, district attorney, and juryman at a trial spend a bona fide term in jail, and there would be no more convictions--prisons would end. Every convict and ex-convict knows that, and eternity will be too short to obliterate the knowledge in him. The unctuous plausibility of the pretense that prisons are beneficent purgatories and not hells renders it the more sickening. Life is a God-given discipline for men, and at best a severe one; but if we believe in God, we know it is given in love, for loving ends. All mortal life is an imprisonment; the laws of it are essential and natural, and breaking them involves essential and natural penalties. God deputed this régimen of love to parents, and to those who deal with their fellow creatures from impulses of parental or brotherly love; but He never licensed any man to punish another from revenge or hate, or in mere indifference. He licensed no man to do it, nor any community or nation. And whoever does it, serves not God but the devil; and if any crime be unpardonable, it is that, because it is not essential or natural, but an usurpation against nature, and breeds not reform but more evil.