The account in the following chapters of my week in Auburn Prison is taken from the pages of a journal I kept during my confinement. In that I jotted down, day by day, every incident no matter how trivial it seemed at the time; so that I possess a very complete record of my week in prison. As I have transcribed the pages of the diary I have lived over again every moment of that remarkably vivid experience, finding that almost every act, every word, every detail, is fairly burned into my memory. I have scarcely needed the pages of the journal, nor the long account of our week together which my working partner in the basket shop, Jack Murphy, wrote out at my request. I shall not attempt to draw up any bill of indictment against the Prison System, or to suggest specific improvements, either in general principles or administrative details; I shall simply set down the facts and my feelings as accurately as I can. One final word by way of introduction. Many newspapers, presumably reflecting the impressions of a considerable number of individuals, have expressed the idea that nothing of value could possibly have been obtained because I was not a real convict; although the same newspapers would probably be the first to discredit any statements a real convict might make. Foreseeing such criticism, I had tried to forestall it in the remarks I addressed to the prisoners the day before my experiment began; and if some of my editorial critics had taken the trouble to read their own press dispatches, they might have been saved some distress of mind. No one could have understood better than I did at the outset, that it is impossible to place yourself exactly in the shoes of a man who has been sentenced to prison for an actual crime; I did not expect to do so. No one, so far as I know, has ever yet succeeded in putting himself precisely in the place of another in any given set of circumstances; yet that does not keep us from constantly studying and analyzing the human problem. It still remains true that "The proper study of mankind is man." In this particular instance, perhaps some things of value were obtained for the very reason that I was not a criminal. Possibly I could judge of some matters with a juster appreciation than could any man suffering involuntary imprisonment. It did, in fact, surprise me very much that anyone could succeed to so great an extent in putting himself in the place and in sharing so many of the sensations of an actual prisoner. Time and again I heard from others the expression of thoughts and feelings which I recognized as those which had swept over me; and I found that, partly by force of imagination and environment and partly by the actual physical conditions of confinement, one could really come into astonishingly close sympathy and understanding with the prisoner. The truth of this can, I believe, be seen in my narrative and has been demonstrated many times since my release.