Opium was the medium of exchange in the prison. About three hundred men used it habitually and a hundred more, occasionally. Incoming prisoners smuggled money in and we bribed the poorly paid guards to buy hop at Sacramento. No prisoner was allowed to buy anything through the office. The trusties stole every movable article they could from the guards’ and warden’s quarters and peddled them to us in the prison for their rations of hop. The “cons” were divided roughly into three groups. One group played the officers’ game, working in the offices or holding down other soft jobs where they could loaf about the place and spy and snitch on the others. Murphy rewarded them all. He gave the best snitches the biggest beefsteaks. Another and larger group openly antagonized the officers, engineering hop deals, planning the murder of stool pigeons, and promoting escapes. Between these two groups was a small bunch of convicts who did not handle hop or curry favor with the officers. They were the best conducted prisoners there, yet they were ground to pieces by the two stronger factions. They got fag ends of food in the convict mess and wore the patched-up clothes of the others. I had some thought of getting off the hop when I got to Folsom and of keeping my nose clean and trying to shorten my time by making a parole. But I saw quickly all that was impossible for me and that I would be lucky if I earned my credits. I joined the schemers and soon had my share of the opium which meant power and influence. We sold the hop to those who had money and with the money we bought more. Also we paid guards to smuggle in sugar, butter, and other food. Conditions at San Quentin were the same. Martin Aguirre became warden there under Governor Gage. Aguirre introduced the strait-jacket punishment and I have been told he did it on the suggestion of a convict. This brutal and inhuman form of torture had been condemned in English prisons years before as dangerous to life and limb. Yet this man was permitted to revive it in California and its use was continued until Hiram Johnson became governor. Let it be said to this humane and enlightened gentleman’s everlasting credit that one of his first official acts was to banish the jacket and other brutalities from California prisons forever. Captain Murphy welcomed the jacket as something superior to anything he had at Folsom in the way of punishment. Up to that time the prisoners were “regulated” by long terms in the dungeons on bread and water, loss of credits, or by hanging them up by the wrists till they were on tiptoe. When Dirty Dick saw what could be done with the jacket he came into the stoneyard and declared himself openly, “I’ve got something now that will make you tough birds snitch on yourselves.”