Word: prisons
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...they give the abstract lie to scores of meaningful psychological statistics. Harry Elmer Barnes may go on believing that the last twenty-five years have given man more knowledge of this problem than the preceding two thousand. The Thomas Mott Oshornes of America may yet succeed in making the prison punitive rather than corrective. But as long as men of Mr. Coolidge's eminence continue to find the problem inconsiderable at its source, the armored skins of complacent legislators can never be pricked into action...
...Indictment. Every year France sends a dismal shipload of some 700 convicts to her penal colony in French Guiana -north of Brazil, southeast of Venezuela. Here the condemned, one-half of whom die in the first year, eke out a prison sentence with hard labor, followed by continued exile; the avowed purpose being: "expiation of crime, regeneration of the guilty, and the protection of Society." That the purpose has been sadly travestied is common gossip abroad, but Blair Niles went to see for herself...
...Witness. Author Niles achieved unaccountable permission to inspect gang prisons of the mainland and individual cells on the rockbound islands. She chatted with convicts, and followed the trails so many of them have hacked in vain through the jungle. Everything she saw was evidence of the demoded prison conditions that a twentieth century government tolerates...
Gaunt from wretched diet, toothless from scurvy, the cynical oldsters were right that escape was not so certain. Six weary years dragged themselves out: lumberjacking or road-building under armed guards, restless hours in prison, philosophising, swearing, gambling for "mômes," the girlish boys who were possessed by carnal strongmen. With luck bits of wood could be stolen and carved into salable boxes, or penny errands might be run for the slave-drivers, and bit by tarnished bit the price of attempt at freedom could be bought. Five hundred francs would bribe a bushman to paddle one convict across...
Broken in spirit and body, Michel became at last "liberé" (fantastic name for those wretches who survive imprisonment, but, exiled for years to come, must report periodically to the Guiana authorities). Meanwhile there was the listless scramble for barest necessities of existence. Few as these were after prison fare, the possibilities of work were fewer still, since employers preferred gangs of supervised prisoners available at minimum wage. Michel, marveled at his long-lost joie de vivre, remembered his ambitions, and the oath that never would he degenerate to a contemptible liberé, crouched on his empty barrow awaiting...