to recognize in his new cell mate the judge who sentenced him, the
attorney who prosecuted him, the juryman who convicted him, or the
plaintiff who accused him, we shall find it expedient to subject our
legal nostrums to a system of purgation, and our fever of legalism will
abate. But if we will take thought betimes we may meet the trouble half
way, and thus avert, perhaps, the danger that the fever will be checked
only by the overturning of all law, sane or insane. The following
chapters are designed to help in defeating a catastrophe so unlovely.

Be it observed, first, that the only persons competent to reveal prison
life as it is are persons who have been sentenced to prisons and lived in
them as prisoners. Such showings might have been made long ago and often
but that those who knew the facts were afraid to speak, or could not win
belief, or had not education and capacity for expression requisite to get
their facts printed. Others, exhausted or unmanned by their sufferings,
wished only to hide themselves and forget and be forgotten; others have
indictments still hanging over them, to be pressed should they betray a
disposition to loquacity. Seldom, at any rate, has a man trained as a
writer lived out a prison sentence and emerged with the ability and
determination to throw the prison doors ajar and expose what has hitherto
been invisible, unknown, and unsuspected.

Such a story has importance, because there is no group of persons
anywhere but has some relation near or remote to what goes on in prisons.
And the constant output of new laws, creating new crimes (so that one
might say a man goes to bed innocent and wakes guilty)--this delirious
industry must goad us all into feeling a personal interest in the
administration of our penal machinery. You saw your friend tried and
sentenced yesterday; you may yourself stand in the dock to-morrow,
knowing yourself morally innocent, astounded at finding yourself