When an applicant goes before the board for examination, he is sometimes turned down summarily; but more often he goes out ignorant whether or not he will succeed, and, as I have already shown, he is not seldom kept in this torturing uncertainty until the day when he is either turned loose or told that he has been rejected. This seems unnecessary, and often appears to be due to sheer carelessness; the papers are not promptly submitted to the Attorney-General, or they are pigeonholed and forgotten. It may be true that the law does not categorically demand that a prisoner shall be released immediately upon a favorable report; but there is no obvious reason why he should not be, and it is cruel to keep him in suspense.
There was a young fellow while I was there, a well educated and agreeable man, whose conduct had always been unexceptionable; he applied when eligible for parole, and was informed that he would be released. Every morning thereafter for three weeks he arose with the hope that the release would come that day; every night he went to bed with a heart heavy with disappointment. He could not eat or sleep, he could not talk connectedly, he trembled and turned pale, and was on the way to becoming a nervous wreck; but no explanation was vouchsafed him. At last he was suddenly told that he might go. The sole reason that I ever heard for the delay was that the papers had been overlooked. There are a great many government employees at Washington; it might be worth while to appoint one more, charged with the duty of seeing that the overlooking of parole papers be henceforth avoided. This was a very mild instance; I have related how poor Dennis lingered for six months and finally died from the same inattention or indifference.
There was a friend of mine, M., a highly intelligent, good natured fellow, active and efficient in his prison duties, always courteous and obliging; he was serving a sentence of five years, I think, for some theft or confidence game. He had "done time" some six or seven years previously, but during the interval had lived straight. At the time of his last arrest he had been kept in the local jail, somewhere in New England, after conviction, for four months before being transferred to Atlanta. Time spent in a local jail before conviction is not counted in the prisoner's favor; for example, I was arrested several months before my conviction, and the trial itself lasted four months, and after the trial I spent ten days in the Tombs.