After one of my mothers visits I used to have more sympathy for my fellow convicts. I was always a keen observer, and in the shops or at mess time, and when we were exercising together in lock step, or working about the yard or in the halls, I used to "feel out" my brother "cons," often with a kindly motive. I grew very expert in telling when a friend was becoming insane; for imprisonment leads to insanity, as everybody knows. Many a time a man I knew in stir would grow nervous or absent-minded, then suspicious, and finally would be sent to the madhouse at Dannemora or Matteawan.
For instance, take a friend of mine named Billy. He was doing a bit of ten years. In the fifth year of his sentence I noticed that he was brooding, and I asked him what was the matter.
"I am afraid," he said, "that my wife is going outside of me."
"You are not positive, are you?" I asked.
"Well," he answered, "she visited me the other day, and she was looking good (prosperous). My son was with her, and he looked good, too. She gave me five dollars and some delicacies. But she never had five dollars when I was on the outside."
"She's working," said I, trying to calm him.
"No; she has got a father and mother," he replied, "and she is living with them."
"Billy," I continued, "how long have you been in stir?"
"Billy," I proceeded, "what would you do if you were on the outside and she was in prison for six years?"
"Well," he replied, "I'd have to give myself some rope."
"Philosophers claim that it is just as hard for a woman to live alone as for a man," I said. "You're unreasonable, Billy. Surely you can't blame her."
Billy's case is an instance of how, when a convict has had bad food, bad air and an unnatural routine for some time, he begins to borrow trouble. He grows anæmic and then is on the road to insanity. If he has a wife he almost always grows suspicious of her, though he does not speak about it until he has been a certain number of years in prison. It was not long after the above conversation took place that Billy was sent to the insane asylum at Matteawan.
Sometimes, after a man has begun to grow insane, he will show it by reticence, rather than by talkativeness, according to his disposition. One of my intimate friends, in stir much longer than I, was like a ray of sunshine, witty and a good story teller. His laugh was contagious and we all liked to see him. He was one of the best night prowlers (burglars) in the profession, and had many other gifts. After he had been in stir, however, for a few years, he grew reticent and suspicious, thought that everybody was a stool-pigeon, and died a raving maniac a few years later at Matteawan.