The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1909-03-01
Exclusive Service Charities and The
 Common Press Bureau.) |.


 If most county jails are free schools of crime then there is at least one state prison that ought to be called the university. The Kansas Peniten- tfary las for years been boarding out prison for Oklahoma whose terri has shipped it's convicts across the border to the Kansas prison in Lan- sing. In the old frontier days crimi- nals were aplenty in the territory and the contract with Kansas was highly agreeable to the Oklahoma settlers who were glad to free the territory of its "bad men, The further they were sent the better. and what became of them no one cared. That was in the old days.
 year and was entitled to put state in front of her name the same system was in use and for forty cents day a man, Kansas ran it's criminal board carried on in Lansing had drffted across the border from time to time but nothing definite was known about the real state of affairs until last fall when Oklahoma'S new commissioner of charities, Kate Barnard, stirred up an investigation that disclosed an ,almost unbelievable state of affairs in the Kansas Prison. It costs 10:9 cents a and by working them hard and long in the mines, at contract labor and in the twine factory. the state has clear ed up a hundred thousand dollars ''the blackest and dirtiest crime of modern states,'' says Miss Barnard The state makes about forty cents a day on each prisoner. It's an interest ing question what becomes of all the coal mined by the prisoners. Three tons a day for each man in the mines means a total of about 1000 tons day. The state institutions are sup posed to consume all of this out put. Do they?
 In her report Oklahoma's charity in the prison coal mines creeping and crawling through bending passages where the props and supports of the roof sagged under the weight of the dirt ceiling." There the prisoners do their days work which consists in min ing three cars of coal. Three cars there must be and Miss Barnard tells about a seventeen year old Joungster from locked up in a black dun geon and chained to the wall because he was unable to extract from the inlzy depths those three cars of coal! He told me with tears in his eyes that he had gotten out a little over two cars but that he just could not get out any more, that the coal was so hard and he never had dug any be- fore and he did not know how to dig it. One big, strapping prisoner told me that he did not find it hard to get out his cars of coal because he under stood the job. but that he felt sorry for the younger and weaker men. He said that sometimes when the guards were not looking he helped these boys get their cars full of coal so that they wouldn't be put on bread and water dier and chained up to the walls of the '.
 Some say that the stories of the water hole'' and ''the crib" are iso- lated instances that ought not to count too much in the condemnation of the Kansas prison. But there is a ''water hOle'' and there is a "crib'' and there are unprintable immoralities all of which have their uses in subduing refractory men. Miss Barnard says that while going through the mine coal prisoner "shot swiftly, Sil- entIy and steathly from the darkness. grabbed me by the arm and wh Spered these words: See the water hole. girl, for Gods sake see the water hole said what is the water hole? He an- swered. Where they throw us in and pump water on us. It's terrible. sec it. Before I had time to ask where to find the water hole the convict was yone-the Superintendent was return ng'' And the superintendent said. There is no water hole" Is there? A letter from an Oklahoma prisoner to Miss Barnard quoted in her report says After you had come and gone day night the holes were all full and the crib and water played no small part. so official displeasure at your expressed opinions vented it. self in retaliation upon helpless con- victs.''
 That there are dungeons there is no doubt. Miss Barnard saw fourteen of them i'll ventilated and unlighted, with ron hooks in the wall from which hand cuffs hung. The convict lies on the floor during the night and wh en daylight struggles in through the little openings at the tops of the cells. he is hand cuffed to the wall where he stands during the day. "On the second Jay of my visit,'' says Miss Barnard T went down to the dungeon and there found a sixteen year old Oklahoma boy shackled up to a sprocket in the dun yeon wall. Upon inquiry I found that he had been placed in this dungeon the night before. and that he had call ed for the Warden at z o'clock in the when they lifted him from he floor to shackle him to the wall. Now according to the prison rules and regulations, this guard should report