Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/122

100 history of our leased-convict system in North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana—shocking and shameful as that record is—cannot parallel this rate of mortality. According to Mr. Cable, whose researches in the field of leased-convict labor are well known, the annual death-rate amongst leased convicts working on railroads in North Carolina in 1879 was a little less than 11.5 per cent.—a death-rate, he remarks, higher than that of the city of New Orleans during the great epidemic of yellow fever in 1853. And yet this rate is only a quarter as high as the death-rate in the Tiumén forwarding prison that very same year of 1879.

It has been said to me repeatedly, since the publication of my magazine articles upon this subject, that "there are prisons in America as bad as any that you have described in Russia." This remark has been made to me even by American prison officials. I should like to know in what part of the United States such prisons are situated. Some American prisons, I know, are bad enough, and I have no desire to excuse or palliate their evils; but when an American says that they are as bad as the Tiumén forwarding prison, he does not know, or does not appreciate, the state of affairs in the latter.

In the year 1885 Dr. P. D. Sims, chairman of the prison committee of the Tennessee State Board of Health, made a report to the president of that board upon the condition of the convicts in the Tennessee State prisons under the so-called "lease system." In this report he showed that among the prisoners in the branch prisons at Coal Creek and Tracy City the death-rate ranged from 10 to 14 per cent. per annum, or from 105 to 147 per annum per thousand. After quoting the statistics in detail he said:

Before these figures humanity stands aghast and our boasted civilization must hide her face in shame. We are appalled at their enormity. We fain would throw over them the mantle of eternal oblivion and forever hide them from the gaze of the civilized