You must admit that’s quite the crutch and bonny-roo boon for any nervously salivating, licensed goon who might otherwise have to weather the accusation, though almost never indeed the charges, of barging his baton and fists and general belligerence upon packs of shackled others.

Each prized medicalizing inkwork quirking a clever walk and bureaucratic caulking around the potentially awkward requirement to make an orderly annual report of one’s trespasses
        their passing into erasure    
                before a very forgiving legislature


In the obligatory appended accounts of the attending prison physicians, the hemi-hawing jaws of ‘experts’ gawkily chaw at the task of providing ‘reasonable’ exam room renditions to suspect events. A best possible tenting for the scores of dead. To give you but a small sordid window into the galling lingual ringers of these finger-smudged testimonials, I offer the emphasis-added following:

"[…] although this Penitentiary is burdened with a sickly, inefficient colored population, which by self-abuse become debilitated in mind and body and diseased, and make 3/5 of its mortality, yet during a period of 7 years and 3 months there has been no more than 51 deaths, of whom only 17 are of the white prisoners."

"The inferior vitality of colored prisoners in our Penitentiary would excite less surprise and perchance commiseration were their customary diseased and depraved state more clearly understood."

"The refuse of the coloured population who, owing to our proximity to the slave states,
constitutes a disproportionate number of the prisoners, are here deprived of sensual indulgence, except self abuse, and in this therefore they are excessive, as are also the less intelligent white prisoners."

"The colored prisoners, compared with the colored population of the State, are proportionately far more numerous than the white. [...]Of the total amount of prisoners, 1480, which have been admitted since the opening of the institution, 929 have been white, and 551 colored, which affords a total average of 37.2% of colored prisoners. No
prison out of the Southern States presents so large a percentage of colored persons. More than 4/5ths of the mortality of this Penitentiary has been owing to the above fact."

"[…] it is not surprising that, among the depraved part of the colored population who became prisoners, there shall be an average of 9 % mortality. This analysis will serve to correct an allegation which has been made, that the mortality of the Eastern Penitentiary is greater than that of other prisons of the United States."

        [*All citations above extracted directly and verbatim from ESP Annual Reports]




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