Jack London - The "Pen"

The "Pen"

Long Days in a County Penitentiary

By Jack London



For two days I toiled in the prison-yard. It was heavy work, and, in spite of the fact that I malingered at every opportunity, I was played out. This was because of the food. No man could work hard on such food. Bread and water, that was all that was given us. Once a week we were supposed to get meat; but this meat did not always go around, and since all nutriment had first been boiled out of it in the making of soup, it didn't matter much whether one got a taste of it once a week or not.
Furthermore, there was on vital defect in the bread-and-water diet. While we got plenty of water, we did not get enough of the bread. A ration of bread was about the size of one's two fists, and three rations a day were given to each prisoner. There was one good thing, I must say, about the water: it was hot. In the morning it was called "coffee," at noon it was dignified as "soup," and at night it masqueraded as "tea." But it was the same old water all the time. The prisoners called it "water bewitched." In the morning it was black water, the color being due to boiling it with burnt bread-crusts. At noon it was served minus the color, with salt and a drop of grease added. At night it was served with a purplish-auburn hue that defied all speculation; it was darn poor tea, but it was dandy hot water.
We were a hungry lot in the Erie County pen. Only the long-timers knew what it was to have enough to eat. The reason for this was that they would have died after a time on the fare we short-timers received. I know that the long-timers got more substantial grub, because there was a whole row of them on the ground floor in our hall, and when I was a trusty I used to steal from their grub while serving them. Man cannot live on bread along and not enough of it.
My pal delivered the goods. After two days of work in the yard I was taken out of my cell and made a trusty, a hall-man. At morning and night we served the bread to the prisoners in their cells; but at twelve o'clock a different method was used. The convicts marched in from work in a long line. As they entered the door of our hall, they broke the lock-step and took their hands down from the shoulders of their line-mates. Just inside the door were piled trays of bread, and here also stood the first hall-man and two ordinary hall-men. I was one of the two. Our task was to hold the trays of bread as the line of convicts filed past. As soon as they tray, say that I was holding, was emptied, the other hall-man took my place with a full tray; and when his was emptied, I took his place with a full tray. Thus the line tramped steadily by, each man reaching with his right hand and taking one ration of bread from the extended tray.
The task of the first hall-man was different. He used a club. He stood beside the tray and watched. The hungry wretches could never get over the delusion that some time they could manage to get two rations of bread out of the tray. But in my experience that time never came. The club of the first hall-man had a way of flashing out, quick as the stroke of a tiger's paw, to the hand that dared ambitiously. The first hall-man was a good judge of distance, and he had smashed so many hands with that club that he had become infallible. He never missed, and he usually punished the offending convict by taking his one ration away from him and sending him to his cell to make his meal on hot water.