AMERICAN POLICE METHODS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 294, 21 January 1910, Page 3

AMERICAN POLICE METHODS

REMARKABLE DISCLOSURES. Remarkable disclosures have just been made as the result of an investigation into methods in vogue in United State prisons. Attention has /jecn drawn to the Ohio State Penitentiary, where various methods of torture are practised; as an accompaniment of the contract system of labor. The investigators worked in shops under the dire;-, tion and control and practically at the mercy of contractors, who wer e irresponsible to the State or in this maiter to any other human authority. Each i convict must each day nroduce a certain amount of work, called his "task." If he fell short the contractor's foreman reported him to the guard, who forthwith took him to the "cellar." This was the place of judgment—and of torture. The deputy warden sat as tae Court; on the report of the guard swift sentence was pronounced. Usually the offender was condemned to be paddled, sometimes to the water-cure, and in ail the cases of old offenders to all threeone after another. THE PADDLE AND THE BULLRING. Punishment by the paddle is managed in this fashion:—The prisoner is seized, stripped, and bent over the edge of a bath tub, his legs being manacled to the floor, and his hands chained before him. The guard takes a flat instrument, lash, three and a-half feet long, two inches wide, fitted with a handle. He soaks it in hot* water. This he beats the prisoner with a prescribed number of times —four to five, according to the prison officers, ten to thirty according to the prisoners. "Bull-rings" mean that the prisoner is strung up by the wrists in a dark cell, and' thus left hanging like a carcase of beef. Sufferers from this device and other witnesses have declared tha.t the chains are sometimes so adjusted that the delinquent's feet barely touch, the floor. This is denied by the prison officers. There is no reason why it should not be true; the guards are a law unto themselves. The cell is perfectly dark except for what light filters through a few narrow slits in the door, ~end is otherwise unventilated. At night the victim is -usually lowered and allowed' to sfeep on the floor—usually, not always. THE "WATER CURE." In an affidavit a prisoner gives a pun. gent if crude description of the cure." Having been stripped, the delinquent is manacled in the great bath tub. At the height of the neck in the sides of the tub are grooves, and in these .play great wooden clamps, carved to fit the human body. These are screwed together so as to grip in a vice th e man's cliest and arms. In front of him is a faucet and a bit of hose throwing a smart stream of water. First it is necessary to get the man's mouth open by making him" cry out (which usually done by frightening liimU whereupon the water streams down his throat and strangles him. By those that have suffered this treatment the sensations are said to be. indescribably horrible. In spite of his reason the vietim feels that With the most excruciating pains' he is being tortured to dcutn. "It brings them around, it bring them around," said the old guard. "1 never seen but on e of them that could stand six minutes of it without caving, and lie wasn't a man, he was a demon." A witness tells of a convict crippled for life by the water cure, and of one made insane.