SICKENING AND DISGRACEFUL SCENE IN GEORGIA.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2108, 7 October 1890, Page 3

SICKENING AND DISGRACEFUL SCENE IN GEORGIA.

The New Terk World has been doing a great derl of good by sending faithful correspondents outto ascertain the depth of dishonesty, duplicity, and degradation the people of the country are coming to through their campingstore system, and in the management of theii prisons. Of late one of these competent correspondents has been visiting the prison pens' of Georgia, and the pictures he presents are enough to sicken and disgust the public with the sentiment of brutality in Georgia that finds expression in and under its State officials and legislators. In Georgia, as in some other Southern States, persons convicted of crimes and offences, and sentenced to imprisonment, are leased to contractors, who work these convicts in stone quarries, coal mines, brick yards, railroad buildings, etc. In these contracts —as partner, it is said —Goyernor Gordon, of Georgia, is interested; but this cannot, or should not, he true, as the revealments imply a brutality we would not expect a gentleman of his standing to tolerate. At Chattaheoehe, Georgia, is one of these prison camps, where about 200 convicts are employed in making bricks. The condition and treatment of these convicts —the majority of whom are colored—are simply horrible. The works are run every day of the week. In each camp is a Stateappointed whipping boss, whose duty is to whip conyicts, and whose pleasure is to goad out of convicts, sick or well, every bit of work they can be made to perform: The convicts are chained together, as they sleep in rows. They are fed only on raw meat and corn bread made from unsifted meal. At night each convict is handed a small piece of raw meat and two chunks of corn bread, that must serve for supper and breakfast. None of them are given as much food as Nature requires, i hey begin at six in the morning and quit at six at night. When brick kilns are opened the convicts are driven into them when the bricks are so hot that they blister the hands that touch them, and piled in the railroad cars, often set the cars ©n fire. Women and men are employed to tote those hot bricks from kiln to cars. Each woman must carry seven bricks at a load, the lower one resting on a block at her hip, the upper one reaching to her arm pits. Their hands, sides, and arms are burned, blistered, calloused by fire; hut they must carry their loads. For complaining, protesting, talking hack, fainting dead away, as many of tbe convicts do, they are stripped and whipped. Women are stripped naked in the brick yards, held by other convicts, and whipped till they faint away, and till the ground about their feet is red with blood, The laws says no convict shall receive more than twenty-five lashes in one day; hat no attention is paid to the law, fifty lashes, laid on with all tho strength of a political heeler, being often inflicted, and the next day the cruel dose is often repeated.

Women have been whipped for not acceding quietly to the sensual demands of brutal keepers. Children of ust and brutality hard been born in three prison-pens. The least complaint, or threat to tell of the treatment is punished fearfully- The contractors demand the result of labour, and if the whipping boss cannot lash the labour out of the poor victims of politics and society, he is complained of by the contractors, and the governor appoints a more brutal person in his place. There is no need of going to Liberia to find brutality, as exists in the same degree, or worse, so far as the treatment of convicts in Georgia is concerned. Under the system prevailing it is for the interest of contractors to have negroes made drunk, arrested for offences committed when drunk, imprisoned ani rushed off to prison-camps, where their labour enriches monopolists, and blisters the good name and reputation of the State and country- This is the way the oplored race in the South is being educated. Before the South can deserve or receive the respect and fraternal love of the North, which is less brutal, it must completely change its methods and treatment of which it terms its mudsill element. The humane element which there is in each State must educate and care for weak and ignorant ones, and must see that the prison system is lifted out of the lash and oat of the grasp of the brutality of millionaires.