By midnight there were fourteen of us in a small,
poorly-ventilated, dirty room. Planks extended around the room on three
sides, and on these those who could get a place lay down. Among the number
of "drunks" imprisoned with me were some of the worst and largest roughs of
Jersey City, and these inhuman wretches, in the absence of the police,
threatened; to take my life if I vomited again. In the room adjoining ours
a madman was confined, and I don't think he ceased kicking and screaming a
moment from Saturday night until Monday. In the room just across the narrow
hall, fronting ours, was an insane woman, who swore she had two souls, one
of which was in hell! She, too, kept up an incessant, piteous wailing,
begging some one, ever and anon, with piercing screams, to bring back her
lost soul! Indianapolis is more civilized than Jersey City in respect to
her prisons, but not with respect to her police. And I am pretty sure that,
as managed by its present superintendent, the unfortunate insane are in no
other State cared for as they are in the Indiana asylum, and in no other
State is the appropriation for running such a noble institution so beggarly
as in ours.
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