Theodore Dreiser, 1871-1945

American novelist_________________

 

From An American Tragedy

The "death house" in this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenances of human insensitiveness and stupidity principally for which no one was primarily responsible. Indeed, its total plan and procedure were the results of a series of primary legislative enactments, followed by decisions and compulsions as devised by the temperaments and seeming necessities of various wardens, until at last - by degrees and without anything worthy of the name of thinking on any one's part - there had been gathered and was now being enforced all that could possibly be imagined in the way of unnecessary and really unauthorized cruelty or stupid and destructive torture. And to the end that a man, once condemned by a jury, would be compelled to suffer not alone the death for which his sentence called but a thousand others before that. For the very room by its arrangement, as well as the rules governing the lives and actions of the inmates, was sufficient to bring about this torture, willy-nilly. . .

Worse yet, and productive of perhaps the most grinding and destroying of all the miseries here - the transverse passage leading between the old death house on the one hand and the execution-chamber on the other. For this from time to time - alas, how frequently - was the scene or stage for at least a part of the tragedy that was here so regularly enacted - the final business of execution.

For through this passage, on his last day, a man was transferred from his better cell in the new building, where he might have been incarcerated for so much as a year or two, to one of the older ones in the death house, in order that he might spend his last hours in solitude, although compelled at the final moment, nonetheless (the death march), to retrace his steps along this narrower cross passage - and where all might see - into the execution chamber at the other end of it.