7. Joliet State Penitentiary, IllinoisOn 1st November 1881, I entered a kind of Hades that I would never wish you to visit dear friend. If I had ever thought that I was treated with disdain in the Boone County Jail, well now I was something totally new, a number.
As Prisoner 4374, I was stripped of all my possessions and then stripped again, the second time literally, with a full body search followed by a freezing cold bucket of water thrown over me. I was presented with the kind of garb that only a coal miner or laborer might wear, given four candles as my monthly allowance of light source and shown to a grey cell in the main prison block. I was endowed with a list of rules to read and memorize, the like of which I had never been subjected to before. There I sat until it was time to marc
