Hellraisers Journal – Saturday July 15, 1922 Eugene Debs Shares Letter from Inmate at Atlanta Penitentiary
From the Buffalo New Age of July 6, 1922
From Atlanta Prison: A Letter from a Prisoner with a Warning by Eugene V. Debs ———-
Eugene Debs Leaving Atlanta Penitentiary Christmas Day 1921
I have received a letter from a prisoner in the United States penitentiary in Atlanta that makes interesting and profitable reading. The name of the writer for the present at least must remain unknown. The letter would never have been permitted to go out of the prison in the regular way. Not a word of criticism of the prison, of anyone connected with its management is allowed to pass the censor. No matter what practices may prevail or what outrages may be perpetrated, no report thereof is permitted to pass the walls. The general public, which supports the prison, is not allowed to know what goes on there except as it may please the officers in charge to let the people known what a fine place it is and what a privilege to be locked up there.
Just at this writing a huge scandal has been uncovered at the United States penitentiary at Atlanta. A “dope ring,” headed by a prison physician and several guards, has been long operating there making dope fiends of young prisoners and supplying all who could pay for it at robber rates with the poisonous drug that would ruin them for life. And this is the benevolent United States government institution where drug addicts are sent to be reformed. And truly it is a fine bourgeois reformation they get at this walled-in inferno.
Underground Kite.
The letter, which follows, was sent out underground or it would never have left the prison. It is from a man who served a term of years in the navy and has been rewarded for his patriotism by a long prison sentence. There are several hundred inmates at Atlanta who were soldiers, marines, and sailors, some of them of many years standing, who for more or less trifling offenses were court-martialed by their “superiors” and sent to the penitentiary to contemplate the beauty of their reward for putting on a uniform and fighting to make their country “safe for democracy.” The writer of this letter is one of those victims and the letter speaks eloquently for itself. Here it is:
Through your many friends and comrades in prison here I have learned of your suffering for the noble cause of the human race. Your martyrdom will blaze the trail to the goal which the working class are destined to reach. With a few more such martyrs the cause will be won. Your undying devotion to your noble principles and your untiring efforts to secure liberty and justice for all, to make this country a fit place to live in, will be crowned with victory at last. From now on my life belongs to your cause.
Having thrown away 11 years in the navy, the lessons of experience have at last been a blessing to me. I have learned what our navy really stands for and that is not for the protection against invasion, but simply a school that teaches the doctrines of the rich.
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