Punishment Without Crime by Isidore Zimmerman

Author:Isidore Zimmerman [Zimmerman, Isidore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: .ISBNincl, Prison, Memoir, Wrongful Imprisonment
ISBN: 9780532121275
Publisher: C.N. Potter, New York
Published: 1964-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

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You heard a lot about suicides in prison—not that the people in charge publicized them, but because they couldn’t always

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cover them up. One man I knew of managed to drown by keeping his head in a pail of water; don’t ask me how. Another managed to decapitate himself—not completely, but it did the job—with nothing more complicated than a single-edged razor blade. The easiest way to end it all is probably to provoke a lifer with a nasty disposition. In twenty-five years I gave a lot of thought to dying by my own hand, but it was only on five or six occasions that I got around to making concrete arrangements for it. One reason for my indolence was, of course, the knowledge of my own innocence, and the conviction I held to over the years that the wrong done me would be righted. Another reason is that the authorities don’t make suicide easy: just desirable. Suicide requires privacy, as a general thing, and privacy is hard to come by in prison.

During one of my stretches in the isolation block at Auburn I had a curious conversation with the man in the adjoining cell. He wanted to know what day we had canteen privileges, that is, what day of the week we’d be allowed to renew our stocks of candy, cigarettes, shaving soap, and the other odds and ends to which all but the baddest boys in the box were entitled. “What for?” I asked. “I’ve got me a plan,” said the man next door. “I’m going to buy up all I can eat, and eat it, and then hang myself.” His tone was too matter-of-fact: like an announcement it was raining, or that he had bedbugs in his cell. And I was going through one of my mad-at-the-world periods: they hadn’t slapped me in isolation for being a model prisoner. So I said, “Yeah, sure—funny man,” or something on that order. “You’ll see,” he said. “You’ll see.”

There was a tiny window in each cell, set high up the wall close to the ceiling, well beyond a man’s reach. It occurred to me that if you could get to the window and fasten a rope to it, somehow, and then jump off your bed with the other end around your neck, you stood a fair chance of hanging yourself. But the odds were all against you: no rope; no way really to reach the window; and no way to fasten it. It was possible, I thought; but just about as possible as tunneling your way out of the block with a plastic spoon.

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We went to the commissary and did our shopping for the week. On our way back to the lock-up I said to my neighbor, with the spirit of philanthropy prison does so much to develop in a man, “Lots of luck to you, friend.” For a while I could hear him crumpling wrappers, moving around in the cell next door. I could imagine him feeding his face with candy bars.

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