“TRUTH MUST WlN"

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 139, 8 March 1929, Page 10

“TRUTH MUST WlN"

PRISONERS AND THEIR THOUGHTS » i - RECORDS ON UNDERGROUND WALLS PUNISHMENT OF ONE’S OWN CONSCIENCE ® ■■■■ ■* “Truth must win. I have faith in the Judge of all earthly judges.” In a dark, underground cell, where others had tarried before him, some prisoner of the law scrawled this message on the whitewashed walls, while above him in the temple of justice his fate hung in the balance. Among other fragments, from the thoughts of those now banished he found space for his own. Then his hour of suspense ended, he passed on. To the gallows, a life sentence, or into the sunshine of the outer world—which? Only the dusty, forgotten records can tell. Beneath the footway of Stout Street, below the narrow gratings, are the cells of the Wellington Supreme Court, where prisoners brought to trial await the jury’s verdict These cells, though empty now, still record on their walls the storms of mind and emotion wrung from those confined there. Thoughts of all kinds are written, in fear, in hope, in despair; there are shafts of wisdom and quips of wit, a clinging to faith or to laughter in the face of adversity. A bare six yards by two, furnished only with chairs and admitting light through a small, heavily-barred window facing a concrete wall, the tiny cells confine a prisoner to his thoughts. Silent, perhaps sullen and forbidding, he leaves his cell and climbs up a spiral staircase, to find he has left the bowels of the Court and is standing now in the dock facing the Judge. By his looks might the public judge the prisoner, and deem his sentence fit, yet would they pause and ponder, were they to see on the walls of his cell the scribblings that prove him a human among humans? ! “How long, O Lord, how long wilt Thou forget me?” reads one message. Was he forgotten—or remembered? There is nothing to show. “Lord help me —a spender,” appeals another. Who was it caricatured himself with hat a-tilt, and, with boastful gesture, wrote beneath: “When I was King!”? And who, sketching a gallows with a corpse hanging, added with grim humour just two words: “Next time?” “Lord, in Thee have I trusted,” wrote one prisoner as he waited. When his waiting was ended and the verdict announced, did he carry his trust through the opened door as he returned to those of his name and his blood, or did the warder come at last to manacle his wrists, so that he could not even tepr with his finger-nails at those words of hope he had written a short time before? Whether he knew bitterness or joy, he carried it with him in his heart, becajise he left no further message. * To one law-breaker his sentence of four years must have come as a blow. His calculation as to how many hours he would have to serve behind prison bars is still on the wall —a pitiful little sum. The answer is 8660 hours —each an eternity. Somewhat cryptical at first glance is the brief announcement: "Exit Plutus.” Reading it again, however, one senses a care-free philosophy. “Oh , what I would give to get the jury to include the word ‘not’ in their verdict —that little word that means so much to met” (This was written by a murderer). How many hundreds of others have wished the same? In sympathy a later occupant of the cell has added the words, “Alas, my poor brother.” Passing from cell to cell, one finds on the walls message after message, Intense and Inspired. "Crime never pays.” “Women” — and this is scored deep so that the plaster flakes away—“ Women are a curse.” “Honesty is the best policy” (this is endorsed, “You are right, mate”). “There is no way like the straight way.” A note of drama is struck by the following: “4/4/28. Hanged with barbed wire.”. Who was hanged? What is the mystery behind this message? Lastly, from all the Inscriptions, and summing up in a little over a dozen words the bitter experience of those whose paths have turned to crime and who have seen the evil of their ways, the following stands out as a beacon light “Earthly judges cannot inflict any punishment comparable with the punishment inflicted by one's own conscience.”