Petticoats in Prison.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 935, 31 January 1890, Page 4

Petticoats in Prison.

It ia only fair that a woman sent to prison should have some softer discipline than that applied to a man ; for, sentimentally, she suffers the most. Women, more than men, hate to be classified, and grouped, and ruled by laws which ignore idiosyncrasy. Then the absolute mortification of that harmless sort of vanity which fills so much of a woman’s life makes her durance doubly vile. She loses all her fine feathers. Her hair, which she has even apostolic authority for regarding as an adornment, is shorn to its last lock, once the cell has been allotted ; aqd the face that has been passive, and the tongue that has been mute under the finding of the jury and the sentence of the judge, are raised to plead with THE HOLDER OF THE SCISSORS, while the corridors ring again with cries while the inexorable task proceeds. The hair reqew* itself, however ; and before shearing day is due again the girls grumble that a thoughtless government gives them no hair pins. One WQnfqn, whose hair was resplendent as of macassar, was an object of some wonder* ment to my friend, the chaplain, till she ex* plained to him that she allowed her broth to get cool and then skimmed the fat off the top to gleam in her crown of glory. Another girl certainly rouged, and rouge talks with great effect on the pallid faces of the prisoners. Great was XIJE ENVIOUS INDIGNATION OF HER SISTERS in servitude against such frivolity, and greater still the curiosity as to the ways and means. It was discovered at lash that some red threads in the blue skirt she had to sew would, when extracted and chewed, yield the bloom that was wanted by the ch- ek <> f beauty. The way in which every woman manages to disarrange and double one of her underskirts so as to represent a crinolette is

so comic as to make even a prison chaplain sometimes smile. And a

WOMAN WITHOUT A LOOKING GLASS ! Why, only the severest and ‘enclosed ’ order of nuns renounce that. Perhaps it is the female prisoner’s greatest penaHCß, and to obtain a substitute for it she is willing to r * s Jji imposition of a puniahtpent. in the shape of more work or less food. The method is simple. By an accident she declares she will regret to the last day of her life, she has broken a window pane. There is the hole, sure enough ; but where is the detached found concealed in some corner of the cell, and with it a dark atrip of cloth—asubstitute for quicksilver. And all for what? There are no male hearts to win or to break, and hardly any male eyo> to see or discriminate. The governor comas and goes, but he ia hardly human. The doctor is always in request—but do women ever try t>» fool the doctor? As for the chaplain, he blushed so much when I suggested (says a writer in the Chicago Time*) he was perhaps regarded as heing susceptible that I put an end to his confusion by putting an end to our interview.