CONVICTS SMOKE CIGARS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20964, 1 March 1930, Page 3

CONVICTS SMOKE CIGARS.

EDGAR WALLACE AMAZED. “Convicts and warders in a great American prison are boys together. The prisoners come out in the exercise yard smoking cigars, and doing much as they like. They lead a life which is entirely different from the life of the Eimlish prisoner.” ° Mr Edgar Wallace, the crime novelist and playriglit, gave a Daily Express reporter this impression of United States jail life when he arrived in the liner Berengaria from New York, “All my time in America,” said Mr Wallace, “ I spent with the police and m studying the aspects of the crime wave in New York and Chicago compared with the everyday incidents of crime in London. My most interesting experience was a visit to Sing Sing, the great convict prison.

The whole system amazed me. I saw convicts talking together like ordinary individuals in the street. There was no sort of discipline as we know it in an English prison. Every prisoner has a sort of apartment which is fairly comfortable and entirely unlike the narrow cell behind a barred door in which the_ English prisoner lives. “I sat in the execution chair in SinSing and tried to visualise the feelings of p- man going to execution. ° They told me that the electric current they turned on prisoners condemned to death was quicker than pain. They had taken graphs of the heart action of executed men, and found that the reaction of the nerves was behind that of the electric shock.

“I went to the Rothstein murder trial In New York, The whole procedure was surprising to an Englishman. During my day at the court the time was spent in challenging jurymen. “When I went to Chicago I was taken round the city by the chief of the police and shown all the places where murders and ‘shoot-ups’ have been committed.

. impressions, both in Chicago and in Aew York, was that the police were exceptionally efficient, but that they were handicapped all the time by the pobtical influence of headquarters. Nobody in England realises the prevalence of gang murders in New York and Chicago. If we had anythinlike them in England there would be a revolution.

‘I saw a whole series of photographs in Aew York of people who had been murdered in gang outrages—a number of thorn were women. I’liey were il' ®Fot just above the heart. “ One of the troubles of the New York police, at the moment is what is known as torch murders. The people who are killed in the gang feuds are taken out by motor car, their clothing is saturated witn petrol, and they are set on fire. . have in England no equivalent crime to that of America. Our police are dealing all tlfc time with the ordinary offences of a well-regulated public. We have no counterpart to the amazing disregard for life which is an everyday event in the great cities of America.

“ There have been only two exccutions during the past year for all the murders that have been comiriiited in York- 1 "’as told in Sing Sing that they were ‘treasuring up’ for execution in the first week of Decembei a man who was the only prisoner they remembei'ed during the past ten years who had been convicted of murder on circumstantial evidence.”