"Life in the Ludlow Street Jail" - Unsigned - New York Tribune

A Voluntary Incarceration. Warden Tracey's Hotel. A Public Prison Run as a Private Boarding-House. Mr. Tracey's Menu. Money the Key to the Cell Door. Imprisonment for Debt. Innocent Men in Prison. Malice as a Jailer. The Squeezing System. The Miseries of Detained Witnesses. The Agonies of Confinement.

 "Mr. ____, I have determined to send you to prison," smoke like a knell on my ear. Little Tommy, the office boy, could have knocked me down with a feater; the more stalwart Johnny Weinheimer could, at that moment, ahve rendered my children fatherless and my wife a widow with an ease which woudl have utterly astonished him. . . . 'The face is, Mr. _____, I have reason to suspect that there is something rotten in Mr. Warden Tracey's state of Denmark . . .."

Description:A reporter goes undercover in the oh-so-posh but oh-so-corrupt Ludlow Street Jail of 1871.

Rights: public domain