BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

154 BARBAROUS MEXICO
many weeks. The insufficiency of this ration is so well
realized by the prison officials that a regular system of
feeding from the outside has grown up. Daily the
friends and relatives of prisoners bring them baskets of
food, in order that they may live through their term of
confinement. Of course it is a terrible drain on the
poor, but the system serves its purpose—except for
those hundreds of unfortunates who have no friends on
the outside. These starve to death without a finger being
raised to help them.
"Within three days after entering Belem," a Mexican
prison physician informed me, "every inmate contracts
a skin disease, a terrible itch which sets the body on fire.
This disease is entirel y the result of the filthy conditions
of the place. Every year," he continued, "the
prison goes through an epidemic of typhus, which kills
an average of at least ten per cent of the inmates.
Within Belem there is no system of order among the
prisoners. The weak are at the mercy of the strong
Immediately you enter as a prisoner you are set upon
by a horde of half-crazed men who tear the clothes
from your back, take away your valuables, if you have
any, and usually commit nameless crimes upon your
person, while officials of the prison stand grinning by.
The only way to save yourself in Belem is to turn wild
beast like the rest, and even then you must be strong—
very strong."
Should I give the name of this physician every official
at the national capital would instantly recognize him as
a man of high standing with the government. I shall
not name him only because if I did he also would go to
Belem as a prisoner. Such stories as his I heard from
too many widely different sources to be able to doubt
them. The stories of the Belem epidemics always get