A New Yorker recounted seeing inmates rotating in groups of a half dozen for ten minutes at a time to crowd each tiny, unglazed window above Crown Street: “Every narrow aperture of those stone walls filled with human heads, face above face, seeking a portion of the external air.” Prisoner Samuel Young later described guards slopping food at suppertime “as if to so many hogs—a quantity of old biscuit, broken and in crumbs, mostly molded, and some of it crawling with maggots.” Another prisoner wrote, “As soon as the bread fell on the floor it took legs and ran in all directions. So full of
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