Let it be said to this humane and enlightened gentleman’s everlasting credit that one of his first official acts was to banish the jacket and other brutalities from California prisons forever. Captain Murphy welcomed the jacket as something superior to anything he had at Folsom in the way of punishment. Up to that time the prisoners were “regulated” by long terms in the dungeons on bread and water, loss of credits, or by hanging them up by the wrists till they were on tiptoe. When Dirty Dick saw what could be done with the jacket he came into the stoneyard and declared himself openly, “I’ve got something now that will make you tough birds snitch on yourselves.”

The killing and maiming of convicts in the straitjackets are matters of record and too well known to call for any notice in this story. At Folsom I saw the jacket making beasts of the convicts and brutes of their keepers. I saw Jakey Oppenheimer transformed from a well-intentioned prisoner into a murder maniac whose wanton killings and assaults in prison brought him “under the rope” in the end. I saw the convicts throw their hats in the air and shout for joy when Warden Charles Aull died.