Falconer [antikvár]

The main entrance to Falconer - the only entrance for convicts^ their visitors and the staff - was crowned by an escutcheon representing Liberty, Justice and, between the two, the sovereign power of government. Liberty wore a mobcap and car-« ried a pike. Government was the federal Eagle holding an olive branch and armed with hunting arrows. Justice was conventional; blinded, vaguely erotic in her clinging robes and armed with a headsman's sword. The bas-relief was bronze, but black these days - as black as unpolished anthracite or onyx. How many hundreds had passed under this, the last emblem most of them would see of man's endeavor to Interpret the mystery of imprisonment in terms of symbols. Hundreds, one guessed, thousands, millions was close. Above the escutcheon was a declension of the place-names: Falconer Jail 1871, Falconer Reformatory, Falconer Federal Penitentiary, Falconer State Prison, Falconer Correctional Facility, and the last, which had never caught on: Daybreak House. Now cons were inmates, the assholes were officers and the warden was a superintendent. Fame is chancy, God knows, but Falconer - with its limited accommodations for two thousand miscreants - was as famous as Newgate. Gone was the water torture, the striped suits, the lock step, the balls and chains, and there was a Softball field where the gallows had stood, but at the time of which I'm writing, leg irons were still used in Auburn. You could tell the men from Auburn by the noise they made, Farragut (fratricide, zip to ten, #734-508-32) had been brought to this old iron place on a late summer's day. He wore no leg irons but was manacled to nine other men, four of them black and all of them younger than he. The windows of the van were so high and unclean that he could not see the color of the