25 Hours in Jail—"I Lived in a Chamber of Horrors"
May 9, 1955

EL PASO, Texas—I spent a night in a Chamber of Horrors. I saw City Jail prisoners take dope inside Tank 6. I saw powder capsules swallowed and dissolved in hot water and men become crazy with dope.

I saw packages smuggled into the jail by prisoners who lived from day to day for dope parties that began at 5:30 p.m. and lasted until dawn.

On an assignment for the Herald-Post I had myself "arrested" on a drunk charge last Thursday. I was fined $15, but, acting like a broke drunk, I said I could not pay. I was sentenced to Tank 6. My acting became better when I entered. The stench was so repulsive I vomited twice.

That was at 8 a.m. Twenty-five hours later I had all I could take.

Tank 6 is a disgusting combination of live and inanimate filth. The men are systematically killing themselves: some with liquor, the rest with narcotics. The cells are like pigsties. There are two stinking toilets in the 22-foot-long tanks. At one end of the tank is a bathtub. The whole inside is one solid black bathtub ring. The "cots" are thin slabs of interwoven steel strips attached to the walls. One blanket is given each man.

When I was taken in about 10 men were in Tank 6. They were friendly, for most were drunks, not hopheads.

At 2:30 p.m. the chain gang came in from work. Their chains were removed and they charged into the tank with authority. They chased off the non-chain gang inmates using the toilets and the bathtub. The friendly group meekly retreated into their cells. The bosses had come in.

At 4:30 p.m. we lined up for chow. Next to me was a small redheaded individual with a ravaged face who appeared drunk. He looked down at my shoes and mumbled. "Like your shoes. Let's trade." I refused and he boomed obscenities.

We ate standing up crowded as in a 5 o'clock bus and we gobbled

down the food fast with the help of the jailers yelling, "Hurry it up, you guys, hurry it up."

Red took out a small wad of tissue. Inside were two red capsules. He put them in his mouth and downed them with black coffee. Then a small brown paper bag was passed to him, coming quickly from the direction of the food servers, and he immediately took the bag and dropped it down a convenient hole to his cell downstairs. We marched down to our cells.

Red and a couple of his cronies were pretty "loco." Their speech was incoherent and their eyes blurry.

One of the friendly men warned me to stay in my bunk. "They got a big load today," he said.

It wasn't long before Red summoned me to his cell. He was sitting on a high bunk surrounded by his henchmen. Red took me by the collar and his vile breath hit me in the face. He said, "First-timer, ain't you?" I said "Yes." He let go my collar and showed me his yellow shaking hands.

"See these hands?" he asked. "They can beat you up or kill you and no one here will say anything about it."

I went back to my bunk and lay still while lice crawled all over me.

Red and his crowd starting heating water in a can over some burning newspapers. A half hour later all of Red's gang was goofier than Snake Pit. Some of them began wailing like maniacs. Once in a while one would shout horribly: "Pasame un calmante" ("Pass me a calmer").

Then they would "sing" at the top of their voices. It sounded more like the writhings of sinners in hell you read about. Minor fights broke out, but were stopped by other hopheads.

"You want to ruin everything?" one of them asked, meaning that the jailers would come up. Why the jailers didn't come, anyway, considering the loud noise, I'll never know.

The night wore on slowly. Nobody in the jail could have gotten a wink of sleep—except the hopheads when they passed out. The rest of us were kept awake by fear, the horrible noise and the ever-present lice.

One of the hopheads was sent to his bunk crying when he refused to go through an unnatural demand by a big hophead.

Finally the morning broke through and the hopheads became quiet.

"I hope we get a bigger load tomorrow," one of them said.

I decided to end my experiment in misery. I called the Herald-Post and asked to be freed. I had intended to stay longer. I couldn't.

I left the jail knowing how it feels to live in a hophead Chamber of Horrors.