The straight-jacket, made of coarse canvas, was about 4 feet long and on one side had brass eyelets about 4 inches apart. On the inside were two canvas pockets…. The guard ordered me to put my arms into the pockets. Then he wrapped the canvas folds about me and … began lacing it tight across my back. He then jerked me off my feet and flung my face down on the floor. He braced his foot against my back and laced the cord still tighter until my breath came in short, hard gasps…. No conceivable torture can be worse than no hours continuous compression in that canvas constrictor that I suffered … my first experience in the jacket that has killed and maimed many prisoners…. I had not been in it fifteen minutes when sharp, needlelike pains began shooting through my fingers, hands and arms, which gradually extended to my shoulders … within half an hour these pains shot back and forth like lightning. Cramping pains clutched my bowels; my breath pained with a hot dry sensation. The brass rivets ate into my flesh, and the cord ground into my back until the slightest movement, even breathing, was an added agony. My head grew hot and feverish, and a burning thirst seized me which compelled me every few minutes to ask the guard for water…. As the hours and days passed the anguish became more and more unbearable. I slept neither night nor day…. The bodily excretions over which I had no control in the canvas vice, ate into my bruised limbs adding pain to pain. My fingers, hands and arms finally became numb and paralyzing shock stunrfed my brain….

Had I been offered a dose of poison I would have drunk it with gratitude. Thus I suffered for 4 days and 14 hours incessantly…. Released I reeled off to my cell where I sank on my mattress in utter collapse…. I managed to drag off my saturated clothes…. What a sight I beheld. My hands, arms, and thighs were frightfully bruised, and had all the colors of the rainbow. My body was shrivelled like that of an old man and a horrible stench arose from it. I sank down on my mattress and never arose from it for a week….

Prisoners have been killed and crippled for life in the

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