Devil's Island

CONDEMNED TO DEVIL'S ISLAND--Blair Niles--Harcourt Brace ($3.00).

The Indictment. Every year France sends a dismal shipload of some 700 convicts to her penal colony in French Guiana --north of Brazil, southeast of Venezuela. Here the condemned, one-half of whom die in the first year, eke out a prison sentence with hard labor, followed by continued exile; the avowed purpose being: "expiation of crime, regeneration of the guilty, and the protection of Society." That the purpose has been sadly travestied is common gossip abroad, but Blair Niles went to see for herself.

The Witness. Author Niles achieved unaccountable permission to inspect gang prisons of the mainland and individual cells on the rockbound islands. She chatted with convicts, and followed the trails so many of them have hacked in vain through the jungle. Everything she saw was evidence of the demoded prison conditions that a twentieth century government tolerates.

The Evidence. Twenty-year-old Michel's wooden pallet stretched narrowly between two seasoned convicts, murderers both. So Michel expected to escape, did he, as soon as he had learned from the "Aces" the finer points of his late thieving trade? Well, so had many another expected, and moreover struggled well on his way to freedom when manhunters tracked him down, and goaded him back to the solitary confinement, disease and starvation of Devil's Island (famed for the incarceration of Dreyfus).

Gaunt from wretched diet, toothless from scurvy, the cynical oldsters were right that escape was not so certain. Six weary years dragged themselves out: lumberjacking or road-building under armed guards, restless hours in prison, philosophising, swearing, gambling for "momes," the girlish boys who were possessed by carnal strongmen. With luck bits of wood could be stolen and carved into salable boxes, or penny errands might be run for the slave-drivers, and bit by tarnished bit the price of attempt at freedom could be bought. Five hundred francs would bribe a bushman to paddle one convict across to the jungle, and buy a few days' scanty provisions. Michel achieved the jungle, staggered and bruised his way through to Paramaribo, only to be arrested as he tried to board a Dutch freighter, and shipped summarily back to an extra twist of the screw.

Broken in spirit and body, Michel became at last "libere" (fantastic name for those wretches who survive imprisonment, but, exiled for years to come, must report periodically to the Guiana authorities). Meanwhile there was the listless scramble for barest necessities of existence. Few as these were after prison fare, the possibilities of work were fewer still, since employers preferred gangs of supervised prisoners available at minimum wage. Michel, marveled at his long-lost joie de vivre, remembered his ambitions, and the oath that never would he degenerate to a contemptible libere, crouched on his empty barrow awaiting a stray commission. But there he was, and there the Guiana vulture, bird of ill omen, flapped in the dust, croaked over dung in the street.

The Verdict. The pitiful story of Michel and his comrades in adversity is abundantly damning evidence. Readers' jury returns the unanimous verdict that a civilization which fosters such penal measures is guilty of criminal negligence, gross stupidity.