DO YOUR OWN TIME By Don Castle
The extravagances of American social life make pleasantly horrific reading for English escapists ; we can enjoy the scandal for its own sake, and don't have to do anything about it except feel superior. In New York, Dutch Schultz made six million dollars in one year from his " numbers " racket. In Los Angeles, a popular preacher maintains a detective- bureau in order to pep up- his- Sunday sermon.- In Connec- ticut, you can be fined for chewing tobacco without a doctor's permit. In San Quentin prison . . . Don Castle, a Californian journalist who went down for two years, undertakes to enlighten us about the last. His appeal is largely to the escapist, and his sensational experiences run suspiciously to type (although this may be due to the depersonalised newspaper style he uses). Many old friends turn up, for the first time altogether in one prison; the radical who is in gaol for singing Hail ! Columbia (it is usually for quoting the Declaration of Inde- pendence), the gangster who bosses the prison by terrorism and graft, the negro who is shot down to provide a Roman holiday for bored guards. All these things are, or have been, true of the peculiar U.S. penal system ; but Do Your Own Time (Arthur Barker, 7s. 6d.) somehow makes them dull and unconvincing. One wonders why, if Messrs. Arthur Barker wanted to publish a book of this sort, they didn't commission someone to write up the story of Governor's Island prison, which New York gangsters turned into a sort of country-club-cum-headquarters, and which provides a much more dramatic escape than San Quentin for minds jaded by the niggardly .horrors of our own prisons.— • -
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