The Unlikely Bond Between a Convict and His Keeper
A rare glimpse of humanity inside the grim walls of a frontier jail, where a long-term prisoner and the man paid to guard him found a surprising connection.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
In the jail at Tacoma, there is a convict who has been there for several years, and for three years the man who has served as his keeper is a fellow named Quiatt. Mr. Quiatt told me of the prisoner: 'I have been here three years. I have been his constant companion, his only friend in the world. I feed him, I talk to him, and he has told me his life story. I think he is innocent of the crime for which he is serving time, and I have done all I could to make his life endurable. Last Sunday, I felt sorry for him and asked him what he would like to have, and he answered that he would like to see a bit of the outside world. So I took him out, and we walked down the street together, and he shook hands with the people we met. He was like a child, and I had to tell him not to be too familiar. He was so happy.' When I asked Mr. Quiatt why he did this, he replied, 'It was because I thought of the man as a human. He was not just a prisoner.'
“I think he is innocent of the crime for which he is serving time, and I have done all I could to make his life endurable.”
This story from 1887 offers a rare, humanizing counter-narrative to the standard 'law and order' reporting of the era. It speaks to the ongoing struggle in the American carceral system between viewing people as disposable objects of the state versus recognizing their fundamental humanity—a tension that persists in modern debates about prison reform in Washington.
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