The Man Who Wanted to Go to Jail
A desperate and confused man repeatedly begged police to arrest him, only to be rebuffed by officers who had no interest in adding him to their workload.
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.
Last evening, as Officer Manning was standing on the corner of Mill and Commercial streets, a sad-eyed, woe-begone individual, grasping a half-eaten parsnip fondly in his right hand, staggered up and said, huskily, 'Please, sir, you [hic] shee I mon a little [hic] jamboree [hic], and would you please arresht me?' 'Go along,' said Manning: 'you don't want to be arrested.' 'Oh, yesh I do, though,' reiterated the sad man, 'I want t'be locked up, and yer won't be adoin of yer duty if you don't take me in.' 'Now go along and go to bed; you don't want to be put to work on these muddy streets for sixty days, do you?' The man's eyes gleamed at the suggestion, and he murmured, in an ecstatic tone: 'Oh: yesh, yesh, sixty days on streets; take m'long.' But the officer sternly refused, and the man with the parsnip plead, with tears in his eyes, first for sixty, then for thirty, and then for ten days. The last seen of him he was going up Mill street, sobbing as if his heart would break and looking in all the store boxes for a policeman who would arrest him.
“I want t'be locked up, and yer won't be adoin of yer duty if you don't take me in.”
In an era when incarceration was often used as a blunt-force method of city 'cleaning'—forcing vagrants to work off sentences on muddy roads—this story highlights both the dehumanizing nature of the practice and the tragic desperation of those who saw the jail as their only hope for a bed and a meal.
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