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were either hung or put in gaol. And if you were sentenced to gaol, you did not go to an 

institution. No, you dug your own gaol with a spade provided to you by the Province of 

Maine. You dug it as wide and as deep as you could during the period between sunup and 

sundown. Then ,they gave you a couple of skins and a bucket, and down you went Once 

down, the gaoler would bar the top of your hole, -.row down some grain or maybe a piece 

of maggoty meat once or twice a week, and maybe there would be a dipperful ; barley 

soup on Sunday night You pissed in the bucket, and you held up the same bucket for 

water when the gaoler came around at six in the morning. When it rained, you used lie 

bucket to bail out your gaol-cell ... unless, that is, you wanted to drown like a rat in a 

rainbarrel. 

No one spent a long time 'in the hole', as it was called; thirty months was an unusually 

long term, and so far as I've been able to tell, the longest term ever spent from which an 

inmate actually emerged alive was served by the so-called Durham Boy', a fourteen-year- 

old psychopath who castrated a schoolmate with a piece of rusty metal. He did seven 

years, but of course he went in young and strong. 

You have to remember that for a crime that was more serious than petty theft or 

blasphemy or forgetting to put a snotrag in your pocket when out of doors on the 

Sabbath, you were hung. For low crimes such as those just mentioned and for others like 

them, you'd do your three or six or nine months in the hole and come out fishbelly white, 

cringing from the wide-open spaces, your eyes half-blind, your teeth more than likely 

rocking and rolling in their sockets from the scurvy, your feet crawling with fungus. Jolly 

old Province of Maine. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. 

Shawshank's Solitary Wing was nowhere as bad as that... I guess. Things come in three 

major degrees in the human experience, I think. There's good, bad, and terrible. And as 

you go down into progressive darkness towards terrible, it gets harder and harder to make 

subdivisions. 

To get to Solitary Wing you were led down twenty-three steps to a basement level where 

the only sound was the drip of water. The only light was supplied by a series of dangling 

sixty-watt bulbs. The cells were keg-shaped, like those wall-safes rich people sometimes 

hide behind a picture. Like a safe, the round doorways were hinged, and solid instead of 

barred. You get ventilation from above, but no light except for your own sixty-watt bulb, 

which was turned off from a master-switch promptly at eight p.m., an hour before lights- 

out in the rest of the prison. The wire wasn't in a wire mesh cage or anything like that. 

The feeling was that if you wanted to exist down there in the dark, you were welcome to 

it. Not many did ... but after eight, of course, you had no choice. You had a bunk bolted 

to the wall and a can with no toilet seat. You had three ways to spend your time: sitting, 

shitting, or sleeping. Big choice. Twenty days could get to seem like a year. Thirty days 

could seem like two, and forty days like ten. Sometimes you could hear rats in the 

ventilation system. In a situation like that, subdivisions of terrible tend to get lost. 

If anything at all can be said in favour of solitary, it's just that you get time to think. Andy 

had twenty days in which to think while he enjoyed his grain and drain, and when he got 

out he requested another meeting with the warden. Request denied. Such a meeting, the