Miracle at Sing Sing : How One Man Transformed the Lives of America's Most Dangerous Prisoners

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Summary: Inspiring to Prisoners, Inspiring for Readers
Review: The prison movie has been a staple for decades, with perhaps its peak in the thirties. It will come as a surprise that much of Hollywood's fascination for prison life, shown in pictures like _20,000 Years in Sing Sing_, was due to an enormously popular penologist, warden Lewis E. Lawes, who served at Sing Sing from 1919 to 1942. Indeed, Lawes wrote the book on which that movie is based, as well as other best-selling books turned into movies, and stage and radio plays. He liked being a media star, but he was also a devoted public servant with humanitarian aims for the prisoners in his charge. _Miracle at Sing Sing: How One Man Transformed the Lives of America's Most Dangerous Prisoners_ (St. Martin's Press) is an absorbing look at Lawes's work within the prison and without, and has lessons for our own time.

Lawes started as a guard, moved into youth reformatories, and had success in getting the youths to work together. His successes took him to the intimidating assignment of warden at Sing Sing. Lawes wanted the job and campaigned for it, but he knew what he was up against; he was the seventh warden in four years. In his first address to the men, he even joked about the impermanence: "If you want to get out of this place quickly, you have to come in as warden." The men laughed, but they also heard from him that they would get privileges that they earned, and that as the warden walked the yard he wanted to be addressed on any subject they liked. He believed in sunshine, open air, sports and music as civilizing influences. His sports efforts became legendary. The Sing Sing Orioles played the New York Yankees (with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig) at Lawes Field in 1929 (Yankees 15, Orioles 3). The outcomes of the games didn't much matter. The effort meant a lot to "the boys" as he called them, and there were no incidents of foul play or attempts to take advantage of the crowds to escape. He had a cutthroat give him a shave every day, and other felons were nannies to his three daughters. There were failures, but there were countless inmates who learned some civilizing lessons and when free, remembered them. When Lawes visited New York, taxi drivers would refuse his fare: "It's on me, boss. I'm one of the boys."

Lawes would have seen his greatest failure as his inability to curb capital punishment. When he got to the prison, he favored the electric chair, but as he saw it at work on the condemned, and as he realized that it was doing little for deterrence, he actively worked against it, even as he was responsible for the state-mandated deaths of one inmate after another. He also was aghast at the Baumes laws, which were similar to our three-strikes-you're-out philosophy, by which four-time losers were imprisoned without hope of ever leaving prison alive. Lawes viewed robbing men of hope as the greatest of crimes. The anecdotes of prison life given here are detailed and engaging. Blumenthal has sketched pictures of Charles Chapin, the wife-murderer who became the prison's renowned rose gardener, George Parker who really did sell the Brooklyn Bridge to a rube for $50,000, and Willie Sutton who repeatedly and memorably robbed banks for the inescapable reason, "That's where the money is." Blumenthal's book is an entertaining depiction of colorful characters and a humane, confident warden who made a difference in their lives.