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Fire in the Big House - America’s Deadliest Prison Disaster (Hardcover)
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Fire in the Big House - America’s Deadliest Prison Disaster (Hardcover)
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On April 21, 1930--Easter Monday--some rags caught fire under the
Ohio Penitentiary's dry and aging wooden roof, shortly after
inmates had returned to their locked cells after supper. In less
than an hour, 320 men who came from all corners of Prohibition-era
America and from as far away as Russia had succumbed to fire and
smoke in what remains the deadliest prison disaster in United
States history. Within 24 hours, moviegoers were watching Pathé's
newsreel of the fire, and in less than a week, the first iteration
of the weepy ballad "Ohio Prison Fire" was released. The deaths
brought urgent national and international focus to the horrifying
conditions of America's prisons (at the time of the fire, the Ohio
Penitentiary was at almost three times its capacity). Yet, amid
darkening world politics and the first years of the Great
Depression, the fire receded from public concern. In Fire in the
Big House, Mitchel P. Roth does justice to the lives of convicts
and guards and puts the conflagration in the context of the rise of
the Big House prison model, local and state political machinations,
and American penal history and reform efforts. The result is the
first comprehensive account of a tragedy whose
circumstances--violent unrest, overcrowding, poorly trained and
underpaid guards, unsanitary conditions, inadequate food--will be
familiar to prison watchdogs today.
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