Books: How To Break Prison

You CAN ESCAPE—Edward H. Smith— Macmillan ($2.50).

¶ In the State Prison at Windsor, Ontario, Clarence Adams played dead by self-hypnotism, a friend “embalmed” him, accomplices outside got the coffin, released him.

¶ In Michigan’s State Prison two keepers were R. Irving Latimer’s obstacles. He poisoned them.

¶ At Joliet, Tommy Dowd ate dust and grabbed red-hot irons to prove insanity, then jumped out of an asylum window.

¶ At Germany’s Reuss-Gera Prison, one Schaarschmidt, deprived of tools, chewed his way out through solid oak bars. When captured his teeth were found mere stumps, his jaws ape-size.

¶ At Raleigh Prison, one John Wilson got an impression of his room’s keyhole with chewing-gum, made a key to match out of a buttonhook, walked out at night.

¶ One Sing Sing convict, disguised in a keeper’s raincoat, drove away with five convict-comrades in a motor truck.

¶ One John Callahan actually scaled the 20-ft. wall of Manhattan’s Tombs with tenacious hands and feet. Two keepers conducting one Dr. Theodore Gallaudet to the same bleak prison were magnificently wined-dined by their prisoner en route. In their stupor he left the restaurant on a pretext, went to Havana and Paris where his family joined him, lived happily and immune thereafter.

¶ Of the above liberty-lovers and many another Author Smith writes with full sympathy, a modern criminological attitude and a sense of what thrills. Presumably, few convicts will be allowed to read the book.