CRIME: Again, Auburn

Not in hope but in despair, in the weighing of different deaths, in a whisper passed with a plate at mess, along a file at exercise, in a package slipped under the table in the visitors’ room, a stolen knife, a gun under the grey clothes—so prison breaks begin, nobody knows just how. One morning last week at Auburn. N. Y., an appointed moment came. Father Donald Cleary, the prison’s young chaplain, found a strange party in one of the corridors.

It was 11 a. m., the time when 200 segregated prisoners, under special watch for taking part in the attempted break and prison-burning less than five months ago (TIME, Aug. 5), were supposed to be having lunch. They were not eating. Some of them had handcuffed six guards and marched them back to the punishment cells to set free their comrades.They had sent a message to Warden Jennings and he was there now, manacled and trembling, a white-haired man with a lined, anxious face, a hostage. The prisoners waited for their leader, Convict Henry Sullivan, to tell them how the guards and troopers at the main gate, where the siren was screaming, had received their ultimatum, a soiled paper across which was scrawled “For God’s sake, give them what they want,” followed by Warden Jennings’ signature. The priest’s advent was an accident, not to be considered, an irrelevant, frantic voice, begging them to think, to undo what they had done. His words fell on the deaf faces like a flurry of wind on stone.

Several other people had stumbled on the party in the corridor. One of them, George A. Durnford, the head keeper, had been shot and killed when he tried to run. A keeper named David Winney had dodged the bullets by falling down and rolling through a doorway. He had sent the alarm to the gate by the only telephone the conspirators had overlooked when they were cutting wires. Now at the gate Captain Stephen McGrath, State trooper, held Sullivan’s ultimatum between his fists, wondering how he could take the responsibility of ignoring that scrawled postscript signed with Warden Jennings’ name.

“Phone the Commissioner at Albany.” Captain McOrath commanded one of his men. “See what he says.”

After a bit the trooper came back. “He says, ‘Go in and get them. The warden will have to take his chances.'”

From the snowy roadway, darkened in irregular patches by the parked automobiles of townspeople who had turned out to help, McGrath looked toward the wing of the grey stone block next to thewarden’s office, the wing where the rebels were barricaded. He could charge in all right, get across the yard to the main hall maybe, but no further. They would have the steel doors of the hall closed. He studied it until he thought of a plan, then took Father Cleary aside and talked to him. . . . Automobiles for their escape? The gate open?Even Convict Sullivan believed that message when the priest brought it back. Possibly McGrath apologized to Cleary afterward for using him that way.

Vignettes of blood on snow: a man in a guard’s blue jacket and reefer, his long, impassive face, with its heavy eyebrows, oblique eyes, long upper lip and thin mouth pushed into the ground, lying dead, his head pointed toward freedom. That was Convict Sullivan in clothes he had stripped from a captured guard. He had run through the barrage of tear gas that the troopers let loose on the screaming phalanx as it advanced across the yard toward the gate holding Warden Jennings and the other hostages as a screen in front of them. He had run toward the cars drawn up there outside the gate as decoys, their engines running. Beside him was another convict. In the yard were others. Death was waiting for them, they knew that as soon as the cloud of gas sprang out of the gate. They backed up to the wall on the opposite side of the yard, clawed at it with their nails, climbed on each other’s backs trying to pyramid over. As shots followed them, they ran inside the south cell block.

At twilight the machine guns on the walls were quiet, still waiting. A thousand people and a regiment of militia were at the gates. An airplane droned overhead. Death came for the rioters across the yard, up into the cell block, past the barricades which they had piled up with mattresses, chairs, beds at corners where they could shoot down a corridor two ways and back up to a stairway. Troopers told a convict named Johnson, who was helping them, to pull a mattress off a barricade. A bullet stopped Johnson when he took his first step. A bullet stopped Captain Bruton of the guards. On the top floor there were six rebels left. Troopers brought machine guns into position.

“Will you surrender? We will shoot to kill.”

Behind the last barricade one Steven Pawlak, lifer, stood up. “Go to hell,” he snarled. Troopers crossed the barricade after the last wooden-sounding machine gun volley. They found all the last six rebels dead in a pile. Warden Jennings, dragged to safety when the convicts charged the gate, was dizzy from gas and a clubbing but all right. Nine guards and convicts had been killed, many others injured. After the break Governor Roosevelt said: “We have three commissions working on the problem now. I would name a fourth if it would do any good.” He announced that seven captured rioters would be tried for their lives. He promised to make special penal recommendations to the legislature next month concerning:1) A five-year building program to increase prison accommodations by 3,000;2) Construction of a new 1,000-men model prison at Attica;3) Increase in prisoners’ daily ration allowance from 21¢ to 26¢4) Work for every prisoner, with pay for all work.

He appointed a new acting warden, Dr. Frank L. Christian, superintendent of the Elmira Reformatory, humanitarian.