National Affairs: Parboiled Prisoners

“The Bing” or “Klondike” is what convicts in Philadelphia’s County Prison at suburban Holmesburg, Pa. call it: a narrow, thick-walled little brick cell block where fractious inmates are put for “treatment.” It holds nine cells, each 8 ft. long, 4 ft. wide, 10 ft. high. In each cell are a small sink with one spigot, a “hopper” (toilet) and six bolts in the wall for cots. Walls & floor are rough concrete, doors sheet steel, with small ventilating holes at the bottom. Three windows and several small roof outlets comprise the ventilation of the building. Across a two-foot corridor from the cells the wall is lined with steal radiators, which can provide several times the amount of radiation necessary to warm such a small building in winter.

One day last fortnight, after 650 of the prison’s 1,414 prisoners had yammered, clamored and “hunger-struck” against the prison food and discipline, six ringleaders were thrust into “The Klondike.” Next day 13 more, and after that another six were thrust in, so that the men were jammed in two and three to a cell. Someone shut the windows. Someone turned off the water from the spigots. Someone turned on the steam heat.

“The Klondike’s” temperature rose to more than 150° F. in the “treatment cells, bedlam raged. Tearing their clothes off, gasping for breath, the tortured men roared and screamed for hours. When guards came with breakfast the third day, they found 21 of the prisoners unconscious, four (two in each of two cells) dead on the floor—bruised, gouged, discolored, parboiled.

Despite officious interference from Philadelphia’s jowly Mayor Samuel Davis Wilson, whose homicide squad reported “nothing suspicious” in the deaths, scythe-nose Coroner Charles H. Hersch took charge. His investigators compared “The Klondike” with the Black Hole of Calcutta.—* The scene they reconstructed was as horrid as anything ever written in the dingy annals of U. S. prisons: Stifled, maddened by the heat, the prisoners evidently fought savagely to get water from the “hoppers,” air through the tiny ventilating holes. They had stuffed clothing into the “hoppers” to flood the floors, lain down in the water, which got so hot it scalded them. If they touched the metal doors, their naked bodies were scorched. The dead men’s feet were puffed, their flesh dehydrated until it turned to powder.

Warden William (“Bill”) Mills, one-time footballer for Temple University, onetime superintendent (1920-33) of Philadelphia’s none too savory police force, denied all knowledge of how it could have happened. He declared he had been out for a jog in the woods the morning the bodies were found, could not have been more surprised. He shut himself up in his house and tried to wash his hands of the whole horrid affair. Two guards—Alfred Brough and Francis Smith—were held on homicide charges by the Coroner, who promised eight arrests of guards and “higher-ups” after the inquest this week.

—*During the Indian uprising of 1756, when the Suraj-ud-Dowlah (native Viceroy of Bengal) captured the British garrison at Calcutta, he had 146 English prisoners thrown into their own fort’s prison, a “Black Hole” 18 ft. by 15 ft. It was in hottest June. All night the Indian goalers mocked their prisoners who, maddened by the heat, fought and trampled each other to get what little breath came in the tiny airholes. In the morning, 23 survivors—one a woman, who was promptly put in the Surajah’s harem—staggered out from among 123 corpses.