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Author: Ralph Blumenthal
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 9780312342739
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
From the riotous days of Prohibition and the Jazz Age to the brutal awakening of Pearl Harbor, one man ruled the fate of America's most dangerous criminals. He was Lewis E. Lawes, warden of Sing Sing prison, the Big House up the river, who believed that no man was beyond redemption. Warden Lawes couldn't banish the electric chair (though he tried) but he knew that humanitarian care and good morale provided better security than the stoutest walls. Lawes befriended the Hollywood greats, Charlie Chaplin and Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy and Harry Warner, opening Sing Sing to the movies and exposing prisoners to the glamour of the silver screen. He brought Babe Ruth to Sing Sing, fielded a winning football team called The Black Sheep that brought gridiron glory to the circuit known as the Big Pen, and ran training shops, school classes and culture programs. Truly, Warden Lawes made Sing Sing sing. But Lawes was no pushover. He brought law to Sing Sing, a tale that comes alive in the hands of prize-winning New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal. He killed on orders from the state, consigning 303 condemned men and women to the electric chair. But he crusaded fiercely against the death penalty as useless and preached that every man deserved a second chance, even if, in the end, he faced a terrible betrayal. Lawes taught the nation that a jail was a lockup but a prison was a community. With his perfect name and flawless eye for fashion, Lawes took over as the ninth warden in eight years -- at 39, the youngest man to lead the century-old institution, then overflowing with more than a thousand hardened criminals and luckless youths. Vice was rife -- bribery, alcohol, drugs and sex. The political bosses held sway, swinging deals for favored inmates. Enemies accused him of coddling prisoners but he ridiculed the charge. No one was coddled on a food budget of 18 cents a day. Lawes lived with his wife and daughters in a Victorian mansion abutting the cellblock, where he was shaved each morning by a prison barber convicted of slashing a man's throat, the household cook was a murderer, and his youngest daughter's favorite babysitter was serving twenty-five years for kidnapping. Lawes tamed the tyrannical Charles E. Chapin who had terrorized generations of reporters as the editor of Joseph Pulitzer's Evening World before murdering his wife and winding up as Lawes's favorite horticulturist, the Rose Man of Sing Sing. Lawes championed the advent of radio and used it to inspire his prisoners and educate the public on penal reform. He wrote film scripts and radio plays and dramas and best-selling books. But in the end, his finest tribute came not from the mighty but a lowly prisoner in the yard who muttered, to no one in particular, "There was a right guy."
Author: Ralph Blumenthal
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 9780312342739
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Get Book Here
Book Description
From the riotous days of Prohibition and the Jazz Age to the brutal awakening of Pearl Harbor, one man ruled the fate of America's most dangerous criminals. He was Lewis E. Lawes, warden of Sing Sing prison, the Big House up the river, who believed that no man was beyond redemption. Warden Lawes couldn't banish the electric chair (though he tried) but he knew that humanitarian care and good morale provided better security than the stoutest walls. Lawes befriended the Hollywood greats, Charlie Chaplin and Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy and Harry Warner, opening Sing Sing to the movies and exposing prisoners to the glamour of the silver screen. He brought Babe Ruth to Sing Sing, fielded a winning football team called The Black Sheep that brought gridiron glory to the circuit known as the Big Pen, and ran training shops, school classes and culture programs. Truly, Warden Lawes made Sing Sing sing. But Lawes was no pushover. He brought law to Sing Sing, a tale that comes alive in the hands of prize-winning New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal. He killed on orders from the state, consigning 303 condemned men and women to the electric chair. But he crusaded fiercely against the death penalty as useless and preached that every man deserved a second chance, even if, in the end, he faced a terrible betrayal. Lawes taught the nation that a jail was a lockup but a prison was a community. With his perfect name and flawless eye for fashion, Lawes took over as the ninth warden in eight years -- at 39, the youngest man to lead the century-old institution, then overflowing with more than a thousand hardened criminals and luckless youths. Vice was rife -- bribery, alcohol, drugs and sex. The political bosses held sway, swinging deals for favored inmates. Enemies accused him of coddling prisoners but he ridiculed the charge. No one was coddled on a food budget of 18 cents a day. Lawes lived with his wife and daughters in a Victorian mansion abutting the cellblock, where he was shaved each morning by a prison barber convicted of slashing a man's throat, the household cook was a murderer, and his youngest daughter's favorite babysitter was serving twenty-five years for kidnapping. Lawes tamed the tyrannical Charles E. Chapin who had terrorized generations of reporters as the editor of Joseph Pulitzer's Evening World before murdering his wife and winding up as Lawes's favorite horticulturist, the Rose Man of Sing Sing. Lawes championed the advent of radio and used it to inspire his prisoners and educate the public on penal reform. He wrote film scripts and radio plays and dramas and best-selling books. But in the end, his finest tribute came not from the mighty but a lowly prisoner in the yard who muttered, to no one in particular, "There was a right guy."
Author: Denis Brian
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615925449
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
Based on extensive research with original sources, Brian's narrative covers every period of the prison's checkered history, from the awful conditions of the 19th century to the relative improvements of the 20th century to today.
Author: John Cheever
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307760715
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Stunning and brutally powerful, "one of the most important novels of our time" (The New York Times) tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into childhood. In a nightmarish prison, out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction. Only Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination.
Author: Ron Arons
Publisher: Barricade Books
ISBN: 9781569801536
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Once Ron Arons was over the shock of learning that his great-grandfather had done a 'stretch' in the famed sing sing prison, he embarked on a journey to learn more about his ancestor and how he landed in jail. What he discovered was that between 1880 and 1950 there were thousands of Jews behind bars at Sing Sing, for crimes ranging from incest to arson to selling air rights over Manhattan. The Jews of Sing Sing is the first book to fully expose the scope of Jewish criminality over the past 160 years, and it features famous gangsters like Lepke Buchalter.
Author: Idanna Pucci
Publisher: Tiller Press
ISBN: 1982139315
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
This “gripping social history” (Publishers Weekly), with all the passion and pathos of a classic opera, chronicles the riveting first campaign against the death penalty waged in 1895 by American pioneer activist, Cora Slocomb, Countess of Brazzà, to save the life of a twenty-year-old illiterate Italian immigrant, Maria Barbella, who killed the man who had abused her. Previously published as The Trials of Maria Barbella. In 1895, a twenty-two-year-old Italian seamstress named Maria Barbella was accused of murdering her lover, Domenico Cataldo, after he seduced her and broke his promise to marry her. Following a sensational trial filled with inept lawyers, dishonest reporters and editors, and a crooked judge repaying political favors, the illiterate immigrant became the first woman sentenced to the newly invented electric chair at Sing Sing, where she is also the first female prisoner. Behind the scenes, a corporate war raged for the monopoly of electricity pitting two giants, Edison and Westinghouse with Nikola Tesla at his side, against each other. Enter Cora Slocomb, an American-born Italian aristocrat and activist, who launched the first campaign against the death penalty to save Maria. Rallying the New York press, Cora reached out across the social divide—from the mansions of Fifth Avenue to the tenements of Little Italy. Maria’s “crime of honor” quickly becomes a cause celebre, seizing the nation’s attention. Idanna Pucci, Cora’s great-granddaughter, masterfully recounts this astonishing story by drawing on original research and documents from the US and Italy. This dramatic page-turner, interwoven with twists and unexpected turns, grapples with the tragedy of immigration, capital punishment, ethnic prejudice, criminal justice, corporate greed, violence against women, and a woman’s right to reject the role of victim. Over a century later, this story is as urgent as ever.
Author: Ronald D. Lemmert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781626982840
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
"This book tells the story of how God's love provides a refuge in whatever hell a person may be experiencing. My prayer is that this story about the love of God for prisoners may help the readers of this book find that same oasis in their own lives."This is the story of an unusual parish - drawn from the inmates of Sing Sing Prison - told by their chaplain of sixteen years. Unsparing in his treatment of the brutalities of prison life, Fr. Lemmert chronicles the stories of the prisoners he served, revealing their humanity, and showing that there is no place so dark that God's love cannot be found.Fr. Lemmert's ministry began with the project of rebuilding the long-neglected prison chapel. By enlisting the prisoners' help, they were also gradually transformed. Refuge in Hell describes how a caring community can emerge, as the practice of faith leads to deeper lessons in forgiveness, reconciliation, and liberation.
Author: Lewis Edward Lawes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
The author, the warden of Sing Sing Prison, knows the criminal as he is and portrays him, not in a sensational or romantic way, but as a human being who has violated the law.
Author: Scott Christianson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814716164
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
An inside look into one of the most mythologized prisons in modern America--the Sing Sing death house In the annals of American criminal justice, two prisons stand out as icons of institutionalized brutality and deprivation: Alcatraz and Sing Sing. In the 70 odd years before 1963, when the death sentence was declared unconstitutional in New York, Sing Sing was the site of almost one-half of the 1,353 executions carried out in the state. More people were executed at Sing Sing than at any other American prison, yet Sing Sing's death house was, to a remarkable extent, one of the most closed, secret and mythologized places in modern America. In this remarkable book, based on recently revealed archival materials, Scott Christianson takes us on a disturbing and poignant tour of Sing Sing's legendary death house, and introduces us to those whose lives Sing Sing claimed. Within the dusty files were mug shots of each newly arrived prisoner, most still wearing the out-to-court clothes they had on earlier that day when they learned their verdict and were sentenced to death. It is these sometimes bewildered, sometimes defiant, faces that fill the pages of Condemned, along with the documents of their last months at Sing Sing. The reader follows prisoners from their introduction to the rules of Sing Sing, through their contact with guards and psychiatrists, their pleas for clemency, escape attempts, resistance, and their final letters and messages before being put to death. We meet the mother of five accused of killing her husband, the two young Chinese men accused of a murder during a robbery and the drifter who doesn't remember killing at all. While the majority of inmates are everyday people, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were also executed here, as were the major figures in the infamous Murder Inc., forerunner of the American mafia. Page upon page, Condemned leaves an indelible impression of humanity and suffering.
Author: Zara Stone
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1633886735
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359
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Book Description
Killer Looks is the definitive story about the long-forgotten practice of providing free nose jobs, face-lifts, breast implants, and other physical alterations to prisoners, the idea being that by remodeling the face you remake the man. From the 1920s up to the mid-1990s, half a million prison inmates across America, Canada, and the U.K willingly went under the knife, their tab picked up by the government. In the beginning, this was a haphazard affair -- applied inconsistently and unfairly to inmates, but entering the 1960s, a movement to scientifically quantify the long-term effect of such programs took hold. And, strange as it may sound, the criminologists were right: recidivism rates plummeted. In 1967, a three-year cosmetic surgery program set on Rikers Island saw recidivism rates drop 36% for surgically altered offenders. The program, funded by a $240,000 grant from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, was led by Dr. Michael Lewin, who ran a similar program at Sing-Sing prison in 1953. Killer Looks draws on the intersectionality of socioeconomic success, racial bias, the prison industry complex and the fallacy of attractiveness to get to the heart of how appearance and societal approval creates self-worth, and uncovers deeper truths of beauty bias, inherited racism, effective recidivism programs, and inequality. ,
Author: Number
Publisher: Hva Press
ISBN: 9781948697033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Life in Sing Sing takes you behind the iron bars of one of America's most notorious prisons. On February 11, 1897, Number 1500 went "up the river" to serve over six years in prison. In Life in Sing Sing, he takes you inside the stone walls to see first-hand what it was really like to be incarcerated there. You'll find out about the day-to-day experience of prison life, with chapters on diet, discipline, famous prisoners, executions, escapes, and much more. Number 1500 also focuses on rehabilitation, citing contemporary and potential methods for helping prisoners get back on their feet after serving time. Against the odds, the author launched a prison newspaper, Star of Hope, one of America's earliest prison newspapers. Written entirely by convicts, it ran successfully for many years and often provided material to dozens of newspapers in the outside world. Ten years after it began, The New York Times said of Star of Hope, "this production of jailbirds...is superior to half the papers in the United States...." Life in Sing Sing remains a valuable and articulate guide to prison life. It offers a rare inside look at what it was like to serve time in an American prison at the turn of the twentieth century. Includes a glossary of prisoner slang.
