A Deadly Battle at the Oklahoma Penitentiary.—On January 19, seven men were shot to death and three persons wounded when three convicts attempted to escape from the State penitentiary of Oklahoma and were slain by guards.
No general attempt was made by other convicts to join in the delivery, but the three mutineers were encouraged by their less desperate followers who cheered the onslaught of the armed prisoners.
Before the escaping convicts fell, however, they had killed four men, a guard, a deputy warden, the superintendent of the Bertillon department and a visitor, who was formerly a member of Congress and a judge. No more desperate break for liberty has ever occurred in an American place of confinement, says the Washington (D. C.) Star. How the men obtained the weapons with which they were enabled to fight their way to the doors and to brief liberty is a mystery, but obviously they were smuggled to them by friends. All three of these were “bad” men, but only one of them was serving a long sentence. One had two years to serve in all and one five years, the third man having been sentenced for forty years for manslaughter, probably covering the remainder of his life. Doubtless they thought that they could get away, although, of course, the chances were heavily against them. Even if they had distanced their immediate pursuers they would have been trailed without mercy after having taken life so recklessly in their escape.
Such tragedies give pause to the tendency toward a more lenient system of punishments, and may discourage those who believe in paroles and probations rather than imprisonments. “Men of the type who broke from the McAlester prison seem to be absolutely incorrigible. One of them, he who was serving the shortest term, had a long record of law violations and punishments. Under an habitual criminal’s act he would probably have been sentenced for his last offense to a very long term, but, of course, this would not have altered his disposition. There would still have remained the desire to escape and the willingness to kill if necessary to accomplish that end. The shocking slaughter points plainly to the necessity of a more rigid watchfulness over the desperadoes confined in prison to prevent them from obtaining weapons and using them.”
The St. Louis Republic observes that, “to make the better ways of prison discipline effective a man is needed in whom are combined enthusiasm, sympathy, firmness and knowledge. It happens that the Oklahoma penitentiary at this time is the storm center of a political quarrel, and the real lesson of the riot and murders is not one of reaction, but merely that partisan politics does not lead to the discovery of such men.”
The Responsibility of the Church.—Dr. Frank Moore, superintendent of the New Jersey State Reformatory at Rahway, and a clergyman himself, in an address before the Y. M. C. A. at Atlantic City declared “crime is on the increase in America, and the churches and the ministers are in a large measure to blame because they do not get the boys and the men who are unfortunate before they are gotten by the police and hauled into court and consigned to the reformatories or prisons.” Dr. Moore said that in 1910 statistics showed there were 125 arrests in the United States for every 100,000 of population. In New Jersey alone there were 53,000 arrests for crime, exclusive of 9,700 arrests for drunkenness. In 12 counties in New Jersey there were 44 murders.
Socrates on Missouri Prisons.—Here is something in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which is trying to reform prison conditions in Missouri: