Left To Die

Few things can be considered as horrific as the tragedy that happened on April 21, 1930, at an Ohio prison in Columbus, Ohio. The Ohio State Penitentiary was built in 1834, had a poor reputation from the start. In 1849, a cholera epidemic swept through the facility in 1849, killing 121 convicts. A prison superintendent wrote in 1893, that “ten thousand pages of history of the Ohio Penitentiary would [not] give one idea of the inward wretchedness of its 1,900 inmates. The unwritten history is known only by God himself.” The gravity of the situation is glaringly visible to all, however.

The prison was built to hold 1,500 people, but it was almost always overcrowded. It was also notorious for its poor conditions, but it didn’t matter, because they were prisoners, and probably considered “unimportant” to say the least. On the night of April 21, 1930, a fire broke out on a scaffolding that had been set up by construction crews were working on an expansion along one side of the building. At that time, there were 4,300 prisoners living in the jail…a shocking 2800 more that the prison had been designed or approved to house.

There were 800 prisoners in the cell block adjacent to the scaffolding, most of whom were already locked in for the night. The inmates begged to be let out of their cells as smoke filled the cell block. The guards not only refused to unlock the cells, but they continued to lock up other prisoners, according to most reports following the incident. The fire spread quickly to the roof, endangering the inmates on the prison’s upper level as well.

In desperation, two prisoners finally took the keys forcibly from a guard and began their own rescue efforts. It was too little, too late, but approximately 50 inmates made it out of their cells before the heavy smoke stopped the spontaneous evacuation. The roof then caved in on the upper cells, and about 160 prisoners burned to death. Not all of the guards were as heartless as some, and some guards did work to save the lives of their charges, but the seemingly willful indifference displayed by other guards led to a general riot. The riot became so chaotic that when the firefighters tried to get in to fight the fire, they were denied access because the angry prisoners were pelting them with rocks. By the time the fire was finally under control, 320 people were dead, some of whom burned to death when they are not unlocked from their cells, and another 130 were seriously injured. It is one of the worst prison disasters in American history.

The tragedy was condemned in the press as preventable, and rightly so. Some of the laws concerning minimum sentences were repealed. It was these laws that had, in part, caused the overcrowding of the prison. The Ohio Parole Board was established in 1931 and within the next year more than 2,300 prisoners from the Ohio Penitentiary had been released on parole. Of course, no one wants dangerous prisoners on the street, but no crime could make the criminal deserve such a harsh death.