Life is filled with the good and the bad. The easy and the hard. The wonderful and the hideous.
The bad parts sometimes occur in absolute tragedies.
Some tragedies arrive with a huge announcement. And others unfold behind locked doors.
One of those disasters occurred in 1930. There was a horrific fire at the Ohio State Penitentiary. It announced itself in warnings before it finally broke loose. It was a disaster years in the making.
The exact date of the fire was April 21, 1930. By the time the flames were extinguished, an unbelievable 320 inmates were dead. That made it one of the worst prison catastrophes in American history.
Leave it to Ohio. The Ohio State Penitentiary had been a troubled institution almost from the moment it opened in Columbus in 1834. The big problems initially were overcrowding and disease.
A cholera outbreak in 1849 killed 121 inmates. Decades later, in 1893, a superintendent wrote that even “ten thousand pages” couldn’t capture the misery of its population. The treachury continued. The prison was built for 1,500 people. But by 1930, it held nearly 4,300. The conditions were terrible to say the least.
On the night of the fire, construction crews had left scaffolding along one side of the building. A fire sparked on that scaffolding and quickly crawled upward. Those flames fed on dry wood and a century’s worth of neglect.
Inside the adjacent cell block, 800 inmates were already locked in for the night. Smoke seeped into the rows of cells. The screaming began. Prisoners begged to be released. But most accounts say the guards refused. And some of those guards even continued locking other prisoners up as the smoke thickened.
Amid the chaos, two inmates wrested the keys from a guard. Those two prisoners began frantically freeing as many people as they could. About 50 inmates escaped before the smoke became too heavy to continue. Moments later, the roof collapsed onto the upper tier of cells. About 160 inmates died in the flames.
But here is one detail to note. Not all guards stood by. Some of them risked their lives to help. But the indifference of other guards fueled a riot. Firefighters couldn’t reach the blaze at first. Angry prisoners hurled rocks, grief and fury mixing in the air with the smoke.
When it was all said and done, the toll was staggering. There were 320 dead and 130 injured. And the nation was horrified.
Public outrage pushed Ohio to rethink its prison system. Minimum-sentence laws were repealed. And then, in 1931, the Ohio Parole Board was created. Within a year, more than 2,300 inmates were released. It was a sweeping attempt to make sure such a tragedy would never happen again.
Our prison systems remain flawed in many ways. But hopefully, we will never see such a tragedy as this happen again.
And yet, we are seeing terrible things happen now, in America. Every day.
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“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
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“The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.” — Elie Wiesel
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“Civilization is judged by how it treats its prisoners.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
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“History is not just what happened. It is what happened to people.” — Howard Zinn
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