Miracle at Sing Sing: How One Man Transformed the Lives of America's Most Dangerous Prisoners

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."

About the Author :
Ralph Blumenthal is a longtime investigative reporter at the "New York Times," who now heads the Houston Bureau covering Texas and the southwest. He is also the author of "Stork Club." He received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on this book. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Review :
"Miracle at Sing Sing is history as storytelling...[and] illuminates for current readers what Lawes sought to teach his contemporaries: how to run a prison while holding fast to one's humanity." - New York Times ..".informative and entertaining..." - New York Times Book Review "If Lewis Edward Lawes' long career as Warden of Sing Sing were written as a novel, it would surely be criticized as implausible. Over two decades he supervised three hundred executions because it was his duty. But for all that time he argued passionately for the repeal of the death penalty because it was brutal, senseless and unproductive. His administration was called humane, honest, firm and fair, and when he retired he did so accompanied by the cheers of more than two thousand prisoners who thought of him as a 'right guy.' A story almost too good to be true, but too true to miss." - Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York "The astonishing and compassionate life of Lewis Lawes has remained one of the buried gems of American prison history until now. Ralph Blumenthal's biography of this patron saint of the dispossessed and discarded restores Lawes to a place of worthy prominence in American history." - James Morris, author of "The Rose Man of Sing Sing"