The Ohio Penitentiary Disaster of 1930 | Episode 56

We've been a lot of places together. We've flown on rockets, we've sailed the ocean blue, We've even spent some time in Kalamazoo. But the one place we've never been before prison. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together, we're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll hear the details of the most unusually botched execution ever. You'll learn what I must feel like to share an outfit with multiple people, and we're going to teach you how not to get shanked. It's your other favorite podcasts gonna teach you that much today. This is not to show you a play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company, but as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. Grab some for sale signs for your kids. Tie everything you own to the roof of your car, and maybe pack a bottle of SSRI inhibitors because today we are visiting depression era America. Oh and maybe pack a face mask or two so you don't end up choking on the dust from the drought of the Great Plains or the ash from the economy burning down. Yes, we have picked one hell of a time to visit an entire decade of global political and economic crisis that dovetailed nicely into World War Two. So how should we spend our time in this dusty wasteland of economic ruin? Well, let's run a foul of the law and go to jail. Everyone was doing it when the economy imploded. Businesses had to close or cut back on staff, and that meant a lot of people have been told not to let the door hit them on the ass on the way out. This was the decade that popularized terms like grinding poverty and cooking tips like boiling leather to make soup. A lot of people were forced to side hustle to make ends meat and because of that, activities like bootlegging and loan sharking and even murder started to skyrocket. So how did things get this ugly? While we did that episode on the Boston malassacre of nineteen nineteen all about those people dying terribly as a result of the Prohibition laws that basically handed the keys to that whole part of the economy to organize crime for twenty four years. Pair that with the drought stricken planes and actual human exodus and the Great Depression, and you have got one hell of a starter pistol for crime, a whole ecosystem of crime, from the lowliest bathtub gin enthusiasts to the most cartoonishly malicious mobster. The nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties were a heyday for bank robberies and mob executions and anarchists, bombings and kidnappings. It was a whole thing. And by the time they finally repealed prohibition laws, the damage was already done, and year over year, prisons across the country bulged at the seams. And where will we be spending our time in this alcohol soaked criminal apocalypse. I'll give you a hint. It's round on the outsides and high in the middle. That's right. Ohio, the Buckeye State, the birthplace of aviation and the electric light bulb chewing gum. You ever find yourself in Ohio. Get ready for a good time. Ohio's got your pro sports teams, zoos of food and drink, museums, universities, amusement parks, presidential birthplaces. I mean, whatever you need, you're gonna find it. One of my favorite things about different American states is how they like to differentiate themselves through food, and in this case, chili. You got your Texas Chili concarnate, you got your Who's your chili, You got your Chili Verde, and your white chili and your regional veggie chilis. But if you've never heard of Cincinnati chili before, pictured chili but with cinnamon, allspice, Worcester sauce, cocoa. Yeah, and it's all served on spaghetti. You can't make this stuff up. And much like the local chili, today's story will be a little hot, a little spicy, and maybe a little hard to swallow, just like life in prison the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus. To be exact, and let me manage your expectations by pulling off this band aid quickly to give you a sense of how cruel and unforgiving life in the pen around this time could be we turn to the words of the prison superintendent, who said, if you read through ten thousand pages of Ohio State Penitentiary history, you still wouldn't have a single clue how inwardly wretched it really was. He said, the true suffering that went on there was known only to God and those who endured it. The Ohio State Penitentiary was actually Ohio's third state prison. The first was an old fashioned, two story log stockade, you know, like an old timey fort, surrounded by an upright log fence with pointed tips. Was built back in eighteen o four, so it wasn't great. Just picture a cell, not heated and not much larger than a booth at Applebee's, with a straw mat for accommodations. You've got lice and rats you can hang out with, and there's always cholera or dysentery or diarrhea to give you something to do. Oh and there's no laundry services available, so careful with that. The prison did come with whipping posts. It came with as many as it did sells a literal one to one ratio. Imagine pulling up to a prison that had hundreds of electric chairs lined up outside. Wolf I mean sweatboxes, ball and chain, dunking tubs, and stretching rings for one thing, but one on earth could a person do to deserve being tied and whipped until their skin looked like a tasseled jacket made of flesh. You two can read all about it in the English Whipping Act of fifteen thirty lost your means of employment and can't maintain your home, accused of owning an evil looking goat, And just to add insult and further injury to injury, they'd smushed hot ash and coal into the wound to create a permanent momentum of the occasion. Our version of the Ohio Penitentiary opened in late October of eighteen thirty four, and there were stories about prisoners being led to the new building from other prisons who were dumb struck by what had looked like absolutely futuristic thirty foot stone walls. Hundreds of thousands of men and women would be sent to this prison over the next one hundred and fifty years. Yeah, that's right. In eighteen thirty seven, a women's wing was opened, So go, ladies. The prison had been designed and built to house fifteen hundred people, but like most prisons, they take so long to actually build that by the time they're moving ready, they're already too small and over capacity. By nineteen thirty, the Ohio State Penitentiary held more than forty three hundred prisoners. That's two hundred and eighty six percent over capacity. Imagine bunking Haad defeat with two other dudes. You can understand how that kind of overcrowding would lead to tensions between the inmates. You know, if you get a knee in the back here, a fart in the face there, and all that tension it led to violence. Imagine getting shanked by three guys all squeezed into a single prisoners uniform. So yes, it was uncomfortable, but it was also a little corrupt too. A newspaper reporter had learned that for a bribe, you could have someone blindfolded and tortured. For a little more paola, you could even get yourself a roomy or cell. Guards were more than happy to use their batons to practice their back end against your skull. Because if there's one thing that's true was that confinement was a contact sport, which again only made things worse. And the only thing worse than listening to thousands of angry men was smelling them. Imagine how much better you'd smell if you hadn't been breaking rocks on a chain gang, or sewing wallets or purses in an unconditioned sweatshop all day. Deodorant was a thing in nineteen thirty, but if you're not getting vitamins or a bed, you are not getting any deodorant. And as a result, hygiene and sanitation were less than ideal, and this of course led to the spread of disease, which only made everything that much worse. The first prisoner execution held that the Otio State Penitentiary was a bit of a ship show. A convict was hung for murder in a ravine by Mound and Second Streets if you know the area. The year was eighteen forty four, and the day was remembered for all the quote noise and confusion and drunkenness and disorder. Let's see one bystander was kicked to death by a horse. Another man was choked to death, and after the actual execution, two sets of doctors setting quotes got into a pistol fight while both parties attempted to take possession of the body. A lot went down that day, but in the end one of the deceased feet had been removed, pickled, and put on display in a lawyer's office. And on that note, as a rule of thumb, the further back in time that we go, the bigger the quotes around the word doctor get. By eighteen eighty five, the Ohio State Penitentiary became the second place in America to get the electric chair. There were arguments made about how it was more humane for prisoner executions, but they were made by the same people who affectually named it old sparky up till then it was all hangings. And in all that time a general lack of maintenance around the place had led to rotting roofs and crumbling walls, which only added to the ambiance. Fast forward another five decades, and we're here at a pretty good time because construction crews were actually working on an expansion to relieve some of the overcrowding. Scaffolding had been set up along one side of the building by the prison's western edge, along the eye and the jay wings. The wings were letters, while the prisoners were numbers. Our story takes place April twenty first, nineteen thirty It was late afternoon and the inmates of the Ohio State Penitentiary had just finished dinner Easter dinner at that They had corn bread and bacon and beans that was served on rust eaten tin plates, and they were eaten with not quite cutlery. Imagine a kind of spork that was whittled down from a broom handle. And I'm not making that up. With dinner finished, there would be no Easter egg hunt, no giggly little chases for chocolates hidden around the prison. There's pretty much back to your cell head count, maybe a wooden club in the ribs to dream about. Then lights out, and as you can imagine, it takes a lot to lock down that many prisoners. Each of the wings held around eight hundred men, grouped into spaces half the size of a dodged caravan. Around five thirty that night, one of the prisoners had been idly sharpening his ship while staring down his cellmates when he noticed smouth near the ceiling of their cell. Now, what's the first thing I tell you to do when you see smoke? You let someone know. That's right, And the prisoner cried out for help, but the guards weren't having it, imagine it. The prisoner was incredulous, but not just him. A slow burning fire had broken out on the western edge of the six story West block, and the cries of trapped inmates quickly built into a chorus of streams. Men pleaded with the guards to come unlock the doors as the smoke spread, but the guards were all, nice, try now pipe down in the air, or I'll come in and give you sum to cry fire about. In fact, they were still actively locking up inmates from dinner, and the prisoners weren't lying. This was a real fire. As flames spread upward, the roof ignited, and prisoners on the floor above had to start doing the hot foot dance. The pleating morphed into screaming as the heat and smoke and sound of wood crackling grew, and within minutes the wooden roof was completely engulfed. The blaze spread to the roofs of the prisons G and H blocks, and the flames rose high into the sky. Inmates screamed and raged against their bars as fire began to spread from cell to sell. The wood from the new construction created an ungreathably noxious, dark smoke, and in spite of all that with the fire absolutely confirmed, these same guards who wouldn't help them before wouldn't help them now because they were afraid of what the men might do to them for not helping them before. It was confusing, but direction we looked to upper management. The warden was a man named Preston Thomas, and if I were to try to distill his entire career into a single sentence, I'd say that his life goal was to prevent prison escapes. As soon as Thomas learned of the fire, he immediately knew in his heart this was nothing more than part of some mastermind escape plan, and under his watch no less. In his own not completely clear or obvious way, Thomas implied that inmates would assemble in the prison yard. He was much clearer when he was ordering guards positioned along the walls and guard towers to be armed with machine guns. He even called in five hundred soldiers from nearby Fort Hayes and then National Guard. The warden was so worried he even sent his own daughter to distribute machine guns and ammunition. The prison was secured, surrounded by men fixing bayonets to their weapons, standing at the ready to shoot or stab anyone exiting the burning building, and with all that in place, Warden Preston Thomas then contact did the fire department. Troops were forced to listen to the anguished screams of prisoners echoing through the prison yard while the fire roared and grew around them, and when the firefighters finally arrived on the scene, guards who were too confused to connect two and two together strictly denied them entry without the wardens of Krugal. Yeah, but let's rewind a bit and head back inside the building. William Baldwin and Thomas Little were waiting in the guardroom before their shift when a prisoner ran into the room and screamed fire, so they reflexively cabbed him unconscious for startling them. Before running out to confirm his story, they found themselves blocked from the upper tiers of the prison by the guard on duty was a man named Watson, and I didn't get his first name, so we're gonna call him Dick. The upper cell block of I and K were clearly filling with smoke and the warm glow of flame, and Little and Baldwin pleaded for sanity, but Dick insisted he needed orders before he unlocked Jack a bit of a skipping record among the staff. Little screamed, jet this goddamn door open, or those fellows are going to die. The mixture of adrenaline, fear, and anxiety and confusion was overwhelming. One surviving inmate described the helplessness they felt as the fire grew and the heat intensified. All of those men were hollering and screaming for help. Some were praying, some were cussing, and others were raving. He said, I hope I never go to Hell if it's this hot. Imagine grabbing your cell bars and leaving your entire handprint behind. When Dick finally started to relent, almost ten minutes had passed, Little snatched the keys from him and opened the gate. Dozens of inmates had already died in the rapidly spreading flames. Inmates were desperately splashing each other with toilet water and hung wet blankets in front of their cells, trying to create some protection from the flames, while Little and Baldwin furiously unlocked every cell they could. When the keys were cells couldn't be found quick enough, they'd skipped the question and just smash their way in with axes and sledge hammers, but there was nothing they could do for the fourth tier of the wing. It was already overcome with flames and smoke and had grown silent except for the roar and crackle of the fire. Not thinking they would be rescued in enough time, some inmates pleaded with the guards to just run by and shoot them. Several others reportedly gave themselves a bit of a permanent shaving accident if you follow my meaning, rather than die by flame, and I'm guessing about half of you were thinking at some point, I'm gonna tell you how the smoking, hairless inmates killed Little and Baldwin and tried to escape wearing their faces silence of the lamp style, but that never happened. They opened cells and carried away the injured while trying to fight or at least slow down the fire. Aggravatingly, the closest hydrants connected to the city water supply were all outside the walls. There was one hundred and thirty four foot high water tower that contained one hundred and twenty five thousand gallons of water inside the prison walls, but it didn't come with hydrants for firefighting, and there were actual fire extinguishers inside the prison, but they were few and far between, and tiny and not well marked, probably on fire by now. Inmates took key rings and disappeared down smoke filled halls to continue the work at their own peril, and not all were seen again. Chester Himes was a famous writer who wrote an incredible account of what he witnessed, which I'm sharing in full here because this man had a gift of understanding for the psychology of discarded men. He said, the sight of convicts who were in for murder and rape and arson, who had shot down policemen in dark alleys, which snatched pocketbooks and brand who had stolen automobiles and forged checks, who had mutilated women and carved their torsos into separate arms and legs and heads and packed them into trunks. Now these men, working overtime at their jobs of being heroes, moving through the smoke with reckless haste to save some other bastard's worthless life, all working like mad at being heroes, some laughing, some solemn, some hysterical. They were drunk from this momentary freedom, drunk from being brave for once a cowardly life. Amazing little and Baldwin fought and struggled until they were finally overcome by the heat and smoke, and were themselves rescued by convicts. All told, about a thousand men finally made their way out of the building and were moved to the relative safety of the prison yard. I say relative because they found themselves in the immediate crosshair of hundreds of rifles and machine guns, without a helping hand in sight. While men laid smoldering in the yard, many saw nothing but contempt and empty hatreds staring at them from the walls. It comes a point where they just couldn't take any more of it. Now. What began as a thrown fist quickly became flying rocks and escalated into a bit of a riot in the prison yard. A dusty cloud of fists and flying teeth concealed the anger unleashed inside. They even fought against the firefighters and pelting them with rocks and cutting their hose lines. Their motivations were a little all over the place. But some of these men were there for stealing a loaf of bread to feed their families. Some of them were there for robbing a bank with a stick of dynamite. But no matter what, any of them did to get locked up. Not one of them had done anything half as evil as burning hundreds of people to death. About thirty minutes had passed since the fire began, and there were still one hundred and sixty inmates in immediate danger. They remained trapped inside their cells and surrounded by fire. That was until the support beams could no longer support them. It's waiting and it collapsed, ending their time at the Ohio State Penitentiary. So you traded out your work suit for an orange jumpsuit, and you're about to hang full time with people deemed too degenerate to mingle with polite society. Would you know what to do once those cell door slam shot behind you? It's time to begin planning your survival. Prison is dangerous, but if you live by all the unwritten rules and follow these simple precautions, we'll get you to your first parole hearing. As rules go, for the most part, just use common sense. Never enter another inmate, sell or touch anything unless you are invited to, unless you're looking forward to a trip to the infirmary or the hole, or a toe tag fitting cut in line at the cafeteria, or you get into a staring contest with another prisoner, and you might become a knife holder. By the way, staring in prison usually mean sexual interest or hostility, So just keep your eyes down, especially on the toilet. Remember it's right beside your celli's head, so try to use it only when your celli's out. But if you have to, any kind of eye contact is not going to work out so well for you. Your job is to be nice to all people and be respectful even if they're being disrespectful until it's time not to be nice. Unlike most safety segments, I can't tell you to know your exits, but I will tell you to always be aware of your surroundings. You got to treat everyone like the run predictable, and remember these inmates have twenty four seven to do so just assume that a threat is imminent all the time. Remember if someone disrespects you, it's not like you're at the grocery store. You can't ignore it. You have to fight about it, or the entire prison body is going to line up single file to abuse you. There's a common myth that you need to join a gang immediately as soon as you get inside the walls for protection. But The reality is members of gangs in prisons suffer the most stabbings and slashings, and they find themselves in the most fights, So really you're just trading one trouble for another. Gangs and gambling and drugs, those are the three things you've got to stay away from. Older convicts will tell you that getting into a gambling debt or having to take credit from a drug dealer is always going to end badly. You get in a situation like that, and whenever you go in the yard, there's always a chance you're not going to come back. You need to defend yourself. And like I say, anything can be a weapon. If you're in a prison yard that hasn't been asphalted, over rocks are always available. I was reading about one man who was assaulted and he freaked out, took off his glasses, broke them apart, and then use the arms to stab his attacker to death. It's a hell of a thing. And if you have the option, you might want to take out a few dozen magazine subscriptions, and not just for the content. You can layer up paper around your torso nice and tight. It's kind of like prison armor, and the thicker you make it, the better your chances to take a knife made of brass or plastic, or wood or aluminum. These are experiences better left unknown. And not all the fighting that you might do will be physical. In fact, most likely you're going to be fighting your own mind just to keep saying so, I'll tell you what to do. You want to maintain contact with the family and friends, just to keep some sense of normalcy. You want to keep a daily mental routine. Wake up, eat breakfast, go to work, have lunch, come home, eat dinner, watch TV, and go to sleep. Even if it's all just in your mind. One thing you actually can do it. One thing you can actually do outside of your mind is exercise. Physically fit people are way less likely to be targeted as victims, and it also passes and it releases hormones that help fight stress and depression. And participating in activities that gets you out of your cell, even for an hour, does seem to take a little bit of the fear out of being there. And if you are experiencing depression, try to use the one day at a time approach. Each day you wake up, just assess your mood and your energy right away and try to set a goal that feels achievable for the day, and at the end of the day you just reflect on whether or not you actually did it, and then you validate yourself for your accomplishment. And off topic, if you're just feeling this way right now, I don't make any secret of my own mental challenges, So if you just want to talk about it, please, I'm right here. Which is a funny thing to say, because my next point is, don't trust anybody anybody inmates, guards, prison staff. Nothing in prison is free. So ask yourself in every interaction you have, what is in this for them? And make a count. Anyone sees you talk to you a guard, and now you risk someone thinking you're a snitch. Those guards, they're not there for you. If a guard asks you anything, you want to be nothing but a kindly but visually impaired convict who didn't see nothing. Don't ask a guard to help solve your problems. They're not your dad and they really don't care. And to remind you about stitches and snitches. When you get a cut from the ear all the way to the mouth, those are called telephone slashes, and cut straight down the face are called curtains. But most people just call them snitch marks, and they only get worse and more visually disturbing from there. The best that I can offer is really simple. For the most part, you just want to be a well behaved, robotic cucumber and keep everything to yourself. Just be polite, mind your own business, and you should be okay, and maybe tell your sally about the show. I've never actually received a fan mail from prison before, so what happened? Three separate invest negations were launched by the State Fire Marshal, the Attorney General's Office, and the Ohio Governor. Prisoners testified that they smelled smoke as early as five PM, and it was seen blowing in the windows around five twenty. Not sure exactly what time the guards started arguing about it, but the investigation clarified that the guard's training was so one sided the very notion of prisoner's safety threw them into this kind of decision paralysis that led to hundreds of preventable debts. They were so afraid for their jobs that the very thought of freeing inmates felt like they were giving them a knife and bus fare and just putting them directly onto the streets. Warton Thomas claimed that he knew about the fire by around five thirty five, and the Columbus Fire Department found out about five forty. And I'm not sure who called it in, but they did not hear about it from the prison. When they found out, the warden was still arranging his Smith and Wesson welcome party in the yard. When the board finished their inquiry, they attributed fault to a combination of overcrowding and adequate training, non existent fire fighting measures, and the highly flammable nature of the building itself. But more specifically, they strongly believed that the fire had been started by wiring on defective worklights. Back then, wiring was all knob and two single insulated copper, no grounding. And I know those words don't make sense in that order to all of us electrician school dropouts, But the long and the short of it is it was known for heating up and occasionally bursting into flames. It's the reason we don't use it anymore. They firmly believed faulty wiring ignited a pile of oily rags that had been left on the scaffolding. All that construction outside provided lumber, sawdust, tar, kerosene, all the oddball name brand accelerants that fire just loves, which created again the thick, black, toxic smoke. And even though the fire had acted as a kind of a magic eraser for actual evidence, they pushed all in on faulty wiring, although again any real proof had gone poof. All the investigations agreed on the origin point, but they leaved in alternative sources of the actual ignition. Some believe that hydrocarbons in the oil rags spontaneously combusted. When I was a kid, spontaneous combustion only happened to elderly British people on mystery shows. They'd always lead behind a pair of shiny, stunted calves sticking out of their slippers, and everything else was reduced to ash. But if you'll remember from our recent Guadalajara sewer explosion episode, hydrocarbons are found in oil based products and they're known for their combustibility. The idea here was that hydrocarbons had begun to slowly oxidize, which releases heat, which was then trapped under all those rags until it grew to reach an ignition point and burst into flames. Now, this is a crime and Prison episode So if you think we're getting off this topic without the idea of arson coming up, think again. The fire marshal and the warden believed firmly that the fire had been started by inmates, after all inmates had been working in the area. The marshall believed that inmates had used candles to create a slow, simmering fire that was time to grow into a blaze while the inmates were off eating, and that would have created the perfect distraction for a mass escape. I mean, this guy was a real Colombo. But for this to be true two things. Candles are a proven technology. But if you think calculating time in dodge caravans is difficult, try using a candle as a clock. And if that had been a plan, the fire started much later than expected. The prisoners were already being reselled before the smoke was even noticed. And second, they obviously didn't count on the warden's violent phobia of prison escapes. Officers and soldiers were under strict no questions asked orders to gun down anything that even looked like it smelled like it was thinking of escaping. Fast forward a few months and a prisoner named James Raymond approached the cards and claimed that he provided candles from the prisons church to two other men, Clinton Great and Hugh Gibson to set a fire to create a distraction and escape. It was like a dream come true. But confused by his new rat powers, he then went on to say that the candles used to start the fire actually came from a different prisoner, another prisoner, Jimmy Maloney. Jimmy Maloney was all whoa wo wo wo. Yes, he had given candles to Great and Gibson, but he didn't know nothing about no Arson plan Ah. With so many rats pointing so many fingers at each other, the warden and the fire marshal must have high fived, and so you know. The first actual high five was invented publicly on October the second, nineteen seventy seven, when Wiley Brown and Derek Smith of the La Dodgers freaked out after a play and accidentally slapped hands over their heads. Raymond asked to be put into solitary confinement for his protection, which was probably smart, as he was later found hanging in his cell. The other men vehemently denied having anything to do with any of this, but they were sentenced to life over it and one of them was also found hanging in his cell. Prisoners convesting to crimes and then killing themselves as a very old and not always convincing story, and many believed that the prison officials had blamed the disaster on these prisoners just to cover up their own incompetence. But as strange explanations go, there were others who believed in a more supernatural explanation. The West cell block had been built directly on top of the old prison cemetery, right on top, and the bodies had never been removed, And how did those bodies get to be in the ground in the first place. Well, a hundred years before there was another fire that ravaged the exact same site. They built a prison on top of an existing cemetery without removing the bodies, So this was clearly a poltergeist revenge scenarios. We'll never know for sure. As they say, dead men tell no tales, But regardless of what the actual cause was, the result was furious and chaotic. They didn't have procedures for something like this. Warden Thomas told investigators that he just assumed common sense was sufficient for meeting emergency evacuation standards. Yeah, okay, but let me ask you this. Have you ever worked for a really jarring and authoritative boss. They get you so rattled you don't know up from down. So when the time came to face their worst day at work, many of the guards just malfunctioned. You know how scared of your boss you have to be to think that listening to people roast to death is preferable to getting chewed out. These men were killed by the inactions of apathetic or sadistic or cowardly guards. Men in solitary confinement found themselves in cages that functioned like ovens, and they were literally cooked to death. Others had been so desperate for any kind of relief they had been found completely burned to death with their faces in the toilets. But others had been saved in acts of unparalleled selflessness and bravery. But even those did not make it out of the building alive. Wharton Thomas behaved as if safety were some kind of liberal homosexual agenda, and don't quote me on that, please. It was very clear he was no fan of wasting time on safety, and he made sure his staff knew. He admitted to investigators that he'd been way more concerned with escapes than the fire itself, and guards sestified that he'd given vague commands about the fire before excusing himself and evacuating from the building. The entire incident, from ignition to the roof collapsing, took all of thirty minutes, ten of which were wasted with guards arguing amongst themselves about what they were supposed to do. I'm not saying prison necessarily should have prison or fire drills, but if there had been even a little staff training on what they should do, we would probably be talking about a Kansas parking lot, tornado or something completely different right now. No officials or guards were held accountable or charged for their role in the disaster, and in all, three hundred and twenty two men died that day. An additional two hundred and fifty more were hospitalized, with a full one hundred and fifty of them hospitalized with only a slight chance of recovery for days after. The bodies of dead men lay in the yard, and photographs of debris from the fire showed evidence of incredible heat, which turned the levels of catwalks and bars into a tangled of blackened and twisted metal and starting the year prior, prisoners had been rioting across a nation for better conditions, but after the Ohio State disaster, it kicked into a higher gear. Riots led to at least a million dollars and fired images and the destruction of nine buildings and damaged to six others. The inmates not only started their own fires, but they took nine guards hostage. Two. Fast forward to the resolution of that and after some additional scrutiny from the press and the public, and slowly things improved. Minimum sentencing laws were changed and a parole board was created to cut the number of nine violot inmates being warehoused for pettied crimes. In the year after the fire, the parole board released two thousand, three hundred and forty six prisoners from the Ohio eight pen This eased the overcrowding nicely, but by nineteen fifty five, the gen pop headcount had ballooned all the way back up to a record of five thousand, two hundred and thirty five. That's three hundred and forty nine percent over capacity. Even today, this is not all that uncommon. Today, the most overcrowded prisons in the world are in Haiti at four hundred and fifty five percent over capacity, but as far as having situational spikes. After the Rwandan genocide, the Guitara Prison in Rwanda packed people in at seventeen hundred and fifty percent over capacity, and today Nicaragua is currently experimenting with this kind of pressed meat prison approach after recent gang crackdowns. The Ohio State Penitentiary remained open until nineteen eighty four, where it finally sat silent and empty for the first time in over one hundred and fifty years. And the first thing people thought was, Hey, what a fun idea for a future tourist attraction. And on that a former guard said, I wouldn't care if they dynamited the place. It is the entrance to hell itself. In nineteen ninety nine, the building was demolished, and in the fall of two thousand an arena was built on the spot, which became the home of the brand's baking New Columbus Blue Jackets NHL team, which to my knowledge makes them the only hockey team situated on the site of multiple disasters and and abandoned graveyard with heavy poultergeist potential. Go Blue Jackets. Today, Candles founded a prison would be contraband, and the prison itself would be fireproof, and there would be smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, sprinklers, and all kinds of training and safety protocols. Oh and there would be remote control doors too, so amates could be released automatically in emergency. Automated sprinkler systems were a thing back in nineteen thirty, and the Columbus Fire Department was top notch even back then, but the Ohio State Prison staff, the building, and its fire safety codes were trash. The whole building had been basically made a fifty percent stone, fifty percent highly combustible materials. Today, the Ohio State Penitentiary fire is ranked as the thirteenth deadliest fire in US history, in world history, it says, behind a fire in twenty twelve at the Kama Yogua National Penitentiary in Honduras which killed three hundred and sixty one, which is really only thirty more people. The Ohio State Penitentiary fire of nineteen thirty ranks as the third deadliest fire inside of a building, Which really feels like the most astounding thing I've ever said out loud. It is right up there with the Iroquois Theater fire of nineteen o three, but that is a different story. This disaster remains one of the deadliest fires overall, and the deadliest prison fire in all of American history. The purpose of finement, it's supposed to beat to punish an offender while getting them out of the public's face and time permitting offers some kind of rehabilitation. But let's be honest, the reality is more of a mixed bag. Do I want my neighbor arrested and incarcerated? Absolutely? But for how long? How long would he have to stay warehouse to make me feel happy? Not long enough? And what am I getting back out of this deal? A neighbor with prison skills? No thanks. Cities like prisoners like my neighbor, eventually need to be forgiven from their past misdeeds if we're ever going to grow. But I would recommend never forgetting or the next time they do something on our watch, it's on us. And although we really didn't get into the fire from one hundred years before our fire, that blaze took place in eighteen thirty and destroyed most of the prisoned workshops. And if you believe that buildings are imprinted with the second residue from all the murdered and tortured souls that used to dwell on them. Then prisons must be the most haunted places of world, and the Ohio Penitentiary must have been one of the most haunted prisons in America. And I know it meet the point about hospitals being more like the rave scene from the Matrix for Dead People before, but I think that was because we've never been to prison before. You can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire an email to Doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. Older episodes confound where have you found this one? While you're there, please leave a review and tell your friends. And if you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo, or you can just buy me a coffee at buy Me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday And I really want to thank all those people who've done that. You have no idea how happy it makes me. And yet here I go in saying that if you could spare the money and had to choose, I ask you to consider making a donation to Global medic Little Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers off bring assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people cross seventy seven different countries. People are more and Domate Pipable medic dot CA. On the next episode, we're going back to Manhattan. I've always found it to be so equally awful and magical. But if you've ever had a bad flight into New York City, wait till you hear our next episode. It's the Empire State Building crash of nineteen forty five. We'll talk soon. Save to goggles off and thanks for listening.