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From the Baltimore Sun
'The Cut' took on state's most dangerous criminals
Overcrowded facility was site of countless riots, prison breaks
By Justin Fenton
Sun reporter
March 18, 2007
Whether they were stabbing each other with blades fashioned out of
turkey bones or scaling barbed-wire fences in daring escapes, plenty of
prisoners at the House of Correction in Jessup were scraped and
scratched over the years.
And while inmates credit those episodes as the inspiration for the
nearly 130-year-old facility's long-standing nickname - "The Cut" - its
origins are far more mundane. The House of Correction, which closes
tomorrow, is positioned on an embankment overlooking railroad tracks
that "cut" through the rolling hills of Jessup.
Perhaps the mythical explanation just seemed more befitting the teeming
brick fortress.
After opening in January 1879 as a medium-security facility housing
convicts serving less than three-year sentences, the House of
Correction soon took on some of the state's most dangerous criminals as
its population swelled to more than 1,500.
It has been site of countless inmate riots and prison breaks.
Correctional officers have been attacked and killed. For decades,
legislative panels consistently reported that the facility was
hopelessly outdated and needed significant renovations or total
replacement.
As punishment, hundreds of inmates were once forced to double up in
cells until they stopped a work strike - but years later, state
officials would report that the facility was packed three times its
capacity because of overcrowding.
In the early 1920s, the warden's daughter, who had established a group
called the "Myrtle Club" to foster honor and structure among inmates,
begged her father to let her ease a rioting mob. He refused to let her
enter.
The most dreaded area of the prison was a series of seven basement
cells known as "the Hole," a last resort for unruly inmates that lacked
sinks, toilets or beds. The only feature was a hole in the floor for
defecation.
"Every man by the laws of nature is entitled to at least some privacy,
some solitude, some territorial area to call his own," one inmate wrote
in a letter to the editor in 1979. "We have already been stripped of
our dignity. Now we are to be denied the most basic of human rights?"
Mostly the House of Correction was notorious for its cramped conditions
and outrageous behavior by inmates.
"The House is an old, poorly designed prison that doesn't lend itself
to good safety and security," said Frank C. Sizer Jr., former
commissioner of the Maryland Division of Correction. "There are too
many nooks and crannies" that enable prisoners to hide their activities.
The largest riot occurred in 1945, when 900 inmates rioted for 3 1/2
hours in protest over meatless meals - stampeding through a mess hall
and lobbing hot water and broken glass at correctional officers.
There were two riots over the course of three days in 1964. Eight
hundred prisoners lit scraps of paper and clothing, and tossed them
from their cells. Three days later 500 prisoners staged a sit-down over
allegations of guard abuse.
The second-largest prison break in Maryland occurred at the House of
Correction in 1979, when 30 inmates fled the prison after using a
carbon steel saw blade to cut through a window bar and security screen
in a television room. They then cut and climbed over three large fences
topped with barbed wire that surround the prison. The last of them
would not be captured until six years later.
During the early 1980s, there were a series of escapes at the
institution. In 1981, an inmate escaped in a supply truck by hiding in
a carton of toilet paper. That same year, another prisoner fled a House
of Correction work detail during a storm - only to be captured while
using a heat lamp to dry off in an empty house next to the home of the
superintendent of the nearby Patuxent Institution. A maintenance worker
borrowed a gun from the superintendent's wife and apprehended the
inmate.
In 1983, a prisoner escaped by forging a court document ordering his
release.
Sometimes the results of the prison's porous security turned tragic.
Three inmates who escaped in June 1988 were captured by police in
Tallahassee, Fla., after a shootout. A police officer was killed at
point-blank range, and four people were wounded.
justin.fenton@baltsun.com
Copyright © 2007, The Baltimore Sun