Lewis E. Lawes

For those who have not studied the familiar Bartlett, the prison warden Lewis E. Lawes sort of famously said, “If you want to make a dangerous man your friend let him do you a favor.” (Burroughs said, though, that if you do a favor for a friend he’ll never forgive you, but that’s a whole nother ball game.) I ask, then, what is a dangerous man? Men in prison by definition are dangerous men, we are told, and it is these kinds of men that the coolheaded (if prone to grandstanding the cause somewhat) reformist Warden Lawes attempted to befriend, back in the good old bad old days, in his storied stewardship of the notorious Sing Sing state prison in Ossining, New York, and storied I say because during the second decade of his tenure, from 1932–40, no fewer than five Hollywood movies were made based on his published (fiction and nonfiction both) books. Such danger men, Lawes calculated, notably and also famously even now, served during his wardenship, in toto, many thousands of years behind bars, doing society a favor. He evoked terrifically for us all the ineffably wasted time simply with the title of his best-known work, “Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing.” Twenty thousand years! Think of the action abused, the energy spat away. Lawes gathered some of that vulnerable hope and energetic despair and told the stories of the general character of such fallen men, whose literary portraits at least, thanks to his stamina, remain for us today, if not exactly what makes the danger back of it all so quotable in the minds of the otherwise silent readers of books on prisons and prisoners.

by Don Kennison