Behind the walls of Joliet Penitentiary, the search for escape did not always mean files, tunnels, or midnight breaks across the prison yard. Sometimes it came in a bottle, brewed in secret from whatever materials desperate men could get their hands on.
In December 1916, that search turned deadly.
According to Warden Michael Zimmerman, a group of convicts at the Illinois prison had been drinking what they believed was grain alcohol. It was not.
The liquor had been extracted through a crude prison moonshining process from a shellac mixture used in the penitentiary shops. Instead of offering a few hours of drunken forgetfulness, it delivered poison.
The men had been trying to blot out “the bitterness of prison life” with the false comfort of inebriety. What they swallowed was wood alcohol, a deadly substance that could blind, cripple, or kill. By the time the effects were known, four convicts were dead and several more were gravely ill.
Six men survived the poisoning, and although officials initially feared that three of them would also die, the warden later said they were expected to recover.
Poison Kills 3 Convicts
JOLIET, Illinois. — Warden Michael Zimmerman of the Joliet Penitentiary said the six convicts who survived the wood alcohol debauch on Saturday, which killed four men, would recover. It was thought three of them would probably die.
Prison moonshining, by which convicts extract alcohol by strange chemical processes from drugs and products used in the shops behind the walls, enables the men to obtain the alcohol from a shellac mixture.
They believed the poison to be grain alcohol and drank it in an effort to forget the bitterness of prison life in the false joys of inebriety.
The dead: Alexander Archer, Iroquois County, 5th term for robbery; Martin Harris, Cook Countyunty, serving 2 years for a serious offense; Edward Williams, Cook County, serving 5th term for robbery; Frank Dawson, Grandy County, 1 to 14 years for robbery.
Source: The Mellette County Pioneer. Wood, Mellette County, S.D. December 29, 1916.
