Mitchel P Roth, Fire in the Big House: America’s Deadliest Prison Disaster
| Author | Alex Tepperman |
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474520933061 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book reviews
Mitchel P Roth, Fire in the Big House: America’s Deadliest Prison Disaster,
Ohio University Press: Athens, OH, 2019; 278 pp. (including index):
978-0-8214-2383-7, $29.95 (hbk)
In presenting a unique story of a sudden catastrophe within the Big House prison,
Mitchel Roth has produced a captivating work offering a fresh perspective on the
pains of imprisonment. He guides readers through the minutes and hours imme-
diately preceding a devastating fire at Ohio Penitentiary that took the lives of 320
prisoners. Roth reflects on the cause of the April 21, 1930 inferno before consid-
ering the event’s broader social context, including the state- and federal-level polit-
ical machinations that followed. The result is not simply a consuming story, but is
also a powerful consideration of public commemoration and historical memory.
In lieu of a linear narrative, Roth has provided a series of twelve free-standing
chapters, each of which encapsulates a unique and important dimension of the
larger story. Early chapters provide readers with the major beats of the fire’s onset
and the immediate fallout, presenting the tragedy from the perspectives of Warden
Preston Thomas, Father Albert O’Brien, and a variety of firefighters, journalists,
and local residents. Roth draws a bleak picture of institutional unpreparedness and
resource strain, describing how emergency workers ferried corpses to the state
fairgrounds, where overwhelmed and underfunded medical professionals struggled
to attend to wounded and dying prisoners.
In Chapters Three through Five, Roth reflects on what made Ohio’s largest
prison both similar to, and distinct from, penal environments throughout the rest
of the country. Columbus, in addition to serving as a government and college town,
grew to become “synonymous with its famous prison,” similar to “a handful of other
American cities – Huntsville, Texas, Clinton and Ossining, New York, and others”
(p. 55). Its rapid growth reflected the escalation of national prison populations
throughout the country between 1870 and 1935, as overcrowding quickly came to
define life within American prisons generally, but was especially prominent in Big
House prisons, such as the Ohio Penitentiary. Overcrowding and strained prisoner-
administration relationships were a fact of life in most prisons, Roth claims, and the
fallout of the 1930 fire showed the fragility of Ohio Penitentiary’s social ecosystem.
Having established the mise en scene, Roth speaks to the principle players of his
narrative, beginning with a discussion of Warden Thomas, before speaking to the
Punishment & Society
2021, Vol. 23(2) 281–293
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520933061
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