Looking Back: The Old Reformatory

I was in my office and it was really quiet. We had what we called clerks, they were inmate that did all your clerical work for you. Well, I’m sitting at my office doing paperwork, its really quiet, first thing in the morning, probably wasn’t even seven o’clock yet.

To get to my office you had to walk up these old-fashioned — I call them fire escape — steps. When you walked on them they clanged and rattled. I’m sitting in my office and I heard this rattle on the steps. Where my office was located you could look out these big windows and peer around the corner. You could see if somebody was out on the landing waiting to come in the door.

I looked out there, looked around and I didn’t see anything so I went back to work. It wasn’t five minutes later I heard that noise again. I pulled away the curtains and I peered around the corner, but this time I looked up. On the tier of steps above me were two inmates and they had a homemade rope and grappling hook. They were trying to throw a rope from that level onto the east block wall. On that wall there were a set of handrails — I think they were trying to throw their grappling hook onto the wall and then tie it off on the rail so they could maybe climb across and escape.

Well, I freaked out. I’m running around the room going, ‘what should I do?’ One of the inmates heard me and said, ‘Mr. Milligan, what’s up?’ and I said, ‘I think there is a couple inmates outside trying to escape.’

The inmate told me what number to dial. So I went over to the phone and I dialed the number. Not a minute later there were gray shirts everywhere.

As a result of that I got this big “attaboy” from the warden and he wrote a letter and put it in my file. Eventually I went to warden and told him, ‘I’m the one that made the call and saw what happened, but inmates are the ones that told me what to do.’

He said, ‘Well if you want, go ahead and write something up and we will put it in their master files so if they go to the parole board maybe it will help them get out.’

So that’s what I did.

Written by Tim Milligan