Third Break in Two Weeks: A Prisoner Simply Walks Off the County Farm
A Newport man jailed for refusing to pay his poll tax slipped his shackles and disappeared into the hills, handing the county's chain-gang overseer his third escape in a fortnight.
Ex-Street Commissioner James Kearns is certainly having tough luck since he became overseer of the county jail chain gang. For the third time in two weeks a prisoner escaped the chain gang at the county farm this morning, when Grady, sent up last week from Newport on a vagrancy charge, made his getaway about 10 o'clock. The shackles were being put on the prisoners and Grady, just before his turn came, excused himself and went down the road a short distance, kept going.
Sheriff Merritt and Under Sheriff Cox were notified of the escape by 'phone and put in the forenoon looking for Grady. They traced him back into the hills, but could not overtake him.
Grady refused to pay his poll tax at Newport and was sent to the county for 15 days and to work out a fine.
“For the third time in two weeks a prisoner escaped the chain gang at the county farm this morning.”
Grady's crime was poverty: he could not pay a poll tax, so the county converted the debt into fifteen days of shackled labor on a farm — and he ran rather than serve it. The modern equivalent is the fines-and-fees pipeline, where an unpaid bill becomes jail time. Kearns, the overseer, was a former street commissioner, a reminder that jail administration in 1909 was a patronage job with no training attached — and in two weeks he had lost three men.
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