Radio Mirror (Nov 1936-Apr 1937)

I1 BUB USD B tf al Phyfe WOULD you have the courage to bring your daughter up inside prison walls? Would you entrust her to the care of men who had committed offenses against the state, and encourage deep friendships between her and such men? In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, 1 am sure your answer would be the same: "No, certainly not!" Yet Lewis E. Lawes, Warden of Sing Sing prison, at Ossining, New York, has done just that. His youngest daughter not only was born within prison walls, but she spent the first eleven years of her life in intimate daily contact with convicted men. Today, at the age of fifteen, she still counts many convicts among her best friends. More, Warden Lawes, whose prison stories you hear every week on NBC, is convinced that his daughter's early contacts with the men in his charge constituted the finest possible training for her. And, after meeting her and talking to her, I am sure he is right. 30 Cherie Lawes is fifteen now. She has the poise both of a trained athlete and of a young woman who is used to meeting many people. You think, on first being introduced to her, that she is at least three years older than her actual age. She isn't really pretty, but her small face, lightly dusted with freckles, is charming in its enthusiasm and vitality. Her blue eyes sparkle and snap as she talks. She has her mother's auburn hair, falling against her cheeks in loose waves. She was born when her father had been warden of Sing Sing for two years. The family at that time was living in the old Warden's Residence inside the prison, and Cherie was the first — and so far the only — child ever to be born and raised in Sing Sing. There were several courses Warden and Mrs. Lawes could have followed. As Cherie grew older, they could have sent her away from the penitentiary, to live with relatives for a while, later to go to some private boarding school. Or they could even have raised her there, in the Warden's Residence, and still sheltered her from the prison. It would have meant engaging a special servant from outside. It would have meant laying down strict boundary lines past which she must be forbidden to go. But it could have been done. Warden Lawes chose to follow neither of these courses. He had been in the penal service, at various institutions, for seventeen years at the time of Cherie's birth, and the philosophy upon which he has built his advanced and liberal system of prison government was already formed. His two older daughters, Kathleen and Crystal, had come into a certain amount of contact with the inmates of the reformatory from which he had come to Sing Sing, and he believed that instead of harming them it had done them good. He determined to do something that most parents would have fought bitterly to keep from doing. He would raise Cherie in the prison grounds. Her attendants and nurses would be the regular house servants, all of them trusties who had been assigned to the Warden as his personal employees. As Cherie grew older she would be given the run of the penitentiary. Until she was six, Cherie never wore girl's dresses. Perhaps the Warden and Mrs. Lawes had hoped their third child would be a boy; at any rate, boys' clothes were much more practical than girls' for such an active young person as Cherie proved to be. When she was two, she used to sit atop a heap of clothes in a basket in the prison laundry, solemnly chewing on a strip of bacon and watching the two colored men who ran the ironing machine feed linen into its slow-moving rollers and pull it out again. Another colored man, whom she never knew by any other name {Continued on page 73)