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在singsing监狱，人们生产的产品之一是床垫。我的一个朋友，杰克•利维利用完全平躺的床垫做伪装，想把自己偷偷的运出去。可是看守很快就找到了他，“你知道有多少人尝试过这种方式吗？“他们抓到他时说。
一年多过去了，一个模范囚犯传来一个不知有没有用的消息，说A区后面的哨塔在午夜班期间无人值守。还有，在食堂的地下室里有两个梯子，可以捆在一起，做成一个足够长的梯子到达墙顶。
我的第一个想法是他的消息几乎毫无价值。当你仔细的想一想，他们在夜晚清点了人数并且确定所有的人都被锁起来之后，他们不需要任何人在警卫塔里。随后我改变了想法，当我回到我的牢房里时，我心里想，谁说这是逃脱不了的？监狱当局？从我上过的心理学方面的课程，我非常清楚暗示的力量。实际上，我自己经常用它来对付银行经理。如果你能说服每个人钢筋无法切断（无法越狱），谁还会去尝试？
就在那时，我改变了我的想法。我认识的一个家伙Johnny Eagen在白铁铜工车间工作。他的两个兄弟在西边（West Side）开了一个码头。他们是非常有名的人，他们一生都在那里工作。Johnny 是个漂亮的金发碧眼的家伙。非常强大。他年轻时曾经是个好运动员，每天在院子里打手球使他恢复了良好的状态。我（之前）偶尔打一会手球，(现在）我开始和Johnny Eagen经常打手球。直到有一天，当我们走出院子时，我说：“我需要几把钢锯，Johnny。你能帮我拿到吗？“
Johnny和我关在同一个监区，在A区的顶层。几天后，当我们在工作结束的时候爬上小山时，他在我身边，随后我的手里就有了两把钢锯条。
我一直等到每个人都睡着了，并且不得不非常小心地去锯。这些新牢房前面没有水泥，它们都被钢筋隔开。如果有人在两三间牢房外面打鼾，你就能清楚地听到他的声音。总之，牢房里有一种清晰的回声，从某种意义上说，这都是好事。夜晚狱警每隔半个小时或每小时来一次，这取决于他的心情，随着一路发出来的声音，我能听到他从走廊一路走来的脚步声。在狱警做完10点半的检查后，我在牢房里躺下，非常小心，非常慢地开始锯角落上的钢筋。花了好长一段时间锯子才开始锯开一点。一旦我锯开了一个缺口，进展就开始顺利了。事实上，考虑到我小心又慢的方式，我可以判断这个“防逃跑”的钢筋甚至比普通钢筋还要容易切割。
不过，这并不能明确的说明什么，还不到时候。很有可能在钢筋里面还有实心挑料铁杆。当你的钢锯碰到实心挑料铁杆后，它会不断的随着你（的钢锯）而动。如果实心挑料铁杆是由硬化钢做的，而你又不能锯在同一个地方，你就会明白，你要用尽你毕生的时间在这里用钢锯锯钢筋。
原文：
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One of the things they manufactured at Sing Sing was mattresses. A friend of mine, Jack Levy, tried to smuggle himself out by means of a camouflage system that permitted the mattresses to lie perfectly flat. First thing they looked for. “You know how often that’s been tried?” they said when they captured him.
A year had passed, more than a year, when an old trusty passed on the information, for what it was worth, that the tower behind A block was left unmanned during the midnight shift. And also that there were two ladders in the cellar of the mess hall, hard by, that could be strapped together to make a ladder long enough to reach the top of the wall.
My first thought was that his information was worth practically nothing.
When you came right down to it, they didn’t need anybody in any of the guard towers after they had made the evening count and determined that the full population was locked up. It wasn’t until later, when I was back in my cell, that I thought to myself, Who says it’s escapeproof? The prison authorities? From the courses I had taken in psychology I was very well aware of the power of suggestion. In more practical terms, I had used it often enough on bank managers myself. If you can convince everybody that the bars can’t be cut through, who’s going to try? Right there was when I reversed my thinking. There was a guy I knew who worked in the plumber shop. Johnny Eagen. Two of his brothers ran a dock on the West Side. They were very well-known people, they had been in the rackets all their lives. Johnny was a good-looking blond fellow. Very strong.
He had been a good athlete in his younger days, and by playing handball in the yard every day he had got himself back into very good shape. I played a little handball from time to time myself, and I began to play a lot of handball with Johnny Eagen. So one day as we were walking off the court, I said: “I need a couple of hacksaws, Johnny. Can you get them for me?” Johnny locked in the same section of the cellblock that I did. The top tier of the A block. A few days later, while we were walking up the hill at the end of the workday, he fell in beside me, and the next thing I knew there were two hacksaw blades in my hand.
I waited until everybody was asleep, and still I had to go about it very carefully. There was no cement in front of these new cells; they were barred all the way across. If somebody was snoring two or three cells away you could hear him plainly. There is a certain kind of echo to a cellblock, anyway, and in one way, that was all to the good. The night guard came by every half hour or hour, depending on his mood, and the way the sound carried, I was able to hear his footsteps all the way down the gallery. After he had made his ten-thirty check I lay down in the front of the cell and very carefully . . . very slowly . . . began to saw at the corner bar. It took quite a while for the saw to begin to bite in, but once I had a notch on it, it began to go quite well. In fact, considering the way I was working, I could see that the “escapeproof” bars cut even easier than ordinary steel.
That didn’t prove anything conclusively, though. Not yet. It was always possible that they had put a spinning rod inside the bar. What happens when you hit a spinning rod with a saw is that it keeps moving on you. If you have a spinning rod of hardened steel and you’re never hitting the same place twice, you can see where you’d be able to spend the rest of your life trying to go through it with a hacksaw.