Prisoner of Conscience

When he was called last month to testify before a Cincinnati grand jury investigating a prison escape, the Rev. Maurice McCrackin refused to appear. He was a key witness because he had been kidnaped and held hostage by two convicts who had broken out of the Lucasville, Ohio, penitentiary.

McCrackin did more than refuse to show. To protest conditions in the prison, he ignored a subpoena, made a squad of five policemen carry him physically to jail, and began a hunger strike that lasted three weeks and forced his transfer to a hospital for intravenous feeding.

The minister's resistance has produced one of those classic confrontations between conscience and the forces of law and order. Although the prosecutors are embarrassed by McCrackin's acts, they have argued in court that simply to release him would "destroy the foundation and value of giving a judge authority to compel testimony."

McCrackin, 73, is a pacifist with a long history of civil disobedience. He was jailed in the early 1960s for civil rights activities, and fasted in prison for 25 days. Protesting the use of tax money to buy weapons, he refused to pay income taxes; he was convicted in 1958 for nonpayment and subsequently expelled from the Presbyterian Church, which had ordained him in 1935.

Asks McCrackin: "How can I go and testify against a prisoner on behalf of the state when it is the state that is responsible for the vast injustice, degradation and horror that is Lucasville?" But with the grand jury stalled by McCrackin's steadfastness, the kidnapers are still in Lucasville--and they are likely to stay there for quite a while.

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