Fugitive from a Prison Camp

Bill Harding's love for Ann Baldwin causes him to become involved with a gang of criminals when he tries to convince Ann's brother Ted to quit the gang. Arrested as an accomplice of the gang, Bill is sent to jail despite the belief of Sheriff Lawson that the boy is innocent. Lawson has an idealistic plan of establishing a work prison camp to which young first offenders may be sent in order to keep them apart from the hardened criminals in the prisons. Bill is sent to Lawson's camp and is assigned to work on a road job on which a crooked contractor is defaulting. Realizing that the road is about to be completed, the contractor bribes Chester Russell, the county engineer, to sabotage the project. Following the unheeded warning Sheriff Lawson gives Russell about a dangerous safety condition on the work site, a rockslide occurs and some of the prisoners are injured. Meanwhile, Bill, discouraged when the court rejects his appeals, decides to break out of jail with Slugger Martin, Russell's operative in the sabotage attempts. After the break, Bill seeks refuge at Ann's, while Martin and the others are intercepted and gunned down by the police. Tracking Bill to Ann's house, Lawson tells him that in a deathbed confession Martin exonerated him of any complicity in the gang, and he is now a free man. A 1940 Larry Darmour production for Columbia Pictures, directed by Lewis D. Collins, from a screenplay written by Albert DeMond, based on a story by Albert DeMond & Stanley Roberts.