An adorable, button-eyed rat carved from a block of wood, with floppy leather ears and a twine tail, rendered slightly less adorable by the X-Acto knife blades stuck in its back and a death threat scratched into its side.

“Dead Soon.”

There’s even a red paint-splash of faux blood.

Its maker had some serious time to stew.

“They’re kind of scavengers, really. They make some things out of nothing,” said Warden Jeffrey Merrill, surveying the long conference table in his office covered with odd Maine State Prison contraband going back 100 years.

“We’ve got some very, very talented guys in here.”

How talented?

He used to know an inmate who could make fishing poles out of toothpaste and toilet paper.

On the long table: A water pipe made out of a light bulb. A glittery-eyed voodoo doll stuffed with what might be brown human hair. A ladle with the scoop knocked off and filed to a point.

The leather-shop knife, framed and mounted, used to kill Warden Richard Tinker in May 1863.

Merrill has hung onto it all for posterity, and for training. He tells prison guards not to be naive. The littlest scrap of whatever, the odd broom, if it doesn’t belong, don’t let inmates have it.

“Whatever you can dream up,” said Bob Costigan, prison administrative coordinator, “they’ve done.”

Take the benign-looking heart-shaped lamp that sat for sale in the prison showroom. Its maker, an inmate named Rosenbloom, made a bunch for the gift shop with a signature rose design on one corner of the pine base. He made this one just a little different so his wife could pick it out of a lamp crowd.

Rosenbloom disabled its wiring, so the light wouldn’t light, and hollowed out a hole, hidden by green felt, just deep enough for his wife to stash a .25-caliber automatic. She went into the showroom, hid the gun in the lamp and brought the lamp to the counter.

Costigan said the wife asked the clerk at checkout if he could plug the lamp in, on the off-chance it wouldn’t work. When it didn’t, it was bound for the defect cart – and back to her waiting husband in jail, presumably to be fixed.

Defects weren’t typically checked in the late 1970s, but for some reason, someone checked the lamp. The plot went bust.

Cayenne and contraband

Guns have made it in before. One was found in a cell during a shakedown in the early ’80s, inside a hollowed-out table leg. The old 38-caliber revolver was nestled in newspaper; the inmate’s workmanship on the table’s hide-hole was so clean it wasn’t visible from the outside.

“He was planning to use it to escape, he had 50 years,” Costigan said.

The inmate was escorted off to a federal facility. Now he’s back.

“Can you imagine the value of the weapon inside this facility?” Merrill asked. Considering that already-smoked cigarettes go for $5 – it’d be a lot.

He’s still got the table leg, and the gun.

Merrill said most of his odd and illicit finds came from the old prison in Thomaston. The new facility in Warren has more metal detectors, more security cameras, and rows and rows of shiny barbed wire.

At the old jail, officials thwarted an escape attempt when they seized two white hoods with eye holes, a fat red hook and cayenne pepper, and got wind of two inmates making dummies to stuff in their beds.

The hoods were to blend in with the fog and snow. The hook to scale the wall. The pepper to burn the search dogs’ noses.

“We tested (the hook) – this would have held a person,” Merrill said.

The prison has a committee that examines contraband after it’s found to figure out how it was made, he said. Sometimes it’s obvious and sometimes it’s not.

Several shivs on his conference room table look like screwdriver spikes wrapped in bed sheets or poked in new handles. Rough slingshots are carved from wood. Tiny tattoo guns get made with toothbrush handles and stolen motors, sometimes held together with guitar string.

The voodoo doll may have been secreted in fully intact or made from fabric in the old upholstery shop. The wood-block rodent could have come from shop scraps. Its recipient had been deemed – no surprise – a rat. “Pig lover” is scrawled on its other side.