Academic Takes Over Prison

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31590, 30 January 1968, Page 15

Academic Takes Over Prison

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) LITTLE ROCK (Arkansas), Jan. 29. A former criminology professor has strapped a pistol on his hip and become the boss of what he considers the most notorious prison system in the nation, the “New York Times” News Service reports.

At the Arkansas State Penitentiary. Mr Thomas O. Murton found the centre of extreme brutality and neglect, a chamber of horrors where, he said, “a guy woke up in the morning and did not know whether he’d be back that night.” Mr Murton suggested that the bizarre world he seeks to control might soon yield disclosures of even greater outrages. • . J . The new superintendent said in an interview that he was convinced a number of inmates had been shot or beaten to death and secretly buried on the prison grounds. A search for bodies would begin within 10 days, he said. Intensive investigation of the penitentiary has been made by the Arkansas State Police, which issued a report last January, and by a special penitentiary study commission composed of leading citizens, which reported January 1 this year. The Arkansas Legislative Council, an arm of the legislature, recommended legislative changes last September 23.

Mr Murton said guards and other prison authorities were implicated and charged they

they had sought to cover up by writing off the slain inmates as “escapers.”

Mr Murton said he was unable to estimate the number of deaths. He noted, however, that 213 inmates were officially listed as escaped. Mr Murton said three prisoners had led him independently to a spot known as "the graveyard.” He found several depressions in the ground where soil apparently had settled. The Cummins farm, where the “graveyard” is situated, which houses 1284 felons, lies in extremely rich farming country along the Arkansas River and is 44 miles south-east of Little Rock.

Mr John H. Haley, a Little Rock lawyer who is chairman of the State Penitentiary Board, said prison records showed a few one-week periods in which eight to 10 inmates, some in their twenties and thirties, had died of “congestive heart failure.” Tucker Prison Farm is the penitentiary’s smaller unit. The State police made an investigation of the Tucker unit in August, 1966. Some of the findings were as follows: Officials, guards and “trusties” tortured and flogged scores of prisoners with heavy leather straps, rubber hoses, chains, knotted ropes, shovels, baseball bats, hoe handles, needles, pliers and the fan belt from a farm tractor.

Kitchen and dining areas were unbelievably filthy, with food exposed to a swarm of flies. Kitchen workers said that meat was served once a month. Other meals consisted of “a very thin, watered-

down serving of rice” and “tasteless com bread.” Liquor was readily available. Inmates paid hundreds of dollars for assignment to attractive jobs and other favours. A number were permitted to live in individual “squatter shacks” at Cummins, some of which were furnished with refrigerators and television sets. At the penitentiary homosexuality was rampant, prison officials said. At the smaller farm unit, the authorities rigged up a torture device that consisted of the electric generator from a crank-type telephone and two dry-cell batteries. One electrode was connected to an inmate’s toe, the other to his testicles. Mr Bob Scott, an assistant to Governor Rockefeller working on the penitentiary problems, attributes many of the region’s penal shortcomings to the complications of white supremacy and a sort of fundamentalist approach to punishment. “The feeling isn’t limited to the South,” Mr Scott said, “but I think the punitive, eye-for-an-eye orientation is a lot more common here.” This was especially true, he said, with a prison population about 55 per cent Negro. Mr Murton, who organised five prisons in Alaska before he joined the faculty of Southern Illinois University as an assistant professor of criminology, is not expected to remedy ills such as overcrowding until large sums of money are made available by the State authorities. The prison system embraces an elaborate underworld .economy complete with its own form of money and

an elite class of merchant entrepreneurs. Many inmates, Mr Murton believes, remained in prison simply because it enabled them to make far more money than would be possible if they broke out. One convict described how he took canned mackerel from the prison kitchen and converted it into “salmon patties” for sale to his fellow prisoners. This and less important enterprises earned about $12,000 last year alone. Much of an inmate’s earnings, he said, go to maintain his privilege and protect his source of supply. One of the worst organisations at Cummins was reformatory for women. The women's prison, drab and bare, is some distance from the men’s barracks. The 25 Negroes and 17 whites held there once endured an enforced silence for eight months. They were not permitted to speak except to ask one of the matrons a question. The Negro women were provided with a galvanised tub and a scrub board to wash clothing sent in by the matrons and their families. Their food was generally limited to left-overs from the tables where white prisoners ate.

Mr Murton has dropped a rule that forbade the women to go outside alone. He has also dropped a regulation that required women working outside to run for the barracks if men appeared. “My biggest problem,” Mr Murton said, “is to convince people that it is not proper to torture inmates. There seems to be a feeling that prisoners are somehow subhuman, and a lot of the inmates cqme to believe it themselves.”