Playboy Interview: Tom Murton

On a bleak, rainy morning in late January of 1968, a small group of convicts trudged through the dark, alluvial mud behind a levee that keeps floodwaters from the Arkansas River out of a mule pasture at Cummins Prison Farm. When they reached a spot marked by a 58-year-old black prisoner, Reuben Johnson, they dug into the earth and, within an hour or so, struck the first of three coffins uncovered that, day. The superintendent of Cummins, Tom Murton, told the press that the remains were those of inmates who had been secretly and brutally murdered under previous prison administrations; he also said there was evidence that as many as 200 other men were buried on the prison grounds. The governor of Arkansas, Winthrop Rockefeller, promised a full investigation. Instead, Murton was fired and the burial site was officially described as a paupers' graveyard. There was no more digging in the mule pasture.

The summary dismissal—he was given three days to gel his wife and four children and their belongings out of the quarters he occupied on the prison grounds—came as no surprise to Murton; it had happened before. A year earlier, he had lost his job at Southern Illinois University: "I was one of three instructors in a program to train prison middle-management types, and the school wanted me to talk about the ideal number of cells and bars and that sort of thing. Instead, I tried to get my students talking about whether we needed cells or bars—or even prisons—and if we do, what their role in society should be. That was obviously unacceptable, because I was asked to leave."

Murton established his reputation as an iconoclast in the field of penology before the experience at Southern Illinois. From 1952 to 1954, when Alaska was still a territory, he was a Deputy U.S. Marshal, sometimes working in the jail at Anchorage. Because of his efforts to expose and eliminate alleged corruption in the marshal's office—including some under-the-table dealings with organized, crime that would have brought slot machines and other gambling into the territory—Murton was fired in 1956, shortly after he returned to his job from a two-year tour in the Army. During his hitch, Murton was confinement officer for the stockade at Fort Richardson, near Anchorage. "They chose me because I was one of the few people in the Army at that time with any outside experience in the field. For my part, I became more interested in the problems of prisons and prisoners. I guess that's where the seed was planted."

Staying on in Alaska, Murton put his college degree in agriculture to work andfarmed for a brief period before going back to school to take a degree in education. He was teaching algebra when Alaska became a state. With the change from Federal to local control of law enforcement, he went back into penology, rising from the position of jail administrator in Ketchikan to chief of correctional institutions for the state in 1964. But once again, he succeeded in alienating the higher-ups. Murton was called upon to testify before the state legislature and, against the governor's wishes, did so. He complained that he was being thwarted in his efforts to build a model prison system by state officials, who tied up the materials he needed and for which funds had been allocated. Although the charges were true, Murton was fired for the second time in Alaska.

Next, he went to Berkeley and earned a master's and a doctorate in criminology. "By this time, I had all the credentials—degrees and all that sort of thing;. But I couldn't get a prison job in Alaska." So Murton went to teach in Illinois. While he was there, the prisons in Arkansas were being exposed by the press as medieval even by that state's archaic standards. When Rockefeller was elected the first Republican governor of the state since Reconstruction—some claimed the prison scandal played a large part in the Democrats' defeat—he talked to Murton, who was serving as a consultant to the Arkansas prison system under a Federal grant, and was impressed enough with his blunt assessment of the situation at notorious Tucker Prison Farm, and with his self-confidence ("I'd like to go to Tucker and demonstrate to the people of Arkansas that you can run a prison without torture and brutality"), to hire him as superintendent of the institution. Once Murton had reformed Tucker, he was to take over its larger parent institution, Cummins, and responsibility for all correctional programs in the state. The next 13 months were filled with political backbiting and subterfuge, reform and revolution in the prisons, and a sense of both accomplishment and frustration for Murton—culminating with the exhumation of the bodies at Cummins and Ins subsequent dismissal.

This time, the period of unemployment lasted two and a half years. "I seem to be able to accomplish more each time I get a job, but then the roof falls in and things get tougher." Oregon turned Murton down when he asked for a prison position there. Alaska wouldn't accept his applications to return for either corrections work or teaching. While his wife taught in Anchorage, Murton served as a part-time security guard for Atlantic Richfield during the oil boom of 1969. Finally, in September 1970, he was appointed visiting professor of criminology at the University of Minnesota, a position he still holds. "I haven't found anything around here to rebel against yet. I really don't expect to."

Between his departure from Arkansas and his return to academe. Murton campaigned for a full investigation into the dark past of Arkansas' infamous prisons. And in speeches before students and professional colleagues and through letters written to public officials, he has continued, to press for more digging around Cummins and more questioning of the men who were inmates there. His efforts have been unsuccessful, but he continues writing and speaking. Last fall, his book, "Accomplices to the Crime" (co-authored with writer Joe Hyams and published by Grove Press), a chronicle of his experiences that indicts many Arkansas officials, came to the attention of Dick Cavett, and Murton was invited to be a guest on Cavett's late-night talk show. Murton took along some of the torture devices he had found at Tucker and described them to a shocked audience. He also said Governor Rockefeller had subverted his campaign for reform in Arkansas and his subsequent efforts to find employment; he claimed that Arkansas prisons had gone back to the bad old days since his departure, and that the new head of the system there knew that murdered inmates were buried around Cummins, but refused to do anything about it.

Rockefeller protested and demanded equal time. Since it was an election year, Rockefeller himself was not allowed to appear, but Arkansas Correction Commissioner Robert Sarver was invited in his place. He told Cavett that he wanted "the same reforms Murton wants," but that he realized he had to work within the system and be willing to compromise. He said that Rockefeller was "a very busy man" who didn't have time to keep Murton from getting a job; that while the prisons in Arkansas had a long way to go, they were making progress; that Murton's claims about worsening prison conditions were simply untrue; and that while there may be more inmates buried around Cummins, they weren't his responsibility. A few weeks later, on November 2, 1970, there was a riot at Cummins and Sarver himself was held hostage for a short time. The next day, Rockefeller was defeated in a bid for reelection.

Concerned about the issues Murton has raised, Playboy asked the embattled prison reformer for an interview. He consented. After spending two days talking with him in his university office in Minneapolis, Assistant Editor Geoffrey Norman reports: "Even though he has four degrees and is a college professor, Murton likes to refer to himself as an Oklahoma farmer. During the interview, he alternated between the dry, technical, speech of a sociologist and the colorful idiom of prisoners. He was thoughtful and deliberate when he discussed theoretical questions, but animated and intense when he related the story of his experiences in Arkansas. We began by asking him to recapitulate that story."

[Q] Playboy: What was the situation when you took over the Tucker Prison Farm?

[A] Murton: It couldn't have been much worse. There had been no prison superintendent at Tucker for weeks. One had lasted 90 days and my predecessor had been there only a month before he was found in his office cradling a Thompson submachine gun and defying the inmates to "cross the line." When I arrived on the prison grounds, "order" was being maintained by the presence of 13 unarmed state troopers. It was ludicrous: They were there to control more than 300 inmates, many of whom were armed to the teeth.

[Q] Playboy: Where did they get the guns?

[A] Murton: From the state. Since no funds were appropriated for prison administration, farming operations were supposed to turn a profit for the state. One of the economies instituted at Arkansas' two prison farms, Tucker and Cummins, located about 50 miles from each other, was a system whereby trusties—inmates who have proved they can be trusted—serve as armed guards over work details of the other two classes of prisoners: the "rank" men, who harvest the crops and perform most of the drudgery around the prison, and the "doh-pops," so called because they used to have to pop doors open for wardens and trusties. "Doh-pops" work with livestock herds, farm machinery and in the garage and slaughterhouse. As part of the prison underground, the inmates also ran a number of illegal activities such as gambling, dope and liquor sales, and homosexual prostitution. The prison staff granted these privileges to trusties who cooperated with them in keeping order and enforcing discipline through the use of torture and brutality.

[Q] Playboy: What sort of torture and brutality?

[A] Murton: In 1966, then-Governor Orval Faubus authorized an investigation of the prisons based on a number of letters and complaints about excessive brutality. It uncovered a variety of shocking practices employed by the wardens, their staffs and inmate trusties. Among these was the use of the strap, which was authorized by state law, making Arkansas the last state in the Union legally utilizing corporal punishment. The mandate was carried out with a vengeance. For offenses as trivial as failure to pick an established quota of cotton, men were forced to lie naked while a warden struck them as many as 60 times with a five-loot-long, wooden-handled leather strap. Every time the leather cut into his flesh, the prisoner had to shout the number of blows and "Oh, Captain!" Some men's buttocks were ripped and scarred beyond recognition; others passed out from the pain.

[A] But this wasn't the most brutal device. That distinction belonged to the "Tucker Telephone," a satanic instrument employed by Jim Bruton, who was superintendent of Tucker until Faubus fired him in the wake of a report by the state criminal-investigations division. When a man received this form of punishment, he was taken to the hospital infirmary, stripped, then strapped to the operating table; electrodes were attached to his big toe and penis and wired to an old-fashioned rural telephone. When the handle was cranked, six volts of electricity discharged into his body. The process was repeated until the man was thought sufficiently disciplined, revealed some desired information or passed out from a sustained jolt of electricity, which inmates referred to as getting a "long-distance call." Typical prison humor. Some men were rendered permanently sterile; others went insane.

[A] Not all torture, of course, was this exotic. Some men were beaten with pipes, clubs or rifle butts. As knowledge of this kind of barbarism became public, Rockefeller was able to campaign for Do you have room in your home for three wise men? They are Plato, Aristotle, and Marcus prison reform and was elected the first Republican governor in nearly 100 years. I was appointed a month later. My first job was to serve as superintendent of Tucker Farm; later, I was to take over Cummins and, simultaneously, the responsibility for all prisons and correctional institutions in the state.

[Q] Playboy: What were you able to do at Tucker to ease the tension and take control?

[A] Murton: Well, I realized that I couldn't take over by force, since I was the only nonconvict in the place with a gun—a little .38 I smuggled in past the guard at the gate. In that insane situation, I had to have the inmates' approval before I could begin to take charge and run the place. So, as my first official act, I abolished all forms of corporal punishment to show them I intended to make life better for them. Then I replaced with a civilian the inmate who kept the prison records and ran all the communications—radios and telephones—to let them know that I was going to administer the institution.

[A] Then I called a meeting with the trusties, who were afraid of losing their power and privileges under my administration. I knew that if they wanted to stop me, they could, since I depended on them for all the services in the prison. I told them so and assured them that there wouldn't be any immediate shake-up. I promised not to demote any of them to "doh-pop" or rank jobs, where their lives would be in danger because of the resentments that had built up against them. I told them that if they cooperated with me, we could work together and make the prison a better place, that I intended to eventually stop their illegal activities, but that they would have plenty of notice.

[A] Then I called a meeting of the other prisoners and told them that there would be no more brutal treatment; that the trusties would still be guards, since I didn't have the funds to change that; so they couldn't expect to just take oft or they would be shot. But I told them I was going to improve conditions. After these meetings, I had to make good on my promises to both groups to win their confidence.

[Q] Playboy: Were you able to do that?

[A] Murton: Slowly. But some things called for immediate action. Prisoners live from day to day; their lives are simple. To improve their lot, you tackle the simple grievances—like food. When I got to Tucker, the prisoners were all being fed in segregated groups to avoid mess-hall riots and fights between the trusties and rank men. The quality of food a man ate was determined by the power he had in the institution. If he was a trusty or had money, the inmates in the kitchen saw to it that he had meat three times a day, milk, vegetables and as much as he wanted to eat. Most "short hairs," as new inmates are called, got a spoonful of rice a day, plus some soybeans, corn bread and water. They ate meat once a year, usually pigs'-knuckles soup. The food was rancid and often contaminated with weevils. If they wanted any better fare, they had to bribe someone to get it. Some men were 40 to 60 pounds underweight. All this despite the fact that the kitchen, which had been built in 1966, was completely modern; the prison was farming several thousand acres and had large livestock herds and a slaughterhouse; the means to feed the convicts well were all right there.

[A] I brought in an old friend, Bea Craw-ford, a large, dynamic woman who had worked with me when I ran the Alaskan correctional institutions, to take over the kitchen. She put the inmate kitchen crew to work cleaning the place up, started planning meals, accounting for supplies and feeding all prisoners three meals a day at the same time. Within a couple of weeks, we were serving meat at every meal and all the inmates had enough to eat. This accomplished two things: It showed the prisoners that I would deliver on my promise to improve conditions and it eliminated two major sources of tension—bad food and black-marketing of provisions. In any prison, there are a few simple measures that can be taken immediately that will win the prisoners' confidence and improve conditions. These are the things I went after right away in Arkansas.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do next?

[A] Murton: I went after the rackets. Any kind of prison racket is a source of trouble. Violence erupts because of debts not paid off to loan sharks, and theft of contraband, whiskey or narcotics. If you can eliminate the illegal activities, you can cut down on violence and assaults. The usual approach is tight security, close inspection of all mail and packages coming in, close supervision of visiting—in some places, they even shake down visitors—all the obvious police techniques. But these techniques, like all the other traditional tools of prison administration, are negative and unproductive. In Arkansas, where the inmates were in charge, trusties were allowed to go uptown and buy liquor, so shakedowns were even less likely to eliminate illegal activities, since the inmates didn't need people on the outside to get booze. They had what they call "brozene," an inmate coin. The trusties would go uptown on the tractors or horses, buy whiskey in the liquor store and give the man brozene. The liquor-store owner would come out to the prison and exchange the brozene for real money. That's how open it was.

[A] When I went in there, we stopped the procedure of shaking down the visitors for contraband whiskey or weapons or drugs and the shaking down of inmates by other inmates. I opened up the prison to unsupervised visits by family, friends—everybody—and there's no evidence that anything was ever smuggled in after that, since the prisoners didn't want to risk losing these new privileges by trying to bring contraband inside. Then we eliminated the brozene and instituted a ledger system whereby a convict could purchase goods at the commissary but couldn't make cash transfers to another inmate. Under this new system, they couldn't buy whiskey when they went into town on prison business and they couldn't gamble for large sums. They still played cards for chewing gum and soft drinks, but nobody is going to get stabbed for a Coca-Cola.

[Q] Playboy: Homosexuality is a major cause of prison violence. How did you handle this problem?

[A] Murton: I used some other nontraditional approaches. The homosexual situation was particularly bad in Arkansas, because there were only a few cells. If you can provide single-cell confinement, a man can, at least, be protected at night. But most of the inmates at Tucker were in three barracks of 100 to 150 men each. A complicating factor was that there was no minimum age for commitment, so I had 14-year-old boys in the same barracks with older men, since there were no special facilities for either. The first thing I did was put a staff guard in charge of the yard, the central hallway that controls the dormitory area, but this didn't really accomplish much, because the one man we could afford couldn't cover three barracks. We had serious situations develop, where kids were raped, and one even had his eye knocked out of his head. We were able to put into isolation some men who were likely to make homosexual attacks, but we had to double them up, since we only had seven cells and they had to be used to confine other prisoners for such things as attempting escape. Under these crowded conditions, one man was raped in his cell. So things were getting pretty bad.

[A] Realizing that the professional staff couldn't handle it, I turned to the major source of change in the prison—the inmate power structure. I took a man by the name of "Chain-saw Jack," who was serving life for cutting a man's head off with a saw for making homosexual advances to him. He obviously had a useful hang-up, so I put him in charge of a barracks that I had been having a lot of trouble with. He called the boys together and he said, "OK, you know what I'm doing time for. I'm going to run this place, and if I catch two of you in the same sack, I'm gonna go up front and check out the chain saw." He was joking, of course, but being an older man and being in for murder, he had a certain status and they knew he wasn't going to tolerate any homosexuality. As long as he was in charge of the barracks, the rapes dropped to zero and the other, consensual activities were so infrequent, you couldn't count them. This is the way we changed the prison—using inmates with leadership ability to bring it about.

[Q] Playboy: How did you convince these men that it was in their interest to cooperate with you?

[A] Murton: Every inmate wants two things in prison: to survive and to get out. His ability to get out is dependent upon pleasing the warden, since the institution makes recommendations to the parole boards. If the institution doesn't recommend it, the man will never get out until his sentence expires. So it's not difficult to make people do things the way you want them done. But not all of them. Chain-saw Jack was one of those few people in prison who can be killed but not controlled, like Cool Hand Luke in the Paul Newman movie. Those are the kind you want on your side. Once these very powerful men see that there's a better way to live, they'll follow you and become leaders of the new movement. And other people will emerge who never demonstrated leadership ability before under the corrupt system.

[Q] Playboy: A number of your colleagues would contend that this is the worst possible means of reforming prisons—that it's letting the lunatics run the asylum. The man who replaced you in Arkansas, Robert Sarver, says that what is needed to reform prisons and reduce recidivism is more funds for professional supervision and training of inmates to prepare them for the kind of responsibilities you gave them outright.

[A] Murton: My colleagues and the other public figures in America who address themselves to prison reform are, as far as I'm concerned, generally sincere and well motivated, but lack an understanding of the true situation. When they speak of work-release programs—whereby a prisoner holds down a day job in the community—and vocational training, academic training, conjugal visits, group therapy, psychological counseling, halfway houses, all of these experiments that have been tried over the past 50 years, they're missing the point. There's no empirical evidence to demonstrate that any of these things has the slightest relationship to reducing recidivism. And that should be one of the first aims of any prison reform. The major justification for most of these programs, aside from employing people, is that they keep the inmates busy and, when they're busy, they don't cause trouble. It's an internal device for control of the institution.

[Q] Playboy: But don't all these things have a place in penology? Can't the prisoners be at least partially rehabilitated by educational and vocational training?

[A] Murton: It's not too difficult to get the inmates interested in such things, but what have they got to do with recidivism? What have they got to do with anything? Educational and vocational training may assuage the guilt that liberals feel about the treatment convicts receive, but that's about all. A warden I know talked to a guy who said he'd learned two things in prison: welding, so that when he got out he would be more competent as a safe-cracker, and Dale Carnegie lessons, so he could better con the probation officer and the court when he was arrested again. That's an honest statement by an ex-inmate and it's typical. If you don't change the basic problem with the man, all you're doing is turning out a more skilled and better-educated criminal. As long as you maintain the autocratic system, whatever other Mickey Mouse stuff you do is irrelevant, because you can't let a man be raped at night and expect rehabilitation through group counseling and remedial reading during the day. All these things may be valid, or they may not, but they're probably secondary and superfluous if the true function of the prison is to prepare a man for the free world, which it should be.

[A] We have a democracy here on the outside—compared with other political systems, at least—yet the professionals choose an autocratic, dictatorial system to train a man to function in society. It's analogous to training a man in the Gestapo to be president of the P.T.A. The man most likely to obtain parole is the man who adapts to the autocratic system of the prison, the one who "adjusts" and becomes a robot, the one who isn't bothered by somebody telling him when to get up, when to eat and everything else; he's the one most likely to regain his freedom. He's also the most likely to fail outside, because in free-world society, decisions aren't made for him anymore. He has to decide for himself where he's going to live, where he's going to work, what he's going to do, what time he gets up, what time he goes to bed. I'm suggesting that a better preparation for those responsibilities would be a democratic prison system—one based, at least partially, on inmate self-government.

[Q] Playboy: Did you succeed in achieving true self-government at Tucker?

[A] Murton: Definitely. We even held elections in which some of the men voted for the first time in their lives. We set up an inmate council composed of six members; each of the three barracks sent two representatives. I explained voting procedures to the men and some of the inmates whose trust I had cultivated supervised the balloting. It's significant that no prison "wheels" were elected. When the council was established, we split it into two committees—one in charge of work assignments, the other of discipline. The committee on discipline would hear the case of a man who had been charged with violating any rules, allow him to speak and present evidence in his defense, then decide on his guilt or innocence and pass sentence. Since I had outlawed corporal punishment, discipline consisted of extra work loads, denial of privileges or, in extreme cases, a period in solitary—the hole. The committee was remarkably fair and, in many cases, sterner than I would have been. I had veto power, but I never felt obliged to use it.

[A] The committee on prisoner work assignments looked over the records of each new inmate and decided on his function in the prison labor force, based on his outside experience and other factors. It also had the responsibility of determining the appropriate level of custody for each man and deciding which inmates carried guns. These inmates knew more about the minds of convicts than I did and were able to arrive at reasonable conclusions about a man's potential threat to the well-being of the institution and the probability that he would attempt to escape. Again I had veto power but never used it, and none of the men assigned to minimum custody by the inmates ever attempted to escape. Those who weren't able to demonstrate responsibility were given a high-custody grade or restricted until they were able to show they could achieve responsibility. The prisoners know instinctively who these men are. There's no scientific method. You can't tear the walls down and you can't grant everyone the same freedoms in the institution. But I suspect that most prisoners can rise to a higher level of responsibility than they're usually allowed.

[Q] Playboy: How much are they usually allowed?

[A] Murton: Practically none. The traditional approach is to put a man into the system at the maximum-custody level, where he's placed under a microscope and examined and evaluated by people who may or may not be any smarter than he is, and who may or may not decide to reduce his custody level—regardless of his trustworthiness. This happens even to a draft dodger or a pot smoker. Why send him to maximum custody? The custody level should be determined by whether he's going to run or not and whether his running constitutes a real threat to the community. If a man is in for nonsupport, forget it. If he runs oil, he's not going to nonsupport another woman. No hazard to the community. Maybe it would be well to send first offenders and people convicted of nonviolent crimes to the sort of minimum-custody detention camps where the total impact of imprisonment would not be imposed upon them. There are people, of course, who, for a variety of reasons that may be either congenital or environmental, are a physical hazard to the free-world community. They will always be a problem and should be in a maximum-custody unit. Every legal effort should be made to detain them. But the impulse of most wardens is to provide the highest level of custody for everyone, despite the fact that only about 15 percent of the inmates require the severity of custody we impose; and most condemned men aren't even allowed out of their cells.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have condemned men at Tucker?

[A] Murton: Nine—eight of whom were black. When I arrived, they were confined to their cells, which were filthy. One man hadn't been out of his cell for eight years. They weren't allowed to have books, newspapers or magazines. They weren't allowed to communicate with other inmates. They were fed by guards who poked them with sticks and then threw food between the bars, like afternoon feeding at the zoo. One of the first things I did was provide materials for the men to clean and paint their cells. I sent reading material in to them. Then, gradually, I let them move around the cell block. Finally, I allowed them to go outdoors. It was an almost maudlin sight: Men were weeping and kissing the ground. They began to do work around the prison grounds and eat in the mess hall with the other inmates. That was the first instance of this kind of integrated dining in the history of the Arkansas prison system. The death-row men formed a baseball team and built a playing field where they played the other inmates. They became completely integrated into the prison society without any problems. In fact, they were vital to one of the greatest morale boosters we came up with while I was at Tucker.

[Q] Playboy: What was that?

[A] Murton: The chaplain, Jon Kimbrell, who had been around Tucker before my time, but was only allowed to give ten-minute Bible readings to the inmates, who were forced to march to his chapel to hear them, dedicated himself to reform when I arrived and began going around talking to the inmates on a personal basis. He came up with the idea of a prison band. He had heard one of the inmates playing and singing some of his own tunes on an old rebuilt guitar and thought it might be a good idea to encourage an inmate group that could give concerts at the prison. I agreed and spent $2000 from the inmate welfare fund on equipment. Five inmates, including two from death row, formed a group and began playing for the other prisoners. They even traveled off the grounds and played for the patients at the state mental hospital on one occasion. It's hard for people outside to understand how much something like this means. These men had known nothing but sheer drudgery, brutality and hostility for years. At the first concert, trusties and rank men, black and white prisoners, staff and inmates all sat together and enjoyed the music. In Arkansas, that's a revolution. Later, the band played for dances. At the first one. prisoners were allowed to invite their wives or girlfriends—not both—and staff men attended with their families.

[Q] Playboy: And there was no trouble?

[A] Murton: None whatsoever. The traditional prison warden would never have scheduled such an event for fear that somebody would get raped. I demonstrated my trust in the inmates and they responded in kind. Before the evening was over, prisoners were dancing with staff wives and there was even some interracial dancing, which gave my hate mail a real boost.

[Q] Playboy: Even without the racial factor, isn't your kind of program especially vulnerable to charges of "coddling criminals"?

[A] Murton: The issue of coddling is a smoke screen. I've never found an inmate who preferred prison to freedom, whatever privileges he enjoys inside. There is, by definition, no real way of coddling a man in prison. You're not giving him a break by having him there even if you treat him decently. There are some exceptions: old men who have been in prison most of their lives. Their families are all gone, they have no skills, they have no trade, they're weak—and that's their home. There's another group, which is like military men who do 30 years and really thrive on it and aren't comfortable out in the free world. I think there are even a few people who would commit a crime in order to go back to prison, but such an infinitesimally small number that it's not worthy of debate.

[A] When you strip a man of his masculinity, his heterosexual experiences and his freedom of choice, he simply isn't going to prosper. Because as bad as it may be on the street, he can still decide which side of the street he wants to walk on. Of course, you can do what they did with Joe Valachi: Give him a penthouse, like the Bureau of Prisons did—a special suite; he probably lived better there than he did outside. That, I would say, was definitely coddling. But I'm not out to make the prisoner's life posh and comfortable. I'm talking about the common humanity of reminding the inmate that he's a human being. That's where reform starts—as a communication to the inmate that he has dignity as a man.

[Q] Playboy: But don't you also have to communicate to those on the outside? Doesn't the idea of inmate power seem a little dangerous to most people?

[A] Murton: Well, prisoners had been running the Arkansas prison long before I got there, so the citizens weren't too worried about my substituting one form of inmate control for another. As far as educating the public about my objectives, I did the only thing that's effective, that lets both the prisoners and the taxpayers know they're being told the truth: I instituted a completely open press policy. Any newsman from any of the media could come in. No newsman had ever been in Tucker before I got there and it blew their minds. I would say, "Here's the joint. I'll give you a brief orientation, then you can talk to any officer you want to. or to any inmate. If you feel uncomfortable going through the institution unescorted. I'll assign an officer to you. But if you have no fear for your personal safety, you can go into the barracks, into death row. anywhere you want." This way. the inmates know their story is being told and the public feels it's hearing the truth, not just the administration's version of it. I believe in an absolutely free press and I was never burned.

[Q] Playboy: Did any of those who read about your administration and its unorthodox procedures ever raise any objection to them?

[A] Murton: Not really. When you try to change anything, the people who fight you are those who have the most to lose. In the case of prisons, that doesn't include the inmates, who stand to lead better lives: or the public, which is told every day that crime is rising and that they're threatened if they dare walk the streets or fail to lock the doors on their homes. When the recidivism rate is better than 50 percent nationwide, they don't really stand to lose anything when a warden tries to change things with an eye to rehabilitating criminals and thus reducing recidivism. The people who do stand to lose both power and prestige in a campaign of genuine reform are those who have an interest in the old system. That applies to any power structure: In the Army, those who resist reform are the senior officers, who have their lives tied up in the old-style caste system: in the Government, it's those who have administered the programs that have failed for all these years: in penology, it's those who have created and supervised the old autocratic, brutalizing system. When somebody comes in with a new way of doing things, he's telling them that they've failed and that they're going to lose whatever prerogatives they've accumulated. They'll fight and fight hard against that.

[Q] Playboy: Don't they want the same results you do?

[A] Murton: Sure. But they have other interests, too. Almost every man who comes into corrections feels he's going to change things, work to help the inmates, improve the system. But as these new men break in and begin to see failure all around them, they either quit or compromise, and there's a long litany they all use to justify their failure: "We've studied the problem, we know what the answers are and we do the best we can. But we just don't have the money. Give us the funds and we'll produce." This way, they rationalize their own failures and shift the blame elsewhere. The whole process leads to a very sad conclusion and you wind up with men whose convictions and integrity have been diluted and frustrated through years of operating in a system that isn't working and never will, but that they have a stake in.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of experiences bring on this disenchantment?

[A] Murton: It's a pattern, a sort of evolution. Generally a man works his way up to warden, going through a lot of jobs before he gets there and learning a lot on the way. A rookie correctional officer, a "screw," is normally assigned to the third tier, one of the toughest jobs in the prison. After a brief period, the inmate tier boss will come to him and say, "Welcome to the joint. Tonight we're going to do a little hustling." Meaning homosexual prostitution, gambling, pushing or some other type of illegal activity. The officer has two choices: He can either ignore the hustling or he can enforce the rules of the institution—turn violators in. If he turns them in, the inmates will rattle their cages, drag their cups across the bars, stuff paper in the toilets and flush the water down on the tiers below, raise so much hell that the officer's going to be in trouble, because these things will occur only on his shift. The inmates will then force his reassignment to another location. It he goes through about three of those transfers, he'll be fired. That's how the inmates can run the institution; it can't operate without them.

[A] They run all the housekeeping functions; if they strike, no cooking gets done, no heat is provided, no laundry, no services at all. The amount of authority exercised by the staff is the amount granted by the inmates. They let the staff pretend they're in charge and allow them to control routine procedures in the prison. But the administrators maintain the fiction that they're in charge, doing the job, working with their limited resources to correct the abuses. Finally, you get a situation where the corrections people are doing literally anything to keep the prison from erupting, and lying to the public about what's going on. keeping up a good front with educational programs and the like, and trying to keep alive the lie that a prison can follow—like a number of institutions—the medical model whereby the treator is able to help the treatee whether the latter wants help or not. The assumption is that the treators have inherent wisdom that can be communicated by coercion to the treatee. It can't be done. I can't rehabilitate anyone, but I can create an environment wherein change may come about. I can provide a man with positive experiences. In Arkansas, I ate with the prisoners, talked with them In language they could understand, and wore Levis and work shirts.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't they feel you were patronizing them?

[A] Murton: Hell, I'm just a hick from Oklahoma; that sort of thing is what I like to wear. But aside from that, I was running a farm and I was out and around all the time, so I wore clothes that were practical for the job. But the real reason was so that I wouldn't set myself apart. There are certain barriers to communication: One is having your degrees hanging on the wall; another is wearing a suit when your clientele in prison is wearing cruddy uniforms. What you're really doing when you wear a suit is identifying with the establishment. When I'm with the square Johns in the free world, I dress like they do; I wear their uniform so that I can communicate with them; when I'm working with inmates, I dress like they do. In Arkansas, one group of inmates wore Levis, another group wore white and the trusties wore khakis. Some of the trusties told me they outranked me because they wore khakis and I wore Levis.

[A] For the same reason, staff, trusties and rank men all ate in the mess hall. And when the prison board came to visit, I made them take a tray and go through the line with me. You can imagine what that does to the inmates. These are the ways you tell a convict you don't consider yourself any better than he is by status or birth or any special knowledge. That's how you establish rapport, and you can't fake it. It has to be for real. I don't think I'm any better; I may have had some advantages, some experiences that are different, but if you cut me, I bleed just like any inmate. Prison reform starts with the rapport.

[A] My critics would say there's danger in my methods, but they've got 180 years of prison experience to show what doesn't work. They don't have any experience to show what does. I'm arguing that I've demonstrated what works. I'm not talking from a purely theoretical stance. I've been there; I've carried the keys. I'm not a patsy or a Pollyanna. There are people I would never let out of a cell. I used the hole and I used humane punitive measures. A certain segment of the inmate population is dangerous; you grant them as much freedom as you can without threatening the rest of the people in the prison community. But even the men on death row. who have the least to lose by resisting reform—you can only kill them once—will cooperate if you're straight with them.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about capital punishment?

[A] Murton: There's only one valid reason in favor of it and that's retribution. It's one of the few things in the criminal-justice system that we have statistics on. We know there's no such thing as a deterrent effect. Georgia, for example, had more executions since 1930 than any other state; it also has one of the highest homicide rates. There is no empirical evidence—in fact, the empirical evidence demonstrates to the contrary—that execution serves a valid function in a criminal-justice system, unless you accept the validity of retribution. Of course, it does reduce recidivism; you can't argue with that. The man you execute never commits another crime.

[Q] Playboy: What effect do executions have on the other prisoners?

[A] Murton: Brutalizing. Inmates come up to you and ask how you can murder an inmate when murder is against the laws of the state. You can't tell them that it's legal; try to explain legal murder. That poor slob may have done something in a moment of passion; he may have had some emotional problem that precipitated the act. But you're doing it as a cool, calculated act. You're going to squash him like a bug. In many ways, that's less forgivable than the original act.

[Q] Playboy: Were there any executions in Arkansas while you were there?

[A] Murton: No, because all the cases were on appeal. I would have resigned before allowing an execution. I wouldn't have participated in any way. In fact, we converted the death house into an infirmary and closed off "Old Satan," the electric chair. I could never have killed one of the death-row inmates. They were some of the best men I had. I was never quite so moved as when I received a Christmas card from the men on death row, shortly before I left Tucker to take over Cummins. The message was simple: "There is no possible way for us to put what you truly mean to us on this card. If it wasn't for you, there might not have been [a Christmas]. So from our hearts we say, may the God of your father, Jesus Christ, be with you and your family forever."

[Q] Playboy: Why did you leave Tucker?

[A] Murton: It was part of the plan. Once I had control of Tucker, I was to take over Cummins and eventually administer both institutions. The last five months at Tucker were incredibly calm—one attempted escape and no assaults; at the same time. Cummins was getting worse. Everything I found when I went into Tucker prevailed on an even larger scale at Cummins, since they had an inmate population four times the size of Tucker's. The trusties at Cummins knew that at Tucker I had eliminated the corruption that was their source of power, so they were opposed to me even before I got there. The staff opposed me because I represented a threat to them, too. So they kept the prisoners in a high state of agitation for several weeks before my take-over. O. E. Bishop, who had been running the institution, confined all prisoners to their barracks for three weeks before my arrival. One man had been stabbed to death in a fight over a poker game. There had been sit-down strikes. The situation was so volatile that plans had been made to make a detachment of state troopers, National Guardsmen and airborne troops available in case the institution had to be taken over by force.

[Q] Playboy: How much force was actually required?

[A] Murton: I had one man with me when I took over—Chain-saw Jack.

[Q] Playboy: Was there any violence?

[A] Murton: No. We went in quietly. Two of the blacks from death row at Tucker came to Cummins a few days after I took over and talked to the black inmates there and convinced them that working with me would be to their advantage. Chain-saw Jack accomplished the same thing with the white inmates and I worked out a temporary truce with the staff by appointing one of the guards there temporary superintendent to act in my place during the first weeks, when I would be moving between Tucker and Cummins and couldn't be on the scene at all times.

[Q] Playboy: Your successor has accused you of allowing this man to use corporal punishment. Is that true?

[A] Murton: Yes, it is. But I needed the support of the staff while I gradually brought my own people in and changed the trusty assignments. I drafted a memo appointing Clay Smith acting superintendent and instructed him to use any lawful means he thought necessary to maintain order at the prison. I couldn't hold him responsible for the institution without giving him full authority. The strap hadn't been outlawed in Arkansas at that time, so its use fell within his mandate; and he used it once. I had to prove to the staff that I wasn't a fanatic out to undermine them. They could have ruined me by stirring up the inmates. My tactic worked; there was no explosion and, within a few days, Smith resigned. I was able to fire most of the old guards who had relied on the strap and replace them with people who believed in my methods. I never personally authorized corporal punishment as long as I was in Arkansas.

[Q] Playboy: Were you able to institute the kind of reforms at Cummins that had worked at Tucker?

[A] Murton: To a certain extent. Within the 67 days I was there, we cleaned up the mess hall, broke up the rackets and generally brought a sense of order and purpose to the place. At the same time, I turned my attention to the Women's Reformatory at Cummins.

[Q] Playboy: What was the situation there?

[A] Murton: Women have been little discussed in relation to prisons. Hardly a single story or article or book has been written by a female ex-offender. Their problems are almost never brought to the attention of the public. They are truly the neglected prisoners of America. The women in the Arkansas reformatory were lodged in an antiquated facility that looked like a converted chicken house. There were cracks in the walls, the facilities were poor and it was totally segregated. The Negro women were only allowed to eat the scraps of food from the table after the white women left. The matrons stole most of the food that was brought to the reformatory and they had clothing made for their own families by the inmates. The Negro inmates clipped the grass with their fingernails; they wouldn't even give diem clippers. Not that they thought clippers were dangerous. It was just one more mindless humiliation. Those women didn't even have any fingernails; just gnarled stubs.

[A] Worse than that, they were beaten; they had the hide laid on them. They were put without clothing into the hole—a concrete-block structure with no heat and no water, no bedding—and they would have to defecate in a number-ten can. One of my predecessors as superintendent had a buzzer installed beside his bed and he'd just punch it and some gal would have to come trotting over from the reformatory to perform sex acts on him. If it matters, this guy was married. The women were transported to the prison in the back of a van with male convicts—no separation, no supervision. Consequently, they were nil raped before they got to the prison. This is the prison as it was.

[Q] Playboy: What changes did you make?

[A] Murton: I kept the women from being raped. And we got the place cleaned up, the women dressed and fed, and we put a stop to the brutality. But the thing that really broke it as far as the inmates were concerned was when an inmate by the name of Ann Shappy had her baby at the state hospital. She would probably be characterized by many people in that area as poor white trash—not too literate, low socioeconomic group and so forth. She'd had eight children before, by a variety of men, and the father of this particular baby was, at that time, in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. I got a call from the head matron at the women's prison and she told me Mrs. Shappy was very despondent and the prison doctor thought she was going to commit suicide because she'd never been allowed to see her newborn baby, even though she'd given birth to it at the state hospital three weeks before. I called the slate hospital and asked why. "Because she's a convict. " I couldn't believe my ears. So I went over there and asked her, "Do you want your baby with you?" She said she'd like to see it, at least. So we got the baby and brought it to the prison.

[Q] Playboy: How did you authorize the baby's release from the state hospital?

[A] Murton: I let them believe that we'd found a foster home and were placing it with the foster parents. The next day, the welfare department was going to take the baby and put it out for adoption and Mrs. Shappy would never have been able to see it. I had no notion of raising that kid in the prison, but at that time his mother needed her baby and he needed his mother. Unless the mother's beating her baby, it's better for a child to be with the natural mother for the first two years—even in prison—than with anyone else. So I went up and grabbed it and we got a case of formula milk and went on back to the prison. By the time we got there, one of the trusties had given up her bed; they'd strung a curtain across the corner and we had a nursery going there. After a few days, the male inmates down at the carpenter shop built little toys and a high chair. The women's attitude changed, the whole joint changed; we had no problem at all.

[A] By this simple act of humanity, I was able to gain the confidence and respect of the inmates at the Women's Reformatory. I did the same thing at the men's prison by firing a staff man who was stealing. Many of the inmates literally went to the wall with me; they risked their lives by taking on the old system and risking the vengeance of the trusties and guards who ran it. That's how we changed the prison—recognizing these people and giving them a chance.

[Q] Playboy: What finally happened to the baby?

[A] Murton: The "new, progressive" prison board expelled the baby while I was away. The reason wasn't because the people in the community complained, although a few did. The staff tolerated it and the inmates loved it. The reason was because the people in the power structure thought it was unethical to have a baby in prison, because prisons are bad for people. They ought to know; they make them that way. All of this came from those in the system who were afraid of the ways I rocked their little boat. It was just a general resistance to innovation that might eventually threaten their fiefdoms. But it wasn't until I began to expose the system in its most naked brutality that they fought back hard. Hard enough to get me fired.

[Q] Playboy: Are you referring to the murdered inmates whose bodies you uncovered?

[A] Murton: Right. When I arrived at Cummins, the records were in such bad shape that we didn't even know how many men we had in the prison. Some men had two files; brothers were listed in a single set of records; men were still carried who had escaped or been released years before. It was a total mess. Gradually, we got things straightened out, but we discovered a curious thing in the process. Over 200 prisoners were listed as escapees and had never been found—an unusually high number. The prison doctor also found that a number of inmates had been listed as victims of heart disease on death certificates—six within a four-day period.

[A] Then he talked to a 58-year-old black inmate, Reuben Johnson, who said he had buried three prisoners, one of whom was listed as an escapee. He claimed he had seen the man murdered in 1947—on Christmas Eve—by a warden who told him to bury the dead man. Johnson said he built a coffin, put the body in it and buried it out near the levee that kept the floodwaters from the Arkansas River out of the prison fields. He said he had buried two other convicts, one of whom had been beheaded by a warden, the other bludgeoned to death by trusties, in the same location. He said he could point right to the spot.

[A] A reporter from The New York Times called me shortly after I received this information and asked if I had heard anything about murdered inmates buried on prison grounds. I told him we intended to start digging. After his story appeared, we were besieged by newsmen. On January 29, 1968, we took a crew to the spot indicated by Johnson and with reporters and television newsmen watching, began digging. In a few hours, we uncovered three coffins. Preliminary study of the bones indicated that one man's head had been cut oil, another's legs, and one's skull had been pounded to the size of a grapefruit. Since the press was there, all of this was front page and on the evening news. We had a large scandal on our hands in Arkansas, since most of the people who had run the prisons when the murders were committed were still around.

[Q] Playboy: What was the official reaction?

[A] Murton: Governor Rockefeller called a press conference and promised a full investigation that would "let the chips fall where they may." In less than a week, he was begging off this promise, saying he thought the Criminal Investigation Department of the state police should have handled the digging, that I should have cleared it first with him—although I had authorization from his office—and that I was probably not the right man to run the Arkansas prison system. He was being pressured by members of the legislature, some of whom had worked in the prison system or had relatives and friends who had. A grand-jury investigation was held in Lincoln County, where Cummins is located; it consisted for the most part of people who had connections with the prison. The judge in Lincoln County, Henry W. Smith, was the same man whose nephew I had made temporary warden at Cummins. Judge Smith so structured the grand jury that they were even considering indicting me for "grave robbing." They were far more interested in finding out why the men were dug up than who they were and why they were buried. A number of people in the state suggested that I had stumbled across a paupers' graveyard, and the deputy state medical investigator said he doubted that any of the men whose skeletons we had found had died violently. Nobody seemed very concerned about explaining why a head had been cut off and another crushed before these "paupers" were buried. And although there were several depressions in the earth in the field nearby where we found the skeletons, there was no additional digging to see if these were more graves.

[Q] Playboy: And there was no action taken?

[A] Murton: I was fired.

[Q] Playboy: For digging up the graves?

[A] Murton: Well, that wasn't the official charge. They said I wasn't a good administrator. In fact, my supposed lack of administrative talent was so grievous that I was given 24 hours to leave the prison grounds. This was generously extended to three clays of house arrest, so I could have time to pack.

[Q] Playboy: Was your record as an administrator ever challenged?

[A] Murton: Oh, yes. After I was fired, John Haley, chairman of the Board of Correction, drew up a list of reasons for my dismissal. His charges were simply untrue and in some cases ludicrous. Among his specific allegations was the charge that I had ordered asparagus tips for the prison mess hall. I'll admit that something of so serious a nature can't go unpunished, but as it happens, I never ordered the purchase of gourmet items. The State Purchasing Department did, however, buy 137 cases of asparagus tips for other state institutions during that year, so they might have fired the wrong man. Haley did make one responsible charge during the press conference at which he and Rockefeller tried to justify my dismissal to the press: He said I had an abrasive personality. The evidence being that when he or the governor talked about creating "a model prison system" in Arkansas, I had said things like, "You can't get there from here." True. I said it—and you can't.

[Q] Playboy: Has anything been done since to determine the cause of death of those three men, or to find out if others are buried in the same area?

[A] Murton: Nothing, even though there is no statute of limitations on murder in Arkansas or in any other state. My successor, Robert Sarver, even admits that more men may have been secretly murdered and buried in that pasture at Cummins, but he doesn't make any effort to do anything about it. He says it's not his responsibility, that the local prosecutor should conduct the investigation not the prison administration. All this is technically correct, but four years have passed since we first discovered the bodies. I think that indicates just how concerned the law-enforcement people are about the murder of inmates in Arkansas prisons. Sarver makes high-sounding statements about how he's concerned with the living and with trying to make prison conditions better for them. Well, I wonder how the living feel about working over the bodies of inmates who were murdered in the night and secretly buried by men who will never have to answer for their crimes. No prisoner in Arkansas can believe that justice is anything but a travesty as long as the resources of the state can be mobilized to punish him for his crime while the barbarism of state officials goes unpunished even when the evidence is clear.

[A] I don't want to single Sarver out, however. He's no worse, and in many ways better, than a number of men in the corrections profession. At the last convention of the American Correctional Association, I introduced a resolution condemning acts of murder in the Arkansas prison system and urging that state to take action against such crimes by holding a thorough investigation to see that justice is done and the guilty parties punished. It was voted down 36 to 70. One hundred members of the association didn't even vote. Couldn't decide which way to stand on the issue of murder.

[Q] Playboy: Even though nothing has been done to determine if more bodies are buried on the prison grounds, hasn't Sarver, as he claims, continued your campaign to reform the Arkansas prison system?

[A] Murton: I can't see how he could make that claim. Since I left, the inmate council has been abolished; the open-press policy has been eliminated; death-row inmates are once again restricted to their cells for most of the day. Conditions at the women's reformatory have reverted to those of the old, brutal days. Women are thrown naked into isolation units that have no plumbing, water or heat. They are fed miserably and sometimes beaten. Things became so bad that women began to attempt escape—something that had never happened before. In 1968, the then-superintendent at Cummins, Victor Urban, had inmates chained to a fence for several days as punishment. The men had to sleep on the ground and defecate publicly. Shortly after this, 100 inmates sat in the prison yard to protest work loads, inadequate food and other conditions. Although they constituted no threat to prison security, did not riot and made no attempt to escape, they were shotgunned. Twenty-four men were wounded. One lost an eye.

[A] The inmate power structure is once again operating a number of rackets, so violence among prisoners has increased. There have been at least 18 stabbings and seven deaths since I was fired. Most of the staff I hired left with me or were fired shortly after my dismissal. The inmates who had worked with me and taken great risks to bring about reform weren't so lucky. They had to stay and face the vengeance of guards and inmates who regained their old positions of power. Chain-saw Jack was blinded in one eye when an inmate attacked him with a log chain. His assailant was never punished. The action that finally demonstrated the total bankruptcy of Arkansas prison reform was a court ruling. Judge f. Henley Smith, a Federal District Judge, ruled in February of 1970 that confinement in the Arkansas penitentiary was per se unconstitutional because it violated an inmate's right to protection against cruel and unusual punishment. He gave the prison officials several months to present a plan for reform to him.

[Q] Playboy: Have they done so?

[A] Murton: Yes, and he's rejected three plans to date. He's insisting that the state prison system be brought up to minimal constitutional standards and he's threatened to close the prison if they don't do it. I mean totally close it. They'll have to board their prisoners with some other state or some other system, unless he receives a plan that's acceptable to him.

[Q] Playboy: In fact, aren't prison administrators more often hindered than helped by the judicial system? Chief Justice Warren Burger recently addressed the American Bar Association on this issue, contending that bail procedures and long court delays are keeping men in prison who shouldn't be there and in effect, perpetuating the cycle of criminality.

[A] Murton: I view prison as only part of the whole system. You have to consider not only the system of criminal justice but the entire societal matrix. There are social, economic and political factors that perpetuate the cycle of criminality. Therefore, any single attack on only one segment of that conglomerate is futile. It does no good to talk about reform of the prison from the standpoint of breaking criminality unless you're talking about reform of probation, parole, the courts, the bail system and a variety of other things. And that can't happen until the public understands that experiments in many of these areas aren't threatening to them, that they don't involve turning murderers and rapists loose on a whim.

[A] Take probation. Since many offenders are placed on probation anyway, why not try something new? In an experiment in California, now being duplicated in other states, probationers were randomly placed under supervision, from a maximum level of daily contact to no contact at all—the probation officer never saw the probationer and never heard from him. Failure was determined if the probationer was arrested and convicted of a subsequent crime, including parole violation. The highest failure rate was with those who had daily contact with the probation officer. Those who had the lowest rate never saw the probation officer. What are the implications of that? Maybe that many offenders don't need a probation officer at all.

[Q] Playboy: What sort of restrictions are put on a man on probation or on parole under the present system?

[A] Murton: Generally, without permission, he can't get a driver's license, he can't get married, he can't buy a car, he can't change jobs, he can't go into a saloon and drink whiskey. Parole is really an extension of the prison; it's custody without walls. If parole is supposed to be easing the man back into full responsibility for himself, how can you have Big Brother checking him in at night? It's the same way with state-operated halfway houses. A halfway house is supposedly a transition from the prison to the street. If a guy's on parole and is messing up and needs a little closer supervision, you move him back into the halfway house so he gets a little tighter structure, where you can watch him a little closer and maybe you won't have to send him back to prison. Excellent idea, excellent theory. But it doesn't always work that way. A man has to sign in and sign out. He can't have female guests in his room. He has to submit to bed checks. This sort of treatment at the hands of the state after a man has been physically released from prison does nothing but remind him of his degradation.

[A] The best halfway houses are those operated by ex-inmates, because they know how to talk to a man. They know that confinement and supervision of a man who has committed a crime is only part of the solution. He also needs some basic understanding and respect. There's an uninformed notion that once you convict a man and send him to prison, that solves the problem. But about 95 percent of these guys come back—if they don't die in prison. What we should be doing is turning these men out of prison with the proper training—not just in manufacturing license plates, because about the only place you can practice that trade is inside a prison—then help them get jobs and offer the help of the state in solving their problems. But above all, we must start treating these people as humans. Every man who goes to prison isn't a moral reprobate. Until we stop behaving as though prisoners are fallen people whom we can pity and supervise and straighten out by imposing some formal "book" solution, we're going to re-enforce their antisocial attitudes.

[A] So parole, halfway houses, work release and all the rest of the ways we have of working a former prisoner back into society are good only as far as they're administered by people who don't assume a posture of superiority to the man they're trying to help. This change in attitude is what I want to see. All the money for all the high-priced help in the world is useless if we insist on treating those who have performed criminal acts with condescension and authoritarianism.

[Q] Playboy: Can anything be done before a man gets to prison to reduce the chance of his repeating criminal acts?

[A] Murton: Any number of things. Prison should be the last resort. We should be trying to keep lawbreakers out of prison. Consider the first offenders who do go to prison and fall into the cycle of criminality. The poor man's kid goes to the reformatory and the rich man's kid goes to the military academy. Or we can talk about suburbia, where you'll find essentially the same incidence of criminal conduct as in the ghetto. It's just handled informally. The adolescent vandal winds up on probation rather than in juvenile hall. I'm not suggesting that the rich should have imposed upon them the system that the poor have. I'm suggesting that the rich could share with the poor their method of escaping the criminal-justice system, because in many cases these informal systems seem to work and the kid does not recidivate. Those who could benefit by probation should be taken out of the prison system. One could talk about the whole court process; one could talk about the system of criminal justice for the rich and the system for the poor; or about the bail system, which in most cases is based more on a man's ability to pay than the danger he represents to society or the likelihood that he won't appear in court.

[Q] Playboy: Is there any validity to the charge that our system of justice is biased against racial minority groups as well as against the poor?

[A] Murton: It's weighted against the powerless in our society, and that includes not only the poor and the indigent but the black, the Indian and the Spanish American. But this is probably more a function of the fact that they can't retain adequate counsel than of racial bias. But it's a cold fact that no white man in Arkansas has ever been convicted and sentenced to the chair for raping a black woman. Yet Negroes are condemned for the opposite crime all the time. So there's no denying that there's a differential enforcement of the law. Until such basic injustice is corrected, it's a little fanciful to think that more sociological expertise among prison, probation and parole authorities is going to infuse a sense of responsibility to society in the people who are convicted of crimes. They're simply going to believe they've been shafted because they're unwhite and unrich. And they'll behave accordingly.

[A] When prisoners look around and see only people like themselves inside the walls, they take it as evidence that they're being singled out by society as scapegoats. Inmates aren't dumb and they aren't entirely cut off from the outside world. They know that organized crime flourishes, that corporation officials are violating the law and getting away with it, that public officials are making and taking payoffs and being re-elected in spite of it. Until recently, you had no college-educated people to speak of in the inmate population. Now, with people like Joan Baez' husband, David Harris, and many other "political prisoners" coming into the institutions, there is going to be a change in inmates' political attitudes. It's too early to tell exactly what direction it will take. But wardens are already talking about it, and not with any gleeful anticipation, because people like Harris see tire treatment of prisoners as part of a general political malaise, something that can be changed through political action. Prisoners never had any sense of this before; they fought back in very unsophisticated ways, individually or in mobs. Once they learn the language and tactics of confrontation, we may see unrest in prisons that will make some of the college disturbances look very tame.

[Q] Playboy: You've said that prison is a microcosm of society and should be studied as such. Doesn't this contradict what you just said about most prisoners being from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds?

[A] Murton: Not really. I don't think prisons represent an exact one-to-one model of the society that establishes them. But they are a perfect model of the development of power systems. There is no masking in prison. Nobody worries about the social amenities and that sort of thing. So prisons should be studied by people who are interested in the motivating factors involved in human behavior, in understanding how power systems evolve and how people are manipulated. We can evaluate how far society has progressed on the evolutionary scale by examining how it treats its deviates, what form punishment takes for those who commit antisocial acts.

[A] There have always been prisoners, slaves, people awaiting trial, execution or some other form of punishment. In the late 18th Century, the Quakers thought a man who was locked up alone in a cell would have time to dwell on his sins and become penitent. Hence the term penitentiary. But they soon learned that people in solitary confinement tend to go insane. So they started letting prisoners have some human contact—but not talk. They worked side by side and all the rest, but they weren't allowed to talk. Then, toward the last third of the 19th Century, there were a number of changes. The prison began to be seen as a place to reform a man through education and work projects. Parole and probation came along. Juveniles were taken out of the prison system. But there were still problems. One was overcrowding; another was outside opposition, in this century, to prison industries. Labor unions were able to outlaw the interstate sale o£ prison-made goods, arguing that it was unfair for free workers to have to compete with inmate labor.

[A] So drudgery became the name of the game and, today, we have prisoners making license plates and breaking big ones into little ones—all this despite the innovations that have come along, all the things the professionals talk about. The official posture of the American Correctional Association is that prisons were created to implement the philosophy of retribution, and then moved into an era of reform of the individual and of the institution, and that the next few years will be devoted to "reintegration," as they call it—trying to get the offender from the prison back into society in such a manner that he won't commit criminal acts again. That's the official posture. But I really don't see that much difference; there's a difference in terminology, but the reality is still essentially the same as it was in the 18th Century: punitive.

[Q] Playboy: Can you suggest a more humane form of imprisonment?

[A] Murton: A society will always have its outcasts. Even in prison, which is a sub-society consisting entirely of outcasts, you still find outcasts—those who are sent to solitary. Maybe we should find a new way of marking people as deviant. We had other means before the modern prison came along: branding, exile, the stocks and all sorts of other degradation ceremonies. It might be possible to come up with some sort of new ritual by which a man is ostracized for antisocial behavior. I don't know exactly what it would be, but until we come up with something better, the prison should at least be in a continuous state of reform.

[A] Certain inmate groups and radical reformers have taken up the cry, "Tear down the walls." They believe that the present system is a monster and that we should quit feeding it. But they're like some of the radicals in the larger society who want to abolish the system: They don't have anything to replace it with. The people who want to abolish the prison system don't have an alternative method of taking dangerous people off the streets. I want to see the walls torn down, too; but until they are and something better replaces them. I want to help the inmates who are still behind them.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you lose any chance of doing this by alienating your employers and getting fired? Couldn't you accomplish more, as Sarver contends, by bending a little and cooperating with elected officials instead of attacking them?

[A] Murton: I do polarize people, no question about it. I was fired in Alaska when I testified before the legislature about prison conditions there. I had helped establish the system when Alaska became a state and was in the process of building a model prison camp. But I couldn't get any support from the governor and his people. When I was invited to testify, I embarrassed the governor and he fired me. But I would do it again. Rockefeller didn't want the abuses in the Arkansas prisons spread all over the national media, so he got rid of me. But I didn't create the problems. When I tried to improve them and he and his staff resisted, that made news. It was news, too, when I discovered evidence of mass murder. I wouldn't do anything differently in Arkansas, if I had it to do over. There is no easy road to true and lasting prison reform. Attention has to be called to the reality of prison conditions, and this is certain to make some people look bad—especially those who have created the situation. So whenever a true reformer comes in, he's going to be opposed by legislators and other government officials who have a stake in the old order. Eventually, he'll push too hard and they'll get rid of him. It's a cycle that's been going on for a long time. I'm not the first—or the last—person who's tried to reform a prison and been dismissed just as real change was being made.

[Q] Playboy: Couldn't you settle for a rate of change that wouldn't create so much political hostility?

[A] Murton: Not without losing the trust of the inmates. You can't fake it with them.

[Q] Playboy: But as you said, the inmates are worse off now than they were when you had the job. Which is worse: incurring their distrust or being responsible—by leaving the job—for returning them to inhuman living conditions?

[A] Murton: Inmate trust is an absolute thing. You can have their welfare in mind and still not have them believe in you or cooperate with you. If they see you make small compromises with their rights and well-being, they'll suspect that you may be willing to sell out when more critical issues are at stake. So they won't work with you. And until you have the inmates on your side, there's going to be no real reform. The prison can't run without the inmates, since they run the joint in so many ways. But if you have them on your side, anything is possible. First, however, you have to go to bat for them. Show a little trust in them and they'll respond. That's what I did in Arkansas—and it drove people crazy. You can't just move into a prison and take over and say, "Let bygones be bygones." There are going to be prisoners there who have been beaten or tortured and guards who have done it. There are going to be powerful inmates who run rackets. There are likely to be state officials involved in some sort of corruption. The brutal guards have to be exposed and held accountable or the inmates aren't going to trust you and believe that you have any real concern for their rights. The prison rackets have to be broken up or the inmates are going to be assaulted. The corruption has to be eliminated or you won't be able to look a prisoner in the eye and tell him that you're justified in keeping him in because he broke the law and criminal acts should be punished. But when you do these things, you make enemies and they fight back. You cause a fuss and people get embarrassed. They'd rather have things quiet, so they get rid of you and bring in someone who promises tranquillity.

[A] Now, I don't have any political ambitions and I don't resist legitimate political authority. If they tell me to paint a barn red instead of green, hell, I'll paint it red. But I cannot accept the mere facade of reform and neither can the inmates; when real issues come up, questions about true prison reform, I have to take a stand for what I believe is right—first, because I'm a man and I value my own integrity; second, because if I don't, the next warden with a riot on his hands is going to be Tom Murton. Since I left Arkansas, a lot of people have gone around saying I make waves and that I don't cooperate. I wasn't able to get a job although I have fours degrees and a teaching certificate. I'm a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota now, but before that, I was unemployed for two and a half years. I was on food stamps. I applied for a job in the Alaskan prison system and Rockefeller said he couldn't recommend me because, while I was an "extraordinary penologist," I had "other shortcomings"—like honesty, presumably. I wasn't allowed to teach in Alaska and, at first, neither was my wife. Now, I don't think you get this kind of treatment just because you're ill-mannered. You get it because you pose some sort of threat to things as they are. I love prison work. I feel strongly about inmate welfare. Because I feel strongly, I want to be on the inside. But I also want to do what's right. Under the present system, that makes me a pariah.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you'll ever be allowed to work inside a prison again?

[A] Murton: Yes. This may be the decade of prison reform. Human rights will be provided by the prison administrators, imposed by the courts or seized by the inmates. But as Martin Luther King, Jr., once observed, freedom is never willingly granted by the oppressor; it must be taken by the oppressed. So we will probably see more riots like those at three New York State institutions and people like myself will finally be hired because the others have failed again. I don't want to see this happen, but when it does, I'll go back—because my real place isn't in the ivory tower; it's in the gun tower.