Hell in Arkansas

To most people outside penitentiary walls, the term prison reform is a meaningless abstraction. Only when the particular problems of a particular prison break into the open is there public pressure for correction. Such was the case in Arkansas last week. For years, Arkansas legislators have been referring to their two large convict farms as a "model system." The farms turned in a handsome profit that averaged about $1,400,000 over the years from the sale of farm products, and few prisoners ever seemed to escape. But the realities of prison life in Arkansas were far removed from the comfortable assumption. The point was brought home painfully when three skeletons, one decapitated, one with its skull crushed, the third with its legs broken back, were unearthed from shallow, unmarked graves in a field of the state's Cummins prison farm.

It was not the first hint of brutality and murder at the farms. Shortly after Governor Winthrop Rockefeller took office in 1967, he released a 67-page state-police prison report, ordered and then suppressed by former Governor Orval Faubus, that painted a picture of hell in Arkansas. To maintain discipline, prisoners were beaten with leather straps, blackjacks, hoses. Needles were shoved under their fingernails, and cigarettes were applied to their bodies. For the truly unregenerate, there was the "Tucker telephone," a form of electric-shock torture used by James Bruton, former superintendent of the Tucker prison farm. A prisoner was strapped to a table. Wires leading from an old-fashioned crank telephone were attached to one of his big toes and to his genitals. The crank was spun, and the victim got a series of electric shocks.

Grotesque Practices. When Thomas Murton, Rockefeller's 39-year-old reform appointee to the prison superintendent's job, took over early in 1967, enforced homosexuality and traffic in liquor and narcotics were rampant at Tucker and the Cummins prison farm.

Trusties, armed with shotguns, were squeezing weekly payoffs out of the "rankmen," or ordinary inmates, who worked under their supervision. Often the trusties, who lived in unlocked TV-and-refrigerator-equipped shacks, fired rifles inches over rankmen's heads simply for sport. Murton quickly abolished many of the grotesque practices, but he was troubled by continuing rumors that prisoners had been murdered and buried on the prison grounds. Last week Murton ordered digging started in a treeless pasture at Cummins. Led to the site, which contained between 15 and 25 unexplained earth depressions, by strapping, 59-year-old Inmate Reuben Johnson, the workmen uncovered the three skeletons.

Murder for Money. Johnson, who has spent some 30 years on the farms for murder and robbery, identified one of the skeletons as Jake Jackson, a Negro whom he had helped bury on Christmas Eve, 1946. Prison records indicated that Jackson had "escaped" two days later. Around Labor Day in 1940, he said, "they killed a bunch of them--I'd say about 20." Asked why the men had been murdered, Johnson said: "For money. You need money to make it here." Often he had to pay $2 or $3 a week for protection himself.

Another inmate, 51-year-old James Wilson, laconically reported that even returning escapees were gunned down. "If you had your hands up," Wilson said, "you ought to been praying. They going to kill you anyway." Then the killers would strip some of them "buck-naked and go on and drop 'em in."

More than 200 prisoners are listed as "escapees" from the farms since 1915. Some state officials dismissed the prisoners' stories, speculating that the skeletons uncovered may have been men buried in paupers' graves after natural deaths. But one reporter noted that the farm's potter's field is at least a mile from last week's digging site. Said Murton: "When a guy can go out and show you where the bodies are buried, and you go out and dig and there they are, it just has to increase his credibility."

Pathological tests on the skeletons are now being run at the University of Arkansas Medical Center. But even when they are completed, warned Governor Rockefeller, details of the investigation will be withheld from the public until a full state-police report is compiled. There is no point, he said, in "washing dirty linen for weeks on end as each body is dug up."

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