From Killers to Priests: Six Men Behind the Bars

Most U.S. inmates are faceless, nameless men--mere crime statistics converted to prison numbers. But even behind the walls, some have overcome that anonymity, or retained their original notoriety. Among them:

EDGAR SMITH. No American has endured death row longer (13 years, 7 months) than Edgar Smith--and few inmates have achieved greater self-rehabilitation. In 1957 he was a high school dropout of 23, an ex-Marine and jobless drifter. That summer he was charged with killing an acquaintance, a Ramsey, N.J., schoolgirl whose body was found in a deserted sand pit, her skull crushed by a 14-lb. boulder. Though Smith vehemently denied guilt, he was convicted on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to die in the electric chair at Trenton State Penitentiary. Instead of vegetating in his cell, Smith, now 36, has fully employed his genius-level IQ (154). He has read scores of books, rushed through college correspondence courses and written two published books, one a novel (A Reasonable Doubt) and the other a blast at U.S. justice (Brief Against Death). Still proclaiming his innocence, he has also become a first-rate jailhouse lawyer, personally filing appeals that even the judge who sentenced him admits show "the consummate skill of a seasoned practitioner."

GEORGE JACKSON. As a small boy growing up in one of Chicago's black ghettos, Jackson was so intrigued by his first sight of a white skin that he walked up and touched it. His curiosity earned him a swift blow on the head with a baseball bat. Since that time, Jackson, whose brother Jonathan was cut down while leading a raid on the Marin County courthouse last August, has battled white society. For eleven years, Jackson, 29, has served time in California prisons for the $70 robbery of a gas station -- 7 1/2 years of that time in solitary confinement. Though eligible for parole after his first six months, he has been repeatedly turned down, and continues to promote black rage and militancy among inmates. His own rage has gone partly into self-help training: 1,000 push-ups a day, heavy reading, and the writing of letters so striking that they have recently been published in a book, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. He now sits in San Quentin's maximum-security wing, awaiting trial on new charges of murdering a white prison guard at Soledad Prison last year. If convicted, Jackson faces a mandatory sentence: death in the gas chamber.

JAMES HOFFA. Once the omnipotent union boss who ruled the nation's 1,650,000 Teamsters from his elegant Washington office, Jimmy Hoffa, 57, now lives in a first-floor cell in the medium-security federal prison at Lewisburg, Pa. During the first four years of his eight-year term for jury tampering, Hoffa the tough guy has seemingly been a model prisoner. He spends most of his days working in a humid subbasement shop making and repairing mattresses for his fellow prisoners. He gets no pay, whereas his former salary was $100,000 a year. Polite but somewhat remote from other inmates, Hoffa lifts barbells in the prison gym, attends church services, does a lot of reading and takes periodic walks round the prison's quarter-mile circular track. He may not walk out of the prison gates for many years. Rejected for parole in 1969, he gets a second chance this March. But if his current appeals fail, he faces four more five-year sentences on charges that he misused union funds.

THE BERRIGANS. After being convicted for their 1967-68 draft-board raids in Baltimore and Catonsville, Md., the nation's most famous peace criminals. Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, jumped bail and eluded FBI agents for weeks before their capture last year. Despite their confinement in the minimum-security federal prison at Danbury, Conn., the two Roman Catholic priests are still bucking the system. Daniel, 49, a Jesuit and poet, is serving a three-year sentence and working as a dental assistant. Philip, 47, a member of the Josephite fathers and a polemicist, is in for six years and doing office work. Together they lead a great books seminar for their fellow inmates. But the imprisoned priests' main interest is prison reform. As self-assigned advocates for the nation's 20,000 federal prisoners, the Berrigans have already filed a class-action suit asking federal courts to halt censorship of prisoners' manuscripts, and to allow all inmates to preach, write and teach freely behind the walls.

JAMES EARL RAY. Officially, he is just another state prisoner in cellblock C at Brushy Mountain Penitentiary n Petros, Tenn. But Warden Lewis Tollett keeps a special eye on the man who is serving 99 years for the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and vows that he will never escape. Indeed, Ray, 42, would need a miracle to bust out of Tennessee's only maximum-security prison, a stark structure of white stone in the rugged Cumberland Mountains, where inmates used to dig coal round the clock for 25-c- a ton. Things are far better now, but only a masochist would try to get away. Ray's isolated world consists of his cellblock's 21 other inmates, some of them blacks. Up at 5:30 a.m., he spends eight hours a day as a "block man" (janitor) sweeping and mopping the place, gets a brief recess in the prison gym. At 5 p.m., he is locked up, then toils over his typewriter. Ray and his lawyers still hope for a new trial in state criminal court in Memphis, so each night he churns out more legal memorandums for the lawyers before going to sleep.

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