Death in San Quentin

IN his book Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, the author repeatedly prophesied that he would not leave the California prison system alive. Last week the grim prediction came true. In one of the bloodiest prison upheavals in recent years, Jackson--robber, author, radical hero, self-styled revolutionary--was killed while attempting to escape from the California State Prison at San Quentin. With him died three prison guards and two fellow inmates.

The bloodletting lasted only a few tragic minutes, but it is as surrounded with controversy as was Jackson himself. According to prison authorities, it began when Jackson was led, without handcuffs, from the maximum-security Adjustment Center--the prison home of death row inmates on one floor and those deemed incorrigible on another--to a nearby visitors' area for a conference with a lawyer. Before leaving the Adjustment Center, Jackson was made to strip for a thorough "skin search," a regular routine for Adjustment Center inmates. As was usual during such a search, his thick Afro-style hair was briskly rubbed to loosen any contraband that might be concealed there.

A Single Bullet. While Jackson was being led across the landscaped courtyard, a white lawyer, Stephen M. Bingham, 29, was undergoing a search in the visitors' center. His briefcase was examined by guards; Bingham walked through a metal-detecting device. When Jackson arrived, the two men sat together at a small table and talked for about 30 minutes. Bingham then left the room, and Guard Frank DeLeon escorted Jackson across the prison yard back to the Adjustment Center.

There, another skin search was just beginning when, according to prison officials, a guard noticed a gun in Jackson's hair. Jackson, said the officials, screamed, "This is it!" When a guard came to get DeLeon for another assignment, a shot was fired through a glass door and the mayhem began.

Someone threw the switch that controls the locks on the first floor of the Adjustment Center; 25 prisoners were freed from their cells. There is confusion over the precise sequence of events, but before order was restored Jackson was dead. So were Guards DeLeon, Paul Krasenes and Jere Graham, and two inmates, John Lynn and Ronald Kane. The throats of all five had been slashed with a razor blade imbedded in a toothbrush handle, and two of the guards had been shot. Four of the bodies were piled into Jackson's cell, perhaps saving the life of a wounded guard who was covered by the corpses. Jackson and another prisoner had dashed from the Adjustment Center, sprinted across an open courtyard toward a wall in an attempt to escape. Jackson was killed by a single bullet fired through the top of his head from a guard tower above the courtyard. The other prisoner was captured unharmed.

Inside the Center, inmates huddled at the far end of the cell block holding two wounded guards as hostages. Prison authorities fired into the building, and during the confusion the guards escaped. With that, the uprising folded. The 25 prisoners were led into the courtyard, forced to strip and lie manacled on the ground. When one of the prisoners moved, he was shot in the leg by a guard. It was the last shot of a violent day. According to lawyers who visited the prison later in the week, the inmates remained naked on the ground from 4 that afternoon until after 10 p.m., when they were returned to cells on another floor of the Center. Some prisoners, the lawyers charged, were beaten by the guards.

It was two days before any of the prisoners, even those in minimum security sections, were allowed out of their cells for exercise or hot meals. Five days after the uprising, the first visitors --lawyers whose clients were held in the Adjustment Center--were allowed inside the prison's walls.

A Dry Run. Challenges to the official version of the incident were immediate. Jackson's mother said her son had told her weeks ago that he feared an attempt on his life would be made in the near future. Said Mrs. Georgia Jackson: "They killed him and set him out in the yard and photographed him and then said he tried to escape." Prison officials, on the other hand, insisted that Jackson had planned his escape over a long period of time. They said a letter had been intercepted that outlined the escape plot in detail, and they alleged that a "dry run" had been made earlier in the month during a visit from Jackson's sisters, his niece and two nephews. Despite their purported knowledge of the escape plans, prison authorities took no extra precautions during Jackson's visit with Bingham. Normally, Jackson was handcuffed while seeing visitors; last week he was not, prison officials explained, because he had been "cooperative" in the past.

Courtroom Violence. Other apparent inconsistencies in the official account were pointed out by Jackson's lawyers and family. The Spanish-made 9-mm. gun that Jackson reportedly carried in his hair was approximately 8 in. long--too large not to be spotted immediately or indeed, it would seem, to be Carried in his hair as prison officials claimed. Later, spokesmen at San Quentin announced that the gun was concealed under a wig, which they said they had found in the cell block plumbing. Bingham, the nephew of New York Congressman Jonathan Bingham and the grandson of a former Connecticut Governor and Senator, was suspected of smuggling the gun into the prison inside a tape recorder. After leaving the prison, Bingham had lunch with another uncle. He then disappeared and has not been heard from since. At week's end, no official investigation into the conflicting charges had been started.

The violence inside the prison soon spread to a San Francisco courtroom. Jackson and two other inmates charged with the 1970 murder of a Soledad prison guard were scheduled for pretrial hearings. The remaining "Soledad brothers," as they are known, Fleeta Drumbo and John Clutchette, stripped off their shirts in court in an attempt to expose bruises from beatings that they said they had received after the uprising. Two days later, in a tense, spectator-filled courtroom newly equipped with a bulletproof barrier between spectators and the bench, another hearing took place. When Judge Carl Allen repeatedly denied defense motions to investigate the beating charge, Mrs. Doris Maxwell, Clutchette's mother, screamed, "You ain't no honorable judge!" Bailiffs, later reinforced by helmeted San Francisco policemen, moved into the spectator section. A fight broke out, and four persons were injured.

A Special Page. George Jackson's death and the accusations that followed pose the challenge to the American penal system that Jackson sought to make in life. "There will be a special page in the book of life for the men who have crawled back from the grave," he wrote his mother in 1966. To Jackson the grave was the life of black people in a racist society, the prison a kind of cemetery for the not yet dead, and the journey back from both could only be made through violent revolution. "All the gentle, shy characteristics of the black man have been wrung unceremoniously from my soul. The buffets and blows of this have and have-not society have engendered in me a flame that will live, live to grow, until it either destroys my tormentor or myself." Last week in San Quentin, the flame burned out.

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