Cool Hand Bob

Twentieth Century Fox paid Robert Redford $3 million to portray penologist Tom Murton in the film Brubaker, released last week. Tom Murton's lifetime earnings will probably never total $3 million. Or even $2 million.

A dozen years ago inmates at Tucker State prison in Arkansas ran the place. Prisoners convicted of murder toted guns, bullied their fellows into the fields at dawn and laughed them back to their cells at dusk. These prisoner/guards--called trusties--beat other inmates with a devilish tool called a strap, a leather slab with a wooden handle that, when handled "properly," can knock a victim six inches into the air. They tortured them by running pins and razor blades along the soft flesh under their fingernails. They gang-raped them in the barred dormitories where each prisoner slept with an arm flung over his eyes to block out light from the naked light bulbs that were never turned off.

The trusties worked hand in hand with the hired help, stealing provisions and supplies ordered for the inmates and selling them in black markets throughout Arkansas and as far away as Chicago. Those who managed the kitchen took bribes as payment for sand-wiches. Poorer prisoners made do with a spoonful of rice a day, plus soybeans, corn bread and water. The food was rancid and contaminated by weevils.

Meanwhile, the trusties managed the huge herd of livestock owned by the prison, eating meat at every meal and employing prison labor to build them homes on the prison grounds, complete with appliances and televisions.

Physical punishment and violence was a way of life in the prison. Life was cheap, after all, and a conspiracy of silence spread from within the prison walls to the Arkansas borders. But when a prisoner couldn't be controlled by beatings or chainings or bone-crushing labor in the flat fertile prison fields, the trusties used "The Tucker Telephone." They would take the offending prisoner to the infirmary, strip him and attack electrodes to his big toe and penis, which were wired to an old-fashioned rural telephone. By cranking the handle, the "operator" discharged six volts through the man's body. A "long distance call" could render a man permanently sterile, or insane.

Complaints about prison conditions grew so loud that Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, elected on a prison reform platform, hired Tom Murton to clean up Tucker Prison farm as a warm-up to overhauling the Arkansas prison system. Murton made drastic changes; he assigned power to the prisoners and removed authority from the trusties. He put an end to the torture, even abolishing use of the strap. He released death-row prisoners from their dark, solitary cells where they had been sequestered for months or years without human contact, reading material, plumbing or light. He halted the corruption that had drained prison supplies, making it possible to feed the prisoners full meals with meat at every sitting. He instituted a prisoners' council that met regularly to legislate changes and rule on problems of discipline. He organized baseball games, a prison band, even a prison band, even a prison dance. He put an effective end to homosexual rapes and a simple, honest security system cut the number of escapes from 38 per year to one during his ten-month tenure at Tucker.

In January, 1968 Murton moved to Cummins Prison Farm, a much larger institution with abuses even more widespread than at Tucker. This time, the trusties and guards were prepared for the new warden and Murton was in physical danger for several days until prisoners from Tucker were brought over to convince Cummins inmates that the new "Man" would be a good thing for everybody.

A few weeks later Murton found the bodies.

An old Black prisoner came to the new warden with the horrifying news that he had helped bury three inmates in the corner of the prison fields several years earlier. The next day, Murton selected a group of men and, accompanied by newspaper reporters and television crews, set out on a rainy morning to dig for the graves. By the middle of the day, three coffins had been unearthed and Murton figured that as many as 200 other graves had been dug in the field. Each grave represented a prisoner who had been murdered by prison authorities and discreetly buried.

Authorities charged that the coffins had been illegally removed from a paupers' graveyard on the prison grounds. But Murton had evidence for his charges of murder. The skeletons had multiple fractures, the legs had been broken to fit the bodies into the coffins, and one man's skull had been crushed to the size of a grapefruit.

A month later, Murton was out, fired from his post in Arkansas and unable to land a teaching job despite his four degrees in penology and criminology and experience as a university professor. The fraternity of prison wardens, naturally gregarious and even boastful, ostracized him. Murton threw up his hands and conceded the end of his criminology career.

Despite his best efforts, which included a book detailing the grisly conditions at Tucker and Cummins, and appearances on the Dick Cavett show, Murton could not prevail upon Arkansas state authorities to investigate the murders, despite the existence of an unlimited statute of limitations on murder. Only in 1970 was Murton vindicated when the Supreme Court ruled that confinement in Arkansas prisons was cruel and unusual punishment and therefore unconstitutional.

But the wave of reform ended when Tom Murton left Arkansas. The new warden reverted to a strict trustie system that eliminated the prisoners' new-found sense of responsibility. A few of Murton's innovations were retained but the system was not new, only dressed-up. "Cosmetic changes only domesticate the animal but don't kill it," Murton says.

Murton is a realistic idealist: "I don't think prison reform is attainable," he says matter-of-factly. "It's a goal we won't ever reach but we can get closer." He smiles. "We don't have Jeffersonian democracy either."

Murton didn't play by the rules. Throughout his life he has flaunted a cardinal rule: never expose the system you're working for. His role as he sees it is to uncover the abuses of the old system and point the way toward a new system. At times he sounds like an evangelist.

"You have to pay dues for living," he insists. "Those who have many talents have to do more. It's always a risk but systems only change if you take a risk. If nobody ever tried we'd still be getting our meat by clubbing a saber-toothed tiger every night."

For all the good he did the prisoners at Tucker, and for all the good he might have done at Cummins, Murton still has no regrets about revealing the murders, the incident that led to his dismissal. "Murder is non-negotiable," he says passionately. "Inmates don't care what you say, they watch what you do. Once I knew about those murders, I was an accomplice unless I made some effort to unearth them, even if that meant losing my job. They couldn't have trusted me anymore."

Trust was an essential part of Murton's reform program. "Animals respond as addressed. Other organisms do too. Some of those prisoners--most--had more integrity than the officers." Murton insisted on eating with his prisoners, dressing in work clothes and supervising them personally in the fields, even encouraging his wife to work as a volunteer among the inmates.

But the success was short-lived and Murton remains bitter about the state of American prisons. "You don't put a duck in a sandbox to improve his swimming. You can't reform with this system. How is a prisoner supposed to learn democracy and decision-making in a totalitarian, fascist system? And then everyone's surprised when an ex-con fails and winds up back in prison."

Murton hopes Brubaker, which fictionalizes his experiences in a prison that represents a composite of Tucker and Cummins, may help his crusade. With his story "immortalized on screen by Big Bob," he thinks more people may act to promote prison reform. He notes that the film makes a 4-1 reduction in the pressures and horrors of a warden's job.

He calls Brubaker the best film about a plantation prison, comparing it to Cool Hand Luke, about a chain gang, and Papillon, which showed life in a penal colony. Redford, he says, seems deliberate and intelligent, perfect for the role of the good guy, the renegade hero.

In fact, Redford plays Murton with quiet aplomb. It is not a particularly demanding role; anyone can look horrified by the abuses at the Arkansas prison. And the abuses reel by in living color: whippings, rapes, tortures and murders, all preparation for the true-to-life discovery of coffins in the prison field.

Brubaker is a difficult film to dislike, and for that reason it may accomplish part of its goal, which is to educate audiences to the bloody reality of prison existence. But as entertainment, it remains somewhat bland and predictable. Redford--Murton--drives off into the sunset, leaving behind a plantation of untamed men whose personal well-being he has sacrificed to protect his moral principles.

This I'd-rather-be-right-than-warden attitude is noble but frustrating. Murton ahs made no effort to break with the Democratic system he extolls while trying to improve it; yet he refused to compromise when it came to working within the Arkansas prison system. It's hard to break with a system. It's harder to be right all the time. But it's even harder to change the system, instead of simply revealing its failures.

Murton's reforms worked for a short while. "You could argue that I made things worse for the inmates," he says, "lighting a candle to have it blown out. As people said, start a band, then they want dances. Let 'em out of their cells, they want out of prison." But ultimately the reforms upset the politicians and exposed the system." As Murton says, smiling, "It worked. That's why it failed."