Word: murton
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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...
...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...
...weeks later Murton found the bodies...
...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...