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Thomas O. Murton (March 15, 1928 – October 10, 1990) was a penology best known for his wardenship of the prison farms of Arkansas. In 1969, he published an account of the endemic corruption there which created a national scandal, and which was popularized in a fictional version by the film Brubaker.
Murton died of cancer at the age of 62 on October 10, 1990, at a Veterans Affairs Hospital in Oklahoma City. Thomas Murton, 62, a Penologist Who Advocated Reforms, Is Dead The New York Times obituary, October 19, 1990; accessed March 30, 2008. Both of his parents and the four children survived him.
According to his obituary in The New York Times,
Mr. Murton's ideas on prison reform included treating prisoners with respect, abolishing corporal punishment, providing better food and rooting out extortion and other rackets among the inmates. Vehemently opposed to the death penalty, he dismantled the electric chair at Cummins. He also opposed life sentences. "When you sentence a man to life in prison, with no chance of getting out, he's going to die one day at a time because he knows he's doomed to walk the halls of purgatory for as long as he's alive," he once told an interviewer.
He was teaching at Southern Illinois University when he was hired to reform the Arkansas prison system in 1968. He wrote about his experiences there (with co-author Joe Hyams) in Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal, published in 1969 by Grove Press. (1969). 9780718101107, Grove Press. ISBN 9780718101107 He was unable to find work in the correctional industry after that, and believed he had been blackballed for his work in Arkansas.
From 1971 to 1979, he taught at the University of Minnesota. In 1980, he left full-time teaching and returned to farming, raising wheat and ducks on his mother's farm in Deer Creek, Oklahoma. He occasionally taught courses in Corrections in the early to mid-1980s as an adjunct professor at San Jose State University and Chaminade University of Honolulu, which were affiliated at the time in their Criminal Justice programs. He was professor of sociology, Oklahoma State University, in 1985.publisher's notes, Murton, Crime and Punishment in Arkansas He died in Deer Creek in 1990.
In 1976, he wrote his second book on penal reform, The Dilemma of Prison Reform, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. He self-published a third book, Crime and Punishment in Arkansas – Adventures in Wonderland in 1985, published in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
In 1967, Arkansas inaugurated a new governor to follow Orval Faubus, who had held that office for twelve years (six terms). State Governor Winthrop Rockefeller released a report on the state prison system which had been ordered and then suppressed by Faubus. The 67-page report detailed horrific conditions at the two state penal farms, including endemic sexual assault, electrical torture, flogging, beatings with blackjacks and hoses, extortion of money from other inmates by the armed prisoners who were working as "trusty" guards (due to the absence of a salaried guard force), open marketing of illegal drugs and alcohol, and a host of other malicious and criminal practices. Particularly ironic, as well as harsh, was the poor quality and quantity of food given to the prisoners—on a farm which marketed enough produce and dairy products to produce profits that were averaging $1.4 million (US) in 1960s dollars (more than $ in current dollars).
In his own later writings about Tucker, Murton noted the cruelty of the "trustees":
Discipline was routinely enforced by flogging, beating with clubs, inserting of needles under fingernails, crushing of testicles with pliers, and the last word in torture devices: the "Tucker telephone," an instrument used to send an electric current through genitals. "U.S. Prisons: Myth vs. Mayhem". TIME, May 5, 1980 essay by Frank Trippett on prison reform, quoting Murton, accessed September 13, 2006.
In 1967, along with releasing the Faubus report, Rockefeller sought to reform the system by bringing in Murton, who had made his reputation by helping establish the correctional system after that territory achieved statehood in 1959. Murton, then 39 years old, was chosen to be the first professional penologist the state of Arkansas had ever hired as a warden.
In early February 1968, Murton ordered excavations on the grounds of the Cummins prison farm. Three bodies were uncovered before the excavation was halted, although 15 to 25 depressions were clearly visible. Murton's inmate informant told him that as many as 200 bodies had been buried there; also, the number of prisoners listed as "escapees" since 1915 was reported as "more than 200".
According to the informant, Reuben Johnson, most of the men had been killed after refusing extortion demands from the "trusty" guards. Their deaths were either falsely recorded as successful escapes, or recorded as deaths, but under false pretenses. Johnson, a lifer, gave details of murders and burials on the prison grounds dating back for decades, including a mass murder of about 20 inmates around Labor Day of 1940. Johnson was backed up by at least one other inmate, James Wilson. Wilson also asserted that returning escapees were routinely murdered.
The skeletons were turned over to another arm of state government, the University of Arkansas Medical Center. At the time, Governor Rockefeller stated his intention to withhold details of the investigation from the public until the Arkansas state police issued a report of their findings, incorporating the university's results. Rockefeller was quoted nationwide when he said that there could be no point in "washing dirty linen for weeks on end as each body is dug up".
Murton's agitation eventually disrupted the Rockefeller administration to the extent that not only was he fired two months after the bodies were exhumed, he was told he had twenty-four hours to get out of the state, or be arrested for grave-robbing—a charge with a sentence of twenty-one years, under Arkansas law at that time. He left. A Real Story, Like "Walking Tall" April 15, 2003 Amazon.Com review of Brubaker DVD by Mark D. Murton, accessed September 13, 2006. NBC Evening News for Tuesday, Mar 04, 1969 Vanderbilt Television News Archive David Brinkley and Douglas Kiker reporting on interviews with Tom Murton and Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, summarized by Vanderbilt University Television News Archive, accessed September 13, 2006 (free archive).
Murton was dismissed in early spring 1968, less than a year after his 1967 hire. Governor Rockefeller claimed that Murton's excavations had become a "sideshow". The governor halted the excavations after the first three bodies were found. The official report by the Rockefeller administration, written by the Arkansas state police, took the position that the bodies must have been from the paupers' cemetery—although the cemetery was a mile away from where the bodies were located.
Murton's book about the scandalous conditions was released the next year, 1969, and the Robert Redford movie was released eleven years later, in 1980 (see Brubaker).
In 1982, Murton shared with students in a criminal justice graduate seminar course at the University of Central Oklahoma that he was "blackballed" by the "correctional community". To make a living, he started and maintained a duck farm north of Oklahoma City, where he lived until his death.
Dr. William Parker, then department chair over the criminal justice program and subsequently the assistant dean, invited Murton to teach at the University of Central Oklahoma in the mid-1980s. He returned to academia for the next several years, including a short stint teaching criminology and corrections at Oklahoma State University in the mid-1980s. Murton continued to maintain his duck farm until his death in late 1990.
The fabricated prisoner-impersonation device may have been inspired by Thomas Mott Osborne, a former warden at Sing Sing, who had had himself committed to Auburn Prison in 1913 under an assumed name. The Prison Film, by Mike Nellis and Christopher Hale (London: 1982), at p. 12; accessed via The Prison Film Project September 13, 2006.
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