Behind gray walls

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Introduction

by

I

.••

Copyright 1920 By Patrick C Murphy

Caxton Printere, Ltd.

Caldwell, Idaho 2 0 9 7 1

INTRODUCTION

Some time ago I had a letter from 'Taf' Murphy, the man who has written this book. It was a very brief note. It said :

"/ am a convict in the Idaho State Penitentiary. My sentence is life imprisonment. I have been here five years. There is an impulse in me to vrrite my experiences since I was put in here, hut I do not know how to go about it, or to arrange to have it published after it is written. I have heard of you and that you are a vmter. I thought perhaps you would help me'

ff

That note was my introduction to "Pat" Murphy, "lifer" in the Idaho State Penitentiary.

I went out to the penitentiary and talked with Murphy. He looked me straight in the eye when he spoke, in his voice there was the sound of sincerity, his bearing showed that he was a man with Hope in his heart, an objective in life, and a purpose to "go square" and clean.

He |old me the story of his experiences since, five years ago, a man without friends and penniless, he was sentenced to life imprisonment behind gray walls.

I did not ask him to tell me anything that happened before the iron doors swung shut behind him. It was none of my business. Who am I that I should part the curtain Time mercifully drops down to separate the Past from the Present in the life of a man?

Only the hand of Grod has the right to draw back that screen.

After I heard the story *Tat" Murphy told me I said:

**Write it. Write it just as you have told it to me. Make no effort at literary style, don't worry about grammatical construction — ^use your own language, speak as you have spoken to me — straight from the heart.*'

I read the story and it appears in this book almost verbatim as Murphy wrote it. I touched it very littie.

Mr. Jas. H. Gipson, of Caxton Printers, Caldwell, and a man whom 1 knew to be an idealist — counting men of more worth than money — ^became interested and without profit, at actual cost, has published the book, agreeing with me, that the things "Pat" Murphy has done behind prison walls show something that men ought to know.

So, the book is before you.

What you will find in it I cannot say.

This is what I have found :

A man, though plunged into the blackest depths of the abyss can, if he will, look up and up and he will find gleaming yet, on the mountain top, a ray of Hope.

And while there is hope in the heart of a man, there is excuse for life.

'Taf' Murphy, convict, sentenced to life imprisonment in the Idaho State Penitentiary, has told something in this roughly written book that he himself has proved true in the five years he has spent behind gray, stone walls. It is this :

The soul of a man can rise above his physical environment.

— Earl Wayland Bowmtm.

Boise, Idaho.

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Chapter I. When The Gates Swung Shut

It was the dawn of a clear September day in 1915 that I arrived, with one companion, on the early morning train, in Boise, the beautiful capital of Idaho. We were met at the depot by a slender, dark-eyed young fellow who conveyed us to a hack drawn up at the curb and to which was hitched a pair of nervous gray horses. We climbed into the rig and the team was driven swiftly through the business section of the city and turned toward the east, out Warm Springs avenue. My thoughts were quite different from those of most tourists that land for the first time in the charming city of Boise, for I was in irons; my companion was a heavily armed guard who watched my every move.

For fifteen minutes perhaps we drove past stately homes and shaded lawns. Ahead of us, to the right, at some distance a large building loomed before us. At first I thought it was to be our destination, but when we reached it our driver drove straight past it — it was the Natatorium. A few hundred yards farther on we came to a stone-arched gate, beyond that was an open space — ^like a farm, and against the brown hillside, in the distance, I saw the massive walls of the Idaho State Penitentiary, and within those walls I was soon to be con-

'l- :*'. flne(t'focpi|ie rest of my natural life —

. , . * ... . My eyes searched the premises surrounding the

>"•: r-'r.-'prisoh* for "the* convict graveyard where I, myself,

might find peace when my sentence expired. But

as I failed to see any tombstones that represented a

graveyard I dismissed the subject from my mind

and took a deep breath — as one who feels himself

sinking under dark waters — ^wishing to inhale all of

Grod's free air that was possible.

The vehicle stopped before the prison office. The

guard rang a bell to signal the guard on the early

morning watch to open the door from within. The

door swung open. No word was spoken. We

stepped inside, the door closed behind us, a great

key was turned in the lock and iron bars and

stx)ne walls shut me in forever from

I was then told to remove my clothing and put on a prison suit that had evidently been laid out ready for my arrival. The guard escorted me into the yard and I was locked in a cell.

"Hello, *fish'!" (a new prisoner) was called from the cell adjoining the one in which I was locked. ''Are you Murphy?" my neighbor asked.

Tes," I answered.

The judge gave you the 'book' (meaning life term) didn't he?"

Of course he knew I was a 'lifer' before I hit the prison from reading the papers. After firing a few preliminary questions at me he began unraveling his own history. He boasted of serving time it'

to in seven different penitentiaries. He also claimed he had been sentenced three times out of his own home town and since then every distant prison he had served time in quickly got a line on him through his Bertillion being thrown broadcast from his home town — ^but I thought to myself, "I don't blame your home town for keeping track of you for you might become lost/' He told me the name of the town that was his birthplace but I have forgotten it. From his conversation I quickly formed an opinion of this bird that later proved correct — either he was trying to pose as a hard-boiled guy or working to draw me out. It was a relief when the bell rang for the early morning unlock and took him away.

Breakfast was served to me in my cell, as all "fisih** are kept locked up until they are inspected. Later in the day I was taken to the front office to be Bertillioned and have my picture taken. The cons call it "Getting mugged and your pedigree taken.'' There I saw, for the first time, Warden Snook who had been warden several years and was quite an adept at handling the Bertillion system. The warden himself took my height, weight, age, etc. He was very positive in his Bertillion work; he did not try to browbeat me or bulldoze in any way — ^he simply asked the necessary questions in tones that a man would speak to a man. His last question was :

"How much money have you?"

"Not a cent. Warden." The guard who brought me answered for me, and that was true. For the first time in many a moon I was absolutely biioke.

I was taken back inside and into the bath house and given a bath. Then to the tailor shop and measured for clothing. From the tailor shop they took me to the barber shop to be shaved and it was there I saw the face, for the first time, of my early morning neighbor. He was talking in a loud, boisterous way as we entered. When he saw me he stopped as though to get his breath and then shouted "Hello, Murphy," and shoved a large freckled hand at me as though I was a long-lost brother, but I did not look up or speak and stepped into an empty barber chair as I had been beckoned to do by a barber. The party who wished to greet me looked silly, grinned, and sat down. You see this fellow could do a little extra choring, clean spittoons and occasionally shave a man to get the privilege of lounging in the barber shop and "pop" off. The barbers are continually bothered with this kind of cattle. I never could learn why all the gossipers in the penitentiary have a craving desire to loaf in the barber shop. Nor can I see how the barbers can stand it, for myself I hate to see shave day come for the few minutes I have to sit in the barber chair and listen to this peculiar class. You see no shop has a regular guard in it; each shop has a prisoner acting as head man and it is almost impossible for one prisoner to keep another prisoner out of a state shop, but the yard guards make frequent trips to all shops during the day. I have seen a bunch of these loafers run out of the barber shop and as soon as the guard is gone, in ten minutes they are sneaking back.

After I was shaved I was taken to the store room before the captain of the yard. I was given a number, assigned to a regular celL My number was 2838. That meant 2338 prisoners had been received at the penitentiary during the sixty years it had been in existence.

The captain took me in charge and across the yard to a different cell house from the one I had previously been in. He showed me the cell to which I was to come when the whistle was sounded for lock-up and count every evening. He then gave me some general instructions about where the ''deadline'' was ; not to go to the shops without a guard ; how, when and where to go when meal time came. Then I was permitted to go to the yard and mingle with the other men. But I was inclined to be distant and did not mix up. That night I found in my cell a library catalogue with the numbers of 4»000 books which are available for the use of the prisoners. This was an agreeable surprise to me for I could at least read. Ahead were the years — "Until the end of your natural life," and books promised to make less dreary those years behind the gray stone walls.

CHAPTER IL

GOOD ADVICE FROM AN OLD 'CRACKSMAN'

The first night in my own cell I noticed a card stuck to the wall and on it the rules a prisoner should obey. At the bottom of the card in large print were these words :

*'Any prisoner wilfully breaking the rules will be forced to forfeit all of his good time/'

In other words he would automatically sentence himself to a longer period of time. I thought to myself :

"Well, I'm in the mire as far as they can get me so it's up to me to pull myself out. Maybe some day I will get this life sentence cut down to a point where it might put me on the level with those who are fortunate enough to have good time to lose." And I may add here that time off for good conduct is a powerful stimulant to discipline and obedience in prison. Hope is hard to die. It seems that any man — even a lifer — can dream of a day when things will be different.

It was a few days after this first night that I made the acquaintance of an old safe blower, John B., who had approached me in the yard. I saw at a glance that he was more intelligent than the aver* age con I had seen so far and I ventured to ask him a few questions about the place. He was willing to talk.

''Well, Murph/' he said as he took a seat on a nearby rock and motioned me to sit beside him, "there is one thing I want to put you wise to, that is, do your own time. Don't let no one here draw you out in talking about your case, your past, your intentions, or know your business in any way. shape or form. I have noticed you have been rather distant — stay that way. I have learned from many years' experience that it is your fellow prisoner you want to look out for. Most of the officials here ain't a bad bunch of fellows and the guards are most apt to report things just as they are, while some of the cons will stretch the truth and manufacture stuff in order to try to get themselves to the 'front'."

The aged cracksman lit his pipe which had gone out while he was talking, and continued :

"I am just finishing a ten to twenty-five year sentence. I got the top twenty-five years cut off so it leaves me ten to do and with good time off I will just have to do seven years solid in all which 1 will have finished in a few months."

His story made me see the value of the last clause on the rule card. Then I ventured to ask him about Harry Orchard of whom I had read a great deal.

"Oh, yes," he said. "Harry is in charge of the shoe shop. Three other cons work in there with him. They mend the shoes for all the inmates.

Harry attends strictly to his own business and doesn't bother anybody. You seldom see him in the yard — he prefers to work all the time."

Just then I observed a large audience of cons that had collected around a big chunk of human flesh a few yards away. The center of attraction was rehearsing in boastful tones the many sensational and hair-breadth escapes he had made in robbing banks. As he put it he did not stop at anything less than First Nationals. He was simply darkening the sky with flying fragments of bank vaults which he was unmercifully ripping to pieces with his *'soup" (nitro-glycerine) .

He was the same fellow who had tried to force his acquaintance upon me when I was first locked in a cell. A guard had just run him and his audience out of the barber shop and he was continuing his. open air oration of bravado and criminal daring. The thought struck me that he had steered them to that particular spot so as to be in earshot of me and make me feel that I had made a mistake in not accepting his offered hand when I first entered the barber shop, when I had a chance to give his followers an impression that I was quite fortunate to know a noted bear-cat like him.

"Who and what is that fellow?" I asked the old cracksman sitting beside me.

"Oh," he said laughing, "I call him ^Gossiping Joe.' He is one of the worst stool pigeons in here. He will peddle that hot air stuff to them poor boobs and if he can get one of them to drop a remark he can patch up and add to, he will then report it to one of the officials." He paused a moment and added: "Yes, and that bird would hang you for 25 cents or for a shot of snow (cocaine). But as a rule these old officials are wise to him and his kind. That rough stuff don't get him ansrwhere and instead of him being a .'pete-man' (a safe blower) he is nothing but a cheese and cracker weeder (a petty larceny thief) . The bank he boasts of serving time for robbing was a little grocery store run by an old widow woman that had seven children to support and the big bunch of money he claims he got away with was a roll of cheese and a sack of crackers. The next morning the marshal followed him by the crackers that had dropped through the hole in the sack. He was found asleep in the brush and was using the roll of cheese for a pillow. The only weapon he had was a deadly appetite and now he has the nerve to say he was nabbed through his own carelessness by dropping $20 gold pieces in making his get-away — ^the gold pieces were only crackers!" and the old cracksman laughed scornfully.

CHAPTER IIL

IN BAD AT THE START.

Just ten days after I was landed at the penitentiary I was picked out of the main line as it came out of the dining room from dinner. The guard took me to my own cell and I was told to get my blankets and then was taken down to the hard-boiled row and locked in a cell. In a few moments they brought in six more, mostly all long timers. The hard-boil, you understand, is a row of ten cells on the ground floor of No. 1 cell house.

The first one of these cells is the death cell which was occupied at that time by Charlie George who was sentenced to be hanged but was later commuted to life in prison. He is a trusty now, outside the walls, and is making good. The other nine cells were for men who had been ordered, or sentenced, to solitary confinement.

Why I was put in solitary at this time I did not know, but was sure it was a rank piece of jobbery. The first thing that flashed to my mind was the thought that some of the petty offenders that were in jail where I was sentenced and after I had been taken out had told some undersherifF that wanted to be important that I intended to beat the dump as soon as I hit here. Their intentions in telling some-

BEHIND GKAY WALLS 21

thing of that kind to make a hit with the jailor and possibly get their own time cut down.

Of course the jailor would report such word to the penitentiary and on the strength of this I would be confined to solitary without even getting a hearing before the warden. But I could not understand why the other men were there also.

In a few days I learned that we all had been ordered to solitary through fear of a break, as it had been reported that a bunch was going to try and beat the dump.

It developed that a short timer doing from one to fourteen years had gone to a few long timers who were foolish enough to listen to him and had told them how sorry he was for them and him being acquainted with the surrounding country— -claiming he had friends living in the distant hills — ^he would be glad to go with them, help them escape and make a successful get-away. He pictured in a dime novel way how they could charge a tower guard with rocks and while some of the bunch ran to the dining room and got tables which they could place against the wall and run right over to liberty like sheep out of a corral.

Of course he knew they would be running right into the jaws of death, even if they got that fay. But that made no difference to him. He wanted to work the thing up to the boiling point, thinking maybe he would get a feather in his cap. Of course I knew nothing of all this and being a new arrival and a stranger it isn't possible that anyone, had they had such intentions, would be apt to tell me. and I am morally certain I had never spoken to this dime novel fiend. He would go to the warden and tell him the men's secrets and that they wanted him as their leader. Then he would tell the warden they were to meet him at a certain time in a certain place in the yard when the plans were to be talked over. Then he would go to his victims in the yard and tell them to meet him at that place and they would figure things out. As a precaution, naturally, the wall guards would by this time have been given orders to be on the lookout and when this secret meeting was held they would phone a report to the office and so apparently the stool-pigeon's statements would seem to be corroborated.

In this case I think he went so far in his imagination as to even manufacture some guns that were supposed to be smuggled in. He was double-crossing the cons and he was double-crossing the warden.

I could never understand why he implicated me unless he took a dislike to my looks or thought I was an ignorant kind of a fellow and would be an easy victim. At least I was a "fish'' and a life-timer and would make pretty good bait. So I suppose he just put me down as one of those fellows they say are bom every minute — an easy mark. The tune I had to do also would probably influence the warden to think I was in on the plot and in so much as I was charged with the murder of a man supposed to be an officer would convince the prison authorities that I was a dangerous man to be running loose in the yard. Under these circumstances naturally the warden would not overlook a bet that would give him a chance to lock me up.

But if that is what the bird thought he was wrong in his judgment of the warden. For Snook looked at a man for what he was and not for what he had done. He would not knowingly persecute any man because he was a prisoner.

When he ordered me locked up he believed he was in the right. He was going away that day and from the reports that had come to him I suppose he felt that he was justifiable and did not wish to take any chances. Only a few months previous to this a break had been made in practically the same way this one was supposed to be pulled off. Out of the bunch that made the rush to get over the walls three got over entirely, one of them was killed outright and two others were shot down and maimed for life.

So, here I was, a stranger in a strange land; stripped of every penny and of course without friends, and starting on a life sentence by getting in bad right on the jump-off. And to think it was a fellow-prisoner who had lied to get me in solitary to further his own selfish cause filled my heart with hell and hate.

In the blackness of that cell, seemingly, with all the world against me and not even the sympathy of cons like myself who were shut out from everything that makes life worth while what other feelings but feelings of passionate resentment against the whole scheme of life could I have? I sweat nitric acid. The drops of perspiration that dampened my forehead would have poisoned a rattlesnake. In them was the venom of utter despair and yet-- some way I mastered those feelings and a stubborn calm settled over me.

I would not have minded it so bad had it been really true that there was a plot or that I was in it. I would have taken my medicine without a murmur. But getting it dead wrong was what hurt I swore right then I would never speak or associate with another prisoner unless I knew for sure he meant me no harm. And I made up my mind, too, that even then I would utter no remark that I would not say in front of the warden and the whole world. Although I was in as bad a fix it seemed as a man could possibly be, right there I determined to come out of it and raise up in an honest way above the

rat who had got me in solitary.

After a month in solitary the warden had me brought out to the front office. He did not speak for a minute or two but just sat there and looked at me as if to study me. I thought : ''If you think I am going to cringe or beg you to let me out of solitary you are mistaken — I'll stay in there till moss grows on my back before I'll ask to get out."

Finally Warden Snook spoke and his voice was pleasant: "Say, Pat," he said, "I believe I have made a mistake in your case. After sifting this thing out and the reports that have come to me, I cannot understand how a man witii your intelligence will come here in this prison with a life sentence to do and on a ten-day acquaintance start telling every Tom, Dick and Harry that you are going over the walls. I can't hardly believe it and I'm going to turn you out in the yard."

"That's all right," I said, "but how long will it be before you fall for another frame-up like this and throw me back into solitary? And further, Warden, I want you to understand that if a fellowinmate had come to me in there and passed a remark or given me a secret and asked me to keep it, if I had promised him I would do so I would keep that promise. I would not tell you or any other man for what I know I would die knowing and with it untold."

"Well,'* Warden Snook answered, "if you think so much of your promise that you will keep it with a con no doubt you will hold it with me when you know and I know it was the lies of a fellow-prisoner that got you in there."

"Yes," I said, "Warden, if you care to take a chance with me by giving me the liberty of the yard I will see that you never have occasion to regret it." And he never did.

Snook seemed to like the way I talked to him. He believed in fair play and would fire a guard in a minute if he knew he was trying to bulldoze or persecute a prisoner for he knew that a guard that would do that was a coward and Snook hated a coward because he himself feared neither man nor devil.

CHAPTER IV.

THE SOLACE OF LABOR.

Along in November when cold weather came we could go into Cell House No. 3. This building was the oldest and first put up at the prison. It is over sixty years old. The walls are of stone, of course ; the cells are brick, some of the bars on the outer windows are wood and the building is pretty well dilapidated so only trusties are allowed to sleep in these cells at night although the corridors are used for all the idle men to spend the day in during the winter.

It was there I first got introduced to the junkmaking, as the cons call it. Junk means any kind of souvenirs that are made here in the prison whether they are belts, bridles, charms, or other trinkets. They all come under that heading. And a poor grade of junk is called bull's wool junk.

Some of the men, I noticed, had short boards bolted onto the steam pipes which answered the purpose of a kind of work bench. The tools they used were very crude but nevertheless the boys seemed to be busy turning out some very beautiful articles. The files and hacksaws they had would be turned in to the captain at the store-room each evening and in his presence they were counted and then locked up until the following day. The silver used in making the articles is ordered from the east and the shell from California.

Each man that had junk was allowed one display tray in the library of the penitentiary with his name on it and the librarian who is also a prisoner would keep a check on all these trays and keep them clean. He sells the articles to visitors who come through to visit the prison. The junk men pay him a small commission on each item sold. After a sale is made the guard who has the visitor in charge takes the money and a slip of paper from the librarian, stating from whose tray the junk was bought, and turns the money in at the front office where it is put to the credit of the con whose junk was sold. The clerk and librarian both keep separate books on these junk sales so there is never any mistake. All are treated fair. It is a great help to the men, for they can use tiie money to buy tobacco, butter, and such things as they need. And the work is a great relief to the men who cannot stand to be idle. It helps the long hours to pass more quickly and gives their mind occupation and keeps them from brooding over things too much.