the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas

“ Many of the complaints that the Court receives about violence practiced upon inmates have been prepared by writ writers and signed by the complaining inmates. What a writ writer puts into his writ may be nothing in the world but the product of his own imagination, and the allegations of the writ may have little or no resemblance to what the complainant actually recalls about the incident or to what he would have said about it if interviewed at the time. The value of the Court's suggestion to prison personnel ought to be apparent to them without further elaboration. ”

“ A trusty is not expected to take any steps to protect an inmate from violence at the hands of another inmate, and the trusties do not do so.
In a very real sense trusty guards have the power of life and death over other inmates. Some guards are doubtless men of some judgment and humanity; others are not. It is within the power of a trusty guard to murder another inmate with practical impunity, and the danger that such will be done is always clear and present. ”

“ They refuse to obey orders, they loiter at their tasks or positively refuse to work; they fight with each other; and they curse and abuse and sometimes assault or fight with their keepers. Indeed, some inmates appear at times to deliberately engage in conduct which they know will result in the use of force upon them.
In view of such inmate conduct, it is not strange that the relations between prison personnel, on the one hand, and certain inmates, particularly those in the maximum security unit, are bad, to put it conservatively. ”

“ The peril and the degradation to which Arkansas convicts are subjected daily are aggravated by the fact that the treatment which a convict may expect to receive depends not at all upon the gravity of his offense or the length of his term. In point of fact, a man sentenced to life imprisonment for first degree murder and who has a long criminal record may expect to fare better than a country boy with no serious record who is sentenced to a term of two years for stealing a pig.
It is one thing for the State to send a man to the Penitentiary as a punishment for crime. ”

“ The Court realizes that escapes and recaptures can be and frequently are irritating and exasperating to prison administrators and lesser personnel, particularly where as occasionally happens the escape involves a breach of trust reposed in an inmate, as where he does not return to the prison at the expiration of a furlough. And the Court realizes that at times inmates resist recapture and have to be subdued forcibly. But, people who are engaged in custodial work must learn to take such episodes in stride and must learn to control themselves. ”

“ Living as he must under the conditions that have been described, with no legitimate rewards or incentives, in fear and apprehension, in degrading surroundings, and with no help from the State, an Arkansas convict will hardly be able to reform himself, and his experience in the Penitentiary is apt to do nothing but instill in him a deep or deeper hatred for and alienation from the society that put him there. ”

“ The Court recognizes at the outset that at times force has to be used by prison personnel on recalcitrant inmates, and that an inmate who has been the subject of force is not likely to concede that its use was necessary or that the amount used was reasonable. The Court also recognizes that an employee charged with improper use of force is not to be judged by hindsight but in the light of facts and circumstances as they reasonably appeared to him to exist at the time.
Force is used from time to time at both Cummins and Tucker, as it is in prisons all over the United States. ”

“ A man who gets only one toothbrush and one tube of toothpaste, who is supplied with no towels, and with insufficient socks and underclothing, and who is required to sleep night after night on filthy bedding is certainly not stimulated to take any pride in himself or to try to be a good inmate of the Penitentiary to say nothing of being a good citizen in the free world when he is released. ”

“ The requirement that an adult give his consent to be included on an inmate's mailing list is obviously designed to protect the former from unwanted mail communications. There are many reasons why a person in the outside world may not want to receive letters from a convict, even though he may be a close relative, spouse, or former spouse. Such a person may welcome a prison rule or policy which will insulate him or her from such correspondence. And the willingness of prison administrators to provide such insulation in the interest of public relations or for other reasons is understandable. ”

“ For the ordinary convict a sentence to the Arkansas Penitentiary today amounts to a banishment from civilized society to a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world, a world that is administered by criminals under unwritten rules and customs completely foreign to free world culture. ”

“ As far as incidents of force in the maximum security unit, the barracks, and the fields are concerned, the Court simply does not find that the problem is as serious as the inmates would make it. While the Court suspects that some of such incidents were unnecessary, and that employees may have over reacted in certain situations, the Court finds that by and large the inmates who have been subjected to force have brought it on themselves, and that in general the degree of force used has been in reasonable proportion to the violence displayed by the inmates involved. ”

“ The Court heard much testimony about homosexuality in the barracks and elsewhere at Cummins. Homosexuality probably is practiced in all prisons in the United States, and there is a great deal of it practiced at Cummins, some consensual, a great deal nonconsensual. An inmate who is physically attractive to other men may be, and frequently is, raped in the barracks by other inmates. No one comes to his assistance; the floor walkers do not interfere; the trusties look on with indifference or satisfaction; the two free world people on duty appear to be helpless. ”

“ And the Court thinks that it is safe to say that if an inmate, whether white or black, of either institution behaves himself and does the work assigned to him to the best of his ability, he will be able to do his time without serious difficulties as far as prison personnel are concerned.
However, the prison staff is required to deal constitutionally not only with tractable inmates but also with inmates who are not so tractable, and there are many inmates who fall within the latter category. Those inmates make a great deal of trouble for themselves. ”

“ The distinguishing aspects of Arkansas penitentiary life must be considered together. One cannot consider separately a trusty system, a system in which men are confined together in large numbers in open barracks, bad conditions in the isolation cells, or an absence of a meaningful program of rehabilitation. All of those things exist in combination; each affects the other; and taken together they have a cumulative impact on the inmates regardless of their status. ”

“ One serious problem is that a number of inmates are mentally ill or emotionally disturbed and probably should not be in a penal institution at all. Unfortunately, a viable alternative to their confinement in the Department does not exist in Arkansas today since the Arkansas State Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Little Rock will not care for them except when they are violent. Some of these people are extremely dangerous to themselves and to their keepers and other inmates and tend to keep other inmates in states of unrest and excitement. ”

“ Apart from the use of trusties as guards, they can be given too much authority in other areas of prison life. When that is done, various abuses come into existence. When all is said and done, the fact remains that a trusty is a convict, and many trusties will on occasions act like felons and thieves. They will take bribes, they will engage in extortion, they will smuggle contraband, and they will connive at violations of prison rules. Opportunity for abuse is particularly present where, as in Arkansas, trusties have access to prison records pertaining to themselves and to other inmates. ”

“ No regard is paid to the tests and their results in assigning prisoners to barracks or to work. As far as the inmates are concerned, the tests are of no benefit whatever.
A large proportion, perhaps a majority, of the inmates of the Penitentiary are ignorant and unskilled. Many are illiterate. The contribution of ignorance and lack of skills and specialization to crime today is well known. If a man who is ignorant and unskilled when he goes into prison can come out with some education and some usable skill, he has an improved chance of staying out of prison in the future. ”

“ Those employees have in general been recruited locally; they are poorly paid by modern standards; they have had little training or experience; many of them are uncultured and poorly educated; some of them are quite young, perhaps too young to be in position of authority over convicts; some of them are quick tempered. If one adjective is to be used to describe them, it would be "unprofessional."
From top to bottom the personnel of the Department are predominantly white notwithstanding the fact that the inmate population of both institutions is approximately 50 percent black. ”

“ As stated, the men are paid nothing for their work. If an inmate wants to earn money legitimately in his spare time while in the Penitentiary, there are only two ways in which he can do it. The inmates as a class are permitted to have an Inmate Welfare Fund which operates a commissary type store and which also operates a blood bank. Profits from the store and the blood bank inure to the Fund which, parenthetically, appears as of this moment to have more money available to it than Respondents have available to them to run the Penitentiary. ”