NCJ Number
101334
Date Published
1985
Length
48 pages
Annotation
The former warden of the Arkansas State Penitentiary discusses serious abuses of inmates in that Arkansas prison and draws parallels between his experience of being fired as warden and the criminal justice system's treatment of alleged killer James Dean Walker.
Abstract
The author's firing resulted from his ordering the excavation of the location on the penitentiary grounds where 213 allegedly murdered inmates were buried. He believed the excavation to be essential to prison reform in that it would make it clear that reform was needed. However, the criminal justice system was unwilling to admit its problems. The author has been unable to find a job in corrections since his firing. However, in 1970, a Federal judge declared the Arkansas prison to be unconstitutional, and national and media attention has focused on prison conditions in the State. Judicial intervention in the system ended in 1982. James Dean Walker was convicted in 1964 for the killing of a police officer. After the first conviction was reversed, he was reconvicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1965. He failed to return from a furlough in 1975, went to California, and was arrested on a misdemeanor drug charge in 1979 and returned to Arkansas. Evidence that another man actually killed the police officer was suppressed for 21 years. Walker was granted a new trial in 1985. However, both Walker and the author remain as embarrassments to the Arkansas prison system, which is unwilling to admit its serious problems. Photographs and appended transcript of a television interview.