One Year of Prison Reform.

CORRECTIONAL institutions; PRISON reform; ROCKEFELLER, Winthrop, 1912-1973; GOVERNORS; INMATE guards; PRISONERS

ARKANSASReport Available; UNITED StatesReport Available

The state's prison system of Arkansas, had been operated on fear for a century, and most of the traditional methods had been used to instill it: beatings, needles under the fingernails, stompings, starvation and an electric device whose terminals were attached to the genitals of the inmate while a trusty or "warden" gleefully turned the crank. The prison has survived the cycle of scandal and reform every twenty or thirty years and has resisted with equal success the occasional token objections from those who became "concerned" about the treatment of prisoners. But that was before Winthrop Rockefeller became the first Republican governor of the state since Reconstruction. Rockefeller expressed understandable indignation over a state police report, prepared in August of 1966, which catalogued the cruelty practiced in the Arkansas prison system.