Tom Murton facts for kids

Thomas O. Murton (March 15, 1928 – October 10, 1990) was a penologist 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.

Personal life

Tom Murton was born in 1928. His parents were E.T. Murton and Bessie Glass Stevens. He was married to Margaret E. Conway and had four children, Marquita (Marquita Schendel), Teresa (Teresa Kress), Melanie (Melanie Sandstrom) and Mark Murton.

Murton died of cancer at the age of 62 on October 10, 1990, at a Veterans Affairs Hospital in Oklahoma City. Both of his parents and the four children survived him.

Education and penological views

Before his career as a penologist, Murton attained a bachelor's degree in animal husbandry from Oklahoma State University in 1950. He earned a degree in mathematics at Fairbanks, Alaska between 1957 and 1958 with benefits under the GI bill. He enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley in 1964 and completed a Master of Arts Degree in criminology and satisfied residency requirements for a doctorate in 1966. After he was dismissed from the Arkansas correctional system in 1968, he completed a doctoral degree in criminology at the University of California, Berkeley.

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.

Career

Murton had helped establish the correctional system of the new state of Alaska during the 1960s.

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. 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. 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.

Film

The book written by Murton and Hyams was published in 1969. In 1980, a fictionalized film treatment starring Robert Redford as "Warden Henry Brubaker" was released to wide acclaim, earning an Oscar nomination. Although the dramatic opening of the film, in which Brubaker impersonates an inmate in order to see the system literally "from inside" before taking up the warden's post, was a fabrication, much of the movie's drama was taken directly from the book.

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 Penitentiary in 1913 under an assumed name.

Song

In 1968, the popular singer Bobby Darin wrote and recorded "Long Line Rider", a song which described the incident, on his album Bobby Darin Born Walden Robert Cassotto. Some of its lyrics were: "There's a farm in Arkansas, got some secrets in its floor, in decay, in decay. You can tell where they're at, nothing grows, the ground is flat, where they lay, where they lay." It also includes the line "This kind of thing can't happen here, especially not in election year." Darin was due to perform the song on The Jackie Gleason Show, but when they ordered him to cut that particular line, rather than censor himself, he walked off the set.

Quotes

"Prisons, mental hospitals, and other institutions are a thermometer that measures the sickness of the larger society. The treatment society affords its outcasts reveals the way in which its members view one another—and themselves."—From the Preface of his book: Accomplices to the Crime, 1969, Grove Press, Inc., New York.

See also

• Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal