THE ROAD BACK

[Applause] [Music] [Music] this man is 36 years old he has spent the last 20 of those years in and out of prison now he's out again this time out of the US Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta this time he swears he won't be back but he remembers how many times he said that before and he wonders you wouldn't think a man who had spent more than half his life in prison could be called lucky yet that man is lucky lucky that prisons today aren't what they were when he first steps out 20 years ago and the bars closed found him the steel is still cold and hard the calendar is still the most important thing in a man's life and the war still casts long shadows when the Sun runs down the sky it took fifty thousand days of prison labor to build that wall and it took many thousands more days for the slow changes in prison treatment but give a man a better chance of making good once he gets outside that wall the alot of pen opened or as one convict put it close for business in nineteen to look how it is now and listen to what it was like then the guards now carry neither guns nor clobbers then they carried clubs and struck any convict who spoke to another convict the cafeteria now has 2,500 steady customers who talked freely among themselves then there was no talk if a prisoner wanted bread he held up his right hand if he wanted soupy hell of a spoon if water his cup if he so much has made us sign to another inmate he might be handcuffed to a wall for several days not until 1916 could a prisoner buy candy but not happened it was front-page news for the Atlanta Journal an inmates family may visit him now two hours a month gone is the wire cage you see in the movies once there were no visitors and the second one said that if he had his way every convict would be isolated from the world as if he were dead he didn't have his way then the inmates wore stripes now they wear a solid blue or white all the same no matter how important or unimportant they may have been and there have been important men here gangster Al Capone Broadway's Earl Carroll big league baseballs Jim Rivera presidential candidate Eugene Debs who campaigned in 1920 from inside the prison and got a million socialist votes at one time in the 1920s there were in Atlanta pen 25 bankers 22 lawyers 16 preachers 43 policemen and one X warden of the Atlanta Fed bullpen right now a Paris leader of the French forces of resistance in world war two runs an elevator here how why does a man send himself to prison let's look for one answer in the editorial offices of the prison magazine headquarters of writers artists toys the editor was selling cars in Mississippi in 1949 making good money yet he tried a holdup failed because he was an amateur then to make his getaway he forced a cab driver at gunpoint to drive him across a state line today a Saturday he can play during the week he can work a visitor may look and say these guys have got it solved and then he meets a man whose world for 11 years has been bounded by a wall that ranges in height from 28 to 37 feet his two feet thick at the top and four feet thick at the bottom if a man inside that wall is worried and wants to walk it off someone's liable to ask him where he's going if he has a headache at night he waits till 11:30 the next morning then gets in line and waits for a pill if he wants to be alone he has seven cellmates and 2,600 fellow prisoners in a place built for half that number 2600 men no women if he wants to see his wife and children he can talk to them for two hours a month two hours a month that's our man is punished a poet who was never in Christmas wrote the bird of time has but a little way to flutter and the bird is on the wing for a prisoner the bird of time is a vulture wheeling and soaring seemingly in the same spot over the dead wasted hours [Music] and still the man can smile at his place the feds are one of the few baseball teams who play only home games when a foul ball goes over the wall the inmates groan with envy once the fence had a big pitcher who took the lengthy vacations between each pitch hecklers and thus fans tried to speed him up but a feds catcher a pepper a negro shouted take your time friend of mine you got ten years vocational counselor Perry Westbrook knows of a man who wasn't stopped by a prison record or another handicap hey give me an example of a man who has taken your vocational training we had a young fella who came in here for car there was physically handicapped and after period of counseling and a series of tests he chose radio and television repair after two years in a training program he was released found a job as a television repairman about $85 a week then after a few months he went into business for himself and now has it been this Grossman 225 and $30,000 a year and he hires four or five mechanics and he prefers men who either have had a prison record or physically handicapped but he went to rent a place of business move into he told his landlord I want to be perfectly honest with you I have a prison record the landlord said I don't think they'll interfere too much but I have written record to TV repair is only one phase of vocational training counselors test each new arrival if he's been in trouble because he didn't know a trade they helped him select one he might be taught to be a carpenter and a poster an architect a privat a machinist a textile worker oh well they're a cook a baker a dental technician a commercial artist an artist who paints with oils a horticulturist or even a worm farmer his crop is 100 million worms and if he could sell them which he can't they'd be worth perhaps $25,000 the worms are busy making compost a mixture perhaps three to six times more fertile than the richest soil example big tomatoes are grown in a rich soil bigger tomatoes are grown above a patch of one the worm farmer gets out next year he's found that crime does not pay but worms do the prison turns out 24 accomplished bricklayers each year instructor John chick says one man came to him with a speech difficulty that indirectly may have turned the man toward crime once the prisoner had mastered a brick lane he found new confidence overcame the speech defect and got a job outside making three dollars and sixty-five cents an hour most of the inmates at Atlanta federal pen they have a chance to go to school and plenty of them take the chance psychologists recognize that a physical handicap may twist a man's personality so much that he becomes a criminal if the handicap can be removed the man is less likely to renew his lease on a Cell dr. kyle / co chief medical officer at the prison has something to say about that most people feel as they can pick out a criminal just from the way he looks anyone who visits a final federal penitentiary would find that not to be the case yet looks do play a part in a man's criminal tendencies how do you do about that here at doctor we use plastic surgery we attempt to improve a man's appearance so that'll give him more pride in a separate when he goes out I can give you an example of a case who came with a double harelip whose teeth protruded through these this parallel defect he was so gave such a poor appearance that the other inmates refused to eat at the same table with him so we removed his teeth fixed him a partial plate repaired his harelip the man grew a moustache you could hardly tell that he never had her hair left before it was very proud of himself and that has been several years ago and he's going out and hasn't come back some prisoners need more work on the inside than the outside another doctor chaplain H park tucker is one who takes over them chaplain Tucker's own dramatic career was reviewed for 50 million people on the network television show this is your life now he's written the book prison is my parish different men choose different ways of getting out some try escape the wall began to rise in 1903 and for 20 years not a man was able to go over the top then at this spot one March morning the notorious general Chapman using rope and a hook here was gone somewhere the prisons at some other time the great truck robber had a date with an electric chair he kept it three years ago two inmates pried open a manhole cover and crawled a thousand feet through a drain pipe that went under the wall emptied into a woods back of the prison two days later two more prisoners went down the drain and powers that low road to freedom has now been launched and the four members of the drainpipe Brigade have been redrafted for longer hitches in this prisons 55 year history several have escaped Q for long [Music] another way out serve out the time to the end of endless days each man leaves with a new outfit a train ticket and up to $30 warden Fred Wilkinson knows the furrow of story the men know him as an intelligent rugged square shooter he's the mayor of this town but he answers to the director of all federal prisons James Bennett the warden was a marine lieutenant in World War two landed on Iwo Jima but when aid blew away part of his left cheek and three machine gun slugs shortened his left arm that ended his amateur boxing but the man still slugs a tennis ball and runs a prison so well that last year he was named one of her top ten civil servants among two and a half million government workers what now much of a man's sentence must be served before is eligible for parole one third of the sentence is there anyone not eligible for parole well recently in particular last year the Congress passed what they call the narcotic Act of 1956 which means a man convicted twice of the felony of narcotics handling under certain statute may not be eligible for parole otherwise any person serving one third of the Senate does have the eligibility it does not mean he will be granted parole of course what about a man who's serving a life sentence 15 years he is eligible have there been any notable failures in the parole system well of course there live heartbreaks in the business and you're going to have some we had a lot of satisfactions with it too but one thing I might mention was the fellow we had on our honor farm out here who worked at the piggery he was released here in Atlanta and he recruited some laborers and they came out there in the dark of night he knew the setup out there pigley and stole about $300 worth of our pigs he hauled him off and sold him down the stockyard well he was sent back then of course for stealing government property and for some time and this time even when he goes into the dining room with a grunt at him that's a dramatic case of failure I'd say sure let's talk about the brighter side what is the percentage of success in the parolees I'm exactly where those who are paroled there are several types of release now on parole or conditional release but parolees I would say we have a pretty good percentage about eighty to eighty-five on those actually released by method of parole now out of five men who go out on parole do not come back what's your philosophy of running a prison warden I would say that above everything else I feel a man has been punished by being sent yet and our job our major job is to prepare him for the outside because we know he's going back into your community of mind we want him to be able to take his place on the competitive lines the standpoint of work and above everything else should be able to fit into the community so I tried to get a man to identify with good wholesome groups of people so he can do it when he gets that that others are waiting and suffering justly for at some time in their lives they have killed stolen cheated but no matter how black is deeded every single man here has at least a speck of white goodness in him the prison welfare Club has given 25,000 dollars to the poor and sick they paid for an Atlanta girls high school education she still doesn't know that criminals were her guardian angels the Catholic prisoners built for themselves a place to worship but forgiving God the paintings everything is the handiwork of sinners the prisoners have allowed themselves to be bitten so that malaria fever bakes their bodies their sacrifices help develop a new vaccine that guarantee is in malaria a great lysergic acid suffered the tortures of schizophrenia to help science understand and pure the methyl a hero [Music] why do they do these things to ease their feeling of guilt you say perhaps but it might also be that a convict who lives in a house and steel and stone is still a man and cares about what happens to his fellow man do you care what happens to him maybe you'll be getting out tomorrow you'll be looking for the road back would you help him find it [Music] [Music] [Music]