Let it be said to this humane and enlightened gentleman’s everlasting credit that one of his first official acts was to banish the jacket and other brutalities from California prisons forever. Captain Murphy welcomed the jacket as something superior to anything he had at Folsom in the way of punishment. Up to that time the prisoners were “regulated” by long terms in the dungeons on bread and water, loss of credits, or by hanging them up by the wrists till they were on tiptoe. When Dirty Dick saw what could be done with the jacket he came into the stoneyard and declared himself openly, “I’ve got something now that will make you tough birds snitch on yourselves.”
The killing and maiming of convicts in the strait-jackets are matters of record and too well known to call for any notice in this story. At Folsom I saw the jacket making beasts of the convicts and brutes of their keepers. I saw Jakey Oppenheimer transformed from a well-intentioned prisoner into a murder maniac whose wanton killings and assaults in prison brought him “under the rope” in the end. I saw the convicts throw their hats in the air and shout for joy when Warden Charles Aull died.
Thomas Wilkinson followed him as warden.
The tasks were increased, the food rations cut, and even the convict stripes were made thinner and cheaper. These abuses, coupled with brutal strait-jacketings for the slightest infraction of rules, crystallized all the hatred, despair, and hopelessness in the prison. All the convicts needed was an organizer, a leader. He appeared in the person of Dick Gordon. With a sentence of forty-five years and a prior prison experience, Gordon saw no chance of getting out on the square and began planning to escape. He was young—about twenty-three—modest, kindly, intelligent. He came to Folsom with a reputation for doing things on the outside and for being on the square. With great care and diplomacy he sorted out a dozen men and his plan was laid down for the getaway. It was simple and direct. Every Monday morning there were at least a dozen officers and guards at the prison office.
The warden was always there to get everything under way; the captain to try all prisoners for offenses committed between Saturday evening and Monday morning; the overseer to plan the week’s work; the commissary to give out clothing, and the turnkey to listen to requests for changing of cells. This meant there were always thirty or forty prisoners at the office.
The plan was for Gordon and his men to mingle with others at the captain’s office. When the signal was given they were to rush the officers, who were unarmed, put a knife at the throat of every one, and march them all out through the guard line, using them as shields against the gatling-gun fire from guard towers that encircled the prison. For once Captain Murphy’s carefully built-up system of spying failed him; it toppled on him, crushed him, and brought about his dismissal from the prison.
His spies, when things were dull, often fabricated plots and stories to hold their jobs. Sunday, before the break, they reported to Murphy that something was brewing in the prison. He ordered fifty suspected men searched but nothing was found. The knives Gordon and his men were to use were being carried about by a “harmless” short-time convict, who kept by himself and was not suspected.
Murphy, finding nothing wrong after the search, put the reports down to over-zealousness by his stool pigeons and forgot them.
The next morning the knives were distributed and the dozen men dropped out of the line at the captain’s office as the men went out to work. Every officer in the prison except the doctor was captured.
The only guard that resisted was killed instantly, cut to pieces. The only officer that resisted was Cochrane, the turnkey, the man who personally laced up the strait-jacket victims. He was hated bitterly and every man that got near enough put a knife into him. He was cut a dozen times and left for dead. He recovered, and later took his grudge out by brutalities to prisoners who had never harmed him.