Georgia's Middle Ages

In the tiny, heat-sodden office building of the Cartersville (Ga.) State Prison camp sat Warden Arthur W. Clay: a stocky, tight-lipped man with hair clipped high about his ears, his white shirt open at the neck, his wash trousers hitched up above the garterless white socks.

Through the office passed a long line of convicts in stripes, to testify for the visiting members of a special legislative committee. The testimony might have made impassive Warden Clay squirm:

> Prisoners get a diet mostly of peas, beans and syrup, work sunup to sundown on road gangs, know they will be beaten if they ever slow up under the hot sun.

> Convicts are put in leg picks--two-foot iron bars locked over an ankle--for trying to escape, for failing to call Warden Clay "Captain," for no reason at all. The picks stay on night & day.

> Being "taken to see the pigs" means a trip to a little shack near the camp hogpen. There "Big Jim" Bryant, a 7 ft. 2 1/2 in., 300-lb. guard, holds the door shut while Warden Clay administers a whipping--up to 50 lashes--with a rubber hose.

> Convict Water C. Huff, 21, serving a year for reckless driving, testified: "I came here with two other boys and after Captain Clay took off my handcuffs ... he busted me in the mouth with his fist and my teeth are loose now. Big Jim kicked us and put two picks on us. Captain Clay . . . then took us back to the little house in front of the pigpen and beat me up. He made me bend over the bed and he let loose. ... I was so sore I had to lay on my stomach. . . . The beating was on Sunday and I had to work Monday. . . ."

> Four convicts have used safety razor blades to cut their "heel strings" (the Achilles' tendon) and thus crippled themselves to escape the work and beatings.

After the convicts finished, Big Jim Bryant and everyone else on the prison staff blandly denied the stories. Warden Clay, who used to be a farmer before he got his $160-a-month job, said:

"I expect they need kicking sometimes but I don't do it and I don't want my men to do it. ... I have been just as good as possible in the chain gang. . . . It's all a frame-up. There ain't nothing to it."

But last week the "frame-up" showed signs of blasting Georgia's prison system out of its antiquated, sadistic, scandal-ridden past. Georgia's Governor Ellis Arnall, trying hard to erase the black marks of the Talmadge regime, turned the Cartersville investigation into a study of all State prisons. First step: suspension of Warden Clay and Guard Bryant. Second: a tour by legislative leaders, to learn what other State prison systems had been up to since Oglethorpe first brought his oppressed debtors to the New World.

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