Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 13, 1971)
Folk Concert featuring The Sweets Mill String Band and Don Ross 8 p.m. Erb Memorial Union Ballroom $1.00 Saturday October 16 sponsored by ASUO & University Folk Music Club Bananas UsOANo I Potatoes Turkeys Ground Beef 'ST* »ens J° f° 14 lb Grade h . cent Beef m a 5a Townhouse Tomato Sauce .o,c,„9c Campbells Soup !5e Cream of Chicken 10,/2 oz- Can Chicken Noodle Cream of Mushroom Oven Joy Broad 4 $1 22' 2 oz. loaves Lucerne Cottage Cheese p.n,29e I ibby's Tomato Juice .^ J1 Hamms Beer < 1 B<.. 99e Prices Effective: Thurs. - Fri. - Sat. Oct. 14, 15, and 16th. Store Hours: 9:00 a.m. to 10 p.m. everyday at Safeway in Springfield and Eugene at 145 E. 18th, 1156 Hwy. 99N, 845 W. 6th, 1840 E. 13th, 1625 Harlow Rd„ L jtQth and Donald and River Road. San Quentin: a ove to the desert? SAN QUENTIN, Calif.—The prison stands on a tip of shoreline with a spectacular view of San Francisco Bay and Mt. Tamalpais to the north. Some of the 2,600 inmates can enjoy the spec tacle of two bay bridges, a ship cracking the shimmering reflection of sunlight on the water or the moon hanging over the mountain. Others have only a view of the yellow and beige within the walls or of barbed wire entaglements, gun towers and bars. The hundred men held in what is euphemistically called the “adjustment center,” a prison within the prison for men considered too dangerous to mix with the general inmate population, have no view at all. They are truly caged men, searched carefully whenever they go to see a visitor and fed through a slot in the bars. Yet a gun was smuggled into the adjustment center and six persons were killed in an escape attempt Aug. 21. That episode raises anew several questions about the future of San Quentin, which was established in 1852 and is the oldest of California’s 13 prisons. By Daryl Lembke <C) 1971, The Los Angeles Times Has it outlived its usefulness? Should the inmates be moved and the old pile of brick and mortar be demolished? What kind of an institution should replace it? What kind of prison can contain the current inmate crop of revolutionaries? The violence is nothing new but now it has taken a new shape. Since the first cellblock was completed in 1854, the prison has witnessed a parade of dramatic events. Thomas McFarland Foley was sent to San Quentin on July 1, 1854, to serve a three-year sen tence in the Killing of John Dunn, a San Francisco newspaper editor, but he did not stay long. An adventurer named James Estell had been awarded a lease to establish the prison and use I convict labor for his own gain. Estell did not think Foley was guilty so he gave him special treatment. He let him sleep in the guards’ boardinghouse and two weeks after the convict’s arrival, gave him a gun and made him a guard. Roley repaid the kindness by walking away from the brickyard, where he had been assigned to keep the prison hogs away from soft bricks. He left behind a note promising to pay back the $500 he had taken with him from the prison safe. Flogging inmates at San Quentin was com monplace up to 1940, when Gov. Culbert Olson removed members of the prison board for ordering the whipping of inmates. Profiteering and mistreatment of prisoners were also routine in the early years. There were food riots, frequent use of the dungeon for punishment and many celebrated hangings. Some of the big names of crime resided at San Quentin, often temporarily until their date with the noose or the gas chamber. In recent years, the best known were Barbara Graham and Caryl Chessman, both executed in the gas chamber after lengthy (12 years for Chessman) appeals. The biggest break in San Quentin’s history occurred in 1935, when four armed inmates beat Warden James (Big Jim) Holohan to death and escaped, taking with them the entire parole board. Two of the parole board members were wounded in the wild chase but the hostages were finally rescued and inmates captured near California’s Tomales Bay. The last execution by hanging in California took place at San Quentin in 1942, four years after the gas chamber had been installed. Louis Nelson, the present warden, has been confronted with serious challenges in his long career, but none have been as baffling as his present quandary of how to control dedicated revolutionaries in prison. Mounting violence at me prison, loppea Dy uie bloody attempted escape in August, has spurred demands in northern California’s Marin County to level the prison and build a maximum security institution elsewhere to replace it. The Marin County Human Rights Commission, which inspected San Quentin after the August escape attempt, found it to be “an antiquated structure by design and construction, incapable of providing proper security and sanitation.” Fred Mayer, a pharmacist who is commission chairman, urges that Raymond Procunier, State Director of Corrections, look for a maximum security prison site “away from suburbia, out in the desert or boondocks.” “We should put all the tough guys in one place, where they could be watched by closed circuit television, guarded closely and kept away from people,” said Mayer. Jim Park, San Quentin Associate Warden, is inclined to agree. “Ideally, we should get the hoodlums and revolutionaries out of this increasingly populated area and make this a psychiatric and medical facility,” he said. Procunier, a short ruddy-faced man with steel gray hair and a disarming style of speaking can didly to newsmen, is against building an armed fortress “super prison” for the 600 to 1,000 un manageable inmates in the state prison population of 22,000. He said it is too hard to determine which in mates offer no hope of “rehabilitation” and therefore should be assigned to such a dead-end lockup. “People are always saying we ought to move these places out in the middle of the desert, but you can’t get a staff to move out there,” said Nelson. The warden, who lives in family housing on the 44-acre prison grounds with about 100 of the 300 guards, makes no apologies for San Quentin's buildings. “We can run an adequate program at San Quentin and we do,” he said. “The housing is an tiquated, but it’s no worse than 75 per cent of the other prisons in this country. . .” Times-Washington Post News Service -- COMING SOON At the College Side Inn Dimers -- Monday nights 8:30 to 10 p.m. Trirwrlo ——'^ere wor*<ing on this one. Come out and ask how it‘ ■ ■ IvjwIC HiIvCS going, and have a beer while you're here. The College Side Inn 6431 College View Road 746-9302 If you don't know where it's at— ask a friend. —i.
