Cell 2455, Death Row

by Caryl Chessman

  Typically, the newspapers reported that Chessman, “as spokesman for ‘the gang,’” admitted commission of various crimes “boldly and without apparent remorse.” And how incredibly easy it was to explain all! Let us look at the newspaper version of my explanation. Bill and I “were in Road Camp No. 7 in Las Flores Canyon. Auto stealing. You pick up ideas there. We did. And here we are.”

  Then Tim, described by the newspapers as “a dark-haired kid whom the [others] obviously sought to protect,” is quoted as adding: “The rest of us were in Camp No. 1 in Soledad Canyon. Same rap. I’ve known Chessman all my life. We went to school together. So when we got out last autumn, we just naturally drifted together.”

  “But why rob?

  “ ‘Lucrative,’ said Chessman briefly.”

  Thus was narrated how “Police . . . smashed the last vestiges of a ‘boy bandit’ gang which owed its inception to whispered conferences at two County Jail road camps.” (The newspapers made not so much as passing mention of the fact that Tim and I had previous long records as juvenile delinquents, that we had served time in the state’s reform schools, and hence that the program then in effect for reforming the young delinquent was, at least so far as we were concerned, a conspicuous failure. What, then, of that much-praised “system which strikes at the undeveloped roots of potential criminal careers”?)

  The newspaper accounts continued: “Two boys remain at large, authorities said, but their apprehension was expected soon.

  “With this swift action by the law, the little band reached the end of an astounding trail of holdups, running gun duels with police, and automobile thieving. City and county law-enforcement agencies joined in compiling the docket, extending back several months, on the young ‘mob’ . . .”

  But still no penetrating analysis of why the young mob, nor any objective reporting about it or its members. Like the iceberg, nine-tenths of who and what we were and what we had done remained beneath the surface, unseen, unreckoned. And there it stayed. We put on our masks; we played our assigned roles. Just a group of impulsive, talkative boys who had tried, rather ingeniously, to make a fast buck and failed. And our failure was rewarded. We were the beneficiaries of the post hoc fallacy that forever is advanced each time a gang, juvenile or adult, is “smashed.” The faulty reasoning goes like this: “Hereafter potential criminals will have clear, stern warning they cannot possibly win if they turn to crime; therefore, on account of our smashing of this gang we have proved crime doesn’t pay.”

  But this is specious, idle proof. This cops-and-robbers approach to crime is at best an expensive and dangerous consolation prize. Left unanswered, or only superficially and misleadingly answered, is the question: What makes youngsters willing and eager to buck the odds, to fight their society, recklessly to gamble their lives in the face of such “proof"? And what of the gangs and individual criminals never captured, of the crimes never solved? We know that only 13 per cent of the nation’s criminals ever wind up in jail.

  Thus, in this light, how does such unpenetrating and stereotyped cops-and-robbers, you-can’t-win, no-matter-how-smart-they-are-they always-end-up-in-jail reporting help society and those agencies concerned with the administration of justice? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t help; rather it definitely and stupidly hinders.

  Catching us and putting us in prison, in and by itself, solved absolutely nothing. It proved absolutely nothing. If we had been given twice or ten times as stiff a sentence this still would be indisputably true. It wouldn’t have changed the fact that youngsters were then continuing and are now continuing to turn to crime in ever-increasing numbers. It wouldn’t have explained why we had turned to crime. It wouldn’t have deterred any of those youngsters following in our footsteps.

  But the screaming headlines and the stories beneath those headlines led one to believe otherwise and hence made the work of law enforcement infinitely more difficult. The implication was that from the start we didn’t have a chance, that the cops inevitably would catch up with us. The unrealistic inference to be drawn was that anyone, regardless of how clever he is, who picks up a pistol with robbery in mind inescapably will wind up behind bars, with the cops knowing every last crime he has committed. Accordingly, the public relaxes its vigilance. All is well. The police always catch the criminal. He is always convicted and put away. That is that.

  Only it isn’t.

  To be sure, the 87 per cent of those committing crimes and escaping arrest are most happy with this situation, with these fictions by which society ignores or denies their predatory presence. But law enforcement isn’t. It’s handcuffed by the situation, the fictions. It’s fully, keenly aware of its own limitations and of the fact that its job is to solve crimes as well as to catch criminals. It knows that convicting a criminal of some crime is important. But equally important is solving crimes. And a balance must be struck.

  Conviction of just one robbery in most jurisdictions, particularly those with an indeterminate sentence law, permits society to imprison the offender as long as if he had been convicted of, say, twenty robberies. In California, for example, the punishment for first degree robbery is “not less than five years,” and for second degree robbery “not less than one year,” which means that the state’s paroling and term-fixing agency can, in the exercise of its wide discretion, fix the term at natural life. Thus, while they may impress the public, multiple convictions rarely serve any useful purpose so far as maximum possible imprisonment is concerned. However, if run consecutively, they can greatly increase the minimum—and thus operate to defeat the very constructive purposes of the indeterminate sentence law. Both humane and economic considerations dictate that in the vast majority of cases society’s goal must be to rehabilitate the offender and then return him to his community. Should law enforcement adopt a policy of endeavoring to “bury” every offender taken into custody, it would succeed only in jamming busy court calendars, in adding prohibitively to the bill the taxpayer must pay for the administration of justice, and in making it virtually impossible for the penologist to change the offender’s attitude toward society and crime during the needlessly long (and, for the taxpayer, needlessly expensive) period of incarceration. Whether rightly or wrongly, the offender would be convinced that society’s only interest in him is to take vengeance upon him.

  The police know that most of those who commit the traditional offenses and who are caught haven’t committed just one crime, one robbery or burglary or forgery or car theft, and they know they have a long list of unsolved crimes with only the vaguest description of the perpetrator in many instances. So they do the rational thing: they offer to file only a specified number of charges if the suspect will clear up for them all the crimes he has committed, and if he will aid them in recovering missing loot. If they didn’t do this, the police would have an impossible task. Obviously most suspects would admit absolutely nothing if they knew that every admission would lead to the filing of another charge.

  Tuffy, Bill and I were charged with an impressive number of robberies, as well as with one count of attempted murder, another of assault with a deadly weapon. Extremely high bail was set. The police worked feverishly to link Bill and me with a robbery-murder in Hollywood, but ultimately concluded we had had nothing to do with it. We hadn’t. The newspapers played up our initial court appearances, had us swaggering into court. We pled not guilty. Two trial dates were set, one for each of two groups of charges. A nationally broadcast “true” crime cases program dramatized the story of Los Angeles’ boy bandit gang. The “High Power” tank where we were lodged had a radio and I was amazed by this “authentic” dramatization of our activities. At one point the script had me snarling savagely out of the side of my mouth, “All right, copper, where do you want it, in the head or the guts?”

  Then came trial. Unfortunately, the case had been assigned to be tried before the same judge who had warned me that he would throw the book at me when he had put me on three years’ probation, with the first six months t
o be served in the County Jail (road camp). My objections to being tried by this particular judge were overruled, a jury was called, and we were speedily convicted of four counts of first degree robbery. The district attorney’s office then offered to let us plead guilty to one count of assault with a deadly weapon, with the understanding that if we did so—which we did—the remaining robbery charges, as well as the count of attempted murder, still scheduled for trial, would be dismissed. As soon as the guilty plea was entered and the dismissal order made, the judge sentenced us to three five to life terms and a one to ten term all to run consecutively, plus another five to life term to run concurrently. That added up to sixteen years to a possible four lifetimes in prison!

  “Damn!” Tuffy softly exclaimed. “That’s apt to keep us busy for awhile!”

  Bill grinned. “Let that be a lesson to you,” he said, which was what, in effect, the judge had told us at the time of sentence.

  We didn’t cry, figuratively or literally, over the stiff jolts the judge had handed us. We didn’t blame the other guy for what had happened. We had stood together and we had fallen together. Sure, we had failed, and to ourselves we admitted our failure. Well, now we would accept whatever the state had to hand out in the way of punishment. We wouldn’t whine or cry or beg for mercy; we wouldn’t try to excuse away what we had done. Instead we would look to the future and salvage as much as we could from it. We fully expected to find San Quentin a harsh, brutal, gray place. Well, we wouldn’t let The Joint, as it was called, beat us or defeat us. We’d do our time. We’d stick together and we’d get along. We weren’t the swaggering, posing, tough-talking kind; neither were we the kind who could be shoved around, bulldozed or taken advantage of.

  Tuffy and Tim were taken with a chain of prisoners on the long ride north to San Quentin a week before Bill and I were transported to the prison with a group of thirty-odd. The others followed in subsequent weeks. As soon as Bill and I exchanged our civilian clothing for prison garb, we had our heads shaved (a practice soon discontinued), were mugged, measured for Bertillon indexing, fingerprinted, and then assigned single cells in what was then the “Fish tank” section of the Old Prison. We spent slightly more than two weeks there, being interviewed by various institutional departments and were given thorough physical examinations. We were allowed the liberty of a small, fenced-in yard adjoining our cells, where we could walk, talk, sit in the sun and play checkers or chess, when we weren’t being interviewed or examined. Tuffy, Tim, Bill and I spent most of our free time walking and talking about the future and what it might hold.

  Ten days after my arrival at San Quentin, I celebrated my twentieth birthday and reflected, somewhat wryly, on that sixteen years to a possible four lifetimes birthday present I had given myself. Being healthy young animals, however, all of us regarded the prison years before us as an interesting challenge, not as a final, dreadful defeat.

  When our initial detention period was up we were given “fish” (new man) job assignments, transferred to other cells in the big cell blocks and absorbed into the general population of this walled city of five thousand prisoners. We had begun serving our terms in earnest.

  It seemed to me that at least half of the youngsters I had known at the reformation factory were doing time here, with one just executed and another on Death Row waiting to die, while a third was given a life sentence and a transfer to Folsom for beating another prisoner to death with a hammer less than a month before my arrival—all of which eloquently attested to the singular success of the reformation factory’s “beneficial training program.”

  One of those who had matriculated to The Joint from the school was a smiling, adventurous lad. He had been sent here after the cops blew a hot car out from under him less than a block from my home. The first chance he got he ran up and greeted me. Then, half-seriously, half-jokingly, he asked, “What the heck took you so long to get here, Chess?”

  What had been the delay? Why had it taken me nearly two years after leaving the reformation factory to get to Quentin? That hardly spoke well of my enterprise, did it?

  My cell was on the fourth tier of the South block—the world’s largest cell block, incidentally—a huge building containing one thousand cells, with two men assigned to each cell. (The block has since been divided into four more easily manageable sections.) When the bell for “music hour” rang that first night, my unsuspecting ears were assaulted by a din that, to the uninitiated, was nothing less than, infernal. Musical instruments of every imaginable kind, as well as some unimaginable kinds, blared, honked, oompahed, beeped and boomed; simultaneously, scratchy, hand-wound phonographs equipped with extra loud needles screeched jive, jump, hillbilly and western tunes, with some opera being thrown in here and there just for the hell of it. When Pandemonium broke loose, I leaped to my feet, startled. What manner of mass madness was this? My cell partner rocked and rolled with laughter. He was finally able to stop laughing long enough to shout an explanation. I immediately set to work making a homemade pair of earplugs.

  Thus began my indoctrination. While it was not the brutal, jungle-like place I had expected, San Quentin was still prison in every sense of the word, and I was often reminded of the fact during those first eventful days here. The high walls, the armed guards, the mass feeding, the shakedowns, the cell searches, the machinery of custody, the rules and regulations posted on the cell wall reminded me. And so did sudden and violent incidents which are a part of the warp and woof of any high-custody prison.

  A man a few cells from me blew his top one midnight. He stood at the bars shouting hysterically, “Taxi! Taxi, you bastards!,” until the night nurse and a squad of guards came and took him to the hospital.

  Another time I was returning to my cell after the night meal when I heard a scream and some smart character with a twisted sense of humor shouted “Tim-ber-r!” Down hurtled a living, kicking, screaming body. It struck the cement floor with a thud. Two men darted out of line, to render aid I thought—but actually to snatch the shoes from the feet of the smashed and dying man. I watched these two human vultures make hurriedly off with their prize. The smart character cracked with awed approval, “Man, did you see that! They beat the fool for his kicks before the second bounce!” Whereupon, I am pleased to report, some indignant soul planted a number nine in the most appropriate part of the smart character’s anatomy.

  One day, in the Big Yard, a paretic Filipino ran amok with a butcher knife. In nothing flat, showing rare good judgment, prisoners and guards alike were fleeing for their lives in every direction. A dead-eyed guard calmly took aim with his carbine and shot the Filipino to death. . . .

  Tuffy had gone to the Mess Hall and was working as a waiter. Tim and I had been assigned to the Jute Mill and I was then in the process of “learning a trade with a future in it"—namely, the running of a spinning machine. This was before the abolition of the con-boss system, and the con boss of my section was a ratty, self-important joker who had developed the habit of throwing his weight around. When he gave me some guff I belted him. The gun guard on the cat walk blew his whistle and came on the run, aiming and kicking a shell into the chamber of his rifle as he ran. I punched Mr. Yelling Self-importance one more time and then held him up in front of me, as a shield. That way, to shoot me, the gun guard would have to shoot through one highly vocal and thoroughly alarmed con boss. The section’s floor guard broke us apart. Then I got into it with the guard. That netted me a fast trip to the Captain’s Office—The Porch.

  The old lieutenant on duty heard what the guard had to say and then bellowed, “Thinks he’s a fighter, huh? Well, let’s send him on high and see if that doesn’t cool him off.”

  “On high” meant the isolated punishment unit behind Condemned Row and on the top tier of the North block.

  “Hell,” I said, “give me a chance to get warmed up first.”

  “Are you arguing with me?” the old lieutenant roared.

  I was positive I had discerned a twinkle in those old eyes. “Yes,”
I said, “I’m arguing with you—if it’ll do any good.”

  It did. I didn’t go on high. Instead I was given four Sunday lockups and lost my privilege card for thirty days, which was a relatively mild punishment for swabbing a con boss and having a run-in with a guard.

  The Jute Mill, by the way, is no more. On April 18, 1951, it burned to the ground. . . .

  Prison officials don’t have too much to say about the very real problem of homosexuality in prison. What can they say? They are fully aware that prison breeds the problem; they do all they can to combat it, realizing all the while that the best they can do is to drive it underground, out of sight, and thereby hold it in a form of check. So far as possible, prison wolves or “jockers” are kept from preying on the young, frightened and physically or morally weak inmate. The known and aggressively active “queen” is segregated and, when possible, helped medically and psychiatrically. Morality is demanded and homosexuality made an offense. Reads California Department of Corrections Rule D1207: “Any inmate committing, soliciting or inciting others to commit any sexual or immoral act shall be subject to disciplinary action."’ Thus inversion in any of its forms is punished, often severely. Yet, nevertheless, the practice of homosexuality still flourishes, secretly. That it does so is inevitable.