Tom Murton, who was born in Los Angeles on March 15, 1928, went on to become one of the most famous reformist prison wardens in popular culture. And that is despite the fact that few may remember his name and the fact that he served as a warden for less than a year. But Robert Redford portrayed a character based upon Murton, and Bobby Darin sang a song about him.
After helping establish the correctional system in the new state of Alaska in the 1960s, Murton was hired to reform the Arkansas prison system in 1968. Arkansas’s new governor Winthrop Rockefeller wanted Murton to be the first professional penologist to head the system, which included the Tucker State Prison Farm and Cummins State Prison Farm.
Arkansas Prison Farms & Dead Bodies
The prisoners at the large prison farms endured harsh conditions, sexual assault, torture, beatings, and more. The prisons used a “trusty” system, where prisoners were assigned to act as guards but instead were perpetrating abuses.
Later, an Arkansas Times article described the prison: “Under the blazing Delta sun, long-line riders armed with pistols, rifles and shotguns patrolled the grounds on horseback while rank men worked fields full of cotton, rice, soybeans and cucumbers. Men who didn’t work hard were punished like slaves. Should a rider shoot a man trying to escape, he was given a free pass out of the prison. A long leather strap was another instrument of terror. Because men were housed in barracks, rather than cells, they had little protection at night against roaming thieves and sexual predators.”
As the new head of Tucker State Prison Farm, the 39-year-old Murton began instituting reforms. He eliminated corporal punishment, improved the prisoners’ diets, and reformed the parole system.
But Murton did too good of a job. After an informant told Murton of bodies buried on the prison grounds, Murton began digging up dead prisoners. Records indicated more than 200 men had “escaped” since 1915, but when he started discovering dead bodies in unmarked graves, Murton suspected foul play.
Although Governor Rockefeller’s administration was not implicated in the discovery, the state was embarrassed by the developing news. Murton was fired in spring 1968 two months after the first discovery of the bodies. The governor stopped the exhumation, claiming the bodies were from a pauper’s field.
According to Wikipedia, Murton was told to leave the state or face arrest for digging up the bodies. He left town for Alaska and never worked at a prison again.
Murton was likely blackballed from further penal work in Arkansas, but he continued to advocate for reform, testifying before a U.S. Senate Committee on juvenile delinquency in 1969 and appearing on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970 to talk about Arkansas prison conditions.
Personally, though, times were rough for Murton. Without work, he suffered in poverty and his family life fell apart, losing his wife to divorce. Eventually, his life rebounded after writing a book about his experience and taking a teaching job at the University of Minnesota. After his time as warden, he co-authored books related to his time as warden, taught courses, founded the Murton Foundation for Criminal Justice, and worked as a duck farmer in Oklahoma.
Bobby Darin’s “Long Line Rider” About the Arkansas Prison
Others outside the legal system also took note of Murton’s courage. Bobby Darin, who had hits with “Splish Splash” and “Mac the Knife” had been inspired to turn deeper to folk and political music after the death of Robert Kennedy. And one of his greatest political songs was about Tom Murton’s discoveries in Arkansas.
The pop singer’s turn to write a song about the Arkansas prison was likely also inspired by his work as an actor, having spent several days in a prison in 1967 filming his role in The Cage. The TV drama appeared as an episode in The Danny Thomas Show. According to Shane Brown’s excellent book Bobby Darin: The Ultimate Listener’s Guide around the time of taping that episode, Darin told a newspaper interviewer, “I was affected far more by that experience than I ever want to get into . . . I saw 18-year-old faces and older, hardened faces. We are criminals by not insisting that psychiatrists run prisons rather than just being consulted once in awhile.”
The title to Darin’s song about the Arkansas prison scandal — “Long Line Rider” –refers to the a segment of the brutal trusty inmates who served as guards. The riders rode horses and carried guards, enforcing their own laws on the prison grounds. Darin’s song specifically referenced the dead bodies that Murton had discovered and that the state tried to cover up.
There’s a funny taste in the air
Big bulldozers everywhere
Diggin’ clay
Turnin’ clay.
And the ground coughs up some roots
Wearin’ denim shirts and boots
Haul ’em away
Haul ’em away.
Hey, long line rider, turn away.
The song unfortunately did not become a best seller for Darin. His older fans likely wanted him to maintain his old style of singing, and younger listeners may have been reluctant to buy albums by a balding older man that there parents had followed. But Darin did some great work in this era of his career, and his turn to rock and folk was authentic. And one of the reasons we are still talking about what happened in Arkansas today is because of Bobby Darin’s song.
Darin backed up his beliefs and his music with his actions. In January 1969 he was scheduled to sing “Long Line Rider” on The Jackie Gleason Show. The show’s producers, however, were not happy. Depending on the source, they either asked him to sing another song or to cut the line from “Long Line Rider” that made a clear reference to Governor Rockefeller,”This kind of thing can’t happen here /Especially not in election year.”
Darin refused to comply with the censorship, and he walked off the set. Darin explained, “I don’t care if I never do another TV show in my life. They are not going to interfere with my right to express myself.”
Fortunately, we do have on YouTube a powerful performance he gave on TV earlier in November 1968. “Long Line Rider” is not only great commentary on a forgotten injustice, it rocks.
Brubaker & Robert Redford’s Portrayal
People did not forget about Murton’s work after Darin’s song.
In 1980, director Stuart Rosenberg released the movie Brubaker. The film is a somewhat fictionalized version of Murton’s experience in Arkansas (filmed in Ohio). Robert Redford starred as the young prison warden trying to reform a brutal prison and literally uncovering dead bodies.
Tom Murton helped with the fim. He retired from his teaching position and served as a technical advisor for the movie. He was reportedly satisfied with the film despite it taking some liberties with his life story.
The movie opens with a fictionalized version of the new warden going into the prison undercover as a prisoner. Later, Redford’s warden uncovers the brutality inside of the prison as well as dead bodies buried on prison grounds.
The movie was a commercial and critical success, nominated for the Academy Award for best original screenplay in 1981.
Afterward
We cannot measure the impact of the horrendous prison conditions in Arkansas in the 1960s and 1970s. One judge in 1970 called it a “dark and evil world.” There was never a full reckoning that revealed the information about the men buried on the prison grounds. Regarding the three bodies found in 1968 before the digging stopped, some claimed they had been buried there for many years and had not been murdered. But we still do not know for sure who they were or how they ended up there.
And we can of course only guess about the impact that the prison conditions had on the living prisoners there and even the guards. Surely, many of the men subjected to the horrendous conditions were changed by what they experienced, and many of them probably carried those effects through the rest of their lives.
We do not know about most of the prisoners and the effects of the trauma. We do know that one of the prisoners at the Tucker Unit in 1970 was a 16-year-old boy named Don Harding, sent to the adult maximum security prison after escaping from the Arkansas Boys Industrial School serving a burglary charge. While at the Tucker Unit, adults repeatedly violently brutalized the skinny kid. That experience, along with the boy’s organic brain damage and other childhood abuse, likely contributed to him destroying the lives of others. Having failed to kill himself several times in his life, he later was convicted of murdering several men and was executed in Arizona’s gas chamber in 1992.
How many other prisoners from that time in Arkansas carried the effects out into the world?
Regarding the prisons themselves, while Murton was pushed to the sidelines of government, others took note of the prison conditions in Arkansas that he highlighted. In Holt v. Sarver, a federal judge in 1970 held that the conditions at the Arkansas prison constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the U.S. Constitution. A series of reforms brought some improvements to the Arkansas system in the 1970s and 1980s.
Finally, after the film Brubaker, Tom Murton published two more books, The Dilemma of Prison Reform (1982) and Crime and Punishment in Arkansas: Adventures in Wonderland (1985). He died of cancer at age 62 on October 10, 1990, in Oklahoma City.
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