On Monday morning, July 15th, at 6:30 a.m., Clinton Duffy entered the office for his first day as warden. By 9 a.m. he had fired six guards and banned the use of loaded canes, whips, straps, rubber hoses and other forms of corporal punishment.
He then directed the inmate painting crew to obliterate the nine-inch circles on cell block floors where prisoners were forced to stand for hours at a stretch without moving or talking.
In the same order, he abolished the head shaving of new arrivals since he felt that entering a prison was humiliation enough; he refused to perpetrate the added indignity of a medieval practice inherited from early California Spanish days. In addition, the stenciling of large black numbers on the backs of convicts’ clothing was eliminated.
The orders issued by the acting warden during the first hours of his new administration were a shock to the older guards, especially those who remembered Clinton as Officer Bill Duffy’s mischievous kid running around the residential areas. Gossip, rumors and comments of “meddling amateur, he’s issuing orders right and left” and “he’ll get his ears pinned back soon enough” filtered through the prison that morning. Just before noon, five guards stomped into the warden’s office and resigned. “You’re turning San Quentin into a playground,” one of them said, “and we don’t want to stick around for the riots that are coming.”
Duffy rose from his chair behind the large desk and said simply, “I’m much more interested in the reactions of men who cannot march into this office to speak their piece.” With that he walked out and across the small parking lot into the old three-story parapet structure which served as the control point for the “inside.” Duffy told the half-dozen officers assembled there that he was going into the big yard alone.
To the horror of the tower officers, Duffy crossed the gardens and past the battered Spanish cell block and hospital and strolled into the large, uncovered concrete yard. Years later, in his 1950 autobiography, Duffy wrote,
Thousands of men swarmed over the stone flats, shifting and turning to loosen the press of bodies, men doing nothing, men going nowhere. Their clothes were shapeless and dirty gray; they walked with a slouch and some talked from the corner of their mouths. I stood there for a moment, watching the gray pattern, the light faces and the darker ones, the tired eyes of the old and the cold eyes of the young. They knew I was there. The news had already swept across the yard and I could see the solid mass ripple, like water kicked up by the wind. I suppose I should have considered that there were men in that yard who had no use for me or any warden; that there were also men who had murdered other men for small change or just for the hell of it. There were probably no less than 200 knives, daggers, blackjacks and other hidden weapons somewhere in those thousands of pockets and sleeves. I suppose I should have remembered that I was no longer a clerk but a man who might be worth kidnapping because I could order gates unlocked and guard fire withheld.”
But Duffy didn’t think of these things. As demonstrated time and again during the 11 years that followed, he saw the men on that yard not as strangers or criminals or even numbers on file cards, but as individual human beings whose virtues and faults he knew better than anyone else. After all, he had studied and prepared their case histories for the parole board.
From the yard, the new warden walked directly into the mess hall and watched the last men for lunch shuffle in and out. Overhead, on the steel catwalks stretching across and around the 200 foot hall, four gun guards were marching their restless patrols, their automatic rifles prodding the air.
Then and there he decided that since guns were not exactly an appetizing influence, he would ban them from where men ate. Duffy then noticed that the lukewarm beef stew being served that day had little or no beef in it. “Beef costs money,” said the civilian steward. “Why don’t you add dumplings to your stew for a change?” asked Duffy. “Can’t be done. Never been done.” replied the steward.
“Tomorrow you serve stew again. This time with dumplings and once a week thereafter,” Duffy ordered, deciding the prison would soon have a new steward. Furthermore, he would increase the inmate food budget of $.19 a day to $.75 a day.
To the officers’ infinite surprise, the new warden walked leisurely back to his office unharmed. Duffy was secure in the knowledge that unlike many a prison reformer before him, he was personally strong enough not to confuse fairness with softness.
That afternoon, Duffy continued one of the most dramatic housecleaning jobs in penal history. He tore up the previous warden’s list of prison stool pigeons and stripped convict politicians of their power.
Already a brutish captain was gone as well as six other sadistic “screws” and five disgruntled old-timers who considered the kid crazy. The dungeon was dead. And so were the lashes, straps and rubber hoses. Numbered uniforms and shaved heads would never again be seen at San Quentin.
Starting the next morning, convicts placed in isolation would no longer be fed from buckets. A modern cafeteria would be installed as soon as possible and a dietician in place by week’s end. Duffy’s final order on his first day as warden was to order the laundry to press all inmate shirts and pants. “Such small things will foster the rebirth of self-respect,” he told his staff.
(Researched and written by Don DeNevi. Part three will appear in the next issue of the SQ News)
