Men in Despair

Said the witness: "I was sitting there on the ledge watching them. They laid their legs across two stones. Three men came down the line with hammers breaking their legs. They were using 2O-lb. hammers. I could hear the bones crack. They'd holler some, and turn aside, but they didn't holler too loud. The guard, he was a pretty good piece off, and he couldn't hear them. They asked me to join them, but I said no."

Before a Georgia legislative investigating committee, a lanky, 46-year-old Negro, serving his third term for robbery, was describing a desperate interlude at Georgia's Rock Quarry Prison near Buford last week. Some of his details invited dispute. But beyond dispute was the fact that inmates of Rock Quarry had sunk so low on the scale of human hope that they had ducked out of the searing sun into the shadow of a rock pile, had smashed each other's legs in a despairing gesture of mass protest.

Slashed Tendons. Rock Quarry, Georgia's "Little Alcatraz" for incorrigible convicts, is a new (1950), clean but forbidding building guarded by two turreted towers. To Rock Quarry go the unruly convicts from other state prisons for twelve-month terms on the rock pile, a nearby granite quarry. From 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (with three hours out for lunch and rest), under the eyes of hard-eyed guards armed with Winchesters and heavy sticks, they smash granite and push wheelbarrows. The discipline is as rough as the work. Five years ago 31 convicts staged a protest against both by slashing their heel tendons with razor blades.

Last week's self-mutilators told the investigators that they had been driven to their madness by the brutality of prison bosses. Some told of being blackjacked, beaten with sticks, thrown into solitary confinement for trivial offenses. Said one wheel-chaired prisoner, his eyes blazing with hate: "The onliest thing we ask for is that the beatings and cussing stop."

Moderate Findings. Prison officials flatly denied any willful mistreatment or brutality. Said huge, knife-scarred Deputy Warden Doyle Smith, object of many of the charges: "I've never whipped a prisoner, but you have to be boss." He was backed to the hilt by wispy, sick-looking Hubert Smith (no relation), chief warden at Rock Quarry since 1951. Declared the warden: "This leg-breaking was planned by these men to get public sympathy to bring pressure on the state to abolish this camp."

At week's end the legislative committee released its findings. It gave the prison a clean bill of health, restricted its criticism to the fact that the guards used profanity and "on occasions" slapped the prisoners. It asked that these practices stop. But for all the moderate words, Georgia (the state motto: Wisdom, Justice and Moderation) and the U.S. would search a long time before they found evidence to outweigh the act of 41 desperate men.

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