Six Convicts

MY SIX CONVICTS (369 pp.)—Donald Powell Wilson—Rinehart ($3.50).

Fort Leavenworth in the early '30s was a well-run penitentiary, even if the prisoners seemed to run most of it themselves. Or, certainly, so Psychologist Donald Wilson remembers it from his three-year stint there as an investigator for the U.S. Public Health Service. In those days, Fort Leavenworth was the Government's No. 1 pokey for narcotics-law violators,* and Wilson's job was to study the relationship between drug addiction and crime in general.

Psychologist Wilson got his first shock the first day. He asked the warden for some staff assistants to help administer psychological tests, and the warden simply gestured toward the cell blocks and told him: "You have 2,000 men to choose from." Convict assistants had not figured in Wilson's blueprint. But he wound up with six of them: a safecracker, a smuggler, a counterfeiter, a forger, a gangster and an innocent who had taken the rap for a woman.

Wilson's heavily documented official report—a dry, two-volume affair—has long been gathering dust. His unofficial report, MY SIX CONVICTS, is a different matter. Based simply on reminiscences of his Fort Leavenworth days and his six assistants, it is a Book-of-the-Month Club selection for February and, as it happens, one of the liveliest inside jobs on prison manners & morals to appear in many a year. Author Wilson occasionally seems to be writing sequences for a B movie; sometimes he lectures verbosely in psychologist's lingo. But most of the time he keeps up a good story.

Safety in the Storeroom. The amateur psychologists were far from reliable at first. When they ran I.Q. tests on their fellow cons, they deliberately held the scores down to make their own I.Q.s look better by comparison. Soon they were showing the objectivity of professionals. When Punch, the gangster, gave a test to Al Capone,† he told the sulking big shot: "You didn't do so good last time, Al, so we gotta run it again. I swear to hell I don't see how you get nowhere with a I.Q. like that!"

Psychologist Wilson himself was by no means accepted on faith. Under cover of interior construction work, the convicts wired his office for evidence that he might be some new kind of spy for the warden. Once the prisoners decided that "Doc" was no stool pigeon, they were fiercely loyal. They cracked the skull of a disgruntled convict who spoke ill of the Doc, and once they rushed him off to the safety of a storeroom when a few other cons staged an armed break. Later, Wilson learned that the jailbreakers had intended to kidnap him as a hostage.

Flowers in the Spring. The prisoners, Wilson quickly discovered, were far from cut off from the world. When he needed an Ediphone and saw no way of getting it through the coils of Government red tape inside of six months, his six convicts got one delivered through their outside "connections." For the greater comfort of some of the prisoners, a large radio-phonograph and two refrigerators were smuggled in; so, repeatedly, were prostitutes. And on New Year's Day, the parties staged on prison-made brews assumed such proportions that the guards could only herd the convicts into an open room and watch them drink themselves into hospital cases.

One spring the prisoners showed a passionate interest in flower gardening. The beds were beautifully kept until a visiting narcotics agent discovered marijuana growing among the hollyhocks and sunflowers. The garden fad ended on the spot.

Psychologist Wilson, now a professor at Los Angeles State College, sees no grave faults with the liberties allowed prisoners in his day at Fort Leavenworth. Drug addicts, he feels, are not so much criminals as neurotics who belong in hospitals. He writes of his cons with affection, and it is plain that he won theirs. When his assignment ended, they tried to offer him a choice of profitable jobs through their underworld connections. In his garage, a few days before he left, he found a brand-new car in place of his wobbly old one. When he refused it with regrets, Punch said: "Boss, I hate to say this to you, but I'm afraid you'll always be a sucker."

* In 1940, Fort Leavenworth (not to be confused with the larger prison at Leavenworth, Kans., two miles away) was returned to the U.S. Army for use as a military prison. Narcotics addicts are now sent to Public Health Service hospitals at Fort Worth and Lexington, Ky.

† Afterward, Capone was moved to Atlanta and Alcatraz penitentiaries, where he served 7½ years.