Voices from a Southern Prison

Personal Struggles

Personal Struggles During the corrections administration’s struggle to implement the consent decree, the lives of the three inmates who played key roles in the litigation followed a similar mixed pattern of progress and setback. Wilgus Haddix and Shorty Thompson ceased active participation in the litigation because they left KSR, and Walter Harris emerged as the prisoners’ designated leader in their effort to enforce the decree. The lives of all three, however, remained entwined with the litigation as they continued their individual struggles to rise above the squalid conditions to which they had been subjected and to achieve a measure of human dignity. About the same time George Wilson was appointed secretary of corrections , Walter became eligible for parole after eight years behind bars. He had compiled a good prison record, stayed out of trouble, done well in the prison school, and held steady jobs. He had a plan, if he were granted parole , to pursue a college degree at the University of Kentucky. The parole board was impressed and granted Walter parole in July 1981. 171 But Walter was not ready for parole. He went to Lexington, rented an apartment, and enrolled in the university, lasting less than seven months. I started having woman problems. I started resorting to the same things that led me to be incarcerated in the first place, only not to the extreme this time. My parole was violated. He was convicted of robbery and sentenced to ten years in prison. Walter was back at KSR by February 1982. Walter: No More Mr. Loner In the early days of his return to KSR, Walter tried to retreat back into the woodwork, stay out of trouble, avoid being noticed, attend prison school, get an innocuous job, and wait for his next parole eligibility date. He wanted nothing to do with the consent decree or with trying to improve conditions at KSR. Walter wanted to be Mr. Loner again. The inmates on the yard refused to leave him alone, however. The prisoners were unhappy with the pace of implementing the decree. The carpenters’ strike and the power struggle between Wilson and Neil Welch had slowed everything down. Nearly two years had passed since Shorty’s lawsuit was settled, and the men believed that life for the average prisoner was little improved. Most of the dorms remained in shambles, the food was still filthy and lacking in nutrition, inmates were idle most of the time because the school and job-training programs had too few positions, and prison jobs remained a pretense of meaningful work. Shorty had served out his sentence and gone home, so the prisoners had no leadership. To the prisoners, the consent decree looked like a mere piece of paper with no substance. As Walter recalled, Everybody was wondering what I was going to do, even guards. I never thought my role initially was that prestigious or influential. Apparently they thought I had wielded some influence on the Plaintiffs’ Committee, so they would come around and just ask me, here and there, what I was going to do. I was taking a low profile, trying to work on my own case. After I got done, I started working on other cases. They just came and got me out of the woodwork again—figured that 172 Voices from a Southern Prison I wasn’t being fair to the guys since I had signed my name to the consent decree and represented it to be about the best deal we could come up with at the time. It got to the point where guys were saying that I sold ’em out. I was telling them that anything I signed my name to, I would stand by. And if it turned out that it was actually a sellout, I’d own up to it. I wasn’t convinced at that point that’s what it was. And since I was back in prison, I just said, ‘‘What the hell.’’ About that time, a new warden came along. I thought he was a good guy, but he could only go so far. He needed somebody to antagonize him a bit. So I elected myself, got back on the committee. The Plaintiffs’ Committee by this time consisted of all new members who understood very little about the consent decree. They were bickering among themselves, and the bickering bothered the men on the yard. The general...