Word: psychologist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...