Word: tuckers
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...dozen years ago inmates at Tucker State prison in Arkansas ran the place. Prisoners convicted of murder toted guns, bullied their fellows into the fields at dawn and laughed them back to their cells at dusk. These prisoner/guards--called trusties--beat other inmates with a devilish tool called a strap, a leather slab with a wooden handle that, when handled "properly," can knock a victim six inches into the air. They tortured them by running pins and razor blades along the soft flesh under their fingernails. They gang-raped them in the barred dormitories where each prisoner slept with...
...prison. Life was cheap, after all, and a conspiracy of silence spread from within the prison walls to the Arkansas borders. But when a prisoner couldn't be controlled by beatings or chainings or bone-crushing labor in the flat fertile prison fields, the trusties used "The Tucker Telephone." They would take the offending prisoner to the infirmary, strip him and attack electrodes to his big toe and penis, which were wired to an old-fashioned rural telephone. By cranking the handle, the "operator" discharged six volts through the man's body. A "long distance call" could render...
Complaints about prison conditions grew so loud that Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, elected on a prison reform platform, hired Tom Murton to clean up Tucker Prison farm as a warm-up to overhauling the Arkansas prison system. Murton made drastic changes; he assigned power to the prisoners and removed authority from the trusties. He put an end to the torture, even abolishing use of the strap. He released death-row prisoners from their dark, solitary cells where they had been sequestered for months or years without human contact, reading material, plumbing or light. He halted the corruption that had drained prison...
When Carll Tucker bought the august Saturday Review in 1977, he described its typical reader as "somebody's aunt." Unable to attract a younger audience of nieces and nephews, Tucker, 28, sold the ailing magazine last week to Robert I. Weingarten, 38, owner of Financial World (circ. 59,000), an investment magazine. The purchase price was not revealed. Says Tucker, who will stay on as editor of Saturday Review (circ. 500,000): "Going at the speed we were going at, we weren't going to get from here to there...
...magazine into four separate monthlies on arts, education, science and society. The new format was confusing to readers and financially ruinous. Saturday Review went bankrupt in 1973, and Cousins came to the rescue. He ran it for the next four years and converted it to a fortnightly. Under Tucker, the magazine added more reportage and brighter graphics. But it continued losing between $500,000 and $1 million a year. (To keep losses from going even higher, Tucker changed it back to a monthly with the May issue, out this week.) Earlier this year, Tucker came close to selling the magazine...