Word: wardens
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...cells. It was never executed, but audiences have enjoyed panopticonic vision for years. Countless films and TV plays have made the state pen almost as familiar a setting as Tombstone-the hostages with shivs at their throats, the leader in the besieged cell block on the phone to the warden, the Spartacus-in-denims who invariably fails to make it out of stir. Giving the old plot a new twist, Novelist William Wiegand (who teaches creative writing at Stanford) has produced a tale of a prison riot that is at once a violent melodrama, a psychological quiz and a political...
Maximum Security. The story is told by two narrators, Joe Sharon, an alcoholic prison counselor, and Hastel Desai, a diabetic inmate. This method creates a bifocal picture of Southern State Penitentiary at Creighton and its chief inhabitants, the most important of whom is "the treatment man," an assistant warden and psychologist who is symbolically named Pryor. Also called the Messiah, he is a vaguely evangelical figure with a jade ring and an MG, who keeps most of the inmates under his Freudian thumb. As the story flickers between Convict Desai and Counselor Sharon, it is clear that there are flaws...
Back to Abnormal. Authority collapses in the persons of the warden and the chaplain; there is nothing left but the tainted and ambiguous influence of the psychologist, who must bargain for peace and the lives of the guards. Before the insurrection is over, one man has been tortured and two cons are dead (killed by their fellows because they tried to spoil the gratuitous beauty of the riot with an attempt at escape...
...Although Warden Jack Fogliani, the prison's new boss, has decreased the amount of gambling by putting more prisoners out in the open air on work details, the card tables are still busy. The convicts themselves are responsible for keeping the games clean. Says one: "The inmates control the gambling. They watch out and keep the trouble down, because they don't want to lose this privilege. Listen, most of these guys know all about cheating; they could outcheat anybody. So there isn't any. They ride herd on it." Adds he: "This is probably the most...
Armstrong Circle Theatre (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A semi-documentary dramatization of last March's prison riot in Walpole, Mass., during which the warden, chaplain and guards were seized as hostages, soaked with gasoline and threatened with fiery death...