3/11/2016
PULLMAN, Wash.— The 1970s and 80s saw a cultural shift in prisons across the country, but only one became the archetype of failed reform. That singular institution was the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Reports of shocking incidents—extended lockdowns, riots, bombings, and murders—were splashed across newspapers and television screens nationwide. For the first time, Unusual Punishment: Inside the Walla Walla Prison, 1970–1985, tells the complete story.
Pre-reform, the Walla Walla penitentiary warden ruled everything and everyone. On his word alone, an offender could be isolated for weeks, naked, in a cold dark cell or sent to a terrifying mental health ward. Any employee could be fired at will. Inmates and guards alike called it “super custody.” Despite its alarming aspects, a number of prisoners actually preferred that incarceration model because someone else told them what, when, and how to do everything—even hair length was regulated.
As a young architect fresh from graduate school, author Christopher Murray accepted a position with the agency responsible for the state’s prisons, but when he arrived in July 1976, he observed a vastly altered custody culture. Instead of the strictly controlled model he envisioned, it appeared as though the offenders were in charge. They wandered around outside, talking, laughing, and playing music. He could smell marijuana. “I knew at the time I was witnessing something extraordinary,” he remembers. “There wasn’t another prison on the planet quite like the Washington State Penitentiary.”
In the early 1970s, well-intentioned but naïve reform created a penal institution environment unlike any other, and it became one of the most bizarre chapters in American prison history. Inmates abused new freedoms, riding prison-made choppers in the Big Yard, openly using drugs, and taking lives. Frustrated and afraid, correctional officers quit or looked the other way. The complex careened into chaos, and violence escalated. In the end, many of the guards rebelled, demanding a brutal crackdown and return to super custody.
Finally, a new superintendent curtailed the most dysfunctional inmate privileges and transferred troublesome incarcerated leaders to distant institutions. He fired numerous guards. Courts intervened and politics changed. In 1981, a charismatic leader—charming in public and tyrannical in private—took command of a newly created department of corrections. With skill and determination, he transformed the agency into a modern correctional system.
Unusual Punishment fully examines how and why the system collapsed, and the story Murray uncovers deviates from commonly repeated versions. He conducted dozens of interviews in order to share perspectives from administrators, staff, convicts, and politicians, and reveals the extreme measures it took to regain control. In addition, he discusses the core of the revised system that exists today. Murray stresses that as a young man, he encountered people who did courageous things—particularly superintendent Jim Spalding, who became one of his greatest inspirations. “He definitely was one of my heroes.”