CALIFORNIA: Mister San Quentin

Reforming a bad prison is as delicate and dangerous a job as tinkering with the mechanism of a faulty bomb. For 88 years, California ran its fortress-like San Quentin penitentiary by looking the other way and hoping for the best. From the days when it was still a barnacled hulk floating off San Quentin Point, tough "con-bosses" all but ran the prison. Money bought liquor, women and narcotics, and the place was incredibly mismanaged. Some inmates made a small fortune during the '30s by turning out counterfeit bills in the prison photoengraving shop. But ordinary convicts were flogged or water-tortured for the slightest infraction of rules.

When Clinton Truman Duffy became warden back in 1940, nobody expected that the prison would really change—even though he got the job because of public revulsion at the prison's sadism and corruption. San Quentin seemed to need a lion tamer, and Duffy was a mild, grey-haired little man who favored gold-rimmed spectacles and always wore a rosebud in his lapel. He was appointed temporarily, for only 30 days, while the governor looked for a more impressive crusader.

Back from Outside. But Duffy knew San Quentin. He was born there (the son of a prison guard), grew up inside the walls, and married the daughter of another San Quentin guard. Fascination for the gloomy pile, and an odd, boyhood ambition—to live some day in the big warden's mansion—brought him back from a job on the "outside."

Warden Duffy began one of the most dramatic housecleaning jobs in penal history. He fired the brutish captain of guards and six other sadistic "screws," sternly prohibited the use of clubs, lashes, straps and hoses. He closed up the "hole" —a dungeon of airless, lightless, unfurnished, iron-doored stone cells into which convicts were thrown as punishment for even the most trivial offenses. San Quentin still shaved prisoners' heads and dressed them in numbered uniforms. Duffy abolished both practices. Men were fed out of buckets. Duffy installed a cafeteria and hired a dietitian.

Duffy tore up the list of prison stool pigeons, and stripped convict politicians of their power. To the horror of his staff, he strolled, unarmed, into the prison yard and chatted with convicts. To their infinite surprise, he strolled out again. But, unlike many a reformer, he was too wise to confuse fairness with softness. Duffy kept his job.

Acclaim from a Lifer. In the last decade, Warden Duffy has never abandoned his belief that San Quentin can rehabilitate as well as punish. He established a broad program of vocational training. He was the first warden to let prisoners listen to radios in their cells. He encouraged athletics, inaugurated a prison newspaper to which he contributed a regular column ("Facts—Not Rumors"), established the first prison chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, let prisoners sell handiwork such as belts and wallets.

Last week, after eleven years, Warden Duffy, 53, was finally preparing to leave