Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking Read Free

wont to say in dedications, is certainly true of Casket & Sunnyside, Mortuary Management , and —my favorite title— Concept: The Journal of Creative Ideas for Cemeteries . Here were undertakers and “cemeterians” talking to each other , in the secure belief that no prying outsider would ever have access to their inner councils.
    But how to lay hands on such magazines? They are not to be found in public or university libraries, and must be obtained by subscription. Although a simple request, accompanied by a check, may bring results (for these publishers are, like others, interested in expanding their circulation), you cannot always count on it. Paranoia tends to reign in some of these circles, a pervasive fear of the word getting out via a nosy journalist. You may have to spend much time and effort cajoling fringe types—backsliders in your field of investigation who are sympathetic to your viewpoint—to supply the coveted publications.
    An example: When researching Kind and Usual Punishment , I kept thinking that lurking somewhere in this wide land must be an equivalent for the prison administrators of Casket & Sunny-side —a frank and explicit interchange of views and news by and for prison wardens. Finally I found a clue to the existence of such a publication, contained in a stuffy, almost unreadable sociological magazine called American Journal of Correction , official journal of prisondom and counterpart for the Correction crowd of JAMA or the ABA Journal . Leafing through this, I came across a sort of gossip column headed “News from the Affiliated Organizations.” Seeing my own name in there, I read more closely:
WARDENS TALK ABOUT HOSTILE NEWS REPORTING
G. Norton Jameson, editor of The Grapevine , mimeographed monthly of the American Association of Wardens and Superintendents, in its November 29 issue wrote about an interesting contrast between words spoken by Warden Lash of the Indiana State Penitentiary and Jessica Mitford....
    The article went on to say, “Miss Mitford is noted for her caustic pen. Her kind of reporter is one of the realities of life in these troubled times....”
    The Grapevine , I felt sure, was the publication I was looking for. At the time, an undergraduate named Kathy Mill was helping me with research, and together we pondered how to find out the address of The Grapevine , and how to get a year’s back issues. I telephoned around the country to my undercover collaborators, disaffected workers in various Departments of Correction, and eventually one of these mailed me a copy of The Grapevine . Step one was completed; we now had the address, a box number in Sioux Falls. I suggested to Kathy that she concoct a letter to the editor saying she was a graduate student in the Criminology School at the University of California (then under severe attack by the law-and-order people for being too radical), that she was unhappy with the content of the instruction, and she wanted to get the viewpoint of the wardens as set forth in The Grapevine . She should sign a man’s name, I said, as Corrections is by and large a man’s world. She produced the letter, signed “Karl Mill.” I thought it masterly for the purpose, but fearing that “Karl” had a slightly subversive ring, I changed that to “Kenneth” and sent it off.
    In the course of time twelve mint copies of The Grapevine appeared on Kathy’s doorstep. They proved to be just what I had hoped for, a gold mine of material affording rare glimpses into the Correctional mind: exchanges of opinion on how to circumvent court rulings favorable to prisoners’ rights without getting caught, how to starve out convict sit-down strikers, how to avoid investigation of prison conditions by the state legislature: “Warden Frank A. Eyman of Arizona State Prison revealed that he had refused three black legislators admittance beyond his office to meet with black prisoners last year. They stormed out of his office in a rage, he said.... ‘I’ll