ustxtxb_obs_1969_01_24_50_00013-00000_000.pdf

Political Intelligence small and was scared to death of the man. This guard gave the boys about seven minutes to make up their bunks and brush their teeth and get out the door. Those who didn’t get up right off “he’d kick you out of bed or turn your bunk over on you.” Boys who tried to wake up friends were beaten on for doing that. Boys late out the door he’d smack right in the mouth with his fist, they’d fall, he’d say ‘Come on, get up, you’re late.’ ” The boys were forbidden to talk on the way to mess hall or back. This guard, Finn says, would line the boys up back in the dorm and tell those who had talked to step forward for a racking. If a boy who had talked did not step forward, but the guard knew he had talked, then he really got it. “He’d walk around you and you wouldn’t know when he was gonna hit you. I seen a lot of guys almost pass out [from fear as he stood near them]. Lot of times he’d hit you from behind . . . he’d run you into a wall, tables, chairs.” One Mexican boy, who the guard had heard talking but had not stepped forward to confess it, had his head beaten on a brick wall, was thrown on the ground, and then the guard holding onto a pole to give himself leverage was stomped in the chest and face until his face “look like a tomato.” The guard also used a paddle with holes in it. Sometimes he would throw wooden ash trays at boys. The incident reports, Finn says, usually attributed boys’ injuries to falling in the shower, fights, accidents at baseball or accidental falls”anything to put it off on the boys.” It was also at Terrace this time, this witness says, that “one guy got his ear screwed up when another guard kicked him in the ear.” His second time up, Finn was again put in Terrace. He names a guardthe same one named by Kenneth Cook as the one who slapped him in the ear, perforating itwho, Finn says, gave permission for about five fights among the boys, on one condition. “He’d say, ‘If you’re gonna fight, I wanta see blood.’ He told me that.” Finn had a fight with a boy and both of them did draw blood. But in such sponsored fights in which one boy did not, Finn says, the guard would draw blood from the boy who failed. “He’d catch you off guard’, like he was playing a game. ‘C’mere,’ he’d say, like he wasn’t going to do anything, he’d look in another direction, and next thing you know he had hit you in the face.” B u t in general, conditions at Gatesville were not as bad in the mid-1960’s as his first time, Finn says. His theory is that so many boys ran in the earlier sixties, the beatings were reduced. After a few weeks at Terrace, Finn w a s sent to Hilltop. In lockup there, boys had to sit on the floor if inside du r i n g the day and couldn’t talk or smoke. With guards using glovesb u t no small bats by 1964-’65beatings were administered, and Finn says he was racked about 30 or 40 times in this sec ond stay. But it was better, he s a y s, “because you got to walk somewhere.” Finn suggests indirectly that he was looked up to by other boys as a leader, and the guards liked to cut such boys down to size. Once, after he had neglected to get in line as instructed, Finn says, a guard was hitting at him, he fell out of his chair, and the guard “held on the t a b le and started kicking me in the chest,” thusly banging his head against the wall about ten times as he tried to get up to show he wasn’t defeated. This very guard, whom Finn names, also reported him for remarking to the guard what had happened to four enemies of a boy, a guard’s informer, who Finn says the boys called “a rat.” \(“Rats” snitch for guards, shine their shoes, and brought three guards through the dorm one night and pointed out four boys who were unfriendly toward him. The guards took these four to the office and beat them. Finn told the named guard this the next day and was called to the office half an hour later. T he r e, he was worked over by one guard while a supervisor sat behind his desk and watched. Finn names both these men. The guard got him against a pipe leading down from the ceiling to an old steam heater and went to slugging him, battering his head against the pipe; “and I could hear that pipe ringing.” Then he started hitting him in the stomach, asking him, “You gonna treat this boy just like you treat these other guys?” The supervisor rising, asked the guard if he would mind if the supervisor talked to Finn a whileand then the supervisor hit him. “I never pictured that anybody could be cruel, you know,” Finn says. “I figured I’d just do it right and get through it. You really learn how to hate in there.” Of the guard he called a sadist, he said, “I wished many times I had a gun so I could blow his brains out.” The beat fror Of approximately 20 Associated Press reporters in Texas who belonged to the Wire Service Guild, only four men chose to participate in a recent eightday strike against the news agency. The Texas strikers were B.F. Kellam of Houston and Lee Jones, Robert Heard and Jack Keever, all of Austin. Two union wire machine operators in Dallas honored the strike by refusing to work. The strike was the first by editorial employees in AP’s history. Approximately two-thirds of the agency’s reporters in the United States walked out. Before the strike was c a 11 e d, the AP management in Dallas advised Texas reporters that the strike would have little, support south of the Mason Dixon line. Apparently most Texas guildsmen took management’s advice. ings were no secret, he says. ‘Everybody knows about it, everybody in that school, teachers and everybody.” He wrote Barnes about only one of these incidentsthe time he could hear the pipe ringing. Barnes wrote him back that he had taken the liberty of showing his letter to Capt. Clint Peoples of the Texas Rangers, who is “directing the investigation at Gatesville.” “It is my main concern,” Barnes wrote him, “that we attempt to determine the r ea s o n s and facts involved in the increased rate of juvenile crime. I believe in the majority of cases that the delinquent youth is not a criminal, but a young person in need of guidance, protection, and understanding rather than harsh punishment.” The Fort Worth Star-Telegram presented the stories of two boys whose names were not given. The Star-Telegram arranged to have lie tests given the boys. One passed and the other part i ally passed, the paper said. These boys told stories of beatings and the like along the lines of the stories told in this story. The Houston Post has run a series by Felton West reviewing the matter and giving data from Gatesville officials tending to indicate that in six years, only 27 employees have been fired for the use of force on boys. This figure is lower than the 87 firings over a five-year period a TYC spokesman first acknowledged, and the 40 or so firings Turman later said had occurred, as a result of the use of force on boys. The higher earlier figures are now identified by Gatesville spokesmen as errors on their part. Four present chaplains were quoted that the reports of brutality were exaggerated. Gatesville officials stressed to Wes t that the use of force on the boys have been declining; that the guards are unarmed, and the boys have to be controlled and kept from rebelling; and that on some occasions, guards have been attacked, and two have been killed by boys in Gatesville since 1963. R.D. V Neither the right nor the left seems pleased with the addition to the University faculty of W. W. Rostow, a former special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson. fro UT leftists are planning an anti-wel come for Rostow during registration for spring classes. Members of the SDS will distribute a leaflet critical of Rostow’s role in foreign affairs. “Rout Rostow” buttons already are on sale around the campus. V Across the spectrum on the far right, the Houston Tribune has run front page stories on the high government ‘offi cial with such headlines as “Did Rostow Spill Some Beans in His Apologia?” and January 24, 1969 1.11110111 13