Victor Baldwin, a guard hostage in prison riot in Montana in 1959, has never forgotten
A gray mist fell like Victor Baldwin was on the exact place where inmates have taken him hostage riots in 1959. He was 40 years later, but he remembered everything: what they said, how they threatened him, how he felt afraid.
Baldwin was one of 26 hostages held at the Montana State Prison during a violent takeover led by Jerry Myles inmate, who had served a long Alcatraz Island before arriving in Deer Lodge.
The day I went to the Old Montana Prison, with Baldwin, the fog enveloped the guard towers. The yard, once the hub of life in prison stopped. Our footsteps echoed in the house remains a cell, cold as a freezer.
I was researching a book I wanted to write since I am a boy. Baldwin has been a key source for Jerry's Riot: The True Story of Montana 1959 Prison Disturbance, as well as several other guards and inmates who had direct knowledge of the riot. Baldwin recalled how Myles walked around the prison, as he was the owner place. Guards called "Little Hitler" among other names.
The worst fear among the guards, Baldwin said, is that they lose control in a riot. Guards in 1959 had little training. They had no special weapons to protect themselves. houses were no cell telephone, and the guards had no means to communicate with one another, except in conversations face-to-face. It is particularly dangerous, too, because until the end of 1958, the prison had no system of classification. Rapists mingled with the fish. Murderers walked with counterfeiters check. Violent men controlled the humble. The boss "con" the system, a state-sanctioned agreement that allowed punish leaders run the industries inside, gave some detainees more power than the guards.
When new Warden Floyd Powell fired patterns con, to replace them in some cases with civilian supervisors, it upset the balance of power in the prison. Jerry Myles was one of those bosses cunt and he vowed revenge.
On the day of the riot began, April 16, 1959, Baldwin was an officer in the second floor shift House 2 in the cell, also known as "the old cell house" or home cells 1896, when Myles and his accomplices took him. He had just returned from eating dinner in the dining room of the guards outside the walls where he felt a knife sting his ribs.
Decades later, as we walked in the former prison, I asked Victor to show me where it happened. The House of older cells no longer holds and the state where it has demolished four months after the riot because of structural damage after an earthquake. We were on an open concrete slab where his office was sitting near the wall in the northeast corner. He showed me how to Myles and the others came from behind, turns him with weapons.
It is haunting to hear a guard you back in time. Baldwin, like many other guards and inmates I interviewed, remembered everything that was happening that day. He thought he would die, and die is a careful man.
To me, Jerry's Riot was an adventure personal. My father, Murry, worked with Baldwin inside the prison the day of the riot began, but has not been taken hostage. Dad later became a lieutenant of the guard, and until I left home and went to college, the prison is part of my life. I heard stories from my father about the riot for many years, and dinner (when he was not at work), we often told stories of various incidents in the walls.
When I decided to write Jerry's Riot, I had two objectives principal in mind: to compile a clear and precise manner of the riot, and tell an interesting story about prison life in the 1950s. I used the language commonly spoken then (which is why I say "guardians" instead of "correctional officers" by example) and tried to portray the risk that officers and other employees have taken every time they entered the gray walls.
It is a pity Victor Baldwin, and my father, and other former guards died before he could read Jerry's Riot. In many ways the book is their subject. Some people say the dynamics inside the prisons do change. If so, my book is all about today's devices and tomorrow too.
(Kevin S. Giles is a native of Deer Lodge. More information about Jerry's Riot are available www.skybluewaterspress.com)
About the Author
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