A man is strapped to a gurney in a room that’s referred to as the hospital room of a prison,
but it’s really just a dingy basement where the warden watches over the torture of prisoners.
That prisoner is hooked up to wires, each of them connected to a telephone.
He’s never seen such a contraption and has no idea what’s about to happen to him. He
takes a big gulp as one guard, barely concealing his laughter, shouts, “Boss, is this gonna
be a local call or long distance?” The warden smirks and replies, “Tokyo, boys,
I think we’ll give Tokyo a call.” The room is filled with a whizzing sound as
a guard winds the crank of the telephone. The prisoner screams out in pain as electricity
surges through his body. Since it’s a long-distance call, that’s just the start of the punishment.
The torture will leave this prisoner with irreversible organ damage, not to mention
life-long mental scars. We wouldn’t blame you for thinking what
we’ve just described never actually happened. It sounds like something from the “Saw”
movie franchise, or maybe it’s closer to something you saw in a Looney Tunes cartoon.
It did actually happen, and when it was finally disclosed to the American public, one critic
wrote that this form of punishment “shocked the consciousness of the nation.”
Let’s now go back to the start. The kind of telephone used for the torture
was a “crank telephone.” This is how they worked.
In short, when a person manually turned the crank, an electrical generator was powered
up. The mechanism produced somewhere between 50 and 100 volts, which would send a signal
to a switchboard. The operator at the switchboard would usually hear a buzzing or ringing sound
and the two people could be connected. It was a man named Dr. A. E. Rollins that
decided one of these phones could be used to torture prisoners. In the 1960s, he was
the resident physician at the Tucker State Prison Farm, Arkansas. That’s why the torture
device became known as the Tucker Telephone. Prisoners who were deemed impervious to all
other punishments were the ones who were subjected to telephone torture. Some of you might recall
a prison movie from the 1960s called “Cool Hand Luke.” Paul Newman’s character was
the unruly prisoner who just wouldn’t follow the rules. The captain in the movie looked
at that character and said the now historical lines, “What we’ve got here is a failure
to communicate. Some men, you just can’t reach.”
That movie wasn’t too far away from reality. Men at Tucker State Prison Farm were forced
to work all day in the fields under the baking sun. If they became troublesome, they were
tortured. Prisoners were routinely beaten. If they were killed, they were sometimes secretly
buried in the prison grounds. This is a snippet from a Time magazine article
printed in 1968, regrading torture and murder in the state’s prisons:
“The point was brought home painfully when three skeletons, one decapitated, one with
its skull crushed, the third with its legs broken back, were unearthed from shallow,
unmarked graves.” The article said that for the truly intransigent
prisoners, the Tucker telephone was used. Even though some men had nails forced under
their fingernails and others were whipped with leather straps, it was the telephone
that really put the fear of God in them. The article explained that a superintendent
named James Bruton was the person that employed this particular form of punishment. A naked
prisoner would be strapped down to a table in what was called the hospital room, and
then one wire would be wrapped around his big toe. The other wire would usually be attached
to his genitals. When the crank was turned, an electrical current
would pass through the prisoner’s body. As for long-distance and short-distance calls,
this was euphemistic language used by the officials as a kind of joke. Short distance
meant one shock, or possibly one or two shocks. A long-distance call was a series of shocks.
The process was not only frightening and painful for the prisoner, but it was also dangerous.
Repeated shocks at that voltage attacked the nervous system of the man, which could cause
permanent damage to the organs. Repeated exposure to electric shocks can also lead to behavioral
changes, such as the person becoming afflicted with depression or anxiety.
The horrors that happened at the prison soon became known to people on the outside. This
led to an investigation, which detailed the brutality prisoners faced on a day-to-day
basis. The Tucker telephone, though, was the thing that most shocked the public.
Here’s what a 1969 report said, “In ‘long distance calls’ several charges were inflicted
— of a duration designed to stop just short of the inmate’s fainting. Sometimes the
‘telephone’ operator’s skill was defective and the sustained current not only caused
the inmate to lose consciousness but resulted in irreparable damage... Some men were literally
driven out of their minds.” The report stated that the telephone wasn’t
only used just to inflict pain but also to extract information from prisoners. The prison
tried to keep the use of the device under wraps, but investigators found one of the
specially-made phones hidden in a hatbox inside a closet where Jim Bruton lived. That was
referred to as the “Big House.”
Reports stated that most of the prisoners were African Americans, but the horrors were
also inflicted on men of all colors.
Bruton eventually faced charges for what he’d done, charges that said he’d “violated
prisoners’ civil rights by administering cruel and unusual punishment.”
He should have spent a year in prison and received a $1,000 fine, but the judge, Mr.
J. Smith Henley, said that if he sent Bruton to prison, the outcome would be him being
killed by other prisoners. For that reason, he suspended the sentence. This is what the
judge said: “The court doesn’t want to give you a
death sentence, and quite frankly, Mr. Bruton, the chances of your surviving that year would
not be good. One or more of these persons or their friends with whom you have dealt
in the past as inmates of the Arkansas penitentiary would kill you.”
The same judge would eventually say that all prisons in the state were unconstitutional.
Thomas O. Murton was hired to weed out corruption at the state’s prison farms and address
the brutality that happened there. He later talked about the massive profits being made
at these prisons from slave labor, and he mentioned some of the tortures we have, adding
some more that are too graphic to state here. He also discovered that men had been summarily
executed and buried at Cummins prison farm. He wrote in 1969, “Prisons, mental hospitals,
and other institutions are a thermometer that measures the sickness of the larger society.
The treatment society affords its outcasts reveals the way in which its members view
one another, and themselves.” Many years earlier, the Russian novelist Fyodor
Dostoevsky said this, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its
prisons.” Just after Murton started uncovering the atrocities
at Arkansas prisons, he was dismissed from his position. He’d just begun digging up
bodies of men when he was told to stop by the governor. Murton later said he was “blackballed”
by the corrections community for unearthing too many uncomfortable truths. He said a grand
jury even thought about indicting him for “grave robbing.”
It seems from then on, the Tucker telephone was no longer used in American prisons, but
something very similar was used by US soldiers during the Vietnam war. A book called, “Torture
and Democracy” by Darius M. Rejali, shines a light on the torture employed. The author
writes that using appliances on the battlefield, such as field telephones, to electrocute prisoners
was hardly anything new. Many countries had done that over the years.
You all know about cattle prods and taser guns, with the former delivering a shock of
around 50,000 volts. The reason that shouldn’t immediately kill someone is that the current
isn’t strong enough to damage the internal organs. They are supposed to stun a person,
even though people have died from sudden cardiac arrest. According to Reuters, there were 48
such deaths in the US in 2018. As scientists will tell you, it’s not the
voltage that kills you but how great the current is that surges through the body. That’s
why the Tucker Telephone could cause such grievous physical and mental injuries.
Unfortunately, we can’t find any accounts of victims who survived the telephone torture
in prison. Nonetheless, we saw reports that stated it was brought back in the 1980s in
Chicago. According to a number of resources, Lieutenant Jon Burge used it while he was
commander of the Chicago Police Department. He headed a police outfit that became known
as the “Midnight Crew”, a bunch of officers that were said to torture people to get confessions.
News reports state that from 1972 to 1991, Burge “either directly participated in or
implicitly approved the torture” against 118 people that were in police custody. The
reports state that the torture including burning and beating, but also electric shocks.
It was heard in court that men had been convicted solely on confessions that had been coerced
through prolonged torture. There is mention of cattle prods being used, but we can also
find instances when a victim of Burge’s was electrocuted with something that looked
like the Tucker telephone. One person was Andrew Wilson, who, with his
brother Jackie, was found guilty of killing two Chicago police officers in 1982. Both
brothers suffered injuries at the hands of cops, who burned and beat them and shoved
pistols into their mouths as they demanded confessions.
Andrew later sued the city, saying one of the things the cops used in his interrogation
was a black box with a crank attached to it. He said police officers fastened wires to
his body and a policeman turned the crank, which delivered painful electric shocks to
his body. Reports state that Burge had served in Vietnam
in the Mekong delta in 1968. There he could have come across a torture technique that
some US troops called the “the Bell telephone hour”. This technique was very close to
the Tucker telephone experience. In court, Burge said he’d never heard of
such a thing, and certainly never took part in such interrogations during his service
in Vietnam. Investigations later revealed that some men in the Ninth Infantry Division
that Burge was assigned to denied they’d electrocuted prisoners, but others said outright
that it happened all the time. Dennis Carstens was one of them. He said,
“We would pretty much do anything as long as we didn't leave scars on the people.”
He told journalists that field phone interrogations worked well. He said they gave “a pretty
good jolt, kind of like if you've ever had an electric fence charge.”
Former sergeant D.J. Lewis agreed. He said they’d take a prisoner and strap them to
a pole in a tent. In his own words, he said the men would “rig up a field telephone
and put one wire around a finger and the other around the scrotum and start cranking. And
they would eventually tell you what you wanted to know.”
When asked if he thought it was painful, he replied, “Oh, hell yes, it's painful. I
mean, you can hold the two wires and barely crank it and get a jolt. The more you crank
the higher the voltage, and it's DC voltage, so that's more intense shock.”
Former army ranger, Philip Wolever, said this about the pain, “I know it is strong enough
to where after a couple of jolts you can fake a crank because the victim would be looking
right at you, and the guy would go into convulsions.” When Andrew Wilson first came out of police
custody, he had marks on his ears as if alligator clips had been fastened to them. It doesn’t
take a great leap of the imagination to arrive at the assumption that Burge took what he’d
learned in the army and used it during his reign of terror in the Chicago police force.
Burge was fired in 1993. At that time, some attorneys in the city of Chicago believed
Wilson’s story about the electrocution torture. Some years later, former detective Melvin
Duncan, said this in court, “While working at Area 2, I heard that certain robbery detectives
used an electrical box and cattle prods on people to get confessions from them.”
Former officer Walter Young said he’d seen a device with a hand crank lying around during
the time of Wilson’s interrogation, but he said at the time he didn’t really know
what it was used for. He added that he heard people referring to the box as the “Vietnamese
treatment.” Andrew Wilson fought for his innocence but
was convicted twice in the end. He died in prison in 2007. His brother, Jackie, who was
also tortured into making a confession, spent 36 years behind bars. He was declared innocent
during his third trial and released in 2020. He has since filed a lawsuit against all those
that did him wrong. He told the press, “All I am looking for is justice. All I have ever
looked for is justice.” This kind of torture likely happened to a
lot more people. We’ll finish with the words of a man named Leonard Hinton. He was one
of the victims of electric shock torture during those dark days when Burge and his men acted
like medieval inquisitors. He said he was taken down to a basement where
the cops told him to strip. He had wires connected to sensitive parts of his body, which were
connected to a black box. They put a cloth in his mouth and cranked up the machine, which
Hinton described as causing out-of-this-world pain. As soon as one cop took the cloth out
of his mouth, he cried out, “I am ready to talk. Tell me what you want me to say,
sir. Please stop.” Now you need to watch, “Illegal Things That
YOU Do Every Day.” Or, have a look at...