IN his book Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, the
author repeatedly prophesied that he would not leave the California
prison system alive. Last week the grim prediction came true. In one of
the bloodiest prison upheavals in recent years, Jackson—robber,
author, radical hero, self-styled revolutionary—was killed while
attempting to escape from the California State Prison at San Quentin.
With him died three prison guards and two fellow inmates. The bloodletting lasted only a few tragic minutes, but it is as
surrounded with controversy as was Jackson himself. According to prison
authorities, it began when Jackson was led, without handcuffs, from the
maximum-security Adjustment Center—the prison home of death row
inmates on one floor and those deemed incorrigible on another—to a
nearby visitors' area for a conference with a lawyer. Before leaving
the Adjustment Center, Jackson was made to strip for a thorough “skin
search,” a regular routine for Adjustment Center inmates. As was usual
during such a search, his thick Afro-style hair was briskly rubbed to
loosen any contraband that might be concealed there. A Single Bullet. While Jackson was being led across the landscaped
courtyard, a white lawyer, Stephen M. Bingham, 29, was undergoing a
search in the visitors' center. His briefcase was examined by guards;
Bingham walked through a metal-detecting device. When Jackson arrived,
the two men sat together at a small table and talked for about 30
minutes. Bingham then left the room, and Guard Frank DeLeon escorted
Jackson across the prison yard back to the Adjustment Center. There, another skin search was just beginning when, according to prison
officials, a guard noticed a gun in Jackson's hair. Jackson, said the
officials, screamed, “This is it!” When a guard came to get DeLeon for
another assignment, a shot was fired through a glass door and the
mayhem began. Someone threw the switch that controls the locks on the first floor of
the Adjustment Center; 25 prisoners were freed from their cells. There
is confusion over the precise sequence of events, but before order was
restored Jackson was dead. So were Guards DeLeon, Paul Krasenes and
Jere Graham, and two inmates, John Lynn and Ronald Kane. The throats of
all five had been slashed with a razor blade imbedded in a toothbrush
handle, and two of the guards had been shot. Four of the bodies were
piled into Jackson's cell, perhaps saving the life of a wounded guard
who was covered by the corpses. Jackson and another prisoner had dashed
from the Adjustment Center, sprinted across an open courtyard toward a
wall in an attempt to escape. Jackson was killed by a single bullet
fired through the top of his head from a guard tower above the
courtyard. The other prisoner was captured unharmed.
