From My Six
Convicts: A Psychologist's Three Years in Fort Leavenworth,
by Donald Powell Wilson
(Rinehart and Co, 1948): Selected parts of pp. 71-76
...[my convict staff] suddenly realized they had been overlooking their own intellecutal superiority as compared to the I.Q.s of their fellow-inmates. Whereupon a new danger threatened the integrity of the daily intelligence quotients. The lower my men could make the scores [of others] read, the more superior they themselves felt. They tried to outdo each other in reporting the outlandish answers of the feebleminded. It was no longer a mark of pride for them to turn up with a high I.Q. among their tests. The distinction now was the lowest score. I had to supervise their work closely to prevent them from "forgetting" to record an answer, or to shade the stop-watch timing. When I was suspicious of a score, I called in the inmate and retested him myself.
Finally Scott found our lowest man, "I.Q. 33", a low-grade imbecile, a sweet, happy vegetable. ... We placed the man in the psychopathic ward for his own protection. The more agile inmates helped him dress each morning after approaching convulsive seizures a few times, watching him spend two hours at the job. I don't know that his vocabulary of forty-nine words was much changed in that ward, but after months of coaching he learned to play a passable game of checkers, although he took as much as two days to conclude a game.
My men made surmises about the ingenuity necessary to get him into a Federal penitentiary. They thought it probable that the combined resources of the FBI and the city police prosecuted a charge of "stealing a manhole." Actually "I.Q. 33" was guilty of possession of postage stamps and blank money orders with which he had papered the walls of his packing-box hovel at the edge of the city dump. Among his forty-nine words were none with which to explain where he had found the stamps or the blanks. Tough luck.
Weary Willie was another case whose I.Q. was stimulating. Willie, a low-grade moron, was the subject of excitement, conjecture, study, examination and exasperation.
He could not stay awake.
This happy state of affairs afforded him periodic psychiatric examinations. He was observed for encephalitis, but the staff concluded that it was a personality set rather than a disease. He was just born sleepy. The hospital repeatedly discharged him [as] being entirely harmless. He certainly was no criminal. He was in for possession of stolen goods, a fact which Willie couldn't illuminate. His confederates probably left him holding the bag while he was asleep.
He so frequently was missing at cell count that whenever escape alarms were sounded everyone first thought of Weary Willie. He never tried to escape. He would just fall asleep, in the cornfield, the hay mow, the grainery - wherever he happened to be when he found something to lean against. Eventually, therefore, when Willie was missing, no alarm was turned in. Instead the guards would check the last place Willie was seen, and they were sure to find him not far away fast asleep.
Although he never initiated any mischief he was alwavs in trouble through the good-natured baiting of the men. When, this baiting campaign became apparent to the captain all marks against Willie were erased and his Good Time re-established.
He proved such a bothersome charge on the farm that they sent him back inside the wall. This decision was reached by the medical staff after treating him for exposure. He had gone to sleep without reference to weather.
His mental candle power equipped him for only two vocations, toting or sweeping. However, he was taken off street detail after several incidents of guards rushing up to his reclining form, thinking someone had been stabbed or clubbed. He was then attached to the loading gang at the railroad gate. This proved a very nostalgic pastime for Weary Willie, who had spent most of his life on the rods. Inevitably, Willie was found missing one night. This time he was nowhere near the railroad gate, where he was last seen loading a freight car.
Later in the night, remembering Willie's somnolent propensities, the captain traced the car number through the dispatcher's once and telegraphed an alert to the freight's next stop. When the yard detectives and brakemen spotted the car, they found Willie asleep on the rods.
The captain was inclined to believe that Willie had been innocent of intent to escape; nevertheless, the act constituted a technical break. He sent Willie to my office, and I found a completely innocent record on the lie detector. Willie explained to me unofficially that the appeal of an old car had been too much for him.
"You see, Doc, all the modern freight cars don't have no rods below. They're just steel girders-no place to ride. But here was this old, old baby and-well, I just wanted to see how it would feel again, so I climbed under. I guess the homesickness was too much, and I just naturally went to sleep. The next thing I knew I was six hours and a hundred miles away and the brakeman was pulling me off.
"Gosh, Doc, I don't want to escape! I want to spend the rest of my life here. It's the easiest go I know. No begging for food, free clothes. And it's a funny thing, I'm even getting used to the showers. I don't mind them so much any more. The hot water is kinda soothing."
The following week Willie was missing again. This time they found him sleeping in the corner of the shower, a tiny stream of warm water spattering down from his bald forehead over his round pug nose.
One afternoon about closing time a high-grade imbecile named Brody came into my office where I was talking with a staff doctor. In the bantering conversation we held with this feeble minded chap it developed that he had been caught four times by the same deputy sheriff in the same mountain community for the same attempted job, and was sentenced each time by the same home-town judge. He had attempted to rob the country store and post office, above which the deputy lived. But he had gone about it so thick-headedly and made so much noise breaking in that he was invariably caught. After the first two lugubrious attempts the deputy had stopped laughing at him and preferred charges. Brody was now being released and meant to try the job again. "That little store has the best cheese in the country, Doc, and do I like cheese!"
The staff doctor tried to argue him out of the idea, but Brody's resistance was definite and well-organized. He was going to prove that the job could be done, and done his way. It was such an obviously stupid plan that finally the doctor took paper and pencil and jokingly drew up a much better strategy. Brody listened respectfully and said he would think it over.
Two days later he came back and said, "Doctor, I know you fellows are smarter than me because you're out and I'm in. An' I know you've got a lot of learnin' an' things, but you don't know nothin' about criminals. I'm goin' to go and do this job just the same way I done it before, just to prove it can be did."
A few weeks later I received a letter written for Brody by a friend. Brody couldn't write. "Dear Doc: Please get me my same job. I'm coming back."
He had tried to pull the job, all right, and got life this time for his trouble. He was very happy.
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