By Gerald D. Klee, MD
The
Before starting psychiatric
training I served for a year at the US Medical Center for Federal Prisoners,
providing general medical care to the prisoners and experiencing many things
that can’t be learned from a book. The medical center was (and still is) a
1000 bed facility that accepted male patients from federal prisons all over the
The prison riot took place one
night when I was “Officer of the Day” (OD). The title applied to the sole
physician who was on duty at the hospital overnight. That means I was the
only MD covering a 1000 bed hospital, and I had little experience.
Close to midnight, as I was half
dozing over Krafft-Ebbing’s famous “Psychopathia Sexualis”, the phone
rang, shattering the silence of the OD room. I picked it up and heard the voice
of the lieutenant of the guard. “Doc, there’s a riot in cell block three.
Get over here right away.” Thus began an adventure in my early medical career
that taught me some things about desperate men and about myself.
I dropped the book and hurried
towards the riot. It was a long way getting there and involved passing through
lengthy corridors, unlocking multiple security gates and relocking them behind
me. Along the way, I stopped for a moment. “A riot”, I said to myself,
“why should I, a doctor, be in such a hurry to get to a riot?”
I then proceeded at a more
sensible pace. When I arrived, I found most of the inmates locked behind the
gates of the cell block, screaming in rage as they rattled the bars. The
lieutenant stood in a foyer outside the bars, accompanied by several other
guards. An inmate, a handsome, but delicate fellow, about 20 years old, lay on
the floor outside the bars and near the guards. I’ll call him “Floyd”. He
was bleeding from a wound in his neck. I had no idea what had happened, but this
called for immediate action rather than talk.
I knelt down and examined him as
the guards watched and the other prisoners screamed. He was in pain, but his
vital signs were normal. On the left side of his neck there was a ragged wound,
less than an inch long, from which blood was trickling. It was not far from the
jugular vein and the carotid artery. In that region, it could have been fatal.
It looked like he had been stabbed with a crude instrument of the kind that
prisoners constantly fashioned from scraps of metal, such as bed springs or
pieces of metal trays from the dining hall.
As I dabbed at the wound with a
cotton sponge, blood spurted all over me and my white coat. An artery must have
been cut after all! I was afraid it was the carotid. As it turned out, it was a
minor artery, but it gave me quite a scare. Somehow I quickly succeeded in
stopping the bleeding and got him stabilized. I can remember most of the other
details of that night pretty clearly, but I wish I could remember what I did to
stop the bleeding. (Floyd subsequently made an uneventful recovery on the
medical ward under my care.)
After I attended to Floyd, the
inmates continued screaming bloody murder and trying to break down the bars. I
still hadn’t the faintest idea what had happened and what was going on. This
cell block contained many of the most violent and mentally disturbed patients in
the prison. Many had committed homicide and most of them looked and sounded
homicidal that night.
The lieutenant was a seasoned
veteran of the prison and was the senior man in charge of the guards that night.
He made the following announcement to me. Gesturing toward the cell block full
of loud and potentially homicidal inmates, he said, “Doc, we’re going in
there.”
I imagined us being torn apart
by this howling mob and I tried not to show how scared I was. I was terrified of
going in among them, but I discovered I was even more afraid of being labeled a
coward. I was pretty new there, and I would never live it down with either the
guards or the inmates.
I quickly reasoned that the
lieutenant knew more than I about the prisoners and about what was going on that
night. I had to trust him. Surely, he didn’t want to be torn apart any more
than I did. I was quaking inside as we entered the cell block.
Once we were in with the
prisoners it became clear that we weren’t the targets of their rage. They
gathered about us and described what had happened. It seems that Floyd was
the favorite love object of the sex starved prisoners. They competed for his
affection. As is usual in these circumstances, the most powerful and dangerous
men got most of Floyd’s attentions. The two most dominant men, Baker and
Fuller, competed with each other to monopolize Floyd. That night, Fuller caught
Floyd with Baker, and in a fit of jealous rage, stabbed Floyd. There was an
immediate uproar. Floyd was everyone’s darling and the mob wanted to kill
Fuller.
I learned that the inmates had
been trying to break out in order to get at Fuller. When I was attending to
Floyd’s wound I hadn’t noticed Fuller, who had been skulking in a corner of
the foyer. The other inmates knew where he was and he wouldn’t have lasted
long if they got at him.
I couldn’t imagine how the
guards on duty had been able to extract Fuller and his victim Floyd from the
cell block without letting the other inmates out. It still seems like a miracle.
In 1946 when I was a soldier, visiting
The noise of the prison rioters
reminded me of the yelling of the opera audience. I had thought things like that
happened only in the theater, but on that night at the medical center I was
reminded that theater imitates life.