They Know What Freedom Means

"Hell," said an indignant inmate of California's grim 404-acre San Quentin Prison, "there's more patriotism inside here than outside. . . ."

A boisterous near-riot of San Quentin's 4,000-odd convicts one somber Sunday afternoon almost twelve months ago made able Warden Clinton Truman Duffy grin with pride. Reason: the Japs had just attacked Pearl Harbor; the convicts, swarming around him in the "Big Yard," were patriotically clamoring for immediate revenge.

They are getting it. Warden Duffy went after war contracts;* today San Quentin works eight hours a day instead of the traditional six, tops U.S. prisons in war production.

For the Navy, convicts make submarine nets; make or recondition buoys; repair hundreds of shoes; do laundry. They are making 300,000 Navy pillowcases, 40,000 mattress covers, have turned out 10,000 Navy cafeteria trays and only await metal to turn out 100,000. The prison's furniture shop has made hundreds of night sticks for the California State Guard; the jute mill makes sacking for sandbags, the machine shop repairs Navy valves.

When the Red Cross asked for blood, 700 convicts volunteered, 144 already have donated. Men in the prison tailor shop cut material for Red Cross sewing units. Soon the convicts will begin to reclaim rubber-covered copper wire salvaged and brought back from Pearl Harbor. In a million-dollar, convict-built factory, 1,000 skiff-type commando assault boats will be made if San Quentin's bid is accepted.

F. H. ("Buster") Haley is a Negro convict who may never get out (he got a life sentence in 1932 for murder), but he is a war worker, too. Recently he wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt: "I told him he was just about the best man there is excepting the warden. I told him I wanted to see my boys. My boys are in the Army and I figured they was going to send my boys over the sea. President Roosevelt wrote back and said he'd have the Adjutant General look into it. An' now my boys are going to come to see me. ... I told Mr. President that as long as this war is on I'd be willing to work ... for nothing until we lick those guys!"

"Hell," said a San Quentin inmate, "we know what freedom means."

* Peacetime laws limiting operation of prison industries have been shelved for the duration, to make possible full use of the 150,000 men in the nation's State prisons.

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