death

My late May, 2004

From the email archives:

On Sunday 30 May 2004 11:32 pm, Jerry Hubbard wrote:
> How is everyone? Hope the storms did not harm anyone.

My basement flooded twice, my tenant’s kitchen had water streaming in through the window frame, our backyard fence was blown down, the umbrella on our deck was blown off the deck into the yard while flipping the table over, and I found a dead cat in the alley (which I buried in our back yard).

Oh, and my car needs a new transmission: $1900.

Other than that, a typical week.

My late May, 2004 Read More »

Dead five years before he was discovered

From Reuters’s “Body found in bed 5 years after death” (4 October 2006):

Austrian authorities have discovered the body of a man who apparently died at home in bed five years ago, a Vienna newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The corpse of Franz Riedl, thought to have been in his late 80s when he died, went undetected for so long because his rent had been paid by automatic order from the bank account into which he received his pension, the daily Kurier said.

Neighbors said there was no strange smell coming from Riedl’s apartment and authorities who found the body after a court order was given to enter said his body appeared to have “mummified” and was well preserved.

“He had been frail and a woman had helped him,” the husband of the apartment block’s caretaker told Kurier, adding that mail had always piled up outside the pensioner’s flat. “We thought he had moved in with her or gone to an old people’s home.”

Police said they were not certain as to exactly when the man had died, but that they had found only schilling notes in the apartment — the currency used by Austria before the introduction of the euro on January 1, 2002.

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The end of days in Slab City

From Charlie LeDuff’s “Parked in a Desert, Waiting Out the Winter of Life” (The New York Times: 17 December 2004):

Directions to purgatory are as follows: from Los Angeles drive east past Palm Springs into the bowels of the Mojave Desert. Turn south at the stench of the Salton Sea. Proceed down Highway 111 to the town of Niland, a broken-down place of limited possibilities.

Turn left on Main Street and head down the road to the railroad tracks where the law sometimes waits, as though the tracks were an international boundary.

“Where you going?” asked the deputy, Frank Lopez, on a recent night, even though the road leads to just one place. The Slabs.

Bored stiff, the deputy spun a ghost story about drugged-out crazies, a cult in a blue bus, a child molester, a man who sleeps with rattlesnakes, a mobster on the lam, and old people, flocks of old people who have traded in their picket fences for a mobile home and a life on the drift. …

Five miles down is the sign, “Welcome to Slab City,” marking the entrance of this former World War II military base. The only suggestion of life this night was the flickering of campfires. …

Pastor Hyatt, at 69, has inherited the burden of living. His wife, Audrey, died this year after suffering a stroke here in the desert wasteland. The memory of her scent is everywhere.

“Ah, he’s lonely, and it’s tough to see it,” said Rusty, 73, who sat at the pastor’s fire, warming himself. Rusty looked and smelled like a bum — the price paid, he said, for freedom. “Nobody particularly wants to die out here in the desert, but the living’s free.”

Slab City is not so sinister as it is a strange, forlorn quarter of America. It is a town that is not really a town, a former training grounds with nothing left but the concrete slabs where the barracks stood. Gen. George S. Patton trained troops here. Pilots of the Enola Gay practiced their atomic mission, dropping dummy bombs into the sea.

The land belongs to the state, but the state, like the law, does not bother, and so the Slabs have become a place to park free. More than 3,000 elderly people settle in for the winter, in a pattern that dates back at least 20 years. They are mostly single, divorced or widowed — a whole generation on the road, independent, alone. In this place, to be 55 years old is to be young.

There are no amenities; no potable water, no electricity, no sewerage. Groceries can be picked up in town at the grubby market whose managers do not seem to mind that hundreds of people fill their jugs from the water tap. Mail is routed to a post office box — Niland, CA 92257. Gasoline is bought in distant towns like Brawley; prescriptions and liquor are bought in Mexico. Sewage is held in storage tanks or holes in the ground.

The north side of Main Street is Poverty Flats. The south side, the suburbs, where the relatively well-to-do motorhomies have their dinner dances and clubhouse trailers.

Cole Robertson lives in the Flats with his wife, Mabel. Mr. Robertson, 72, is a retired construction worker from East Texas who cuts an intimidating figure, sitting shirtless, with one rheumy eye, a watermelon physique and a cotton fields vocabulary. An argument with a neighbor last year ended with one of the Robertsons’ trailers in flames. That is how law is dispensed in the Flats, vigilante style. One man was dragged to death a few years ago, another shot in the kneecap last year. Occasionally, the deputies do come around, usually in the day to exercise a warrant or to remove children who have not been seen in school for months. But normally, justice comes at the end of a matchstick in the Flats.

“There ain’t no rules,” Mr. Robertson said. He told of his neighbors, an aging man who lives with his voices in the rundown bus, a geriatric transvestite, a no-good who strapped his kid to a tree and left him in the sun.

A few years ago, a man tried making scrap metal from an unexploded aluminum shell he found at the bombing range in the nearby Chocolate Mountains. He succeeded but at the cost of his own life. His legs had to be picked from a tree.

It was in this anarchy, eight years ago, that Pastor Hyatt stumbled upon his life’s purpose. He discovered the Slabs quite by accident. He and Audrey had packed up their whole life, sold the house in Lebanon, Ore., left their jobs at the titanium plant where he was a shift foreman, said goodbye to their children and to their obligations and struck out on the road.

He was not always a good man, he admits that. He had a temper and hard fists. But he came across a band of rolling revivalists that first year on the road, and followed them to Minnesota. He was ordained by the World Wide Ministries without ever studying at seminary and seems a little embarrassed by this.

Stuck near Niland, the pastor inquired about a place to camp in an R.V. for the evening. A stranger told him about the Slabs, five miles down the road.

Upon seeing the privation and sadness and isolation, the preacher and his wife believed that the Creator had given them a second life. They built the Slab City Christian Center out of modular housing and began to preach and feed October through April, when the weather is clement and the Slabs come to life.

When people were found dead in their trailers, the pastor and his wife were there with a Psalm. They gave children rides to the hospital. The Hyatts paid for the work from their life savings. But Audrey was felled by a stroke in February and passed in May.

When she died, the pastor’s self-assurance faltered and he found that he had become one of the lost, emotionally stranded with one foot in hell and the other on an ice cube. …

Rusty, the doubter who cleans his shirt once a week in a bucket. Rusty, who tells about a prepubescent military career. Rusty, whose smell and language come from the stables. Rusty, who came in on a bus and says he ran a militia out of this camp for 12 years in case the Mexicans invaded from the south or the F.B.I. from the east.

“Everybody can’t fit in to the middle-class life,” said Rusty, who wore a military shirt and cap, military boots and long fingernails as thick as seashells. Suffice it to say, Rusty does not want people to know him and does not disclose his last name.

The evening was cold and dark, the air thick with the smells of burning salt oak as Slab City went to sleep. A Frank Sinatra record played somewhere across the salt flats. The thunder of bombs clapped on the far side of the Chocolate Mountains. Rusty smoked by himself in his broken-down camper with the flat wheels and camouflage netting. A lamp burned in the pastor’s trailer.

Rusty talked about a daughter who did not want anything to do with him; a wife he reckoned was working a truck stop somewhere between California and Texas. But Rusty is human. He dreams of a rich woman from the south side of the Slabs. They wear makeup, those girls over there in the R.V.’s. They use toilets instead of buckets. They have class. It’s never going to happen, he says. “I’d love to have company, but I can’t dance anymore,” he said. “I got old legs, but I’m a good conversationalist. But those women over there, they’re stuck up. Middle-class stuck up.”

The senior citizens on the south side of town travel in a sort of lonely-hearts club tailgate. They are alone, having suffered a late-life divorce or the death of a longtime partner. Their vehicles are big, expensive Coachmen and Fleetwoods and Ramblers and the like. They work as a sort of neighborhood watch, and the denizens of the Flats do not cross the imaginary line.

The majority of the society is women. They come to the Slabs because it is free and close to Mexico, where liquor and prescription medicine can be bought cheap. They are educated, savvy about life and competent mechanics.

Donna Lee Cole is a member of Loners on Wheels, a rolling singles club with chapters across the United States. Mrs. Cole says there are at least 10,000 people who belong to this subsociety of aged hobos, people who drive around in search of nothing except tomorrow. They tend to be women, she said, because women live longer than men. …

“We women aren’t looking for a man,” she explained. “The divorcees walked away from a bad situation and don’t want another one. The widows draw Blue Cross and their husband’s Social Security and would lose it if they married a new man. So you don’t bother. You’re just looking for some company.”

Besides, Mrs. Cole says, look at the quality of men, no offense. “They’re bald and paunchy and toothless. I’m old, but I’m not dead.” …

The lonely-hearts clubs have happy hour and social mixers, dances twice a week and trips to town for steak dinners. Still, the Elvis generation goes to bed early and goes to bed alone.

“I was married 46 years,” says Tina Faye at the afternoon mixer at the L.O.W. slab. At 80, Mrs. Faye strikes an exotic figure, lean, rouged, coiffed, with a voice as thick as apricot nectar.

“My man told me to go on if I was to outlive him. So I took to the road. But I feel him sitting there right next to me. I can’t let him go.”

The mood is a bit sad until Ruth Halford, a 74-year-old-widow with a silver permanent, pipes up. “I’m not sad about anything. I don’t owe nobody nothing. I scratch my plans in the dirt. I’m not looking for anybody. The only person I’m in love with is me. Right, girls?”

This is maddening to the eligible bachelor, like a dog chasing a pork chop on a string. A waste of a perfectly beautiful woman.

“Those girls, they get to being independent and they don’t need men,” said John Clairmont, 77, a retired truck driver. “You can never get them to come home with you.” …

The pastor talked about random things from his life with his wife. The snowstorms and eggs in a rooming house. The smell of her hair. Ceramic snowmen she collected. Her face lighted by the dashboard lights. Recipes the children do not ask for. Grandchildren who, chances are, will not remember her name. Death in the desert in some nameless place without longitude or shade.

“That’s the tragedy of old age,” the pastor said as his eyes welled once again. “I’m alone. I’m derelict without her.”

Rusty stared at his feet.

The end of days in Slab City Read More »

The airplane graveyard

From Patrick Smith’s “Ask the pilot” (Salon: 4 August 2006):

The wing is shorn off. It lies upside down in the dirt amid a cluster of desert bushes. The flaps and slats are ripped away, and a nest of pipes sprouts from the engine attachment pylon like the flailing innards of some immense dead beast. Several yards to the west, the center fuselage has come to rest inverted, the cabin cracked open like an eggshell. Inside, shattered rows of overhead bins are visible through a savage tangle of cables, wires, ducts and insulation. Seats are flung everywhere, still attached to one another in smashed-up units of two and three. I come to a pair of first-class chairs, crushed beneath the remains of a thousand-pound bulkhead. In the distance, the plane’s tail sits upright in a gesture of mutilated repose, twisted sharply to one side. High on the fin, the blue and white logo remains visible, save for a large vacant portion where the rudder used to be. …

I’m taking in one of the aviation world’s most curious and fascinating places, the “boneyard” at Mojave Airport in California, 70 miles north of Los Angeles.

The Mojave Desert is a barren place, a region of forbidding rocky hills and centuries-old Joshua trees. But it’s also an area with a rich aerospace history. Edwards Air Force Base and the U.S. Navy’s China Lake weapons station are both here, as well as the airport in Palmdale, where the Lockheed L-1011 was built. The Mojave Airport, officially known as the Mojave Airport and Civilian Aerospace Test Center, is the first FAA-licensed “spaceport” in the United States, home to a burgeoning commercial spacecraft industry. It’s a spot for ingenuity and innovation, you could say. But for hundreds of commercial jetliners, it is also the end of the road.

Of several aircraft scrap yards and storage facilities, including others in Arizona, Oklahoma and elsewhere in California, Mojave is arguably the most famous. …

There are upward of 200 planes at Mojave, though the number rises and falls as hulls are destroyed — or returned to service. Not all of the inventory is permanently grounded or slated for destruction. Neither are the planes necessarily old. Aircraft are taken out of service for a host of reasons, and age, strictly speaking, isn’t always one of them. The west side of the airport is where most of the newer examples are parked. MD-80s, Fokker 100s and an assortment of later-model 737s line the sunbaked apron in a state of semiretirement, waiting for potential buyers. They wear the standard uniform of prolonged storage: liveries blotted out, intakes and sensor probes wrapped and covered to protect them from the ravages of climate — and from the thousands of desert jackrabbits that make their homes here. A few of the ships are literally brand new, flown straight to Mojave from the assembly line to await reassignment after a customer changed its plans. …

The scrap value of a carcass is anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000.

“New arrivals, as it were, tend to come in bunches,” explains Mike Potter, one of several Mojave proprietors. …

Before they’re broken up, jets are scavenged for any useful or valuable parts. Control surfaces — ailerons, rudders, slats and elevators — have been carefully removed. Radomes — the nose-cone assemblies that conceal a plane’s radar — are another item noticeable by their absence. And, almost without exception, engines have been carted away for use elsewhere, in whole or in part. Potter has a point about being careful out here, for the boneyard floor is an obstacle course of random, twisted, dangerously sharp detritus. Curiously, I notice hundreds of discarded oxygen masks, their plastic face cups bearing the gnaw marks of jackrabbits. Some of the jets are almost fully skeletonized, and much of what used to rest inside is now scattered across the ground. …

Near the eastern perimeter sits a mostly intact Continental Airlines 747. This is one of Potter’s birds, deposited here in 1999. A hundred-million-dollar plane, ultimately worth about 25 grand for the recyclers. …

The airplane graveyard Read More »

OnStar: the numbers

From PR Newswire’s “OnStar Achieves Another First as Winner of Good Housekeeping’s ‘Good Buy’ Award for Best Servic” (3 December 2004):

Each month on average, OnStar receives about 700 airbag notifications and 11,000 emergency assistance calls, which include 4,000 Good Samaritan calls for a variety of emergency situations. In addition, each month OnStar advisors respond to an average of 500 stolen vehicle location requests, 20,000 requests for roadside assistance, 36,000 remote door-unlock requests and 19,000 GM Goodwrench remote diagnostics requests.

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How doctors measure what percentage of your body is burned

From Daniel Engber’s “How Much of Me Is Burned?” (Slate: 11 July 2006):

rule-of-nines.gif In the 1950s, doctors developed an easy way to estimate the ratio of the area of a patient’s burns to the total area of his skin. The system works by assigning standard percentages to major body parts. (Most of these happen to be multiples of nine.) The skin on each arm, for example, covers 9 percent of a patient’s total surface area. Each leg comprises 18 percent, as do the front and back of the torso. The head and neck together make up another 9 percent, and the last bit (or 1 percent) covers the genitalia and perineum. This breakdown makes it easy for doctors to estimate the size of a burn in relation to a body—a burn that covered half the arm would add 4 or 5 percent to the total figure. …

Another method uses the size of a patient’s palm as a reference. As a general rule, the skin on the palm of your hand comprises 0.5 percent of your total surface area. (For children, it’s 1 percent.) A doctor can check the size of a patient’s hand and compare it with the size of a burn to make a quick guess about the percentage.

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Camouflaged weapons

From Noah Shachtman’s “Chameleon Weapons Defy Detection” (Defense Tech: 27 March 2006):

Last week I talked to Anthony Taylor, managing partner of an outfit which makes weapons which can be hidden in plain sight. You can be looking right at one without realizing what it is.

One type is the exact size and shape of a credit card, except that two of the edges are lethally sharp. It’s made of G10 laminate, an ultra-hard material normally employed for circuit boards. You need a diamond file to get an edge on it.

Taylor suggests that the card could easily be camouflaged as an ID card or one of the many other bits of plastic that clutter up the average wallet. Each weapon is individually handmade so they can be tailored to the user’s requirements.

Another configuration is a stabbing weapon which is indistinguishable from a pen. This one is made from melamine fiber, and can sit snugly inside a Bic casing. You would only find out it was not the real thing if you tried to write with it. It’s sharpened with a blade edge at the tip which Defense Review describes as “scary sharp.” …

According to one gun magazine, the CIA has had a ceramic handgun firing caseless non-metallic ammo for years.

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Who was saved in the storming of the Bastille?

From Wikipedia’s “French Revolution” (5 July 2006):

On July 14, 1789, after hours of combat, the insurgents seized the Bastille prison, killing the governor, Marquis Bernard de Launay, and several of his guards. Although the Parisians released only seven prisoners; four forgers, two lunatics, and a sexual offender, the Bastille served as a potent symbol of everything hated under the ancien régime.

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Napoleon’s losses in the invasion of Russia

From Wikipedia’s “Napoleon I of France” (5 July 2006):

The French suffered greatly in the course of a ruinous retreat; the Army had begun as over 650,000 frontline troops, but in the end fewer than 40,000 crossed the Berezina River (November 1812) to escape. In total French losses in the campaign were 570,000 against about 400,000 Russian casualties and several hundred thousand civilian deaths.

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Joseph Fouche the atheist

From Central Missouri State University’s “Joseph Fouche“:

Moreover, Fouché was not content with merely attacking the aristocracy. He orchestrated a campaign of atheistic fervor never before seen in Europe. He abolished clerical celibacy and ordered priests to marry or adopt a child within a month. Churches were pillaged, and priests were forbidden from wearing their robes in public. By his command Christian funeral services were banned and the inscription, “Death is an eternal sleep,” placed over the gates of the cemeteries (Zweig, p. 39).

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Kids forcibly sent to re-education programs

From Nadya Labi’s “Want Your Kid to Disappear?” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2004):

RICK STRAWN IS AN EX-COP WHO STARTED HIS COMPANY in 1988 to help police officers find off-duty work guarding construction sites. Ten years later, he was asked by a member of his United Methodist church to transport the churchgoer’s son to Tranquility Bay in Jamaica. The school is run by the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs, a company headquartered in Utah that owns eight schools in the United States and abroad, including Louis, Jr.’s destination. …

Three years ago, Strawn escorted Valerie Ann Heron, a 17-year-old from Montgomery, Ala., to Tranquility Bay. The school is the most hardcore in the WWASP system, the one to which students are sent when they repeatedly cause trouble at other schools. …

The world according to Strawn is based on choices and consequences. The world according to WWASP is designed to reinforce the same principle. Students enter Casa by the Sea at the first of six levels. To advance, they have to earn points through good behavior and schoolwork. Until they reach level three, which takes an average of three months, they can communicate with the outside world only through letters to their parents, which the school monitors. After that, they can talk on the phone to their parents but no one else.

Casa costs nearly $30,000 for a year – as much as a year’s tuition at Harvard – but offers no traditional academic instruction. Instead the schoolwork is self-paced; the students sit at tables with a workbook and take a test on a section when they decide they’re ready. They can retake the same test as many times as necessary to achieve an 80 percent passing grade. According to the Casa parent handbook, the school does not ensure that “the student will even receive any credits” or that the teachers who monitor the study sessions will have U.S. credentials. The school does not track how many of its students go on to high school or college. “You’re not going to have a teacher riding your back,” Dalton told Louis. “It’s all independent study. I just read the module, and did the test. I finished class in a week. That’s how easy it is.”

Students spend more time studying themselves than any other subject. They write daily reflections in response to self-help tapes and videos such as Tony Robbins’s Personal Power, You Can Choose, and Price Tag of Sex. They answer questions like “What feelings/emotions did I experience today and how did I choose to respond?”

Students also attend, and eventually staff, self-help seminars. The entry-level seminar, called Discovery, encourages participants to “learn to interrupt unconscious mental and emotional cycles which tend to sabotage results.” Kelly Lauritsen participated in Discovery at Casa in 2000 and said she was encouraged to hit the walls with rolled towels to release her anger. The price of tuition includes versions of these seminars for parents. Like Oprah on speed, sessions run nonstop from morning until midnight. Many parents and kids say they benefit from the self-analysis. “I didn’t realize that I had so much anger inside,” the 14-year-old girl whom Strawn transported in November wrote to her mother. …

Strawn told Louis that the hardest thing about Casa would be abiding by the school’s intricate system of discipline. “It’s not the big rules that get you. It’s all the little rules,” Strawn said. Casa docks students, according to its handbook, for telling “war stories” about inappropriate experiences, for being unkind to each other, and for making “negative statements about the School, the staff, the country, or other students.”

“There’s a whole page of rules,” said Shannon Eierman, who attended Casa last year. “That page is divided into sections of categories, into different codes, and a million subcategories. You could be there forever and the next day and learn a new rule.”

Students at Casa who commit “Category 5 infractions” can be punished with an “intervention,” for example, which is defined as being left alone in a room. Students say that the punishment can last for weeks, though Casa insists that the maximum penalty is three days. “I had to sit with crossed legs in a closet for three days,” said Kaori Gutierrez, who left Casa in 2001. Interventions may be used to punish out-of-control behavior, drug use, and escape attempts. But they’re also the way the school handles “self-inflicted injuries,” which can range from cracked knuckles to self-mutilation with pens or paper clips to an attempted suicide.

At the root of this long list of punishable violations is “manipulation,” which includes lying or exaggerating. Strawn repeatedly uses the word to dismiss a kid’s behavior – it’s the way he said Valerie Heron acted the day before her suicide. In the WWASP universe that he inhabits, manipulation is a term of art that refers to just about anything a teen does or says that the staff doesn’t like.

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Why it’s hard for prisoners to sue prison systems

From Daniel Brook’s “The Problem of Prison Rape” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2004):

When inmates seek civil damages against the prison system, as [Roderick Johnson, a 35-year-old African-American who is suing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice] has done, they must prove not merely that prison officials should have done more to prevent abuse but that they showed “deliberate indifference” – that is, that they had actual knowledge that an inmate was at risk and disregarded it. Showing that a prison guard should have known is not enough, no matter how obvious the signs of abuse.

This standard was established by the Supreme Court in the 1994 case Farmer v. Brennan, in which a transsexual inmate imprisoned for credit card fraud sued federal prison officials for ignoring his rape behind bars. While the court affirmed that prison rape is a violation of an inmate’s constitutional rights and stated plainly that sexual assault is “not part of the penalty that criminal offenders pay for their offenses,” it set up formidable barriers to establishing the culpability of corrections staff. At the cellblock level, the “deliberate indifference” standard discourages prison guards from shining a light into dark corners. What they don’t know can’t hurt them.

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The history of solitary confinement

From Daniel Brook’s “A History of Hard Time” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2003):

Dickens wasn’t the first European intellectual who had crossed the Atlantic to visit Eastern State Penitentiary. A decade earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville had been sent by the French government to study the Philadelphia prison. …

What drew the attention of Americans and Europeans was an innovative method of punishment being pioneered at the prison called solitary confinement. While the practice had roots in medieval monasteries, where it was used to punish disobedient monks, solitary confinement came to prominence as a form of criminal punishment in the United States soon after the Revolution. …

In colonial America, capital punishment had been common, and not just for murder – burglary and sodomy could earn an offender the death penalty as well. For less serious offenses, criminals were generally subjected to physical punishments meted out on the public square. In a frontier nation of small towns, public embarrassment was seen as the key to deterring crime. Physical punishment, whether in the form of the stockade or the whipping post, was combined with the psychological punishment of being shamed in front of the community. Jails existed, but they were used mainly to hold criminals before trial and punishment. There were no cells and few rules: Men and women were housed together, and alcohol was often available. …

In 1787, at a soiree held in Benjamin Franklin’s living room, [Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence & widely regarded as America’s foremost physician] presented an essay titled, “An Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments Upon Criminals, and Upon Society.” Rush declared that “crimes should be punished in private, or not punished at all.” He claimed that public punishment failed to rehabilitate the criminal and risked letting the convict become an object of community sympathy. In lieu of public, physical punishments, Rush endorsed the creation of a “house of repentance.” Grounded in the Quaker principle that each individual is blessed with “Inner Light,” Rush envisioned a place of anonymity, solitude, and silence, where prisoners could dwell on their crimes, repent, and return rehabilitated into society. …

In 1821, the reformers finally convinced the Pennsylvania legislature to approve funding for Eastern State Penitentiary, which would be the largest public building in the country; with a price tag of nearly $800,000, it was likely the most costly one as well. No expense was spared: To prevent disease, each cell in the new prison was equipped with a toilet, a rare luxury at the time. When the penitentiary opened in 1829, President Andrew Jackson was still using an outhouse on the White House lawn.

The principles of the penitentiary system – silence, solitude, surveillance, and anonymity – were incorporated into the architectural plan. Eastern State was designed by John Haviland, a young architect, who proposed a hub-and-spokes model that allowed for constant surveillance. Inmates were housed in 8-by-12-foot cells arranged along a series of cellblocks radiating out from a central observation tower.

Each prisoner remained in his cell at all times, save for a brief daily exercise period held in an individual pen adjoining each cell. Prisoners ate their meals in their cells and did small-scale prison labor there like shoemaking. On the rare occasions when prisoners were allowed to leave their cells, they were prevented from interacting with other prisoners by hoods they were forced to wear to protect their anonymity. They were also forced to use numbers instead of names for the same reason. Silence was maintained at all times in the prison, and reading the Bible was the only activity other than labor that was permitted. Reformers believed that cutting inmates off from the world would foster meditation that would lead to rehabilitation, so visits from family or friends were prohibited. On average, inmates spent two to four years alone in their cells, underneath a single round skylight, known in the prison as the “eye of God.”

The expense of the building limited its influence in the United States, but Eastern State was widely copied in Europe and even in Latin America and Japan, where economic conditions made the model more attractive. Over 300 prisons were built on Eastern States’ hub-and-spokes model, in cities as diverse as London, Paris, Milan, St. Petersburg, and Beijing. Architectural historians consider the hub-and-spokes penitentiary to be the only American building type to have had global influence until the first skyscrapers began to rise in Chicago and New York in the 1880s. …

Dickens, who also interviewed prisoners at Eastern State, was far more skeptical. In his travelogue, American Notes, he described Philadelphia’s system of “rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement” as “cruel and wrong.” …

Dickens didn’t accept that the penitentiary represented human progress over the days of floggings on the public square, or as his prose suggested, even the medieval torture chamber. “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” …

In New York, at the Auburn prison near Syracuse and later at Sing Sing in Westchester County, a modified system of solitary confinement was being put into practice. While inmates spent their nights in solitary cells, they worked together silently in a common area during the day. This allowed wardens to set up profitable prison industries that could offset the costs of prison construction. …

Despite this vehement defense of the solitary system, in the period after the Civil War, the regimen at Eastern State was slowly abandoned. … Without enough funding to keep the system running, inmates were frequently doubled up in cells. In 1913, the solitary system was officially abandoned. Solitary confinement became a short-term punishment for misbehaving prisoners rather than the prison’s standard operating procedure. …

More than half of all U.S. prisons in use today were built in the past 25 years, to house a prison population that has risen almost 500 percent over roughly the same period. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. In raw numbers, it has more prisoners than China, a country with over four times as many people. …

Supermax prisons – high-tech, maximum-security facilities – were the answer politicians and corrections departments were looking for to solve the problem of increasing violence in prisons. Following Marion’s lead, corrections departments around the country began building supermax prisons, or adding supermax wings to their existing prisons to handle the growing number of violent prisoners who could not be controlled in the traditional prison system. Today there are 20,000 supermax inmates in the United States, roughly 2 percent of the total prison population, though in some states the proportion is much higher: In Mississippi, 12 percent of prisoners live in supermax units.

The system of punishment in supermax units resembles nothing so much as the system of punishment pioneered at Eastern State. The Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit, which cost California taxpayers a quarter of a billion dollars, is perhaps the most notorious supermax. From the air it looks like a high-tech version of the Philadelphia prison: Its hub-and-spokes design is clearly descended from John Haviland’s 19th-century architectural plan. Inmates in the SHU (known as “the shoe”) are kept in their cells close to 24 hours a day. As at Eastern State, inmates eat in their cells and exercise in isolated attached yards. …

Dr. Stuart Grassian, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who was given access to SHU inmates to prepare for providing expert testimony in lawsuits against the California Department of Corrections, has concluded that the regimen in security housing units drives prisoners insane, and he estimates that one-third of all SHU inmates are psychotic. He writes of what he calls “the SHU syndrome,” the symptoms of which include self-mutilation and throwing excrement.

Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist who has interviewed supermax inmates, writes that a majority of inmates “talk about their inability to concentrate, their heightened anxiety, their intermittent disorientation and confusion, their experience of unreality, and their tendency to strike out at the nearest person when they reach their ‘breaking point.’ ” Even those inmates who don’t become psychotic experience many of these symptoms. Those least likely to become mentally ill in solitary confinement are prisoners who can read, because reading prevents the boredom that can lead to insanity. (The human psyche appears not to have changed since the days of Eastern State, when an inmate told Alexis de Tocqueville that reading the Bible was his “greatest consolation.”) Because roughly 40 percent of U.S. prisoners are functionally illiterate, however, reading can provide solace and sanity to only a fraction of those behind bars.

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Alcatraz: reality & Hollywood

From Dashka Slater’s “Lights, Camera, Lockdown” (Legal Affairs: May/June 2003):

The first two Alcatraz films, Alcatraz Island and The Last Gangster, arrived in theaters in 1937; the most recent, Half Past Dead, came out last November. In the 65 years in between, Alcatraz has been the subject of some two dozen movies and has made guest appearances in many more. There have been prison movies, horror movies, comedies, romances, action films, cartoons, and even porn flicks set on Alcatraz. It’s rare for a Hollywood set to last even a few weeks after a film is complete, but the prison is so popular with filmmakers that a meticulous replica of its cellblock, first created for the Clint Eastwood film Escape From Alcatraz, has resided on a Culver City soundstage for more than 20 years. It has provided penal ambience for hundreds of movies, television shows, commercials, and music videos. …

THE FEDERAL PENITENTIARY AT ALCATRAZ opened on August 22, 1934. It was to be a prison like no other, a high-tech, escape-proof, super-maximum warehouse for the nation’s most incorrigible bad guys. …

The secrecy had been designed to deflate the celebrity reputations of gangsters like Al Capone, who had enjoyed special treatment at other prisons. James A. Johnston, the prison’s first warden, believed that egoism was the chief failing of recidivists. His prescription was total isolation and total anonymity. At Alcatraz, he promised, Capone and his ilk would become “forgotten men.” …

The articles emphasized the prison’s harshness and brutality, chronicling its excruciating rule of silence, which required prisoners to stay mute except during a two-hour recreation period on Sundays, and describing the dank “Spanish dungeons” where prisoners were sent for disobeying rules.

Many of these accounts were embellished, and some of the more lurid tales were pure fabrications. Alcatraz was tough but not barbaric. Inmates were guaranteed the basics of food, shelter, clothing, and medical attention; everything else – work, exercise, visitors – had to be earned. Minor infractions – failing to finish the food on your plate, talking while in the cellhouse, sassing a guard – brought a swift reduction in privileges. More serious violations, like taking a swing at a guard, sent prisoners to the chilly darkness of “the hole.” Particularly obstreperous prisoners were hosed down with cold water from the bay, a practice that earned the warden the nickname “Saltwater” Johnston.

Alcatraz was hardly a country club, but it was still one of the better-run prisons in the United States. Inmates had their own cells, an improvement over bunking with another con. These five-by-nine-foot cells were cramped, but each had its own light and running water, and prisoners could order as many books as they wanted from the prison library. The cellblock was kept at a comfortable 70 degrees and the food was considered some of the best in the prison system. …

Throughout the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, films like Train to Alcatraz, Prison Train, King of Alcatraz, San Francisco Docks, and The House Across the Bay picked up the mythology of the “Inside Alcatraz” accounts and ran with it, depicting the prison as a place that made even hardened cons quake in their leg irons. …

… fewer than 300 prisoners [were] kept there at any one time …

The island’s reputation was increasingly out of step with the times, and the prison was facing more tangible problems as well. After years of exposure to the salt air, the fortress was literally falling apart, and the cost of repairs was prohibitive. The prison closed in 1963 …

IN 1972, AFTER LANGUISHING IN BUREAUCRATIC LIMBO for nearly a decade, Alcatraz became a national park, a move that allowed Hollywood to begin making movies on the Rock itself. …

The Park Service originally thought interest in the prison would peter out within five years. Instead, the park receives 1.5 million visitors a year, about five times as many as Antietam or Little Big Horn and nearly as many as Mt. Rushmore. …

Hollywood is responsible, in large part, for making the former penitentiary recognizable as a prison rather than just a decaying collection of empty Depression-era buildings. Escape From Alcatraz brought fresh coats of paint to the mess hall and D block, as well as the yellow stripes (which never existed when the prison was open) that now run down the main cellhouse corridor. Murder in the First funded the restoration of a guard tower on the dock, and The Rock paid for the removal of hazardous waste. Leftover Hollywood props – metal detectors, cell cots, benches, even pillows – have stayed on as permanent adornments, giving tourists a sense of what the penitentiary was like when it was operating. Over time it has become difficult to distinguish Hollywood’s Alcatraz from the real one.

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Road rash, fender vaults, & root vaults

From Jascha Hoffman’s “Crash Course” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2004):

Typically there are two kinds of injuries [in hit-and-run cases], those from the initial impact, and the ones from hitting and sliding on the asphalt, known as “road rash.” To illustrate the different types of impact a pedestrian can suffer, Rich cued up a series of video clips on his laptop. The first one showed a well-dressed man with a briefcase in each hand caught crossing a busy Manhattan street. Suddenly, a white minivan blindsided him, causing a “fender vault” that tossed the man three feet into the air, still holding one briefcase. A taxi approaching from the opposite direction then launched him into a textbook “roof vault,” sending his remaining briefcase flying and hurling him headfirst onto the pavement. This was not a walk-away accident.

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Poems dug up from the grave

From Wikipedia’s “Dante Gabriel Rossetti“:

[Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal] had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a dead child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in her grave at Highgate Cemetery. … During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends to exhume his poems from his wife’s grave. This he did, collating and publishing them in 1871.

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Modern mercenaries

From Rebecca Ulam Weiner’s “Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2006):

YOU WON’T FIND THE WORD “MERCENARY” on the homepage of the International Peace Operations Association, the trade group for the private military industry. While many of the IPOA’s member companies are staffed by elite former soldiers of the United States military who now make a living hiring themselves out, the so-called “M word” isn’t in the IPOA’s corporate vocabulary. Members are known as private military companies (often called PMCs) or military service providers, who specialize in “private peace operations.” …

In recent years, private contractors have increasingly taken on important military functions, operating in some 50 countries and earning an estimated $100 billion in annual revenue. They provide security to civilian aid workers, other contractors, and even military forces. They train local armies for combat, develop future American soldiers (the firm MPRI helps run ROTC), and interrogate prisoners. At times, they’ve engaged in combat. During the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the U.S. has relied heavily on their support – private contractors make up a workforce of about 20,000, double the British troop presence. …

During the Iraq war, contractors have run the computers that control Predator drones, operated guided missile systems on naval ships, and maintained aerial surveillance and communications systems. In the Persian Gulf war of 1991, the ratio of soldiers to contractors was 50 to 1. In the current Iraqi conflict, it is 10 to 1 and falling.

This proliferation has worried many – in the academy, Congress, the media, and, increasingly, the military – because contractors operate outside the military chain of command and most legal jurisdictions. PMCs have no clear place under the framework of the Geneva Conventions – they aren’t noncombatants, because they carry weapons, but they aren’t lawful combatants, because they don’t wear uniforms. Nor do they fit the anachronistic definitions of mercenaries found in international treaties and resolutions, because those definitions generally require engagement in direct combat.

Soldiers are subject to rules of engagement and can be court-martialed for breaking the law. Contractors are governed most directly by the terms of their contracts – their extraterritorial activities and corporate status make them virtually immune from federal law. …

Worse, critics argue, because the military has no direct control over its contractors, it won’t accept responsibility for their actions. And PMCs allow the Pentagon to evade accountability to Congress, because they circumvent caps on the number of troops approved for deployment and their casualties aren’t counted.

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James Jesse Strang, Mormon King of Michigan

From Geoffrey Gagnon’s “King James I, of Michigan” (Legal Affairs: September/October 2005):

One letter that isn’t on display is the one that James Jesse Strang said he received from Smith just before the Mormon leader was murdered in June 1844. In the letter, which now resides in a university library, Smith bequeaths the nascent Mormon Church to Strang – a new friend, a Mormon of just five months, and, of all things, a lawyer. “If evil befall me,” Smith wrote to Strang in the letter, “thou shalt lead the flock to pleasant pastures.”

Strang’s rivals, among them Brigham Young, dismissed the missive as a forgery and Strang as an unworthy successor to Smith. Yet a couple of hundred church members – Joseph Smith’s widow, mother, brother, and sisters among them – believed the letter was authentic and that it granted church leadership to Strang. A disgusted Brigham Young took his followers west to Utah and built what is now the fastest growing religion in the United States. Strang took his followers to a remote island in Lake Michigan and declared the place his sovereign kingdom.

Hold up the palm of your right hand and you’re looking at a map of Michigan’s lower peninsula. Thirty miles off the coast of your ring finger sits Beaver Island, a 55-square-mile island on the inland sea of Lake Michigan. Only one building survives from Strang’s sojourn, a museum in which Strang artifacts fill one room. …

An old metal press, long since disappeared, once filled the building’s big front room. Strang used the press to spit out the Northern Islander, the region’s first newspaper, and to print his magnum opus, The Book of the Law of the Lord. The long-winded tome of decrees includes what Strang described as the lost transcription of the meeting between Moses and God on Mount Sinai. …

He settled, for the time being, on being a lawyer. “I should rather be the best hunter in an Indian tribe than a commonplace member of the New York bar,” he wrote. But a decade of legal practice yielded little more than common accomplishments, and little more power than that which was afforded him in his capacity as the postmaster of Chautauqua County. …

Strang met the church’s leader after making the acquaintance of Smith’s brother Aaron, who lived near Strang in Wisconsin. Initially, he wasn’t impressed with Joseph Smith, describing him in his diary as a man of “meager education.” Smith, however, seems to have been smitten with Strang’s intelligence. Within weeks of meeting Strang, Smith baptized him, and just weeks after that, he named him a church elder.

Strang, who as a teen was tossed out of the local Baptist church for questioning its precepts, had called himself the “perfect atheist” before moving West, but once on the frontier he realized he might command from the pulpit the power that had eluded him. Strang didn’t bother to familiarize himself with Mormon doctrine until long after he was a church leader. …

In June of 1844, an anti-Mormon crowd killed Joseph and Hyrum Smith. At the instant Smith met his demise, Strang claimed that he received a visit from an angel who anointed his head with oil and declared him the leader of the Mormons. A few days later, a letter to the same effect, purportedly mailed by Joseph Smith before his death, arrived in Strang’s hand. His years as a postmaster, perhaps, had not been wasted. …

Strang and his followers arrived on Beaver Island in the spring of 1847 and spent three difficult summers recruiting followers before he was convinced he had enough subjects to make a respectable kingdom. In 1850, with 200 followers on hand in an unfinished log tabernacle, Strang enlisted a traveling Shakespearean actor named George Adams to muster all the pomp and circumstance he could. Strang appeared before an audience of several hundred on a moss-stuffed seat, wearing a giant red flannel robe trimmed in white. Adams came before the crowd and placed a makeshift crown on Strang’s head, anointing him King James the First. Taking hold of a two-foot wooden pole, Strang returned the favor and named Adams his prime minister.

IN THE SPRING OF 1851, NOT YET A YEAR after Strang had taken royal possession of Beaver Island, the sound of waves helped cover the midnight approach of a rowboat full of troops and U.S. Marshals. Carrying government-issue revolvers, the men slipped toward the glow of an oil lamp in a square log house. Expecting a fight, they instead found the small village of St. James asleep. Marines lay on the deck of the iron-hulled Michigan, armed and ready to charge the beach. But no shots were fired. Within an hour of coming ashore, the landing party had matter-of-factly taken the king into custody. …

President Millard Fillmore, who had entered office the day after Strang’s coronation, reportedly received news of the frontier king from his brother, Charles Fillmore, who lived in Detroit. He soon began hearing about the king from prominent members of his party as well, who pressured the president to take action. Among them was Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 Senate rival, Stephan Douglas, who was wary of giving the South a secession movement to point to in the North. Fillmore instructed his attorney general and the secretary of the Navy to arrest the king. …

Judge Ross Wilkins told the prosecution that because the king and his followers hadn’t engaged in war against the United States or aided enemies of the nation in doing so, the king couldn’t be convicted of treason. That left the federal government with charges against Strang of trespassing on federal land, counterfeiting coins, and obstructing the mail. …

The next morning they delivered a verdict of not guilty. …

STRANG RETURNED FROM DETROIT AND DECLARED HIS TRIAL VICTORY a mandate for his absolute rule. He modernized the kingdom with roads (the King’s Highway, recently resurfaced, is still traveled), managed a lumber export business and a booming fishing trade, and enacted progressive conservation laws (“Ye shall preserve the trees by the wayside. And if there be none, ye shall plant them”). He even appointed garbagemen to keep the kingdom clean.

A year after his win in court, Strang won election to the Michigan Legislature, representing the island and a huge swath of the northern woods, and he commuted to the mainland to serve a pair of two-year terms. He deigned to recognize Michigan’s government, he said, because he saw that as engaging in international relations with a neighboring country. …

After his court victory, Strang’s absolute power began to corrupt him, if not quite absolutely, then bizarrely. He had a fixation with fashion that led him to decree that, for reasons of health, women should wear only loose fitting, knee-length bloomers as opposed to anything that “pinches or compresses the body or limbs.” The king’s stance, and the resulting uproar, unraveled the kingdom. When a collection of outspoken wives refused to don their new pants, Strang had their husbands flogged with a willow whip for “endeavoring to incite mischief and crime.” He reprimanded his subjects in print as well. “We laugh in bitter scorn at all these threats,” he wrote, using the royal we, in what proved to be one of the final issues of the Northern Islander.

Less than two weeks later, a mob of angered husbands, still smarting from their willow lashings, ambushed the king. Strang was pistol-whipped and then felled by an assassin’s bullet. … When Strang fell, pillaging mainlanders flooded the island to drive the Mormons away. The kingdom was scattered and soon forgotten to all but a handful of us Michiganders.

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Henry Wirz, the Demon of Andersonville

From Carolyn Kleiner’s “The Demon of Andersonville” (Legal Affairs: September/October 2002):

During the last 14 months of the Civil War, nearly 13,000 Union prisoners of war died at the Confederate prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia – more than at Antietam, one of the war’s bloodiest battles, and more than at any of the other hundred or so Civil War prisons. Reports of atrocities at Andersonville and other Southern jails had been widely circulated in the North during the war, along with photos of severely emaciated inmates who to 21st-century eyes bear an unnerving resemblance to prisoners at Nazi concentration camps. Captain Henry Wirz was the commandant of the prison and, by the end of the war, he was one of the most infamous men in America. By a special military commission, he was convicted of conspiracy to intentionally harm Union prisoners and of personally murdering at least ten soldiers. The noose was for him. …

Many captured Union soldiers were kept in and around Richmond, but as the front lines edged south and Dixie jails started to overflow, the Confederate government planned a new facility in the small, out-of-the-way town of Andersonville. The site was chosen for its easy railroad access, an abundance of pine forests, and a clear creek that ran across the property – and because the town’s 20 or so residents didn’t object. The first load of prisoners arrived in February 1864, before construction was complete. From that point on, the trains never stopped.

Built with the official name of Camp Sumter, the Andersonville prison consisted of a sixteen-and-a-half-acre dirt pen (later enlarged to twenty-six and a half acres), surrounded by a stockade made of rough-hewn, 15-foot-tall pine logs placed so close together it was impossible to see outside.

Though conditions were initially a vast improvement over Richmond detention centers, problems grew in proportion to the number of inmates. By late summer 1864, the prison population made Andersonville one of the largest cities in the Confederacy. At its peak in August, the “bullpen,” built to lodge up to 10,000 enlisted men, held 33,000 grimy, gaunt prisoners, each one crammed into a living area the size of a coffin. Their only protections from the sun were “shebangs,” improvised shelters constructed from blankets, rags, and pine boughs, or dug into the hard, red Georgia clay.

As the war dragged on and the Rebel government fell further into disarray, its resources and supplies depleted more each day, Andersonville became increasingly ill-equipped to provide for its wards. Daily prison rations usually consisted of coarse cornmeal with small bits of cob still in it (very rough on Northern stomachs accustomed to wheat bread), around two ounces of beef or pork, often served raw and moldy, and occasionally beans or molasses. (Guards got the same gruel.) Too many inmates meant not enough water to go around, as well as too much human waste, and the once-clear stream that ran through the camp became polluted, covered with a thin layer of green slime. The stench of the place carried as far as the town of Americus, ten miles away. Prisoners suffered from afflictions ranging from diarrhea and dysentery to scurvy and a condition described in death records as “nostalgia,” when men seemed to stop wanting to live.

Between March and June of 1864, the number of casualties per month more than tripled, reaching 2,994 at the end of the summer – or around 100 men a day. …

After arriving in Andersonville, Wirz initiated a record system and reorganized the prisoners into small details of 90 men each. A believer in strict discipline, he preferred forms of punishment like putting a prisoner in stocks or shackling him to a ball and chain. He was concerned about escapes, so he built a “deadline” of posts approximately 15 feet inside the prison walls; if inmates crossed the line, they were to be shot, no questions asked. Hungry dogs were sent after any who managed to break out. …

Andersonville closed for good the day after Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Twelve thousand, nine hundred and twelve of the 45,000 men who did time there as inmates remained behind forever, buried shoulder to shoulder in the prison cemetery. …

The Union government had been loath to recognize the Confederacy as a separate nation during the war, but now that it was over the government made an exception, in order to prosecute Captain Wirz squarely. He was charged as a foreign enemy who had violated the international laws of war. The fact that he was born abroad may have made it easier for Americans to swallow the notion of a fellow citizen being tried for criminal behavior in a military commission. The rules of the commission provided more room to maneuver and allowed for a broader range of admissible evidence.

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A brief history of American bodysnatching

From Emily Bazelon’s “Grave Offense” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):

In December 1882, hundreds of black Philadelphians gathered at the city morgue. They feared that family members whom they had recently buried were, as a reporter put it, “amongst the staring corpses” that lay inside. Six bodies that had been taken from their graves at Lebanon Cemetery, the burial ground for Philadelphia’s African-Americans, had been brought to the morgue after being discovered on the back of a wagon bound for Jefferson Medical College. The cemetery’s black superintendent had admitted that for many years he let three grave robbers, his brother and two white men, steal as many corpses as they could sell to the college for dissection in anatomy classes.

At the morgue, a man asked others to bare their heads and swear on the bodies before them that they would kill the grave robbers. Another man found the body of his 29-year-old brother and screamed. A weeping elderly woman identified one of the corpses as her dead husband. According to the Philadelphia Press, which broke the story, to pay for her husband’s burial she had begged $22 at the wharves where he had once worked.

Medical science lay behind the body snatchings at Lebanon Cemetery and similar crimes throughout the Northeast and Midwest during the 19th century. By the 1820s, anatomy instruction had become central to medical education, but laws of the time, if they allowed for dissection, let medical schools use corpses only of condemned murderers. In their scramble to find other cadavers for students, doctors who taught anatomy competed for the booty of grave robbers—or sent medical students to rob the graves themselves. …

In the early 19th century, doctors were eager to distinguish themselves from midwives and homeopaths, and embraced anatomy as a critical source of their exclusive knowledge. In the words of a speaker at a New York medical society meeting in 1834, a physician who had not dissected a human body was “a disgrace to himself, a pest in society, and would maintain but a level with steam and red pepper quacks.” …

According to Michael Sappol’s recent book, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, Harvard Medical School moved its campus from Cambridge to Boston (where it remains) expecting to get bodies from an almshouse there. …

“Men seem prompted by their very nature to an earnest desire that their deceased friends be decently interred,” explained the grand jury charged with investigating a 1788 dissection-sparked riot in which 5,000 people stormed New York Hospital.

To protect the graves of their loved ones, 19th-century families who could afford it bought sturdy coffins and plots in a churchyard or cemetery guarded by night watchmen. Bodies buried in black cemeteries and paupers’ burial grounds, which often lacked those safeguards, were more vulnerable. In 1827, a black newspaper called Freedom’s Journal instructed readers that they could cheaply guard against body snatching by packing straw into the graves. In 1820s Philadelphia, several medical schools secretly bribed the superintendent of the public graveyard for 12 to 20 cadavers a week during “dissecting season.” He made sure to keep strict watch “to prevent adventurers from robbing him—not to prevent them from emptying the pits,” Philadelphia doctor John D. Godman wrote in 1829.

When a body snatching was detected, it made for fury and headlines. The 1788 New York riot, in which three people were killed, began when an anatomy instructor shooed some children away from his window with the dismembered arm of a corpse, which (legend has it) belonged to the recently buried mother of one of the boys; her body had been stolen from its coffin. In 1824, the body of a farmer’s daughter was found beneath the floor of the cellar of Yale’s medical school. An assistant suspected of the crime was almost tarred and feathered. In 1852, after a woman’s body was found in a cesspool near Cleveland’s medical school, a mob led by her father set fire to the building, wrecking a laboratory and a museum inside. …

In the morning, news spread that the robbers had been taken into custody. An “immense crowd of people surrounded the magistrate’s office and threatened to kill the resurrectionists,” the Press reported. …

The doctors got what they asked for. A new Pennsylvania law, passed in 1883, required officials at every almshouse, prison, morgue, hospital, and public institution in the state to give medical schools corpses that would otherwise be buried at public expense.

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