Early in his new memoir from North Dakota State University Press, Tough but Fair: Reformation of a Prison, Memoir of a Warden, Winston Satran recounts a great escape. Ten prisoners broke out of the North Dakota Penitentiary in 1973. They overpowered officers in recreation areas, scaled the walls, stole a car, and lit out east on Highway 10. The ten-day manhunt required to return them to captivity was a shock to the public, and to prison administrators.
For Satran, the episode is a framing device: there was trouble in prison administration. His book is about redemption in several ways, including fundamental reform of management.
As the narrative commences, a new warden, a military man, Col. Robert M. Landon, has arrived to shape things up. His tenure was brief, but transformative, with his deputy, Satran, deployed as his change agent, then succeeding him as warden, as Landon graduated to another position. Satran would serve, as deputy and then as warden, for fourteen years before departing to lead the Home on the Range for Boys in western North Dakota.
Tough but Fair recounts multiple constructive reforms made. Prison life was in many respects humanized: a gym built, recreation programs initiated. Educational offerings leading to high school diploma-equivalent certification and college credit. Prison shops established and organized as Rough Rider Industries: furniture assembly, highway signs, upholstery, as well as the farm. A so-called “hobby” shop where prisoners could make items for sale. Reconstruction of the entire campus, including the dicey time when the walls were down.
An extended chapter treats an initiative dear to Satran’s heart: the prison rodeo. Warden Landon heard the request from prisoners to have a rodeo and charged Satran to make it happen. He got able and wise assistance from stockman and rodeo empresario J. C. Stevenson. Satran involved inmates in planning and production, not just as competitors. “I knew there was an opportunity,” he writes, “to create a new era within the prison.”
He risked his own body in the cause, riding bulls at the rodeo until a higher official suggested he not do so. “I wanted to be part of this wild, crazy environment,” Satran writes. “It taxed every ounce of who I was.” At the final performance, one of the convict participants, tears streaming down his face, presented Satran with a parting gift—a three-year-old quarter horse gelding.
Satran cannot be pigeonholed as to his philosophy of reform. He surely did not coddle prisoners, but neither did he exact cruelty as punishment. He favored substantial sentencing, not for the sake of retribution, but in order to allow time for rehabilitation. He believed in the reality of evil, but strove to salvage lives.
I spend a lot of college teaching time trying to get students to understand chaos and complexity. History and life are a mess, but if you observe and reflect, you can discern the patterns of complexity. Don't accept pat explanations or ideological imperatives. Somehow Satran realized this from experience, and applied it. He closes with a catalog of maxims, his lessons of experience, from which I share just a few.
- Be engaged and present, especially in time of crisis.
- Be aware of your own physical and emotional state.
- Follow your instincts through to the end.
