Confidential File

A Stirring Problem When You're in Stir

Among
men doing hard time, the proper care and handling of a parole board is
a priceless skill. It's an art practiced and polished and passed along
from generation to generation of the convicted.

It's endless fodder for bull sessions. It moves the listless clock.

In their luxury-naked cells the younger, less seasoned prisoners sit in the background, listening and dreaming.

The old cons do the talking. Like professors at a seminar, they drone ad infinitum.

Theories, counter-theories. They've got an endless supply. Bone by bone, they analyze the men paid by the state to analyze them.

There
are points of contradiction on how to appear before the board. Should a
prisoner shave off his mustache? How should he part his hair? Should he
borrow his cellmate's glasses to look more scholarly?

But there is one point, always, where the old pros are in agreement:

When
you go before the board — when you face the men who have the magical
power of slashing years off your prison stay — go with humility.
Confess your crimes. (At least, those crimes of which you've been
convicted.)

And then, young man, repent. Admit the error of your ways.

It is imperative, they tell you, to confess and repent.

And here lies an interesting drama, about to be enacted.

It revolves around a 26-year-old man named Jack Eugene Bishop, formerly of this town, now a resident of San Quentin.

He's doing a five-to-life stretch for armed robbery of a gas station.

Briefly, these are the details of the crime:

At
9 p.m. on July 19, 1957, a man walked up to the 19-year-old attendant
of a Compton service station and, brandishing a blue-steel revolver,
robbed him of $109.

Through mug books and, later, a police lineup Jack Bishop was identified as the robber by the attendant.

Bishop's
attorney waived a jury trial and, in court, produced witnesses —
waitresses and bartenders — who testified that they had seen the
defendant intoxicated to the point of being unable to stand up both at
8:30 that night and at 10:30. They had seen him in a cafe and a bar a
few miles from the scene of the crime.

No evidence other than
the attendant's eyewitness identification connected Bishop to the
crime. No clues, no weapon — nothing else was found to tie him to it.

In
fact, the attendant noted no slurring of speech, no staggering walk or
no mustache on the suspect. (It wasn't brought out until after the
trial, however, that Bishop sported a mustache the week of the robbery.)

The judge found Bishop guilty, nevertheless.

Today,
Bishop still swears that he's innocent. He admits to being no angel. At
the ages of 18 through 20, he was continually in trouble with the law.
Once he did 90 days for burglary.

A few days ago, he wrote a letter from San Quentin to his brother in Paramount. It read, in part:

"I just got back from having my pre-board hearing, so that means I'll be going before the parole board in about three weeks.

"I
sure have been doing some hard time sweating it out. There is really
not too much to sweat out, as most likely I will get denied.

"If I had pleaded guilty at the start, there would be hardly any doubt that I'd get my date set.

"I
just got through writing a letter to the head psychiatrist and I'm
going to try to get him to give me a lie detector test or sodium pentothal.

Whether to Cop a Plea

"There's not a person in the world can realize what kind of a position I'm in. Whatever I do is wrong.

"It's ridiculous to go up before the board and admit something I never did. It's worse yet not to…"

If he follows the advice of the old-timers, he'll "cop out" and "repent" to cut a couple years off his time.

He'll
feel like a damn liar and an awful fool if — as he maintains — he's
innocent. But when you go before the parole board, mister, you play
their rules.