The warden of one of the world’s largest and most overcrowded penitentiaries might reasonably be expected to be a burly, hard-spoken disciplinarian, packing a gun as he shoulders his way through the-prison yard and living in constant fear of an outbreak among his: prisoners.
Warden Clinton T. Duffy of San Quentin fits no part of that description, however. A slight grayish man who wears glasses, he looks more like a librarian than the absolute ruler of some 5,000 lawbreakers. He seldom speaks of brutality or of restrictive measures to be used against the few prisoners who get out of line. His main concern at “Q,” as the prison is known among its inmates, is in rehabilitation, in ways and means of transforming prisoners into potentially useful citizens after their release.
As a result, Warden Duffy, unlike his predecessors, can walk alone, unarmed and unguarded, among hundreds of prisoners, greeting scores of them by name, discussing work and the weather with others, listening to complaints and suggestions with courtesy and attentiveness.
A typical Duffy story concerns the time, a few years ago, he was considering turning San Quentin's huge dining halls into cafeterias. When I asked him why, he explained simply: “Well, it'll give the boys a choice of food. The way it is now, they have to eat any old thing that is slapped down in front of them.”
And whereas things like this don’t happen at “Q” every day, this did happen there on a recent Christmas Eve: a Negro prisoner walked up to Duffy, suddenly produced a pair of dice, shook them expertly, and grinned: “Shoot you for five days, Warden!”
But perhaps the neatest capsule description of his gentleness came from an associate who told me one day: “Clint is so kind-hearted he has to surround himself with ‘No’ men.”
This is Clinton T. Duffy, the unusual warden—justifiably a celebrity among the unusual people of Baghdad by the Bay.
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