Honor Block A, relaxed and comfortable at the end of
another, day, found itself shaken alert by strange goings-
on. First there was the whir and roar of the Air Force
overhead. Trouble. Then there was the sudden arrival of
extra guards, doubling the normal complementday-shift
guards, summoned away from their comfortable civil-
service homes at some urgent call. Trouble for sure.
Honor Block A wasn't used to trouble. A Block was as
far from the Green Sleeves of 0 Block as you could get
and still stay in the Jug. Honor Block A belonged to the
prison's halfbreedsthe honor prisoners, the trusties who
did guards' work because there weren't enough guards to
go around. They weren't Apaches or Piutes; they were
camp-following Injuns who had sold out for the white
man's firewater. The ppce of their services was privilege
many privileges. Item:' TV sets in every cell. Item: Hobby
tools, to make gadgets for the visitor tradethe only way
an inmate could earn an honest dollar. Item: In conse-
quence, an exact knowledge of everything the outside
world knew and put on its TV screens (including the
grim, alarming reports of "trouble at Estates-General")
and the capacity to convert their "hobby tools" toother
uses.
An honor prisoner named Wilmer Lafon was watching
the TV screen with an expression of rage and despair.
Lafon was a credit to the Jughe was a showpiece for
visitors. Prison rules provided for prisoner trainingit
was a matter of "rehabilitation." Prisoner rehabilitation is
a joke, and a centuries-old one at that; but it had its
serious uses, and one of them was to keep the prisoners
busy. It didn't much matter at what.
Lafon, for instance, was being "rehabilitated" by study-
ing architecture. The guards made a point of bringing in-
spection delegations to his cell to show him off. There
were his walls, covered with pin-upsbut not of women.
The pictures were sketches Lafon had drawn himself; they
were of buildings, highways, dams and bridges; they were
splendidly conceived and immaculately executed. "Looka
that!" the guards would rumble to their guests. "There
isn't an architect on the outside as good as this boy!
What do you say, Wilmer? Tell the gentlemenhow long
you been taking these correspondence courses in architec-
ture? Six years! Ever since he came to the Jug."
And Lafon would grin and bob his head, and the dele-
gation would go, with the guard saying something like:
"Believe me, that Wihner could design a whole skyscraper
and it wouldn't fall down, either!"
And they were perfectly, provably right. Not only could
Inmate Lafon design a skyscraper, but he had already
done so. More than a dozen of them. And none had
