Rubin Carter's Prison Record
the Reality vs the Myths 

Rahway Prison, New Jersey

View Carter's prison record (pdf file)

But then they took him to the jail house

Where they tried to turn a man into a mouse.

from "Hurricane" by Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy

 

Thrown
in the hole!

Part I: In 1992, Denzel Washington played Malcolm X (above) in Spike Lee's movie. Malcolm Little (who later became Malcolm X), newly sent to jail, is thrown into solitary for refusing to state his prisoner number. (I recommend this movie -- it's a beautifully filmed tribute to an important American whose life was tragically cut short.)

Carter met Denzel Washington the same year the Malcolm X movie was released

"In '92 Carter was living at his mother's in south Jersey, drinking heavily, not eating and so frail he could hardly walk.

"Frightened, he drove up to Canada. [The Canadians]... paid $2,400 a day for his treatment for tuberculosis because Carter had no health coverage.

"The day after Carter came to their new home in King City to convalesce, Denzel Washington visited to try to buy the film rights to Lazarus And The Hurricane, the Canadians' book and Carter's story. (They opted for another company, which later approached Washington to act in the movie.)"

Toronto Star,
February 13, 2000

Thrown in the hole!

Part II
(Denzel does another
stint in the Hole in the Hurricane movie)

Warden (to Carter): You are being issued a standard inmate uniform with your number sewn on it so that we can identify you immediately...

Carter: I can't do that.


Carter's prison reputation:

"He had only to open his mouth in displeasure and drastic things would ensue."

In the movie... When Rubin Carter is sent to prison, he refuses to wear prison uniform and is thrown into The Hole for ninety days -- but did this happen in real life?
Larry King Live, Jan. 21, 2000 -- Carter repeats the claim that he was thrown in the Hole for 90 days.

KING: Is [the movie version] just the way it happened?

CARTER: That's exactly the way it happened. Little did I know what that decision [to refuse to wear a uniform] meant.

KING: They put you in the hole?

CARTER: They put me in the hole. I mean the hole, hole, hole.

KING: For how long?

CARTER: I have no idea. When you go into the hole six feet under -- six feet under the ground, there was no delineation as to what time that I'm going to do there. There was no 90 days. Six feet under the ground, in the dark: no sanitary, no lights, no anything there in that dark.

KING: How do you get food? They just pass it under...

CARTER: Five slices of bread and a cup of water a day.

But he doesn't even mention ninety days in the hole and the bread and water in his 1974 autobiography.... “For the entire month of July (that is, the month he entered Trenton Prison), I stayed locked away in my cell in deep meditation, going into myself with silence, gathering up all three of my souls -- Rubin, Hurricane and Carter, -- and wondering what we should do.”
Or in this
September 22, 1975, newspaper interview:		 "The ex-boxer has refused from the beginning of his term to wear prison garb. 'The reason I don't wear prison clothes is because I am not guilty of this crime and also because I love myself and have the highest regard for myself. There is no way I will let myself be abused.'"
Or in this lengthy interview in Penthouse magazine in 1975..... "When I came into this jail, I had perfect vision... But then I came to this jail, and when I was here about three weeks I had an examination - at that time they gave every person an examination; now they don't give you anything - and the man who gave me the examination said I had a detached retina."
Lazarus and the Hurricane, the book written by his supporters, the Canadians doesn't mention the ninety days in the Hole at all!
Here it is! In a 1992 Sports Illustrated interview: On first entering Trenton he refused to surrender his wristwatch and ring; to shave his goatee, as prison rules required; to work at any of the prison jobs. As punishment he spent three months in The Hole, his first of many descents into that airless, sepulchral dungeon.
Did I say three months? How about four months!

"When I first walked into prison, I refused to wear prison clothes. They threw me into solitary confinement for four months, with nothing to eat but bread and water."

New York Times, January 24, 1993

Did I say five slices of bread? It was really only three! And I stayed there for more than four months! ``Solitary confinement at that time was underground,'' he explains.

``It was literally a hole. There was no light, no running water, no sanitary conditions. You got three pieces of bread a day and a cup of water. The floor was just dirt. I stayed there for months and months and months and months.''

The Toronto Star, June 28, 1998
But his actual prison record states: Carter had a medical entrance exam on July 12, 1967, (at his entry to prison), and the doctor recommended him fit for any work. He was assigned to the tag shop, but was later re-assigned by a disciplinary court to work as a runner.

In the movie... Rubin Carter, as a young boy, is almost tossed over a cliff by a pedophile. He fights back and escapes. He's sentenced to juvenile detention until he's 21. Is it true?

From his biography: The 16th Round: Carter claims the incident happened when he was eleven years old. That would have been in 1948 or '49.

The judge sat high above us, his black robe rippling in the breeze of a huge fan..... "I sentence you, Rubin Carter, to Jamesburg State Home for Boys, as of this day until you are twenty-one years of age. So be it."

There was utter silence in the courtroom... My mother grasped my hand tightly and cried.... Goddamn! That was ten years away. Ten long years. A lifetime!

Here's the court record. Carter was not a young boy, but a teenager. It was Rubin Carter's fourth juvenile complaint. Previous incidents included stealing shirts and breaking into parking meters. On June 25, 1951, Rubin Carter, at age 14, was charged with Assault and Robbery resulting from the stealing of $55 and a wristwatch from a man who was struck over the head with a bottle. The victim’s injury required four sutures.... The defendant was sentenced to the State Home for Boys on July 3, 1951 as a result of this complaint and paroled on December 13, 1952. He was returned on a parole revocation on September 18, 1953.... The defendant escaped from the State Home for Boys on July 1, 1954.
After Carter was discharged, "unfit" from the Army, he was picked up by police and returned to serve nine months for escaping and to finish his original sentence. One month after his release from jail, he was arrested again for three muggings. He served four years in Trenton State Prison for that offence, where he met Bucky Leggett, a prison guard, who saw Carter's amazing talent as a boxer and who became his manager when he got out of prison.

Ten Years in Solitary on bread and water

Carter says he was kept in solitary confinement, in barbaric conditions. Is it true?

From the University of South Florida "Oracle" web site, March 2, 2001...
"His stubbornness and refusal to conform.... led him to many days, weeks and years in solitary confinement. For 10 of the 22 years, Carter said he sat thinking in it's darkness, also called 'the hole.'

'Six feet underground, in total darkness, without sanitation, with five slices of stale bread and one glass of water,' Carter said. 'Trenton State Prison was so bad, even the cockroaches stayed out.'" 
Boston Globe, March 11, 1992 For many of his years in prison, Carter was in solitary confinement. He learned to subsist on five slices of bread and two glasses of water and on food brought in from the outside -- there was a 25-pound-a-month limit.
 New York Times, Jan 16, 2000 For 20 years, I was in solitary confinement, reviled as a racist triple murderer, just narrowly escaping the electric chair.
Correction published in New York Times
Jan 19, 2000		 He was held in solitary confinement sporadically for a few months
during his 19-year imprisonment, not for the entire time.

 Did Carter choose to isolate himself while in prison?

"If punishment consisted of being locked in your cell, then by simply choosing to never leave my cell, I deprive them of that weapon. I would not work in their shops. I would not eat their food."

-- dialogue from the movie

"I only wish I could build me a hut far out in the fields by myself, and live there alone for the remaining time before going back to court."

-- letter from prison, Nov. 7, 1972

(1) Plough Reader, Feb. 2000

(2) Sports Illustrated, 1992


That’s why when I went to prison I refused to wear prison clothes, eat prison food, work a prison job. I refused even to talk to a guard.


An angry recluse, he ate his meals alone in his cell, heating up cans of soup with a small copper coil.

His official biography, Hurricane

He rarely ate in the dining room. Other inmates.... helped him maintain his independence by bringing him food. They brought mostly canned goods, beans, and soup, which Carter warmed up with a wire coil... He refused to see parole officers, and he rarely worked in any prison shop.
Toronto Globe & Mail, Dec. 20, 1977 By choice, Carter has isolated himself from 900 other inmates inside the grimy, red brick prison walls. He declined to participate in any work or educational programs or even to eat prison food.

Interview in The Aquarian, Sept. 10, 1975

I had changed my lifestyle around here, changed my schedule to prevent a lot of problems of coming in contact with a lot of guards or coming in contact with a lot of prisoners. I sleep during the day when I have a chance and I work during the night.... I work (at) getting out... I work being free... They want me to work in one of these factories around here making mattresses or sweeping up some floors or some other nonsensical job, and I will not do that.

His autobiography, The 16th Round doesn't mention any trips to solitary at all

From that day (the day he entered prison) to this, I have kept myself removed from the institution and its people... Each day at Trenton State (Carter and another prisoner) met in the library and researched the dusty law books...
The Canadians, in Lazarus and the Hurricane, say that Rubin chose to isolate himself (When he was sent to the Vroom building -- an institution for persons suspected of mental illness or incorrigibles who could not be handled in the regular prison environment) "For most inmates, a year's stint in there was living hell, the worst punishment the administration could distribute. To Rubin, who rarely left his cell, this kind of jailing was normal. In this building, morever, his cell was bigger than his five-by-seven foot cell in Trenton, and it was new and clean. It had one of those shiny, stainless-steel sink-and-toilet units that Rubin found positively space-age. And although contact visits were not allowed, he had lots of access to a phone. If it wasn't quite heaven, for Rubin at least, it was a hell of a lot closer to it than what he was used to in Trenton.

Journalists often refer to Carter's refusal to participate in prison programs or wear a prison uniform as being part of his protest against his wrongful conviction. However, Carter also refused to wear the uniform or work prison jobs during his earlier stints in prison [for escaping from juvenile detention and for assault].

 

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