Remaking a Truant into a Con

David Wainwright's earliest memories are of the little cakes his mom used to make, and then of her lying down one day, when he was about 7, and dying. "At the time, I thought she was just tired and went to sleep, and I started shaking her," he says. "To this day I don't know what happened. Nobody ever took the time to explain it to me."

The Wainwrights lived in a semirough part of Kansas City; David's brothers were all older, and his dad was a big, stern man ("You didn't quiz him") who worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad and was gone often. That left David with his new stepmother for long stretches, and at 15, when he started getting "rowdy," she wasn't sure how to handle him. "One day we were on our way to school," he recalls. "We wanted to go to this baseball game at the old (Municipal) Royals stadium so bad. So I said, 'Hey, we can walk from here, from 40th and Prospect down to 18th and Brooklyn, and be there in time for the game.' We made it inside and there was this truant officer -- I don't know where he came from. Fat Sundae (his friend Robert Burns, who always had an ice cream in his hand) still thinks I'm mad at him because he got away -- I was the one who ran track! But they caught me and took me to school, and that's when the trouble started. I've never been much of a person to like authority, and they started talking to me, and I kind of -- no, I didn't 'kind of' nothing -- I got pissed. I said, 'This is the first time I done anything and y'all gonna try and suspend me?' And then I got into a fight in the lunchroom, and they did suspend me."

Next thing he knew, he found himself walking through the heavy doors of the Missouri Training School for Boys (MTS) in Boonville, Mo. One hundred miles east of Kansas City, the residence opened back in 1887 to reform delinquent youngsters ages 10 through 17. By the early 1940s, its reputation was Dickensian. ("When they wanted to punish the boys, they would put them in solitary and grind up their food into garbage," recalls Ann Carter Stith of St. Louis, a former Kansas City Star reporter who was eventually driven to work for prison reform.)

At Boonville, school "wasn't pushed," says Wainwright -- at least, not if you were sufficiently big and strong to work the fields. Evenings he spent dodging bullies -- such as the massive "Raspberry," who'd terrified him from day one -- or fighting. "They had a little ritual -- they'd take you down in the basement and you had to fight the duke of the dormitory," he recalls. "Either you learned, or you took a whuppin'. At first, I just put my head down and started swingin'; that's what I thought fighting was about." Finally another boy taught him technique. "You take a kid, 15 years old, and every day you get him in the basement boxing with people, it becomes part of who you are," observes Wainwright. "We didn't think about things, we just reacted: 'You piss me off, I'll get your butt.' The guards used to goad us into fighting with each other, and they'd bet on us."

One night, he says, "a guard came downstairs and broke up a fight by hitting us with a steel watchclock, and we fought back." As punishment, Wainwright and several others were sent to the "hole," which he remembers as "up on the roof, kind of like an old warehouse." Then he was told that they were being moved. "There was a priest -- he's the one told us," says Wainwright, his eyes narrowing. "We asked why and he said, 'Because you're mess-ups.'"

In March of 1963, Wainwright, then 17, found himself handcuffed, shackled, and thrown on a bus with six other boys. They were being "administratively transferred" to the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City.

"The first thing I saw," recalls Wainwright, "was a guy being brought out on a stretcher, dead, with a knife in his stomach. Big, muscular guy, a grown man." He remembers whispering to the others, "We haven't even gotten into the place yet and they bringing out dead bodies."

Inside, the boys were strip-searched, fingerprinted, photographed, and assigned inmate numbers. There had been no warning, no hearing, no certification of the 14- and 15-year-olds in the group as legal adults, and no criminal charges had been filed against them, let alone convictions. According to Missouri prison records, all these boys originally were charged with "delinquency," then transferred to the penitentiary because they were "incorrigible."

They were also black. And in the next two weeks, they saw two more groups of juveniles processed into the penitentiary, not a white boy among them.

The Missouri State Penitentiary had been branded "the bloodiest 40 acres in America" when a 1954 riot left five men dead, scores of guards injured, and seven buildings burned. Nine years later, 3,400 prisoners were jammed inside the Gothic limestone, gun-turreted walls -- more than double the number it was built to house. "It was a very dangerous place," concedes Department of Corrections spokesman Tim Kniest. "It was the only maximum-security prison in the state, so they had nowhere else to send people. Now you can hone in on how violent they are and house the most predatory together. But back then they had barely any classifications."