Continuing the theme of last week's Perspective cover story, here are more summer reading suggestions for those interested in Arkansas:

"Cries From the Walls: Hell in Arkansas Prisons," edited by Van Hawkins of Jonesboro -- This anthology about people who experienced cruelty in Arkansas' prison system was published last year by Writers Bloc in Jonesboro. It's an important collection, especially at a time when talk of a massive new state prison is making headlines.

"Imprisoned people--men, women, black and white--endured hellish conditions," Hawkins writes. "Convicts experienced psychological abuse, impossible workloads, starvation, beatings and sometimes murder. This occurred at The Walls, an informal name given to the state prison in Little Rock. Mistreatment also existed at Cummins Prison Farm, established in 1902 for Black convicts, and Tucker Prison Farm, opened in 1916 for white prisoners.

"Trustees who ran these facilities, also criminals, did so with merciless brutality. Two former prisoners wrote important and rare books about their experiences at The Walls and in prison work camps."

William Hill's 1912 memoir and Dale Woodcock's descriptions of his experiences in convict work camps during the 1950s are included in the anthology.

The "hellish conditions" continued into the 1960s. Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, who took office in January 1967, said: "We have probably the most barbaric prison system in the United States. Some of the tortures that are inflicted on prisoners are beyond belief."

"Decades of brutality, corruption and perversity described by Hill and Woodcock passed unabated," Hawkins writes. "An official response held that complaining convicts could not be trusted. And, after all, most refused to go on the public record with their accusations. However, this political smokescreen was dispelled by an Arkansas State Police Criminal Investigation Division report. Through numerous interviews and seized evidence, the appalling truth came out."

In 1970, federal Judge J. Smith Henley wrote: "For the ordinary convict a sentence to the Arkansas penitentiary today amounts to a banishment from civilized society to a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world, a world that is administered by criminals under unwritten rules and customs completely foreign to free world culture."

"Double Toil and Trouble," a novel and collection of short stories by the late Donald Harington, edited by Brian Walter -- Harington, among the best writers in Arkansas history, died in November 2009. More than a decade later, the University of Arkansas Press released a previously unpublished novel and four short stories.

Harington, a Little Rock native who lost nearly all of his hearing at age 12 due to meningitis, taught art history in New York, Vermont and South Dakota before returning to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He taught at UA for 22 years before his retirement in May 2008. Entertainment Weekly once called him "America's greatest unknown........

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