21 Facts About Tom Murton

Thomas O Murton was a penologist best known for his wardenship of the prison farms of Arkansas.

Tom Murton was married to Margaret E Conway and had four children, Marquita, Teresa, Melanie and Mark Murton.

Tom Murton died of cancer at the age of 62 on October 10,1990, at a Veterans Affairs Hospital in Oklahoma City.

Tom Murton earned a degree in mathematics at Fairbanks, Alaska between 1957 and 1958 with benefits under the GI bill.

Tom Murton enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley in 1964 and completed a Master of Arts Degree in criminology and satisfied residency requirements for a doctorate in 1966.

Tom Murton had helped establish the correctional system of the new state of Alaska during the 1960s.

Tom Murton was teaching at Southern Illinois University when he was hired to reform the Arkansas prison system in 1968.

Tom Murton wrote about his experiences there in Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal, published in 1969 by Grove Press.

Tom Murton was unable to find work in the correctional industry after that, and believed he had been blackballed for his work in Arkansas.

Tom Murton occasionally taught courses in Corrections in the early to mid-1980s as an adjunct professor at San Jose State University and Chaminade University of Honolulu, which were affiliated at the time in their Criminal Justice programs.

Tom Murton was professor of sociology, Oklahoma State University, in 1985.

In 1967, along with releasing the Faubus report, Rockefeller sought to reform the system by bringing in Tom Murton, who had made his reputation by helping establish the Alaskan correctional system after that territory achieved statehood in 1959.

In early February 1968, Tom Murton ordered excavations on the grounds of the Cummins prison farm.

However, as Time noted in February 1968, the cemetery in question was over a mile away from where Tom Murton found the bodies, at least one of which was positively identified as prisoner Joe Jackson, buried by Reuben Johnson on Christmas Eve, 1946.

Tom Murton was dismissed in early spring 1968, less than a year after his 1967 hire.

Governor Rockefeller claimed that Tom Murton's excavations had become a "sideshow".

Tom Murton served as its president from 1969 to at least 1985.

In 1982, Tom Murton shared with students in a criminal justice graduate seminar course at the University of Central Oklahoma that he was "blackballed" by the "correctional community".

Dr William Parker, then department chair over the criminal justice program and subsequently the assistant dean, invited Tom Murton to teach at the University of Central Oklahoma in the mid-1980s.

Tom Murton returned to academia for the next several years, including a short stint teaching criminology and corrections at Oklahoma State University in the mid-1980s.

Tom Murton continued to maintain his duck farm until his death in late 1990.