Twentieth Century Fox paid Robert Redford $3 million to portray penologist Tom Murton in the film Brubaker, released last week. Tom Murton's lifetime earnings will probably never total $3 million. Or even $2 million.

A dozen years ago inmates at Tucker State prison in Arkansas ran the place. Prisoners convicted of murder toted guns, bullied their fellows into the fields at dawn and laughed them back to their cells at dusk. These prisoner/guards--called trusties--beat other inmates with a devilish tool called a strap, a leather slab with a wooden handle that, when handled "properly," can knock a victim six inches into the air. They tortured them by running pins and razor blades along the soft flesh under their fingernails. They gang-raped them in the barred dormitories where each prisoner slept with an arm flung over his eyes to block out light from the naked light bulbs that were never turned off.

The trusties worked hand in hand with the hired help, stealing provisions and supplies ordered for the inmates and selling them in black markets throughout Arkansas and as far away as Chicago. Those who managed the kitchen took bribes as payment for sand-wiches. Poorer prisoners made do with a spoonful of rice a day, plus soybeans, corn bread and water. The food was rancid and contaminated by weevils.

Meanwhile, the trusties managed the huge herd of livestock owned by the prison, eating meat at every meal and employing prison labor to build them homes on the prison grounds, complete with appliances and televisions.

Physical punishment and violence was a way of life in the prison. Life was cheap, after all, and a conspiracy of silence spread from within the prison walls to the Arkansas borders. But when a prisoner couldn't be controlled by beatings or chainings or bone-crushing labor in the flat fertile prison fields, the trusties used "The Tucker Telephone." They would take the offending prisoner to the infirmary, strip him and attack electrodes to his big toe and penis, which were wired to an old-fashioned rural telephone. By cranking the handle, the "operator" discharged six volts through the man's body. A "long distance call" could render a man permanently sterile, or insane.

Complaints about prison conditions grew so loud that Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, elected on a prison reform platform, hired Tom Murton to clean up Tucker Prison farm as a warm-up to overhauling the Arkansas prison system. Murton made drastic changes; he assigned power to the prisoners and removed authority from the trusties. He put an end to the torture, even abolishing use of the strap. He released death-row prisoners from their dark, solitary cells where they had been sequestered for months or years without human contact, reading material, plumbing or light. He halted the corruption that had drained prison supplies, making it possible to feed the prisoners full meals with meat at every sitting. He instituted a prisoners' council that met regularly to legislate changes and rule on problems of discipline. He organized baseball games, a prison band, even a prison band, even a prison dance. He put an effective end to homosexual rapes and a simple, honest security system cut the number of escapes from 38 per year to one during his ten-month tenure at Tucker.

In January, 1968 Murton moved to Cummins Prison Farm, a much larger institution with abuses even more widespread than at Tucker. This time, the trusties and guards were prepared for the new warden and Murton was in physical danger for several days until prisoners from Tucker were brought over to convince Cummins inmates that the new "Man" would be a good thing for everybody.

A few weeks later Murton found the bodies.

An old Black prisoner came to the new warden with the horrifying news that he had helped bury three inmates in the corner of the prison fields several years earlier. The next day, Murton selected a group of men and, accompanied by newspaper reporters and television crews, set out on a rainy morning to dig for the graves. By the middle of the day, three coffins had been unearthed and Murton figured that as many as 200 other graves had been dug in the field. Each grave represented a prisoner who had been murdered by prison authorities and discreetly buried.

Authorities charged that the coffins had been illegally removed from a paupers' graveyard on the prison grounds. But Murton had evidence for his charges of murder. The skeletons had multiple fractures, the legs had been broken to fit the bodies into the coffins, and one man's skull had been crushed to the size of a grapefruit.

A month later, Murton was out, fired from his post in Arkansas and unable to land a teaching job despite his four degrees in penology and criminology and experience as a university professor. The fraternity of prison wardens, naturally gregarious and even boastful, ostracized him. Murton threw up his hands and conceded the end of his criminology career.

Despite his best efforts, which included a book detailing the grisly conditions at Tucker and Cummins, and appearances on the Dick Cavett show, Murton could not prevail upon Arkansas state authorities to investigate the murders, despite the existence of an unlimited statute of limitations on murder. Only in 1970 was Murton vindicated when the Supreme Court ruled that confinement in Arkansas prisons was cruel and unusual punishment and therefore unconstitutional.

But the wave of reform ended when Tom Murton left Arkansas. The new warden reverted to a strict trustie system that eliminated the prisoners' new-found sense of responsibility. A few of Murton's innovations were retained but the system was not new, only dressed-up. "Cosmetic changes only domesticate the animal but don't kill it," Murton says.

Murton is a realistic idealist: "I don't think prison reform is attainable," he says matter-of-factly. "It's a goal we won't ever reach but we can get closer." He smiles. "We don't have Jeffersonian democracy either."

Murton didn't play by the rules. Throughout his life he has flaunted a cardinal rule: never expose the system you're working for. His role as he sees it is to uncover the abuses of the old system and point the way toward a new system. At times he sounds like an evangelist.