Originally aired November 23, 2001

Many of us have wanted to get in touch with an old teacher to let them know how they changed our life. But how about a former prison inmate who tracks down his old warden to say “thank you.” In the 1950s Ramone Tapia made headlines for his escape attempts and leading a prison riot in the Nebraska Penitentiary. After the state hired a new warden, Ramone dropped out of the headlines. That was good news. Recently he shared his story with “Statewide’s” Bill Kelly. It’s a story of how the prison system changed, and how that changed the life of one man.

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TRANSCRIPT

Transcript of Perspective

Reported by Statewide correspondent, Bill Kelly.

Ramon Tapia, a tough guy armed robber, took another wrong turn in prison and triggered a riot that nearly burnt the place down.
[Ramon Tapia] "I wasn't a very nice person. Like I said earlier, I didn't cry. I didn't have any compassion for weakness."
Maurice Sigler made a career out of trying to turn tough guys around.
[Maurice Sigler] "The man is sent to prison as punishment and not for punishment."
Forty years later, the ex-con drove to Florida to met the retired warden. One man changed his life in a remarkable fashion.
The other at 93 years of age had hardly changed at all.
[Tapia] "Ray Tapia."
[Sigler] "Is this Ray?"
[Tapia] "Yes."
[Sigler] "Ray, I didn't… I didn't remember you being this tall."
[Tapia] "Oh really. Or this old."
Two men whose lives intersected inside the Nebraska State Penitentiary had a few things they wanted to say to each other.
[Tapia] "I'm kind of a product of your philosophies."
In the 1950s the Nebraska State Penitentiary was not the worst prison in America but aging buildings made it little more than a warehouse for criminals. Albert Bovey had been chief janitor at the state capitol before he was named warden in the mid-1050s as a political favor by the governor. Untrained and underpaid guards turned to brute force before finesse with the inmates.
[Bill Kelly, Reporting] "Were they quick to use force?"
[Tapia] "Oh definitely. We had what they called the goon squad. And I remember when one guy was rebelling about getting a haircut; they went in and beat him with blackjacks. I was there."
Twenty-year-old Ramon Tapia got seven years for armed robbery and he only made it worse for himself.
[Bill Kelly, Reporting] "Are you carrying a weapon most of the time in prison?"
[Tapia] "Knife… had a knife. Got a kitchen knife and had it sharpened in the machine shop."
He got caught hiding marijuana in the prison yard, and later with a homemade key. Each time he was sent back to solitary confinement in a horrible place called 'the hole'.
[Tapia] "It was a place where you had just a toilet bowl stuck in concrete, with a faucet… water faucet over it that was for drinking and flushing the toilet."
It was dark, nearly without heat, and bread and water arrived every third day. Nearly starvation rations.
[Tapia] "We were in there over thirty days, and that's pretty much the limit. A guy is pretty weak and in pain. After thirty days you're weak and skinny."
Bad choices added time to Ray's sentence, making him a desperate man willing to risk anything to get out. A small group of inmates were smart enough to come up with an escape plan, and naïve enough to think it would work.
[Tapia] "We ran for the cars but there was snow on the cars and we got in the wrong car. And somebody was trying to start it, and meantime the deputy warden and some others were running out with riot guns. So the guy fired in that shot and we ducked. And then by then they all came out with their guns so we gave up. We would have gotten killed if we decided to walk."
More time in prison, more time in the hole. There were no rules governing how long a man could be punished this way.
[Tapia] "Every day it's like getting a sentence. And I think that was the hardest thing for me was to wake up every morning and realize that I had no immediate hope of getting out. There's nothing like losing your freedom."
Still in the basement of the solitary facility after a full month a prisoner in the next cell shares his secret with Ray in the coded language used by inmates.
[Tapia] "He said, 'Issi isa gissawon tissew gissa issit isof issi sezza.'"
[Bill Kelly, Reporting] "Which means?"
[Tapia] "I'm going to get out of my cell."
Guards didn't understand that.
[Tapia] "No, you say it real fast. 'Issisagissawon tissewgissaissit isofissisezza.'"
He surprised a guard, stole his keys, freed the other prisoners in solitary, took another guard hostage and demanded to speak with Governor Anderson. In a handwritten note the rebel prisoners laid out demands, including getting rid of guards labeled 'sadists and headbeaters'. After sixty-five hours the guards were released after the governor agreed to hear from the prisoners. Not much changed. Ramon Tapia certainly hadn't changed. It was an odd choice for a summer trip. Ray Tapia drove from his home in Colorado with his wife at his side and drove around the outside of the Nebraska Penitentiary.
[Tapia] "I look at these walls and I remember I used to be on the other side, I used to play handball right here by this tower."
Thinking back, Ray knows he lost touch in the summer of 1955. It's the only thing that can explain launching a prison riot just weeks after getting back out of solitary. It started in the dining hall on a hot August night, armed only with a homemade knife Ray persuaded other prisoners to sit down for a strike.
[Tapia] "Well, I said sit back down. And everybody just sat back down."
The guards retreated almost immediately, leaving the prisoners to roam the buildings and prison yards freely. Soon the fire started, gutting the machine shop, the furniture-shop, and the cannery. Inmates roamed the yard freely. The fire department refused to enter the burning prison.
[Tapia] "We enjoyed the fire. It was kind of exciting to be free. We weren't outside but we had freedom. You walked in the cell-house; there were no guards. You walked out in the yard and there was nobody in sight. The guards were up on the walls."
The National Guard arrived and inmates were ordered back inside the cellblocks, but not into their cells. That night, the dark buildings gave Ray and others a chance to settle scores with inmate informers, the snitches.
[Bill Kelly, Reporting] "Did you want both of these guys dead?"
[Tapia] "I don't think I cared if they were dead. There wasn't intent to kill them, but just to exact some kind of message to any snitch that you can't do that in here."
The next morning, the warden ordered the prisoners back in their cells. Armed National Guardsmen made it impossible to argue. While the prison smoked and smoldered, Ray and everyone else who started the riot were locked in isolation again. Again, they broke out. Again they tore up the lock up. And again, Ray Tapia faced more time. This time charged with arson. What could have been just a couple years in prison stretched to twenty years, maybe more.
[Tapia] "I remember thinking about that; I could die there. I had never seen this until the other day. And I was thinking that I might die in there. And then things changed."
Ray remembered the day he decided to change. The day he thought about the cemetery just outside the prison walls where they bury inmates who never leave. Boot Hill.
[Tapia] "The other night I was out here by myself. I realized I could easily be still in there or dead."
Maurice Sigler worked as a guard at Leavenworth and reformed the Angola Prison Camp in Louisiana before Nebraska hired him to overhaul the State Penitentiary in Lincoln. He picked up on the problem walking through the prison yard the first time.
[Sigler] "Nobody spoke to us. I mean, the prisoners that you saw. There was no animation in the place."
[Bill Kelly, Reporting] "What did that tell you?"
[Sigler] "Well, it told me what I had been told, that nobody cares."
The hole had been replaced by the new but no less isolated Adjustment Center. The warden still couldn't believe one man, Ray Tapia, had been in there nearly four years.
[Sigler] "I asked him, why are you here? So he honestly told me."
[Bill Kelly, Reporting] "And he said?"
[Sigler] "I helped burn up the penitentiary."
[Bill Kelly, Reporting] "That blunt."
[Sigler] "Yeah."
He may have been a troublemaker, but a throw-away-the-key philosophy did not work for the new warden. He asked his deputy warden to explain.
[Bill Kelly, Reporting] "When it's done that way, what does that do to the inmate?"
[Sigler] "It'll do two things. It'll make him vicious; or it will kill him completely, his spirit."
Sigler's philosophy for reforming the prison started with reforming the prisoner.
[Sigler] "And I got the idea that all people who come to prison aren't people who need to die there. I don't think they're all going to be failures. And I believe that if there is some way that we have… they've got a lot of idle time. If there's some way they can use their time towards self-improvement, this is going to help them along."
And that is what led one prisoner to drive halfway across the country to say thank you to his ex-warden.
[Tapia] "You weren't brutal. You didn't rule by brutality as in the past. The threat of force is how they ruled before you came there."
[Sigler] "But you don't have to do that."
So in Maurice Sigler's living room, two men sat down to share stories like old college friends. Recalling how the warden brought the three biggest troublemakers to his office days after he arrived.
[Tapia] "It was kind of refreshing to find that somebody would want to ask us what we could do…"
[Sigler] "… to help me."
[Tapia] "To help you, and in turn you were going to help us because… it was a community effort."
[Sigler] "And one of them said something about being tough. I said, hold it. Right there is where you made a mistake. You are looking at the toughest guy here. I got up. I said I've got the state of Nebraska backing me, man. You guys aren't tough."
No one doubted the new warden was tough. But also surprisingly friendly. He never had a guard at his side when he walked and talked to he prisoners in the yard. In return, there were new expectations for prisoners. Sigler required inmates to attend classes for credit. Alcoholic's Anonymous opened a chapter, along with the Jaycees and Toastmasters.
[Sigler] "I think it requires self-evaluation. Facing up to the fact that here I'm a stoop."
A documentary done on prison reform in Nebraska shows a calm and mannered Ray Tapia cleaning his prison cell, and studying. He had decided he could be something other than a prisoner.
[Tapia] "I think when a person comes in the penitentiary he has to adapt himself to his environment. And sometimes that's rough and I think that's when a person rebuilds the most."
[Sigler] "Here's the way I made my judgement. Here is a guy 31 years old. Up until four years ago he had never tried to do anything for himself. And now he has won these honors here in our little deals. He has a GED from our school and his work record is perfect. My judgement was that if he does not get out now and get straightened out, he never will. And so I know I took a gamble on him."
Ray left prison in 1963. There were a few more scrapes with the law, but four years later he married Naida. Kids, grandkids, and better jobs followed. Guided by his faith as a Jehovah's Witness, it's been a good life… a blessedly uneventful life.
[Tapia] "I was intent on preparing myself to go back out in society."
That's what brought Ray Tapia to Florida, to the retirement village where Maurice Sigler holds court. He wanted to introduce his wife to this man.
[Tapia] "The change we made, I do acknowledge that you started it and she refined it."
He wanted to say thank you.
[Tapia] "I figured that he answered a prayer. And the only thing I want to say in looking back on it, I think it was an answer to a prayer."