In 1969, he published an account of the endemic corruption there which created a national scandal, and which was popularized in a fictional version by the film Brubaker.
He 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.
"When you sentence a man to life in prison, with no chance of getting out, he's going to die one day at a time because he knows he's doomed to walk the halls of purgatory for as long as he's alive," he once told an interviewer.
He wrote about his experiences there (with co-author Joe Hyams) in Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal, published in 1969 by Grove Press.
The 67-page report detailed horrific conditions at the two state penal farms, including endemic sexual assault, electrical torture, flogging, beatings with blackjacks and hoses, extortion of money from other inmates by the armed prisoners who were working as "trusty" guards (due to the absence of a salaried guard force), open marketing of illegal drugs and alcohol, and a host of other malicious and criminal practices.
[citation needed] In his own later writings about Tucker, Murton noted the cruelty of the "trustees": Discipline was routinely enforced by flogging, beating with clubs, inserting of needles under fingernails, crushing of testicles with pliers, and the last word in torture devices: the "Tucker telephone," an instrument used to send an electric current through genitals.
[6] The Rockefeller administration, though not directly implicated in crimes which took place before 1967, was deeply embarrassed by the national attention drawn to the brutality Murton revealed.
However, as Time noted in February 1968, the cemetery in question was over a mile away from where Murton found the bodies, at least one of which was positively identified as prisoner Joe Jackson, buried by Reuben Johnson on Christmas Eve, 1946.
[6] Murton's agitation eventually disrupted the Rockefeller administration to the extent that not only was he fired two months after the bodies were exhumed, he was told he had twenty-four hours to get out of the state, or be arrested for grave-robbing—a charge with a sentence of twenty-one years, under Arkansas law at that time.
[10] In 1982, 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 Murton to teach at the University of Central Oklahoma in the mid-1980s.
He returned to academia for the next several years, including a short stint teaching criminology and corrections at Oklahoma State University in the mid-1980s.
In 1980, a fictionalized film treatment starring Robert Redford as "Warden Henry Brubaker" was released to wide acclaim, earning an Oscar nomination.
Although the dramatic opening of the film, in which Brubaker impersonates an inmate in order to see the system literally "from inside" before taking up the warden's post, was a fabrication, much of the movie's drama was taken directly from the book.
Darin was due to perform the song on The Jackie Gleason Show, but when they ordered him to cut that particular line, rather than censor himself, he walked off the set.