Street-Smart Ex-Felon Runs Prison -- It Took 20 Years Of `Scratching And Clawing'

FORT SUPPLY, Okla. - Ray Little went to prison in 1968 for his role in the armed robbery of a grocery store. For the most part, he has been on the inside ever since.

Today, he is at a minimum-security prison in northwestern Oklahoma.

He's running the joint.

Little, 45, has risen from ex-convict to the job of warden of a state correctional facility.

"What you see now looks good," he said philosophically, in a recent interview in his office overlooking the brick dormitories and tree-lined courtyards of the William S. Key Correctional Center.

"What is lost in the equation is the 20 years of scratching and clawing to get here," Little said.

Like fox guarding henhouse?

To some, Little's ascension might seem the equivalent of the fox guarding the henhouse.

Yet Little's saga - from a streetwise kid in the South Bronx to a survivor of the Attica, N.Y., prison riot, from a one-eyed basketball star for a small Christian university in Oklahoma to the warden of a prison with 505 inmates and 157 employees - is cause for celebration here.

Woodward County Sheriff Jerry Nickel called him "the best we've seen up here in a long time when it comes to security issues and working with law enforcement."

The only public criticism of his promotion was that some state Corrections Board members were not aware of his past until they learned of it through the media. He was confirmed unanimously anyway.

Little's journey from the streets of New York to the plains of Oklahoma is the stuff of movie scripts.

Life in the South Bronx was meager. He was one of six children. His father disappeared early. His mother was partially paralyzed and unable to work.

At age 9, while riding his bike, Little lost his right eye when a cherry bomb blew up in his face.

"I wasn't as well-dressed, as well-fed or as socially accepted as other kids in school," he said. "I learned how to gamble. I learned how to be street-smart."

In Little's world, it was a natural progression from pop-bottle deposits (at age 10) to blackjack (age 12) to numbers (age 14) to holdups (age 17).

"New York was a funny place," he said. "We knew we would be going away to prison. We just didn't know when or for what."

Little went to prison for helping rob a grocery store. One of his three accomplices brandished a gun. They escaped with about $2,000. Two years later, the authorities caught up with him, convicted him of robbery and sentenced him to up to 10 years.

While at Rikers Island, awaiting transfer to Attica, Little fully comprehended the destructive path that he had taken. Also at Rikers, Little said, he read his first book ever: "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." It encouraged him to pursue education, he said, and it began to sharpen his political thinking.

"At some point it just clicked," he said. "When I was in the streets, I thought I had good money. At some point there was the realization that it wasn't permanent money. There was the realization that you could have money one moment and not the next, and as soon as I lost the money, the crowd left."

High-school equivalency

He went on to earn his high-school equivalency degree in prison. He also got to know Charles Van Boskirk, head of Attica's vocational rehabilitation programs. Van Boskirk steered Little to his hometown college, Phillips University in Enid, Okla., and helped secure him a basketball scholarship.

Little was in the right place at the right time when the Attica riot erupted in September 1971. He had just been escorted into an administrative area for a pre-parole interview when the siege began. Thirty-nine inmates and hostages died, and 80 others were injured. But Little was out of the danger zone. He left prison after serving three years of his sentence.

His new home: the wheat fields of northwestern Oklahoma. His new persona: a lanky, one-eyed, 6-foot-4 guard-forward.

After graduating from Phillips in 1975, Little, still on parole, joined the Oklahoma Department of Corrections as supervisor of a minimum-security dormitory in Lexington.

He later became a case manager, a unit manager and a deputy warden before his appointment in March as warden. At his installation in June, his mother, whom he had moved to Oklahoma, and Van Boskirk sat in the front row.

Also there were Little's wife, Margaret, and their three children: a 25-year-old daughter in graduate school at the University of Oklahoma, a son who just graduated from Lexington High School and an 11-year-old daughter entering the sixth grade.

Both Ray Don Jackson, Woodward County prosecutor, and Nickel, the county sheriff, said Little, after being named warden, visited them and their staffs to introduce himself and tell them about his record.

"He said, `I want you to know about it ahead of time so you won't be caught by surprise,' " Jackson said. "I really appreciated that."

Criminal-justice experts say Little's inmate-to-warden story is rare, at least in part because felons are not eligible for corrections jobs in many states. Other states, experts said, have changed their laws so former inmates can pursue such jobs.

Little said his background provides a unique perspective for prison management: He knows how the typical inmate thinks and understands that correctional officers often need to be front-line counselors.

Little said it is better to transform prisons "from houses of pain to houses of incarceration. We inside corrections have learned that it's a lot less expensive than the other way that can lead to burning the place down."

One problem, he said, is that public frustration with crime has caused critics to misconstrue tools used by corrections experts to maintain order: "People on the outside are saying, `They're living too damn good.' "

Little said he emphasizes accountability and responsibility with inmates, noting that more than one-third of them eventually return to prison, most because they failed to carry out a "plan to stay out."

"A lot of them don't think about tomorrow," he said. "They think only of today."

But, he added, "Inmates are just like people on the outside. Some, you can get their attention; some are just knotheads."