The Big Sleep: Prison Graveyard Is End Of Sentence

RAIFORD, Fla. - In the quiet shade of tall pine trees, nearly 1,000 men from the Big House are sleeping the Big Sleep.

They have escaped the whorls of barbed concertina wire, and the grim watchtowers that guarded them in life. Here, between a forest and a cow pasture, they lie in single-spaced rows, awaiting the final Roll Call.

Boot Hill is what the inmates at Union Correctional Institution call the potter's field where Florida's prisoners are buried: Prisoners who die behind bars, and who are too poor, too wretched, too despised to receive a burial in the "free world," as those on the inside call the outside.

Each plot is marked by a concrete slab with a license tag-shaped metal plaque affixed. The tags are stamped in the prison's own license plate factory.

Perhaps the nicest words ever spoken about these men, are spoken at their funerals by the Rev. Eldon Cornett of the Church of the Nazarene, who serves as the prison chaplain. Unfortunately, the dead cannot hear this last sweet benediction.

"I say: `These fences do not fence God out,"' said Cornett, a trim, dark-suited, silver-haired man who has spent 20 of his 71 years working behind bars.

" I say we are here to pay a final tribute of respect to that which is mortal of - and here I say the name - and on behalf of the state, I extend my condolences. I say the grave levels all argument. You can't argue with death."

The cemetery was laid out in 1913, the same year the prison opened as a wooden stockade on 18,000 acres of oak and pine scrubland in north central Florida. Today it is the oldest and largest penitentiary in the state, holding 1,690.

The first man to be buried in the cemetery was Justice Rice, No. A747, who died Oct. 30, 1913. Rice lay alone until inmate No. B21, Charles Small, joined him April 18, 1914.

Rice was African American; Small was white. The cemetery was unusual, at least for those times, in that African Americans and whites were buried side by side, right from the start. Yet they came here by different paths: Following a custom time-honored in North Florida, white inmates who die behind bars are sent to the Archer Funeral Home in Lake Butler; African-American inmates go to the Hale Funeral Home in Starke.

The state pays the funeral homes $160 for transportation from the prison, to the medical examiner's office, to the funeral home, to the cemetery. The deceased inmates get a simple wooden coffin with metal handles and a funeral suit of civilian clothes with a necktie. Embalming, clothes and a casket come to $940. Cremations are cheaper: $425, with $55 more for a pouch to hold the ashes.

At the prison, inmates hammer together a wooden burial vault. This is trucked to the cemetery, where a crew of seven trusties digs a hole big enough to hold the vault.

The cemetery's most famous occupant is Giuseppe Zangara, the unemployed bricklayer who came within a hair's breadth of changing world history when he fired a pistol at President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami's Bayfront Park in March 1933.

Zangara missed, but mortally wounded Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak. Zangara was tried, convicted and strapped into the electric chair in just a few weeks. Asked whether he had any last words, he spat defiantly: "Pusha da button."

Inmates were originally identified only by their jailhouse numbers here, but chaplain Cornett has persuaded prison officials to replace the numbers with names from the registry, and the old tin plates are being gradually superseded.

Unfortunately for Zangara, the inmates at the license plate-stamping shop made a mistake. He is identified as "Zangana Giuseppe, 24996, DOD (date of death) 3 30 33."

In all, there are 940 regular burials and 41 cremation-burials at the cemetery. Seventy more gravesites are occupied by indigent patients from the Northeast Florida State Hospital at Maclenny.

A single guard is buried here, W.H. Nettles, who died of a heart attack March 31, 1933, aged 26. He had no family to claim his body, and so was put in among the inmates in death.

He has, however, the honor of an upright headstone, the only one in the cemetery, which says he is "Gone But Not Forgotten."