THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, September 6, 1995 TAG: 9509060047
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MICHELE SNIPE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 125 lines
FROGGIE, GREEN and the rest of the Imperial Lords that roamed Manhattan's Upper West Side were sure their leader would go from a street gang to a chain gang. Just as they had.
And he did.
Melvin Dixon spent 25 years at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y.
Only the former gang leader wasn't a prisoner. Dixon was a guard at the famed ``Big House.''
``I'm the one that got away,'' says Dixon, who lives in a three-bedroom apartment near Norfolk International Airport. ``I survived by the grace of God and pure unadulterated luck.''
Now 65 and retired from the prison for 14 years, Dixon wants to write a book about his experiences as a black man on the ``other side'' of the bars.
In his quarter of a century patrolling the catwalks at Sing Sing, Dixon endured four attempts on his life, several riots, saw countless men assaulted and raped and witnessed the execution of a mass murderer.
It has left him with the view that ``Sing Sing, like all prisons, is an archaic concept.
``It doesn't work,'' he says describing an inmate who killed four people, stabbed someone in prison, was released, then returned again for murder - all in a four-year period.
``If people have the mental capacity to put a man on the moon, they can come up with something different,'' he says.
Dixon, who was picked up by police some 35 times during his high school years before going into the Air Force, worked the night shift at the five-housing cell prison some 30 miles from Manhattan.
By day, he operated a carpet cleaning business and then at night, he'd drive the eight miles from Elmsford, where he lived with his wife and two children, to change into his gray uniform.
``It was like a dungeon,'' he says of Sing Sing, whose first structures were built in 1826.
Dixon rotated through every part of the prison, including stints in the hospital, on the wall and in the Death House.
He was working the Death House in 1963 when one of New York's last death row inmates was strapped into the electric chair.
Guards were generally not allowed to witness executions. So, Dixon had to ask for special permission to attend.
The 51-year-old inmate, known for his sharp wit, was sentenced to death after being re-arrested for a double murder. Before walking his ``last mile'' to the chair, the prisoner wrote a letter to the parole board members thanking them for releasing him so he could kill again.
As the electricity raced through the inmate's body, every vein in the his head was bulging, Dixon says. The smell of burnt hair permeated the room.
``I stood there like a tin soldier because I was afraid,'' Dixon says.
He had to fight not feeling during the execution. ``I didn't want to go in there and faint or start crying,'' he says.
But the fear he felt during the electrocution has not swayed Dixon's view of capital punishment.
``I'd pull the switch and still eat my breakfast,'' he says.
In the case of Virginia's Dennis W. Stockton, who was found guilty of murder for hire in 1983, Dixon says, ``If they have the evidence they say they do, he should have been dead 18 months after he got to the Death House.''
But Dixon also says his first-hand experiences with the system have made him wary of ``blind justice.''
``When you can buy justice, I don't believe in it,'' he says.
With a homemade doll dressed like a New York state prison guard kept on the shelf in his back room, Dixon's mind is never far from those years at Sing Sing.
Fear, says Dixon, was the last thing you wanted to show at Sing Sing. Fear was something he learned to control during his days with the Imperial Lords. He used this control to get along with inmates and stay alive.
``The worst thing you can do is make someone fear you. Then they'll be after you.''
At least three attempts were made on his life.
In one instance, an inmate in the Death House hit a guard in the head with a metal pail. When Dixon got involved, the inmate pulled a homemade pick on him.
Luckily, he avoided getting stabbed, but the inmate was beaten so badly that a metal plate in his head was left exposed. The inmate told Dixon after the attack that he had been instructed to kill him.
This wasn't the only time Dixon's composure was challenged.
One night, about 25 years ago, while working the night shift in the prison hospital, Dixon heard a shuffling noise coming from behind his book.
Looking up the half-lit corridor, a man came slowly toward Dixon in a halo of light.
``I looked up and there was a man walking toward me with tubes hanging from his body,'' he says, shifting his position in a living room easy chair. ``There was blood dripping from the tubes.''
The gaunt and ashen man, a drug addict, cried and asked Dixon to let him go home. Dixon carefully helped him back to bed. The man died the next day.
``You've never seen a horror movie like that,'' he says shaking his head grimly.
Sing Sing, named after the Sint Sinck Indians, was popularized by movies such as ``The Big House'' with James Cagney and the classic ``20,000 Years in Sing Sing'' starring Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis that depicted the dank despair of prison life.
Since these early portrayals, the prison's decor has changed. With a visiting room with ceiling-to-floor windows overlooking the Hudson River, a special needs unit for inmates with AIDS and several vocational and academic programs, inmates have more to do than sulk in the dismal dungeon.
Sing Sing has about 2,500 prisoners and more than 1,000 employees. Greensville Correctional Center, Virginia's largest prison, has about the same number of inmates.
Having spent many of his adult years behind bars, Dixon says young people have gotten the wrong message. Getting locked up has been glorified.
``I've seen so much negativity. I've seen so much of the raw side of life,'' he says. ``Now, it's hard for me to change the institutionalized mentality'' learned in prison.
Dixon contends that the tough guys, are not those who hit old ladies over their heads for money, but are the ones who go to work and try to raise families.
He's hoping to make young people aware of the 7-by-3-by-6 reality of a jail cell.
Hopefully, by reading about his experiences, people will see that life at a place like Sing Sing, regardless of what side of the bars they are on, is one that they never escape, he says. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Melvin Dixon, who spent 25 years as a guard at Sing Sing, wants to
write a book about his experience.
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