“It was just putting them in cells as you went along,” Cundiff says of his job when he entered the prison with a group of other troopers. “There wasn’t any argument about whether [an inmate was assigned to a particular cell] or not, you went in there anyway, and just getting them locked up so there wasn’t any running around the Penitentiary.”
The last building to be retaken on the morning of September 23 was B and C Hall. Some inmates there refused to back down and surrender until one was fatally shot by a trooper.
The damage is assessed
No inmates had escaped in the riot, which was fortunate for the people of Jefferson City given the prison’s location near the heart of the city. Many of those residents had spent the night armed with their own rifles and shotguns, prepared to respond if any convicts did manage to breach the wall. Some banded together to search a wooded area outside the east wall when rumours circulated that some inmates had been freed and were hiding among the trees there.
A wounded inmate is carried by fellows through the lobby of MSP to the prison hospital during the riot. (Courtesy; Missouri State Archives and Mark Schreiber)
The riot left four inmates dead and about 60 injured. Among the facilities that had been destroyed were the prison’s recreation building, vocational building, tobacco shop, license plate factory and the dining hall that also housed a chapel and school. Damage estimates at the time were between $4-million and $5-million.
Several guards had been held hostage and some, including Dietzel, had been beaten. Dietzel had been carried out of B and C Hall by two inmates who didn’t want to see him killed because “he was a decent man.” There were other such stories of inmates helping to rescue staff and fight fires, and many others didn’t participate in the riot for reasons including being too near the end of a sentence and not wanting to risk more time.
The legacy of the September 1954 prison riot
The tension did not ease with the end of the September 1954 riot. Even as the Truman Commission was beginning its review of the prison, another, smaller riot broke out on October 23, 1954. Though it was said to have been put down in roughly an hour it left one inmate dead, shot by a guard, and about 40 inmates injured.
Historian and former MSP Deputy Warden Mark Schreiber say the Missouri Department of Corrections learned many lessons from the riots of 1954.
“Though Missouri was, in my opinion, rather slow to respond to a lot of the needs, we certainly made some changes,” says Schreiber. “We added another maximum-security institution, that being the Potosi Correctional Center, we added a good classification system, we devised staff training; a rulebook for staff and offenders, we implemented … the first emergency squads … so that prison staff, themselves, would be able to respond to emergencies once they first occurred.”
A lone man walks the yard in front of B and C Hall on the morning after the riot. In the background is the burned-out shell of the dining hall. (Courtesy; Missouri State Archives and Mark Schreiber)