Prison Reformer Lawrence Pope, 70, Dies

Lawrence Pope, whose anger at being eased out of a job at a bank led him to start robbing them instead and whose lack of success at that led him to become an inmate prison reformer, has died in Texas at the age of 70.

For the last six years, the soft-spoken, grandfatherly Pope was a familiar figure in the legislative and bureaucratic halls of the Lone Star State, where he was known for his untiring efforts to upgrade the Texas Department of Corrections.

Earlier--while still in prison serving a 25-year sentence for bank robbery--he had been the lead witness in a federal lawsuit against the department. At the end of that trial, U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice ruled that the state’s prison system was unconstitutionally unfair and ordered sweeping changes.

“Prison reform history will shine bright on Lawrence Pope,” Bill Miller, an Austin lawyer heading up a prison modernization group, said in 1987.

But if prison activists praised Pope and his accomplishments, there were others who considered him a bothersome curmudgeon.

“All you hear about is this kindly old man who walks with a cane and is interested in prison reform,” George Beto, a former Department of Corrections director, said 15 months ago. “But you’ve also got to look at his prison record. It’s a lulu.”

Pope, whose grandfather and father were both prominent bankers, began his own career as an office boy at a bank in Dallas, moving up rapidly to a position as a bank examiner. Within a few years, he was named vice president of a major bank in Houston.

By 1958, he was president and part owner of a bank in a rural town near Waco, but a management shake-up left him out on the street, convinced that he had been cheated by his partners.

Pope decided to get even.

“I was not so much a matter of me being desperate for money as it was just being real damned mad at banks and bankers,” he said later.

In October, 1960, he robbed two banks--one in Thornton and the other in Schulenberg--and got about $6,500.

One of his less-endearing quirks was to force his victims to remove their clothes and assume obscene poses while he photographed them. He explained later that he thought he could blackmail them if they threatened to identify him.

It did not work.

Two months later, the FBI arrested him at a hotel in San Antonio.

“I made every damned fool mistake that an amateur would make,” he recalled. “I didn’t wear a disguise, and I knocked them both off on a Saturday, which any banker knows is the worst day because by then they are almost out of money.”

In the spring of 1961, Pope was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

“Going in, I knew nothing about prison law,” he said. “I decided to give myself five years to learn the system. It gave me something to work on. You’ve got to have some kind of escape.”

By the early ‘70s, Pope--who served time on his sentence in three federal and several state prisons--joined half a dozen other “writ-writing” inmates in an all-out effort to expose what they considered inhumane conditions in the Texas prison system.

They filed lawsuits over such issues as censorship of inmate mail and brutality by guards--and won some of them. The success of their efforts attracted attention from outside the walls and probably helped Pope win a parole in 1982 after 21 years of incarceration.

Once free, the self-described “agitator, troublemaker and rabble-rouser” continued his crusade, bombarding legislators and other state officials with his criticism of the penal system.

“This is my life,” he said in December, 1987. “It’s what I’m all about. I’ll keep doing this until they put me in a pine box.”

He was as good as his word, daily championing the cause of prison reform until he collapsed with a fatal heart attack on an Austin street corner Monday.