Howl

Chino, a maximum security prison, was where convicts were evaluated and assigned to the most suitable prison to serve their time. On his third day at Chino he was sent for the mandatory psychological assessment and presented with a set of tests. A significant part of those, he was shocked to realize, had been written by himself, 14 years earlier, when he had been one of America’s leading psychologists […] The completed tests clearly showed, to the surprise of anyone who had read newspapers during the previous decade, that Dr. Timothy Leary was docile, conformist and meek. He was, the paperwork insisted, in no way an escape risk, and no one was prepared to argue with the paperwork.

Jon Evans has been reading I Have America Surrounded: The Life Of Timothy Leary by John Higgs.

The local authorities initiated a zero-tolerance policy with the ‘long-hairs’. Scores of arrests followed, as did many allegations of beatings and police brutality. People were arrested for jaywalking. Laws against riding skateboards were introduced and enforced. A ‘Gay Squad’ was created to entrap homosexuals. According to Rolling Stone [ed. note: in an article by Joe Eszterhas, who would go on to script Basic Instinct and Showgirls], other measures to defeat the menace that were raised at council meetings included permanent police barricades on both of the roads into town, the dynamiting of the caves in Laguna Canyon where the hippies were believed to hang out, and the mandatory removal of vocal cords of all resident dogs at birth to prevent the hippies from using guard dogs to alert them to police presence. A local columnist even went as far as to argue for conditional use of permits for the building of sandcastles. “No sandcastle may be built if the shape deviates from the established norm of sandcastle construction,” he proposed. “A copy of the norm is on file with the chief of police.”