Straitjacket

The Straitjacket recurs as a practical instrument of confinement and as a measure of the gap between institutional control and Tommy’s abilities. In the Franklin County Jail it is intended to prevent self-harm, yet Tommy slips out of it repeatedly. The episodes turn a restraint into a demonstration: its effectiveness depends not only on the garment, but on who is wearing it, who is watching, and what the institution expects it to accomplish.

Confinement and escape

After the sheriff’s office moved William Stanley Milligan to an infirmary single cell to prevent further suicide attempts, officers placed him in a Straitjacket. Russ Hill, the medic, later found that Milligan had removed it and fallen asleep with it arranged beneath his head as a pillow. The detail reverses the garment’s intended function: what was supposed to immobilize him had become something he could manipulate and repurpose. Hill called Sergeant Willis C. Driscoll to look through the bars, making the escape a witnessed challenge to the jail’s confidence in its restraint.

The same capacity became apparent when Gary Schweickart and Judy Stevenson asked to speak with Tommy. As Milligan’s body seemed to withdraw inward and his face paled, Tommy came forward; Schweickart recognized him as the personality who had been slipping out of the Straitjacket. The garment thus marks a distinction between the person the jail believed it had secured and the person now occupying the body. Tommy’s boast that no jail could hold him was not merely bravado in this context: the officers had already seen the practical basis for his claim.

The transfer bargain

On March 14, officers came to take Milligan from his cell. He did not resist when they fastened the Straitjacket and led him to the elevator. But when the elevator opened downstairs, Schweickart and Stevenson saw him step out of it almost completely freed. The scene makes the restraint’s failure public at the precise moment when the lawyers had come to tell their client that a transfer to Harding Hospital had been arranged. The garment that was supposed to secure a prisoner during removal instead became the first visible sign that ordinary assumptions about securing him might not hold.

The proposed transfer came with a condition. Judge Jay Flowers would allow Milligan to be sent to Harding Hospital if he promised not to escape. Dr. Cornelia Wilbur had told the judge that the personalities kept promises, and Schweickart presented that understanding as the basis for the arrangement. Tommy initially rejected the request: escaping was the talent the Straitjacket had repeatedly failed to contain, and he resented being asked to surrender it. Stevenson appealed to his responsibility for the younger personalities, and he finally promised not to escape.

The promise did not remove the danger surrounding a transfer. Tommy had secretly obtained a razor blade and taped it to the sole of his left foot. He expected that he might need a weapon to defend himself against sexual assault, or might give it to Billy to use against himself. The concealed blade does not show that he intended to break his promise by escaping; it shows instead that agreeing to the transfer did not mean he felt safe. The Straitjacket could restrain his movements, but it could not settle the fears and risks he associated with being moved between institutions.

A technique turned around

Four days before the scheduled move, Sergeant Willis C. Driscoll asked Tommy to explain how he escaped the Straitjacket. He framed the request as a way to help protect other people in the jail who might harm themselves if they got free. Tommy initially showed little interest in that appeal. The following day, however, he demonstrated how to remove the restraint and then taught the sergeant how to put it on another person so that escape would be impossible.

The exchange turns the garment into an instrument of knowledge as well as control. Tommy, previously the person whose escape exposed the limits of the jail’s methods, becomes the instructor who can make those methods more effective. His expertise is not erased; it is transferred to the officer responsible for confinement. The contrast also complicates the simple opposition between a resourceful prisoner and a powerless institution: the same knowledge that enabled Tommy’s escapes could be put to use in tightening restraint on others.

From jail restraint to institutional control

The Straitjacket’s part in the narrative belongs to a wider sequence of transfers in which security and treatment do not neatly coincide. At Harding Hospital, Milligan was placed in Wakefield Cottage, a locked unit for difficult patients requiring constant observation; a special-care room had a heavy oak door with a peephole. The text does not describe him arriving there in the Straitjacket, and the distinction matters: the garment’s escape episodes are specific to the jail scenes, while the hospital’s account emphasizes locked doors and surveillance.

After Milligan’s trial, Dr. David Caul told him that he had been found not guilty and that the people at Athens did not regard him as a criminal. That later account contrasts the jail’s physical restraint with a stated therapeutic aim of helping him work with Billy and bring himself together. Yet institutional control remained changeable. In October 1979, when Milligan was sent from Athens to Lima State Hospital, he was handcuffed and belt-shackled; the account names those restraints rather than a Straitjacket. At Dayton Forensic Center, where he was transferred in 1980, he could read, write, and sketch but was not allowed to paint. Across these settings, the Straitjacket is therefore not a universal emblem for every restriction placed on him. Its particular force comes from the early episodes in which its failure is seen, argued over, and finally converted into a technique for restraining someone else.