Tucker telephone

English

Etymology

Named after the Tucker State Prison Farm, where its inventor Dr. A. E. Rollins worked.

Noun

Tucker telephone (plural Tucker telephones)

1. A torture device for giving electric shocks, designed using parts from an old-fashioned crank telephone.
   • 1992, British Medical Association, quoting Case report: Tucker State Prison Farm, Tucker, Arkansas (1966), Medicine Betrayed: The Participation of Doctors in Human Rights Abuses, Zed Books, page 33:

     The inmate doctor wired him up on the "Tucker Telephone" with one wire to his penis and another to his big toe.

   • 2000 March 18, Malcolm M. Feeley with Edward L. Rubin, Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America's Prisons, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 57:

     Although they enjoined the use of the Tucker telephone and similar instruments of torture, they noted that the Department of Corrections had dismissed a number of officials implicated in past violations and had instituted new rules to govern corporal punishment.