CHEYENNE - Gary Starbuck was the kind of guy who didn't give up on people.

No matter what your wrong, no matter the crime you'd committed, Starbuck, the longtime warden at the Wyoming Honor Farm in Riverton, believed in your right to redemption.

"He knew that not everybody was savable, but he thought they all deserved the opportunity to see if they were," said Starbuck's wife of 35 years, Kandice.

Gary Starbuck died earlier this month of cancer. He was 59.

It's difficult to know precisely when Starbuck formed his philosophy of prisoner rehabilitation. But it probably grew while he was counseling children at St. Joseph's Children's Home in Torrington, where he spent seven years working with troubled kids.

From Torrington, Starbuck moved his young family to Riverton, where he became counselor and eventually superintendent and warden at the Honor Farm.

At the Honor Farm, a minimum-security men's prison through which many Wyoming prisoners pass before their release, Starbuck institutionalized his beliefs in people and their possible salvation.

He did so by treating prisoners with a firm but respectful hand. He believed in cultivating, or recuperating, prisoners' humanity and showing them their potential through compassion. He also urged them to accept responsibility for their wrongs.

The prison's agriculture-based programs helped prisoners develop teamwork and communications skills, but it was the compassionate treatment that Starbuck demanded from his staff that helped prisoners reclaim their dignity, Kandice Starbuck said.

"He just had a real vision that the way to impact people was not through harsh punishment tactics, but rather to understand where they were coming from," said Tony Thornton, associate warden at the Honor Farm and Gary Starbuck's longtime colleague.

Starbuck was dedicated to his profession, spending many hours reading and researching criminology.

He was especially influenced by the works of criminologist and psychologist Dr. Karl Menninger, who believed that shaming prisoners was a self-serving act that helped no one in the long run. Prisoners who receive poor treatment, Menninger preached and Starbuck believed, reflect that hostility upon their release.

"Gary always said that there was some sort of 'emotional logic' that would make sense out of almost every violent crime," said Geral Blanchard, who worked with Starbuck during the last two years of his career at the Community Alternatives Center, a therapeutic and community corrections center in Casper.

Blanchard first became acquainted with Starbuck's philosophies during a tour of the Honor Farm in the 1980s.

A heavy rain had fallen that day, and the men were walking on a concrete pathway when they encountered a prisoner who politely stepped off the path into deep mud to allow them to pass. Starbuck asked the prisoner to step back onto the pathway, Blanchard recalled, not because the prisoner might damage newly planted grass, but because Starbuck believed in parity of dignity for prisoners and Honor Farm employees.

It was no surprise to Blanchard when, shortly before Starbuck's death, he received a gift of 1,000 origami cranes made by prisoners at the Community Alternatives Center to symbolize their respect and gratitude.

The gift of the cranes "made him feel so good because it just validated that everything he believed in worked," Kandice Starbuck said.

Not everyone embraced Starbuck's approach. He was sometimes criticized by those who took a more stern view of corrections. But Starbuck was plenty tough, his wife argued.

"He was in a tough business, and some of these people are tough, evil, lethal people, and he knew there were some of these guys that you don't save," she said. "He was not a bleeding heart kind of guy, but he never lost that dignity. That dignity of human worth was deep in his veins."

"He understood that some were capable of doing great harm," Thornton added, "but he was willing to work with those people because he knew they could do great things if they wanted to."

Outside of work, Gary Starbuck was a family man.

His passion for sports infected all three of his children - Chris, Dane and Alisa. He coached his sons in Babe Ruth baseball for years, served as president of the Riverton Elks-Legion baseball program and loved to join his family on the ski slopes for vacations.

Starbuck loved sports and had played baseball himself as a youth in Casper. He later joined the University of Wyoming ski team for a year before he left school and was drafted into the Army.

He served two years in Vietnam, where he was exposed to the toxin Agent Orange. After the war, Starbuck returned to UW, where he earned a degree in sociology in 1973.

His years in Vietnam were "a very huge thing in his life," Kandice Starbuck said. "He felt like he learned a lot about life, and being a survivor."

Starbuck was a survivor. He tackled prostate cancer as a younger man, an illness his wife attributes to the chemicals he encountered on the battlefield. The cancer that took his life was highly aggressive and attacked his lungs and liver.

Before he died at his home in Riverton, Starbuck wrote a letter of thanks to the inmates who sent him the origami cranes.

In it he wrote: "Over the span of two decades or more, one can only hope that through small tokens of respect, responsibility, communication and cooperation, that a positive difference was somehow imparted to those in my direct care."

Reach capital bureau reporter Jared Miller at (307) 632-1244 or at jared.miller@casperstartribune.net.