The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (5 page)

“No criminal is sent directly to Leavenworth. He must earn his way there.”

How does a criminal achieve that?

“He fucks up everywhere else.”

Leavenworth is an enormous warehouse of the most loathsome, a prison where society isolates men for whom it no longer has any hope—only fear.

The bureau requires each penitentiary to keep a “Posted Picture File” of prisoners within its walls who
are classified as life-threatening or extreme escape risks. The red-covered log at Leavenworth has two hundred entries—more than any other level-five penitentiary. These are typical:

Leavenworth was the first federal prison ever built. Always before, Congress had paid state prisons and
county jails a fee in return for housing criminals convicted of federal crimes such as bank robbery, kidnapping, and counterfeiting. But after the Civil War most of these prisons became badly overcrowded, and states started to turn away federal prisoners. Congress responded in 1891 by ordering the construction of two federal penitentiaries and the acquisition of a third.

Actual construction at Leavenworth began in 1898, and from all accounts, conditions were cruel. Convict laborers, marched daily from the army stockade at nearby Fort Leavenworth, worked twelve straight hours with only a short break for lunch. Rations were meager and there were complaints that the food was little better than garbage. Discipline was crushing. Anyone disobeying an order was forced to “carry the baby,” a form of punishment in which prisoners were chained for months to a twenty-five-pound ball which they had to lift in order to walk. Even the guards were affected by the harsh conditions. According to local newspaper accounts, many quit, saying only “the wall got me,” a reference to the great stone wall being built around the penitentiary compound.

On February 1, 1906, Leavenworth received its first inmate, John Grindstone, a Native American convicted of murder. He was paroled a few years later, but returned to the Hot House within months for killing another man. He eventually died of tuberculosis at the prison and achieved another first by being buried in the first plot of a new pauper cemetery on a hill a half mile from the penitentiary. Officially called Mount Hope, the prison’s cemetery is still used today, although it is better known as Peckerwood Hill, the tag given it by convicts and guards.

By the early 1900s, the government had outgrown Leavenworth and its sister institution in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as a former territorial jail at McNeil Island, Washington. It built four more federal prisons. All were supposed to be overseen by the Justice Department, but
each operated independently. In 1930, Congress created the federal Bureau of Prisons to make them conform to uniform standards.

From the start, the Hot House was designed to intimidate, and when you turn into the horseshoe-shaped driveway that leads to the entrance, you suddenly understand what a convict meant in 1929 when he described the penitentiary in a letter to his mother as a “giant mausoleum adrift in a great sea of nothingness.” The prison dominates the Kansas countryside. It juts abruptly from the gentle grassland north of the town of Leavenworth (population 33,700), piercing the hard blue sky and clear air. Most old prisons are surrounded by high walls that hide them from public sight. At the Hot House, the penitentiary’s two largest cellhouses
are
the front wall. Each is seven stories high and longer than a football field. These great stone giants are joined in the center by a rotunda capped by a grand silvery dome that rises more than 150 feet above the ground.

The prison’s architects patterned Leavenworth after the majestic United States Capitol building in Washington, D.C., with its two cellhouses replicating the chambers of the Senate and House of Representatives and its rotunda serving as a smaller version of the Capitol dome.

At the time, the design was not meant ironically; it reflected the boundless optimism that even the worst criminals could be rehabilitated in so authoritative and exalted an environment. But the prison has none of the grandeur of the marble-clad Capitol. Its facade, made of rough ashlar limestone cut from a nearby quarry, is a faded yellow and has a stark, impermeable look that makes it foreboding.

A red brick wall is connected to the cellhouses and it encloses the penitentiary’s twenty-two acres. Built entirely by convicts’ hands, the wall is unlike any other in the bureau. Four feet thick in spots, it rises thirty-five feet above the ground and sinks another thirty-five feet
below to prevent ingenious or diligent convicts from burrowing to freedom.

Because of the wall, it is impossible to see inside the prison grounds from Metropolitan Avenue, the street that runs parallel to the prison, and it is just as impossible for a convict inside the prison yard to see the outside world.

This isolation was intentional.

When drawings of the prison were unveiled on March 21, 1897, architect William S. Eames proclaimed that the new penitentiary was the first in the world to be entirely self-contained. It would have its own power plant, water supply, maintenance shop, hospital, and the first school ever built inside a penitentiary. It would be a “city within a city,” he said, where convicts could be safely tucked away and forgotten by the outside world.

The Hot House has lived up to Eames’s promises. When asked, prison officials often describe themselves in municipal terms. The warden explains that he is “like a mayor” overseeing a $17 million annual budget, nearly 500 employees, and a walled city that would cost several hundred million dollars to construct today. His executive staff, known as associate wardens, compare themselves to city commissioners. There is a commissioner of public works (associate warden for maintenance and operations), a commissioner of parks and recreation (associate warden for programs), a police commissioner (associate warden for custody), and a police chief (the prison’s captain). Even convicts lapse into municipal jargon, calling their cells “my house,” the guards “the police,” the Hole “the jail.” When it first opened, the prison needed next to nothing from the Leavenworth community. It used convict labor to grow its own food at a prison-owned farm, and chose its meat from its own herd of beef cattle. It produced what clothing, furniture, and other goods it needed at plants inside the walls. The only commodity that it couldn’t produce was the guard force.

The farm and cattle are gone now, but Leavenworth still remains set apart from the outside community. It doesn’t allow “civilians” inside its claustrophobic world. Relatives and friends can visit convicts, but these sessions take place in a special visiting room that is not part of the prison’s interior. Public tours of the main penitentiary compound ended on June 26, 1910. “We are short of help during the hot season,” Warden R. W. McClaughry told a reporter for
The Leavenworth Times
. “If anything should happen, such as a woman or child fainting under the intense heat while passing through, there would be much liability of panic and injury to visitors.” McClaughry’s attitude prevailed through the decades, although the reason for excluding the public changed. Most wardens simply didn’t want to be bothered.

The Bureau of Prisons had never before given a journalist unlimited access to one of its six maximum-security penitentiaries, and I did not know what to expect when I first arrived. If I had not received special permission from the bureau’s director, J. Michael Quinlan, I would have been turned away.

Most journalists only flock to a penitentiary when there is trouble, usually an inmate riot. From outside the walls they watch as the flames lick up from burning buildings, they listen to the angry demands of convicts and wait until officials have regained control, and then they move on to some other calamity. I wondered what everyday life was like inside a prison.

We are all affected by crime, even those who are never directly victims. We avoid walking the streets of major cities at night for fear of attack. We are not permitted to board an airplane without first walking through a metal detector. We awaken in the middle of the night startled by a noise and lie paralyzed with fear that an intruder is lurking in the shadows. Who are these criminals who terrorize us?

By observing the routine rather than the aberrant events in a prison, I hoped to understand the inmates,
the men who guarded them, the institution itself. Everyday happenings rarely reflect extremes; rather, they spring from multiple factors—institutional constraints and demands, coincidence, self-interest, and individual efforts, noble and selfish. In the ordinary we are likelier to see the real person, not some mask worn for the glare of television lights.

At first, Quinlan was enthusiastic about my project, but when I mentioned that I wanted to focus on Leavenworth, he politely suggested an alternative. Newer institutions are more efficient because they are better designed, he explained, and rehabilitative programs that are effective in many of the bureau’s other forty-seven facilities simply don’t work at Leavenworth because its inmates are too hardened, too hopeless. Quinlan said he was worried I would get an unfair view of the entire system by studying the Hot House.

I understood, but disagreed. There is a permanence about the penitentiary at Leavenworth that transcends the latest psychotherapeutic rehabilitation program or whizbang architecture that makes prisons look like suburban shopping malls. Almost ninety years have passed since Leavenworth first opened, and during that time society’s views about prisons have swayed like Kansas wheat in a spring breeze. Yet, it is a penitentiary like Leavenworth that society always has sought as a last resort.

While I could not actually live inside the prison, Quinlan agreed to let me come and go as I pleased at any hour. I could speak to any inmate or guard who wished to speak to me. There would be no guards standing at my side to monitor conversations. Nor would they be there to protect me if I got into trouble. Inside the Hot House, I would be on my own.

When you enter the horseshoe drive at the prison, a sign directs you to stop at a brick-encased intercom under a lighthouse-shaped gun tower at the front of the prison. A monotone voice asks your name and why you
wish to go inside. As a matter of routine, you are asked if you have any contraband, such as illegal drugs or firearms. No one expects a visitor to admit that he is smuggling. The question is a Miranda-style warning to prevent anyone from pleading ignorance if caught later.

The only way into the front of the prison is through the double doors of the administration building, a square structure that stands four stories high and juts out from the prison rotunda. A heavy steel gate protects this outside entrance, and a large wooden sign is posted next to the doorway bearing the Leavenworth employee motto:

LEAVENWORTH PRIDE

The electronic gate makes a low-pitched hum as it slowly opens. The administration building lobby is as far as most visitors ever get. Those coming to see inmates are directed left through a series of steel gates into the prison’s oblong visiting room. The warden’s office is on the right side of the lobby, protected by an electronically locked glass door that must be buzzed open by a guard. Straight ahead, barely visible through a grid of steel bars, is the prison rotunda.

The prison’s control center sits in the middle of the lobby. It looks like a drive-in window at a bank. Guards within stand behind waist-high bulletproof glass and the walls are protected by armor plates hidden from view by pine paneling and red bricks. Inside the center are four thousand keys, which unlock every door within the penitentiary. They are kept on a numbered pegboard that reaches from the tile floor almost to the ceiling. Each time a guard takes a key, a quarter-size brass chit with
his name engraved on it is placed on the pegboard where that key usually hangs. This way, guards can tell instantly who has which keys.

Because Director Quinlan had given me permission to enter Leavenworth, the control center issued me a special laminated pass containing my photograph, name, and a coded magnetic strip. The guards also posted my picture inside the center, because they are required to be able to visually identify everyone who enters or leaves the interior of the prison. Once I was given my pass, I could walk through the second steel gate that led toward the rotunda. Like the gate at the front door, this second gate was eight feet tall, five feet wide, and made of reinforced, one-inch round steel bars. I stepped through it and was now standing in a twelve-foot-wide “sally port,” a holding area between the outside world and the Hot House. I slipped my identification badge across a scanner and my name was automatically added to a computerized list of “non-inmates” inside the prison. In case of a riot, the control center would know my name, as well as the name of every guard inside.

The final gate, or grille, as it is called by guards, was opened and shut by a guard stationed inside the rotunda, not by a guard in the control center. This was a security precaution. If someone from outside the prison stormed the control center and somehow seized control of it, he would still not be able to open this final gate. Conversely, if inmates rioted and took the guard’s key, they would only be able to get through one gate. The control center would keep the other two gates closed. The bureau always wanted at least two gates between convicts and their freedom.