The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (6 page)

On my first day, the guard in the rotunda had been warned by his peers in the control center that I was coming, so I didn’t have to wait long for him to walk over and let me in. As I stepped into the rotunda and heard the gate shut behind me, I felt that awful sensation everyone describes the first time he is actually locked inside
a prison. I later learned that most convicts felt that same initial dread when they first entered the Hot House.

If Leavenworth is an isolated community, then the rotunda is its town square. All the prison’s cellhouses join at the rotunda. There are four. In addition to the two large cellhouses that make up the front of the prison, there are two smaller cellblocks that can’t be seen from the street. From the sky, these four cellblocks look like spokes on a wagon wheel with the rotunda serving as the hub. In keeping with the dehumanized starkness of penitentiary life, none of the cellhouses has a name. They are identified by the first letters of the alphabet. A and B cellhouses are the two largest; C and D are the others.

Each cellhouse, I noticed, had only one doorway, and it led into the rotunda. Each of these four doors had a steel gate across it. The guard showed me how he could open and close these gates electronically by pushing various red and green buttons at his desk.

“I can push one button and close all four gates at the same time,” he explained. “Each cellhouse would be sealed off from the rest of the penitentiary.”

The only furniture in the rotunda is the guard’s wooden desk, which sits directly in the center of the room. At night, after the warden has gone home and the convicts are locked in their cells, guards sometimes heave tennis balls at the crown of the dome. It looks as if it would be easy to hit, but no one has ever been able to hurl a ball straight up 150 feet to the center.

Besides the four cellhouses, there is a fifth spoke connected to the rotunda. It is a long hallway that leads to the rest of the penitentiary compound. Guards call it center hall and the floor there is covered with red and white tiles. Until the 1960s, convicts were only permitted to walk on the red tiles. If they stepped over onto the white, the guards knocked them back.

The lieutenant’s office is located about halfway
down this center hall. It does not belong to a single lieutenant, but is used by the eleven lieutenants who actually run the day-to-day operations of the prison. They report to the prison captain, who technically is in charge of every guard within the prison. Few supervisors in the outside world have as much authority and responsibility as a Leavenworth lieutenant, and the men who earn that rank are quick to remind guards of that fact. A plaque in the office reads:
IF YOU AIN’T A LIEUTENANT AT LEAVENWORTH, YOU AIN’T SHIT
. The slogan can be read two ways, but few guards are foolish enough to mention the double entendre.

There are always at least three lieutenants on duty, and they make the countless decisions that must be resolved each day if the prison is to run smoothly.

Across from the lieutenant’s office is the prison commissary, where inmates can buy snacks, greeting cards, a limited amount of clothing, and toilet items. On the day that I arrived, a red neon sign outside the door flashed:
ATTENTION SHOPPERS: LAST SHIPMENT OF MOONPIES. $2.05
PER BOX!!!!
The commissary is no little operation. Sales to prisoners in fiscal 1987 totaled $1.75 million. They could have been much higher, but the bureau limits each convict to $105 in spending money per month. The money is deposited in the inmate’s account by family or friends outside prison or by direct deposit from wages he earns working at prison jobs. Each inmate can have twenty dollars in change, but not a cent more, for use in the vending machines in the cellhouses. The amount is limited to reduce extortion, theft, and gambling inside the prison. All paper money is prohibited.

Beyond the lieutenant’s office, at the end of center hallway, is another steel gate that leads to the prison dining hall, kitchen, employee cafeteria, auditorium, and chapel. There are two outside exits at the end of the rear corridor that open into the prison yard.

When the penitentiary first opened, a railroad track ran across the yard, passing through two big iron gates
and holes punched into the perimeter wall. A special government train, used exclusively to ferry convicts between federal prisons, was the only vehicle ever permitted on the track. But the track was torn up and removed after six convicts commandeered the train on April 21, 1910, and crashed the steam locomotive through the gates as the guards in the gun towers tried to shoot them. The convicts abandoned the locomotive a few miles from the penitentiary and fled on foot, but only one made his way to Canada and freedom. He remains the
only
convict ever to escape from the Hot House and never be recaptured.

The yard is also where Kansas performed its first legal hanging on September 5, 1930, when it executed Carl Panzram for the murder of a Leavenworth guard. Panzram was the first known serial killer in the United States, having killed twenty-two persons. When they put the noose around his neck, he spit in his executioner’s face and declared, “I wish all mankind had one neck so I could choke it!”

Today, the prison yard is crisscrossed by chain-link fences that slice it into crooked pieces. To an untrained eye there seems to be no purpose to the zigzag design, but the fences are positioned to divide the yard into compartments. During emergencies, guards can quickly separate inmates by opening and shutting gates much like the wooden chutes in a cattle yard.

The yard contains some buildings, a much-used baseball diamond, concrete tennis courts, an outdoor weight-lifting pit, running track, unfinished miniature-golf course, and several basketball courts. Convicts also play handball and racquetball by using the penitentiary wall as a backstop. The buildings in the prison yard include the “butcher shop” (the prison hospital), the “Hole” (the disciplinary housing unit), and a sprawling four-story building known as “UNICOR”—an acronym for the federal prison industry program. Inside UNICOR, Leavenworth inmates produced $27 million
worth of goods in 1986, netting the bureau a tidy $5 million profit that was paid into the national UNICOR coffers to help keep less profitable prison factories solvent. There is a printing plant, a textile shop, and a furniture factory located in the industry building. The most famous product made there was John F. Kennedy’s rocking chair.

Six gun towers protect the Hot House, and every employee, including clerical workers, prison counselors, and even the prison psychologists, is expected to spend time in them at some point during his or her career. Only the chaplains are exempt. When people apply for a job at Leavenworth, they are asked what they would do if they saw an inmate climbing the wall. The correct answer is “shoot to maim.” Any who say they are not willing to shoot an inmate are not hired.

All new employees, even those who aren’t guards, undergo a week of familiarization at the Hot House during which they are taught how to search a cell, frisk an inmate, identify contraband, and avoid being conned by inmates. Leavenworth’s training officer Bob Lawrence also gives newcomers this advice: “Scrape the mud and cow manure off your boots before coming to work, otherwise inmates will snicker and say to themselves, ‘Hell, he can’t even dress right and he is going to tell me what to do.’ ” All employees are sent for three additional weeks of training at the bureau’s academy in Glynco, Georgia, where they are taught self-defense, bureau regulations and policies, and how to fire various weapons.

Penitentiaries are the most expensive form of confinement because they must be manned by guards around-the-clock. In fiscal 1987, the Hot House had a budget of $17 million, of which $12 million went for salaries. It cost $35.62 per day to keep an inmate in Leavenworth. In 1989, that figure had risen to $39.72 per day, in comparison to $28.32 to house a prisoner in a less secure, level-one camp. The $11.40 difference is due to having fewer guards.

When convicts arrive at the Hot House, they receive a twenty-two-page book that lists the rules and what punishments they can expect for violating them. After a short processing period, they are assigned cells. The majority are put in two-man cells; only about thirty percent of the men in the Hot House live in single-man cells. The bureau is supposed to assign these much-desired cells based on inmate seniority. The longer a prisoner stays at Leavenworth and keeps out of trouble, the better his chances of living alone. At least, that is how the system is supposed to work. In actuality, the least deserving inmates are often assigned to single-man cells simply because prison officials know that their violence is a real threat to a cellmate. Regardless of how many occupants there are in a cell, each has identical furnishings: a single bed or a two-man bunk, a lidless steel toilet, a metal counter (for use as a desk) with an attached swing-out stool, a locker with a combination lock, a metal sink, a single light bulb, a mirror. The mirrors are sheets of polished steel bolted onto the wall.

Most convicts, I soon learned, try to avoid trouble and simply do their time as easily as possible. But about twenty percent of the inmates operate inside the prison much the same as they did on the streets. They deal drugs, extort money, bankroll card and dice games, pimp, and run scams on other inmates. These inmates are known as predators. Their victims are called lops. The line between the two groups shifts daily.

“There are no nice guys in Leavenworth,” explained Craig H. Trout, the bureau’s gang expert. “They are all sharks, and when you put sharks together the stronger ones feed on the rest.”

The 487 employees at the Hot House are broken into groups, too. Guards who needlessly harass inmates are called super cops. Those who simply do their jobs are hacks. Besides the 239-man guard force, there are 248 other staff members. These include nineteen hospital workers, thirty-five maintenance men, three psychologists,
two ministers, and seventy supervisors at the prison’s UNICOR operations. The remaining 119 employees are secretaries, food stewards who oversee inmate cooks, teachers, counselors, and administrators. Many of these employees earn higher salaries than the guards, whose entry-level annual starting pay is $16,851. But few have as much clout. It is the guards who control all movement inside the prison. They issue commands, make “arrests,” and keep order. As far as the guards are concerned, all other employees are “weak sisters,” especially those whose jobs require them to help inmates.

Unlike Hollywood scripts in which guards and convicts share a mutual respect and, at times, even become friends, in the real world of the Hot House the hostility between convicts and guards is palpable and enduring. It permeates every aspect of prison life—even the jargon. Guards get angry when anyone calls them that: they are correctional officers. For their part, they never refer to prisoners by any word except inmate. This is an insult to the prisoners, who claim the word is better suited to a patient in a mental ward than it is to them. Using the proper title is a matter of unbelievable significance inside the Hot House. When you are a prisoner and are stripped of all your possessions, the term you are called by becomes important. The same holds true for officers. Without weapons, the only authority that a guard has comes from respect and fear. Titles play a role in establishing both. In this book, all these terms are used interchangeably.

Getting the language straight was not the only problem I encountered. The dual society inside a prison is not used to outside observers. For instance, I did not feel comfortable carrying a portable emergency alarm or two-way radio like those carried by employees, because I felt inmates would view me as a staff member and think that I was afraid of them (I often was). So I walked around the Hot House unprotected. The first time I
went into the penitentiary yard and found myself in the midst of several hundred convicts, I wondered if I had made a mistake. The bureau had warned me about two inmates. Bruce Carroll Pierce, the second-in-command of The Order, a neo-Nazi paramilitary group that had murdered Denver talk-show host Alan Berg, was considered a potential threat to me because I had worked at
The Washington Post
and, while not Jewish, was seen as a member of the “liberal Eastern Establishment press.” Already serving a 250-year sentence, Pierce had little to lose by killing me, bureau officials said. Convicted spy Jerry Whitworth was considered dangerous because he was disgruntled about what I had written about him in my book,
Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring
. But I never spoke to Pierce, and Whitworth never did anything but complain to me. Nor did I ask the bureau to take any special precautions on my behalf. In fact, I asked for the reverse, because I felt convicts at the Hot House would misinterpret such protection and be reluctant to speak frankly.

When I first arrived, only a few convicts spoke to me. Some wanted to be mentioned in a book because it made them feel important. A few hoped that I would use my access to Quinlan to help them. I discovered that these inmates were of little help. They simply told me what they thought I wanted to hear. As the weeks passed, however, I was able to identify inmates and guards who played strong roles within the prison society. I began to focus on six inmates: Carl Bowles, William Post, Dallas Scott, Norman Bucklew, Thomas Little, and Thomas Silverstein. Only Norman Bucklew is a pseudonym. I chose these men because their lives, values, and attitudes were representative, I felt, of other convicts I met. At first, I spoke to them without a tape recorder or notepad and pencil. They were suspicious of me and these tools would have made them even more so. Why had the bureau let me inside? Obviously, the fact that it
had given me access made them suspect me. In the beginning I did not ask too many questions; I simply listened. Some inmates tested me. They would commit a minor rule infraction, such as smuggling a sandwich back to their cell from the prison mess hall, knowing that I had seen them tuck it into their trousers. They wanted to see if I would snitch on them. I never did. After weeks of watching me, one by one these men began to open up. I found them to be amazingly frank, naively so at times. I am certain that some decided to speak to me out of boredom. Monotony is every inmate’s curse, and being able to speak to a writer broke the routine. But as I got to know these six men, I became convinced that for five of them there was a deeper motivation. Buried inside the federal system for years, cut off from the outside world, they wanted to explain their actions, not because they were seeking forgiveness from society, but because they felt they had achieved something in their strange prison world that they had never been credited with when living outside prison. They each considered themselves honorable men—at least by jailhouse standards.