Read The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison Online

Authors: Pete Earley

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BOOK: The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison
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It was not easy to walk the line that separates convicts and guards at the Hot House. Even small matters had to be handled delicately. One afternoon I was invited to a routine target-practice session outside the prison. I found guards firing at targets that contained life-size silhouettes of a man. Several referred to the targets as inmates, in some cases calling them by specific names. I was offered a pistol, but declined. The next night, I visited a convict who was drinking homemade hooch in his cell. “You are always asking what this shit tastes like,” he said. “Well, come have some.” I refused. I felt accepting either offer would make me suspect. I do not know how long I could have continued this balancing act. Knowing a convict is drinking hooch is of little consequence. Knowing that he has a homemade knife hidden in his cell is another matter, particularly if he uses it
a few days later to stab an inmate or guard. The same is true about guards. Shooting a convict target is insignificant, but having a guard tell you how he gave a belligerent convict some “thump therapy,” a euphemism for hitting an inmate, makes you squirm.

When you are inside the Hot House for a long period, even as an outsider, you soon forget what it is like to be anywhere else. Steel doors clanging closed behind you, hostile guards yapping orders, television rooms dominated by hollering blacks watching sports, white toughs in polka-dot gang bandannas pumping iron, mirror-polished tile floors, drab walls painted an unvarying chocolate brown and tan, naked white flesh adorned with obscene tattoos, dainty men with shaven legs dressed in scanty shorts that expose panties made from Jockey shorts dyed pink in red Kool-Aid, old drunks high on homemade mash, neurotics, addicts, sexual deviants, fat bikers with acne-like bullet scars—this is the Hot House community.

In the Leavenworth penitentiary, a carton of cigarettes is worth stabbing for, masturbation—“pulling your choke”—becomes something to brag about, a man’s ass gradually seems less repugnant. Events that would be insignificant anywhere else become momentous. While talking with a convicted murderer one night in his cell, I suddenly heard the country singing of Hank Williams, Jr., blaring from a radio in the cell next door. As I watched, the murderer excused himself and walked down the tier. The music stopped. Later, the murderer explained that he had retrieved a “shank” from a nearby hiding place and, after tucking it under his shirt, had confronted his noisy neighbor. “You’re disrespecting me,” he said. There is little doubt that if the inmate had refused to turn down the radio, the murderer would have, as he said later, “run the gears”—a reference to the most effective method of stabbing another human being, as in “You slam a shank into his chest and then
pull up and over and then down and over, just like shifting gears in a car.”

It is difficult to peer into such blackness without eventually being sucked inside.

While this book focuses on the lives of six convicts and a handful of prison officials during a two-year span from July 1987 until July 1989, numerous other guards and inmates were also interviewed. Many of their comments and stories are significant. Each day, hundreds of chaotic episodes were played out in the prison, many of them unrelated to the major events and characters in this book. Yet these incidents are the heart of prison life. A fistfight breaks out in the dining hall because one inmate has cut in front of another in the serving line. Someone sets a cell on fire because the inmate living there has failed to pay a gambling debt. A guard discovers a shank hidden inside a candy machine. Interspersed throughout the book are short vignettes under the rubric of “the lieutenant’s office” or, in the case of interviews, “voices.” Most of the people mentioned in these episodes play no role in the full-length chapters. They simply appear and then vanish, just as they do in daily life at the Hot House. Some readers may find this disjointedness to be confusing. It is meant to be. The Hot House is an erratic place. Convicts arrive, others are transferred. The inmate who lived in the cell next door for twelve years is gone one morning without explanation. Guards are promoted, they quit, they are fired. A new warden comes and changes all the rules. A new inmate moves onto the tier and decides to “move on you.” In such a cauldron, it is often difficult for an observer to understand what he is seeing or to make sense of it. Rules are enforced to show who is the boss, not out of any sense of fairness. Respect can be worth more than freedom. Convicts do things that seem foolish at first yet months later make perfect sense. Watching events unfold at the Hot House is like trying to solve a puzzle. The answer is always right in front of your eyes, yet you don’t—you
can’t—see it as long as you study it like a “Square John.” In the Hot House, you must suspend much of what you know or have been taught in the outside world and simply let yourself feel the emotions, the tensions. Once you stop trying to understand, and simply watch, the solution to the puzzle suddenly becomes clear. The key to understanding the Hot House is that in an irrational world, irrationality makes sense.

Glenn Walters, a psychologist at Leavenworth, was the first to tell me that understanding events in prison is difficult because most of us do not think like criminals. “There are only two emotions in here,” Walters said, “—fear and anger. Just remember that everything these inmates do revolves around those two emotions and nothing else.”

A Voice: DRUG DEALER, AGE 32

The first day I was in prison, two dudes busted in on this guy in the cell next to mine and stuck him twenty-six times with shanks. He was sitting on the crapper when they killed him, and he couldn’t fight back because his pants were wrapped around his legs. Stupid bastard. Anyone who don’t know better than to take a leg out of his pants in prison before he sits down on a toilet deserves to die. Something you learn in here
.

Another time, I saw a guy get stuck while he was walking out of the shower wearing those rubber thongs. Soon as they hit ’im, he fell over ’cause the floor was wet and he didn’t have any footing. I always go to the shower barefoot
.

Let me tell you another little secret. You know the best time to move on a Square John in the street? I used to do this in New York when I needed a few bucks. Go into a restaurant or bar and wait in the bathroom. You can always be washing your hands when some dude will
come in to pee. As soon as he starts, you nail him against the urinal and grab his billfold
.

Most folks don’t know it, but it is physically impossible for a guy who is taking a piss to fight back. [Laughs] I’m not bullshitting. I never met anyone who can piss and fight at the same time. It just can’t be done
.

Chapter 5
ROBERT MATTHEWS

On the morning of July 13, 1987, Robert L. Matthews pulled his beige Toyota into the space marked
WARDEN
in the parking lot outside the Hot House. He sprinted up the front stone steps that led to the administration building, counting them automatically. When he reached the top—number forty-three—Matthews paused, pleased. He was not the least bit winded. At age thirty-nine, the new warden was in top physical shape. He ran three miles each morning, six miles on Saturdays, lifted weights three times a week, and kept his weight at exactly 195 pounds, the same as it had been when the six-foot two-inch Matthews was a freshman in college. Bolting up stairs was a habit, a way for Matthews to check himself. That was the sort of compulsive man he was. Robert Matthews was always looking for challenges.

From the moment he had joined the bureau in 1973, he had pushed himself to excel. Being good didn’t cut it; he had to be the best. He had told his wife that he intended to be a warden by thirty-five, a seemingly impossible goal given the fact that wardens were almost invariably men seasoned by decades of experience. A mere eight years later, Matthews was chosen to be warden at the prison in Ashland, Kentucky. He was only
thirty-three, the youngest warden in bureau history. Now, six years later, he was setting another precedent. He was entering his new job as the first black ever put in charge of the Hot House. This was no small matter in the summer of 1987. While race relations outside federal prisons had improved in many ways over the decades, the fires of racial hatred still burned as intensely as ever in the prisons. In Leavenworth, black and white convicts segregated themselves in the inmate dining hall and prison officials never housed blacks and whites in the same cell. At least a dozen white convicts had large swastikas or the words
WHITE POWER
boldly tattooed on their arms. At the Hot House, the numbers of black and white inmates were intentionally kept equal to prevent either side from gaining an advantage. In the summer of 1987, 51 percent of its convicts were white, 45 percent were black, the rest were other minority races.

Of course, convicts were not the only racists in prison. The staff that Matthews had come to supervise was overwhelmingly white, and many were frank about their racial hatred. Of the 487 full-time employees, 63 were blacks (13 percent), 24 were Hispanic (5 percent), and one was Native American. The other 399 (82 percent) were white, and all but 40 of them were men.

At the local watering hole for guards, a tiny bar called Benny’s located a few blocks from the Hot House, it was not uncommon to hear racial slurs between sips of beer and during dart games. A white guard would later recall a conversation that took place before Matthews reported to work. “There is nothing wrong with niggers,” one guard said. “In fact, I think everyone should own a few of them!” When the laughing ended, he added, “But work for a nigger warden? Holy shit, what’s the bureau coming to?”

After Matthews, Charles Carter was the highest-ranking black at the Hot House, and he knew firsthand how racist white guards could be. When Carter joined the bureau in 1974 at the federal prison in El Reno,
Oklahoma, he was snubbed by white guards, one referring to him behind his back as the “new nigger.” Carter complained to his lieutenant when he learned of the ongoing slur, but he was told that he would have to solve his own problems. Carter did just that. He confronted the guard in the prison parking lot after work.

“Don’t ever call me nigger again,” Carter demanded. “If you can’t talk to me with respect, then stay away from me. Otherwise, I’ll whip your ass.”

“Fuck you, nigger,” the guard replied.

“When he said that, the fight was on,” Carter later recalled, “and I ended up beating his ass, which is what I should have done in the first place.”

Over the years, Carter had risen through the ranks until now he was a unit manager, which meant he was in charge of the day-to-day operation of B cellhouse. Because he was now an executive, white guards at the Hot House watched what they said, but Carter could tell from his conversations with young black guards that racial hatred still ran deep in the guard force.

Racism was only one of the problems that the new warden would have to overcome. Matthews also had to please his new boss. On the surface, the decision to send Matthews to Leavenworth was unanimous. The bureau’s five regional directors meeting in Washington, D.C., at the bureau’s headquarters had approved the transfer during their last meeting under the leadership of Director Norman Carlson. Carlson, who retired July 1, had run the bureau for seventeen years and Matthews had been one of his favorites. Carlson’s handpicked successor, J. Michael Quinlan, did nothing to stop Matthews’s promotion, but privately he admitted that he had some reservations about him. Quinlan didn’t know Matthews well, and the new warden was not on the list of managers that he had chosen as up-and-coming leaders.

Neither Carlson nor Quinlan had ever said anything to Matthews, but he understood through the grapevine that he had to convince Quinlan of his abilities. He also
realized that Carlson had given him an opportune spot to show them. Leavenworth was considered a make-or-break institution for wardens. “If a warden can run Leavenworth successfully, then the feeling in the bureau is that he can run any prison in the world,” Matthews explained later. The Hot House guards put it more bluntly. “This is where the bureau finds out if a man clangs when he walks.” In other words, a Leavenworth warden had to “have two brass balls” and both had to be “awfully damn big.”

Nearly all of the bureau’s top managers had spent some time at Leavenworth. Carlson had worked there early in his career; so had Quinlan. It had also played a key role in the life of James V. Bennett, who, more than any other man, was responsible for the creation of the bureau.

The son of an Episcopal minister, Bennett was a lawyer in Washington, D.C., during the mid-1920s when he was first asked if he would investigate the seven prisons then owned by the federal government. At the time, Bennett worked for the U.S. Bureau of Efficiency, a now-defunct agency that was responsible for finding ways to make the federal bureaucracy more effective. Bennett had never been in a prison and he immediately left to tour the federal ones and several state institutions. What he found sickened him. He later wrote:

Within prisons, men are routinely strung up by the thumbs, handcuffed to high bars, kept for weeks in solitary confinement on bread and water, are whipped, paddled, and spanked, spread-eagled in the hot sun, locked up in sweatboxes, confined in tiny spaces where they can neither lie nor sit nor stand.

Although the federal prisons were part of the Justice Department, each was run independently by a warden appointed by the U.S. Attorney General. Most
wardens were political hacks. Some knew nothing about running a prison. Bennett described the federal prisons as “vast, idle houses filled with a horde of despairing, discouraged, disgruntled men, milling aimlessly about in overcrowded yards.”

During his tour of Leavenworth, Bennett paused in the prison yard and looked up at the dome that was still under construction even though work on the penitentiary had started two decades earlier. The warden had just bragged about how the dome would be second in size only to the U.S. Capitol dome when finished. Just then, an inmate walked up to Bennett, pointed to the dome, and asked him if he was really serious about prison reform or if he was simply going to perpetuate a system that was more interested in building “that preposterous dome” than in actually helping inmates. Bennett would later recall that incident in his autobiography,
I Chose Prison
, and state that his exchange with the inmate made him realize that the purpose of a federal prison was not to punish inmates or warehouse them, but to
rehabilitate
them.

BOOK: The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison
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