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Authors: Pete Earley

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BOOK: The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison
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A deeply religious man, Bennett returned to Washington and drafted legislation for the Hoover administration that called for the creation of a federal Bureau of Prisons. This new bureau, he wrote, would not only bring uniformity to the seven federal prisons, but also “humanize prison life.” On May 14, 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed a bill creating the bureau and appointed Sanford Bates, the head of the Massachusetts prison system and a dedicated reformer himself, as its first director. Although Bennett was not put in charge, he was named Bates’s chief assistant and was asked to set up the structure of the bureau and define its goals. Seven years later, when Bates resigned to run the Boys Clubs of America, Bennett officially took charge.

“I struck first and hardest at what would now be called the ‘gut issue’ of prison reform—brutality,” he later wrote. “I made it plain to all the wardens that there
was to be no lashing, no use of the strap, no handcuffing men to the bars, no improper solitary confinement.”

During the next
twenty-seven years
as director, Bennett built the bureau into the most progressive prison system in the country. He got Congress to approve funds so that educational and vocational classes could be taught in prisons. He put inmates to work by creating UNICOR, which enabled them to earn money for themselves and their families. He built separate prisons for mentally ill inmates, for those addicted to narcotics, and for offenders under age twenty-two. He got Congress to force the U.S. Public Health Service to provide medical and psychiatric care at federal prisons because he knew its doctors would do a better job than the local physicians whom wardens hired part-time or whenever there were emergencies.

But his biggest priority remained finding a way to rehabilitate convicts, and in 1958, he felt the bureau had finally found a “cure” for crime. It was called the “medical model of rehabilitation” and it soon became the hottest treatment program in both federal and state prisons. The concept was simple. A criminal committed a crime because he was “sick” and, just like a person who was physically ill, he could be “cured” if the cause of his “sickness” was diagnosed and treated. In the early 1960s, criminologists claimed that crime was caused by a lack of education, a bad environment, no job skills, poor self-image. The bureau responded by giving each inmate a battery of tests and then prescribing a treatment program for each man that listed exactly how many hours of education, vocational training, and psychotherapy an inmate would have to complete to be “cured.”

The “medical model” was supposed to make penitentiaries such as Leavenworth obsolete. There was talk of closing the Hot House. Construction of all federal prisons stopped.

Bennett retired in 1964, confident that he had found the cure for crime. His replacement, Myrl E. Alexander,
a former assistant director under Bennett, continued to push Bennett’s programs until poor health forced his retirement six years later.

If Bennett had been the bureau’s impassioned reformer, its next director, Norman Carlson, was its pragmatic administrator. Carlson, who was only thirty-six when he became director, had started his career working part-time as a prison guard while earning a master’s degree in criminology in the early 1950s. As he rose through the ranks at the bureau, he implemented many of Bennett’s reforms, and when he became director in 1970, he was fairly certain that most of them didn’t work. He ordered his staff to investigate and monitor inmates to see how many returned to prison after being pronounced “cured.” The reports showed that recidivism had not dropped significantly.

Based on these studies, the bureau officially abandoned the medical model in 1975. “None of the programs in themselves was a failure,” said Carlson. “The failure was that we assumed there would be a magical cure for crime and delinquency. We have to divorce ourselves from the notion that we can change human behavior, that we have the power to change inmates. We don’t. All we can do is provide opportunities for inmates who want to change.”

Bennett’s vision that prisons could heal “sick” inmates had been replaced by Carlson’s belief that only men who wanted to be cured could be.

Between 1970 and 1987, Carlson shifted emphasis and focused on modernizing the bureau, changing it from Bennett’s one-man dynasty into a solidly run and effective bureaucracy. He divided it into five regions and delegated much of his authority to regional directors who then formed his executive staff. Despite tremendous opposition, he launched an aggressive construction program that added twenty new prisons, nearly doubling the existing number, to ease overcrowding. Stressing professionalism, he implemented better training and
higher standards for guards. He set up the bureau’s stepladder system, which ranks prisons from one to six based on the caliber of their inmates. And he guided the bureau through a decade of turbulence during the 1970s when federal judges gave prisoners a cluster of expanded rights.

Carlson could have remained the bureau’s director longer than seventeen years, but he had always required his wardens to retire at age fifty-five, and he wasn’t going to grant himself an exemption. That created a problem for him, however, because he would turn fifty-five during the 1988 presidential election, and he was worried that if he retired then, the new president would appoint a political hack as director. So Carlson decided to retire two years early so his successor would be firmly in place by election time. The Reagan administration asked Carlson to reconsider this unselfish act and offered to let him pick his own successor in return. Carlson agreed to stay one more year. That would give the new director twelve months to become entrenched. He spent his final year with Quinlan at his side.

Quinlan had joined the bureau in 1971 as an attorney at Washington headquarters, but Carlson had sent him to Leavenworth almost immediately after arrival for on-the-job training. It was the first of a variety of jobs aimed at preparing Quinlan. Carlson knew that his successor was not only going to have to understand prisons, but also Washington politics. In 1987, the bureau had a staff of 13,000, and operated 47 prisons holding more than 44,000 inmates. It had become a big bureaucracy inside the Justice Department and it was destined to grow even larger. Because of tougher federal sentencing guidelines taking shape in Congress, more money for law enforcement, and the booming drug-trafficking business, the bureau expected the number of inmates to increase to at least 85,000—possibly as many as 125,000—by 1995. To meet this need, the bureau estimated it would have to construct at least seventeen new prisons,
and budget analysts were predicting the new director would have to send Congress a $1.4 billion budget request for fiscal 1988—the biggest ever, more than double the previous year’s.

“The fact that Mike was a lawyer was a factor in my choice,” said Carlson, who did not have a legal degree. “I had learned early on that being a lawyer means something in the Justice Department because lawyers like to talk to other lawyers.”

When Quinlan took charge on July 1, 1987, the bureau had completely reversed its philosophy. Six decades had passed since James Bennett had stood in the Leavenworth yard, stared at the giant dome, and decided that the purpose of federal prisons was to rehabilitate inmates. Now the word
rehabilitation
was considered passé, replaced by a new buzz word:
expansion
.

All of this growth, of course, meant that Quinlan would have to hire more employees, who, in turn, would require more managers. He would need a larger executive staff to oversee his mushrooming empire, and this made the spotlight on Warden Robert Matthews burn even brighter.

Matthews did not wish to be left behind or see his soaring career stall. He intended to prove himself by becoming the master of the Hot House.

When it was announced that Matthews was coming to Leavenworth, guards began calling friends who had worked for him in other prisons to learn what he was like. What they heard made them nervous. Matthews was described as a perfectionist, a physical-fitness zealot, and a stickler for rules and procedure. The new warden emphasized appearances. He wanted his institutions to sparkle and he expected guards to keep their shirts tucked in, shoes shined, to answer with snappy “Yes sirs.” Matthews himself wore tailored suits and crisply ironed shirts, and whenever his wing-tips got dirty, he immediately cleaned them, with his handkerchief if necessary. According to those who had worked with him at
other prisons, Matthews was such a stickler for neatness that he never left anything on his desk. If papers needed to be signed, he signed them and put them out of sight. If reports needed to be read, he read them and gave them to his secretary to file. He didn’t even keep his phone on his desk at one prison. He put it in a drawer.

It was the stories about Matthews’s note-taking, however, that most upset the Hot House guards. Within the bureau, Matthews was something of a legend for being the warden who always carried a small notepad in his coat pocket so he could jot down inmate complaints as he walked through a prison. It didn’t matter how minor the gripe, how trivial it might seem to the guards. Matthews investigated every complaint. “Inmates are really our customers,” he had been fond of saying in his previous posts as a warden, “and it is our job to respond to their needs. They aren’t always right, but they still are our customers.”

The staff at Leavenworth had never looked upon inmates as customers, nor were the guards there eager to have a warden question them about some picayune incident. “The rap about Matthews was that he cared more about clean floors and inmate gripes than he did about the staff,” one guard recalled. “Believe me, everyone was watching when Matthews came up those front steps that first day as warden. We all wanted to see what he was made of.”

No one had to wait long.

Chapter 6
THOMAS LITTLE

The 727 jetliner taxied to an out-of-the-way runway near the cargo buildings at Kansas City International Airport and stopped near a waiting passenger bus and a white van parked on the concrete airstrip. Inside the airplane cabin, a U.S. marshal called out the names of the federal prisoners who were supposed to disembark. Thomas Edgar Little stood up when he heard his name, and shuffled toward the exit. At the bottom of the stairs, another marshal and two guards from Leavenworth were waiting.

“Little?” one guard yelled. The pilot had not turned off the engines and the noise made it difficult to hear.

“Yeah,” Little replied.

One guard checked off his name on a list while the other frisked him and made certain that he had not unlocked the handcuffs or somehow slipped out of the chains on his ankles.

“In there,” came the order, and Little fell in line behind another inmate, whose name had been called before his, and walked to the bus. He chose a window seat and looked outside through the bars that covered the green-tinted pane. Little would later describe his feelings that morning: “I was upset—no, it was more than
that, I was scared shitless. I couldn’t believe I was being sent to Leavenworth.”

Little was twenty-six years old and had been convicted of two armed bank robberies in his home state of Florida. He had never been to prison before, and when he discovered that the bureau had elected to send him to the Hot House, he had been dazed. Little had assumed, as had his attorney, that a first-time felon would be sent to a minimum-security institution, probably one of the camps. They were wrong.

When the last Leavenworth prisoner was finally off the federal marshal’s jet and inside the bus, the white van that Little had seen parked nearby pulled forward and preceded the bus off the airstrip. It was a chase car. The armed guards inside it were responsible for protecting the bus from attack. Besides the twenty or so prisoners, the bus held three guards. One sat in a metal cage at the rear of the bus with a pump shotgun cradled in his lap; another stood with a shotgun at the front of the bus, outside a wire-mesh screen that enclosed the convicts. The third guard, who wore a pistol, drove the bus.

As Little watched, the 727 taxied down the runway. Every day the marshal’s plane flew cross-country picking up and discharging prisoners at key cities. The Hot House guards jokingly called it Convict Airlines.

“Hey, white boy,” a black inmate sitting in the seat across from Little whispered, “they gonna love your ass in prison.” He laughed. Little ignored him.

When he was first arrested, Little had actually relished the idea of going to prison. All his life, the slightly built inmate had wanted to be a tough guy. A short stint in jail would be just like going to college, he figured. “I liked stealing things, but I wasn’t very good at it because my mama had raised me to think like a Square John,” he explained later.

While Little was being held for trial in a county jail, he discovered there were drawbacks to being a thief. Three inmates demanded he have sex with them, and
when he refused, they attacked. Little had held them off with a mop handle until a jailer separated him from the group. When he learned that he was being sent to the Hot House, he began having nightmares. “I figured if this shit happens in a county jail, then imagine what Leavenworth is going to be like.”

Another young inmate, who introduced himself as Gary, had sat next to Little on the airplane and had offered him some advice. Gary had done time in Leavenworth before and was quick to tell Little that young, good-looking convicts had a difficult time. There is a saying in the Hot House that goes like this, Gary had explained: “Every convict has three choices, but only three. He can fight [kill someone], he can hit the fence [escape], or he can fuck [submit].”

“You’re gonna need someone to show you around,” Gary said. “Ask for Carl Bowles. No one fucks with him.”

How, Little asked, could he find Bowles?

Gary had laughed. “Don’t worry, Carl will find you,” he said.

When the bus stopped outside the prison’s front entrance, a guard yelled, “Everybody out!”

The guards from the chase car had already formed a gauntlet on each side of the stone steps. The inmates hustled off the bus and climbed the steps single-file. They were directed through the rotunda and downstairs, where they were ordered to strip and stand next to each other in a line.

BOOK: The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison
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