How to Be Alone

by Jonathan Franzen

  The monks at the abbey had held a final vote on the sale and changed their minds.

  “I’d worked hard on that sucker,” Schryver says. “I could have gotten all huffy and puffy when the deal fell through. But I let Steve do that.”

  Steve Stewart believed that since his agency had exclusive rights to represent the abbey and had found a ready, able, and willing buyer, the abbey still owed him the realtor’s fee. He wrote to the Apostolic Delegate in Rome and placed a lien on the abbey. But no one in the Justice Department would confirm that the BOP intended to buy.

  “Everybody’s looking for their twenty minutes of fame,” Jimmie Lloyd tells me on the way back to Florence. “Like most people, Tom Schryver didn’t get his.”

  MY SECOND ATTEMPT TO PENETRATE FCC Florence takes place at the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution. Like ADX, the FCI is a showcase. Among its notably humane features are a sweat lodge where Native Americans can practice their rites, six full-size pool tables, a painting studio, and a library whose holdings include Gravity’s Rain­bow in hardcover and Walter Kaufmann’s study of Hegel. Footpaths crisscross a large central campus whose lush grass is push-mown by prisoners in khaki. Nearly half the inmates at the FCI are in for drug offenses.

  My guide, Case Management Coordinator Denise Snider, gives me an exhaustive tour of the UNICOR furniture factory. UNICOR is a semiautonomous federal corporation, like the Postal Service. It runs the BOP’s factories, selling exclusively to federal buyers. The products of FCI Florence are comfortable, personalityless chairs and sofas. Inmates working here earn between forty cents and a dollar and a quarter an hour. I see towers of foam rubber, air-powered drills and staplers attached to pendant yellow coils of tubing, an intriguing Gluing Room, and a whole lot of men in khaki.

  UNICOR will train you for jobs on the floor—one of the program’s stated purposes is to provide inmates with “marketable skills”—but to land a desk job in UNICOR’s lovely late-model business office, you need prior experience in the outside world. At each desk, where the modern eye expects to see a braceleted young woman with padded shoulders and teased bangs, a bearded long-haired man in khaki is typing briskly. The effect is parodic or surreal.

  For most of my visit to the FCI, Case Management Coordinator Snider remains profoundly unmoved by my efforts to charm and ingratiate. Her clothing and haircut are assertively sensible, and she’s plainly counting the minutes till she’s free of me. As I’m leaving, however, a few tiny chinks open in her professionalism.

  “I was a psychology major in college,” she says, explaining how she acquired two degrees in criminal justice. “A professor told me she thought I’d be perfect for criminology. It suits my nature. I like to find things out about people without their knowing that I’m doing it.”

  I ask her how many prison employees live in Florence or other nearby towns. I recall that Mr. Winn does not live in the area.

  “We’re encouraged to live close by,” Snider says. “But the closest place I could find day care was in Pueblo. The administrators who are black might like to live close by, but they don’t feel welcome in Florence or Cañon City, so they end up in Pueblo or Colorado Springs, with an hour commute. Our warden is black, for example. He can’t live around here.”

  IN JUNE OF 1987, after the abbey deal fell through, the Fremont County Economic Development Commission (FCEDC) learned from Jim Jones that the BOP had decided to build a new prison complex in the Western United States entirely from scratch. The FCEDC hastened to develop four potential sites in Fremont County, and Jones was particularly enthusiastic about a property owned by the Colorado Department of Corrections located between Cañon City and Florence. The FCEDC assured him he could have the land for free.

  In May 1988, Jim Jones asked Skip Dyer, the FCEDC’s executive director, what the community’s response would be to a larger complex, one perhaps containing as many as three facilities. “They’d hug you a lot harder,” Dyer replied.

  Although the BOP was being wooed by depressed communities all over the West and was studying sites in at least five of them, Fremont County had the inside track. Just when it appeared that all systems were go, however, the Colorado state legislature refused to authorize the gift of land to the Feds. “We’d had reasonable confidence that we’d get that state land,” Dyer says. “When it fell through, we felt we had to strike while the iron was still hot.”

  The iron was struck by the owner of Jim’s Clothing in Florence. Jim Provenzano is a heavy-set man with soft brown eyes and olive skin. His father, an Italian tailor, came to Florence in 1916 and built a business by taking the measurements of miners entering the local shafts, sewing while they mined, and delivering their suits when they emerged from their shift. Provenzano fils was a member of the countywide prison steering committee, and he knew that there was an alternate site, just south of Florence, that Jim Jones had deemed adequate. The asking price was a hundred thousand dollars. Provenzano told a friend at the Rocky Mountain Bank & Trust that he would put up a thousand dollars to buy the Florence property if the bank would put up a thousand, too.

  “I could sooner put a man on the moon than afford a thousand dollars,” Provenzano says. “But we only had two weeks, and I knew the Fed was interested in that property. So I said: Let’s buy it. My main purpose was to bring our store into its seventy-fifth year. I hoped we could provide local employment and give our kids a place to work if they wanted it.”

  With Provenzano’s impetus, the FCEDC quickly organized a fund-raising drive. “It was like a disease that everybody caught,” Provenzano says. “It was like an auction. Everybody else was pledging; you had to pledge too.” Within two weeks the FCEDC had eighty thousand dollars in the bank and another sixty thousand in pledges. By the summer of 1988, it was able to send the title for three hundred acres of desert to the BOP—thus fulfilling its promise of free land.

  Ground was broken in Florence on July 14, 1990. Out-of-town dignitaries made appearances at a barbecue in the town park. A pickaxe commemorating the event now hangs on the wall at the Florence Chamber of Commerce. Also on the wall are framed watercolors of the four prisons in the complex. Twin garlands of steel are taped to the plywood paneling above the paintings. A calligraphed card identifies the garlands as RAZOR WIRE FROM FEDERAL PRISON.

  FOR THE NATIONAL and international media, ADX is the showcase of a new millennium, but just east of Cañon City there is a new Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP) that opened fifteen months earlier than the federal ADX, is identical in its principles, and is easily as carefully designed. You have to admire the Feds for persuading people that ADX is newsworthy.

  My guide at the CSP, Administrative Officer Dennis Burbank, could hardly be more different from Louis Winn. Mr. Winn is a transfer to the area; Dennis is a local. Mr. Winn is smooth and well-spoken, a master at passing up obvious opportunities to volunteer information. Dennis expresses feelings, opinions. He’s an individual who utilizes the words “utilize” and “individual” with an ease that makes them sound almost slangy. He can get all glowy on the topic of the federal ADX (“I love their isolation cells”) and yet visibly shudder at the thought of corrections in Oklahoma (“a model of how not to do things”). When I meet him he’s wearing a red-white-and-blue necktie of considerable hideousness. The tie bears a single word: LIBERTY.

  As Dennis presents it, the CSP is designed to provide a kind of tough love: to be the stern, corrective parent that most of its residents presumably never had. If you follow the rules and learn to control your antisocial impulses, you proceed from the very unpleasant Level I (no privileges, a two-guard escort for a trip to the shower) to the less unpleasant Level III (more spending money, more personal freedoms) and finally, after six months or a year, back to a prison where you can interact with fellow prisoners. It’s a theory of in loco parentis. What CSP sets out to do is to impress on the childlike, acting-out prisoner that the world around him is real and that he has responsibilities to it.

  The staff at CS
P devotes considerable ingenuity to tailoring “behavior management plans” to particular offenses. The punishment for throwing feces at a guard, for example, is to be deprived of the usual prison food. The thrower is put, instead, on a “special management diet”: a squishy high-protein loaf that Dennis describes as “not very tasty.” With as much delicacy as I can, I ask if the special management diet changes the nature of its consumers’ feces. Dennis says no. The diet is simply a message: stop misbehaving, and we’ll put you back on real food.

  When I express uneasiness about the possibility of sensory deprivation disorders at CSP, Dennis has an expert paged, a social worker named Gene Espinoza, who tells me that prisoners are not, in fact, all that isolated. Besides the staff-intensive daily contacts, inmates also call to each other from their cells, tap on the walls, and, when they think no one’s looking, fashion their bedsheets into “rat lines”—long cords that they push under the doors of their cells and attempt to snap like a whip and reach the doors of other cells with. If you’ve managed to “keister in” some tobacco (this is Dennis’s jolly phrase; it means “secrete in your rectum out of sight of a simple spread-your-cheeks check”) and wish to sell it to a neighbor, the rat line is the preferred means of conducting the transaction.

  My relationship with Dennis suffers a moment of awkwardness when I point out that the contacts which Mr. Espinoza calls a boon to mental health are in fact against the regulations and routinely punished. This is how Dennis resolves the paradox: “Inmates are not allowed to communicate with each other. Nevertheless, they communicate.”

  CSP is operating at full capacity. As of June, 486 men and thirteen women were imprisoned here. Each of CSP’s four “units” has its own medical exam room and barber room (the latter doubles as a mental-health counseling area); the idea is to minimize the time an inmate spends outside his unit. At the center of the unit is a two-tiered control area from which eight “pods” radiate tangentially. The upper floor of the control area is glassed in and contains a couple of guards who oversee large color monitors controlling locks, lights, intercoms, water flow, and the like. Dennis says that the controls were originally touch-screen, but guards would find themselves opening up doors with a sneeze or the brush of a sleeve. Now they use trackballs and clickers.

  Each pod has sixteen cells arranged on two tiers and looking out on a “day hall” with a waxed concrete floor. The first principle of a control unit is that no inmate should ever have direct contact with another inmate, and the electronics here serve an elaborate choreography of comings and goings. Prisoners at disciplinary Levels I and II must be cuffed and escorted by two guards whenever they leave their cells; the big carrot of Level III is being allowed to walk the fifty feet to the shower or exercise room or telephone without escort. Prisoners at the different levels are mixed together in each unit, so that the privileges of those in Level III are visible to all.

  Eight or ten of the cells are quiescent at any given moment. Silently, behind glass, a blond-bearded inmate is working out in the lower-tier exercise room, whose equipment consists of a chin-up bar. In the upper-tier exercise room an inmate with a half-grown Afro can be seen with his face pressed to the window as he peers out at the late-afternoon nothing. (CSP has no outdoor recreation area.) One or two other inmates have their faces pressed to the windows of their cell doors. Yet another is showering. Through the glass door of the pod’s narrow shower room I can see his head and torso not real clearly in honey-colored light. The water will run for no more than ten minutes before the pod computer turns it off. If he needs a razor, a guard brings it before the shower and takes it away after.

  “It’s still hard for me to get used to how quiet it is in this facility,” Dennis says.

  The cells themselves are seldom quiet. Television is important at CSP—so important that if an inmate arrives at CSP without a set of his own, he’s given one as soon as he’s out of Level I. CSP has its own station, broadcasting self-improvement programming and vocational training (Dennis mentions “janitorial work” as a vocation), as well as movies and devotional instruction. On Saturday nights, there’s bingo. CSP’s recreational therapist, Jim Gentile, focuses the closed-circuit camera on a spinning cage from which he draws numbered balls. He calls six games, and inmates with a winning card send him a Request for Interview slip. When he makes his rounds the next day he awards a candy bar to winners. Gentile says that if he takes a Saturday night off, he gets hate mail for three days.

  The basement of CSP houses what’s called Intake. Inmates arrive and depart here, wearing orange jumpsuits. When Dennis and I pay our visit, a face is pressed against the window of each holding cell. Newcomers. Everybody looks about twenty-eight. White, Hispanic, black; all of them in the pink. One of them calls to nobody: “Yo! How many phone calls a month do you get in Level I?”

  I feel them looking at me and am careful not to meet their eyes. Lest: what? Lest some vertigo draw me to them? Lest they see my fear? Lest they implicate me in their war? Lest I have to register emotionally the fact that I am free and will soon be speeding along a highway through juniper and scrub pine toward dinner in Florence? In junior high I learned that by avoiding certain kids’ eyes in the hallway I could sometimes escape notice, or at least escape being punched. Lowering one’s eyes is a sign of deference—I learned this very early on. But it’s also, of course, a way of not seeing.

  One of the holding cells in Intake has a full window, not just a slit in the door. The black man with a shaved head who’s inside it catches me looking at him. I avert my eyes and then look again, and he gives me a strange smirk—one that I don’t think I’m reading too much into to say that it’s a mockery of the kind of smile shared by two human beings but at the same time is a gesture of trust: that I might understand and share the mockery. I return the smirk, too widely. It falls off my face, and I avert my eyes.

  FOR THE PRISON BOOSTERS who imagined the town blossoming under a shower of federal dollars, there appear to have been a few surprises. The major construction contracts for FCC Florence all went to big firms outside Fremont County, and a lot of the Florentine men who had hoped for construction work failed the test of back strength. Instead of employment, the town got traffic, dust, and a lively bar trade. When it came time to staff ADX, the BOP, which was intent on maximizing the professionalism of its showcase facility, imported seasoned guards and administrators from elsewhere in the country. Most janitorial, laundry, lawn, and kitchen work at the complex is performed by prisoners, and for the locally filled positions, the maximum age for applicants turned out to be thirty-seven. This was an unwelcome revelation for a town of retirees; people at city hall refer to it as “the shocker.”

  Jim Provenzano had hoped that prison corrections officers would buy uniforms at his store. Unfortunately, he says, “they wanted me to sell boots at ten dollars below my cost; otherwise they’d use the regular government supplier. How am I going to compete with that?” Some FCC maintenance workers are buying uniforms from Provenzano, but he’s seen little spillover demand for his stock of Western wear.

  When Provenzano assesses the return on his thousand-dollar gamble, his sentences trail off into worried ellipses. “I don’t mean to sound negative, but. . .” Although he believes that Florence will eventually prosper, he concedes that Jim’s Clothing is not doing as well as he hoped. “I don’t know if I’ll be in business two years from now.”

  “I empathize with our merchants,” says Merle Strickland, Florence’s marketwise mayor. “They’re trying to survive in what’s primarily a service economy. I’d love to see a thriving business community, but they’re going to have the same problems I had with my furniture store: people are going to buy where it’s cheapest. If you want to be successful here, you have to make it in service.”

  Strickland takes me to see Florence’s new nine-hole Bear Paw Golf Course, whose driving range and practice green afford a panorama of the FCC’s northern perimeter. Bear Paw was built in part to appeal to prison bureaucrats, who we
re reputed to be keen linksmen, and in part to anchor a housing development. At the end of a rutted gravel road, several outsize model units offer nice views of electric fences.

  According to Strickland, Florence has the water infrastructure to sustain a population of twenty thousand. Water is a big source of revenue for the town, which exacts a fifty percent markup from customers outside the city limits; the gross is about five thousand dollars a month from selling to the FCC. “Some of our councilmen are fond of saying that our town’s biggest asset is its people,” sh% says. “I happen to believe that the most valuable asset my constituents own is the water.”

  I tell Strickland that I don’t see how exactly the prison has fed the new housing developments going up around town.

  She gestures pooh-poohingly. “The growth isn’t coming from the prison. It’s coming from amenities like this golf course. It’s part of the growth along the whole Front Range. Guards making twelve dollars an hour aren’t going to find housing here. And I’ve heard a lot of prison administrators remark that they personally don’t care to live that close to where they work.”

  Of the prison boosters, Strickland says: “They all think Santa Claus is coming. But there is no Santa Claus.”

  Just such a realization appears to have dawned on Jim Provenzano. He understands now, he says, that once employees leave work at the prison complex they want to go straight home, rather than stop and shop in Florence. He jokes that local businessmen ought to pay for radar traps on the roads to Pueblo and the Springs so that people can’t get to the malls so quickly.

  “People assume that because I’m the only store in a small town my prices must be higher,” Provenzano says. “It’s not true. But we’ve got a generation of kids who know nothing but Wal-Mart, who know nothing but malls.”