The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  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 possessi
ons, 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.

  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.