by Pete Earley
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.
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 reform
er 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 on
e 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.
