The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  Little clearly didn’t belong at Leavenworth.

  Little insisted that he wasn’t hiding anything. There was only one possible explanation, he said. While he was being held in a Florida county jail awaiting trial, jailers had searched his cell and found that two of the bars were cut.

  “They accused me of trying to escape,” he explained.

  “Well, did they ever charge you with escape?” Bowles asked.

  “No,” Little replied. “They blamed me for it, but they couldn’t prove it.”

  With Little in tow, Bowles marched down the tier to see Little’s case manager. Every inmate in Leavenworth was assigned a case manager who was responsible for keeping track of the multitudinous paperwork an inmate’s presence generated. If a convict visited the prison doctor, asked to move to another cell, met with an outside visitor, or even bought a magazine subscription, a note was made in his prison file. Besides compiling all the paperwork, case managers kept tabs on when prisoners were to appear before the parole board or for other periodic reviews. If Little had been accused of trying to escape in Florida, there would be a record of it in his file and his case manager would know about it. And if a mistake had been made, then Little could appeal to him for help.

  It was against the rules for one convict to examine another’s records, but Bowles told Little exactly which forms to ask for, and sent him inside the case manager’s cubbyhole office in A cellhouse. A few minutes after Little returned with copies of his records, Bowles knew why the first-time felon had been sent to a maximum-security penitentiary.

  “Looky here,” Bowles said, pointing at the paper, “they got you down as an extreme escape risk!”

  Little’s permanent police record listed him as being found guilty of attempted escape in Florida. As far as the bureau was concerned, Little had attempted to break out of the county jail, and that offense gave him enough points on the classification scale to merit his being held at the Hot House.

  “But I was never even charged with escape,” Little protested.

  “This says you were,” said Bowles. “C’mon.”

  This time, Bowles led the way into the case manager’s office, where he explained his discovery. “You can’t classify a guy on what you think he might have done,” Bowles complained, “only what you can prove he did.”

  The case manager was not convinced. No staff members were going to take what Carl Bowles said as the truth. Besides, he pointed out, even if the bureau had screwed up, it had the authority to house a convict anywhere it wished regardless of the number of points that inmate had received. The points were merely a guideline, so the bureau was under no legal obligation to move Little.

  “What if we get some written proof that shows Little don’t belong here?” Bowles asked.

  The case manager reluctantly agreed to take a look at any evidence that Bowles and Little could find. Until then, Little was going to be treated as an escape risk.

  When they got back to their cell, Bowles told Little to write down the names of his attorney, the judge who sentenced him, the prosecuting attorney, the sheriff, even the guards who found the two cut bars. They would write a letter to each and ask for their help. Getting the evidence should be easy, Bowles said; the hard part would be getting someone at the Hot House—either the case manager or a prison counselor—to admit that the bureau had made a mistake.

  “If we can get just one staff member to take your side, we can get you out of here,” Bowles promised, “but getting one of these fat-ass bastards to stick out his neck is going to be fucking difficult.”

  Later Thomas Little recalled his feelings that morning. “No one in the system gave a damn about me. They all knew I didn’t belong in a maximum-security prison. I stuck out, but none of the staff did anything to help and they all knew what would happen to me. But here is this supposedly mad-dog killer coming to my aid and he figures out how the bureau fucked up my case within a few days and he is writing letters trying to help me. Carl Bowles was the only person in Leavenworth who really gave a shit about me.”

  The two men became inseparable. On most days, they dressed alike in blue low-top sneakers, olive-green army trousers, white T-shirts, and white terry-cloth hats that looked like sailor caps with the rims pulled down. Most guards and inmates assumed Bowles was teaching “his wife” how to dress. Most didn’t bother to learn Little’s name. He was considered an extension of Bowles. Little knew about the whispers.

  “I am not a homosexual,” Little said one morning in a rare show of exasperation. “I am not Carl’s kid or punk or wife or anything else, except for one thing: I am Carl’s friend.”

  Little credited Bowles with literally saving his life. “In some ways, Carl and I are identical and in some ways we are so far fucking apart, but Carl and I have talked and talked and talked, probably for a thousand hours, and after I tell him something, he will say to me, ‘You know, I’ve had those feelings before,’ and I will say to him, ‘You had those feelings?’ I mean, he has felt just like I have and he has taught me that it is okay to think like I do, it’s okay to feel like I do, and no one else has ever told me that Everyone else told me my thoughts were wrong or bad or evil. I have never had any real friends, but Carl Bowles listens and he understands.”

  I had been warned by guards and convicts not to ask Bowles whether he and Little were homosexual lovers. “Carl is fucking crazy, man,” an inmate warned. “You disrespect him like that and he’ll rip out your throat before you know what’s happening. Ever look in his eyes?—them is dead men’s eyes, no emotion, nothing but blackness.”

  But when I finally brought up the rumors, Bowles said, “I wondered if you’d ever get around to that.

  “Sex,” Bowles explained, “is easy to get in prison. You don’t have to prey on someone. This morning, an orderly who works in the lieutenant’s office said to me, ‘Hey, Carl, you sure are looking good. I’d like to suck your dick sometime.’ Now, he is a homosexual, a known homosexual who enjoys it. Why would anyone have to be a sexual predator in here when it’s that easy to get?

  “See, sex is easy to find, but finding a friend is damn near impossible ’cause no one trusts anyone in here.

  “Look, I’ve been in prison for twenty-three fucking years straight,” Bowles continued. “You don’t think I’ve not gotten lonely during that time? You don’t think I don’t need someone as a friend or someone to love me? Everyone is always worried about sex, okay, but there are different kinds of love. Just ’cause you love someone doesn’t mean you want to fuck them. Goddamn, I mean, that’s a perverted way of looking at things. Sex isn’t everything. There is companionship, understanding, consideration, sharing tough times together, having a guy who knows exactly what you are talking about so when he says, ‘Goddamn, that’s fucked up,’ you understand, ’cause you know it is fucked up too. Is that homosexual to have a friend like that? Or is that just being a human being?

  “Of course my dick still gets hard,” he said. “Sex drive is natural. Being in prison is what isn’t natural. This whole society in here is perverted. Do you think I don’t know the difference between a man and a woman? Bullshit. Sex with a man is a poor substitute, a poor substitute at best, but look around, do you see any women in here?

  “So what do you do? What do you do? It drives you crazy. I’ve tried not to think about it, but there isn’t a day in here when you don’t look at television or look at a magazine and see something arousing. Some guys just try to kill it, pretend their sex drive is dead. Why? Because they are scared of becoming homosexuals. ‘Oh my God, am I turning gay because I want someone to hold, to touch, to love me?’ No one wants to be a homosexual in here because they are usually the weakest mother-fuckers around and are considered as low as a snitch.

  “But I’ve never met a motherfucker that is so fucking cold that he doesn’t give a damn about another person. Never. I’ve never met another person who doesn’t need some physical contact with another human being.

  “Can you imagine not being
able to touch another human being for twenty-three fucking years?

  “So what do you do? What do you do? Do you run behind everyone’s back and have some homosexual suck you off while you look around the whole time and don’t enjoy it because you are worried that someone will see you? Or do you jack yourself crazy every night looking at fucking pictures? This is reality, man! I ain’t had no pussy in twenty-three fucking years.

  “What do you do? I’ll tell you what you do. You recognize that sex is a strong desire, but there are different kinds of love, and if you lower your standard, then you destroy yourself. It’s like food. If you start eating the slop that they throw into the trash compactor and you say, ‘It’s okay, this is still food,’ then you have lowered your standard and it drops you down. You can’t lower your standard, because once you do, all your standards drop. Every one of them. You got to cling to what is pure. You got to cling to what is good. And what is the purest thing? The purest relationship is one of love, not one based on sex, and that comes with friendship and caring about another human being and being there for that person just like he is there for you.

  “The cops will tell you that I’m a predator, but you try to find one person in twenty-three fucking years who I’ve preyed on. There are fifteen or twenty cases, guys who I have helped through the years. Ask any one of them and they will tell you, ‘Oh yeah, Carl, well, he’d probably fuck me if I let him, but he never pressed me out of anything. He’s my friend. He cared about me and helped me.’

  “That’s what is pure.

  “What do I want with Thomas Little? I want someone I can develop a friendship with. I want someone who will say, ‘Hey, old Carl Bowles, society may think he’s a piece of shit, but he’s my friend. He is someone who I care about. He made a difference in my life.’ ”

  Carl Bowles sounded sincere and he sounded convincing. At least Thomas Little thought so.

  Chapter 13

  THE CUBANS

  The Cuban prisoners, all 719 of them, arrived at Leavenworth in what seemed to be good spirits. Some flashed victory signs, others grinned. For thirteen days, the nightly news had broadcast footage about the riots and much of the coverage had been sympathetic toward the detainees. But their demeanor began to change as soon as they were placed in C and D cellhouses. “The Cubans had been babied and catered to in Oakdale and Atlanta,” explained Lieutenant Steven Myhand, one of two lieutenants put in charge of the cellhouses, now known collectively as the Cuban units. “We intended to show them who was boss here and that is exactly what we did.”

  Always before, the Cubans had enjoyed the same privileges as U.S. inmates; in fact, they had often been treated better. Not at the Hot House. All visits between Cubans and their family members and friends were stopped. No nightly movies, no use of the prison gym or weight room, no educational classes, no jobs in the prison factories, no group religious services, no trips to the prison yard. The Cuban units were designed to be a miniature Marion. The inmates were locked in five-and-a-half-by-nine-foot cells, usually two men per cell, and were only allowed outside three times each week for exercise. Even then, they were simply moved to a larger screened cage the size of a two-car garage. Once a week, each Cuban got a shower. Once a month, he could place one collect telephone call, but if no one answered or the line was busy, the phone was passed to the next man. The only goodies were generic cigarettes and writing supplies. If a Cuban had enough money, he could buy a small transistor radio strong enough to pick up Kansas City radio stations. Otherwise, a few Spanish books and magazines passed up and down the tiers were his only entertainment.

  If all that was not enough to make life inside C and D cellhouses miserable, there was the never-ending noise. The roar of hundreds of men yelling from cell to cell reverberated inside the old buildings. It was as loud at three A.M. as at noon. The babble of Spanish was unintelligible to most of the guards, making the racket even more maddening. Like the screech of fingernails across a blackboard, the clamor scraped the nerves. Tempers flared.

  “I don’t feel good about what we are doing here,” Matthews admitted one morning as he inspected the Cuban units. “This is basically a jail and I have never wanted to run a jail. But we have no choice.”

  Not only had the Cubans caused $64.6 million in property damage and cost taxpayers another $48.8 million in funds spent to quell the riots, they had badly humiliated the bureau and committed an unforgivable sin. “These bastards took officers hostage,” a Hot House guard explained, “and they had to be taught a lesson.”

  Warden Matthews and Associate Warden Smith stressed that all Cubans were to be treated as “humanely as possible.” But when the two men chose Lieutenant Phillip Harden Shoats, Jr., to oversee the Cuban cellhouses, they sent the Hot House guards a subtle message. The thirty-eight-year-old Shoats, one of only two black lieutenants at the prison, was known as a “hardball lieutenant” with a reputation for being physical. “Shoats wasn’t the kind of guy who tried to resolve conflicts by talking,” recalled one guard. “He gave an inmate an order and he gave it only once. After that, he kicked butt.”

  Shoats resembled Santa Claus in appearance. He weighed more than three hundred pounds, at least one hundred pounds too much for his six-foot one-inch frame. He always seemed to be smiling, too, ready with some joke. But his easygoing manner could turn into anger in a flash, and when that happened Shoats became a bully. Warden Matthews would later explain that he had chosen Shoats because he wielded “an iron hand inside a velvet glove.” “I needed someone who was cool under pressure, but firm,” Matthews said. “I felt Shoats was that man.”

  Shoats’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Myhand, was the youngest lieutenant at the Hot House at age twenty-nine. He had only worked for the bureau for seven years, but his father was a retired officer with thirty-one years of experience, including stints at the federal prisons at Alcatraz and Leavenworth. The younger Myhand had grown up living in the shadow of penitentiary walls. He knew the lingo, the legends, the procedures. At the Hot House, Myhand had a reputation as an energetic, likeable “cowboy” who, like Shoats, preferred action to talk.

  Neither Shoats nor Myhand received any special training in how to deal with the Cubans. They did not understand Spanish. They did not know which Cubans were killers and which were petty crooks, because the inmates had destroyed their prison records during the riots. Worse, there were only five or six guards who could speak Spanish well enough to interpret.

  “Every Cuban is a shithead until he proves otherwise,” Shoats told the guards whom he handpicked to work with him, “and then he still is a shithead. Don’t take any chances.”

  Trouble between guards and Cubans erupted very quickly. A few days after the Cubans arrived, an inmate in C cellhouse filled a plastic cup with his own urine and feces, let it curdle for several hours, and then screamed until a guard rushed to his cell. The Cuban threw the contents into the guard’s face. Gagging, the guard backed away, trying to clear his burning eyes as the Cuban ducked into a corner of his cell to hide.

  “You little bastard,” the guard yelled. Other guards kept him from attacking the Cuban.

  “It’s time to show these shitheads we mean business,” Shoats declared. “No one throws piss and shit on my officers without paying a price.”

  Shoats called in a SORT team of five specially trained guards who gathered outside the Cuban’s cell. Word of the guard’s “baptism” had spread through the cellhouse, sparking laughter and jeers from other Cubans. The guards unlocked the padlock, removed the chain draped through the door and bars, and slid open the heavy cell door. Inside, the Cuban had doused the floor with soapy water and smeared his body—naked except for undershorts—with soap. SORT attacked. The first guard hit the Cuban in the chest, knocking him onto the slippery concrete floor. Each of the other four grabbed a preassigned limb. Before the Cuban had time to react, he was lifted onto his bed and each arm and leg was shackled to rings on the bed frame. He remained chained down for eight hours.

 
“Getting shit and piss thrown on you became so common we called it ‘getting slimed,’ like in the movie Ghostbusters,” one guard explained later. “At first, we put the little bastards in a four-point position when they slimed us, but after a while, they just laughed at you. They would lay there chained down for eight hours and then get up and piss in a cup and throw it on your face again. You just wanted to smack ’em ’cause they acted like little kids.”

  The bureau released an internal report after the riots that said the Cubans were the most unstable group of prisoners ever put under its care. “Their extremes can go from violent homicidal rage to crying, loneliness, and suicidal behavior,” warned Dr. Bolivar P. Martineau, the report’s author. “At various times, you will be talking to a reasonable twenty-six-year-old person. Suddenly, that same individual can become a sophisticated, manipulative forty-year-old con artist; or he can turn into a three-year-old child with a raging temper tantrum who just happens to be five foot ten inches tall, weighs 180 pounds, and who is physically threatening you.”

  But despite the slimings, the danger, and the dreadful working conditions, the Hot House guards were eager to work in the Cuban units. The reason was overtime. Warden Matthews was willing to pay any cost to keep the inmates under control. “I would rather pay for it now than have the Cubans burn down this institution like they did in Atlanta and Oakdale and pay for it later,” he explained.

  At first the bureau sent in guards from other institutions to help ease the staff shortage at Leavenworth, but the Hot House guards objected, treated the newcomers shabbily, and resented their cutting into the overtime pie. The bureau responded by pulling the outsiders and letting Leavenworth guards work double shifts. Most guards did their regular job and then an additional eight hours. Overtime expenses doubled by $2 million the first year. One veteran employee earned $50,000 in overtime pay—more than his yearly salary. A joke soon spread through the Hot House: