The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  The guard repeated the doctor’s orders and the Cuban became rigid.

  “Okay,” the doctor said after taking the X ray. “Give me a few minutes and then I think you can take him back. He seems all right.”

  Smith turned to Myhand. “Better four-point him for a while. We can’t have him starting fires.”

  The Cuban yelled. The guard interpreted.

  “He says he will kill himself. He says he has been five years in American prisons, fifteen in Cuba. He will kill himself unless you move his lover back. He says he doesn’t care about anything. We can do anything to him, but he will keep setting fires until we move his lover back.”

  Smith and Myhand ignored this.

  The doctor announced that the prisoner could be returned to C cellhouse, and gave him a Dixie cup with a pill in it. Still in handcuffs, the inmate bent down and sucked the pill into his mouth. The doctor held a cup of water to his lips.

  The Cuban walked back into the main penitentiary building on his own and was taken by guards to a cell in C cellhouse not far from cell 124. Other Cuban prisoners shouted to him but he didn’t reply. The Spanish-speaking guard ordered him to lie on his back on the bed and the guards chained his feet, one foot at each corner, then unfastened the belly chain and pulled it from under him. One officer unlocked the handcuffs, another pinned the Cuban’s arms against his chest. The two officers looked like cowboys about to release a Brahma bull from a rodeo chute. One swung the convict’s right arm back and chained it in one swift motion to a ring welded onto the bed. The prisoner didn’t resist. Then his other limp arm was pulled back and chained. Finally he yelled.

  “He says he will kill a guard. He says he is very dangerous. He says that we should be afraid of him.”

  No one in the cell reacted. Instead, they filed out one by one, the last guard locking the door and padlocking the chain strung through the bars. From the corridor, you could see the Cuban’s smoke-blackened face. Alone now, he began to cry. The tears washed through the black smudges, creating thin clear lines. For the next fifteen minutes, he sobbed unashamedly in the cell, and then he fell asleep.

  PART TWO

  Criminals cause crime—not bad neighborhoods, inadequate parents, television, schools, drugs, or unemployment. Crime resides within the minds of human beings and is not caused by social conditions … Despite a multitude of difference in their backgrounds and crime patterns, criminals are alike in one way: All regard the world as a chessboard over which they have total control, and they perceive people as pawns to be pushed around at will.

  STANTON E. SAMENOW

  Inside the Criminal

  Mind

  A Voice: ARMED ROBBER, AGE 35

  You can tell the rabbits, you know, the lops in here. They bring this guy in and he is doing time for some punk-ass white-collar rip-off, and right away I figure this guy’s got no heart. He’s a mark. One afternoon, I go into his cell and I steal some law books he’s got. I wanted to make sure he’s not connected, you know, ’cause some of these rabbits got friends, maybe in the Mafia or maybe he’s a bookkeeper for one of the gangs, maybe his sister is married to the Godfather, who the fuck knows?

  I wait a week and nothing happens. No one’s put out word, you know, that the books better get returned or whoever took them is gonna get stuck. He obviously ain’t connected.

  Once I know this, I go up to him and I tell him, “Hey, man, I hear you lost some law books. I can get ’em back for three bills.” Now this shithead knows I stole his books. Nobody is that stupid. But instead of jamming me right there, he just says, “I don’t want no trouble, just leave me alone.”

  I mean, c’mon, a righteous motherfucker would have stuck me, ’cause he’s gonna know that if he lets me take his law books, I’m coming back for his ass next. I’m no fool.

  A few days later, I go up to this dude and tell ’im we are forming a partnership. He’s gonna do my laundry for me and buy me whatever I want from the commissary and that’s just how it’s gonna be. If he’s good, then I won’t push too hard. But if he bucks, I’m gonna ride ’im. And you know what, I don’t feel bad at all, ’cause this guy really wants to be a victim. I mean that. Otherwise he’d fight back.

  You see, that’s how it is with rabbits. You ever wonder what they are good for or why God made them? They’re food.

  Chapter 17

  ROBERT MATTHEWS

  Elke Shoats wanted her husband remembered. After his funeral she asked Warden Matthews if he would erect a memorial to Shoats at the prison. Matthews agreed at once. “Shoats was an excellent and outstanding lieutenant. His death is a big loss,” he said. Later, after more details about Shoats’s private life surfaced, Matthews adopted a “no comment” policy toward his former lieutenant.

  When the Hot House guards learned Matthews was having inmates make a display case for some of Shoats’s personal effects, they were furious. “We have had officers killed in the line of duty right here inside this penitentiary and the bureau has never done anything for them,” the employee-union president griped. “And now the bureau is putting up a memorial for this guy who is killed by his own kids, kids he abused. Why, you bet we’re angry!”

  Rumors swept through the prison. Some claimed the bureau had known for years that Shoats beat his children. Others accused Matthews of honoring Shoats simply because both were black. Such gossip was untrue and unfair, but it didn’t matter. The guards at the Hot House were furious. Shoats had embarrassed them. If there was one accusation that every guard hated, it was the age-old bugaboo that a guard really wasn’t much different from an inmate. Former Bureau Director Norman Carlson had spent years trying to change the public’s perception of guards as sadistic knuckle-draggers. Carlson had stressed professionalism, required intensive training, and fired guards suspected of brutality. It was Carlson who abandoned the bureau’s police-style uniforms, replacing them with gray slacks, white shirts, red ties, and black blazers—the sort of look that a junior executive might adopt.

  Suddenly Shoats’s death seemed to cancel all that. Everyone was talking about the Hot House lieutenant whose kids had killed him. Of course, the worst razzing came from inmates.

  Hey, I may be a thief but I don’t beat my kids!

  Now the new warden was compounding the problem. He was going to set up a memorial to Shoats, a daily reminder that every guard would see. But despite the complaints, Matthews would not change his mind. A special wooden case, for Shoats’s cap, some of his papers, and the flag that had draped his coffin, was placed in the second-floor hallway of the administration building. A few days later, several employees shoved the case into a corner of an office where it was left to gather dust.

  Matthews’s decision to memorialize Shoats had strained his relations with the guard force. Rather than move to heal the wound, the new warden cut deeper. He continued to push his two priorities: better communication between staff and inmates, and improved sanitation. As Matthews stood in the dining room listening to inmates complain, a guard remarked, “Look at that fool listening to those crybabies.” Later, when Matthews walked through A cellhouse and told guards there that he wanted several scuff marks removed from the floor, another guard grumbled, “He wants us to be maids, not officers.”

  Complaining about the warden became a normal pastime at Benny’s after work, just like flirting with the blonde barmaid. The problem with Matthews, most agreed, was that he was nothing like his predecessor. Warden Jerry O’Brien had spent five years running the Hot House before he retired, and O’Brien had been popular. Within the bureau, he had been considered the last of the great dinosaur wardens, those hard, no-nonsense, bear-shaped wardens who had worked their way up from the guard force.

  “He would bulldoze right over you if you didn’t stand up for yourself,” Associate Warden Richard Smith recalled, “but once you showed some backbone, you were okay. The staff called it becoming ‘O’Brienized.’ ”

  O’Brien had worked nearly every job there was in a prison, joining the bure
au directly out of high school and gradually climbing the ladder to Washington headquarters, where he had served as Carlson’s top trouble-shooter. Whenever there were allegations of staff corruption or brutality, it was O’Brien who was sent to investigate. Whenever there was a riot, O’Brien was sent to clean up the mess. Being named warden of Leavenworth was O’Brien’s payoff for fifteen years of dedicated service, and to him, there was no better job.

  Guards at Leavenworth could watch O’Brien stroll through the rotunda and identify with him. O’Brien knew what it was like to wrestle an inmate to the floor. And his philosophy was similar to that of most guards: The Hot House didn’t exist to rehabilitate inmates. Its purpose was “to keep the bastards locked up.”

  Guards had a tough time identifying with Matthews. He had never been a guard, had never wrestled down any inmates. Matthews had joined the bureau as a caseworker who helped prisoners with their family and legal problems, in guard parlance a “weak sister.” He not only had been to college, but also had finished graduate school. Worst of all, he called inmates “our customers”!

  The Hot House had never had a warden quite like him.

  The fact that Matthews had never worked as a guard was significant at the Hot House, because guards held a special status not only inside the prison, but also in the community. It was the guards who made the prison function, and in the town of Leavenworth, federal guards were accorded the sort of respect common to lawyers and doctors. This had to do with the makeup and history of the community. Before there was even a state of Kansas, there was a prison in Leavenworth: the Oklahoma Territorial Jail, built just south of town. Wild West desperadoes from the Kansas-Oklahoma Indian Territories who were not gunned down at high noon or lynched were brought to the jail by frontier marshals. When Kansas was admitted to statehood in 1861, the territorial jail became the foundation for the Kansas State Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison that today holds nearly two thousand men. In 1874, Leavenworth got its second prison, another maximum-security penitentiary, this one at the army’s Fort Leavenworth, north of the town. Today it holds 1,400 inmates, and is the only military prison in the nation. The Hot House, built between the fort and the town, was the community’s third prison. It was followed in 1915 by yet another state penitentiary originally built for women. On any given day, some six thousand convicts are housed in the Leavenworth area.

  Because prisons dominate the region’s economy (the Hot House alone generates $15 million per year through purchases and staff salaries), it isn’t uncommon for local boys to work as guards directly out of high school. Many of these youngsters plan never to leave Leavenworth, and this has created a hardship for them when they are hired at the Hot House. The bureau believes in transferring guards whenever they start getting promotions. That way they don’t have to supervise their former buddies, and the bureau has an easier time rotating employees in and out of unpopular outposts. But while this seems like good management, it has created a tier system at the Hot House that has badly divided the staff.

  The guards who don’t want to leave town are forced to turn down promotions and remain on the bottom level of the payroll regardless of their years of experience. Guards who are willing to move every two years are regarded as transients, without ties to the Leavenworth community. This was also true of wardens. Warden Matthews was a transient and so were his associate wardens, and while no one would suggest that Matthews wasn’t in charge, everyone knew that wardens came and went. It was the grunt guard force that gave the Hot House its continuity and personality. These were the men who lived in the community, who shared the prison’s history, who grew old along with its convicts. These were the legend-keepers.

  When you asked one of the veteran grunts about leadership in the Hot House, he would mention the names of Ralph Seever and John Drew, two Hot House lieutenants who still resided in Leavenworth and were idolized for their extraordinary skill at manipulating inmates. No one mentioned the twenty-three wardens who had passed through over the years. The same was true whenever guards got together at Benny’s. They swapped tales about Fat Jack, a four-hundred-pound guard who called everyone “shitbird” and used to butt convicts up against the wall with his huge belly. They recalled the practical joker who, in 1973, when inmates were routinely referring to guards as pigs, wore a pig mask to work and passed by each cell oinking rather than calling out numbers during the four o’clock count. They remembered the time when lightning struck the prison power plant and the guards circled the Hot House with their cars and illuminated the walls with their headlights to prevent escapes.

  The split between the grunts and transients had prompted a saying: “There are two ways to do every job—the bureau way and the Leavenworth way.” Bureau Director Quinlan had worked at Leavenworth earlier in his career and he was familiar with the lasting power of “the Leavenworth way.”

  “We spend thousands of dollars each year sending each new employee to our training center in Glynco,” Quinlan explained, “but when a correctional officer returns home, the first thing that happens is a lieutenant tells him, ‘Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but I’ll teach you what you really need to know.’ ”

  Even O’Brien had run into trouble with the grunts when he was warden. O’Brien was the creator of the bureau’s first SORT team, the squad specially trained in handling emergencies. “I outfitted them with their own helmets, vests, holsters, and even their own guns, and gave them special training. They were the best of the best,” he recalled. “I was very, very proud of SORT and then it became a monster.” Associate Warden Smith remembered that guards assigned to SORT “got to thinking that they didn’t need us. The warden and the rest of us in management would be gone in a few years, but they were the real core of Leavenworth.”

  O’Brien began hearing rumors. If trouble broke out, the SORT team would handle it “the Leavenworth way” regardless of what O’Brien said. Finally, when a SORT member got into a fistfight in a bar after making several racial slurs, O’Brien disbanded the entire team. A year later, he formed a new SORT squad, but this time he put it under much tighter rein.

  “At Leavenworth, either you are going to control the staff or they are going to take control,” said Smith. “That’s just how things are.”

  The institution that Warden Matthews inherited from O’Brien was a much different place from the one O’Brien had found when he arrived in 1982. Back then the Hot House was averaging three stabbings per month, three murders per year. “Inmates at Leavenworth didn’t believe in fistfights,” O’Brien recalled. “Their response to every problem was to pull out a knife.” O’Brien took all metal grinders out of the inmate hobbycraft area, where they were being used to make knives. Overnight, he replaced all the stainless-steel flatware in the inmate dining room with plastic knives, forks, and spoons. “The Aryan Brotherhood tried to buck me by breaking all the plastic utensils after every meal,” he recalled. “They figured it would cost so much to replace them that I’d be forced to go back to stainless steel. They were wrong.”

  O’Brien installed metal detectors, like the kind used in airports, in the east prison yard and required inmates to walk through them when going to and from work in the prison factories where most of the weapons were made. He distributed hand-held metal detectors and ordered guards to frisk inmates at random.

  The number of stabbings began dropping dramatically and, for the first time in recent memory, Leavenworth went for one complete year without a murder.

  Under O’Brien, security was always the number-one priority, and the Hot House soon led the bureau in developing and implementing various safeguards. It was the first federal penitentiary to develop a sophisticated telephone monitoring system to track inmate calls, the first to string steel wire across the yard to prevent helicopters from landing, the first to do mass urine testing of inmates to detect illegal drug use.

  O’Brien began each morning by going directly to the lieutenant’s office to confer with the lieutenants about the day’s activities.
Employees from other areas of the prison, such as recreation, education, religious, and psychological programs, were jealous. O’Brien didn’t care. He had seen the bureau introduce dozens of rehabilitative programs and, as far as he was concerned, none had worked. “The only real thing that rehabilitates a convict in Leavenworth,” O’Brien said, “is old age. When they get so old they can’t run out of a bank, they retire.”

  Just before O’Brien stepped down as warden, he had outraged other wardens and proved himself just as independent as many of the Leavenworth grunts who worked for him. For years, convicts had been allowed to receive cookies and clothing from their families and friends at Christmastime, but in 1986 the warden at the Lewisburg penitentiary in Pennsylvania claimed that the gifts were a threat to security. Cookies could be laced with illegal drugs, pieces of hacksaw blades might be concealed in clothing. Examining each Christmas gift would waste time and result in higher overtime pay. The argument made sense at bureau headquarters, but O’Brien would have none of it. “We have used an X-ray machine to check Christmas packages for years here in Leavenworth,” O’Brien argued, “and we have never found any contraband nor spent a penny on staff overtime.” O’Brien claimed the presents were important to maintaining good inmate morale, particularly in the Hot House, where convicts were serving long sentences. “Getting a sack of hard candy might not mean much to most people, but I’d seen these inmates’ eyes when their kids sent one,” he said, “and it meant a lot to them.”

  Because of O’Brien’s resistance, the bureau decided to allow each warden to choose for himself whether or not his institution would accept packages, and the computer that links federal prisons soon was pouring forth bulletins as wardens announced their decisions. “Day after day, we were getting these messages over the computer that said no one was allowing Christmas packages anymore and it really irritated me,” O’Brien recalled. He sat down and sent out his own response. “Leavenworth will accept all packages,” he wrote, adding, “At Leavenworth, we still celebrate Christmas and have the Christmas spirit!” It was that last sentence that irked other wardens, particularly the one at Lewisburg. The regional director ordered O’Brien to apologize. “I never did,” he recalled. “I figured the hell with it.”