The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  Maybe six years later, I’m doing some running around and howdy-doody, I get my butt busted in some fucking tiny town in Arizona and these hicks put me in a cell with this kid, probably seventeen or so, and you know what I did? I fucked him. I beat the shit out of him first and then I rolled him over and I fucked his ass.

  And you know what, when I was doing it, I thought about how I’d been fucked, I sure did. I kept thinking about how it felt to be fucked in the ass, how much I had hated it, how humiliated I’d been.

  You see, I finally understood why those motherfuckers fucked me when I was just a kid.

  It really didn’t have nothing to do with sex. It had to do with power. All my life, people been fucking me, and when I was fucking that kid, I hated what I was doing, but I loved it too, because it was me on top and there wasn’t one fucking thing he could do to stop me. Nothing. I was in charge, complete control.

  I could have done whatever the fuck I wanted to him and it is a fucking amazing feeling when you feel that way.

  Chapter 54

  THOMAS SILVERSTEIN

  In the basement of the Hot House, Thomas Silverstein resumed filing BP-9, BP-10, and BP-11 complaints with the bureau. He asked for permission to exercise outdoors where he could “breathe fresh air,” to be moved to a cell where he could see, hear, and speak with other convicts, to have the lights in his cell turned off or at least dimmed at night when he slept. He complained because he was required to take a urine test each month to determine whether he was using illegal drugs. It was an unnecessary precaution, he argued, “since I’m in total solitary confinement and have no contact with other prisoners or visitors.”

  Every request that Silverstein made was rejected by Warden Matthews, who always gave the same rationale. In order to “maintain security … your request is denied.”

  Once a month, Silverstein was permitted to place a ten-minute collect telephone call. In the spring of 1989, he asked for permission to telephone a woman friend in London, England. She had promised to pay for the call. Warden Matthews denied the request for “security reasons.” Silverstein appealed to the regional director, but this request was also denied. In his final plea to bureau headquarters, Silverstein argued that an overseas call was no more threatening to security than the long-distance call that he was permitted to make. “If she were in New York or California, you would let me call,” he wrote. But Assistant Director K. M. Hawk again rejected Silverstein’s request. Hawk didn’t cite security as a reason: rather she wrote that overseas calls required too much “staff time and supervision.” Silverstein was flabbergasted. “I realize the bureau isn’t known for hiring brain surgeons, but can someone please tell me why it takes more staff to dial a number in England than it does to dial a number in California?” he asked.

  Undeterred, his English pen pal announced that she was coming to the United States for a vacation and wanted to visit Silverstein. He filed an immediate request for permission to see her, but Matthews rejected it. “Our visiting policy requires that inmates have an established relationship with prospective visitors prior to their incarceration,” Matthews wrote. “Your request does not meet this requirement.”

  Based on the bureau’s rules, Silverstein could not visit with anyone he met after 1977, when he was first brought to the Hot House.

  At about this same time, Matthews told Silverstein that he would not be allowed to enter any paintings in the Leavenworth Art Fair, the one time each year when inmates are allowed to sell their art (at bureau-set prices) to the public. Matthews said he didn’t want Silverstein profiting from the notoriety that he received by killing Officer Merle Clutts. “People will buy a picture just because he painted it,” Matthews said, “just because it says Silverstein on it, and that isn’t right.”

  Silverstein stopped talking. He ignored Matthews, Connor, and the guards. On June 20, 1989, Matthews noted Silverstein’s muteness in a monthly report to the regional office.

  When Silverstein was denied [permission to submit paintings to the art show] he became visibly upset and stopped all conversation with the staff.… He turned his television on, began pacing his cell and avoided all eye contact. Other staff have noted similar behavior recently when he is in a situation where he does not get his way. In the past, when he was placed in a conflict situation, he would intellectualize the issues and attempt to persuade and articulate his position. He has also requested a tape recorder to listen to motivational tapes. This request was also denied and his response was to ignore the person delivering the information.… We will keep you informed of any changes.

  I was not at Leavenworth when Silverstein started his silence strike, but he wrote me about it:

  My keepers look and sound human but deep down their actions are totally alien to me. They refuse me a visit with someone I care about because of “security” but Matthews brings tours through here—U.S. attorneys, judges, other BOPers—to see the big bad Silverstein in his cage. These places are just a giant monkey cage where people come to gloat and laugh at the misery of others.

  By June of 1989, Silverstein had been under “no human contact” status for nearly six years. It was beginning to take its toll. He was easily depressed. “Most prisoners look forward to the day when they’ll be set free,” Silverstein explained. “All I can hope for or have left to hope for is that I can hold on to my sanity through it all. This is a nightmare, and it is strange having a nightmare when you’re not even asleep, sitting in your very own personalized coffin, watching yourself rot away, day by day, minute by minute, wondering which part of yourself is first to decay. Is it your mind or your body or your soul or do they all die away simultaneously, until one day you look in the mirror and see tombstones in your eyes?”

  He hated Matthews, Connor, and the guards now more than ever. “They want me to go crazy. They want to point their fingers at me and say, ‘See, see, we told you he is a lunatic.’ No one outside prison really understands how sick these people are. It is easier to assume that we deserve what we get. It’s easier to believe we are all a bunch of animals, because if people on the streets began seeing us as people, they wouldn’t allow the bureau to do what they are doing here.

  “I didn’t come in here a killer, but in here you learn hate. The insanity in here is cultivated by the guards. They feed the beast that lingers within all of us—just like Matthews and Connor are doing now by denying me even the most simple of requests—a telephone call, a visit, the joy of selling a painting.

  “Sometimes, the thought of killing someone brings a smile to my face. It gets real sick when you start to look upon someone else’s death as happiness, but I am not alone. How many guards in here have told you that they want to see me dead, and how did they react when they thought I was going to fly over the wall in Atlanta on a hang glider? They wanted to shoot me. They wanted to kill me.

  “I find myself smiling at the thought of me killing Clutts each time they deny me a phone call, a visit, or keep the lights on. I find it harder and harder to repent and ask for forgiveness, because deep inside I can feel that hatred and anger growing.”

  Silverstein captured his feelings on paper. On an ordinary writing tablet, he had started to write a letter, but instead the black ink pen in his hand seemed to move by itself, rapidly sketching its own design. At the bottom of the page was a prisoner, naked, humbled behind bars, and rising out of the prisoner like a phoenix was a vicious, scowling, wild-eyed monster with his hand thrust forward from the cell, more a claw than fingers, reaching out to kill. When he finished the drawing, Silverstein wrote in block letters on the page: “SITTING, SILENTLY, THINKING AND SCREAMING FOR FREEDOM FROM THIS CONSTANT INSANITY AND ENDLESS SOLITARY CONFINEMENT.”

  He had considered suicide, he said. “Some days, particularly when I’m blue, I think it would be the best way out of this nightmare. I don’t always know why I did what I did, but the pain is there, and in those dark moments, the peace of death is inviting.” He would not kill himself, however, because “that’s what
the BOPers want,” and because if he did, his death would send other convicts a signal that “fighting back is useless.”

  In early July, Silverstein was told that he was going to be moved out of the basement into new quarters designed specifically for him. The bureau had built a new 120-bed special-housing unit in the east prison yard and one end of it contained a special cell just for Silverstein. When it was time for him to be transferred, a group of burly guards gathered outside his cell. Silverstein was ordered to strip, to bend over and spread his buttocks, to open his mouth and stick out his tongue. Convinced he wasn’t hiding any weapons, the guards gave him a new set of clothing and ordered him to turn around and stick his hands through a letter-size window in the cell door. They put two pairs of handcuffs on him and then ordered him to move his legs close to the bars so that they could reach through and put two sets of leg irons on his ankles. Once that was completed, they opened the cell door, rushed in, and grabbed him. He didn’t resist and was led upstairs to a waiting wheelchair. He was chained into it so he could no longer move his arms or feet, and then pushed through the rotunda and down center hall. It was after ten P.M., SO all of the inmates were locked up for the night. At the end of center hall, he was pushed outside. It was the first time that Silverstein had been outdoors since the Cuban riots seventeen months earlier. He stared up at the black Kansas sky and wet his lips as if to taste the night’s warm summer breeze. A few minutes later, he was in his new “home,” which the guards called “the Silverstein suite.” The lights were on. They would never be turned off. The bureau had decided that it cost too much to equip the cell with cameras that could see in the dark. “I’m not certain having the lights on all the time really bothers him,” said Connor. “I think after six years he’s used to it.”

  A month later, Silverstein wrote me this letter:

  I am worried that my complaints will make it sound as if I am crying and sniveling. This is my cross to bear and as I sit here growing more frustrated by the minute, wondering what tomorrow will bring or next year or five years from now, I have to wonder what the fuck I have accomplished by talking to you. You see things in prison never change for the better. They only get worse by the minute when left unattended year after year after year until convicts finally explode and riot. The bottom line is—who the heck wants to listen to a crybaby? And for those who think I got what I deserve, my complaints just bring glee and laughs. To them this torture—messing with mail, denying visits—is sweet revenge. All I can say is fine and dandy, go ahead and gloat, but they should remember this about prisoners who go through this sick trip. Someday most of us finally get out of this hell and even a rational dog after getting kicked around year after year after year attacks when his cage door is finally opened.

  Chapter 55

  ROBERT MATTHEWS

  Warden Matthews couldn’t have been happier on the day he celebrated his two-year anniversary at Leavenworth, July 13, 1989. “The other day I was walking down the institution’s front steps and I was saying to myself, ‘Jeez, I love my job,’ ” Matthews said. “The sun was shining and I was smiling and it was just a beautiful day and I was really happy with my lot in life. Everything is going so well.”

  The regional office had just chosen a Leavenworth guard as the outstanding employee of the year, a much-coveted bureau honor. The prison’s SORT team had defeated its rival from Marion in a day-long competition that tested each team’s skill at rifle and pistol shooting, weight lifting, footraces, rappelling, and a tug-of-war. Warden Matthews had been given a special award by Director Quinlan for instituting a community liaison program that brought civic leaders into the penitentiary once every four months for a tour and lunch.

  Matthews was quick to recall other achievements. Lieutenant Bill Slack had arranged for Cubans to study English in small groups outside their cells and he’d put forty of them to work in prison industries. Eddie Geouge was doing well as the disciplinary-hearing officer. The penitentiary looked better than it ever had. It had been painted, repaired, two of its cellhouses had been remodeled, and construction crews were busy working on a third.

  But most important of all, Matthews felt that he had finally won the support of the guards. Each year during National Corrections Week, all the penitentiary employees were invited to pose with the warden on the front steps of the Hot House for a group photograph. The pictures were placed in the prison archives where albums that contained similar photos dating back to the year the prison opened were kept. Only a few dozen employees had shown up for the photo session during Matthews’s first year. But this time around the front steps had been crowded with close to three hundred employees. Nearly all of the staff at work during the day shift had posed with the warden. Matthews had been so delighted that he had hung copies of the photographs from both years in the warden’s office so that everyone could see the enormous difference.

  “I finally feel that the Bob Matthews administration is in place totally now,” he said. “I do not mean to take anything away from Jerry O’Brien, but I now feel that I am doing the work, that my system is in place, and that the staff is behind me one hundred percent. The transition is complete. This is now my institution.”

  But despite all that he had accomplished, there was one area where Matthews could not claim any improvement. There was absolutely no evidence that anything he had done as warden during the past two years had helped rehabilitate a single convict.

  This did not bother the warden at all. When he was a young caseworker just beginning his career at the penitentiary in Terre Haute, he had believed in rehabilitation. He had taken a personal interest in a young black bank robber from a Chicago ghetto who was the same age as he was. “He was a perfect inmate,” Matthews recalled. “He was polite, respectful, and really seemed anxious to want to improve himself.” Matthews helped the inmate earn his high school diploma and enroll in college courses. He spent hours talking to the inmate about his future and counseling him. “This inmate had been arrested robbing a bank with his older brothers,” Matthews said, “and I was convinced that he was pressured into the robbery by them.”

  Matthews was so certain that the inmate had been rehabilitated that when it came time for him to go before the parole board, he wrote an impassioned plea on the inmate’s behalf. The parole board voted to free the inmate, and over the next few years, Matthews often wondered what had happened to him. “I used to picture him teaching high school or college somewhere, raising a family, paying back his debt to society. If anyone was ever going to make it, he was.”

  And then one day ten years later, Matthews heard a voice call his name as he walked through a prison in Kentucky. It was the inmate. “He was in a wheelchair,” Matthews said. “He had been shot in the back shortly after he was paroled. He had been robbing a bank with his brothers. He was paralyzed from the waist down.”

  Matthews was quiet after telling the story, and then he said, “There is evil in this world and sometimes you can’t do anything to change that. You must accept it and deal with it. There are certain people who are just bad people, and these people are going to do bad things. That is why we need penitentiaries. That is why we need Leavenworth and that is why we will always have penitentiaries like Leavenworth.”

  It was later than usual when Warden Matthews finished his daily close-out session with his executive staff and left for home. As he walked from the warden’s office into the prison lobby, he could hear the muffled sounds of hundreds of inmates inside the great rotunda as they headed toward the dining hall for dinner. The officers in the control center nodded in respect as Matthews stood in front of the penitentiary’s steel front grille, waiting for it to open so he could leave. He hurried down the white limestone front steps guarded by two statues of growling lions. Jerry O’Brien had installed the lions. O’Brien thought they gave Leavenworth a certain regal atmosphere. He also hoped they would intimidate inmates when they first arrived. The guard in the tower yelled a cheery “Good night, sir!” to Matthews as he strolled a
cross the asphalt to his car, now shaded from the hot July sun by the trees that lined the circular drive. It had taken him two full years, but he had finally accomplished his goal.

  Robert Matthews was the master of the Hot House.

  Six months later, he was gone. Director Quinlan sent him to take charge of the penitentiary at Atlanta. On January 1, 1990, Matthews’s successor turned his car into the penitentiary’s drive, drove past the guard tower, and slipped into the parking spot marked WARDEN. Within minutes he was climbing the Hot House’s forty-three front steps.

  Author’s Note

  This book is a factual account of the activities inside the United States penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, between July 1987 and July 1989. The material is based on interviews, prison and court records, newspaper accounts of various crimes, and personal observations by the author. More than one hundred people were interviewed face-to-face for this book, including several whose names do not appear but whose comments proved helpful in describing prison life. A few names have been changed to protect persons from physical harm or prosecution, but the only major character who was given a pseudonym was Norman Bucklew. All other convicts whose stories are described at length chose to use their actual names.

  It would have been impossible to write this book without the cooperation of J. Michael Quinlan, director of the Bureau of Prisons. There is no constitutional guarantee that gives authors the right to enter prisons and interview inmates, yet Director Quinlan permitted me to come and go as I wished. There was never any attempt by guards to monitor my movements or conversations, and, to the best of my knowledge, no inmate or employee was ever coerced to speak to me or punished for doing so. I am grateful to Director Quinlan and to Warden Robert Matthews for their openness. I am also indebted to the employees and inmates at the Hot House who shared their stories with me.