On the other hand it is unlikely that the captains and lieutenants would respect a picket line anyway. Recently, in hearings for promotions to lieutenant, all five of the guard applicants said that if they were promoted to lieutenant they would feel that it would be their duty to come to work even across picket lines. During the January 1973 job action, several of the lieutenants stayed on the job. More recently, lieutenants have decided among themselves that they would stay out only if the job action were over something “damn important” and that, even in such an instance, they would be available for action if “lives were in danger inside.”
What will probably emerge is a series of bargaining units all within AFSCME. The captains and lieutenants may each have their own bargaining units as will the professional employees (the counselors), and the clerical employees. This may have the effect of further segmenting the different groups within the prison, although it should be pointed out that, to the degree that all employees feel some common tie to their umbrella organization AFSCME, there may be a trend away from segmentation.
The potentially most significant barrier to an effective union is the racial division among the employees. To date the blacks have not joined or participated in the union as enthusiastically as whites. Few blacks come to meetings although the present vice-president is a black guard from the Joliet Prison. Only last year the black warden of the Joliet Prison attempted to use the black guards as a counterweight to the old white guard clique that dominated the prison. He urged upon black guards the proposition that the union was racist and that there was no place in it for them. AFSCME has moved hard to establish its legitimacy as a nondiscriminatory union. However, on issues like Affirmative Action, the union and the blacks, or at least the black community, may have conflicting interests. The union is opposed to the Affirmative Action program, which sends recruitment trucks into the inner city to sign up minority guards. “They may as well ask Jeff Fort [leader of the Black P Stone Nation] to do the hiring for us.” The union is also opposed to hiring men with prior criminal records to work as guards. On the issue of promotions there are also racial interests at stake. Past discrimination notwithstanding, the union’s position is that promotion and assignment should come strictly with seniority.
Conclusion
Between 1970 and 1975 the guards emerged as an independent force within the Stateville organization. They were alienated from John Twomey and the reform regime which espoused an ethos of service for the inmate population. Initially the guards rallied around their traditional heroic leaders like Vernon Revis. Even up to the present, faint hope continues that the college-educated professionals will eventually turn the prison back to the traditional elite who know “how to run it.”
Alienation from the reform regime, coupled with growing fear for personal safety, spurred the growth of the union movement. The union brought the guards a voice in policy-making independent of position in the formal organization. With professional union organizers as allies, the Stateville guards became increasingly militant in their demands for greater security and a return to an authoritarian system.
Ties with the trade union movement began subtly to divide the guard subculture horizontally. Top-level guards and assistant wardens, despite their cultural affinity to many of the old-timers, were part of management. Professional union organizers and officials pressed upon the rank and file a redefinition of their work and spoke out against the military model and identification with heroic leaders. The union reinforced the demystification of the prison that was proceeding apace as the boundaries of the prison became more permeable.
The union movement articulates well with the Brierton restoration regime. The corporate model preferred some type of organization representing the rank and file. Brierton went even beyond the union in advocating better security and safety on the job. Likewise, as the union movement has become more mature, it has helped to break down the parochialism among the guards. It has also removed much of the affect from the job. Thus, the union supports the amelioration of living conditions for inmates (TV sets, recreation, school programs, etc.) as long as security needs are being met. The moral drama that once enveloped the prison may be evaporating. The union is turning its attention to raising the guard’s own standard of living and assuring him a high degree of job security. Thus far Brierton’s restoration regime should be able to count on support from the union.
The guard force has also been divided vertically along racial lines. The black guards are clearly more empathic to the inmates than are the white guards.23 The culture conflict within the organization between black and white staff members would appear to be a potentially threatening issue for the future. The very empathy of the black guards for the minority prisoners is potentially antithetical to Brierton’s view of the guard as a detached bureaucratic security specialist.
The division of the guards along racial lines also carries over to the union. The union cannot develop its strength without the support of the black rank-and-file guards. Yet there is a reluctance among the black guards to become active in a union that is associated with “the rednecks.” The very fact that the prison, the union, and the white guards are centered in Joliet while the black guards live in and are oriented toward Chicago further reinforces the racial division.
8
Overview: Restoration and Beyond
The position of all “democratic” currents, in the sense of currents that would minimize “authority,” is necessarily ambiguous. “Equality” before the law and the demand for legal guarantees against arbitrariness demand a formal and rational “objectivity” of administration, as opposed to the personally free discretion flowing from the “grace” of the old patrimonial domination. If, however, an “ethos”—not to speak of instincts—takes hold of the masses on some individual question, it postulates substantive justice oriented toward some concrete instance and person; and such an “ethos” will unavoidably collide with the formalism and the rule-bound and cool “matter of factness” of bureaucratic administration.
Max Weber, quoted in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, From Max Weber
Between 1925 and 1975 Stateville passed through four distinct stages: anarchy, charismatic dominance, drift, and crisis. Beginning in 1975 a fifth stage is discernible: a period of restoration, in which the reforms of the past decade, as well as the redefinition of the prisoner’s status, are integrated with aspects of authoritarian control. Before discussing the limits of this fifth stage it might be well to review the natural history of the prison.
Stateville Penitentiary was opened in 1925 as a reform era’s effort to ameliorate the overcrowded, physically dilapidated, and scandal-ridden Joliet prison. In addition to the construction of the prison, attention of Progressive Era reformers was directed toward several other aspects of prison reform. The Progressive Merit System was established in 1920. The position of sociologist-actuary was created upon the recommendations of the academically dominated Clabaugh commission in 1928. Another foot-hold for reformers in the prisons was the Office of the State Criminologist, which was established in 1917. But the sum of these efforts by Progressive Era reformers amounted to no more than segmental incursions into a system that was a tool of the state political organization.
Spoils politics penetrated the prison through both the staff and the inmates between 1925 and 1936. The warden and the bulk of the guard force owed their positions to political patronage. The existence of a staff without expertise in prison management or a career commitment to the job had fateful consequences for the prison’s social organization. Rules and discipline vacillated according to who was exercising authority. Between 1925 and 1932, Stateville experienced one of the most violent and unstable periods in its history. Between 1932 and 1936, the deepening Depression in the larger society was paralleled inside the prison by idleness, deterioration of discipline, and complete collapse of a daily regimen. Authority passed from the hands of the state officials into the hands of powerful inmate gang leaders. Politics also penetra
ted the inmate social system as is indicated in Leopold’s observation about the ties between the sizable number of Jewish inmates and one of Chicago’s powerful political clubs. Favoritism, lack of uniform standards and rules, and particularistic relationships all characterized the organization during this early period.
During this first decade (1925–36) the prison pursued no consistent organizational goals and developed no stable internal equilibrium. The prisoners were beyond the concern of society’s elite and out of touch with its central institutional and value systems.
The year 1936 was a watershed year in Stateville’s history. The convergence of an aroused press, a highly critical blue ribbon commission, and a reform governor led to Joe Ragen’s appointment as warden of the Stateville/Joliet complex. At the time Ragen’s appointment seemed unexceptional. Like his predecessors he was a political appointee and a former sheriff from downstate although he had also earned a good record in the several years that he had been warden of Menard.
Ragen’s authoritarian system of personal dominance was first of all rooted in his ability to control the relationships between the prison and the outside. Between 1936 and 1961 he created his own independent political base by cultivating the press, the law enforcement community, and individual legislators. At the same time it is likely that during and directly after World War II public attention was completely diverted from events within the state prisons. In addition, the full-employment economy during that period erased the importance of the prison as an instrument of political patronage.
Warden Ragen created a mystique about his own invincibility and omniscience. His daily inspection of the prison, accompanied only by his two dogs, symbolized his highly personalistic rule. He alone managed all contacts with the outside thereby reinforcing his personal power. From his staff he demanded absolute loyalty, identifying his own authority with the best interests of the prison. So great was his personal prestige, charisma, and resources that his system of dominance was not weakened by the forces of politicization and bureaucratization associated with the trend toward mass society in the decade after World War II.
Ragen exercised complete domination over the guard staff. His guards were exclusively recruited from Southern Illinois. They lacked any ties to the Chicago or Joliet communities, identifying totally with the prison and the warden who personified its values. In addition, Ragen expanded the barracks and constructed a trailer court, reinforcing the staff’s segregation from the surrounding community. The rigid and arbitrary discipline to which the guards were subjected generated high rates of turnover within the lower ranks. This diminished the probability that the line personnel would develop an effective counterforce. To the hand-picked elite who occupied top administrative posts, Ragen offered considerable fringe benefits: food allowance, state-owned homes, and inmate servants. Such “payment in kind” Weber considered a leading characteristic of the patrimonial regime.
The inmate social system during this period conforms to what has been described by scholars who studied other prison communities in the decades before and after World War II. Criminal identities imported from the street accounted for an inmate status system. Prison sentences were long and the inmate social system tended to remain stable. A viable reward system stimulated intense competition for the few luxuries that were attainable. Many of the natural leaders among the inmates were co-opted by good jobs and the legitimate and illegitimate opportunities which were attached.
Ragen’s rule was that of a totalitarian. He would not be defied even on insignificant rules. He persistently emphasized to his staff that stress upon the smallest details would prevent authority from ever being openly and collectively challenged. An inmate who challenged the system and called attention to himself as a “no good son of a bitch” would find himself on the coal pile for years, in isolation on a stringent diet, or salted away in segregation for an indefinite term. Ragen’s regime typified Weber’s description of pre-bureaucratic forms of administration: “All non-bureaucratic forms of domination display a peculiar co-existence: on the one hand, there is a sphere of strict traditionalism, and, on the other, a sphere of free arbitrariness and lordly grace.”1
Particularly in the later years of Ragen’s regime, the routine was systematized into a patriarchal system of administration based upon traditional authority. The latent charismatic content of the system only became explicit at infrequent moments of crisis. With Ragen’s departure for Springfield, however, the charismatic aspect of the regime was greatly attenuated. Warden Pate’s administration drifted into a collegial rule. Between 1961 and 1970 this system showed signs of extreme strain under pressures emanating from the outside.
The civil rights movement of the early 1960s served to politicize the prison’s minority population which emerged as a solid majority by 1960. The trend toward mass society redefined the status and value of marginal groups in the polity. The demand by prisoners for fuller participation in the core culture was reinforced by the greater sensitivity of the elites to the moral worth of marginal citizens.
It was the Black Muslims who first gave expression to the heightened aspirations and expectations of the black inmates. Alone among political and religious movements in the 1960s, the Muslims defined the prison as a legitimate arena for organizing a constituency. Later, political radicals, some of whom were themselves prisoners, also attempted to transform prisoners from a group in itself to a group for itself.
The Muslims carried out collective activities which challenged the authority of the patriarchal system. The Pate administration characteristically responded to the Muslims by adopting a policy of massive resistance. Every demand of the Muslims was rejected; their leaders were thrown in segregation. The system could not tolerate any challenge to its basis of control. If it were successfully challenged at any point, authority would be fatally undermined. In order to maintain the integrity of its authority the Pate administration had no other choice than to repress the Muslims, but by doing so it made inevitable the complete collapse of authority after 1970.
The Muslims could not have sustained their challenge to the prison administration without the dramatic turn around in the orientation of the juridical system. Once again the momentum of mass society was fateful. A wide-scale legal reform movement, beginning with the leadership of the Warren Court, extended substantive and procedural rights to the indigent, the illegitimate, minors, students, servicemen, and criminal defendants. A late aspect of this extension of the rights of citizenship to marginal groups was the abandonment of the “hands off” doctrine and the recognition that prisoners were not “slaves of the state.” The limited but symbolic successes of the Muslims before the courts seemed to the prison authorities a total repudiation by the central institutional system of the larger society.
Law reform also penetrated the prison through the new penal code, which expedited parole eligibility. Indirectly this reform had a powerful impact upon the social organization. By greatly increasing inmate turnover it had the effect of destabilizing the old con power structure which had subserved the authority of the system for decades and which was already undermined by rising inmate expectations and a shift from an individual to a group perspective on serving time. By 1970 the forces of bureaucratization, politicization and the penetration of juridical norms had undermined the traditional system of authority to the extent that control itself had become problematic. In the fall of 1970, Warden Pate resigned.
Between 1970 and 1975 the Stateville leadership struggled to regain its balance. The prison’s boundaries had become permeable to the outside. Local control had been lost to centralized authority and the universalistic rule of law. The new emphasis on bureaucratization prescribed professional standards of preparation for a new administrative elite. Sharp conflict developed within the staff; the morale of the rank and file deteriorated. Given the weakened condition of organizational authority, politicized Chicago supergangs were able to penetrate the prison and broaden their organizational structures and prestig
e. Internally, the prison experienced a crisis in control that lasted until 1975.
In Springfield a young, Yale-educated businessman became the first director of corrections in 1970. Eager to align himself with the liberal wing of American corrections, he imposed many reforms upon Stateville designed to “humanize” conditions and to extend “dignity” and “respect” to the “residents.” A Unified Code of Corrections and comprehensive Administrative Regulations limited administrative discretion at the local level. The director sought the advice of reformers and academic specialists and opened the prison to representatives of minority groups.
The new Department of Corrections was far more centralized than its predecessor, the Department of Public Safety. The authority to formulate prison policy passed out of the hands of the local wardens and was exercised by a powerful, active central office in Springfield. The prison was no longer an autonomous institution.
At Stateville, Warden Pate’s two immediate successors were well-educated professionals who adhered to the rehabilitative ideal and the human relations model of management. In place of the authoritarian system they attempted to establish a regime based upon consensual authority. Captains and lieutenants were urged to counsel both rank-and-file guards and inmates before resorting to formal disciplinary mechanisms. Problems in the organization were attributed to problems in communication.
The first two reform regimes failed to establish a viable equilibrium. Inmate expectations increased far more rapidly than did material benefits or the amelioration of unsatisfactory living conditions. The reformers stressed a philosophical reinterpretation of the moral implications of imprisonment at the same time that concrete physical conditions were rapidly deteriorating. Indeed, increased organizational dysfunction meant fewer showers, worse food, dirtier cells, and less regular visiting procedures. The reform regime presided over a shrinking number of programmatic opportunities but, at the same time, encouraged inmate expectations.
Stateville- the Penitentiary in Mass Society Page 25
