The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (20 page)

The Cuban was dressed in badly wrinkled, filthy khaki trousers and a worn pair of blue nylon socks. His kinky hair was dirty. His face was unshaven. His chest was a canvas of tattoos. A haloed Madonna rose from his flabby belly, a red-tongued serpent wrapped around
a naked woman with huge breasts and yellow hair decorated one arm, a dagger stabbed into a human skull adorned the other. The Cuban looked spent, as if his life had been sucked out from inside him, leaving only a limp torso behind.

As the oxygen slowly took effect, he began to moan through the mask. More than a dozen guards had answered the alarm. Now they began to disperse. The medic said, “I got a pretty strong pulse. He’s going to make it.”

“What happened?” asked Smith.

“He’s a porcelain termite,” said Lieutenant Myhand, who was in charge. “He’s destroyed the sinks and toilets in two cells since he’s been here, but this is the first time he’s started his cell on fire.”

Myhand explained that the Cuban had placed his mattress against the front bars of his cell and put a match to the bedsheets. Each cell has a vent at the back that pulls air through from the tier. When the Cuban set fire to the sheets the current fed the flames, causing them to erupt like needles from a dried Christmas tree.

Streeter lifted the prisoner at the waist and slipped a thin steel chain around him. He snapped on handcuffs and connected them to the chain, making it impossible for the Cuban to raise his hands more than five inches from his stomach. Then the guards lifted him onto a wire gurney so he could be transported to the prison hospital. Smith and Myhand followed.

“What’s his story?” Smith asked.

“He’s in love,” Myhand replied. “He and his cellmate are homosexuals and had a fight, so we moved the cellmate. Now he wants him back.”

In an examining room, a prison doctor flashed a tiny light in the inmate’s pupils, removed one of his socks, and began tapping his foot. Even the right ankle had a tattoo. The Cuban yelled something in Spanish.

“He says he will kill himself unless you move his
friend back into his cell,” said one of the guards, a Hispanic.

There was another yell.

“He says he hates all guards. He says he will kill a guard if you don’t move his friend back.”

More yells.

“He says he started the fire and will keep starting fires until we move his friend back.”

“Tell him we are going to take an X ray,” the doctor said. “Tell him not to move.”

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.

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 bureau 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.