The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  The guards at Leavenworth loved O’Brien’s independence. His attitude, they said, was summed up on a plaque that he kept hanging behind his desk in the warden’s office. It said: “When rules and regulations are in conflict with common sense, common sense will prevail.”

  Robert Matthews took down that plaque when he took charge of the Hot House and put up one of his own. It was entitled Loyalty. “When you work for a man, don’t complain behind his back …” it read.

  Under Matthews, Leavenworth stopped accepting Christmas packages for inmates. “I believe,” Matthews explained, “in being conservative and following a strict chain of command. If the central office tells me to do something, we will do it—immediately.”

  Matthews did not give the guards preferential treatment as O’Brien had, nor did he begin his days by visiting the lieutenant’s office. Adjusting to Matthews’s style was difficult for many at the Hot House, particularly the associate wardens who had worked closely with O’Brien. The new warden had inherited all of O’Brien’s top staff, except for one associate warden, Lee Connor, who had arrived at the prison on the same day as Matthews.

  Soon stories about communication problems between Matthews and his inherited managers began to circulate. An incident involving manhole covers in the prison yard was typical. Matthews told his executives that he wanted the metal drain-covers painted. The next morning, he was shocked to find that the covers were all a gaudy bright green. Matthews said he wanted a less jarring color. The next day, he found that the covers had been painted fire-engine red. Once again Matthews complained, and the covers were painted again, this time stoplight yellow, the color of a child’s rain slicker. Matthews gave up.

  In the spring of 1988, the central office in Washington announced that all four of O’Brien’s associate wardens were being transferred from the Hot House. Associate Warden Richard Smith was the only one being promoted. The other three were being shifted to what were perceived to be less glamorous jobs.

  No one at the Hot House missed the significance of the transfers. In one swift move, all of O’Brien’s men were gone. Like it or not, the prison had a new boss, and he was going to run things his way.

  Chapter 18

  CARL BOWLES

  Carl Bowles hadn’t paid much attention to the staff changes that Warden Matthews was making. Besides trying to help Thomas Little get documents that would prove he didn’t belong in the Hot House, Bowles was busy with his prison job.

  It was Associate Warden Richard Smith who had hired Bowles to look after a patch of grass outside the hospital about the size of a tennis court. Smith had known Bowles nearly twenty years and he had created the groundskeeping job just for him. “You got to treat someone who has been down as long as Carl differently from some kid fresh in from the streets,” Smith explained. It was not just kindness that moved Smith to pay Bowles $50 per month from a special discretionary account in his office. Smith wanted the troublesome Bowles somewhere out in the open where he could be easily watched.

  Much to Smith’s delight, Bowles had always taken the job seriously. He was constantly pulling weeds and planting flowers. Bowles nursed his tulips and morning glories with such care that guards began calling the triple murderer a “flower child.” Smith was so pleased that he allowed Bowles to plant a small garden in one corner of the lot just for himself. He also arranged for Little to work with Bowles.

  A few weeks before Smith was scheduled to leave Leavenworth to take up his promotion, Bowles stopped him and Warden Matthews as they walked past the hospital. He needed wood chips for his flower beds, Bowles explained, and he needed them immediately.

  Later that day Matthews mentioned Bowles’s request during his daily afternoon meeting with his executive staff.

  “Bowles is beginning to act like he’s one of us,” Matthews said good-naturedly. “The way he fusses about how the flowers look—we’re going to have to start calling him Lieutenant Bowles.”

  Everyone in the room chuckled, but there was one associate warden who found the remark troubling. Lee Connor didn’t like Carl Bowles and didn’t think he should be getting special treatment. Nor did Connor get along well with Richard Smith. As soon as Smith left Leavenworth, Connor became the new associate warden for custody, and one of the first things that he did was visit the east yard where Bowles and Thomas Little were tending flowers.

  “What is it?” Bowles asked, when he saw Connor approaching.

  “I’m not happy,” Connor replied coolly. “I’ll send someone around to tell you about it.” Lieutenant Tracy Johns appeared an hour later.

  “The garden has to go,” Johns said bluntly.

  “What?” Bowles replied, but Johns simply shrugged. It was an order from Connor. “No more personal gardens. Period,” Johns said.

  Bowles and Little began ripping out the seedlings, tossing them into a trash container.

  Four days later, Connor again strolled into the east yard to make certain the garden was gone. Bowles and Little scowled at him as they leaned against a wall of the hospital smoking cigarettes. An hour later, Lieutenant Johns appeared with another order from Connor.

  “You both have been fired,” said Johns.

  Carl Bowles’s face was blood-red as he stormed back to his cell. Before Bowles was notified of his firing a lieutenant had told me what was going on, and I was waiting near Bowles’s cell when he and Little came up the tier. “The man didn’t have the decency to fire me himself!” Bowles said, his voice filled with hatred. “I know what he’s doing, he’s pissing on me ’cause he and Dick Smith didn’t get along.”

  Little scrambled to fix Bowles a Coca-Cola. He hurried down the tier to get ice, poured Bowles his drink, and climbed up onto the top bunk where he sat silently as Bowles continued to complain.

  “I’m forty-seven years old,” said Bowles, “and during all of my life, Dick Smith is the first person who ever gave me anything to be responsible for. Look around. The guards tell me when to eat, when to sleep, even when I can take a shit. What have I got to be responsible for in here? Not a damn thing. Do you know I’ve never lost a tool out there? In three years, I’ve never taken advantage of the trust that Dick Smith showed me. I worked my ass off ’cause I wanted to show that I could be responsible. Good old Carl Bowles, that worthless piece of shit, could actually be responsible. And what did all that hard work mean to these people? Nothing. Connor just blows in and fires me.”

  At that point, Bowles wanted a cigarette. Little hopped off the bunk. “I’ll get ’em, Carl,” he volunteered.

  “I took human life and that was a bad thing, a terrible thing,” Bowles said as he inhaled, somewhat calmer, “but I have spent twenty-three fucking years of my life in prison. Doesn’t that count for something? Is there some redeemable value to me? If not, then what the fuck is the point of all this?

  “If all of this is meaningless, then why not take me out to the city dump, hit me in the head with a hammer, and leave me there with the garbage? You could have done that, but, you see, society didn’t. ‘Oh my,’ society said, ‘all life is precious. Why, even Carl Bowles’s life is worth rehabilitating.’ So society put me in here under a ‘correctional officer’ who I assume is supposed to correct my behavior.”

  Little laughed. Bowles shot him an angry look. Little stopped chuckling.

  “I’m the asshole in here, right?” Bowles continued. “You put me in this madhouse for twenty-three fucking years. You put me in here with a bunch of fools who are more demented than I am and then you send in even bigger fools to guard us. Every day I have to deal with society’s scum. Every day I have to deal with guards who are complete idiots. There is a guard working right now on this tier who comes in here every day pissed off because his old lady is fucking some other guy. That’s not my fault. I ain’t fucking his old lady. But I have to deal with his anger. I have to adjust for his moods. I got no choice. Yet you expect me to respect this guy ’cause he’s a ‘correctional officer.’ Bullshit!

  “And then one da
y Dick Smith shows up and he is a halfway reasonable and intelligent man and he says, ‘Carl, I want you to take care of these flowers. Keep it pretty.’ It’s not much. Listen, I know it’s just a fucking flower bed, but it’s my fucking flower bed! He gives me something to be responsible for, something I can do to prove that, yes, I may be a no-good motherfucker, but at least I can take care of flowers.

  “And I don’t care, quite frankly, if the fucking director of the Bureau of Prisons walks down here and says, ‘Bowles, I took your flowers because I’m the director and I don’t think we need flowers anymore.’ I’d say, ‘Well, there is no doubt in my mind that you can do that and you have done it, but it don’t mean a fucking thing to me, not in my heart, because you can’t make it right.’ ”

  Bowles stopped talking. For several minutes we sat in silence. All you could hear were the noises outside the cell. An inmate shouted down the tier. “Hey, man, check that dryer. See if my laundry’s done.”

  “Fuck you, man, check it yourself, think I’m your fucking maid?” came the reply.

  Another inmate walked past reading a letter he had just received. Someone opened the door to the television room and for a few seconds the screams of Bon Jovi escaped from MTV.

  Everywhere else, life inside the prison was going on as normal, but inside this cell time had stopped. Little looked down from his bunk at Bowles, but the older convict didn’t respond. He sat on a metal chair in the center of the cell, drained of emotion. There was an uneasy silence. It was impossible to tell what Bowles was thinking.

  The cell that Bowles and Little shared in the newly remodeled A cellhouse was unique because the afternoon sun actually fell inside it. On this particular day, the sunlight struck Bowles’s stubbled face, giving it a jaundiced look. He appeared tired and old.

  The cell was one of the neatest that I had seen. The magazines on the metal locker were not simply stacked together. They had each been turned face-up and their edges were flush. The sheets and blankets on the bunk beds had been pulled tight, military fashion. Both men’s shoes and slippers were lined up as if they had been placed there by a maid. There were two bulletin boards on the wall and both contained the obligatory nude pinups, but Little’s board was dominated by an intricate pencil drawing that, he explained later, was a diagram of a futuristic atomic fallout shelter that he had drawn. Bowles had a drawing too. It showed a man on his knees, his hands tied behind his back. The man’s head had just been sliced off by a sword. Bowles had drawn blood dripping from the neck.

  “See, the truth is that when society sent me here, it really didn’t think my life was important,” Bowles said. “The truth is, you bastards just didn’t have the nuts to hit me in the head with that hammer and throw me in the dump. You put me in here and you wrote me off. You said, ‘Don’t ever let this motherfucker out,’ and that ain’t right.

  “If you want to fuck me, come in here and say, ‘Carl, we’re going to fuck you and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ But don’t lie to me. Don’t tell me my life is worth saving. Don’t tell me what I do in here matters when the truth is no one really gives a shit what Ido.

  “Whether I act good and take care of those flowers or fuck up and start stabbing people—the truth is no one really gives a fuck, ’cause to the outside world, I’m dead and you folks are never letting me out.”

  By the next morning, Bowles had cooled off. “Do you know how many wardens have come and gone since I’ve been here?” he asked. “Look, these people have caused me to bounce off the walls long enough. I’m never touching another flower again for these fuckers.”

  I asked Connor later that day about his decision to fire Bowles, and he quickly assured me that it had nothing to do with his personal clashes with Richard Smith. “No other inmates are allowed to have their own private gardens. Why should Carl Bowles get one? Maybe Dick Smith felt comfortable with that contradiction, but I don’t.”

  Connor continued: “Bowles was referring to certain tools as ‘my tools.’ I was hearing people, including the warden, referring to Bowles as ‘Lieutenant Bowles.’ Comments like that mean something in here. Our environment dictates that an inmate and correctional officer will never be friends. We have to live on separate sides of the street. Even though people were joking about Bowles being a lieutenant, he was beginning to cross that street. Officers were letting down their guard.”

  I told Connor about Bowles’s reaction, his speech about responsibility, how much he had enjoyed the garden. Connor chuckled. “What you got to realize about someone like Carl Bowles is that there is always an ulterior motive. The reason he had that garden was not because he liked gardening but because he was using it as part of some scheme. Maybe he was using it to hide dirt from a tunnel he is digging, maybe he was hiding a shank there, maybe he was simply growing himself a tomato to sell, I can’t tell you, but I know Bowles, and I know he was up to something.

  “The bottom line is that I decided it was time for Mr. Bowles’s world to come crashing in on him,” said Connor. “With someone like Bowles, it’s good to shake them up every once in a while, and remind them of where they are and who is in charge.”

  Connor’s statement sounded harsh. “What people from the outside world don’t understand,” he quickly added, “is that inside here, convicts put on their best face because they want you to feel sorry for them. You see them in a cell and you imagine yourself in that cell and you feel awful about it.

  “But you got to remember that Carl Bowles killed three people simply because he wanted them dead, and you will never convince me that you can change a Carl Bowles. If I were the judge in the chair, I wouldn’t care whether Carl could be rehabilitated, because what he did is so heinous that there is just one payment, either death or to keep him away from people forever. Period. You sure as hell aren’t going to find me shedding tears because Carl Bowles lost his vegetable garden.”

  Now that Bowles and Little were out of work, they began spending more time in the recently remodeled Hot House exercise room. Warden Matthews had purchased several new stationary bicycles, weight benches, and other equipment for the inmates. Bowles had designed a weight-lifting program for Little. He was schooling him in other ways as well.

  “Carl has opened my eyes to things I’d never seen and most people never see in here,” Little explained one afternoon. “You look around, the guards look around, and everyone thinks they see what is going on, but they really don’t see shit. Believe me, Carl sees things going on that you can’t even imagine.”

  In the short time that they had been cellmates, Bowles had already shown Little several scams. A few cells down the tier from their cell was a convict-run store where inmates could buy soft drinks, cigarettes, crackers, fruit, pornography, and even jogging suits. It was against bureau regulations for convicts to stockpile goods from the prison commissary in their cells and then barter or sell them to other inmates. But stores like this could be found on nearly every tier at the Hot House. They were frequented by inmates because the commissary was only open a few hours each day, there was always a long line of customers waiting to get in, and inmates were prohibited from spending more than $105 per month. Moreover, the commissary didn’t give anyone credit. Convict-run stores were always open, there were never lines, there was no limit on spending, and most gladly offered credit. That was because the stores charged one hundred percent interest. If an inmate took a can of Coke on credit, he owed the store two cans of Coke the very next day.

  Most convict-run stores were run by “clerks” who worked for a “backer.” It was the backer’s job to put up enough money to stock the store and, more importantly, supply the muscle when an inmate didn’t pay. The clerk took the risk of getting arrested by the guards for operating a business, although guards rarely bothered them unless a convict got too greedy and stockpiled his cell with so many items that it became obvious what he was doing. In those cases, most guards would step in because they didn’t want to run the risk of being chastised by a lieutenant or ca
ptain who happened by and noticed that an inmate’s cell was overflowing with goods.

  Bowles had pointed out various prison bookies, ex-plained which gangs controlled the drugs, and told Little about the male prostitutes who charged a carton of cigarettes for sex. These were all small scams and most guards knew as much about them as the inmates did. Occasionally, a guard would bust a convict for some minor offense, but in Bowles’s eyes, these routine, petty crimes were inconsequential.

  But extortion, contract murders, major drug smuggling, and escape plots were serious, and Bowles prided himself on being able to spot them long before other inmates or the guards did. One morning he pointed out a fish to Little and predicted that someone would soon make a move on the fat white middle-aged convict who had been sent to prison for bilking investors out of several million dollars through a land-fraud scheme. Just as Bowles had predicted, two D.C. Blacks were arrested by the guards a few days later for trying to extort money from the inmate. They had pushed him down a flight of stairs and threatened to kill him unless he paid them $50 per week. The inmate had rushed to the lieutenant’s office and spilled his story to the guards. The two D.C. Blacks were put in the Hole and their victim was moved into a special cellblock over the prison hospital known as the protective-custody unit, where weak inmates, snitches, and sexual deviants were housed for their own safety. It was a classic example, Bowles told Little, of how not to extort someone.

  “Even a mouse is going to fight if you push him into a corner,” Bowles lectured. “You got to understand that if a guy is weak, he’s always going to take the easiest way out of a situation. This guy ran to the cops.”