Stateville- the Penitentiary in Mass Society

by James B Jacobs

  The guards are on the twelve hour system. Every regulation enforced upon prisoners is a constraint upon the guard; he is under constant tension, further irritated by minute encroachment from an idle and sometimes ill-humored convict group. The life of the guard, except for his privilege of leaving at night after his twelve hour shift, is in many cases more unpleasant than that of the convict. . . .

  The guards are politically appointed, untrained for their work by even an institutional school of instruction, with no assurance of tenure or pension, underpaid, many physically unfit for the crises (escapes, mutiny, pursuit and suppression), inexperienced in prison conditions; many of them [are] called “hayseeds” by the finished Chicago criminal.16

  The very high levels of idleness, violence, and escape that marked this period have to be considered, in part, as a consequence of the spoils system (see table 2). Since state government was organized not so much to provide service as to provide employment in order to reinforce political constituencies, the organization was naturally plagued by inefficiency.17

  Many of the personnel were replaced whenever an election changed the party or faction within the party that controlled the governor’s office and those who survived sacrificed their rank. At any one time, only a small cadre of trained guards was present to run the industries or to look after security properly. Rules were made up on the spot to minimize the guard’s work. Discipline was arbitrary and capricious. Lockup in solitary confinement was accompanied by “stringing up,” which required the inmate to stand handcuffed to the bars eight hours a day for as long as fifteen days, sometimes longer.18 During the ordeal, he was sustained on one slice of bread and one glass of water a day.

  Aside from the wardens and guards, there were few other employees at Stateville. In 1936, the entire noninmate clerical staff consisted of the business manager, chief clerk, comptroller, record clerk, credit clerk and storekeeper. The only way such an immense institution could function was for inmates to fill clerical positions throughout the prison. This gave certain inmates powerful leverage to bargain (explicitly and implicitly) for privileges.

  The prison was not left solely in the hands of the paramilitary hierarchical organization. Even in 1936, Stateville had a newly appointed director of education, a director of industries, several chaplains, and enough medical personnel to run a hospital. The Clabaugh commission expressed concern, however, that these professionals tended to become too “institutionalized,” concerning themselves primarily with issues of custody at the expense of their professional responsibilities.19

  Those reforms that were instituted during Stateville’s first decade, like the opening of the commissary in 1930 and the provision of radios in 1931, came through informal bargaining by the Catholic chaplain who, according to his own report and Leopold’s, was the prisoner’s primary advocate. Warden Hill provided the commissary and radios as part of a deal with Father Weir, whereby the chaplain promised to use his best efforts to talk the inmates out of their intention to kill an unpopular guard. Such reforms as these were not institutionalized and could be dissolved through the same processes by which they were created. There were no formal mechanisms by which prisoners might make requests or complaints to the administration. The prison operated largely on the strength of tradition; it was a kind of feudal system.

  Leopold describes a status system among the inmates rooted in the offense for which the inmate was convicted.20 The murderers and robbers held the highest status; the “rape-o’s” and “sex fiends” the lowest. Leopold speculates that the low status of the forgers, con men, and embezzlers, was probably based less on the nature of those crimes than on lower-class offenders’ resentment of middle-class offenders. Paralleling the status hierarchy based upon offenses was the hierarchical system of prison roles. Many studies of prison organization have described these roles, which range from the low-status “rat,” who is universally despised, to the high-status “right guy” (of which Leopold presents himself as an example), who is universally admired.

  The rat and the right guy were socio-emotional roles functionally related to the peculiar problems of imprisonment. The very low standard of living (even “tailormade” cigarettes were contraband) and the other deprivations attendant upon imprisonment generated a functional distributive system with roles organized around the supplying of food, liquor, sex, information, and money. Prison rackets, especially gambling, flourished. Warden Ragen is said to have collected fifteen thousand dollars in cash in 1936 turned in by inmates to be held in account for them when he declared that he would confiscate all cash not turned over.21

  Over and against the interlocking status system and roles were both primary and secondary ties sometimes imported from the street and sometimes indigenous to the prison itself. Ethnic loyalties played the same role in 1936 that racial solidarities do today. The formation of homogeneous ethnic cliques inside Stateville was reinforced by primary groups imported from the streets.

  Upon taking over the job as warden at Stateville [writes Gladys Erickson], Joe Ragen soon discovered that three powerful gangs dominated the prison. One composed chiefly of Irishmen was led by Daniel Rooney. Another captained by Frank Covelli was for Italians only. And the third, the Powerhouse Outfit, was made up of a motley assortment of desperados under the thumb of Marty Durkin and Rocco Rotunna. There were eight or nine lesser gangs, and all of these warred among themselves—and preyed on the unorganized inmates who were not fortunate enough to have an affiliation. The gangs maintained their power through strong arm methods. Knifings, sluggings and assaults were common daily occurrences throughout the prison. Gang members bullied the guards and made no pretense at recognizing any authority among the lesser prison personnel.22

  Not only did the partisan political system penetrate the prison through the staff, it was also reflected in the inmate social system. Nathan Leopold observed that

  many of the Jewish inmates came from the West Side of Chicago; many had friends high in the council of the 24th Ward Democratic Club, which was, at the moment, at its political zenith. Some of the boys asked their friends in the organization to help in the celebration [of Passover]. Not only did they contribute generously in the form of money and food, but they obtained permission from Warden Whipp to bring down some vaudeville acts to entertain at dinner.

  We were permitted on several occasions to remain in the general dining room as late as midnight. Sometimes the warden and his wife and other officials would be our guests at dinner. The men were permitted to talk and visit with their friends from the outside, and the entertainers put on their acts.23

  And Ragen’s biographer points out:

  Many of the inmates had strong political connections. Whenever a politician wished to confer with one of his incarcerated constituents, he simply arranged in advance to have him transferred to the farm, where visiting was easy and private. Other politicians arranged to send entertainers, male and female, into the prison yard to bring some measure of cheer to favored groups of inmates.24

  The period between 1925 and 1932 was marked by violence among inmates and between inmates and staff. Although accurate statistics are not available, there is good reason to believe that the absence of a capable administration made this period as lawless and violent as the period 1969–75, when for different reasons the formal organization collapsed. Father Weir reports several instances where gang members were simply released from isolation when gang leaders walked to the corner (isolation unit) and personally intimidated the deputy warden.25 In addition, gang leaders set up shacks on the yard and sold young offenders as homosexual prostitutes. Gambling flourished throughout the prison.

  In 1926, seven inmates took the deputy warden hostage and stabbed him to death when he refused, at knife point, to cooperate in their escape. In 1927 there erupted a serious riot at the old prison. In March of 1931, another riot at the old prison was precipitated by an event inmates called the “Washington’s Birthday Massacre.” Father Weir recalls that, according to the inmate
s’ version of the events, the administration had been tipped off that an escape attempt by three notorious inmates was imminent.26 Instead of foiling the escape before it materialized, the officials set up a trap outside the walls and killed all three inmates as they went over the top. A coroner’s jury absolved the prison authorities of all blame despite some public support for the prisoners’ claims.27

  The ensuing riot at the old prison was followed four days later by a much larger riot at Stateville. Five hundred thousand dollars worth of damage resulted from the rampaging and burning. One inmate was killed in the retaking of the prison. The entire prison was placed on “lockup” for seven months, an administrative strategy later to become a tradition at Stateville in times of crisis. Soon thereafter, Warden Hill was replaced by Warden (Colonel) Frank Whipp, characterized by Chaplain Weir as “a bigoted [against Catholics] and ignorant man without any real interest in the prison.”

  As the Depression deepened on the outside, the shops and industries stopped functioning, the staff retreated to the walls, and formal organization, which had previously governed every aspect of inmate life, became relaxed. But after 1932 the violence diminished. Leopold describes this period as follows.

  The next four years, from 1932–1936, were, in many ways, the best I have known in prison. Not for me personally, but for the institution in general. If the two or three years before the riot [of 1932] were the Wild West Days, this period could be called the Golden Age. Hobbies flourished among the men; discipline was at its least stringent. For example, there was yard every day now instead of once a week, and the men were permitted to go to the yard any time they were not actually working. Rules like the one requiring lines to march in strict military cadence were relaxed or not enforced. There was a general spirit of informality. The garden plots were going full blast; athletics of all kinds were encouraged. There were handball courts all around the prison, and everywhere you could see fellows dressed only in shorts and shoes engrossed in hot games. Naturally, everyone was suntanned. Sunbathing became a hobby.28

  We may hypothesize that the absence of effective control was caused by the lack of a trained or career-oriented staff coupled with overcrowding and pervasive idleness. The decrease in violence against the staff can be explained by the withdrawal of the guards from actively attempting to enforce the rules, and, indirectly, by the misery of the Depression out on the streets, which attenuated the inmates’ frustration at parole policies.29

  The Depression also encompassed Stateville. The number of prisoners increased inexorably, creating a situation of unemployment and idleness that paralleled conditions on the streets. Even the limited market of state agencies using prison industrial products cut back upon purchases. Idleness resulted from the political situation in the state as well as from the generally depressed national economic situation after 1929. In that year the Illinois legislature, responding to the widespread unemployment on the streets, killed the last of the labor contracts by which private contractors could come into the prisons in order to carry out private projects by use of prison labor.30 Overcrowding was a major problem. Cells in the round house built for a single individual were holding three men. A prison built for a maximum capacity of 1,800 inmates was pressed to hold 3,500. There were no programs to speak of. Loeb and Leopold inaugurated a correspondence school, which they ran on their own time out of their cells. This supplemented a fourth grade school system staffed by inmate teachers. With respect to inmate employment in useful activities, the Clabaugh commission found that 85 percent of the Stateville inmates were idle in 1927. The situation had not improved by 1936.

  Notwithstanding the development of the Stateville branch, it failed to keep pace with the increase in the prison population, and both the new and old prisons are today seriously overcrowded, and the amount of idleness is shocking, giving rise to discontent, conspiracies and bad conduct among the prisoners themselves.31

  We may conclude that the failure to establish a stable social order at Stateville between 1925 and 1936 reflects the organization’s inability to settle on a goal or set of goals that could have led to the development of a professional, career-oriented staff. Wardens could not expect to prolong their tenure by successfully managing prison crises. The influence on the prison of the partisan political system had to be reduced before a stable social order could be achieved.

  Illinois National Guardsmen at Stateville, March 1931 (Acme Newspictures)

  2

  Emergence of Personal Dominance, 1936–61

  Just as nature, without the right to make laws and enforce them, could accomplish nothing good for nature’s world, so would the warden of a penitentiary without the right to make rules and enforce them, be unable to accomplish anything for the good of the institution as a whole. But nature does have her laws and they are strictly obeyed. And the order in nature is the duplicate of that order that nature’s Creator had in mind for nature. In the mind of a penitentiary warden there is a certain order which should prevail throughout the whole institution, from the next highest ranking official to the lowest inmate.

  Joseph E. Ragen and Charles Finstone

  Inside the World’s Toughest Prison

  The years 1936–61 were most obviously marked by the establishment of an authoritarian prison regime under the growing personal dominance of Warden Joseph Ragen. So unassailable did the Ragen system become that it was disturbed neither by the post-World War II pressures toward prison reform nor by the prison violence of the 1950s. Ragen’s goal of creating a stable social order at Stateville depended upon gaining a large measure of economic, political, and moral autonomy. The absence of interference by outside forces enabled him to develop his authoritarian system of internal order which reached its full elaboration by the early 1950s.

  Ragen was aided by World War II, which diverted attention from the prisons by creating an employment boom which undermined the prison’s significance as an instrument of patronage. The prison organization achieved a stable goal in providing secure and economical custody for offenders. Beyond that, the emergence of a career-oriented elite at the prison provided Stateville a purpose independent of its instrumental goals. For its top staff, Stateville became an institution whose survival was valued for the occupational and moral status which it conferred.

  Like his predecessors, Joseph E. Ragen was a former sheriff from a small, rural Illinois town. He was appointed warden of Stateville in 1936 as a consequence of a crisis in control behind the prison’s walls which threatened to erupt into a full-scale political scandal.1 Although his ninth-grade education, lack of verbal finesse, according to the Chicago press of the time, and provincial background made him an unlikely candidate to succeed in managing the Stateville/Joliet inmates,2 his reputation as a strict disciplinarian while warden of Menard3 made him attractive to a Depression society alarmed by rising crime rates, gang violence, and prison escapes.

  Joe Ragen’s thirty-year “rule” of Stateville was based upon the patriarchal authority that he achieved. In the vocabulary of both employees and inmates, “he ran it.” The “old boss” devoted his life to perfecting the world’s most orderly prison regime. He exercised personal control over every detail, no matter how insignificant. He tolerated challenges neither by inmates nor by employees nor by outside interest groups. He cultivated an image which made him seem invincible to his subordinates as well as to the prisoners.

  In the course of thirty years he transformed Stateville into an efficient paramilitary organization famous and infamous throughout the world; a “must” on any foreign penologist’s tour of the United States. Ragen himself was well known and well integrated into national prison circles, counting leading prison officials across the country among his closest personal friends. In 1951 he was elected president of the American Correctional Association.4 Frequently he was invited to other states to consult on prison matters. One long-time staff member recalls that Ragen boasted at the end of his career that he had been called upon to investigate fifty-seven diff
erent prisons. His national connections and reputation were important resources in maintaining Stateville’s political autonomy.

  Ragen was a complex individual and prison administrator. He was feared and respected, beloved and despised. He inspired intense loyalty among the elite who were close to him, but many among the rank and file deeply resented his authoritarian, arbitrary leadership. Sociologists who worked at Stateville at the time remember Ragen as a strict old-style disciplinarian, while key administrators still refer to him as a penologist and a humanitarian. All agree that Stateville was his sole interest and that as warden he was seemingly omniscient with respect to every detail.5

  He demanded absolute personal loyalty. In the Officer’s Rule Book, employees were presented with the following homily:

  If you work for a man, in Heaven’s name work for him. If he pays you wages that supply your bread and butter, work for him, speak well of him, and stand by him, and stand by the institution he represents.

  If put to a pinch, a pound of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness; if you must vilify, condemn or eternally disparage, resign your position.

  But as long as you are a part of the institution, do not condemn it. If you do you are loosening the tendrils that hold you to the institution, and the first high wind that comes along, you will be uprooted and blown away, and probably you will never know why.6

  In exchange for the loyalty of the employee to the warden, the warden was obliged to the employee:

  It has been shown previously that the warden of a penitentiary is responsible to the people of the state for the conduct of employees under him. It has also been demonstrated that, in order to insure the maximum efficiency of his officers, the warden must demand of them adherence to certain rules and regulations. In other words the officers have definite duties, and in satisfying those duties, they are justifying the faith placed in them by the warden. . . . An enlightened warden will see that his officers are treated justly with all the consideration they deserve, and it behooves the officers working under such a warden to evidence their appreciation by doing their duty to him as well as he has done his to them.7