The lieutenants were the linchpins of the organization. They functioned as a police force which carried out law enforcement, order maintenance, and service functions. They mediated between the administrators and captains on the one hand and the inmates and line employees on the other. Entering a work area, they would disseminate information, discipline guards and inmates, and, with a certain “noblesse oblige,” respond to requests for favors that might be accomplished “up front.”
Sergeants were placed in charge of cell houses and at the key gates. Promotions were slow. Many employees, even after twenty years, never rose above the rank of guard. Those destined for high position were spotted by Ragen early in their careers and groomed for rank. Turnover among the line employees was very high due to the low wages and rigid discipline.23 The Stateville culture and tradition was carried most prominently by a small number of long-time, higher-echelon staff (lieutenants and above) and high-status inmates.
In the name of the greater good, all kinds of individual prerogatives might be trampled. Neither guards nor inmates had any protection against arbitrary administrative action. To Ragen, Stateville constituted the ultimate moral order, and its employees were expected to embody its values. In his manual outlining their responsibilities, Ragen was as much concerned with guards’ behavior off the job as on. He warned guards against becoming indebted to local merchants or in any other way reflecting badly on the prison. For adulterous relations or frequenting houses of prostitution or taverns with unsavory reputations, they were threatened with dismissal.
Guards, like inmates, were “written up” and given pink disciplinary slips (“pinkies”) for such misdeeds as “maintaining a dirty assignment,” “reading the newspaper,” or “failing to salute a captain.” During this period anybody could “write up” anybody else and was encouraged to do so. Failure to write up a violation was itself a violation. It was common for “kites” (notes smuggled to captains or to the outside) to be written by inmates against guards. Enough tickets (disciplinary reports) and pink slips resulted in arbitrary suspensions without pay or even in dismissal. The atmosphere of insecurity and distrust well served Ragen’s strategy of divide and conquer. Perhaps some indication of Ragen’s rigorous supervision of his staff can be gleaned from the following employee bulletin dated 27 January 1955.
Upon entering the hospital at the Joliet Branch on January 19, I found Sergeant Frank Riley at the desk, and I have never failed to find him at the desk upon entering the hospital, which is an indication he does not leave his desk too much. There seemed to be a lot of turmoil when I walked in. Upon visiting the second and third floors, I found bedding equipment, dirty clothes, and the place looked anything but being in shipshape condition. Mr. Riley has been warned of his lack of supervision by the Chief Guard and other supervising officers at the Joliet Branch, but he seems to refuse responsibility. For this violation and others, he is being demoted from Guard Sergeant to Guard. Officer Burton is being suspended for one (1) day for not having the second and third floors properly supervised and in proper condition for visitors.
Guards worked six days a week, eight hours a day, until Ragen left Stateville in 1961. Wages were low and overtime was not allowed. When the chief guard required an employee to work extra hours, the employee was legally entitled to an equivalent amount of compensatory time off. But it was standard procedure for employees to accumulate hundreds of hours of uncompensated overtime without ever being allowed a day off.
Ragen recruited guards exclusively from rural southern Illinois.24 While civil service requirements enhanced Ragen’s independence from the partisan political system, they never limited his administrative prerogatives, since chronic understaffing nearly always left the organization free to engage in “direct hire.” Lieutenants and officers were sent in teams to southern Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky to find good prospects. The guards themselves were not attracted to Stateville by any special desire to work in a prison, but left their homes to escape a dismal economic situation that has plagued southern Illinois for decades. These rural guards constituted a culturally homogeneous work force which reinforced the prison’s isolation from its surrounding environs. Many of the guards maintained farms, residences, and sometimes their families “down south” and visited home whenever possible. While in Joliet, they lived at the officers’ barracks, which physically separated them from their neighbors and reinforced their solidarity with one another. (Those who lived there at the time estimate between one-fourth and one-third of all the guards lived in the barracks.) Ragen also constructed a trailer park (in 1953) for married guards. Senior guards and the assistant wardens lived a kind of baronial existence, with anything between one and five inmate houseboys and yardmen, in state-owned houses on the prison’s property outside the walls.25
The officers’ barracks and the trailer camp were as vulnerable to “shakedowns” as were the inmates’ cells. The captains (or Ragen himself) might raid the barracks at any time during the day or night in order to search for contraband like alcohol or radios or to expose any gambling that might be occurring. An 11:00 P.M. curfew at the barracks was rigidly enforced. When Ragen was dissatisfied with the cleanliness or orderliness of the barracks, he would cut off the water or electricity. The situation persisted long after Ragen’s departure under the caretaker regime of his top assistant and chosen successor, Frank Pate.
In the late 1950s, an employees’ association began to develop at Stateville underground, because Ragen would no more recognize organizations among employees than he would among inmates. He maintained an open door to speak with any one individually, but would not accept those who purported to speak on behalf of others. Discussion of “controversial” topics while on duty was against the rules.
There are rules of long standing in the institution that no controversial subjects are to be discussed while on the institution property. Neither will there be any solicitations made by any employee on state property. . . . Under no circumstances is anyone to violate the above mentioned rules, and if they do they can expect to be disciplined. (Bulletin no. 196, September 24, 1955)
Sensitive to the relationship between basic services (especially food) and inmate morale, Ragen stressed that the inmates were entitled to good food, clean clothing, and satisfactory housing. (At every meal a lieutenant had to sign a statement that he had tasted the food and found it fit). Beyond these essentials, Ragen emphasized that inmates were entitled to nothing. Any other things given them were “privileges granted by the officials of the institution and the Department of Public Safety.” One long-term inmate described his orientation into this system as follows:
On February 10, 1949, the new arrivals at Stateville were taken to the “Jug” [later the isolation unit] for an orientation lecture. I was told, in effect, these walls are our walls; you will stay off our walls . . . or we will most certainly blow you away. And I was told, too, that everything in the universe was a privilege. Work was a privilege, communication with family and friends was a privilege, and even the spending of one’s own money was a privilege. At Stateville prison, even the grass was sacred: Stay off our grass or we will put your stinkin’ self in the hole.26
The Ragen system was based upon internal security so intense that the ultimate perimeter security would never need to be tested. The kinds of restrictions on inmate freedoms which were imposed in the name of security often seem rather far removed from immediate security needs; although scenarios could always be constructed whereby, for example, an inmate who left food on his plate could be said to be challenging authority in a way that, left unpunished, might result in widespread rebellion. Ragen himself bragged that Stateville was the “tightest prison in the United States” (Leopold adds “so tight it cracks”). Few inmates would disagree. During his twenty-five-year tenure as warden, there were no riots, not a single escape from behind the walls, and only two guards and three inmates killed. Whether this security system was a byproduct of the maintenance of order, or whether the achievement o
f order was the primary goal, it is clear that a highly predictable routine which reinforced inmate and staff expectations was the consequence.
The formal organization of the prison was built around comprehensive prescriptive and proscriptive sets of rules and regulations and punishment for their infraction. It was practically impossible for an inmate to abide by all the rules and regulations.27 Failure to button a shirt or to salute a white cap (captain) was reason enough to be brought before the disciplinary captain. “Silent insolence” was an actionable offense. At “the corner” (the captain’s office) the disciplinary captain gave the accused rule violator Hobson’s choice. The inmate might admit to the rule infraction and “take his weight” (take the blame) or try to dispute the “ticket” and thereby be found guilty of calling a guard a liar, itself a violation of the rules. In either event, he would do time in the “hole” (the isolation unit) or suffer a privilege denial (yard, commissary, earphones).28
While Ragen eliminated the practice of “stringing inmates up” at isolation, he did require them to stand silently at attention inside the isolation cell eight hours per day. In the late 1950s, as the nationwide trend toward increased concern for prisoners gained strength, the standing also was abandoned.
The multitude of rules made it a certainty that any inmate could be found guilty of a rule violation at any time and thus could be placed in isolation. Not, of course, that a violation had to be found to remove a “no good son-of-a-bitch” or an “agitator” or a “troublemaker” from the population. In the 1954–55 Annual Report of the Department of Public Safety, Ragen pointed out, “we have found that segregation of a very small percentage of nonconformants has added to the more efficient operation of the institution program.”29
While Ragen stated that no inmate should be treated differently than any other, discipline was so strict that the organization could only function if innumerable exceptions were made. The captains’ clerks couldn’t be “busted” and there were other “untouchables” throughout the prison whose inviolability was based upon stooling, indispensability, or personal relationships with the staff. This led to an arbitrary system of justice, whereby overlooking infractions was a reciprocity for certain inmate compliance, particularly the supplying of information.30 Under such circumstances, it is not suprising that identifying, avoiding, and punishing “rats” became the central theme of the inmate social system.
So effective was this system of arbitrary discipline and harassment of troublemakers that on any given day there were only 25–30 disciplinary tickets for a population of 3,500; thirty-two cells were sufficient to segregate all serious and chronic trouble-makers. It was arbitrary coercion and relentless supervision coupled with a meaningful “reward system” that ensured maintenance of order and control.
The reward system was a much more effective mechanism of social control during the Ragen era than it is today. There was a much greater disparity in the living conditions between the best-off and the worst-off inmates. Prisoners in Illinois faced extremely long prison terms throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Crowded conditions meant that the average inmate was confined with two other men in a tiny cell from 3:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. Those inmates with jobs in the administration building could be given “night details” in order to keep up with their paper work. Thus, they could remain in the comfortable offices sometimes until late evening. These “up front” positions as well as the jobs of clerks and runners carried with them the opportunity for many illegitimate “scores” within the prison as well. Former sociologist-actuary Lloyd Ohlin explains that while he was employed at Stateville some of the inmates who worked for him kept a still going (unbeknown to him) in the file cabinet.31 In addition they used to steal Parole Board decisions and sell them to the inmates in the back before they were officially announced. He concludes that for inmates with good jobs the Stateville system was not oppressive.
Ohlin’s successor in office, Daniel Glaser, has pointed out that the old cons knew how much they could get away with.32 “In the hospital where our offices were located there was regular transmission of food from the officers’ mess to the inmates working elsewhere in the building, generally carried by the porters, and elaborate reciprocities of exchange in services or contraband were continually being fulfilled by the inmates. A little hair oil from the officers’ barbershop was a major exchange item in our building.”
Ragen and his top staff made it a practice to offer many of the top jobs to inmate leaders and toughs. Vernon Revis, a Ragen protégé for many years and eventually superintendent and assistant warden, explains how he approached a “tough son-of-a-bitch” who had just been released from isolation for refusing to work and asked him how he would like to be his personal clerk. Apparently such situations were common. The Catholic chaplain during Ragen’s tenure has noted that Ragen only chose murderers for his clerks. Glaser points out that Ragen picked “square john” type inmates to do the mail censoring, housing them and feeding them in the basement of the administration building completely apart from the others. Other tough inmates were coopted as nurses in the detention hospital, where they celled as well as worked in comparative comfort.
In a tribute to Stateville’s disciplinary system, the Chicago Tribune reporters in 1955 observed:
Discipline at Joliet-Stateville is not merely strict; like security, it is absolute. Not even the slightest infraction of the rules is tolerated. The inmates march to and from work, meals, the bath-house, the barber shop, the commissary, in a column of two’s and they march in step. Profane or abusive language to employees or other inmates is not tolerated. Neither is insolence.33
The silent system was enforced in the dining room and while marching in lines. The entire prison functioned with Prussian punctuality. It is frequently said that you could set your watch by the movements of the lines of prisoners. The strictness of the system caused difficulties for many inmates, although to be sure this strictness protected inmates from many of the physical depredations common at other prisons dominated by “barn bosses.” Going “stir bugs” was an everyday occurrence at Stateville during the Ragen years, as is indicated by the number of transfers to the Psychiatric Division (see table 4). According to notorious Chicago gangster Roger Touhy:
You should know the record of insanity that has resulted from the routine established by rules. What a bad effect all those rules—rules—rules have on men, particularly the young men who come down here. They can’t take it.34
“Going stir bugs”—a paranoid condition wherein the inmate feels that he is being watched from every post and plotted against in every conversation—has been described to me by several old-timers.35 Whether “stir bugs” is a condition of actual psychological deterioration or a strategy to escape the mainline population or some combination of the two is not of great importance here. Requests for transfer to the more relaxed atmosphere of Menard, either as mental patients or as members of its general population, were very frequent despite the hardship that the distance made for visitors.36
In the mid-1950s a greater societal acceptance of the legitimacy of prison reform moved Ragen to redefine his system of total control as “rehabilitation.” Both the Tribune articles of 1955 and Inside the World’s Toughest Prison (1962) are replete with references to Ragen as a “penologist” and a humanist. According to Ragen himself,
There is so much good in the worst of us. . . . Rehabilitation takes as its major premise the thesis that ignorance is the root of all evil, that if man is equally familiar with right and wrong, he will in the majority of instances choose the former. Most of the men in prison have a corrupted courage. They dared to rebel against an unsupportable environment, but they were mentally and spiritually untrained to prosecute the rebellion morally. It has for years been admitted that slums constitute the most insidious social menace known, and the greatest task of the penologist lies in counteracting the influence of the slums. Something like ninety percent of all prison populations in this country are recruited from the margina
l and sub-marginal sections of the large cities. The prison authorities must take this chronically underprivileged mass of humanity and place it on the path of morality.37
The change in the philosophical justification of the same prison system is explained by the increasing prominence being given to prison reform by professional administrators and academics after World War II and following the wave of prison riots in the early 1950s. If Stateville was to maintain its preeminence, then its basis of order would have to claim legitimacy within the vocabulary of the mainstream of “enlightened” opinion about the purpose of prison. About Ragen’s reaction to the reform movement, Daniel Glaser recalls:
Rehabilitation to him was the number of inmates in school, and during his ACA term and thereafter in the early 1950’s he rapidly increased the size of the academic and vocational schools, which were conspicuously located for visitors and kept brightly painted—as was the entire prison. . . . There was always at least one guard in the school and no students were there more than a few hours each day, so his figures for the number of students enrolled in school compared to the numbers at many other prisons made it look favorable. The vocational school was oriented to personal service for staff in repairing cars and radios, appliances and typewriters, and tended to keep as its inmate crew mainly inmates who already had some training or were master craftsmen from the outside. Staff would bring in rundown autos, radios and appliances, pay for parts and supplies including a little surplus of these for the school, and get the labor done free by the inmates. Several staff members told me of buying rundown or wrecked autos or appliances, getting them fixed at “the joint” and selling them for a profit. The elite staff of Ragen’s favorites seemed to have the inside run on these and other fringe benefits from inmate labor and prison facilities.38
Stateville- the Penitentiary in Mass Society Page 6