That so many penal practices over the years could be established in the name of rehabilitation is a tribute to the ambiguity of that term. Ragen reasoned that the strictness of the Stateville regime would coerce the inmate into a conformity that would ultimately produce a respect for the rules. Through obedience to prison rules, the inmate would be resocialized. Ragen was not without outstanding examples of reformed ex-offenders to “prove” the success of his system.
While the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps were creating jobs for the unemployed on the outside, Ragen put as many Stateville inmates to work as possible restoring the prison grounds with no better tools than kitchen pans and bare hands with which to carry dirt.39 A cardinal principle of Ragenism from the beginning and for the next twenty-five years was to keep every inmate working, even if it entailed certain diseconomies and featherbedding. The warden believed that, by working the men, conspiracies for escape and disruption would be minimized. All inmates were assigned to jobs essential to the operation of the prison (clerks, maintenance, laundry, dining room, etc.) or to prison industries where, according to Ragen, an inmate could learn a marketable trade like sheet metal or furniture making.40 The industries were a source of great pride to Ragen. They were at the heart of his “rehabilitation program” and he showed slides of the industries whenever he spoke to community groups. Even at the height of the system, however, it is unlikely that more than 20 percent of the population was assigned to industries.41 The industries also served primarily to reinforce control by keeping inmates busy rather than providing job training. One veteran of the Ragen years recalls:
I was assigned to work in the Tailor Shop where, for roughly twenty months, I watched hustlers, pimps, burglars, gunmen, and killers at work sewing hems on little red flags. I could not then and I can not now seriously entertain the notion that any of these vocational trainees would long work as a seamstress in the “free world.” I had no enthusiasm at all for the work of sewing buttons onto jockey shorts. I was rescued from that line of privileged help by being “fired” from the Tailor Shop and reassigned to work in the so-called Vocational School.42
While ostensibly the assignments hummed with activity, they were plagued by featherbedding caused by the fact that Stateville, throughout the Ragen era, held twice the number of inmates designated as maximum capacity. Perhaps no better symbol of the Ragen regime can be described than the coal pile to which all “fish” were assigned for six months and to which those inmates who “required” punishment were sent. The Stateville coal pile is legend among those old-timers unfortunate enough to recall the experience. In Next Time is for Life, Paul Warren provides a poignant description of the Stateville coal pile.
In a line of men I had wheeled a wheelbarrel down a narrow strip of cement walk to a coal pile. When my wheelbarrel was filled I bent over, took hold of the steel handles and lifted. Christ, it weighed a ton! Straining with all my might, I managed to pick it up, turn around with it and start up the walk. A few steps and the wheelbarrel began to tip. I spread my legs and pulled at the lowering handle. It was too much. I let go and the load of coal spilled over the ground. . . . All morning I struggled with that wheelbarrel. I learned to stall when the guard wasn’t looking. On the pretense of tying a shoelace, I rested a moment. I brushed my face and felt the coal dust scratch. The dust and sweat had mixed to form a mud. Every step was painful; my sore muscles were stretched beyond endurance.43
The coal pile was actually a series of coal piles. A train dumped the coal into the prison yard where it was shoveled into wheelbarrows and carried to one pile after another and stacked in perfect pyramids. The process was repeated until the coal ended up at the powerhouse. The work was draining (for the guards as well) during both the hot and cold months, and its very existence helped to stimulate the intense competition for the better jobs among the inmates.
Illinois prisoners were serving far longer prison terms in the 1940s and 1950s than they are today. Of the indeterminate sentences, 36.8 percent were one-to-life in 1934–42, but only 0.4 percent were one-to-life in 1973. Likewise 36.9 percent of the determinate sentences in 1957 were more than twenty years while only 3.4 percent of the minimum sentences in 1973 were greater than twenty years. In addition, the great liberalization of the good time and parole laws has had an even more important effect on actual time served. In any case, a 1960 nationwide sample found that Illinois prisoners were serving the second-longest prison terms in the country.44 The lengthy sentences and the differential desirability of various jobs created an inmate social system organized according to occupational status. Much jockeying for the better jobs occurred, thus reinforcing the vitality of the “rat” system. If a high-status inmate could be dethroned, his position would, of course, become available. To a great extent, occupational mobility depended upon the identification of deviants.
Those inmates in key positions who were able to maneuver cell and job assignments achieved high status within the inmate social system.45 The important point to keep in mind when we compare the inmate social system of Ragen’s era with the present is that, during Ragen’s day, power and prestige were attached to one’s position in the formal organization, while at present they are independent of formal organizational status. This is not to say that informal affective ties did not bind inmates together during those years. Upon his appointment to Stateville, Ragen’s initial task was to win back control of the prison from the ethnic gangs which were in virtual control. The Italians (associated with Taylor Street in Chicago) maintained especially strong solidarity throughout the 1950s and were sometimes able to assert their influence in strong-arming weaker inmates and controlling some of the better jobs. While the blacks constituted almost 50 percent of the population by the mid-1950s, racial identity at the time was a weak basis for action, and blacks asserted an influence far less than their numbers.
The inmate social system tended to be stable due to the very long prison terms and comparatively low turnover. In the early 1950s Stateville received less than 1,000 new inmates per year, while today almost 2,400 are admitted annually. One former guard notes that out of 150 inmates he had supervised in the furniture factory, 50 had served more than twenty calendar years.
The inmate social system at Stateville during the 1940s and 1950s approximated that described by Sykes and Messinger for other penitentiaries46 except that there was no prisoner ideological solidarity. The prestige structure based upon offense was carried over from earlier decades. The inmate code, even if honored more in the breach, provided an ordering of relationships among “cons”. Both inmates and guards who lived through the Ragen years report that theft between inmates was practically nonexistent. What fights there were involved individual grudges, most often gambling.
A thriving black market in coffee, cigarettes, and “hooch” provided some relief from the Spartan existence. While Ragen removed $15,000 in currency from the prison in his first few years, he by no means eliminated the trafficking of guards or the numbers racket and other forms of gambling.
Nevertheless, inmates during the Ragen years were poor. All who had the funds and desire to trade could be accommodated at the commissary, open just four and a half days each week. Today, with a 60 percent smaller population, there are more inmate customers at the commissary each week than there were twenty years ago. The income of inmates today primarily derives from money sent in from the streets—a source of income quite uncommon twenty years ago.
Fraternization between guards and inmates during Ragen’s administration was a violation for both castes. No more interaction than was necessary to carry out work assignments was to be tolerated. Relations between guards and inmates were impersonal and ritualized. The rules were known and accepted by all participants. As long as the inmate did not challenge authority directly, he might engage in black market trade without serious repercussion. He could, of course, expect periodically to be busted for contraband, purged from his assignment, and sent to the “hole” a
nd back to the coal pile, but these were the pitfalls upon which expectations were built. (“You get me this time, but think of all the times I beat you.”) In six months to a year, the inmate might have a new position and might once more be involved in black market activity.
More extreme was the punishment inflicted upon those few inmates who dared to directly challenge Ragen’s authority by complaining to the outside, attempting escape, defying an officer, or organizing concerted opposition to the regime. Such individuals could expect to be beaten by the captains and lieutenants or by their specially selected inmate helpers.
All inmate communications with the outside were rigorously controlled and censored.
Inmates are permitted to write one letter each week, on Sunday, to their friends and relatives. These letters must be respectful and decent in every way, containing no solicitations or remarks derogatory to the institution. Close censorship is maintained over outgoing mail as well as incoming, and accurate records are kept in both instances.47
Ragen told inmates not to complain to outsiders about the prison or to act in any other way so as to bring criticism upon the institution. He argued that criticism could only result in a negative reaction against ex-convicts and thus redound to the detriment of prisons and prisoners. For the offense of criticizing Stateville to visitors or in letters, an inmate could expect to be “purged” from his job after doing seven days in the hole (isolation).
There was little possibility of organized resistance. The efforts of jailhouse lawyers to take Ragen to task before the courts resulted in their transfer from the mainline population to segregation for years on end. Inmates who challenged the system could be “salted away” in segregation for as long as a decade. One of Ragen’s most rebellious inmates, Major Price (who had savagely attacked two guards in the 1940s and proclaimed himself to be a communist) was kept in segregation for twelve years. Another “troublemaker” and future leader of the Stateville Black Muslims, Thomas X. Cooper, spent ten years in segregation. Jailhouse lawyer Maurice Meyers was thrown in segregation for a year and told he would never be released until he returned records smuggled out of the prison in order to blackmail Ragen into allowing inmate commissary funds to be used for a legal assistance program.
Both isolation (short-term punishment) and segregation (long-term punishment) units were located in the same building. The isolation cells were larger, often holding as many as six (sometimes more) inmates and were constructed with heavy steel doors which blocked the prisoners completely from view of those passing the cells. Aside from being in the special wing, segregation cells were more like ordinary cells, containing one or two prisoners. However, the prisoners were continuously confined to their cells and were always under intense surveillance. Inmates so confined were served their meals in their cells, had no recreation, and were escorted by two guards to the shower once a week.
Thus, in 1961, when Ragen left Stateville, his system of charismatic dominance was unassailable. To the Illinois public, press, and politicians Joe Ragen was “Mr. Prison” in Illinois. In the last half-dozen years of his wardenship he codified the entire administrative system. Stateville was carefully prepared for the transition from a charismatic to a traditional system of authority. In Frank Pate, his assistant warden, Ragen had a thoroughly loyal and like-minded successor. Yet on the national scene it was clear that the type of regime exemplified by Ragen and his generation was passing. At the National Institute of Corrections, the influential Howard Gill used Stateville as an example of what was wrong with the American prison system. In his seminars he referred to Stateville as a “monolithic monstrosity.”
The great jump in the material expectations of the inmates was still a few years off. The civil rights movement was gaining momentum on the streets, and at Stateville the inmate majority had already passed to the blacks, although this was never acknowledged. In 1960 there was some trouble with self-proclaimed Black Muslims, but they were easily dealt with in segregation. Change would, no doubt, have buffeted Stateville even had Ragen stayed on, but his departure added the problem of organizational succession to a host of other strains that found their source in developments occurring in the 1960s in American society at large.
3
Challenge to Institutional Authority, 1961–70
While walking inmate Washington to isolation he said, “The next time you walk me, you’ll have to fight me to get me out, you better bring your army because I’ll have mine, you whites and those bogus niggers are thru running this country, you know that don’t you? This persecution of us Muslims will have to stop. . . .”
Disciplinary ticket, 17 October 65
From 1961 to 1970 the authoritarian system of personal dominance inherited by Ragen’s hand-picked successors was undermined as the prison became less able to dominate its relations with the outside. Staff reaction to the loss of institutional autonomy, the emergence of racial consciousness, and the penetration of juridical norms, was a consistent strategy of resistance. Until 1970, this all-out effort to maintain the old equilibrium was successful in preserving the basic structure of the social organization, but it led directly to a sudden and complete organizational collapse after 1970. By resisting even the most limited changes in the sixties, the tradition bearers of the prison’s goals and values hastened their own demise.
Joseph P. Ragen left Stateville in 1961 to become director of public safety, but his departure for Springfield was hardly fateful for the administration of the prison. In the late 1950s, the Ragen system had been codified. The inmate rule book was expanded; a 132-page manual of “Rules and Regulations” describing the proper functioning of every employee’s post and position was published. Copies of the relevant descriptions from the latter document were placed on every assignment. In his last years at Stateville, Ragen even took to memorializing various sectors of the prison (as well as the state-owned houses) with plaques dedicated to top members of the ruling elite.
Until Ragen’s final retirement from public life in 1965, Stateville continued to be run by the same rules and by the same elite as it had for the previous three decades. Even while he was in Springfield, Ragen’s superordinate goal was managing Stateville and the Joliet prisons. During those four years, he maintained his home and his family at Stateville and spent three or four days a week at the prison making tours, interviewing segregation cases, and directing activity as he had been accustomed in the past.
Frank Pate succeeded Ragen as warden. Pate had begun as a guard at Stateville in 1939, had served as chief guard and most recently as assistant warden. He was personally devoted to Ragen. The assistant wardens who served Pate were also longtime Ragen protégés who had come up through the ranks.1 There was complete continuity between regimes.
However, Pate neither sought nor exercised the charismatic authority of the Old Boss. In part this was due to his long years of collegial association with the men over whom he now had command. This is not to say, however, that Pate did not claim deference and the emoluments of office. The prison remained an imperatively coordinated paramilitary organization, which required its warden to personify its goals and values. But, in practice, the administration of the prison drifted into collegial rule. The very fact that the warden’s role had reverted to a bureaucratic “office” is indication of the transition from a charismatic to a traditional system of authority; a transition accompanied by ritualization and organizational strain.2
Furthermore, Warden Pate had to contend with Director Ragen until 1965. Heretofore, the director of public safety had been a political appointee. While Ragen always maintained a correct formal relationship with his nominal superior, neither the director of public safety nor the superintendent of prisons had ever interfered with Ragen’s management of the Illinois prisons. The day Ragen became director, the autonomy of the local warden began to erode, a trend that has continued irreversibly to the present. Ragen increasingly demanded reports from “his” penitentiaries, and he personally intervened in routine decision makin
g. According to Pate, “you couldn’t even promote a man [inmate] in grade [i.e. from a low to a higher security classification] without Ragen’s approving it.” He further recalls that staff frequently complained, “That’s not the way the old boss did it.” A former inmate who worked as a domestic in the warden’s house both in Ragen’s and in Pate’s regime recalls that Pate was expected to place a daily telephone call to his predecessor. Subordinates understood that Pate “wasn’t running it” and sometimes went over his head to Ragen on important issues.3 For the first time in decades, lines of authority were amorphous, confused, and contradictory. The carefully constructed organization entered a period of drift.
Nor did Pate enjoy his predecessor’s prestige statewide or nationally. Ragen had never included his protégés in his out-of-state consultations and site visits, nor were they invited to the private parties where politicians and the press were entertained. Interestingly enough, the lack of a national perspective is cited by several longtime employees as the major difference between Ragen and Pate. The more parochial perspective at Stateville prevailed at precisely the time that outside forces were generating strains for the prison’s internal organization. Without a leader of national or even statewide prominence, Stateville was less able to protect the sanctity of its boundaries.4
In 1965, after an acute illness and an apparent mental breakdown, Joe Ragen was forced to resign as director of public safety. Governor Otto Kerner appointed Warden Ross Randolph of Menard to replace him. For years there had been an intense rivalry between Ragen and Randolph for preeminence in Illinois corrections. Each was openly critical of the other’s style of administration. It is said that Randolph’s laxness never ceased to annoy Ragen. Ragen’s lockups and strict discipline were sharply criticized by Randolph, who himself was becoming a national figure in corrections by the mid-1950s.
Stateville- the Penitentiary in Mass Society Page 7