Stateville- the Penitentiary in Mass Society

by James B Jacobs

  John Twomey, State of Illinois, Department of Corrections, Five Year Plan: Adult Division

  Stateville’s transformation from a patriarchal organization based upon traditional authority to a rational-legal bureaucracy was powered by three main sources. The first was the creation of the Illinois Department of Corrections, which has centralized specialized resources and ultimate authority in a burgeoning and professionally oriented central administration located in Springfield. The central office has virtually eliminated local autonomy by usurping the prerogative of formulating policy, by promulgating comprehensive rules and regulations, and by demanding ever increasing reports on more and more details of day-to-day activities at the local prisons.

  The second source was the emergence of a highly educated elite occupying the top administrative positions. This elite does not share the homogeneity of the guard force, nor does it view Stateville as an institution with an independent moral value over and above its instrumental function in the criminal justice system. It has brought to the prison the values and attitudes of the American university and embodies within it an ethos of public service. While it is true that under the “rehabilitative” regimes of Pate’s two immediate successors, John Twomey and Joseph Cannon, bureaucratization was stimulated only marginally, the proliferation of administrative tasks and positions held by those with university credentials laid the groundwork for the explicit bureaucratization that has been carried out by Warden David Brierton since December 1975.

  The third pressure toward bureaucratization has come from the injection into the organization of a large number of civilians filling specialized treatment roles. The presence of teachers and counselors on a day-to-day basis at Stateville led to an administrative and moral division of labor which more narrowly specified duties and responsibilities of the entire staff. Furthermore, the civilians’ persistent criticisms of the patriarchal regime ultimately elicited greater attention to the processes of decision and rule making.

  The Demise of Local Autonomy

  With Ragen gone, political intervention into the Illinois prisons (but only at the highest levels) was resumed. Governor Richard Ogilvie, a Republican, took office in January 1969. Ross Randolph, a Democrat, resigned as director of public safety and was replaced by a downstate Republican sheriff (as acting director). The new governor appointed an important backer and member of his transition team, thirty-three-year-old Peter Bensinger, scion of one of the wealthiest Republican families in Illinois, to head the Youth Commission (a sub-department within the Department of Public Safety) and to chair a task force to review the entire penal system.

  While the task force was composed mainly of Illinois prison people (among them Warden Frank Pate), it also included many of the treatment people in the system, like state criminologist Arthur Huffman and Menard sociologist John Twomey. In addition, academic specialists were invited to serve on the task force. Norval Morris (University of Chicago Law School), Meryl Alexander and Tom Eynon (both of Southern Illinois University) all participated. After a year-long study the task force called for a total revamping of Illinois’s adult and juvenile prisons, the establishment of community-based facilities, and the reorganization of Illinois’ juvenile and adult prison facilities into a separate Department of Corrections.

  Ogilvie chose Peter Bensinger to be the first director of the new department, which came into being in 1970. If Ross Randolph’s appointment to Public Safety came as a shock to Stateville after Ragen’s departure, it was at least softened by the fact that Randolph was “a prison man” with thirty years in Illinois prisons. Bensinger, however, was young, Yale-educated, and a former European sales manager for the Brunswick Corporation. Stateville staff recognized in his appointment the triumph of liberalism that Ragen had predicted and for so long forestalled.

  Bensinger took over a prison system that had been physically, fiscally, and organizationally deteriorating for a decade. The fiscal base was poor. Salaries of all staff were terribly low. Turnover in 1969 was at an all-time high. The inmates were becoming more rebellious with the influx of Chicago street gangs which were carving up the prisons into turfs, carrying on gang rivalries, and intimidating the staffs.

  In the course of the next three years, the Bensinger administration created a powerful, active, central Springfield administration. Personnel assigned to the Springfield central office increased from 71 in 1965, to 191 in 1972.1 The fiscal base of the prison system increased from $56 million to $79 million. Salaries for guards rose almost 30 percent. Federal grants to the department multiplied from $1.7 million in fiscal year 1971 to $5.6 million in 1974 to $10.6 million in 1976.

  Bensinger’s reform program, which relied upon the advice of academic experts, American Correctional Association standards, and the treatment people in his own department, demonstrated primary concern with increasing the “respect,” “dignity,” and “status” of the prisoner. Almost at once Bensinger doubled (to $50) the “gate money” given to an inmate when he left prison. Subsequently, he doubled (to two) the number of letters that inmates were permitted to mail each week, and he virtually eliminated censorship of outgoing mail. For the first time, inmates of Illinois prisons were allowed to order Playboy. Sunday visiting was initiated, and all prisons were ordered to release inmates from their cells in the evening during the warm weather for night yard.

  Interests outside the prison were cultivated. Bensinger sponsored entertainment programs for the inmates: Peter, Paul and Mary, Marcel Marceau, and many black musical groups. The introduction of college courses sponsored by Northern Illinois University, Lewis College, Joliet Junior College, and Northwestern University was facilitated. The director cooperated with the black civil rights group Operation Push, and permitted its representative, Dorothy Mason (over the protest of many of the Ragen people), regular visits with as many inmates as wished to see her. The new director formed strong ties with the academic community, particularly with Norval Morris. Under Bensinger’s personal authorization the first stage of my own research was carried out at Stateville during the summer of 1972.

  Bensinger also placed outsiders on the staffs of the local prisons. One of his earliest decisions was to hire civilian counselors. In addition, civilians were for the first time hired as teachers rather than as educational administrators. Group therapy was implemented by contracting for the services of outside psychologists and social workers.

  The director of the Department of Corrections cultivated the press as Ragen had done in earlier years as warden of Stateville. Bensinger institutionalized this relationship by the full-time appointment of an information officer who regularly prepared and distributed press releases on happenings in the department. The results in general were very successful; press coverage was generally favorable.2 The highly visible reforms, coupled with personal charisma and outstanding public relations, contributed to Bensinger’s election as president of the American Association of Directors of Correction and smoothed the way for his later political career.3 The fact that in 1970 Bensinger even saw prison work as a potential springboard into statewide elective office is a comment on the prison’s changing position in mass society.

  Contrary to the staff’s view of Stateville’s mission as unique, Bensinger issued directives which applied with equal force to all Illinois prisons. Assistant Director Bud Monahan was frequently criticized for reversing Stateville administrators on matters of employees’ discipline. Even when the central office agreed with the institutions on a disciplinary matter, guards were increasingly disposed to take their cases before the Civil Service Commission. Relations between guards and administration became increasingly subject to written rules and rational authority. Some top guards believed that the institution had lost its authority to discipline its own staff members. Old-time “Ragenites” argued that without such authority it would be impossible to control the inmates.

  To critics, the Illinois prisons seemed at long last to be catching up with those of the rest of the country. To old-time institut
ion people, Bensinger was “permissive” and his changes left no doubt that he was “for the inmate.” To the inmates, Bensinger was, in the words of one Stateville administrator, “a savior who would free them.” Expectations soared. Inmates began to exploit a split between the liberal Bensinger and the conservative “Ragenites” at Stateville. Stateville guards and administrators were told by inmates that they were acting contrary to the director’s orders and philosophy. The central office increasingly was defined by Stateville staff as an outside force meddling with something they didn’t know anything about. Particular hostility was leveled against Bud Monahan, who, because he had risen from the Youth Commission, was presumed to know nothing about adult maximum security prisons. There was widespread cynicism about the competence of college-educated “professionals” and “so-called experts.”

  Furthermore, the liberal reforms themselves contained contradictions and limitations. Inmates in the Illinois prisons were not a monolithic group. There was more that divided than united them according to their own definition of the situation. Liberal regulations that attempted to ameliorate the intensity of authoritarian control may have reduced suffering for some segments of the prisoner population while increasing it for a substantial number of other inmates, who became easy prey for aggressive and gang-oriented inmates. All of Illinois prisons suffered from the lockups, administrative disruption, and deteriorating physical conditions.

  A special committee headed by an eminent Chicago attorney, Maurice Wexler, was appointed by Governor Ogilvie at the request of Bensinger to draft the nation’s first Unified Code of Corrections.4 The code provided a legislative mandate for a separate Department of Corrections (which, as we have seen, had come into being in 1970) with an Adult Division and a Juvenile Division each to be administered by an assistant director. The fact that the prison had become less of a peripheral institution and one that was now to be tied more closely to society’s core institutional system was recognized in the provision setting up an Adult Advisory Board and a Juvenile Advisory Board, each composed of nine persons with “demonstrated interest in and knowledge of adult and juvenile correctional work” to be appointed by the governor.5 Since its inception the Adult Advisory Board has been dominated by academic specialists like Norval Morris, Hans Mattick, and Tom Eynon.

  The code provided direct impetus for the bureaucratization of the new department. Provision was made for staff training and development, for a separate program of research and long-range planning, and for a grievance mechanism whereby the prisoners could complain of their institutional treatment. Most important was the requirement in several provisions that the department maintain written records.

  The Department shall maintain records of the examination, assignment, transfer, discipline of committed persons and what grievances, if any, are made in each of its institutions, facilities, and programs. The record shall contain the name of the persons involved, the time, date, place and purpose of the procedure, the decision and the basis therefore, and any review of the decision made.6

  The code went far in inaugurating a new relationship between prisoners and prison authorities. In the place of absolute authority and unreviewable discretion the new Unified Code of Corrections announced a more contractual, abstract, and legalistic relationship between the prisoners and their wardens. Various provisions made it clear that the prisoners were entitled to a certain standard of living conditions, medical care, disciplinary procedures and work opportunities. The code provided a rule of law to which prisoners could appeal the decisions of their immediate superiors. This amounted to a redefinition of the statuses of the institutional participants.

  The code states that the “Department shall promulgate Rules and Regulations in conformity with this Code.” Bensinger’s Springfield staff drafted a comprehensive volume of administrative regulations to implement the code provisions. Three meals a day and a mattress were to be provided for inmates in isolation. A three-man disciplinary committee was to replace the traditional authority of the captain to run the disciplinary court. Another committee took over the assignment captain’s role in making work assignments. The administrative regulations provided standards for censorship, allowed for access to law books, and prescribed conditions in isolation. The unprincipled and unreviewable discretion of the past was for the first time narrowed by rule making.

  While Bensinger participated in drafting the Unified Code of Corrections and supervised the writing of the Administrative Regulations, his administration was far from successful in implementing them. In part, this failure is attributable to Bensinger’s inexperience and the brevity of his tenure as director. While Bensinger went far in casting major policies for the department, he often deferred to the judgment of his wardens when it came to deciding whether, when, and how a particular reform could be implemented. Having no intimate experience with daily prison routine, the director of the Department of Corrections had no standard by which to judge whether a lockup was necessary, whether gang leaders were too dangerous to be left in the population, or whether employee morale was so low as to jeopardize a new program. Sensitive to the deeply imbedded resistance to change among large segments of the staff, Bensinger did not sweep out the old-line employees, who he sometimes feared might actively mobilize their resistance.

  By 1972, when the Administrative Regulations were completed (the code was formally passed in July), the familiar gap between formalized rules and working procedures became apparent. The rules were simply not followed. Employees in the mail office, for example, continued to operate much as they always had.7 In some instances the staff simply found strategies to circumvent the rules. Instead of providing an inmate a hearing within seventy-two hours of an alleged disciplinary violation, new forms of “pretrial detention” were developed at Stateville. In clear violation of the letter and spirit of the rules, inmates “under investigation” were placed indefinitely and without hearings in lockup.

  Thus, the first reform administration of Peter Bensinger created inexorable pressure toward bureaucratization. It did so by strictly limiting local autonomy through the strengthening of central authority and by establishing universalistic criteria against which administrative action could be evaluated. These developments did not all occur at once, nor were they implemented without considerable strains at the local level. The Bensinger reforms completed the undermining of the authoritarian system of personal dominance but did not replace it with a viable model of administration at the local level.

  The Separation of Administration from Custody

  Frustration had mounted continuously for Frank Pate since Ragen’s departure from the Department of Public Safety in 1965. First he had to contend with the activities of the Muslims and, beginning in 1969, with the rebellious Chicago gangs. Second, he had to contend with pressures emanating from the increasingly active and policy-oriented Springfield office. Pate resented the fact that Randolph had eliminated Stateville’s prerogative to transfer inmates at will to Menard, had discontinued the use of “pink slips” as a disciplinary mechanism for employees, had recognized the union, had permitted talking in the dining room, and had relaxed the dress code.

  Pate’s greatest frustration came from having to take into account outside forces sharply critical of Stateville. The once cozy relationship with the John Howard Association broke down as the leadership in that organization passed to more militant individuals. The academic community, minority groups, and, most important, the courts were attacking him. He was tired and disgusted after losing the Cooper case. Each victory stimulated more lawsuits. Each new attack seemed to threaten the traditional basis of his authority still further.

  The appointment of Bensinger as Director of the new Department of Corrections placed new strains on the warden’s role. Pate had been invited to participate in the 1969 task force. Having no more than a high school education and having spent most of his adult life at Stateville, it is not unlikely that he was uncomfortable in conference with the Yale-educated Bensinger and
with the highly educated treatment people like Leo Meyer, John Twomey, and Arthur Huffman (not to mention Meryl Alexander, Norval Morris, and Karl Menninger).

  Bensinger, anxious to establish his credibility as a “reformer” with the press and the minority community, pushed a whole series of reforms on Pate that violated “the way things had been done” at Stateville for decades. All of his reforms were unpalatable to Pate. To his closest aides and friends, Frank Pate admitted that he could no longer handle the job, and in the fall of 1970 he resigned.

  Director Bensinger chose John Twomey to become the new warden of the Stateville/Joliet complex. Twomey had come up through the system as a prison sociologist at Menard and had served Bensinger briefly as chief of program services for the new department. He was an “intellectual” in prison circles, holding a master’s degree and having completed all but his dissertation for the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Sociology at Southern Illinois University. At the time of his appointment he was thirty-two years old.

  While he was without a firm conceptual model for administering Stateville, Twomey did adhere roughly to a human relations model of formal organization. He believed that most problems that emerged in the prison were caused by failure in communication, and he stressed nothing so much as “talking out” problems. He believed that the problems of a prison were the problems of people. He interpreted the challenges to effective administration in terms of personal difficulties in “gaining acceptance,” “establishing his image,” and “maintaining credibility.” Perhaps there exists no more poignant illustration of Twomey’s management style than Bulletin no. 206, issued 14 December 1971.