At almost every meeting there was time reserved for an attack upon the Springfield office. The problem, according to the participants, was that Springfield just didn’t understand what was involved in running a maximum security joint. None of the Springfield people had had experience in a place like Stateville. The demands being placed upon Stateville were said to be “unrealistic” and “naive.”
Like Twomey, Cannon possessed no “program” for Stateville. He had no strategy for reducing the violence or for improving morale. He saw his main task as “holding the place together” and “building morale” in the face of pressures from inmates, courts, and central office. He spoke of “setting a tone.” At one session Cannon explained to Brierton that he would wait before making many of the changes desired by Springfield until he had more than 50 percent of the staff with him. Brierton dryly responded by asking whether he would take a survey.
On 6 December 1974, Warden Cannon was abruptly reassigned to a position in the Department of Corrections Field Services. Brierton, still assistant director of the Department of Corrections, assumed direction of Stateville and told the staff that he expected to remain several months until the situation was stabilized. Within a month, however, he decided that the problems at Stateville were so great that they required his full-time attention, and he gave up his position as assistant director.
The thirty-seven-year-old Brierton had for several years been the “rising star” of the Illinois correctional system,17 having worked his way up from guard at the Cook County jail to become one of the most powerful and respected prison people in Illinois. Brierton’s first assignment in the state system was to oversee the construction and opening of the juvenile institution at Valley View, which soon emerged without question as the best youth institution in the state. From there, Bensinger tapped Brierton to rescue the juvenile penal facility at Sheridan, where a scandal had erupted over the use of thorazine in behavior control.18 In the course of the next year Brierton cleaned up Sheridan both by reducing the population and by instituting numerous concrete reforms. Thereafter, he discussed with Director Bensinger the possibility of managing Stateville or Pontiac. Before assigning Brierton that responsibility, the director arranged for him a six-month leave of absence at the Center for Criminal Studies at Harvard University Law School. There Brierton attended Lloyd Ohlin’s classes and furthered the education (B.A.) which he had received as a part-time student at Chicago State University.
It was difficult to assess the impact of the Brierton regime at the time I completed my fieldwork (February 1975), since he had only been at the institution three months. In that brief time six out of nine department heads resigned or were fired.19 Many more personnel shakeups appeared likely.20 Brierton immediately introduced sophisticated management techniques and demanded that his assistant wardens study and implement them. He moved, of course, with considerable support from Director Sielaff.
Brierton sought to develop a task-oriented administration, keyed to identifying problems and finding solutions. In a manner reminiscent of Ragen he began his administration with a complete physical rehabilitation of the prison. The cell houses and tunnels were painted, here and there with graphic designs. The long central table in the visiting room was replaced by individual tables. The employees’ dining room was remodeled.
No action is more indicative of his task and problem-solving orientation than the abolition of isolation in the fall of 1974, while he was assistant director of corrections. This decision stunned the Stateville custody force. They were convinced that discipline could not be maintained without isolation. By contrast, Brierton argued that throwing six inmates into a cramped cell, where it was likely that one or more would be beaten and raped, was not sound prison management. The changed rules provided that if an inmate broke a minor rule he would lose a privilege (telephone, yard, commissary). If an inmate made himself a serious threat to others and was found guilty at a disciplinary hearing, he would be placed in segregation for at least thirty days. All segregated inmates would be in single cells no different from normal cells. Television would be allowed. The effort was not to punish in order to preserve the moral order but to maintain control through restraint and social defense.
Brierton’s main emphasis was upon building a modern organization. The numerous meetings were discontinued. Instead of meeting with captains, Brierton met with department heads (food, medical, recreation, security, etc.), leaving the responsibility for meeting with the captains to the assistant warden in charge of operations.
There can be no doubt that Brierton’s taking over as warden of Stateville marked the end of the old-guard Ragenite power structure. The Ragenites are unlikely to have future input into policy making. The emphasis now is on staying ahead of the courts, on creating an organization which focuses responsibility and meets the due process demands imposed by law. The “fuck the courts” attitude expressed regularly at warden’s meetings in the Cannon administration has disappeared.
Brierton’s administrative and political skills have drawn praise from inmates, union leaders, Ragenites, reformers, and many of the treatment staff (although the abandonment of the medical model has soured some). Whether Brierton can reassert staff control while consolidating the legal and symbolic reforms of the past five years is a crucial issue that will require further research in the years to come.
Civilianization of the Prison
There have been three significant influxes of civilians into the Stateville organization since 1969: administrators, teachers and counselors, and clerical workers. Noncustodial roles at the Joliet prisons never exceeded 15 percent of the total employees until 1970, when the percentage doubled to 30 percent. By 1975, the figure was almost 40 percent. The introduction of so many civilians into Stateville helped make the organization more differentiated, more divided, and more segmented. The civilian teachers, counselors, and administrators brought values and attitudes from liberal colleges and universities and contributed to a far less parochial attitude than existed a half dozen years before.
Until the time Bensinger took over as director of the Department of Corrections, there had never been a school system at Stateville where the instructors were civilians. The school system had been financed out of the inmate benefit fund, which was the repository for interest earned on inmates’ savings and for profits from the inmate commissary. Bensinger ended the school system’s reliance on that source by funding it out of general revenue. Under Sielaff, all the schools within Illinois prisons were organized into a school district under the authority of a governor-appointed school board and administered like any other school district in the state.
Ironically, the grade school and high school, even with civilian teachers, has never achieved the number of students it had before the civilian teachers were hired. In part this can be explained by the frequent lockups and the general rise in disruptiveness. Furthermore, the comparative value of being assigned as a student to the school (a nonpaying job) has diminished since the onerous assignments have either been eliminated (like the coal pile) or made less unpleasant.
The arrival of some half-dozen civilian schoolteachers (and in 1975 of an ex-convict administrator of the high school) was not greeted with pleasure by the custody force. Early in the Twomey administration a young teacher entered into a shoving contest with the assignment captain when the latter refused to accept his recommendation to transfer an inmate to the school. The incident resulted in the filing of a battery charge (later dropped) against the captain and a month’s suspension (later reduced to two days). As the number of young civilian teachers has grown, so has the criticism that they are responsible for carrying drugs and other contraband into the prison. To some degree the school has come to be seen as a subversive enclave inside the walls.
Nor has the arrival of the civilian teachers met the whole-hearted approval of the inmates. The reform movement was accompanied by an emphasis upon delivery of services to inmates (redefined as clients or residents) by professionals. Thi
s has served to eliminate inmates from some of the most self-respecting work in the prison—teaching for example. While the ideology of reform has promoted the moral status of the inmate, the operationalization of reform has narrowed the legitimate opportunities built into the role of the inmate.
The Sielaff administration, soon after it took office, eliminated all inmate clerical positions in the administration building. The reform ideology held that inmates should be clients, not servants.21 According to this ideology, only “professionals” should have access to records. The removal of all inmate clerks required the hiring of a great number of civilian secretaries.
One key consequence of this development has been the breakdown of informal communications between inmates and staff. Until 1973, inmate clerks and “runners” served as intermediaries between staff and the general inmate population, articulating the concerns of the inmate population to the administrators and vice versa. The distance between the administration and the inmates has greatly expanded. Revis recalls that when he was assistant warden under Frank Pate, he and the warden knew the majority of the inmates by name. The reputation of an inmate followed him for years within the institution. Today none of the top administrators comes into contact with any particular inmates or even with inmates’ names, except as a result of a grievance or a lawsuit. The warden’s role has reverted to a bureaucratic office.
Counselors22 were introduced at Stateville and other Illinois prisons in 1970 by Bensinger, who was publicly committed to reforming a prison system that had changed only marginally in decades. The establishment of the counseling program is best understood for its symbolic impact. The introduction of college-educated civilian counselors into the intensely criticized prison had the advantage of constituting a highly visible change that could be effected immediately. Indeed, the John Howard Association had consistently decried the absence of a counseling program as a major weakness in the Illinois prisons. In a September 1968 report the association said:
As far as it is known, Illinois is the only major state in the country where formal counselling services are relatively non-existent. . . . Without citing specific states, it can be conservatively stated that the prisons and reformatories in the larger states have a minimum of ten counsellors (excluding psychologists and psychiatrists). The Illinois Penitentiary System has only several where several dozen are needed.
Like the director of corrections himself, the counselors were outsiders to the prison, having been chosen on the basis of academic achievement rather than practical experience. Assistant Warden Revis argued vigorously that the counselors should be recruited from the ranks of the correctional officers and that further career opportunities for counselors should exist back in the custody ranks. His suggestion was not followed.
Counselors were not recruited from custodial ranks, nor were any of the original group either social workers or psychologists. They were drawn from diverse backgrounds. Several had recently graduated from college with a liberal arts education. Two were college professors between jobs. Only a few had had any experience in any kind of counseling. The state personnel office offered a general examination (used in filling more than one hundred different civil service positions) to qualify applicants for the job. The speed with which the program was formulated and the counselors hired left specific definition of job responsibilities to be formulated at the local level.
While the counselors’ role was never specifically defined at the local level either, the original counselors assumed that their task was “to rehabilitate” or, at least, to help inmates by a mixture of good counsel, humane respect, psychoanalytic insight, and general friendship. In a December 1970 in-house newsletter, the special counselor assigned to the warden’s staff wrote:
Nevertheless, there is a distinction between counseling with one “1” which is Webster’s definition of counsel or guidance, and between counselling with two “1’s” which is therapeutic counselling and communication between a psychotherapist and counsellee. The latter term refers to in-depth consideration of a man’s personal, emotional problems that frequently led to his criminal offense and could easily prevent him from readjustment in the free community after parole or discharge. Professionally speaking, we are trained by education and experience to assist a man with advice or more importantly and lastingly, with therapy.
The Stateville counselors made claim to a professional role similar to that of the prison psychiatrist and to those psychologists and social workers who come into the institution on a contractual basis to provide group therapy. In the first two years of their experience, several of the counselors ran therapy groups, and several of the others picked out particular inmates with whom to work closely on a one-to-one level.
But the diffuseness of the role made it inevitable that counselors would become involved in a struggle over administrative policies. The counselors did not sit back and wait for voluntary requests for counseling sessions. Nor did they refuse to carry out inmate requests for assistance that did not involve therapy. Unlike the prison psychiatrist and contractual psychologists, they became involved in the day-to-day problems, requests, and demands of prisoners.
Anxious to establish and maintain their credibility with the prisoners, the counselors intervened to support inmates in whatever problems they were having with the guards and administration. Why was a certain inmate turned down for the minimum security unit? Why had inmate Smith been denied a cell transfer? Why couldn’t inmate Jones receive a publication or a special visit? This ombudsman-like role was complicated by the fact that Stateville in 1970 was a prebureaucratic organization which relied upon traditional authority. Written rules were often hard to find or ambiguous. Tradition compelled decisions that could not be rationalized to counselors or inmates.
Inmates were interested in the counselors only insofar as the counselors could be of use to them. They were skeptical about therapeutic counseling, both because of the stigma attached to “seeing the bug doctor” and because of their belief that the counselors were not qualified to give any real therapeutic assistance. In any case, the inmates were more interested in enlisting the counselors as advocates than as therapists. Would the counselors stand up against the abuses that were occurring with the prison or would they be coopted by the “po-lice” like the other freemen within the prison regime? This kind of question placed the counselors under great pressure to support the inmates if their credibility was to be maintained.
For the custodial force, the counselors symbolized the crumbling of the old order. Up to 1970 almost no outsiders had penetrated Stateville’s walls. The administrative positions were dominated by former guards who had worked their way up the ranks. Before he left Stateville, Ragen had predicted to his protégés that soon the sociologists were going to run the prisons. The intrusion of the counselors into Stateville’s closed world was, therefore, traumatic because of the perceived threat they posed to the ultimate control of the organization.
The Department of Corrections’ new administrative regulations called for the participation of counselors on both the disciplinary and assignment committees, which meant they entered into decisions that formerly had been carried out solely by the senior captain. The new committee structure sometimes degenerated into bitter feuding between the two custodial members on the one hand and the counselor on the other. In the spring of 1972, one of the younger counselors wrote a letter to the warden alleging brutality on the part of the senior captain in subduing a belligerent inmate at the disciplinary hearing. For the old guards, the counselors were like a fifth column given license to operate inside the walls. This view of the counselors is indicated in many of the complaints and demands made by the union in the tumultuous years between 1970 and 1975. The following is item 10 of the minutes of a union meeting held in June 1971 in the wake of the ball diamond melee in which several guards were injured:
counsellors: not taking care of inmate requests, interfering in officers duties, abusing special letter privilege etc.
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p; The counselors introduced a moral division of labor. The fact that they were hired to carry out “clean work” while the guards continued to be responsible for a great deal of “dirty work” generated further tension and conflict. Before the counselors’ arrival, guards, particularly lieutenants, had carried out many favors for inmates, thereby giving moral balance to their role. While the guard might “write up” an inmate for a rule infraction, he could also act the “good Joe” by later “forgiving the inmate,” checking on his parole date, “putting him in” for the minimum security unit, or conveying a message to his family. These were all tasks that the counselors took over, thereby narrowing the guard’s role to that of a disciplinarian. Consequently, the guard’s ability to manipulate a “reward system” in exchange for inmate conformity to rules and regulations was sharply attenuated. It became a common complaint of guards that “the counselors don’t do anything that we didn’t do.” The Catholic chaplain was so concerned over the potential scope of the counselors’ role that he submitted a proposal for the chaplaincy’s abolition and the contractual hire of chaplains only for religious services.
The counselors opposed custody generally and supported inmates in whatever problems they encountered with the prison bureaucracy. Inmates deluged counselors with requests for information on their time served and time of release, transfer to minimum security, permission for special letters and visits, etc. Where one counselor was unsuccessful, inmates went to another with the same request.
The counselors could not possibly satisfy the inmate requests, both because of lack of manpower and lack of line authority. Yet inmates were quick to interpret failure as lack of sincerity. As the inmates began to complain that “the counselors can’t do nothing for you,” the counselors became more committed to an advocate role, all the more intensely supporting inmate definitions of the situation, sometimes in the vocabulary of political, social, and economic protest.
Stateville- the Penitentiary in Mass Society Page 12