The lack of concrete line authority did not surface as an issue for the counselors. Instead, they tended to view their weakness, as did the inmates, in the context of an ideological and moral struggle. Their frustration intensified. From the outset, their participation on the prison disciplinary committee, which adjudicated innocence and guilt on rule infractions and determined how much time was to be spent in the “hole,” was a focal issue for the counselors. This assignment epitomized what they saw as a fundamental contradiction in their role. How could they earn the trust of an inmate necessary to counsel him if they were linked to the despised disciplinary process? Repeated requests to be relieved from their rotating participation on the committee were denied. Warden Twomey argued that security was the first responsibility of all personnel and that the counselor’s relationship with the inmate should be like a stern father with his son.
In May of 1972 the situation came to a head when the counselors revolted over what they felt was an illegal and unconscionable absence of due process afforded inmates at disciplinary proceedings. Basing their argument both on the Department of Corrections’ own administrative regulations and on constitutional doctrine, the counselors addressed a petition first to the assistant warden, and then to the warden and the director, indicating their intention to “dissent on principle” from all future disciplinary hearings. The conflict did not focus on the issue of whether a therapeutic role should include participation in what was arguably an essentially custodial matter, but broadened to question the very legitimacy of the disciplinary process itself.
Director Bensinger responded to the revolt by coming to Stateville and, in the presence of Warden Twomey, asked each counselor if he intended to dissent at all disciplinary proceedings. Fearful of losing their jobs and demoralized by lack of support from any quarter, the counselors retracted their petition. Subsequently, the administration fired two young probationary counselors (one of whom was the only black), who were leaders in the counselors’ revolt.
Convinced that the administration had sold out to custody, the counselors retreated into psychological alienation and physical isolation in their common office within the administration building. What ensued was a passive revolt against the organization. Some of the counselors now prided themselves on being able to pass an entire day at work without moving from their desks and without engaging in a single work task. The most cynical and sarcastic of them became the group’s informal leaders. Counselors who continued to see their “caseloads” and who attempted to carry out therapy were ridiculed by their colleagues. Work slowdowns were sometimes carried out by functioning with exaggerated conformity to regulations.
The organization responded with more regulations and greater supervision. Counselors were now required to submit records originally intended as counseling instruments to their supervisor as a check on the amount of work being done. One counselor noted to me at the time, “What we do barely passes for work.”
The work which was prescribed was identical to the “go for” tasks originally requested of the counselors by the inmates. The administration now told the counselors that they were responsible for checking on an inmate’s time and for reviewing requests for transfers to minimum security or to another institutional assignment. They were given authority to approve special letters, special visits, and, later, emergency telephone calls. Such tasks were performed with resignation, counselors believing this work to be beneath what should be required of “professionals.”
In addition to performing the “go for” tasks, the counselors over the course of the Bensinger administration gradually became more integrated into the administrative structure. The new regulations called for counselor participation on numerous committees, e.g., literary, grievance, furlough, and orientation. Furthermore, the counselors began to be called in to take over other bureaucratic jobs when manpower was needed. If the counselors “weren’t doing anything” as was believed by many of the administrators, at least they could help with the paper work. The transfer of one counselor in the fall of 1974 to full-time assistance on gathering statistics for the affirmative action officer was indicative of the low administration regard for the counselors’ role.
When David Brierton became warden in December 1974, the counselors—as part of the move to abandon the medical model—were redesignated “caseworkers.” Their shifts were staggered, their offices moved to individual cells in each cell house. Their subculture was broken up. The new warden admitted that, while it was not precisely clear what duties the counselors would have, their role would evolve out of face-to-face interaction in the cell house. What had begun as a symbolic statement to the outside society about commitment to prison reform was thereby transformed into a symbolic statement to the inside community about administration commitment to reform. The individual counselor still remained outside of the central chain of command and without “professional” duties and responsibilities. Cynicism remained high as did constant talk about finding better jobs.
The greatest impact which the counselors have had at Stateville has been indirect and diffuse. The presence of college-educated civilians who have continuous contact with inmates has contributed to the amelioration of some flagrant abuses of the past. With the counselors sitting on committees and freely roaming about the prison, top custody officials had to be prepared to justify decisions for which five years ago they could not have been held accountable.
Additionally, the counselors’ academic skills have slowly brought them a certain degree of both informal and formal respect and influence. As the courts have escalated counselors’ demands for written justification for decisions and greater accountability at all levels, guards have placed more reliance on them. One counselor has seen his influence on the grievance review board grow as he has been relied upon by custodial members who worry that their decisions might be reversed higher up if properly articulated rationales for their decisions are not given.
Formalization Prisoner-Staff Relationships
The civilianization of the prison has been gaining momentum since 1970. The old inmate positions of clerks and runners in the administration building have been eliminated. The fluid communication channels that for decades linked the higher staff to the prisoners no longer exist. Increasingly the communication which does take place between the administrative elite and the general population is formalistic and bureaucratic. The relationship between staff and inmates has become more contractual, impersonal, and abstract.23 The grievance procedure, begun by Bensinger and expanded under Sielaff, is the best evidence of this new relationship.
A grievance procedure is prescribed by the Unified Code of Corrections and implemented by the Administrative Regulations. Inmates under this procedure may lodge formal complaint about any aspect of prison life. The complaint must be investigated and answered in writing within ten days. This does not mean that an inmate will necessarily be satisfied. I found only 10 percent of a sample (of 100) of 1974 first-line grievances that could be considered as having resulted in even partial relief for the inmate. The point is not that inmates get what they ask for but that the procedure recognizes that the staff can be held accountable. The grievance procedure assumes legitimate grievances by inmates and weighs their complaints against formal and impersonal rules. In place of an informal, arbitrary, particularistic, discretionary system, the grievance mechanism supplies formalized and universalistic standards against which the legality of decisions can be measured.
As inmates have become familiar with the mechanism, they have filed more grievances; 48.7 per month in 1972 and approximately 61.5 per month in 1973 and 1974. It is well worth noting that the extension of more substantive and procedural rights to inmates has not reduced grievances or lawsuits. Indeed, just the opposite has occurred. Each inmate victory has stimulated new demands. Where an inmate was previously satisfied to bring his request to the attention of the warden, today inmates routinely appeal as far as they can and send “complimentary copies” to the director, the governor
, and special interest groups.24
Until early 1975, the first stage of the grievance procedure was handled by a “special counselor.” The second stage of the procedure called for a hearing de novo before a three-man Inquiry Board. Neither the grievance counselor nor the Inquiry Board had the authority to dismiss or throw out a meritless complaint. Any action by anyone in the prison was grievable. Every grievance had to be answered and every appeal had to be heard. This, of course, placed a large strain on administrative resources. While such a procedure may have been unwieldy, it served to create a dialogue between staff and inmates at a very formal level. The inmate no longer had to rely upon the whim of some guard to communicate his problem to the relevant administrative actor.25
If the inmate is not satisfied with the decision of the Inquiry Board, he can appeal to the Administrative Review Board in Springfield. This three-man board is chaired by one of the assistant directors. One of the other members is a Department of Corrections “prisoner’s advocate” while the third member is an outside interested party, considered a reformer by the inmates.26 The Administrative Review Board, which meets monthly at each institution often affords the appellant another hearing de novo.27
The setting up of the Administrative Review Board was the central office’s attempt to establish credibility with the inmates. It also inspired considerable antagonism from the local administrators who felt that “they are trying to run it from Springfield.” More than any other mechanism, the board made it clear that local autonomy was a thing of the past.
The first chairman of the Administrative Review Board saw in the mechanism a device to enforce institutional conformity to departmental regulations. Much as the exclusionary rule “punishes” the police by releasing criminals they “know” to be guilty, the board has released “known troublemakers” from segregation (and other disguised punitive assignments) where the institution did not comply with the rules in affording the “known trouble-maker” a hearing or in basing their decision on solid factual evidence.
Conclusion: Bureaucratization and Mass Society
The erosion of local autonomy, the professionalization of administration, and the proliferation of administrative tasks and organizational roles contributed to Stateville’s transformation to a rational-legal bureaucracy. All three of these developments are related to the prison’s changing place in mass society. A politicized environment of the late 1960s, public opinion, court decisions, and media attention created pressures which required a professionalized administration and centralized authority. The old-time Ragen holdovers at Stateville could not manage the demands made by intellectuals, media, politicians, militant groups, and inmates themselves. Nor did they have the bureaucratic skills required to bring the prison into line with certain judicial decisions.
Under the first reform administration of Peter Bensinger, bureaucratization increased dramatically. The tremendous growth of the central office accelerated the trend toward greater and greater accountability of local administrators to the director of the Department of Corrections and his staff. The wardens were reduced in authority and power to middle managers. The central office was responsible for the drafting of the Unified Code of Corrections and the Administrative Regulations. These bodies of law applied equally to all the Illinois prisons and provided definitive standards against which administrative action at the local level could be evaluated.
The bureaucratization of the Illinois prison system did not in itself lead directly to the bureaucratization of each prison administration. Warden Twomey, at Stateville, faced the problem of trying to institute vague reforms in the absence of clear administrative strategies. There seemed to be no way other than moral persuasion to change the behavior of the staff so that they would treat the inmates with dignity and respect. Since the reforms took on ideological overtones and threatened the moral order of the old Ragenite world, it could only be expected that both the spirit and letter of reform would be resisted with intransigence.
But while Warden Twomey held a different ideology from that of the Ragenites, he did not necessarily hold a different view of administration. Like his predecessor Frank Pate, he was unable to make the change from patriarchal to bureaucratic administration. Twomey had been trained as a treatment specialist and not as a modern public administrator. When he did attempt to organize his own office bureaucratically (by withdrawing from the traditional duties of the warden of the yard), he met resistance and suffered loss of prestige.
The crisis in control that enveloped Stateville between 1970 and 1975 (to be discussed more fully in chapter 6) threatened to overwhelm the prison because the advocates of the rehabilitative ideology, first John Twomey and then Joseph Cannon, were unable to build an administration which defined duties and obligations, focused responsibility, and rationalized its procedures. The administrations of these two wardens were characterized by defensiveness and drift. Time and again the situation became explosive. What became increasingly clear was that, under current conditions, a maximum security prison could not meet the demands of prisoners, interest groups, and courts and maintain control at the same time without a fundamentally different type of administration—a rational-legal bureaucracy.
The Sielaff administration stressed bureaucratization rather than rehabilitation as the primary organization goal, at least in the short run. The size of the central office and its attraction of administrative professionals went well beyond the administration of Director Bensinger. From the outset, Sielaff and Brierton stressed management by objectives, zero-based budgeting, and tables of organization. Brierton went from prison to prison, as did other of the top departmental administrators, in order to conduct seminars on these management techniques for the staff.
When Brierton finally decided to take over the management of Stateville himself, he brought to the prison a commitment to scientific management rather than to any correctional ideology. This enabled him initially to maintain good relations with all of the prison’s segments. Brierton is neither in favor of nor opposed to rehabilitation programs. His primary commitment is to running a safe, clean, program-oriented institution which functions smoothly on a day-to-day basis and that is not in violation of code provisions, Administrative Regulations, or court orders.
Brierton’s whole management technique contributes to the demystification of the prison. He has deemphasized the need to punish prisoners for violation of rules, while focusing on the need to restrain those who can be shown to be a threat to institutional security. He is not committed to a particular standard of living that prisoners “deserve.” That is a matter for the courts and the legislature.
To be sure, the bureaucratization and professionalization of the prison has not reached its limits. While a few college graduates are present among the guard force, the great majority of employees are poorly educated and weakly integrated into the bureaucratic structure. The greatest obstacle to the emergence of a period of restoration under Brierton is the traditional task orientation and lack of specialized expertise of the staff. There has in the past been a strong tendency toward cooptation of the new professionals on the staff by the old Ragenites. Some new staff members, anxious to earn acceptance, have been led to accept the long-term employees’ definition of the situation. There is sharp collegial pressure to be seen as realistic, tough, and pragmatic.
The professional administrators identify with the inmates far less than do the counselors and teachers, whose roles are constructed around providing services to their inmate-clients. The professionalization of the administration has not resulted in a monolithic group of “reformers” committed to “treatment” on the one hand, and a monolithic group committed to “punishment” on the other.
Brierton has brought a new definition of administration to the prison. He stresses efficient and emotionally detached management. He has attempted to remove the affect attached to handling inmates. Whether this type of detached bureaucratic administration will ultimately be successful in a people-processing institutio
n may be the crucial question facing corrections in the years ahead.
5
Intrusion of the Legal System and Interest Groups
[T]he view once held that an inmate is a mere slave is now totally rejected. . . . Liberty and custody are not wholly exclusive concepts.
Miller v. Twomey, Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
From 1970 to 1975 the prison’s boundaries became increasingly permeable to juridical norms, government agents, private interest groups, and the press. The warden no longer dominated relationships with the outside. After 1970, relationships developed between outside forces and each segment of the prison organization—administrators, guards, and inmates—greatly complicating administration and adding substantially to potential conflict.
The broad legal reforms of the sixties undermined traditional authority in mental hospitals, schools, and the military, as well as prisons. The extension of constitutional rights to the heretofore marginal inhabitants of these institutions evidenced the “greater sensitivity of society’s elite for the masses.” Fuller participation of all segments of society in such an important central institutional system as the courts is a specific instance of the unfolding of mass society as analyzed by Edward Shils.
The decline of the “hands off” doctrine1 and the intrusion of the federal courts required a rational decison-making process based upon uniform rules, formal decision mechanisms, and ascertainable criteria. The courts brought to bear outside pressure to bureaucratize the prison2 in the same way that the money economy had provided the impetus for the rationalization of private enterprise in Max Weber’s Germany. Liberalized court procedures3 and the extension of the rule of law into the prison also served to raise inmate expectations as to the status and standard of living to which they are entitled. Such expectations have contributed to the proliferation of lawsuits at the same time that an increasing number of prisoners’ rights have been validated.
Stateville- the Penitentiary in Mass Society Page 13