Last night at the movie, the residents from E House walked out after 15 minutes of an 80 minute film on soccer. They damaged some of the projection equipment, but moved back peacefully to the cell house. The major says he is deeply disturbed by this incident and thinks it portends something much more serious in light of the weapons found in E House last week.
And with respect to the central office in Springfield (field notes, 30 September 1974):
[an administrator] said, “Sometimes I think that Springfield doesn’t want any of us here. Maybe they want to clean us out and replace us with their own people. [another administrator] agreed. “Maybe when they were sending us 30 trouble-makers from Pontiac in exchange for 30 of our more stable population, they were precipitating a situation where this place would blow up and they could use us as scapegoats in order to replace us. They would also be taking heat off their golden haired boy at Menard who has lost 17 inmates in the last two months on escapes.
The captains believe that they should be left alone to run the prison the way they knew how. Neither Springfield, nor counselors, nor do-gooders, nor John Howard, nor legal aid, nor the courts, in their opinion, know the slightest thing about how to run a maximum security prison.
Captain says that the Administration of Corrections has not become professionalized, but is pseudo-professionalized because they don’t know anything about corrections; they don’t know anything about institutions.
The old tradition bearers are quite smug in the belief that they are the only ones who really know how to “run” an institution. One needs to hear the oft-repeated phrase, “the old boss, he ran it,” fully to understand the commitment to a system of management where every inmate move was scrutinized for its ulterior (antiorganizational) motive, and where the elite was preoccupied with the task of always being one step ahead of the inmates.
The captains still define the prison in terms of the old ground rules. The assignment captain, for example, continues to operate according to the old strategy of trying to keep the “no good” inmates off balance, despite attempts to bureaucratize his office. For example, he tears up tickets of “troublemakers” who he thinks are merely going to the gym or to the library to “contact” a fellow conspirator, despite the fact that this could bring him and the Stateville administration into conflict with Springfield and the courts.
In the one year that he was warden, Joe Cannon reached a friendly accommodation with the captains and the old guard. In contrast with Twomey, who rarely ventured onto the prison yard, Cannon spent his first several months at Stateville “trying to get accepted.” Having been fired from two previous positions in corrections, Cannon was determined “to win the guards over to his side.” In his first few months of becoming acquainted with Stateville, Cannon lived at the prison, ate his meals with the guards in the employees’ dining room, and left the day-to-day running of the prison to Assistant Warden Revis.
Cannon worked every shift and every assignment. He did achieve a great deal of acceptance among the custody staff, particularly among the captains. If they had to live with an “outsider” in control of the institution, at least they preferred one humble about his abilities and ready to admit that he “had a lot to learn about running a joint.” Unlike Twomey, Cannon met several times weekly with his captains and allowed them the same kind of collegial and consultant role which they had enjoyed under Frank Pate. (The key difference was that the captains and the warden, in exercising their authority, were now more limited by the central office and the Administrative Regulations.)
While the warden may have been popular with his staff, to the Sielaff/Brierton administration it appeared that Cannon had been “co-opted” by the Ragenite subculture which they were determined to dissolve. Cannon’s removal from his position and his replacement by David Brierton sounded the death knell for both “the medical model” and for the power of the old Ragenites. Brierton was not concerned with popularity or acceptance because of his own sense of personal security and because of the security of his position with Springfield. He made it clear from the outset that he would do the accepting and rejecting. After his first day on the job, several old-time employees were comparing him with Warden Ragen. At the end of the first several months, more than half the department heads had resigned or retired. The chief guard took a transfer to Menard.
While the problem with John Twomey, in the eyes of the guard force, was lack of support, the problem with Brierton (although he is extremely popular among all ranks) is lack of empathy. While a Peter Bensinger or a Joe Cannon could be convinced, for example, that it was “impossible” to get the B house inmates out for showers or out on the yard because the cell house was short handed, Brierton (with eleven years of institutional experience) demanded to know the rationale for the scheduling of the shift and the justification for the assignment of officers. He has placed tremendous demands upon supervisory personnel, requiring that they exercise their authority in a situation that for so long had run by consensus and drift.
The bureaucratization of the prison has necessarily changed the captain’s role. The disciplinary captain, once invested with absolute authority to discipline an inmate, now is merely a voting member of a committee. Whereas once the captains could summarily suspend a guard for any reason, they now can only send a report to the Employee Review Board. The chief guard, once the eyes and ears of the warden, is now tied to his desk much of the day carrying out “bureaucratic bullshit.” The captains talk repeatedly of how their time and that of the lieutenants is being wasted on paper work, when they should be out in the back doing their “real job”—shaking down lines (searching inmates), and supervising cell houses and assignments.
But employee evaluations must be filled out quarterly. Line officers must be counseled before being disciplined. Captains and lieutenants have to sit on promotion committees, grievance hearings, inquiry boards, etc. Whereas they were once evaluated according to their ability to get information and “bust” (discipline) an inmate or for some heroic act demonstrating their fighting ability, the Brierton administration evaluates captains according to how well they handle their supervisory responsibilities, much of which involves expediting paper work.
The lieutenants became especially hostile toward the Twomey administration. The warden’s rescinding of their right to demand that inmates be taken to isolation struck at the heart of their fighting tradition. Within a two-year period, a half-dozen lieutenants resigned their jobs outright; all of the rest joined the union. In desperation over the deteriorating security situation, they accepted and even encouraged the appointment of several black lieutenants. The lieutenants felt, at the time, that they had “no support—no backing.” Repeatedly they urged the warden “to lock it up.” Their decisions were questioned and overruled by committees and by the warden himself.
Today there is a general feeling that the lieutenants are not what they once were. Several of the black lieutenants and a few of the white are seen by the others as permissive and weak. Quite recently a fight broke out in the guard hall between a white and a black lieutenant over the former’s handling of a black inmate. Like that of the captains, the lieutenants’ role has also been transformed. While they are still “policemen,” they are far more tied down to cell house duties than they were five years ago, when sergeants ran the cell houses.
There are limitations to the degree to which the guards can become bureaucratized. Although weakened, the old institutional ideology is still significant. Lieutenants and captains are still promoted out of the ranks of those closely conforming to the old military fighting tradition.
A riot or change in the political and juridical environments could once again promote some of the old guards into top administrative positions, thereby restoring the traditional type of organization. Furthermore, there is some question whether the limited training and education of captains, lieutenants, and other supervisors and middle managers will prevent them from mastering “management by objectives” and “zero-based
budgeting.” To date, there remain many snags in the organization. Some orders are still not carried out despite Brierton’s deadlines and follow-ups.
Racial Integration
According to the captains, not only have the inmates completely “gotten out of hand” but the employees have also “gone to hell.” They are disheartened at the policy of paying guards for “excused” absences and at the failure rigorously to enforce the employee dress code. It is a common complaint that “the guards look worse than the inmates.” In the minds of the top guards, the deterioration of the guard force is linked to the massive infusion of minority guards into the system. It is felt that an increase in narcotics trafficking and in absenteeism is attributable to this group of new recruits. In one captain’s opinion, “the new officers from Chicago aren’t worth a damn. Some are just in a daze, others don’t show up for work and others don’t want to work. If they’re criticized, they cop an attitude. They don’t want to take orders.”
Until 1963, only thirty blacks had ever been appointed to positions at Stateville-Joliet. The first black lieutenant (who subsequently became the first black captain) was not appointed until Twomey became warden. However, under pressure from inmates, civil rights groups, and government agents, 195 minority guards were hired in 1974. By 1975 approximately 44 percent of the Stateville guard force was black.8
Of the thirty-four black guards appointed in 1963, twenty terminated their employment that same year; six more left before the end of 1964, and only seven lasted two years or more (see table 18). Since 1963, the tenure of black guards on the job has, indeed, been very brief. While there are no comparable statistics on the turnover among white guards, it is the judgment of white and black guards alike that tenure for whites is much longer. Of a cohort of eighty-eight guards followed by Liebentritt in 1974, 66 percent of the blacks and 58 percent of the whites were gone by the end of six months. While recent Affirmative Action pressures may have slowed the turnover of black guards, there is strong support for the proposition that blacks and whites continue to be differentially assimilated into the organization.
In an attempt to understand the way minority guards are assimilated, we surveyed a sample of all guards who terminated their employment at Stateville between 1 July 1973 and 30 June 1974.9 The most obvious difference in the experience of black and white guard recruits is the significantly higher percentage of blacks who leave Stateville by discharge—61 percent as compared with 18 percent of the whites. This might suggest a differential recruiting process, with higher standards being applied to white applicants from the beginning and lower standards being applied to minority candidates. Although the Department of Corrections has sent recruitment trucks into minority areas of Chicago to recruit applicants for guard positions,10 none of the individuals in our sample was hired in this manner.
Within the six-month probationary period, the guard recruit can be terminated for any reason. The most common reasons for dismissal are: failure to come to work, failure to carry out orders, and “trafficking” with inmates. The first reason is perceived by administrators and top guards to be by far the most common. Of those men in our sample who were discharged, 60 percent of the whites and 47 percent of the blacks indicated that they, too, believed poor attendance to have been a factor contributing to their discharge.
Contrary to the opinion of the administrators and top guards, overall absenteeism for blacks, both those who have terminated their employment and those who are still employed, is lower than for whites (see table 19). On the other hand, blacks are more often docked (not paid) for their absences. This might be explained on the assumption that blacks less often call the prison to explain their absences or fail to cover themselves in some other way, or that superior officers are stricter in evaluating the validity of the minority guard’s excuse for his absence.
Of guards who have been discharged, absenteeism among whites seems to have been worse than among nonwhites (see table 19). Perhaps superior officers are more reluctant to discharge whites? Another explanation might be that a greater percentage of black guards are discharged for reasons other than absenteeism. Stateville lieutenants and captains in private are not sanguine about the performance of recent black guard recruits. They suspect that the higher rate of trafficking in contraband with inmates is attributable to the influx of minority employees hired out of the same Chicago neighborhoods from which inmates are drawn. They also object to what they describe as the “shuckin” and “jivin” that sometimes goes on between black guards and black inmates. There have also been several reports (to date unproven) that a few black guards are members of the same Chicago street gangs as the inmates.
The legacy of the Ragen tradition was primarily carried on by the eight captains and one major, the elite among the guards. Seven of the captains and the major are white; one captain is black. Their average length of employment is 12.4 years. Six were born and raised in southern Illinois, two in Central Illinois, and one (the black captain) in the Joliet area. The eight whites among this guard elite share a cultural affinity, a common ideology, and a lengthy service together—having risen through the ranks. They “fought together as lieutenants,” and often retell “war stories” about some particularly tough fight with a “no good son of a bitch.”
The captains and the long-time guards are profoundly conservative men. They view change in the prison as well as on the outside with apprehension. Both on the outside and on the inside, they find conspiracies forged by radicals and dissidents aimed against the forces of order. One guard captain I talked to believed that “the whole thing” (prison reform) was a liberal movement from the East and West coasts. He pointed out that, after the election, Governor Walker’s campaign manager went to the West coast to work for Bobby Seal. He then suggested that it was all related to the overthrow of the country.
While it would be incorrect to say that the captains are manifestly racist, they clearly are less comfortable with black employees than with whites. One of the captains remarked to me during a casual discussion, “These blacks will be the downfall of these United States.” A lieutenant said there is no discipline at Stateville anymore. He pointed to a list of officers on the 7:00 A.M.-3:00 P.M. shift and told me that out of 140 or so officers, more than 37 had terribly unsatisfactory attendance records—either having unexcused absences or unexcused lateness—and that the morale of the rest of the officers was severely under-mined by the fact that these men were subject to no disciplinary action whatsoever. Upon further questioning, the lieutenant admitted that these thirty-seven officers were almost all black—that the problem with the new officers corresponds to the recruitment of more urban blacks which began in the past several years.
Records of the Employee Review Board, the three-man committee that adjudicates infractions of the rules by guards, indicate a disproportionate number of black guards being disciplined and a disproportionate number being severely disciplined (by suspension). A survey of 127 cases that the board heard between 20 January 1975 and 14 April 1975 reveals that 83 of the guards involved were black and only 44 white. Of the 83 black guards processed by the board, 46 received suspensions, the most severe penalty. Of the 44 whites disciplined, only 12 were suspended. The only lieutenant to be suspended was black.
The kind of extreme racism that has been described in some other prisons has not been evident at Stateville. When we asked our respondents whether they had experienced “racial problems” on the job, 41 percent of the whites and 57 percent of the blacks answered affirmatively. For discharges, the percentages of affirmative responses were 60 and 59 percent respectively. Blacks who were discharged felt they had experienced racial discrimination no more frequently than blacks who resigned.
The striking difference between the white and black respondents is the group to which they attributed their racial problems. Of the sixteen blacks who reported experiencing racial problems, eleven named superior officers as a group responsible. Ten of the eleven whites experiencing racial problems named inma
tes as a group responsible, illuminating the familiar picture of racial and cultural conflict between a guard force dominated by whites and an 80 percent minority inmate population.
If we look at all the guard recruits who terminated their employment (for whatever reason) before their six-month certification, we find that 57.1 percent of the blacks but only 15.3 percent of the whites attributed their greatest difficulties to their relationship with superior officers. Several black recruits expressed an awareness that they departed from the stereotype of a “good prison guard.” Several blacks (as well as a few young white guards) reported consciously presenting themselves to the inmates in ways that would distinguish them from the traditional guard stereotype. They wore mod clothes, fancy shoes, and long hair, acted in an open and friendly way, chatted informally with inmates while on duty. This behavior brought guards into conflict with superiors, which, for several men, was “the real reason” why they were pressured to leave.
The picture which emerges is that of black guard recruits failing to meet the expectations of old-time and top-echelon guards or refusing to accept the definition of the situation prescribed by the elite. It is not surprising to find culture conflict in a situation where southern Illinois white guards dominate the higher ranks (8 of 9 captains and 17 of 23 lieutenants) and young Chicago blacks account for approximately 50 percent of the recruits.
Stateville- the Penitentiary in Mass Society Page 23