Finally, the first two reform regimes failed to maintain control. The number of attacks upon guards and inmates greatly increased. In addition to individual acts of violence there were also many instances of collective violence, including strikes, riots, gang fights, and the seizure of hostages. Having no other strategy to maintain control, the reform regimes periodically reverted to measures even more repressive than those of previous decades. In the years 1970–75 the greatest percentage of inmates were placed in isolation and segregation in Stateville’s history. Conditions in the maximum security Special Program Unit deteriorated to a level of violence and destruction beyond anything previously seen in Illinois.
Administrators attributed the crisis in control to the liberalized court decisions as well as to the power of the supergangs. I have argued that the substance of court decisions themselves did not cause the crisis in control, although they did heighten inmate expectations and stimulate protest.
The most important impact of the penetration of juridical norms was to bring to bear outside pressure upon the Stateville administration to bureaucratize. The tension between the rehabilitative ideal, which prescribed the individualization of treatment, and the rule of law, which demanded universalistic criteria of decision making, was decades ago observed by Weber. The transfer of power from the patriarchal regime of Warden Pate to the professional regimes of Wardens Twomey and Cannon did not automatically transform the administration into a rational-legal bureaucracy. The reform regimes never met the demands for rational and visible decision making which were made by the courts and the department’s own central office.
The reform administrations failed to develop an organization capable of maintaining control or meeting basic demands for services. They also failed to meet the demands of the legal system for visible and rational decision making or to live up to their own reform rhetoric in the opinion of various outside interest groups. And they failed to meet the crucial challenge to order and security posed by the Chicago supergangs.
After 1970 the inmate social system was dominated by four Chicago street gangs which imported their organizational structures, ideologies, and symbol systems from the streets. The very emergence of these minority “supergangs” in Chicago can be accounted for by a new relationship between secular and religious institutions and traditional youth gangs. Beginning in the early 1960s the federal government, private foundations, universities, and established churches redefined youth gangs and their leaders as legitimate indigenous grassroots organizations which spoke in the interest of the minority community. Through publicity, sizable grants, and technical assistance (as well as substantial police attention) these traditional youth gangs evolved into large proto-politicized supergangs. This transition of traditional gang boys into a potential political force was not acceptable to the political and law enforcement interests in Chicago (or to their spokesmen in Congress), and a concerted law enforcement drive against the gangs was pursued after 1968. One consequence was the massive infusion of members of the Black P Stone Nation, Disciples, Vice Lords, and Latin Kings into the state prisons.
The young gang members had assimilated a justificatory vocabulary as well as a set of rising expectations as they were growing up in the Chicago ghettos during the 1960s. The old prison reward system, which promised better jobs and the opportunity to score for “hooch,” coffee, and extra food, was no longer compelling. Unlike the Muslims, the gang members had no specific issues and no concrete agenda. They brought to the prison diffuse goals and a general attitude of lawlessness and rebelliousness. The small minority of white inmates left at Stateville found themselves in grave danger, as did those blacks who were not affiliated with one of the gangs. Increasingly, inmates interrelated as blocks. For a while, the gang leaders were the organization’s most stabilizing force as they struggled to reach an accommodation with one another and with the administration.
In exchange for using their services to keep things cool, the leaders continually demanded formal recognition and deference from the prison authorities. On this issue the staff was divided sharply. Lower-ranking guards and civilians found it necessary to defer to the gang leadership in order to meet their goals. The top administrators remained far more reluctant to share their power with prisoner leaders although, to be sure, certain concessions were exacted. Finally, the gangs could not be controlled. General lockups occurred in 1971, 1972, and 1973; the third occasioned by an inter-gang melee between the Black P Stones and the Disciples. In September 1973 hostages were seized at Stateville and in April 1975 hostages were seized at the Joliet prison.
The rise of professionalism, the intrusion of the courts, and the emergence of unified blocks among the inmates all contributed to a crisis in morale among the custodial staff. Guards were afraid to come to work. Rumors of riots and killings reverberated through the shifts. Many guards followed a strategy of withdrawing from the disciplinary process altogether.
Afraid for their safety and no longer in “awe” of a charismatic leader, the guards began to turn toward the union to give voice to their interests. The union had earlier begun to organize, despite Pate’s protestations, under the leadership of Ross Randolph, Ragen’s successor as director of public safety. The crisis in control occasioned by the gangs, and the rise of professionals, from whom the guards were alienated, made the union all the more appealing. The small local affiliated with a national union, which provided professional expertise and assistance during a period when it was scoring great organizational successes statewide and nationally in agencies throughout the public sector. In 1973, the new Democratic governor (Walker) fulfilled his campaign pledge to support collective bargaining in the public sector; the union had become a major force in Illinois prisons.
At the local level, the union continually demanded more safety and security. After the first guard in thirty years was killed at Stateville in January 1973, the local staged a walkout, taking almost the entire rank and file with them. The spirit of the trade union movement necessarily is in conflict with the paramilitary organization and esprit de corps that had characterized the custody staff for decades. Guards objected to the arbitrary and capricious actions of their superiors and found institutional mechanisms to ensure that they were provided with due process in charges brought against them. These changes greatly weakened the authority of the higher-echelon custody staff.
The custody staff also became increasingly heterogeneous under the combined pressures of minority groups and government Affirmative Action. By 1975, almost 50 percent of the guard force was black or Latino. The minority guards were far more empathic with the plight of the minority inmates and often found themselves alienated from the southern Illinois white guards who occupied almost all the top positions. This tension represented one more strain in an organization that was highly fragmented, factionalized, and conflict-ridden.
The years 1925–70 demonstrated the historical limits of the authoritarian system of personal dominance that depended upon the peripheral position of the prison and its inmates vis-à-vis the central institutional and value systems of society. The years 1970–75 demonstrated the incompatibility of the rehabilitative ideal and the human relations model of management with the functional requisites of maintaining control in maximum security prisons and with the demands of the courts for rational and visible decision making.
The Brierton regime suggests a fifth stage, one of restoration, in Stateville’s history. The warden himself, a former chief guard of the Cook County Jail, is a physically imposing, charismatic figure. The early success of his leadership underscores the point that the maximum security prison functionally requires an imperatively coordinated administration.
Brierton has strengthened security, improved services, and rebuilt the morale of the guard staff. In the first six months of his regime he emphasized the physical reconstruction of the prison. He closed up tunnels, sealed the tiers with iron bars, placed television cameras along the cell house walls, hung tear gas cannisters from the ceili
ngs, and instituted serious riot training. He rejected the rehabilitative ideal and the human relations model of management in favor of a highly rational, problem-oriented “corporate” model of management which is characterized as professional, detached, and cost-conscious.
The new warden has stressed the need to provide basic services through regularized procedures and has deemphasized the concern with redefinition of the inmate’s status. On the other hand, Brierton has committed himself to justice; each prisoner should receive the treatment and opportunities commensurate with law and to which he is entitled. Each month the warden personally speaks to every inmate in the prison on his “call line” and provides a prompt written reply to every inquiry or grievance. He demands the same formal responsiveness of his staff. Written records have proliferated. Each time an inmate showers, the event is documented, as is every contact between a counselor and his client. Brierton has thus taken the initiative in attempting to fully bureaucratize the prison. If he is successful and can re-establish control at the same time as expanding basic services and programmatic opportunities, all without jeopardizing due process, Stateville is sure to reemerge in the next several years as a leading model of prison administration for the nation.
There are limits, however, to the degree to which the corporate model can implement a new equilibrium. The most important obstacle is resources. Will the legislature, in the face of fiscal crisis and an expanding prisoner population, provide the resources necessary to meet the needs of basic services, adequate staff, and increased security?
There may also be limits to a corporate bureaucracy’s ability to be responsive to prisoner problems and needs. More prisoner complaints are being heard and “responded to,” but merely because the rules have become concrete and impartial, there is no assurance that the prisoners’ own conception of substantive justice will not collide with the “formalism” and “cool matter of factness” of bureaucratic administration. It is possible that the expectations engendered by the two previous reform administrations and by numerous interested parties on the outside, as well as by the courts, have created expectations that cannot be satisfied by the corporate model. Will the prisoners any longer accept a safe prison with regularized procedures, better food, regular yard time, and various (limited) programmatic opportunities? Both inmate material expectations and demands for representation in decision making may exceed the capacity of the system to provide solutions.
Third, there is potential for conflict with the media, private interest groups, and reformers. In developing the corporate model Brierton has attempted to maintain a low profile but he has already met sporadic criticism. Some reformers completely reject such security techniques as television surveillance of the cells. There are sure to be claims that Brierton is creating an Orwellian nightmare. The rehabilitative ideal still has considerable vitality among representatives of the media, reformers and academic specialists.
Related to potential criticism from reformers is a conflict over the guard’s future role. Reformers cling to the idea that the guard’s role can evolve into that of a quasi counselor. Brierton’s system demands that the guard be a detached security specialist infused with an esprit de corps within a paramilitary regime. The union professional leadership is opposed to the paramilitary model. The Department of Corrections’ central office itself does not seem to have moved to implement the security specialist guard role precisely because of ambivalence about completely abandoning the guard-as-counselor model.
There is the question of personnel. Can Brierton shape the kind of bureaucratic regime which he advocates with the staff which he has inherited? It is true that there has been a wholesale shake-up of staff since he became warden, yet the professional skills, particularly of management and budget, are clearly lacking except for the few very top administrative positions. The rest of the Illinois maximum security prisons are lagging far behind Stateville in becoming bureaucratized. At the Joliet prison (now under separate administration), a former guard captain without a college education and without sophisticated management skills has recently been elevated to warden. Will a change in political administrations or a reduced budget or the departure of Brierton mean that Stateville will slip back to where it was between 1970 and 1975 or earlier?
The restorational regime is also highly vulnerable to changes in the relationship of the prison to the political environment. The 1976 elections will see a change of governor in Illinois and perhaps a return to a more partisan style of administration. The Ragen legacy was a prison system well insulated from partisan politics, but that tradition is by no means immutable. It would be very difficult for any administration, no matter how partisan, to dismantle the many professional bureaucratic mechanisms built into the prison system at this point. The middle- and lower-level managers have civil service security and are in office to stay. But a partisan governor could choose to appoint a nonprofessional (like Peter Bensinger) as director of corrections, leaving it an open question whether political appointments would be made at the warden level. Even if they were not, a nonprofessional administrator could hardly provide the kind of centralized leadership that first began with Bensinger and was so substantially expanded under Sielaff.
What if the attempt to synthesize reform and control in the maximum security prison fails? What if the prison reverts to arbitrary and capricious management in a situation marked by brutality, favoritism, and staff apathy? The danger is that, in that event, the larger effort to reform our bureaucracies and basic institutions will have been dealt a mortal blow. The failure to institutionalize prison reform could reinforce more general cynicism about the capacity of our society to reform itself.
Appendixes
Appendix 1
Participant Observation among Prisoners*
The first phase of my three years of discontinuous research at Stateville was a four-month participant observation study of the prison social system which began in June 1972. Many of the data reported in chapter 6, although supplemented by later documentary materials and interviews, are drawn from this fieldwork. Almost two years after the conclusion of that four-month study I reentered Stateville for a six-month period to carry out firsthand interviewing and participant observation among the administration and later the guard staff. This second study was not nearly as demanding as the earlier experience.
My attention to the problem of participant observation among prisoners is surely not meant to suggest that I place less importance on the interviewing, documentary analysis, records sampling, or survey research which were also extensively relied upon. My comments are offered simply in the hope that they will ease the path of future researchers.
The prison participant observer enters a highly unstable social setting abounding with rumor, suspicion, factionalism, and open conflict. He must daily negotiate the legitimacy, content, and boundaries of his role with a society which is hostile to his presence.
What is at stake in this “how” of face-to-face interaction is the very fate of the research. The fieldworker’s behavior is without clear meaning to his informants until he settles on an acceptable role. The way in which his informants come to define his role as well as their own (and the way he comes to define his role as well as theirs) will determine with whom he comes in contact, the kinds of inquiries that are permissible, the meanings assigned to the inquiries, the kinds of information communicated by informants, the meanings imputed to those communications by the researcher—ultimately, the validity and success of the project.
I entered Stateville early in the summer of 1972 through the influence of Professor Norval Morris and under the sponsorship of a Ford Foundation grant. For four months, I spent five days a week and several weekends at Stateville. For reasons of prison security and personal apprehensiveness I did no observation during the night shift, although that might have been useful. During the days I had complete freedom to walk about the prison unescorted, and I conducted interviews and observations in the prisoners’ cells, in the work areas,
in the isolation area, and in the prison yard.
Unlike Giallambardo,1 whose entrance to Alderson Prison was preceded by written announcements distributed to the inmate population, I entered Stateville without a coherent definition of my role having been offered to staff or inmates. To those who inquired, I explained that I was both a law and sociology student interested in writing a book about “the way life is” in the prison. During the first several days I was thoroughly acquainted with what might be called “the institutional line.” Mindful of the Sykes2 and Giallambardo warnings, I was anxious to keep staff contacts (especially with guards) to a minimum. However, it was necessary to maintain cordial relations with staff and administration in the face of considerable skepticism about the “advisability” of this research.
The extent of factionalism and conflict within the prison could hardly be exaggerated. The most prominent division, of course, was that between staff and inmates. Scarcely less significant than the caste system were the sharp lines separating the races. At the time of the study, 70 percent of Stateville’s inmates were black, 20 percent were Caucasian, and the remainder Latino.
While the inmates were divided by racial lines, there also existed substantial intraracial factionalism. About 50 percent of the black inmates aligned themselves with three large and mutually antagonistic Chicago street gangs (Black P Stone Nation, Vice Lords, Disciples). The Latino population, though relatively small, was divided between Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans as well as between members of a Chicago street gang, the Latin Kings, and unaffiliated Latinos. Among the Caucasian inmates no formal organizational structures existed, but there were divisions into various cliques. These cliques could be characterized either as protective or nonprotective. Members of protective cliques were secure because of fighting ability, gangland ties, legal skills, or alliance with staff members. Whites within nonprotective cliques were highly vulnerable to physical assault, rape, extortion and general harassment. The prison staff was not immune from conflict and factionalism either. Sharp hostility existed between administrators and upper-echelon security officers, front-line guards, and treatment personnel.
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