6. I have elsewhere discussed the way in which a classification system can be corrupted by the tendency to transform a multi-institutional “differentiated” prison system into a “hierarchical” prison system, where social control is maximized by the distribution of prisons along a reward/punishment continuum. Eric Steele and James Jacobs, “A Theory of Prison Systems,” Crime and Delinquency 21, no. 2 (April 1975): 149–62.
7. Nathan Leopold, Life Plus Ninety Nine Years (New York: Doubleday, 1957).
8. The report of the commission was published in 1928 as: The Workings of the Indeterminate Sentence Law and the Parole System in Illinois, ed. Andrew Bruce, Ernest Burgess, and Albert Horno.
9. Selznick argues that formal co-optation takes place when the group which requires neutralization is weak. Philip Selznick, Leadership in Administration (Evanston, Ill.: Row-Peterson, 1957), p. 21.
10. Prison System (see n. 2 above), p. 16.
11. Clemmer, in The Prison Community (see Introduction, n. 6, above), discusses the tension between the spoils system and prison administration as it affected Illinois’s downstate maximum security prison at Menard. Illinois was not alone among states in the 1930s whose prisons were pervaded by partisan politics. John Bartlow Martin, in Break Down the Walls (New York: Ballentine Books, 1951), p. 22, points out that prisons all over the country were a pork barrel for spoils politics in the thirties and forties.
12. Bruce et al. (see n. 8 above), p. 62.
13. Personal interview with Father Elegius Weir. Father Weir was Stateville’s Catholic Chaplain between 1916 and 1948. He holds several advanced degrees and is the author of a textbook in criminology. His recall of names, facts, and events going back almost fifty years is nothing short of remarkable.
14. Prison System (see n. 2 above), p. 496.
15. Bruce et al., Workings (see n. 7 above), p. 62.
16. Ibid., pp. 167–68.
17. There is no better illustration of Perrow’s point that organizational participants pursue multiple goals simultaneously. He argues that organizations are tools used by actors to achieve influence and power. Perrow, Complex Organizations (see Introduction, n. 1, above), chapter 4.
18. Father Weir recalls “that they had one husky Jew chained up for seventy days.”
19. With respect to the corruption of the professional’s role in prison, see Harvey Powelson and Reinhard Bendix, “Psychiatry in Prisons,” Psychiatry 14 (February 1951): 73–86.
20. Leopold, Life (see n. 7 above). Leopold dedicates this autobiographical account of his more than thirty years in the Stateville/Joliet prisons to Father Weir; Donald Clemmer describes the same kind of status hierarchy at Menard during the same years in The Prison Community. (See Introduction, n. 6, above).
21. Gladys Erickson, Ragen of Joliet (New York: Dutton, 1957), p. 57.
22. Ibid., p. 42.
23. Leopold, Life (see n. 7 above), p. 115.
24. Erickson, Ragen (see n. 21 above), p. 46.
25. It seems remarkable that Superintendent Vernon Revis recounts almost exactly the same incident as occurring at the Joliet Prison in 1970, when a leader of the Black P Stone Nation simply “refused” to “accept” any punishment and was released to his cell house. A similar incident of intimidation stimulated a walk-out and subsequent violence in Eastern Correctional Institution (pseudonym). See Carroll, Hacks, Blacks and Cons (see Introduction, n. 12, above).
26. The Chicago Tribune (18 March 1931, p. 6) reported that “Capt. George L. Whitmeyer who resigned under pressure from his prison post [at the old prison] said that he was going to tell the legislative investigating committee when it meets on Friday that guards deliberately trapped and killed three men who attempted to escape on February 22nd. ‘I warned prison officials of that break. The brutality shown in that affair led to the weekend riot.’”
27. According to the Chicago Tribune (15 March 1931, p. 1), Warden Henry Hill attributed the rioting of 14 March to “overcrowding, unemployment and to sentimentality on the part of so-called reformers.” Hill stated that public support for the inmates over the Washington’s Birthday incident encouraged the inmates to continue in rebellion.
28. Leopold, Life (see n. 7 above), p. 214.
29. Both Father Weir and Nathaniel Leopold identify the tough and arbitrary decisions of the parole board as the underlying cause of the riot of 1931. Perhaps during the next several years the deepening Depression changed the comparative attractiveness of release from prison.
30. An excellent early history of the Illinois State Penitentiary was prepared by a long-term Stateville inmate, R. F. Johns, entitled “A Short History of the Illinois State Penitentiary” (undated). This point about the labor contracts appears on p. 42. I am indebted to Hans Mattick for lending me his copy of this manuscript.
31. Prison System (see n. 2 above), p. 179.
Chapter 2
1. The gang activities, escapes, and other lurid incidents occurring at Stateville finally (after the killing of Richard Loeb) led the governor to appoint a blue ribbon commission in 1936 (discussed in chapter 1). The extent to which the situation at Stateville before Ragen’s appointment had deteriorated is not precisely clear. While all reports are agreed that inmate bosses had taken over, Gladys Erickson’s and the Tribune reporters’ (1955) descriptions, wherein they speak of the inmate golf course, shanty town, vegetable gardens, and truck hijackings, seem somewhat exaggerated when compared with the accounts of Nathan Leopold and Father Eligius Weir.
2. Gladys Erickson reports that, at the outset, Ragen “took a beating in the press.” Ragen (see chap. 1, n. 21, above), p. 72.
3. Ragen had been warden of Menard for three years prior to taking the job at Stateville. His tenure at Menard overlapped with Donald Clemmer’s. About Ragen, Clemmer, in Prison Community (see Intro., n. 6, above), p. 62, noted: “The second warden, a younger man, was 39 years of age when appointed early in 1933. He had attended high school and was in the Navy during the World War. Prior to assuming the wardenship, he had served as deputy sheriff for four years, as a sheriff for four years, and had been county treasurer for three years before his appointment. While his appointment was essentially political, the governor considered him suitable material to administer the lives of 2300 inmates and 230 employees living and working in an institution valued at two and a half million dollars. Soon after taking office, the warden gave evidence of possessing a humanitarian point of view. He allowed inmates who were assigned to indoor shops to have the freedom of the athletic field for an hour each noon. While he insisted on strict discipline, he demanded that brutal punishment be stopped, and in one case discharged a senior officer, who belonged to the same political party as he, for kicking an inmate. He stopped much needless waste and reduced operating costs. He initiated football and boxing. He cooperated with all employees, and for the first time gave some prestige to the Mental Health Staff. The new warden was a marked improvement over his predecessor and when one considers the confusing complexities of penal administration, one can but wonder that prison officials operating in a society such as ours handle the situation as well as they do.”
4. Daniel Glaser explains (in personal correspondence) that Ragen was an active leader of the conservative Warden’s Association. Within the American Correctional Association there was an understanding that liberals and conservatives would alternate in the presidency from year to year.
5. One of the characteristics of prebureaucratic forms of administration is the leader’s monopoly over all specialized skills and knowledge. See Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 235–39.
6. Joseph Ragen and Charles Finstone, Inside the World’s Toughest Prison (Springfield, Ill.: C. C. Thomas, 1962). This volume combines the Inmate Rule Book, the officer’s Manual, and statements of the duties and responsibilities of each position in the organization along with interspersed statements of the Ragen philosophy.
Citations to this book throughout the chapter refer to rules of one kind or another under which the prison was operating.
7. Ibid., pp. 162–63.
8. Clemmer, Prison Community (see Intro., no. 6, above), p. 54.
9. See Philip Selznick’s distinction between an organization and an institution, in Leadership (chap. 1, n. 9, above), p. 21: “As an organization acquires a self, a distinctive identity, it becomes an institution. This involves the taking on of values, ways of acting and believing that are deemed important for their own sake. From then on self-maintenance becomes more than bare organizational survival; it becomes a struggle to preserve the uniqueness of the group in the face of new problems and altered circumstances.”
10. Gladys Erickson points out that prior to Ragen’s resignation after Governor Greene’s election, “unknown to him, the professional and business people of Joliet had prepared a petition and circulated it throughout the state, requesting the new governor to retain Ragen as warden. When he announced his resignation, this petition was just about to be mailed. . . . At the same time, he received telephone calls from prominent citizens all over the state, who insisted that they would do everything in their power to see that he was reinstated, if he would consent to their efforts.” Erickson, Ragen (see chap. 1, n. 21, above), p. 151.
11. Ibid.
12. Ragen and Finstone, Inside (see n. 6 above).
13. For example, Ragen wrote in the Preface to one of his many public relations pamphlets on Stateville (early 1950s): “Illinois was one of the first states to classify prisoners according to age, past criminal history, mentality and the possibilities for rehabilitation. This method of classification has proven to have a stabilizing effect on the inmates’ adjustment.”
14. Annual Report of the Department of Public Safety (1 July 1952–30 June 1953), p. 81.
15. Neither Daniel Glaser nor Lloyd Ohlin received this treatment, although they too report consistent shakedowns of their offices.
16. According to Mattick, after seventeen months at Stateville he was required to write a parole report on the notorious Major Price, a rebellious prisoner whom Ragen kept in segregation for eleven years. When Mattick approached the gate to the yard and reported that he was going to “the corner” (the segregation unit), he was asked whom he intended to interview. When he replied that he had to see Major Price, the guard said the warden’s permission was required for that. Mattick had interviewed other prisoners in segregation before, but Price was, apparently, a “sensitive case.” When Mattick went to Ragen’s office to ask why he was being prevented from preparing a report on Price for the Parole Board, Ragen replied, “Well, we don’t know you people.” Mattick had to threaten to make a formal report about this incident before Ragen reluctantly conceded in order to avoid a showdown with Joseph Lohman, chairman of the Parole Board.
17. According to Stateville administrator Vernon Revis as well as former Stateville sociologist-actuary Hans Mattick, Joe Ragen once threatened to lock Parole Board chairman Joe Lohman out of Stateville because of a disagreement over parole policy. Lohman in turn made Ragen back down by threatening to call the National Guard to aid him in carrying out his legislative duties.
18. Leopold describes the impact of this ground-breaking decision in Life (see chap. 1, n. 7, above), p. 301: “I had lots of free time, but I didn’t get to use very much of it for my own reading and study, for Federal Judge Barnes of Chicago had just ruled that every inmate of the penitentiary must be allowed free access to the courts and be given the right to file a writ whenever he pleased. This had not previously been allowed. The joint promptly went writ-crazy. . . . I was deluged with requests to write writs for the fellows.”
And gangster Roger Touhy described the impact of the same decision in his autobiography The Stolen Years (Cleveland: Pennington Press, 1959), p. 280: “The U.S. Supreme Court discovered that convicts in the Illinois penitentiaries were being stopped from mailing out petitions for writs of habeas corpus. Regardless of the circumstances of their convictions, the development of new evidence or other extenuating circumstances, the convict had no right to appeal. The high court held that hundreds of Illinois convicts were on a legal merry-go-round and ‘at the end of blind alleys’ in violation of their constitutional rights. The Supreme Court asked Judge Barnes to do something about the situation and he did. He threatened to send to jail any prison warden who refused to allow an inmate to mail a petition for a writ.”
19. Siegel v. Ragen, 180 F.2d 785 (1950). Inmate Harp complained that: (1) he was beaten on numerous occasions, (2) his personal property was confiscated, and (3) that he was denied due process at disciplinary hearings where he was maneuvered into the offense of calling a guard a liar if he chose to dispute the ticket. Maurice Meyer, Stateville’s most famous jailhouse lawyer, argued that: (1) Ragen had no right to prevent him from providing legal assistance, (2) it was unconstitutional to put him in segregation for being a jailhouse lawyer, and (3) it was unconstitutional to punish him for trying to set up the Prisoners’ Welfare League. Siegel complained that: (1) he was unconstitutionally punished for his part in trying to establish the Prisoners’ Welfare League, (2) Ragen stole $20,000 out of the inmate amusement fund. The inmates also, on behalf of all other inmates similarly situated, complained of arbitrary enforcement of the rules, illegal expenditures from the inmates’ benefit fund, and poor medical and dietary facilities.
20. U. S. ex rel. George Atterbury v. Ragen 237 F.2d 153 (1956).
21. U. S. ex rel. Wagner v. Ragen 213 F.2d 294 (1954).
22. Joseph Ortega v. Ragen 216 F.2d 561 (1954).
23. Some feeling for the military discipline enforced upon the staff can be obtained from passages like this in Ragen and Finstone, Inside (see chap. 2, n. 6, above), p. 151: “In the opinion of the administration, there is no cause for a riot unless some employee weakens. United, the employees of a prison can be compared to a forged chain of security and a chain is as strong as each link. It is an employee who is not following the rules—one who is not properly supervising the inmates who are assigned to his division, who is not reporting violations of the rules; one who is too weak to speak up, not giving proper application to his job; who is not supervising the use of tools and equipment; who is permitting inmates to connive and organize; and last, but not least, is fraternizing and trafficking with inmates or failing to report an employee who is doing these things.”
24. Even today, eight of nine guards at the captain’s level and above are not originally from Northern Illinois. The trailer court adjacent to the prison has yet to be integrated by a nonwhite family.
25. Payment in kind, according to Weber, is a hallmark of the prebureaucratic regime. “Every sort of assignment of usufructs, tributes, and services which are due to the lord himself or to the official for personal exploitation, always means a surrender of the pure type of bureaucratic organization. The official in such a position has a personal right to the possession of his office. This is the case to a still higher degree when official duty and compensation are interrelated in such a way that the official does not transfer to the lord any yields gained from the objects left to him, but handles these objects for his private ends and in turn renders to the lord services of a personal or a military, political, or ecclesiastical character.” This passage applies equally well to Warden Ragen and his top underlings. Weber, “Bureaucracy” (see n. 5 above), p. 207.
26. Personal correspondence.
27. I am indebted to Bob Brown of the Fortune Society for the observation that Stateville’s rules on contraband were different than those in other prisons. While most prisons listed contraband, Ragen listed all permitted items; everything else was contraband.
28. In a vivid account of life at Stateville in the early 1940s, Paul Warren explains in Next Time Is For Life (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1953), p. 137: “I watched the captain’s big red, well fed face and smelled the talcum powder. He read from some papers before him, then looked up at me. The officer says you were tal
king and laughing in the dining room and when he called your attention to this, you argued with him. What do you have to say?’ ‘I was whispering for the salt. I wasn’t talking and laughing, sir.’ ‘Do my officers lie?’ He had me both ways. I remained silent.”
29. Annual Report of the Department of Public Safety (1 July 1954–30 June 1955), p. 40.
30. Note Weber’s observation that “All non-bureaucratic forms of domination display a peculiar co-existence: on the one hand there is a sphere of strict traditionalism and on the other, a sphere of free arbitrariness and lordly grace.” “Bureaucracy” (see n. 5 above), p. 217.
31. Personal interview.
32. Personal correspondence.
33. Inside Stateville—World of Its Own,” Chicago Tribune, 3 July 1955, p. 18.
34. Roger Touhy “Stateville Prison and Warden Ragen,” in Erickson, Ragen (see chap. 1, n. 21, above), p. 192.
35. Paul Warren himself went through such an experience. Next Time (see n. 28 above), chap. 17.
36. I have no statistics on the rate of requests for transfer, but am assured by former sociologist-actuary, Hans Mattick, and former Menard warden, Ross Randolph, that voluntary transfer to the more relaxed Menard Penitentiary was a frequent aspiration of Stateville inmates. (Menard Penitentiary has both a general population and a Psychiatric Division).
37. Ragen and Finstone, Inside (see n. 6 above), p. 695. I am assured by one long-time Stateville employee and admirer of Warden Ragen that this fluent passage was far beyond the warden’s limited literary skill. Since the book was written with Ragen’s cooperation and close participation, I offer the quotation as indicative of the type of statement about the causes of crime and the need for rehabilitation that Ragen would have approved.
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