The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (24 page)

William Post’s scruffy appearance and eccentricity made inmates and guards regard him as wacky. But Post had a superior IQ and came from a stable middle-class family, which made psychologists wonder: Why had he been drawn into a life of crime?

Triple-murderer Carl Bowles first got into trouble when he was eight years old, and his prison record filled two thick files. Yet after spending nearly twenty-three years in various prisons, he insisted that all he wanted was a friend.

Dallas Scott had only been convicted of two bank robberies, but guards considered the tattooed convict to be one of the most dangerous men in Leavenworth because of his suspected membership in the Aryan Brotherhood, the most feared white gang there.

Front view of Leavenworth. The first federal penitentiary ever built, it was designed to resemble the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., with a grand silver dome that dominates the Kansas landscape.
(Debra Bates-Lamborn)

Warden Robert Matthews was the youngest warden ever put in charge of Leavenworth. He was also the first black warden there. Matthews said it didn’t matter. He soon discovered that it did.
(J. J. Zeman)

Warden Matthews talking with an inmate. Whether “standing mainline” in the dining hall or walking from cell to cell, Matthews made it a priority to be available to the prisoners.
(J. J. Zeman)

During his seventeen years as director, Norman Carlson made the federal Bureau of Prisons into the most modern prison system in the world.
(Bureau of Prisons photo)

J. Michael Quinlan, who was Carlson’s choice to succeed him, was only the fifth director to run the Bureau of Prisons. He inherited an agency that was on the brink of doubling in size.
(Bureau of Prisons photo)

Inside the prison industries building, an inmate performs his job. In 1986 Leavenworth prisoners produced $27 million worth of goods, netting a $5 million profit.
(Debra Bates-Lamborn)

In the penitentiary yard, convicts play handball against thirty-foot brick walls. The gun tower at the right is one of six, manned at all times by watchers under orders to “shoot to maim” if necessary.
(UPI/Bettmann)

When Cuban refugees seized control of the Atlanta penitentiary on November 23, 1987, they took hostages and set fires. Firefighters used long ladders to spray water over the prison wall.
(UPI/Bettmann)

FBI SWAT teams entered the Atlanta penitentiary early on November 24. When the riots in Atlanta and the Oakdale, Louisiana, prisons finally ended, 719 Cubans were transferred to the C and D cell houses in Leavenworth.
(UPI/Bettmann)