The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison (25 page)

D Cellhouse in Leavenworth, in which many of the Cubans were housed. It had been set for renovation until the riots intervened. From their cells prisoners could watch television on the sets fixed to the wall on the left, installed at Lt. Bill Slack’s request after he was put in charge of the Cubans. Below, on the right, is a recreation cage.
(Debra Bates-Lamborn)

Steve and Sharon Lacy, now at the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. Both Lacys were Leavenworth employees until they were transferred. Steve sees himself and his friends as society’s guardians: “In our world, there are only two sides: them and us, and there’s a bunch more of them than us.”
(C. A. Maragni)

Eddie Geouge in the rotunda outside his office. As a soldier in Vietnam, he had killed more men than most of the convicted murderers he supervised in Leavenworth. Few prison officials were as tough, and none knew the scams, players, and dangers of prison life as well as Geouge.
(Debra Bates-Lamborn)

After the Cubans in Leavenworth rioted, Bill Slack was told to bring them under control. Everyone else had used brute force to manage the unruly Cubans. Much to the other guards’ horror, Slack offered them more freedom and decent food.
(Russ Kennedy)

A pen-and-ink drawing by Thomas Silverstein. Drawing and painting were his only outlet in his isolation cell in the Hot House basement, and when he was deprived of drawing materials for three months, he besieged the Bureau of Prisons with formal appeals. When Warden Matthews finally ordered pencils and sketch pads restored to him, the flood of paper abated though his anger did not.

The hiring of a new personnel clerk at the Hot House didn’t usually get much attention, but when Brittany Monet got the job, convicts and guards took notice. Blonde, single, twenty-four years old and striking, Monet worked in an office on the second floor of the administration building and only came into the penitentiary area at lunchtime to eat in the officers’ cafeteria. No matter. By the end of Monet’s first week on the job, convicts had started rearranging their daily routine so they could be near the rotunda when Monet passed through on her way to lunch. They wanted to get a glimpse of her.

The bureau has always been dominated by men, and has remained so even though Norman Carlson was the first director to really open it up to women and minorities. Under his leadership, women were hired as guards for the first time. They did all the jobs that male guards performed, including strip searches, but only in lower-security prisons. The bureau claimed its maximum-security penitentiaries, such as Leavenworth and Marion, were simply too dangerous for women to work in as guards.

This didn’t mean that there were no women inside the Hot House walls. Of the forty female employees, ten actually worked in the main penitentiary or in prison
industries, often side by side with inmates. Nearly all, however, were relegated to lower-paying secretarial jobs, not to the top-paying positions in the custody department.

While the bureau was careful to avoid sexism in its employee manuals, women were expected to adhere to several unwritten rules at the Hot House. Within the penitentiary it was customary for them either to walk together in groups or to ask a guard to escort them. Most women followed this practice. Monet didn’t.

A few days after she began work, Monet noticed that a guard was trailing her and another woman as they went to lunch.

“Is there something we can do for you, Officer?” Monet asked.

“No, I’m just escorting you girls to the officers’ mess,” the guard replied.

“We don’t need an escort,” said Monet. The mess was located at the end of center hallway and there were plenty of guards milling about as the women walked there.

“Well, I’m going to escort you anyway,” the guard said. “It’s for your own good, girls.”

These comments irritated Monet, and later that day she complained to her supervisor. “Correctional officers shouldn’t be bodyguards for the staff,” she said. “I can take care of myself.” She later added that the last two times she had been escorted, the guards had used the opportunity to ask her for a date, and one of them had been married. Monet’s superior told the guard who had followed the women to lunch to apologize.

Several days later, a different guard spotted Monet in the prison yard, where she had been sent on an errand by her boss. The guard demanded to know what she was doing walking alone in the compound. Monet berated him and continued on her way.

Lieutenant Edward Pierce was working in the lieutenant’s office when the guard came in and complained
about Monet. “That blonde bitch is going to get herself or some officer killed,” Pierce snapped. “One of these shitheads is going to drag her into a closet, rape her, and cut her throat, and we’re not going to find out about it until we find her body.”

The two other lieutenants in the room agreed, but neither volunteered to say anything to Monet or her supervisor. “Technically she’s right,” one said. “An employee can walk wherever he or she wants to, and if we demand that she have an escort, some judge will slap us with a fine and we’ll be accused of being sexist pigs. What she’s doing, though, is simply crazy.”

Monet’s attitude upset many of her female coworkers as well. “She is making it dangerous for all of us,” complained Susan Avila-McGill, who worked down the hall from Monet. Refusing an escort was only part of the reason for resentment. The close-fitting business suits, dark-hued hose, and high heels that Monet wore would have been acceptable apparel anywhere else, but in the Hot House, most women intentionally “dressed down.” Some even wore the same black blazers, white shirts, and gray slacks that the men wore. “None of us wants to walk down center hall after she goes by because the inmates are so riled up,” Avila-McGill said. Monet’s good looks had also prompted several guards to stop by her desk and ask her for dates. When Monet announced that she never dated her co-workers, the guards got mad. “That bitch thinks she’s too good for us,” said one.

Soon, Monet was being ostracized by both guards and her female coworkers. A few women felt sorry for her. Phyllis Driscoll later recalled how difficult it was for her to adjust to working in a traditionally all-male environment. When Driscoll’s first boss patted her on the buttocks, Driscoll complained to his superior, only to be told, “Oh well, those things will happen when you’re a pretty girl.”

But even women who felt strongly about equal rights didn’t want guards to stop being their escorts, especially
those women who had worked at the Hot House long enough to recall what had happened to Peggy Hudson.

A stocky woman in her late thirties, Hudson had grown up on a Kansas farm, married her high school sweetheart, and taken work at the prison simply because it paid better than most clerical jobs. In 1983, she was at her desk in the prison hospital when an inmate came in carrying a prescription slip. Hudson’s boss and another man were standing less than ten feet away when the inmate suddenly darted around her desk, pulled a shank from under his shirt, and pressed it against her chest.

“I’ll kill her!” he screamed. “Get out!”

The two men backed out of the office and the inmate kicked the door shut and locked it. He pulled the curtains closed, ordered Hudson to sit down in a chair, and tied her hands with a piece of braided cord he had made from his own hair.

When guards began pounding on the door, the convict yelled that he would kill Hudson if anyone tried to break in. He demanded that another female employee be brought to the office to speak to him. She was the only person he would talk to, he screamed. The guards sent for the woman.

While waiting, the inmate ordered Hudson to stand up and then whispered in her ear, “Pull down your pants!”

“I told him ‘No!’ I wasn’t going to do that,” she recalled later.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

When Hudson refused again, the inmate grabbed her and jerked her pants down. He took out his knife, forced her onto the floor, and climbed on her. Hudson sobbed, but her tears didn’t stop him from raping her.

A few minutes later, the inmate and Hudson heard voices outside the door. The other employee had arrived, and she and the guards were able to convince the inmate to free Hudson and surrender.

The first person Hudson saw was Warden Jerry O’Brien.

“We had sex,” she whispered. “He raped me.”

“Oh my God!” said O’Brien.

“I couldn’t cry,” she recalled later. “I couldn’t cry for three days, and then I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. My husband and I talked for hours and hours about how we wanted to kill that inmate and how we would make him die slowly.”

The FBI told her later that the convict had been planning the rape for three days. He had attacked her simply because she worked in an office with a door that could be locked. He had never spoken to her before the attack and Hudson couldn’t remember ever noticing him before he came into the office that morning. “I was just convenient.” The inmate was sentenced to an additional thirty-five years in prison, but since he already was serving several life terms, the rape sentence was made to run concurrently. As far as Hudson was concerned, he had “gotten off without any punishment at all.”

“I kept thinking about what he said, how he told me he wasn’t going to hurt me,” Hudson recalled. “After he raped me he said, ‘See, I didn’t hurt you,’ and it’s true that people don’t die from having sex, but being raped scars you inside. He really hurt me and he hurt my husband and he hurt my family, and the thing about it is, he didn’t even care.”