Authors: Jonathan Franzen
After years of depression, I didn’t care how forgiving of myself I sounded. I said that what mattered to me was the rescue. I could probably afford a new chair; that I prefer to live among the scavenged and reborn is my own private choice.
A sponge bath, a scrap of sturdy ash plywood from a dresser drawer abandoned at curbside, eight scavenged brass screws to attach the plywood to the underside of the seat, and a black magic marker to mask the spatters of white paint: this is how the chair was rescued.
[1996]
From Colorado Route 67, the gatehouse of the Federal Correctional Complex looks like a pavilion from an up-scale park. It has jade-colored accents and is bordered with pink gravel. As I approach it in my car, I can make out two black men in neckties behind the smoked glass windows. One of them emerges to check my ID and ask if I have weapons. I tell him I’m supposed to meet Mr. Louis Winn at one o’clock.
The guard says, “Who?”
I tell him again. With a puzzled look he returns to the pavilion, and the other man comes out. He has an ebbing hairline and a vaguely Langston Hughesish air. He’s wearing a beautiful gray pin-striped suit. “Louis Winn,” he says without a smile, shaking my hand through the open window.
“Oh, you’re Mr. Winn,” I reply with smile big enough for both of us. I’m convinced he thinks that I’m surprised because he isn’t white. He tells me to follow his car up the hill. Feeling ill-served by the guard, I dig my hole deeper by persisting: “The guard didn’t seem to know who you were.”
Mr. Winn gives me a look of withering disappointment and, without a word, proceeds to his car.
Here in Florence, Colorado, the business of American law and order is booming. The Federal Correctional Complex is the showy new product of a war on drugs which, however much or little it has curbed the nation’s illicit appetites, has helped double the federal prison population in less than a decade. The people of Florence were so keen to have its business that they bought land for the complex and presented it as a gift to the Bureau of Prisons. I’ve come to look at how the business works, inside and outside the fences.
The centerpiece of FCC Florence is the Administrative Maximum Facility, a sixty-million-dollar state-of-the-art warehouse for what the popular press likes to call the “worst of the worst” federal prisoners. ADX Florence, Alcatraz of the Rockies, and Admax are some of its aliases. John Gotti may eventually be shipped here, but Manuel Noriega won’t. (He’s a Panamanian national, and ADX’s protocols violate the Geneva Convention.) ADX currently houses about 250 prisoners—just over half its capacity—and they are locked in their cells for as many as twenty-three hours a day, deprived almost entirely of human contact. Unless capital punishment should happen to become routine, the logic and technology of American corrections are unlikely to advance any further than the systems of control at ADX.
According to Bureau of Prisons (BOP) literature, the mission of ADX “is to impact inmate behavior such that inmates who demonstrate non-dangerous behavior and participate in required programs progress to another, more open Bureau of Prisons facility.” Most of ADX’s inmates have been transferred from less secure prisons for misbehavior. Eighteen percent have murdered a fellow inmate, sixteen percent have assaulted a fellow inmate with a weapon, fifteen percent have escaped or attempted escape, and ten percent have assaulted prison staff members with a weapon. There is also a handful of inmates whom, because of their subversive political views, the Fed considers terrorists. I’ve requested interviews with two political prisoners: Mutulu Shakur and Ray Luc Levasseur.
FCC Florence has four facilities. From the gatehouse, the road winds uphill past a fenceless minimum-security prison camp (“Club Fed”), an inviting medium-security Federal Correctional Institution, a stern maximum-security penitentiary, and the triangular brick bunker that is ADX. Arid high prairie has, with federal correction, become a sprinkled, landscaped campus. When I lived in Colorado Springs, I often passed the construction site of this complex on my way to hiking trails in the Sangre de Cristos. The architecture is stripy and angular, full of teal and salmon. Until the razor wire went up I thought some real-estate cowboy was building a strangely isolated office park with energy-conserving windows.
At the check-in counter, a blond receptionist named Donna signs me in, backs me against a red brick wall, and shoots me three times with a Polaroid. All the while, she’s casually communicating with someone deep in the bowels of ADX, telling them to “bring Shakur up.” The volume and signal strength of ADX’s radios are calibrated so that voices commence speaking at conversational strength, without crackle or distortion; the speaker seems almost to be physically present. Word comes back to Donna that Shakur is being fetched. She stamps my forearm with invisible ink and holds it under a black light. The word TAMP fluoresces.
“It’s supposed to say STAMP,” Donna says, stamping me again. We check under the black light, and the second word is also TAMP. She stamps me a third time and makes a complete mess. Mr. Winn intercedes with an impatient mutter, and already I’m grateful that someone besides me has incurred his disappointment.
Although ADX is the first federal prison designed specifically for round-the-clock isolation of prisoners, the institution of solitary confinement is nearly as old as the republic. In 1823 the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania opened the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, and what became known as the “Pennsylvania system” was copied by jail builders around the world. The Quakers who designed Eastern State believed that jails in which prisoners were housed in common rooms bred depravity, and so at Eastern State each prisoner had a cell and private exercise yard which he never left. If the prisoner had to be moved, a black hood was placed over his head to bar the ingress of free-floating depravity. That prisoners in perpetual solitary confinement often hanged themselves or battered themselves to death was attributed to insanity induced by masturbation.
Over the decades, as American jail space became more precious and penological thinking evolved, routine solitary confinement fell out of favor. By the middle of this century, court rulings had placed strict limits on the use of isolation for discipline. Beginning in the seventies, however, the idea of perpetual lockdown was resurrected as “segregation” for “administrative” purposes. Isolation as a means of controlling prisoners, rather than of punishing them, was considered “administrative” and therefore OK.
Supermaxes represent a hardening of the battle lines between society and its criminal products, and more than twenty-five states now have them. The most notorious is in California, where the confluence of a vengeful public’s know-nothingism and rising intramural gang violence led to the construction of a huge high-tech “control unit” facility at Pelican Bay, just south of the Oregon border. In January of 1995, five years after Pelican Bay opened, several aspects of its brand of punishment were deemed cruel and unusual by a federal district judge, Thelton Henderson, who said, in effect, that Californians’ wish to “lock ’em up and throw away the key” had created a nightmare. Prisoners at Pelican Bay were routinely denied access to medical and mental-health care, suffered gratuitous violence from guards, and showed signs of psychological damage—sleeplessness, inability to concentrate, suicidal thoughts, an aggravated rage against society—almost certainly caused by prolonged isolation. Because Judge Henderson did not go so far as to shut the facility down, however, state prison officials considered his ruling a victory.
The first thing I notice at ADX Florence are the floors. They are mostly linoleum, in checkerboard patterns and custom colors like adobe red and poppy-seed gray, and they’re waxed and buffed to a remarkable sheen. They seem to beg notice and comment. Ditto the cleanliness of ADX, the solidness of its steel fittings, the dapper white shirts and garnet ties and outstanding grooming of its guards, its disorienting nonrectilinear layout, and its unobtrusive but effective protocols: these are all on display. Indeed, it’s possible to read into the place’s high gloss a conscious effort to buff away the tarnish that the “control unit” concept received from Pelican Bay and from ADX’s own predecessor in Marion, Illinois—a supermax whose reputation Amnesty International has blackened periodically.
Even as I admire the sheen at ADX, however, there are things that I won’t notice until after I leave. Not until I get back in my baking car and nearly scald my mouth by drinking from the water bottle I left in it, for example, will I realize that the temperature in ADX has been perfect. Same deal with ADX’s smell, of which there is a complete absence except in one corridor where I catch a whiff of something pleasant, something on the cusp between organic and inorganic—fresh spackle, maybe. ADX’s lighting is ideal: never harsh, easy to read by. The sounds: no clanking, no distant shouts, no barking intercom. The automatic doors hum when they open and click shut without echo. Mr. Winn speaks in a low voice—
MR. WINN:
(to a lieutenant passing by) How’s it going?LIEUTENANT:
(worried, bending closer)
What did you say?MR. WINN:
(wearily, disappointed) I said, How’s it going?LIEUTENANT:
(obviously relieved) Oh, fine, fine.
—but I can hear him without straining. I’m tempted to say that the ambience of ADX is one of sensory deprivation. But the impression that ADX leaves on visitors is one of peace, not deprivation. Indeed, more than once on my tour, I find myself thinking that this would be
an excellent place to read and write
. However, I’m suspicious enough of large systems of control to believe that this is exactly what Mr. Winn would like me to feel.
Each time we encounter a checkpoint, he passes one of the Polaroids that Donna took of me through a metal drawer to a guard behind heavy glass, and the guard slides back a carrot-size portable black light to check my stamp. It’s apparently enough that something on my forearm glow.
Here is how a prisoner enters a “contact” visit room at ADX. Mr. Winn and I are standing on the free-world side of the cast-concrete table that divides the room, and the door behind us has been locked from outside. Through the tiny window on the opposite door I hear rattling and clinking and glimpse some heads and shoulders. The door opens, and Mutulu Shakur steps in, hands cuffed behind his back. The door closes behind him. With a complex expression of nonchalance, anger, and dignity on his face, he places his back against the door, crouches, and lets the guard outside open a shoebox-sized slot and reach through to uncuff him. The cuffs disappear, the slot is closed and locked.
Mr. Winn props himself against the wall behind me. During the interview I don’t look back at him, not once, but the vibe I get is that he’s glancing at his watch a lot.
Shakur is wearing a knit watch cap and generic black plastic eyeglasses. There’s some gray in his dreadlocks. He asks me where I got his name and prisoner number. I reply: from a prison-watch group in Boulder that has close ties with political prisoners. Shakur is active in the Republic of New Afrika movement and was convicted of, among other things, complicity in a 1984 armed robbery that left two cops dead; the prosecution held him responsible under RICO statutes because the robbers had held meetings in his acupuncture clinic.
Shakur explains that he ended up in maximum security, first at Marion and now at ADX, because the warden at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he was first confined, felt he had too much influence on young black men and too much outside contact. Shakur’s message to me, in our too-brief interview, is that black men who have been in trouble with the law have guidance to offer their communities, and that the System locks them up to keep the country’s black communities rudderless. “The prisons are placed in isolated areas around the country,” he says. “People like myself who have a background in communities have a hard time feeling connected to the world. Imagine a kid who gets twenty-five years for a half ounce of crack cocaine: he’s isolated. The potential for mental damage is tremendous.”
Standing up to leave, Shakur asks me to send a copy of my story to his son. “Tupac Shakur,” he says. “You know who that is.”
I promise to get a copy to Tupac.
When Mr. Winn and I are alone again, he gives me a lecture. He says that ADX is being “completely open” with the media, and that he has no control over what I might make of my tour. (He cites, with a chuckle, the headline for the piece the London
Times
did on ADX:
America’s Wild Men Jailed in “Tombs
.”) However, he wishes I’d told him that I’d called the human-rights people in Boulder. “All you would have had to do was mention that,” he says. “It would have helped me understand what you’re doing.”
I explain that I called Boulder only because I needed the names of inmates willing to talk. But by now his disappointment with me seems to have hardened into judgment.
Mr. Winn next announces that our tour must be finished by 3:30. It’s now 2:15, the tour hasn’t even started, and I have a second interview to do. What a shame, he says, that I didn’t come in the morning. Then we’d have had all day.
“But I could have started any time you wanted,” I say. “You asked me to pick a time. I said one o’clock off the top of my head.”
He shakes his head sadly. He was under the impression that I couldn’t come until one. He’s a morning person, himself. If only he’d known . . .
Ray Luc Levasseur is a working-class French Canadian from Maine. He’s powerfully built and well tattooed, and he exhibits the reined nervousness of a man who could smoke half a cigarette in a single drag. He has a mustache and eyebrows so broad and dark it’s as if he has three mustaches.
From 1974 to 1984 Levasseur lived underground and worked with an organization that specialized in bombing the military and corporate enemies of the global working class. After a stint on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, he was captured in 1984.