Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
The Big House Goes Coed
It’s hard to tell who’s a prisoner and who’s not at the federal pen in Fort Worth, where men and women together is just one of the unique things going on.
(Page 2 of 3)
But violence (judging from both official and resident sources) is sufficiently rare as to be only an occasional individual problem. Homosexual attacks, common in penitentiaries, are rarer still, and according to quite a few of the residents homosexuality itself is almost insignificant. The population being fairly evenly divided between Chicanos, blacks and whites, there is racial identification without a great amount of racial tension: here in the dining hall the tables tend to be territorial in terms of race and culture (young blacks at one, white hippies at another, one with Chicanos, one with the elderly, etc.) but there are enough mixed tables to stifle any theories about ironclad racial alliances.
As we gather up our dishes and trays to take back in true summer-camp fashion to the conveyer belt slit to be washed, Thompson tells me about visitation privileges: a resident can have as many visitors as he or she wants, as long as the resident submits a list of approved visitors. Visiting hours are from 3:30 to 9:30 p.m. on weekdays and from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekends. There are, of course, no physical restraints between residents and their families or friends, and a lot of picnicking and strolling takes place on the collegiate lawn.
It’s tour time, and Pat Thompson takes me first to the Education Building, one of four rather chunky edifices that form an impenetrable quadrangle in the center of the prison. The education “building” is really only a sizable section of a building which has a variety of identities. We walk into a classroom that looks like a language lab, with tape machines in individual carrels. Here residents can work toward their high-school equivalency degrees, using an elaborate array of audio-visual gadgetry, including cassettes that provide self-scoring and pacing. Except for a full-time tutor, the classroom is run by residents. Residents, in a scaled-down Sony-equipped TV studio down the halls, also produce some instruction tapes: “Hi, I’m Linda, and I’m here to tell you about vitamin D.”
In other areas of the building are the printshop where Que Paso is produced, a typing and data processing training room, a chapel that serves the needs of a multitude of officially-sanctioned religions, and a coffeehouse. Near the coffeehouse is an outlet for one of the tunnels that connect the buildings. At night, when the residents are not allowed outside, they travel underground like vampires through this spooky and disorienting matrix that looks, from one end to another, as endless and claustrophobic as the Holland Tunnel. For the first time since I’ve been here I can feel the throbbing dullness of incarceration, and I want out.
In the CHU unit, the health unit mostly peopled by middle-aged and elderly residents, a man named Rocky invites us into his room. Like the others on the floor it is private, a small window in the door reinforced with chicken wire the only hint that it’s not a college dorm room. Rocky (he, like most people in prison, doesn’t want his last name mentioned) has a heart bad enough to keep him more or less restricted to his room. His hair is as white as his T-shirt but he has the kind of face that doesn’t age. He makes jokes about the Playmate pin-ups on the walls, as though that recent trend to show pubic hair embarrasses him, and talks about Leavenworth, where he’d been since 1959. His years of prison seem to have made him eccentrically domestic, so he resembles, inside his tight, neat room, with his photographs and books like Mysteries of the Sea by Robert de la Croix and The White Cheyenne by Max Brand, a bowerbird turning around and around in its nest.
“In case you don’t know it, this is a jail,” he laughs.
There is a Social Education class in progress down the hall, a lecture about “Attitude” for people from the Vocational Training Program, mostly carpenters and painters, mostly black. It’s taught by a tall, thin ex-resident who, with his goatee, looks like the stereotype of The Professor in a Beach Party movie.
“An idea is intangible, something you cannot touch,” he says as he makes stray marks on the blackboard for emphasis. “Now—Have I told you about the White Elephant?”
A few of the students, who are listening with an attention that seems rather curious, nod their heads earnestly. They’ve heard it. For the second time I miss connections with the White Elephant parable.
“FUNKY BEHAVIOR”
“I really don’t think it’d be fair of me not to tell you about this,” says Pat Thompson, rummaging a little mournfully through a file to produce a small clipping from the Fort Worth Paper, “you’d probably hear about it anyway, and I think it’d be best if you heard about it from us.”
The clipping is about a man who was found dead in his girlfriend’s apartment closet of multiple stab wounds and blows to the head. The suspect they arrested over the weekend was a 27-year-old resident from FCI on furlough.
“Do you think he did it?” I ask her.
“Well, he’s confessed. I don’t know. I just won’t be convinced until I know the whole story. I know him very well, he used to come in all the time with these drawings.”
The drawings are mostly sentimental, wide-eyed cartoons; one of them is an empty birdcage with a bird flying around outside and the word “Free” written in the corner .
As she talks an accumulation of hope drains from her eyes: apart from its potential for institutional damage, such a crime is a bitterly personal blow. At FCI it’s called “funky behavior.”
“If he’s convicted they’ll probably just send him back to Huntsville,” she sighs. “What do you say when you hurt for someone?”
Down near the base of the hill an ornate Victorian silo, a relic of the days when the mental health facility was a working farm, lurks out of a brewing dust storm. And what I at first take to be a setting, refracted sun turns out to be the full moon rising ponderously through the dusk.
CONVERSATIONS
Prefacing what is to work itself into a near two-hour diatribe, Sam Pollard (“Sure you can use my last name—put it in there: P-O-L-L-A-R-D!”), a thirty-ish resident wearing a slinky red T-shirt and plaid pants, pronounces “In the past two hundred years everything our society has done about felons has been WRONG!”
I manage to ask, before he takes off in a spurt of articulation in which he incorporates a bogus note by Bob Hope, if that judgment includes FCI.
“No,” he says, “this is a PROPER, EXPERIMENTAL SETTING! whoever came up with this idea is LOOKING into the FUTURE of AMERICA!”
And other than some negative feelings about some members of the staff (“They haven’t been THROUGH what we have. We should use ex-offenders as staff!”) Sam’s enthusiasm is untarnished and delivered in a kind of super-charged transactional dialect.
“The answers are in the communities, not in the prisons. The gates have to swing BOTH ways!”
And tonight the gate is scheduled to swing out when Sam goes to Baylor University to deliver a lecture to a group of criminologists.
“It’s pretty equal here”, says Susan, who, with her severely cut black hair and green fingernails, looks a little like Liza Minnelli. Pretty equal, she feels, even though women, being the most conspicuous minority in this prison, feel the brunt of the sexual security precautions. Women are always accounted for, always escorted at night above ground while the men range about in the tunnels beneath them.
I ask her if it bothers her that the machinery at FCI stops short of anything resembling sexual freedom.
“It could be more lenient,” she replies, “I think a lot of people here could handle it.”
There are some other improvements she can think of as well: the institution is understaffed, she’s unhappy with her “group,” the women’s unit needs repair work, and there aren’t enough activities for the high school graduates who are ineligible to take courses at nearby Tarrant County Junior College (to do that you have to be six months short).
“But really ,” she says, “everything runs pretty smooth here. If somebody had told me about this place I wouldn’t have believed them.”
Tattoos of naked women hover like archangels above the picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe breathing on Paul’s chest. He has the athletic build of an artist who, when he’s working, aims himself beyond his physical endurance. His best work shows the exertion: brooding portraits of Geronimo, of a matador, of Johnny Cash staring viciously from a prison cell, all with the paint thickly paletted on in crude, dark ridges.
Paul lives in DAPS, the non-heroin drug unit. A colorful mural in the hall is the only hint of psychedelia and from the hall the rooms have the gray metal exterior of footlockers. Inside, though, they seem comfortable enough, and Paul, who is a resident advisor, has a corner room with two sets of windows and a high-intensity lamp for when he needs more light.
This morning he’s at work on a portrait of his girlfriend, taken from a photograph and not much different from the kind of thing you can have done in those art galleries in enclosed shopping malls. But this is a favor, he says, it’s not the painting he feels most comfortable doing. He feels his real work, which is strong and vivid, can earn him a decent living once he’s released. He has an 18-month parole to work off, first, during which time he must hold at least a half-time job because he can’t convince anyone that his painting is more than a “hobby .”
“A hobby!” he sneers.
“This is the only place I’ve ever seen where if somebody’s mad at the caseworker they can tell the warden.”
Ted, a heavy man with a steady, oppressed stare, has an appointment with Warden Campbell this same afternoon to talk about his Christmas furlough that’s been canceled by his caseworker.
“It was down there in black and white, there was no question about the wording, eight men read it straight. Then two women caseworkers screwed it up. There’s no question about it: a woman don’t think like a man. In my business on the outside I hated to deal with women!”
Does the presence of women in this prison bother him?
“Oh hell no,” he says, “but a woman just don’t think like a man!”
My Library
