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.
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George, a carpenter trainee from the NARA unit, displays when I introduce myself an ethereal sort of cordiality, leaving me to wonder if I might be violating his air space. He leans his chair so his back rests on the dining hall post behind him: he’s already finished his lunch, hot dogs with that faint stinging taste of too many preservatives. I ask him if he, as a black, feels any racial tension at FCI.
“No, not really. We have an understanding here. Everybody seems to get along. It’s all right here. I’d rather have my freedom, but it’s all right here.”
Russell, a fellow NARA who looks like he might be in his late twenties, has been unloading his lunch tray at the table as we talk. He has an air of solid respectability and courtesy widely removed from any visual concepts of criminality.
“I view this whole institution as a learning center,” he says, “If I hadn’t done time I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to go back to school. In fact, if I wasn’t kept away from my loved ones this would be a beautiful place.”
“Warden Campbell is the best thing that’s ever happened to this place,” he continues, leaving room for some negative rumblings about some of the staff, who, he says, “don’t have enough background to relate to drug addicts.”
Russell says treatment for addiction in the NARA unit excludes “substitute” drugs like methadone (although, according to the warden, it’s sometimes used initially); the reliance is placed heavily on Gestalt therapy and transactional analysis (“TA”).
“And I want to say something about sex,” Russell blurts out, “My wife reads all these articles that come out about this place and she thinks we have scheduled orgies up here. Now I’m not denying that sex goes on here, but it’s not so low on repercussions that you’d better not think twice about it. I wish you people would get that sex thing straight so my wife would stop writing me about it.”
All the while I’ve been here I’ve felt vaguely miscreant about not asking every inmate I meet, according to the hard-hitting reporter formula, “What’re you in for?” But that question, I notice, holds no interest for me: it’s just another way to retreat into stereotypes, as though a crime is a capsule summary of character. And it seems a mishandling of the astonishing civility and openness of virtually every resident I meet to ask to see only what is flashy and forgotten.
Warden Charles Campbell is a rangy man with a talent for appearing flawlessly groomed and approachable at the same time. Extending that impression, his office features an area of plush chairs that eschews the traditional desk barricade between Official and Person A. He’s as relaxed and open as a family doctor, with clear, droopy eyes and hair that just barely avoids creeping over the tops of his ears.
“What we call ‘mutuality’ is the most important idea of all here,” he drawls in his character actor’s voice, “exposing residents to the community and vice versa. Uh, I suppose you’ve heard about what happened with one of our people this past weekend.”
I nod, surprised that he should voluntarily broach a subject as potentially dangerous to FCI as the killing Pat Thompson told me about.
“I was very discouraged about that. Then I began thinking that in over 15,000 resident trips to the outside we’ve had only two serious incidents of violence.
“We have problems here, of course. We haven’t yet discovered all the techniques to monitor it, but we do know this place is successful in terms of climate and the lack of violence: we don’t have problems with people not being able to go to sleep at night.”
I ask him why, exactly, residents aren’t allowed to have sexual relations.
“No, I don’t think it’s so much a moral question as a pragmatic one. We’re under a great deal of scrutiny here from the rest of the community, and we deserve to be. There’s a pace you have to keep in mind with these things. Right now, for instance, we’re concentrating on married couples and what we can do in that area.”
About the estrangement and containment of the women residents in order to discourage sex, he seems genuinely concerned and a little stymied.
“Naturally, the inclination is to try to put the burden of security on the smaller group. It’s true that more of the compound is off-limits to women than it is to men, and that’s a serious problem which we don’t have the facilities at present to correct.”
Like an antebellum Southern aristocrat who refuses to own slaves, Campbell, a 19-year veteran of the Bureau of Prisons, moves through his role of warden with a gracious, human conservatism. It is high praise to any official when an interviewer can say that at the end of the conversation he did not feel dispensed with, shuffled aside for more important business. If that languid courtesy extends to Ted, who is waiting to see Campbell armed with legal ramifications of the denial of his furlough, the “revolution” at FCI may be starting from the top.
TALES OF TRUNKS AND THE TREATMENT MODALITY
The white elephant metaphor revealed. Standing in front of a blackboard on which he has just drawn the “I’m OK—You’re OK” scale, Robert explains it this way:
“You’ve got a white elephant on your ass: the government, the police, churches, whatever. So what do you do about it?”
There are, he says, three basic solutions: 1) the “Housewife” solution, simply lying down under the elephant and not worrying about it, which something like 84 percent of the population does; 2) the “Hip Slick” solution: you grease yourself and slide out, all but useless since there are plenty of other white elephants around waiting to sit on you; 3) the “Radical” solution, whereby you sharpen a stick and jab the elephant with it, arousing his anger and causing him to focus more attention on you; or you can 4) try the “Therapeutic” solution, in which you slip out from under, hide in the bushes and fashion yourself a white elephant rope, then harness the critter.
These options are being offered in the top floor of the men’s building, a penthouse-like dorm setting that houses the ongoing therapeutic community of FCJ, the 4-4 unit. The 4-4 program has been in existence for 16 months and, its members claim, has either started or provided the leadership for every positive program in the institution. In addition they boast of a 100 percent rate for 4-4 residents once they are released, meaning their recidivism rate, the number of people who return to prison, is nil.
That’s an impressive claim, especially since the recidivism rate nationally has been estimated as high as 80 percent. And whether or not it’s a realistic claim (based as it is on only a 16-month period) there seems to be a sense of mission among the 26 men living in the 4-4 penthouse, an unabashed and unqualified enthusiasm that fosters a sort of elitism, dividing the world into Flying Aces and Ground Crew.
That air that 4-4 has of being the most prestigious fraternity on campus seems to inspire an incredible and oddly refreshing zeal, especially on the part of Robert, the unit’s chief coordinator and resident, whose jet-propelled metabolism and long hair give him the appearance of local anarchist speed-freak.
Dave, a former accounting major in college 11 years ago, is more quiet and tense. It is he who introduces phrases like “treatment modality” into the conversation as if to complement Robert’s exuberant outbursts about “getting it on with the people.”
In the 4-4 unit there is no distinction between staff and resident.
“We are, first of all, a community,” David explains.
It is a community that spends at least 35-40 hours a week in some sort of therapeutic group activity, that has an extensive psychological library inherited from the outgoing mental health institute. This prison community actually treats people from the outside, from Fort Worth and Dallas, inside the prison once a week, a fact that seems a classic case of “mutuality.”
Members of 4-4 are recruited from all men’s units except comprehensive health. So far not that many residents have expressed a desire to get in (“People are reluctant to change that much,” says Robert) and those that have, after a series of three group sessions in which the heat is turned toward them, must be unanimously approved.
He explains how they were forced to kick out a paranoid who was “taking up so much energy that other people were falling down. I mean, we loved him, but there are some people who just have to go off and die somewhere.”
Though the symbol-making and phraseology of Gestalt and TA, all that “OK” business, seem too easy on the mental digestion, too schematized and hip, to be lasting and pat enough to be addictive, it’s applied with an urgency that is real and devastating to us armchair cynics: you can’t argue with the good graces of a convict frantically trying to understand the kind of society that got him in prison.
DECOMPRESSION
“You come here this time next year and you’ll see Haldeman out there mowing the lawn,” says Bob, taking a moment to look across the quadrangle at the strolling couples and stone-faced benchwarmers and brittle groups of residents that break apart and reform like molecules. Then he looks pensively down at his picture of Snoopy, trying to figure out exactly what’s wrong with it.
And outside, on that lawn that H. R. Haldeman mayor may not see, I notice that girl I know crossing to the dining hall and think once more how I ought to speak to her, to give the article a nice existential touch. Instead, I sit in Pat Thompson’s office for a while before I leave, watching her cut out Christmas decorations and wondering how it will go tomorrow when she gets to talk to her friend at the county jail and find out the true motives behind his funky behavior of last weekend.
At four o’clock in the afternoon all residents are required to be beside their beds for the daily count. The administration building, which guards the entrance and exit to the compound it forms with the other buildings, is sealed off from the rear. But if you’re not imprisoned here it’s an easy matter to sashay out the front door, a full-grown citizen with an ink-swollen spiral notebook and, when you think about it, astonishing good luck. The guards wave.
My Library
