How to Be Alone : Essays

Control Units

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.

“I watch very little TV, mostly news and an occasional ball game,” he says. “When the radio is working — which it hasn’t been for the past few weeks — I’ll listen to NPR sometimes.” The only time he sees a fellow prisoner is during his three weekly outdoor-recreation hours. He has a wife and three daughters whom he last touched in 1989.

Every prisoner in the federal system is expected to participate in some kind of rehabilitative “program”—drug or alcohol treatment, vocational training, factory work. To get out of ADX, a prisoner must not only follow the rules but do “programming” as well. Part of what makes Levasseur a “political” are his refusals. At Marion he refused to work in a factory that manufactured coaxial cable for the military. “They can step on me and keep me as long as they want,” he tells me, “but I’m not making military or police-related equipment, period. Never.” As for working in the furniture factory that recently opened at ADX: “I think using prisoners as indentured servants or slaves is fundamentally wrong.”

I ask him about the guards at ADX.

“I haven’t met one yet that’s from this area,” he says. “They’re all imported. The good thing about that is that, unlike Marion, they don’t have that good-old-boy network. It was terrible at Marion, everybody’s working for their cousin, you know, and they would do some real brutal nasty shit to you and they knew they could get away with it. Here it’s not so bad because they’re all new here. My feeling is that, over time, that old-boy shit’s going to settle in. I think prisons foster that kind of thing.”

Mr. Winn, standing at my shoulder, is sighing at precise five-minute intervals.

I ask Levasseur whether he considers himself the worst of the worst.

“People like Robert McNamara,” he says, “they’ve killed a hell of a lot more people than I have. That’s the problem. If you want to define crime as somebody with a crack pipe, or somebody’s B and E or something like that, it’s always going to boil down to very black and very poor people. OK? But you get these monstrous crimes committed by somebody like McNamara. And Union Carbide, what they did in India, they killed eight thousand fucking people.” He lowers his voice a little, reflectively. “Of course, I was convicted of bombing Union Carbide.” He snickers and then, rubbing his face, regains his composure. “Small price to pay for the lives of those people.” He points at Mr. Winn. “He probably idolizes somebody like Robert McNamara. He doesn’t see what they do as a crime.”

Mr. Winn takes this opportunity to say to me, coolly, “Do you have any final questions you’d like to ask?”

I shrug.

Levasseur shrugs.

I tell him I’ll write to him.

Once he is gone, a guard releases us from our side of the contact visit room. We have twenty-five minutes left to tour ADX. Time enough to walk down a great many climate-controlled corridors; to inspect the cast-concrete indestructibility of the fixtures of an empty cell (the cell is gray, about seven by twelve feet, and it has an integrated sink-toilet-fountain, a concrete bed and desk, a built-in electric cigarette lighter, and a narrow window offering a fragment of blue sky); to drop in at one of the law libraries and the leisure library (mass-market paperbacks only; lots of Louis L’Amour and Robert Heinlein); and to have one brief conversation verging on the pleasant. I ask Mr. Winn how ADX has managed to attract the attention of CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, NPR, the BBC, French TV, Yorkshire TV, Der Spiegel, the New York Times, the London Times, and Details. He replies that the attraction is partly the high-tech stuff but mainly “the mystique of Alcatraz”—the romance that inevitably surrounds whatever prison holds the worst of the worst.

Still hoping to win him over, I venture the opinion that romanticizing prisons is a sick thing. He nods. “Just work in one for a day,” he says. “They’re not happy places.”

I’m moved by his sober tone, but only briefly. The violent political warfare which shook America in the sixties and seventies and which has lately resurfaced — in the Unabomber case, in Oklahoma City, in the Philadelphia of Mumia Abu-Jamal — is most active in the prisons that hold a million and a half people, almost all of them poor. That the vast majority of these people are unpolitical takes nothing away from the state of war. Rare is the war that is fought on principle; jailers and jailed are simply blood enemies. And the roots here are deep. Mr. Winn grew up on Army bases, whereas Shakur grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and Levasseur in a depressed mill town in Maine. Their war is hidden from public view by teal and salmon and phrases like “worst of the worst.” Those who are losing it are, in the main, sociopaths. Those who are winning it wear nice suits and talk of sadness.

I’d like to believe I’m not implicated in this war.

TO FREMONT COUNTY, Colorado, prisons mean one thing and one thing only: dollars. The county seat, Cañon City, may have been the first community in America to recognize incarceration as a growth industry. In 1868, having supported Denver in its successful bid to become the permanent state capital, Cañon was offered its choice of payoff: the state prison or the state university. It took the prison.

More than a century later, the town and its environs have a lock on state corrections. Nine of Colorado’s eighteen prisons are located within five miles of Cañon City’s Wal-Mart. The Colorado Territorial Prison Museum, housed in a decommissioned cellblock at the west end of town, is a rallying point for Cañon’s high society. In the yard outside the museum are picnic tables, a rusting octagonal gas chamber, and a pair of cells in which sunburned British tourists ham it up as desperate convicts. Prominent Cañonites contribute to the Museum Foundation at the Warden level (five to ten thousand dollars); lesser lights may choose, say, the Sergeant level (one hundred to five hundred dollars). To raise further money, there’s an annual golf tournament and an occasional Big House Bash — a fancy-dress affair at which, a few years ago, arriving benefactors dropped their invitations into a plastic scale model of the gas chamber.

A few miles east of Cañon, on the banks of the Arkansas River, is the one-stoplight town of Florence. Elks, Eagles, and Legionnaires call bingo here three nights a week. At the corner of the road to the FCC is a new Hardee’s that everyone in town is proud of. Ranged along Main Street are one bank, one drugstore, one grocery store with a permanent-looking billboard welcoming the FCC, and a wealth of vacancies and For Sale signs. Here the mayor of Florence, Merle Strickland, a seventy-two-year-old Texan lady with diamond stud earrings and a white Ford pickup, liquidated her furniture store because she could make better money on Wall Street and (she quips) the stock is easier to carry.

Concrete-clad irrigation ditches line Florence’s side streets, greening the cottonwood-shaded lawns of stuccoed pillbox houses and a few brick Victorians. Cyanide Street, on the western outskirts, dead-ends in a dismal RV park called Last Mile Estates. The Arkansas, roiling and bucking just beyond, is the color of steamed artichokes.

Florence was once a town of thirty thousand and the center of a booming extractive economy. Coal, oil, gold, limestone, gypsum, fuller’s earth, and alabaster all were mined or processed here. Florence’s No. 42, the country’s oldest continuously producing commercial oil well, still draws four barrels a day. By the 1980s, however, most of Fremont County’s mineral wealth was exhausted. Ruined hillsides and unnatural-looking gulches scarred the local landscape, and Florence’s population had taken a free fall to three thousand.

“We were like a dry lakebed, an area of clay full of cracks,” says Skip Dyer, the former executive director of the Fremont County Economic Development Corporation. “The money was the water, and the water had just disappeared. It was a rather desperate time for many, many people and many, many businesses.”

To economically parched Fremont County, a federal correctional complex represented the terminus of a pipeline through which federal money, in the form of payrolls, could flow at upwards of fifty thousand dollars a day. There would also be one-time cash cloudbursts when facilities were built or renovated. Boosters of the prison envisioned thriving custom for their businesses, and a population rising to the critical mass that would draw new employers to the area.

Fremont County’s tapping of the new federal resource began in 1986, when a local pencil salesman named Tom Schryver saw his chance to make a good old American killing. It happened that Schryver’s brother worked for the BOP, and he mentioned to Schryver that the Fed was seeking troubled colleges, monasteries, and convents that might be convertible to minimum-security prisons. It happened, further, that Cañon City possessed just such a property: the Holy Cross Abbey. Holy Cross sat on 220 acres just outside the Cañon city limits, near the Wal-Mart, and was outfitted with dormitories and a dining hall that could feed three hundred. Its finances were rumored to be precarious.

There was abundant evidence, moreover, that Fremont County did not mind hosting inmates. On a Sunday morning after my visit to ADX, I pick up a Florence town councilman named Jimmie Lloyd who has promised to introduce me to Schryver. Lloyd, a retired air force lieutenant colonel, summarizes the Cañonite attitude toward prisons this way: “Escapees don’t stick around, and who’s going to burglarize a house that’s potentially a prison guard’s? You get caught and go to jail, you may wind up with the victim as your guard. You also run the risk of getting your head blown off. There’s probably more guns in this area than in half the state.”

Driving through the unincorporated town of Penrose, Lloyd and I pass a house with ostriches in the back yard, and he offers his opinion that ostrich farms are a Ponzi scheme. On a dusty street where the house numbers follow no evident logic, we succeed in locating the modest one-story home of Tom Schryver.

Schryver is a good-natured man, his face open and smooth. He has a big belly but a slender man’s handsome features. He meets us at his door in sandals and chocolate-colored polyester slacks. “I’m just an old hick,” he tells me happily. “I was selling pencils when I met Steve Stewart.”

Steve Stewart arrives moments later. He’s a realtor and he looks it. He has the extra pounds, the trustable face, the ease in weekend wear. He has driven down from Colorado Springs and brought along three commemorative clocks for the coaches of his son’s little league team. Tom Schryver has engraved brass nameplates for the clocks. “It’s a sideline of Tom’s,” says Stewart.

Tom Schryver had met Stewart when he peddled personalized pencils and other commercial souvenirs to Stewart’s agency. In late 1986, Schryver acquired a realtor’s license and immediately paid a visit to the Holy Cross Abbey. The abbey’s business manager confirmed that the monks were indeed prepared to sell. The manager and Schryver agreed on an asking price of 12.75 million dollars, and Schryver got exclusive rights to the property for seventy-five days. He began to petition the BOP’s head of property acquisitions, a man named Jim Jones.

What finally swayed Jones was the twelve-minute video Schryver made. In Schryver’s living room, drinking Storebrand diet cola, the four of us watch the video. Schryver can’t hide his pride in the zooms and pans and soundtrack. “It’s not as easy as it looks to match up what you’re saying with the pictures,” he says. “When I wasn’t talking, I turned up the volume of my stereo, and then I’d turn it back down when I had to talk.”

The music sounds like Mantovani.

“It’s a Reader’s Digest record,” Schryver says.

The video purports to be an overview of the abbey’s buildings for any potential buyer. Schryver subtly geared it, however, to the Justice Department. “I make a joke about prisons,” he says. “See if you can catch it. It’s just a joke between me and my mind.”

“Between you and your mind,” Steve Stewart echoes in comic awe.

There are, in fact, several jokes. On the soundtrack, Schryver describes the abbey’s gymnasium as “a very pleasant place to spend time.” (He appeals to us gleefully: “Get it? Spend time?”) He goes on to mention that the abbey’s buildings are set back from Highway 50, thus providing “a buffer zone to the outside” (“Buffer zone! Hee-hee!”) and he notes that the abbey’s single entrance “can easily be outfitted with a gate to restrict access.”

“This whole town has a lot in common with Dachau,” Stewart remarks slyly.

“The last pan was especially hard because I had to do it from a car,” Schryver says. “It came out beautifully. You see how there’s a truck coming out just perfectly when I get to the entrance? This is a lot harder than you might think.”

“‘And now let’s take a look at the crematorium,’” Stewart voice-overs.

In February 1987, Jim Jones flew to Florence and pronounced the abbey the best site he’d seen yet. More than a thousand Cañonites sent copies of a form letter urging the BOP to buy it. According to Stewart, Jones was overwhelmed by the response. He announced publicly that the Bureau was acquiring a property in Colorado.

“I was already counting the three hundred seventy-five thousand that was my share of the commission,” Schryver says. “I was getting Mercedes-Benz literature.”

“It was a done deal,” Stewart says. “And then a week after the final appraisal I get up on a Saturday morning and there’s a banner headline in the paper: DEAL OFF FOR ABBEY. That’s how the exclusive agents for the property got their notice that the deal was off.”

The monks at the abbey had held a final vote on the sale and changed their minds.

“I’d worked hard on that sucker,” Schryver says. “I could have gotten all huffy and puffy when the deal fell through. But I let Steve do that.”

Steve Stewart believed that since his agency had exclusive rights to represent the abbey and had found a ready, able, and willing buyer, the abbey still owed him the realtor’s fee. He wrote to the Apostolic Delegate in Rome and placed a lien on the abbey. But no one in the Justice Department would confirm that the BOP intended to buy.

“Everybody’s looking for their twenty minutes of fame,” Jimmie Lloyd tells me on the way back to Florence. “Like most people, Tom Schryver didn’t get his.”

MY SECOND ATTEMPT TO PENETRATE FCC Florence takes place at the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution. Like ADX, the FCI is a showcase. Among its notably humane features are a sweat lodge where Native Americans can practice their rites, six full-size pool tables, a painting studio, and a library whose holdings include Gravity’s Rainbow in hardcover and Walter Kaufmann’s study of Hegel. Footpaths crisscross a large central campus whose lush grass is push-mown by prisoners in khaki. Nearly half the inmates at the FCI are in for drug offenses.

My guide, Case Management Coordinator Denise Snider, gives me an exhaustive tour of the UNICOR furniture factory. UNICOR is a semiautonomous federal corporation, like the Postal Service. It runs the BOP’s factories, selling exclusively to federal buyers. The products of FCI Florence are comfortable, personalityless chairs and sofas. Inmates working here earn between forty cents and a dollar and a quarter an hour. I see towers of foam rubber, air-powered drills and staplers attached to pendant yellow coils of tubing, an intriguing Gluing Room, and a whole lot of men in khaki.

UNICOR will train you for jobs on the floor — one of the program’s stated purposes is to provide inmates with “marketable skills”—but to land a desk job in UNICOR’s lovely late-model business office, you need prior experience in the outside world. At each desk, where the modern eye expects to see a braceleted young woman with padded shoulders and teased bangs, a bearded long-haired man in khaki is typing briskly. The effect is parodic or surreal.

For most of my visit to the FCI, Case Management Coordinator Snider remains profoundly unmoved by my efforts to charm and ingratiate. Her clothing and haircut are assertively sensible, and she’s plainly counting the minutes till she’s free of me. As I’m leaving, however, a few tiny chinks open in her professionalism.

“I was a psychology major in college,” she says, explaining how she acquired two degrees in criminal justice. “A professor told me she thought I’d be perfect for criminology. It suits my nature. I like to find things out about people without their knowing that I’m doing it.”

I ask her how many prison employees live in Florence or other nearby towns. I recall that Mr. Winn does not live in the area.

“We’re encouraged to live close by,” Snider says. “But the closest place I could find day care was in Pueblo. The administrators who are black might like to live close by, but they don’t feel welcome in Florence or Cañon City, so they end up in Pueblo or Colorado Springs, with an hour commute. Our warden is black, for example. He can’t live around here.”

IN JUNE OF 1987, after the abbey deal fell through, the Fremont County Economic Development Commission (FCEDC) learned from Jim Jones that the BOP had decided to build a new prison complex in the Western United States entirely from scratch. The FCEDC hastened to develop four potential sites in Fremont County, and Jones was particularly enthusiastic about a property owned by the Colorado Department of Corrections located between Cañon City and Florence. The FCEDC assured him he could have the land for free.

In May 1988, Jim Jones asked Skip Dyer, the FCEDC’s executive director, what the community’s response would be to a larger complex, one perhaps containing as many as three facilities. “They’d hug you a lot harder,” Dyer replied.

Although the BOP was being wooed by depressed communities all over the West and was studying sites in at least five of them, Fremont County had the inside track. Just when it appeared that all systems were go, however, the Colorado state legislature refused to authorize the gift of land to the Feds. “We’d had reasonable confidence that we’d get that state land,” Dyer says. “When it fell through, we felt we had to strike while the iron was still hot.”

The iron was struck by the owner of Jim’s Clothing in Florence. Jim Provenzano is a heavy-set man with soft brown eyes and olive skin. His father, an Italian tailor, came to Florence in 1916 and built a business by taking the measurements of miners entering the local shafts, sewing while they mined, and delivering their suits when they emerged from their shift. Provenzano fils was a member of the countywide prison steering committee, and he knew that there was an alternate site, just south of Florence, that Jim Jones had deemed adequate. The asking price was a hundred thousand dollars. Provenzano told a friend at the Rocky Mountain Bank & Trust that he would put up a thousand dollars to buy the Florence property if the bank would put up a thousand, too.

“I could sooner put a man on the moon than afford a thousand dollars,” Provenzano says. “But we only had two weeks, and I knew the Fed was interested in that property. So I said: Let’s buy it. My main purpose was to bring our store into its seventy-fifth year. I hoped we could provide local employment and give our kids a place to work if they wanted it.”

With Provenzano’s impetus, the FCEDC quickly organized a fund-raising drive. “It was like a disease that everybody caught,” Provenzano says. “It was like an auction. Everybody else was pledging; you had to pledge too.” Within two weeks the FCEDC had eighty thousand dollars in the bank and another sixty thousand in pledges. By the summer of 1988, it was able to send the title for three hundred acres of desert to the BOP — thus fulfilling its promise of free land.

Ground was broken in Florence on July 14, 1990. Out-of-town dignitaries made appearances at a barbecue in the town park. A pickaxe commemorating the event now hangs on the wall at the Florence Chamber of Commerce. Also on the wall are framed watercolors of the four prisons in the complex. Twin garlands of steel are taped to the plywood paneling above the paintings. A calligraphed card identifies the garlands as RAZOR WIRE FROM FEDERAL PRISON.

FOR THE NATIONAL and international media, ADX is the showcase of a new millennium, but just east of Cañon City there is a new Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP) that opened fifteen months earlier than the federal ADX, is identical in its principles, and is easily as carefully designed. You have to admire the Feds for persuading people that ADX is newsworthy.

My guide at the CSP, Administrative Officer Dennis Burbank, could hardly be more different from Louis Winn. Mr. Winn is a transfer to the area; Dennis is a local. Mr. Winn is smooth and well-spoken, a master at passing up obvious opportunities to volunteer information. Dennis expresses feelings, opinions. He’s an individual who utilizes the words “utilize” and “individual” with an ease that makes them sound almost slangy. He can get all glowy on the topic of the federal ADX (“I love their isolation cells”) and yet visibly shudder at the thought of corrections in Oklahoma (“a model of how not to do things”). When I meet him he’s wearing a red-white-and-blue necktie of considerable hideousness. The tie bears a single word: LIBERTY.

As Dennis presents it, the CSP is designed to provide a kind of tough love: to be the stern, corrective parent that most of its residents presumably never had. If you follow the rules and learn to control your antisocial impulses, you proceed from the very unpleasant Level I (no privileges, a two-guard escort for a trip to the shower) to the less unpleasant Level III (more spending money, more personal freedoms) and finally, after six months or a year, back to a prison where you can interact with fellow prisoners. It’s a theory of in loco parentis. What CSP sets out to do is to impress on the childlike, acting-out prisoner that the world around him is real and that he has responsibilities to it.

The staff at CSP devotes considerable ingenuity to tailoring “behavior management plans” to particular offenses. The punishment for throwing feces at a guard, for example, is to be deprived of the usual prison food. The thrower is put, instead, on a “special management diet”: a squishy high-protein loaf that Dennis describes as “not very tasty.” With as much delicacy as I can, I ask if the special management diet changes the nature of its consumers’ feces. Dennis says no. The diet is simply a message: stop misbehaving, and we’ll put you back on real food.

When I express uneasiness about the possibility of sensory deprivation disorders at CSP, Dennis has an expert paged, a social worker named Gene Espinoza, who tells me that prisoners are not, in fact, all that isolated. Besides the staff-intensive daily contacts, inmates also call to each other from their cells, tap on the walls, and, when they think no one’s looking, fashion their bedsheets into “rat lines”—long cords that they push under the doors of their cells and attempt to snap like a whip and reach the doors of other cells with. If you’ve managed to “keister in” some tobacco (this is Dennis’s jolly phrase; it means “secrete in your rectum out of sight of a simple spread-your-cheeks check”) and wish to sell it to a neighbor, the rat line is the preferred means of conducting the transaction.

My relationship with Dennis suffers a moment of awkwardness when I point out that the contacts which Mr. Espinoza calls a boon to mental health are in fact against the regulations and routinely punished. This is how Dennis resolves the paradox: “Inmates are not allowed to communicate with each other. Nevertheless, they communicate.”

CSP is operating at full capacity. As of June, 486 men and thirteen women were imprisoned here. Each of CSP’s four “units” has its own medical exam room and barber room (the latter doubles as a mental-health counseling area); the idea is to minimize the time an inmate spends outside his unit. At the center of the unit is a two-tiered control area from which eight “pods” radiate tangentially. The upper floor of the control area is glassed in and contains a couple of guards who oversee large color monitors controlling locks, lights, intercoms, water flow, and the like. Dennis says that the controls were originally touch-screen, but guards would find themselves opening up doors with a sneeze or the brush of a sleeve. Now they use trackballs and clickers.

Each pod has sixteen cells arranged on two tiers and looking out on a “day hall” with a waxed concrete floor. The first principle of a control unit is that no inmate should ever have direct contact with another inmate, and the electronics here serve an elaborate choreography of comings and goings. Prisoners at disciplinary Levels I and II must be cuffed and escorted by two guards whenever they leave their cells; the big carrot of Level III is being allowed to walk the fifty feet to the shower or exercise room or telephone without escort. Prisoners at the different levels are mixed together in each unit, so that the privileges of those in Level III are visible to all.

Eight or ten of the cells are quiescent at any given moment. Silently, behind glass, a blond-bearded inmate is working out in the lower-tier exercise room, whose equipment consists of a chin-up bar. In the upper-tier exercise room an inmate with a half-grown Afro can be seen with his face pressed to the window as he peers out at the late-afternoon nothing. (CSP has no outdoor recreation area.) One or two other inmates have their faces pressed to the windows of their cell doors. Yet another is showering. Through the glass door of the pod’s narrow shower room I can see his head and torso not real clearly in honey-colored light. The water will run for no more than ten minutes before the pod computer turns it off. If he needs a razor, a guard brings it before the shower and takes it away after.

“It’s still hard for me to get used to how quiet it is in this facility,” Dennis says.

The cells themselves are seldom quiet. Television is important at CSP — so important that if an inmate arrives at CSP without a set of his own, he’s given one as soon as he’s out of Level I. CSP has its own station, broadcasting self-improvement programming and vocational training (Dennis mentions “janitorial work” as a vocation), as well as movies and devotional instruction. On Saturday nights, there’s bingo. CSP’s recreational therapist, Jim Gentile, focuses the closed-circuit camera on a spinning cage from which he draws numbered balls. He calls six games, and inmates with a winning card send him a Request for Interview slip. When he makes his rounds the next day he awards a candy bar to winners. Gentile says that if he takes a Saturday night off, he gets hate mail for three days.

The basement of CSP houses what’s called Intake. Inmates arrive and depart here, wearing orange jumpsuits. When Dennis and I pay our visit, a face is pressed against the window of each holding cell. Newcomers. Everybody looks about twenty-eight. White, Hispanic, black; all of them in the pink. One of them calls to nobody: “Yo! How many phone calls a month do you get in Level I?”

I feel them looking at me and am careful not to meet their eyes. Lest: what? Lest some vertigo draw me to them? Lest they see my fear? Lest they implicate me in their war? Lest I have to register emotionally the fact that I am free and will soon be speeding along a highway through juniper and scrub pine toward dinner in Florence? In junior high I learned that by avoiding certain kids’ eyes in the hallway I could sometimes escape notice, or at least escape being punched. Lowering one’s eyes is a sign of deference — I learned this very early on. But it’s also, of course, a way of not seeing.

One of the holding cells in Intake has a full window, not just a slit in the door. The black man with a shaved head who’s inside it catches me looking at him. I avert my eyes and then look again, and he gives me a strange smirk — one that I don’t think I’m reading too much into to say that it’s a mockery of the kind of smile shared by two human beings but at the same time is a gesture of trust: that I might understand and share the mockery. I return the smirk, too widely. It falls off my face, and I avert my eyes.

FOR THE PRISON BOOSTERS who imagined the town blossoming under a shower of federal dollars, there appear to have been a few surprises. The major construction contracts for FCC Florence all went to big firms outside Fremont County, and a lot of the Florentine men who had hoped for construction work failed the test of back strength. Instead of employment, the town got traffic, dust, and a lively bar trade. When it came time to staff ADX, the BOP, which was intent on maximizing the professionalism of its showcase facility, imported seasoned guards and administrators from elsewhere in the country. Most janitorial, laundry, lawn, and kitchen work at the complex is performed by prisoners, and for the locally filled positions, the maximum age for applicants turned out to be thirty-seven. This was an unwelcome revelation for a town of retirees; people at city hall refer to it as “the shocker.”

Jim Provenzano had hoped that prison corrections officers would buy uniforms at his store. Unfortunately, he says, “they wanted me to sell boots at ten dollars below my cost; otherwise they’d use the regular government supplier. How am I going to compete with that?” Some FCC maintenance workers are buying uniforms from Provenzano, but he’s seen little spillover demand for his stock of Western wear.

When Provenzano assesses the return on his thousand-dollar gamble, his sentences trail off into worried ellipses. “I don’t mean to sound negative, but. .” Although he believes that Florence will eventually prosper, he concedes that Jim’s Clothing is not doing as well as he hoped. “I don’t know if I’ll be in business two years from now.”

“I empathize with our merchants,” says Merle Strickland, Florence’s marketwise mayor. “They’re trying to survive in what’s primarily a service economy. I’d love to see a thriving business community, but they’re going to have the same problems I had with my furniture store: people are going to buy where it’s cheapest. If you want to be successful here, you have to make it in service.”

Strickland takes me to see Florence’s new nine-hole Bear Paw Golf Course, whose driving range and practice green afford a panorama of the FCC’s northern perimeter. Bear Paw was built in part to appeal to prison bureaucrats, who were reputed to be keen linksmen, and in part to anchor a housing development. At the end of a rutted gravel road, several outsize model units offer nice views of electric fences.

According to Strickland, Florence has the water infrastructure to sustain a population of twenty thousand. Water is a big source of revenue for the town, which exacts a fifty percent markup from customers outside the city limits; the gross is about five thousand dollars a month from selling to the FCC. “Some of our councilmen are fond of saying that our town’s biggest asset is its people,” sh% says. “I happen to believe that the most valuable asset my constituents own is the water.”

I tell Strickland that I don’t see how exactly the prison has fed the new housing developments going up around town.

She gestures pooh-poohingly. “The growth isn’t coming from the prison. It’s coming from amenities like this golf course. It’s part of the growth along the whole Front Range. Guards making twelve dollars an hour aren’t going to find housing here. And I’ve heard a lot of prison administrators remark that they personally don’t care to live that close to where they work.”

Of the prison boosters, Strickland says: “They all think Santa Claus is coming. But there is no Santa Claus.”

Just such a realization appears to have dawned on Jim Provenzano. He understands now, he says, that once employees leave work at the prison complex they want to go straight home, rather than stop and shop in Florence. He jokes that local businessmen ought to pay for radar traps on the roads to Pueblo and the Springs so that people can’t get to the malls so quickly.

“People assume that because I’m the only store in a small town my prices must be higher,” Provenzano says. “It’s not true. But we’ve got a generation of kids who know nothing but Wal-Mart, who know nothing but malls.”

Provenzano, who initially agreed to talk to me for “a few minutes,” ends up chatting for an hour. When, on my way out, I show an interest in a pair of Levi’s, he confirms what chain-store salesmen in my past have always vehemently denied: that 501s of the same marked size vary widely in their cut. He doesn’t have the preshrunk 32x34s I want — his stock is not large — but he is able, with much measuring and comparing, to locate a pair of 33x34s cut small enough to fit me perfectly.

“I’m having problems with Levi,” he says as he rings up the purchase. (The price is a chain-store price.) “They say I’m short on volume. We’ve been selling Levi’s for sixty years, and now they say I’m short on volume.”

After teasing me affably about my growing waist, and then asking me for my shirt size, he presents me with a T-shirt to wear with my new jeans. It’s stenciled with a drawing of the Federal Prison Camp.

IF SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD II HAD LIVED in Alcatraz in the 1930s, he might have noted the uniqueness of its design and setting, the splendor of the scenery around it, and the romance of its imperfect security. Richard II in ADX Florence would see perfect, anonymous utility in the middle of a blasted landscape. Comparing the prison where he lived unto the world of 1995, he couldn’t miss seeing money. Dollars within, dollars without.

What’s futuristic about ADX and CSP is not their high-tech accoutrements (you won’t see the exoskeletal uniforms or blaster guns of sci-fi flicks) but the social context in which these facilities are coming on line. It isn’t hard to extrapolate the logic of our political economy’s solution to the crime problem. In many respects, the future is glimpsable in our not wholly unpleasant present. The murder rate is plummeting in New York City, for example, as New York State’s prison population soars. Three-quarters of the inmates in the state system come from just seven impoverished neighborhoods in New York City. Apparently it’s genuinely feasible simply to lock away the problem. Across the country, educational programs for inmates are on the wane, executions are mounting, and more and more legislators are clamoring to reduce recreation for prisoners and to extract greater revenues from prison labor.

The black or Latino youth whose father is in prison and whose neighborhood can offer no better job than bagging groceries commits a crime, is processed, and is then shipped to a warehouse in a rural white community. Between strikes one and three there’s a cynical calculus: the imprisoned youth emerges from jail embittered and unemployable; inevitably, he commits another crime; inevitably, there are innocent victims. Residual crimes are the cost of doing business in this country, and even these pay the dividend of keeping the public’s fear of crime ever fresh.

The social Darwinist may here ponder the beauties of our economy’s evolution. The press covers crime (especially the relatively rare instances of random violence against white people) because crime sells — because the white audience loves to hear about it. Then the intensive, decontextualized, and highly salable coverage of crime becomes evidence of a Crime Epidemic; the Audience gets “sick and tired” of hearing about a thing that every marketer knows it actually never gets sick or tired of hearing about, and it empowers its elected representatives to Get Tough. Thus the criminal is demonized. The distance between Us and Him grows and grows, thereby ensuring that here in the country that invented the Western and the crime drama and the News at Eleven, in the country that celebrated the James brothers and Bonnie and Clyde, we will always be able to hear what we most don’t want to hear, which is what we most want to hear. In enjoying and then punishing our murderers, we are continually trying to exorcise the contradictions that make us Americans. Our love-hate love affair with crime is the epos of the controlling dollar at war with the wild frontier.

Eventually, when the black or Latino youth whiffs at his third spitball, he’s remanded for life to a system that maintains internal order and earns money by forcing its prisoners to do, for a dollar or less per hour, the menial work that as free men they refused to do for a minimum wage. For the men who won’t cooperate, there’s always a stint in dispensaries of benevolent discipline like ADX and CSP. At first hearing, Ray Levasseur’s description of ADX as a “proto-techno-fascist’s architectural wetdream” sounds like tired agitprop hyperbole. But consider fascism in its original (Italian) sense of getting government to work with the bloodless efficiency of a corporation; of making the trains run on time. Fascism’s real essence is a patriotic corporatism that presents itself as beneficent and effective. In light of the future we are building in Fremont County, Ray Levasseur and Mutulu Shakur, whose claims of being “political” make them anomalies, are actually the system’s most typical prisoners. It may be true that each of the individuals in our nation’s prisons represents a story of personal irresponsibility. But the whole of a million and a half of these stories is greater than the sum of its parts. The whole is political, and Levasseur and Shakur are the voice of the statistics. They are saying, Let’s think about what a million and a half men in jail might imply about the way we do business.

And here is the thing: the Feds aren’t friendly to me, their reserve won’t thaw. Whereas every Coloradan I speak to is a person of visible hopes, dreams, fears. It takes me only an hour to love them. They are not positive of anything. They seem at once freer and more captive than the federal functionaries who by day are sealed inside their compound and by twilight commute to Pueblo West. Free to be confused and suspicious, and captive to the perpetually self-perfecting mechanisms of control and cash flow that are stalking the last of America’s traditional communities. Captive to the federal agency that allows a town to hope for construction jobs that don’t materialize, promises three prisons and throws in an Alcatraz as an afterthought, hints at trade with local businesses but ends up using prearranged suppliers; captive to the inescapable efficiency of strip malls and tract housing. There’s no conspiracy here, no conscious intent to deceive, no grand ironies. There’s only, in this valley of erosional mesas and spent mines, the stepwise dwindling of an innocence. When Merle Strickland says that her community’s greatest asset is its water rights and not its people, she’s both exactly right and exactly wrong.

At night the prisons glow in the desert like a reactor, a launchpad, some latent federal thing. From miles away you can see that nothing’s moving inside the wire.

[1995]