The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison Read Online Free PDF Page A

cardboard boxes crammed with envelopes, crumpled papers, and tattered paperback books. Guards were always getting after Post to clean up his cell; some even threatened toassign him extra work around the cellhouse if he didn’t straighten up the mess. Such threats would usually prompt him to pick up a few things, but within minutes after guards had checked his cell, it was as messy as it had been before.
    While Post was seen as dimwitted by some at Leavenworth, he had actually scored higher on intelligence tests than most of his peers, and, unlike nearly all of them, he came from a stable, middle-class family. His father was a naval officer cited for heroism in the Pacific theater during World War II. His mother was a housewife and devoted mother. None of Post’s siblings had gotten into trouble.
    Why had he been different?
    Post himself had spent much of his time in prison trying to answer the puzzle. The experts hadn’t helped. Numerous prison psychologists had examined Post since his first arrest, and each had issued a diagnosis that mirrored the latest fad. When society felt criminals were being coddled, the psychologist wrote that Post had not received adequate discipline in his home as a child. Whenever a more liberal attitude prevailed, psychologists reasoned that Post had turned to crime because he was “rebelling against the rigidity of the family setting—a military father who ran his home like he ran his ship.” After Post earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology while in prison, he read the information in his prison file more judiciously. He understood what a psychologist meant in 1968 when he had written that Post exhibited “a sociopathic personality disturbance, anti-social reaction personality trait disturbance, and emotionally unstable personality.” Not only did Post understand the terms, he could remember the interview with the psychologist.
    “He began by reading me my rights, which I thought was odd,” Post recalled, “and then he turned on his tape recorder and started questioning me about my crime like a prosecutor looking for information. I said tohim, ‘You dickhead, you faggot motherfucker, why are you asking me about my crimes? I’ve got nothing to say to you.’ That is all he heard—and from that, he wrote that description which has been part of my file for nearly twenty years!”
    Post had drawn up his own diagnosis: he had always identified with losers. “I was always an outsider,” he explained. “When my family lived at the naval base in the Philippines, I used to tag along with Filipino kids, not Americans. We would sit on the roofs of the whorehouses near the navy base yelling ‘Americans are pigs!’ When my family came back to the States, my brother and sisters and parents didn’t have any problem fitting in, but I did. I used to look at pictures in magazines, you know, of the Chevy commercial with the dad and mom and kids all sitting in the car in suburbia, and it gave me vertigo. I didn’t want it.”
    His relationship with his father played some role in his rejection of society, although Post wasn’t certain how or why. “I was raised by a genuine war hero. He won the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart. People were used to looking up to him,” Post recalled. “No one looked up to me.”
    When Post went to Saturday matinees as a child, he found himself cheering for the outlaws. “I could identify with James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, guys who didn’t fit in, because that is how I always felt.”
    There was one evaluation in his prison file that Post liked. On June 14, 1973, a prison psychologist wrote:
    “It must be noted that Post has spent most of his entire life incarcerated. Yet, he has not become an institutionalized individual.…”
    That someone in authority had written that he had not become “an institutionalized individual” was momentous to him. “After all these years, they still think Ican make it in the outside world,” Post said as he