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

walked around the prison track. “That’s significant.”
    Privately, Post said he sometimes wondered if he could. “It’s getting to the point where I can’t even picture myself on the streets anymore. I look at children on television and they no longer look real to me. After fifteen straight years, they look like cartoon characters.
    “Lately, I’ve been having scary thoughts,” he continued. “Being in here gets to you, day after day after day. Sometimes, I think about what it would be like to just go into a bank and blow the head off the first teller I see. I know that I am capable of that; I mean, any criminal is capable of that, and long-term prisoners can kill easier than most people, because you are around the dregs so much and for so long that you forget the worth of a human life. You think all humans are dregs. The guards are no different. They are dregs, broken by the same system.”
    That is why the cats are so important to him. “I don’t want to be a mass murderer, a killer. The cats keep me feeling some warmth, some kind of feeling connected to something other than ‘those’ dregs or ‘us’ dregs. The cats are what I need to remind me that I still have some standards and have not yet gone to the bottom, where you are capable of anything.”
    Post knew convicts at Leavenworth who, he said, were institutionalized and happy about it. “The truth is, some of these guys really like it here. It’s their home! But it’s not mine. That’s why I don’t clean my cell. I want to remind myself that it isn’t my cell. Guys in here refer to their cell as being their ‘house.’ This isn’t my ‘house.’ It’s theirs, and if they want it clean, then they can clean it.”
    Post had dealt with parole boards several times, he knew his long criminal past was going to be difficult to overcome, but he had been gathering newspaper clippings about other criminals who had been successful at getting paroles. He found the stories encouraging. Thecase of Lawrence Singleton had caught his attention. Convicted in 1978 of raping a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, hacking off her forearms with an ax, and leaving her for dead along a rural California road, Singleton had been paroled after serving nine years. “If a guy like that can get a parole after nine years and I can’t get one for a simple bank robbery after serving fifteen years, then I got to wonder what kind of message they are trying to send me,” Post said. “Does that mean I’m worse than Lawrence Singleton? If the parole board makes me stay here for twenty-five years, are they telling me I am twice as bad as a guy like him?
Twice as bad!
And if that’s the case, what am I allowed to do? Am I missing out on not taking advantage?
    “The next time I rob a bank,” Post continued, “why not rape the teller or shoot everyone, since society already has said to me that I am
twice
as bad as someone who rapes a little kid and chops off her arms? Where is the justice in turning him loose and keeping me in prison?”
    In his appeal to the parole commission, Post had tried to differentiate between himself and the likes of a Singleton:
    I committed none of the mindless random violence of the terrorist or airplane hijacker. None of my crimes was designed specifically to harm people as is the murderer; and none of my crimes had the countless victims as has the large scale heroin dealers.…
    As he turned toward the main penitentiary building and completed his last lap around the track, Post explained: “Perhaps it’s rationalization on my part, but I have always tried to think of my crimes in terms of permanent damage, and I don’t think that bank robbery causes permanent damage. Maybe a teller gets so scared she wets her pants, but it’s not a crime like rape.”
    As soon as Post entered his cellblock, a guard told him that a prison counselor wanted to see him. There could be only one explanation. The federal Parole Commission had written him an answer. Post