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

hurried to the counselor’s office and took the envelope from his outstretched hand. He removed the neatly typed letter.
    In response to your plea for a more lenient decision, you provide no significant mitigating circumstances sufficient to merit a different decision.… Your institutional behavior and achievements have been considered by the commission, but are not deemed sufficient to warrant a more lenient decision.… Your plea is therefore denied.
    Post walked back into the prison yard and tracked down Tiger. He was angry, not at the commission, he said, but at himself for actually believing that the college degree and his good behavior while in prison would sway the board.
    “How can I take these people seriously,” he asked, stroking Tiger, “when they tell me I’m worse than a guy who rapes a girl, chops off her arms, and throws her out on the side of a road?”

Chapter 4
THE PENITENTIARY
    There is no air-conditioning in C cellhouse, and until a man sits inside a cell on the top tier during a scorching Kansas summer, he does not really understand sweat. The brown metal fans turning sluggishly outside the cells do not cool the air, they simply move it back and forth as if to make certain no corner is untouched by the heat. The design of the cellhouse contributes to the misery. It is actually two independent structures, one within the other—a great stone building dropped like a cake dish over a rectangular, five-story-tall row of human cages. The cells are stacked in the center of the building like a giant honeycomb: side by side, one row atop the other and back to back, so that each cell facing north has an identical cell behind it facing south. There is a twenty-foot open space between the cells and the exterior walls. Because of this, you can stand on the bottom floor and look down the entire length of the shoebox-shaped cellhouse. You can look up, too, and see each of the five tiers bounded by steel balconies. But if you try to count the cells you will eventually lose track, because the five-and-a-half-by-nine-foot cubicles are indistinguishable from one another, and counting them isas difficult as keeping track of boxcars on a mile-long freight train.
    On most afternoons the sun filters through the cellhouse’s cathedral-size windows, casting a grid of shadows on the white tile floor. It is then that the cellhouse’s double-structure design works like a greenhouse, capturing the warmth inside. Some convicts claim that the bottom tier is the coolest when they are locked in their cells at night because it is closest to the ground. But others argue the middle floors are the best because they are nearest the few windows that actually open. No one disagrees about the fifth tier. It is agony. The air is thick, hot to the tongue. Convicts sit on mattresses at night on the top tier as if in a narcotic stupor, naked except for sweat-soaked boxer shorts. They keep their cells dark, afraid that the heat generated by the single 100-watt bulb above the metal sink will make the cell even more unbearable. Their bodies are covered with a thin layer of sweat that gleams even in the blackness when illuminated by the red glow of a half-spent cigarette. When you walk along the fifth tier you can smell the sweat and stale smoke. Sometimes, a face will loom forward from a darkened cell, appearing a ghostly white behind the inch-thick steel bars before disappearing moments later into the blackness.
    Little wonder that years ago a gang of convicts called the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth “the Hot House.”
    The twelve hundred men imprisoned there are considered to be among the most dangerous criminals in the United States. Years ago, the Bureau of Prisons learned that mixing first-time offenders with hard-core criminals was disastrous, so it created a stepladder system. Nonviolent and white-collar felons, as well as inmates in their twenties and thirties serving short prison sentences, are supposed to be sent to