In with the Devil Read online

  These are not your typical dangerous prisoners or unsavory mental patients. Instead, in Karell’s eyes, their disabilities make them almost childlike, a sentiment that was probably mirrored by Dr. King and his staff. In this early period, they lived on what they called “the reservation” inside the compound’s fences and barbed wire, some even with wives and young children. Mary Virginia Moore Johnson, daughter of Springfield’s first chief surgeon, remembers, “We never locked our doors, which was very normal.”

  But just three years later in 1938, when work started on the last major structure in the complex, the doctors turned the project over to the same engineer who had supervised the construction of Alcatraz. Clearly, security concerns had come to the fore. From then on 10 Building was known as Springfield’s “Little Alcatraz,” a testament to both its higher security level and the limits of high-minded treatment for the MCFP’s patients. With three hundred beds, 10 Building more than doubled the Medical Center’s psychiatric population. Even with the added capacity, Springfield could not begin to house all of the supposedly psychotic inmates that other federal prisons wanted to dump on it. Most of these transfers had more management issues than certifiable psychiatric disorders. To cope with the demand, the Medical Center instituted a rigorous evaluation process, only keeping the very worst of the bunch for long-term residence.

  During this era, even other public and private psychiatric hospitals had a difficult time dealing with severe psychoses such as schizophrenia. But the degree of difficulty increased exponentially with men who had a history of violence and symptoms exacerbated by the beatings or solitary confinement that they had received in other facilities. To hold the sheer number of them at Springfield, medicine was forced to make way for correction. Special wards in 10 Building were reserved for the most “assaultive,” with status charts posted next to their cells. A “4 Man Order” required the presence of four guards when the door was open. Especially uncontrollable prisoners were tied to their beds with metal cuffs and “soft restraints”—leather or canvas straps—until they calmed down.

  As Springfield’s prisoner population passed one thousand, it left much of the “innocence” of the Medical Center’s first decade behind. In 1941, 10 Building prisoners rioted for several hours, nearly killing a corrections officer and wreaking extensive damage on a cellblock. But the incident received no coverage in the press. In fact, the Springfield newspapers gave no hint of the rising tensions inside the MCFP until a sudden cloudburst of negative publicity in early 1944. It was precipitated by a band of Socialist conscientious objectors who were sent to Springfield for forced feeding after they had conducted hunger strikes in other prisons. While upset with their own rough handling by guards, they claimed to be horrified by the treatment that other inmates were receiving, especially blacks and those with visible psychiatric issues. Charging that the guards tortured prisoners, they filed a complaint with the U.S. attorney general, who promptly opened an inquiry and sent James Bennett, the director of prisons, to Springfield for hearings.

  An undercurrent of clashing cultures rippled beneath the controversy. From the Springfield perspective, the Medical Center was a proud Ozarks institution that was being smeared by draft-dodging, left-wing Yankees. The Socialists saw the prison as a callous Southern backwater under the dominion of redneck guards. Bennett arrived with much fanfare on a Sunday, and the conscientious objectors, in another show of defiance, staged a sit-down strike after the evening movie, refusing to leave until Bennett made an appearance in the auditorium. They got up only after the superintendent, Dr. Michael Pescor, promised that they would be represented at the hearings.

  The guards, now on the defensive, went to the local press with their own grievances, venting for the first time in the MCFP’s history. They were not only battling violent prisoners, they complained to a reporter, but they were also fighting with “temporizing” medical administrators who would not let them use the force necessary to subdue “unruly” or insane prisoners. Within days after the guards talked to reporters, almost on cue, two prisoners escaped, and just a few weeks after that, 10 Building erupted again. Although no one was hurt, the prisoners caused more than $5,000 in damage, and this time the riot made the front page of the Springfield Leader and Press. A large photo of the trashed unit carried the caption “After the storm.” Dr. Pescor blamed a hard core of thirty-seven “tough guys” for all the trouble, some of it dating back to the previous riot. Charging that they only faked mental illness to enjoy the comforts of Springfield, he dispersed them to other penitentiaries across the country. Upon their departure, a headline read, “Tough Inmates Scattered to Other Prisons.” It was one of the first tacit admissions by the local media that their “U.S. Medical Center” was indeed just another prison.

  The 1944 riot did serve one institutional purpose: it muzzled the conscientious objectors and quickly hamstrung Bennett’s hearings. They ended with a whimper, and no charges were filed against Springfield’s staff. (As one newspaper put it, “Medical Center Charges Called Hallucinations.”) Despite the expulsion of the “tough guys,” sporadic violence continued over the years, culminating in another riot in 1959. This was the worst yet, again confined to 10 Building, but with 5 guards held hostage for fifteen hours before 125 guards rushed in—most of them through a window that they had torn out of the TV room. Using clubs—in a haze of tear gas—they fought prisoners supposedly armed with their own clubs and homemade knives. Fifty-three prisoners were injured, and one of them later died from his head wounds. Just one of the attacking guards and one hostage were hurt.

  After the 1959 riot, there was no more “temporizing.” Springfield operated much more like other federal prisons in terms of security and lost some of the softer features that had made it unique. The farming, once seen as so therapeutic, was shut down, and the excess acreage was returned to the city. The hospital staff’s families moved off the reservation. But the MCFP still remained the only psychiatric hospital for prisoners in the federal system. While the patient population swelled beyond capacity, the psychiatric staff shrank as the government had more trouble competing with the private sector for doctors. Other more imaginative treatments had to be developed for the “highly aggressive inmate.”

  In the early seventies, lawsuits revealed that Springfield was experimenting with a behavior modification program known as START (Special Treatment and Rehabilitative Training). The MCFP director, Dr. Pasquale Ciccone, summed up the system as “granting rewards for correct behavior,” but it left some stubborn prisoners naked and hungry and sounded like something out of the recently released movie A Clockwork Orange. Citing budget concerns, the director of the BOP shut it down. But by then Springfield, like the psychiatric hospitals on the outside, was relying on the most effective management tool yet—the needle. Narcoleptic drugs such as Thorazine and Haldol could tame any inmate. Springfield guards administered the injections themselves, often while prisoners thrashed in soft restraints—another queasy cocktail of medicine and correction, this time reminiscent of the Soviet Union. In 1978, lawsuits forced the MCFP to use nurses to dispense all drugs, but ironically, in that same year, supervision at the top of the facility went in the other direction: Dr. Ciccone retired and became the Medical Center’s last MD superintendent. He was replaced by a BOP warden.

  Since that time, if Springfield has been noted in the national press, it’s for the celebrated criminals who touched down there briefly to be treated for physical illness. Almost all of them wanted out as soon as possible. Mobsters from Mickey Cohen to John Gotti have complained about the quality of health care; so, too, did deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and Larry Flynt, who needed special treatment for his paralysis. During the porn magnate’s stay, the town played host to his flamboyant entourage, which had Springfield society talking for years—even though he was at the MCFP for just five weeks. Blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, mastermind of the first World Trade Tower bombing, stayed three years to receive care for his diabetes and high b
lood pressure, but complained most about the guards, who he said humiliated him with frequent strip searches and showed contempt for Islam by repeatedly interrupting his prayer sessions.

  Throughout the federal prison system, Springfield guards had the reputation for being a tough and insular crew, but their hardened attitude toward prisoners was forged by the bizarre demands of the facility. Despite the prison’s overcrowding, it remained the dumping ground for BOP odds and ends who didn’t quite fit anywhere else—men such as Clayton Fountain, but also an enormously ungainly eight-hundred-pound cocaine dealer,* various crackpot con men, putative presidential assassins, and 116 psychotic Cubans from the Mariel boatlift who had literally burned down their previous prison.

  In his book Echoes of Mercy, Randy Greer provides readers with the perspective of a longtime Springfield corrections officer. While he tries to put the MCFP in the best light, he does not hide the eerie atmosphere, describing wards with constant “banging and kicking on the doors” and “screaming obscenities [that] eventual[ly] break down into loud, tearful sobs.” As a routine part of his job, he deals with prisoners who throw body waste through the slots or do disgusting things to themselves (he was called to one cell where an inmate had torn out his own eyes). Although Greer confronted violent prisoners in a previous job as a guard in a state prison, he finds Springfield more threatening because it is so unpredictable. As proof, he describes an incident with a dwarfish Cuban in the Medical Center who suddenly jumps on his chest, screaming that Greer is the devil. He writes, “He hit me quicker and more times than I have ever been hit. I had survived being a police officer and a correctional officer at two state institutions without any serious type of injury, but now found myself momentarily helpless at the hands of this crazed convict.” By the time the prisoner is pulled off him, Greer’s nose is broken and his eyes are swollen shut. Although the Cuban was segregated for sixty days, after his mental condition was stabilized, he was eventually released back into the general population.

  Meanwhile, from the prisoner’s perspective, Springfield was far from the most popular stop on the BOP carousel by the time Jimmy Keene arrived in 1998. The aged buildings were run-down, and the distressed condition of the psychiatric patients was depressing. It was “gloomy,” according to one directory of federal prisons. But even that word was too kind for inmate Jonathan Jay Pollard, who described Springfield as “an environment of total bedlam.” An American naval intelligence analyst convicted of spying for Israel, Pollard believed, like Sheikh Rahman, that he was sent to Springfield more for punishment than treatment, although the BOP claimed the MCFP was the only facility that could handle his psychosomatic illness. “The inhuman screams of the patients around me sounded like something straight out of Dante’s Inferno,” he wrote his sister in a letter from prison. “And then there were the attempted suicides. Witnessing a man cut his own throat from ear to ear was something I could have done without.” After eleven months in Springfield, Pollard gladly accepted a transfer to solitary in the Marion Super Max.

  During Keene’s second morning in Springfield, he saw Larry in the dining hall but didn’t want to approach him again so soon. Besides, Hall sat in a corner with what looked like a regular group of friends, and it would have been pushy to butt in without an invitation. “In every prison, you have to be careful where you sit down,” Keene explains. “You have to earn your place by knowing the people around you. Nothing starts more fights than taking someone else’s spot.”

  Jimmy sat alone, picking at his greasy eggs and still wincing at the din in the cavernous room. “I was a lost puppy,” Keene remembers. “I missed Milan. It had been like home to me. I had developed a lot of relationships there in a short time and I had a group of people I was really tight with.”

  As he scanned the dining hall, Keene wondered whom he could ever become tight with here. It wasn’t just the visibly ill inmates who repelled him, but also seemingly healthy ones, who had a different sort of blank stare. “When some guys end up at a place like Springfield,” he says, “they’re done, and they know they’re done. They got sentences of life one or two times over. You can see it in their faces. There’s no soul left inside them.”

  After the buzzer sounded, Keene went to the laundry in the adjoining building to exchange his clothes. He wanted to turn in his camouflage pants for a pair with deep pockets just like in the army, and he needed a better fit. How he looked in prison mattered as much to him as how he looked on the outside. “I’ve got to have the right shit on me. It was like that when I was on a football team,” he says. “My uniform always had to fit just right, with nothing baggy. It made me feel more powerful.”

  He returned to his cell to find two guards waiting for him inside.

  “Keene, you gotta get a job here,” one told him. When Jimmy protested that he had a medical condition, they laughed. “What are you talking about? Everyone here is sick.”

  But then he showed them the letter about his allergies. “They got all pissed about that,” he says, “but there wasn’t anything they could do about it.” Unlike at Milan, no jobs were available in places such as the prison library that would be hypoallergenic.

  Although Jimmy got out of work, he quickly realized that a monotonous routine awaited him instead. Down the hall was a little cinder-block room with a tiny TV bolted to a stand blaring Jerry Springer. A couple of inmates sat in scattered plastic, stackable chairs, watching listlessly, their jaws slack. “If you didn’t have a job in that place,” Keene says, “then you had to be a real wacko.”

  There was a weight room, but nothing like the elaborate setup in Milan. It had only one pathetic Universal cable machine. Keene used every station, but a full workout on it took less than an hour. After a few hours, he was so bored, he couldn’t wait to be called for his next meal—no matter how inedible it turned out to be.

  He needed something else to occupy him, so after lunch, on his second day in Springfield, he says, “I decided to start my spying missions.” He went first to Hall’s cell, trying to see as much as he could from outside the open door. Family pictures were on the shelf, one with his brother in a Civil War uniform. Larry was also allowed to attach a paper cross to the wall, another privilege given only to the best-behaved prisoners.

  After checking out Hall’s room, Keene fanned out in wider circles from their building, through the tunnels and into the rest of the complex where he had access. “I wanted to see where he checked in for work, where he worked, and where he took a break. I even cased the office where he went to see his counselor.” As Keene soon discovered, Larry did not have the same schedule as other prisoners. “When the buzzer went off each morning,” Keene says, “he was already out of his cell. He was like a member of the staff. Because he had been a maintenance dude on the outside, they could use him on the inside to swab their floors and fix their boilers.” While many buildings were restricted to Keene, Hall appeared to go almost everywhere, not just for cleaning, but for recreation as well. From what Jimmy could tell, Hall spent many evenings in the wood-shop section of the Arts & Crafts center behind the dining hall. Keene would have to be in Springfield six months before he could even walk through the shop door, then would have to get on a waiting list to use the equipment.

  After a few days, Jimmy determined a place and a time in the tunnels where he could pretend to accidentally cross paths with Hall. So shortly before lunch and just after Larry got released from work, as they passed each other, Keene stopped, as though surprised to see him, and said, “Hey.”

  Hall rocked backward, his head doing the slow-motion roll until he seemed to recognize Keene and smiled.

  “You know that paper I saw you reading in the library the other day?” Jimmy said. “Was that your hometown paper?”

  Hall nodded. “I’m from Indiana.”

  “Really. Well, I’m from Kankakee. I don’t know if you ever heard of it, but it’s on the border right next to Indiana.”

  Hall just nodded again.

  “Do yo
u want to meet me down in the library?” Jimmy asked.

  “No. I don’t go there now. I go later. At two thirty.”

  Keene made sure to be there a few minutes early, and as promised, Hall appeared. But just as before, he took out his paper and sat down to methodically read each page. “I was right across the table from him for at least fifteen minutes,” Keene remembers, “and he never said a word; never so much as made eye contact. When he was done, all he said was ‘I’ll see you later, James,’ and just walked out.”

  The same thing happened the next day and then the next. “And now I’m getting frustrated,” Keene says, “and as I look at him reading his paper, I’m thinking, ‘Man, are you a fucking reject. Are you a waste of human life.’ And then, when I had totally given up on him, he looked up from the paper and said, ‘Do you want to have breakfast with us in the morning?’ ”

  It was another breakthrough, and Keene had barely been in Springfield a week. Once again, his hopes soared and he could barely sleep that night. But the next morning, when he arrived at Hall’s corner of the mess with his tray, he realized that their meals together would be a little more complicated than he thought. First of all, he could see heads turn at the other tables around them. There was a reason why Hall and his friends ate with a buffer of empty chairs around them. As Keene would later learn, the men at this table were collectively known as the “baby killers” and were outcasts—even among the lifers and lunatics of Springfield. Merely by sitting with them, Keene was making himself the object of the more common criminals’ scorn.