Free The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison by Pete Earley

kept for weeks in solitary confinement on bread and water, are whipped, paddled, and spanked, spread-eagled in the hot sun, locked up in sweatboxes, confined in tiny spaces where they can neither lie nor sit nor stand.
    Although the federal prisons were part of the Justice Department, each was run independently by a warden appointed by the U.S. Attorney General. Mostwardens were political hacks. Some knew nothing about running a prison. Bennett described the federal prisons as “vast, idle houses filled with a horde of despairing, discouraged, disgruntled men, milling aimlessly about in overcrowded yards.”
    During his tour of Leavenworth, Bennett paused in the prison yard and looked up at the dome that was still under construction even though work on the penitentiary had started two decades earlier. The warden had just bragged about how the dome would be second in size only to the U.S. Capitol dome when finished. Just then, an inmate walked up to Bennett, pointed to the dome, and asked him if he was really serious about prison reform or if he was simply going to perpetuate a system that was more interested in building “that preposterous dome” than in actually helping inmates. Bennett would later recall that incident in his autobiography,
I Chose Prison
, and state that his exchange with the inmate made him realize that the purpose of a federal prison was not to punish inmates or warehouse them, but to
rehabilitate
them.
    A deeply religious man, Bennett returned to Washington and drafted legislation for the Hoover administration that called for the creation of a federal Bureau of Prisons. This new bureau, he wrote, would not only bring uniformity to the seven federal prisons, but also “humanize prison life.” On May 14, 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed a bill creating the bureau and appointed Sanford Bates, the head of the Massachusetts prison system and a dedicated reformer himself, as its first director. Although Bennett was not put in charge, he was named Bates’s chief assistant and was asked to set up the structure of the bureau and define its goals. Seven years later, when Bates resigned to run the Boys Clubs of America, Bennett officially took charge.
    “I struck first and hardest at what would now be called the ‘gut issue’ of prison reform—brutality,” he later wrote. “I made it plain to all the wardens that therewas to be no lashing, no use of the strap, no handcuffing men to the bars, no improper solitary confinement.”
    During the next
twenty-seven years
as director, Bennett built the bureau into the most progressive prison system in the country. He got Congress to approve funds so that educational and vocational classes could be taught in prisons. He put inmates to work by creating UNICOR, which enabled them to earn money for themselves and their families. He built separate prisons for mentally ill inmates, for those addicted to narcotics, and for offenders under age twenty-two. He got Congress to force the U.S. Public Health Service to provide medical and psychiatric care at federal prisons because he knew its doctors would do a better job than the local physicians whom wardens hired part-time or whenever there were emergencies.
    But his biggest priority remained finding a way to rehabilitate convicts, and in 1958, he felt the bureau had finally found a “cure” for crime. It was called the “medical model of rehabilitation” and it soon became the hottest treatment program in both federal and state prisons. The concept was simple. A criminal committed a crime because he was “sick” and, just like a person who was physically ill, he could be “cured” if the cause of his “sickness” was diagnosed and treated. In the early 1960s, criminologists claimed that crime was caused by a lack of education, a bad environment, no job skills, poor self-image. The bureau responded by giving each inmate a battery of tests and then prescribing a treatment program for each man that listed