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

exactly how many hours of education, vocational training, and psychotherapy an inmate would have to complete to be “cured.”
    The “medical model” was supposed to make penitentiaries such as Leavenworth obsolete. There was talk of closing the Hot House. Construction of all federal prisons stopped.
    Bennett retired in 1964, confident that he had found the cure for crime. His replacement, Myrl E. Alexander,a former assistant director under Bennett, continued to push Bennett’s programs until poor health forced his retirement six years later.
    If Bennett had been the bureau’s impassioned reformer, its next director, Norman Carlson, was its pragmatic administrator. Carlson, who was only thirty-six when he became director, had started his career working part-time as a prison guard while earning a master’s degree in criminology in the early 1950s. As he rose through the ranks at the bureau, he implemented many of Bennett’s reforms, and when he became director in 1970, he was fairly certain that most of them didn’t work. He ordered his staff to investigate and monitor inmates to see how many returned to prison after being pronounced “cured.” The reports showed that recidivism had not dropped significantly.
    Based on these studies, the bureau officially abandoned the medical model in 1975. “None of the programs in themselves was a failure,” said Carlson. “The failure was that we assumed there would be a magical cure for crime and delinquency. We have to divorce ourselves from the notion that we can change human behavior, that we have the power to change inmates. We don’t. All we can do is provide opportunities for inmates who want to change.”
    Bennett’s vision that prisons could heal “sick” inmates had been replaced by Carlson’s belief that only men who wanted to be cured could be.
    Between 1970 and 1987, Carlson shifted emphasis and focused on modernizing the bureau, changing it from Bennett’s one-man dynasty into a solidly run and effective bureaucracy. He divided it into five regions and delegated much of his authority to regional directors who then formed his executive staff. Despite tremendous opposition, he launched an aggressive construction program that added twenty new prisons, nearly doubling the existing number, to ease overcrowding. Stressing professionalism, he implemented better training andhigher standards for guards. He set up the bureau’s stepladder system, which ranks prisons from one to six based on the caliber of their inmates. And he guided the bureau through a decade of turbulence during the 1970s when federal judges gave prisoners a cluster of expanded rights.
    Carlson could have remained the bureau’s director longer than seventeen years, but he had always required his wardens to retire at age fifty-five, and he wasn’t going to grant himself an exemption. That created a problem for him, however, because he would turn fifty-five during the 1988 presidential election, and he was worried that if he retired then, the new president would appoint a political hack as director. So Carlson decided to retire two years early so his successor would be firmly in place by election time. The Reagan administration asked Carlson to reconsider this unselfish act and offered to let him pick his own successor in return. Carlson agreed to stay one more year. That would give the new director twelve months to become entrenched. He spent his final year with Quinlan at his side.
    Quinlan had joined the bureau in 1971 as an attorney at Washington headquarters, but Carlson had sent him to Leavenworth almost immediately after arrival for on-the-job training. It was the first of a variety of jobs aimed at preparing Quinlan. Carlson knew that his successor was not only going to have to understand prisons, but also Washington politics. In 1987, the bureau had a staff of 13,000, and operated 47 prisons holding more than 44,000 inmates. It had become a big bureaucracy inside the Justice Department