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

level-one prison camps, where they live in college-style dormitories and attend therapeutic rap sessions and drug-treatment classes. Some ofthese camps don’t even have walls or fences, and in recent years they have been dubbed “Club Feds” by the media because the inmates, including the Watergate conspirators in the 1970s and Wall Street inside traders in the 1980s, often spend their afternoons playing tennis or sunbathing. At the Hot House, level-one camps are called “kiddie joints” because they are considered the kindergarten of prisons.
    On the next rung of the bureau’s ladder are the medium-security prisons, officially labeled “level-two, -three, and -four federal correctional institutions.” These prisons are progressively more secure, and most have perimeter fences and guards stationed in gun towers, but the emphasis remains on educational and vocational training. The Hot House convicts call these prisons “gladiator schools,” because they are where an inmate gets his first taste of real prison life.
    At the top of the ladder are the level-five penitentiaries, the true colleges of crime. The Hot House is the Harvard of them all. It is the oldest, the most infamous.
    There is only one federal penitentiary with a higher ranking than Leavenworth and that is the much-dreaded prison in Marion, Illinois, the bureau’s only level-six penitentiary. It is considered the end of the line for the “worst of the worst convicts.” But Marion’s reputation as being the nation’s most dangerous prison is deceiving. Marion houses only four hundred inmates, and since 1983, when two guards were murdered there, the inmates have been locked in one-man cells for twenty-three hours of each day. Whenever an inmate at Marion is taken from his cell, his hands are cuffed, his legs are chained, and he is surrounded by three guards, each armed with a nightstick.
    The federal penitentiary at Leavenworth holds three times as many inmates as Marion and they roam the compound relatively unchecked during the day. Hot House guards are not permitted to carry nightsticks or any weapons without special authorization. On any givenday, Leavenworth holds a minimum of two hundred men whose records are filled with just as much violence as anyone at Marion. In fact, these men would have been sent to Marion if there had been room for them. So while Marion reigns as the bureau’s “toughest prison,” it is, in many ways, a safer place for both guards and inmates than is the Hot House.
    According to bureau statistics, the average Leavenworth convict is a 39.5-year-old bank robber serving a 35-year prison sentence. But statistics cannot convey the horror of these men’s pasts. Most have spent more than half of their lives in institutions, beginning with reform schools, graduating later to county jails and state prisons. Some (like William Post) started on the treadmill as young as eight years old. They often come from abusive, alcoholic, and violent homes. Many are drug addicts. Through the years, some have been raped in prison, others beaten. A few have been taught job skills, earned high school diplomas, even college degrees. Nearly all have been psychologically analyzed up, down, over, and under, and have participated in some “revolutionary” new program that the public was assured would rehabilitate them. Yet, regardless of whether the latest fad in corrections was mind-altering drugs or group therapy sessions, virtually all the convicts at the Hot House have proved to be resolute, intractable, irredeemable outlaws. Crime is their
chosen
occupation, violence their tool of choice. A popular saying within the Bureau of Prisons goes like this:
    “No criminal is sent directly to Leavenworth. He must earn his way there.”
    How does a criminal achieve that?
    “He fucks up everywhere else.”
    Leavenworth is an enormous warehouse of the most loathsome, a prison where society isolates men for whom it no longer has any hope—only fear.
    The