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

bureau requires each penitentiary to keep a “Posted Picture File” of prisoners within its walls whoare classified as life-threatening or extreme escape risks. The red-covered log at Leavenworth has two hundred entries—more than any other level-five penitentiary. These are typical:
    This inmate was a member of the Westies, violent criminals who controlled, exploited and terrorized the West Side of Manhattan for 20 years through extortion, murder, drug dealing, auto theft, burglary, blackmail, and a variety of other criminal enterprises. The gang caused eight murders including the dismemberment of at least three bodies.
    This inmate was a member of a South Carolina drug and prostitution ring involved in 22 murders and the kidnapping of young girls who were later forced into white slavery.
    This inmate assassinated three CBS employees in 1982, stole five million in jewelry from a New York store, and is worth an estimated $17 million, making him a prime escape risk.
    This inmate took a mother and 14-month-old baby hostage during a bank robbery. When the mother broke loose and escaped, he stabbed the baby to death.
    This inmate operated a major Colombian drug-trafficking ring and is known to have plotted a prison escape by means of an assault with rocket-firing helicopters and paramilitary mercenaries.
    Leavenworth was the first federal prison ever built. Always before, Congress had paid state prisons andcounty jails a fee in return for housing criminals convicted of federal crimes such as bank robbery, kidnapping, and counterfeiting. But after the Civil War most of these prisons became badly overcrowded, and states started to turn away federal prisoners. Congress responded in 1891 by ordering the construction of two federal penitentiaries and the acquisition of a third.
    Actual construction at Leavenworth began in 1898, and from all accounts, conditions were cruel. Convict laborers, marched daily from the army stockade at nearby Fort Leavenworth, worked twelve straight hours with only a short break for lunch. Rations were meager and there were complaints that the food was little better than garbage. Discipline was crushing. Anyone disobeying an order was forced to “carry the baby,” a form of punishment in which prisoners were chained for months to a twenty-five-pound ball which they had to lift in order to walk. Even the guards were affected by the harsh conditions. According to local newspaper accounts, many quit, saying only “the wall got me,” a reference to the great stone wall being built around the penitentiary compound.
    On February 1, 1906, Leavenworth received its first inmate, John Grindstone, a Native American convicted of murder. He was paroled a few years later, but returned to the Hot House within months for killing another man. He eventually died of tuberculosis at the prison and achieved another first by being buried in the first plot of a new pauper cemetery on a hill a half mile from the penitentiary. Officially called Mount Hope, the prison’s cemetery is still used today, although it is better known as Peckerwood Hill, the tag given it by convicts and guards.
    By the early 1900s, the government had outgrown Leavenworth and its sister institution in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as a former territorial jail at McNeil Island, Washington. It built four more federal prisons. All were supposed to be overseen by the Justice Department, buteach operated independently. In 1930, Congress created the federal Bureau of Prisons to make them conform to uniform standards.
    From the start, the Hot House was designed to intimidate, and when you turn into the horseshoe-shaped driveway that leads to the entrance, you suddenly understand what a convict meant in 1929 when he described the penitentiary in a letter to his mother as a “giant mausoleum adrift in a great sea of nothingness.” The prison dominates the Kansas countryside. It juts abruptly from the gentle grassland north of the town of Leavenworth (population