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

33,700), piercing the hard blue sky and clear air. Most old prisons are surrounded by high walls that hide them from public sight. At the Hot House, the penitentiary’s two largest cellhouses
are
the front wall. Each is seven stories high and longer than a football field. These great stone giants are joined in the center by a rotunda capped by a grand silvery dome that rises more than 150 feet above the ground.
    The prison’s architects patterned Leavenworth after the majestic United States Capitol building in Washington, D.C., with its two cellhouses replicating the chambers of the Senate and House of Representatives and its rotunda serving as a smaller version of the Capitol dome.
    At the time, the design was not meant ironically; it reflected the boundless optimism that even the worst criminals could be rehabilitated in so authoritative and exalted an environment. But the prison has none of the grandeur of the marble-clad Capitol. Its facade, made of rough ashlar limestone cut from a nearby quarry, is a faded yellow and has a stark, impermeable look that makes it foreboding.
    A red brick wall is connected to the cellhouses and it encloses the penitentiary’s twenty-two acres. Built entirely by convicts’ hands, the wall is unlike any other in the bureau. Four feet thick in spots, it rises thirty-five feet above the ground and sinks another thirty-five feetbelow to prevent ingenious or diligent convicts from burrowing to freedom.
    Because of the wall, it is impossible to see inside the prison grounds from Metropolitan Avenue, the street that runs parallel to the prison, and it is just as impossible for a convict inside the prison yard to see the outside world.
    This isolation was intentional.
    When drawings of the prison were unveiled on March 21, 1897, architect William S. Eames proclaimed that the new penitentiary was the first in the world to be entirely self-contained. It would have its own power plant, water supply, maintenance shop, hospital, and the first school ever built inside a penitentiary. It would be a “city within a city,” he said, where convicts could be safely tucked away and forgotten by the outside world.
    The Hot House has lived up to Eames’s promises. When asked, prison officials often describe themselves in municipal terms. The warden explains that he is “like a mayor” overseeing a $17 million annual budget, nearly 500 employees, and a walled city that would cost several hundred million dollars to construct today. His executive staff, known as associate wardens, compare themselves to city commissioners. There is a commissioner of public works (associate warden for maintenance and operations), a commissioner of parks and recreation (associate warden for programs), a police commissioner (associate warden for custody), and a police chief (the prison’s captain). Even convicts lapse into municipal jargon, calling their cells “my house,” the guards “the police,” the Hole “the jail.” When it first opened, the prison needed next to nothing from the Leavenworth community. It used convict labor to grow its own food at a prison-owned farm, and chose its meat from its own herd of beef cattle. It produced what clothing, furniture, and other goods it needed at plants inside the walls. The only commodity that it couldn’t produce was the guard force.
    The farm and cattle are gone now, but Leavenworth still remains set apart from the outside community. It doesn’t allow “civilians” inside its claustrophobic world. Relatives and friends can visit convicts, but these sessions take place in a special visiting room that is not part of the prison’s interior. Public tours of the main penitentiary compound ended on June 26, 1910. “We are short of help during the hot season,” Warden R. W. McClaughry told a reporter for
The Leavenworth Times
. “If anything should happen, such as a woman or child fainting under the intense heat while passing through, there would be much liability of