LEAVENWORTH Penitentiary is the oldest prison in the federal system. It may also be the most dangerous. One hundred years ago there were no federal prisons. The roughly 500 convicts with federal sentences longer than a year served their time in state facilities scattered across the country. In 1896 Congress appropriated funds for construction of the first federal penitentiary, to be located on more than 1,500 acres in rural Kansas, a few miles from the Army base at Fort Leavenworth. The new prison was built by the convicts who would soon occupy it. In the eighty-eight years since it opened, only one prisoner has ever escaped from Leavenworth and eluded recapture. The red-brick walls, with a gun tower at each comer, are thirty-five feet high and extend an equal distance beneath the ground. The main building is massive, ominous, and redolent of power. It was designed to resemble the U.S. Capitol, converting a symbol of freedom into one of punishment and obedience. On a bleak winter morning, when the grayness of' the sky and that of the neighboring fields seem to merge, Leavenworth looks exactly as an inmate described it more than six decades ago: like a "giant mausoleum adrift in a great sea of nothingness."
To reach the visiting room, you must state your name and purpose to a corrections officer in a small gun tower and then climb stairs to the front entrance. After passing through two electric doors reinforced with steel bars you are photographed; stamped with invisible ink; asked to sign a pledge that you are not bearing firearms, explosives, or narcotics; led through a metal detector; and then escorted through another large door with steel bars. The visiting room looks like a Knights of Columbus meeting hall, with blond-wood paneling, a row of vending machines, and comfortable chairs separated by small tables. There is no glass between inmates and their guests. Visits are supervised by corrections officers who sit on a platform at one end of the room; surveillance cameras are hidden in the ceiling. As I waited to meet Mark Young, a small boy ran up and down the length of the room playing with his father, a bearded inmate in khaki work clothes.
Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, regards Leavenworth as a perfect microcosm of the federal prison system today: antiquated, often overcrowded, and extremely dangerous both for inmates and for corrections officers. Leavenworth's rated capacity is about 1,100 prisoners, but at times in the past year it has housed more than 1,600. Overcrowding vastly increases the risk of violence; prison riots become virtually inevitable. The federal system as a whole is operating at about 40 percent above capacity. Some facilities now house two to three times the number of people they were designed to hold, even as the federal prison population increases at a rate of about 10,000 inmates a year.
Tough federal drug laws, strictly enforced, have fueled this unprecedented growth in the federal prison system. The Boggs Act of the 1950s did not have the same effect, because drug offenses were less common and less vigorously prosecuted. As late as 1967 the Federal Bureau of' Narcotics had only 300 agents. Its successor, the Drug Enforcement Administration, now has 3,400. During the 1980s annual federal spending to incarcerate drug offenders rose more than 1,300 percent, from $88 million to $1.3 billion. Anti-drug mandatory-minimum sentences and the guideline sentences formulated to mesh neatly with them have transformed the inmate population. In 1970, 16.3 percent of all federal prisoners were drug offenders; today the proportion of federal prisoners who are drug offenders has reached 62 percent. Within three years it should reach 72 percent. Many are first offenders, without so much as a previous arrest, who have been imprisoned for low-level drug violations. Of the 4,244 people convicted last year of violating federal marijuana laws, 56 percent had no criminal record deemed relevant at sentencing. State correctional facilities are also being overwhelmed by drug offenders. The prison systems in forty states are now operating under court order to reduce overcrowding. Violent criminals are sometimes being released early to provide cell space for nonviolent drug offenders whose mandatory sentences do not permit parole. The number of drug offenders imprisoned in America today -- about 200,000 -- is the same as the number of people imprisoned for all crimes in 1970. Since the latest war on drugs began, in 1982, the nation's prison population has more than doubled. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. No society in history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for purposes of crime control.
Mark Young is big -- about six foot five, with the build one would expect of an old biker. He has long hair tied in a ponytail. He seems like a hippie version of the country-and-western star Hank Williams Jr., with a gravely drawl and a deadpan sense of humor. Before being sent to Leavenworth, Young married his longtime girlfriend, Patricia Rowland, in a Native American ceremony at the local jail. Patricia visits him as often as she can, but it is a nine- or ten-hour drive from Indianapolis to Leavenworth, Kansas. She brings him photographs of changes in their neighborhood: new houses, new stores opening at the mall. They discuss how furniture should be rearranged at their rented home; she later moves things around accordingly, and sends him pictures. She does not want him to forget that a familiar world still exists outside the brutal one he now inhabits.
Young had never been in prison before being sentenced to Leavenworth. A marijuana offense usually leads to incarceration at a minimum-security prison or prison camp. But Young's life sentence labels him as a high risk for attempted escape, requiring that he serve his sentence at a maximum-security penitentiary. Young now finds himself living among some of the most violent repeat offenders in the federal system: murderers, rapists, armed robbers, international terrorists. His two-man cell is eight feet by ten feet, with a solid metal sliding door and no view of the outdoors, just a window facing the catwalk. A few months after his arrival Young sat in a prison auditorium, packed with inmates, watching Silence of the Lambs. A riot suddenly erupted in the darkness. Prisoners divided by race and tore furniture apart to make weapons. Corrections officers were taken hostage. Amid the chaos Young grabbed a piece of a chair and huddled against the theater wall, terrified. When officers finally quelled the riot, hours later, Young was teargassed, handcuffed, and dragged alone the floor through a pool of blood. Because of Young's size, other inmates have so far left him alone. "But anything can happen here to anyone, at any time." he told me, snapping his fingers. "Just like that." Inmates with life sentences and no chance of parole have nothing to lose. Last year a good friend of Young's, Clyde Harrison, was stabbed to death in the dining room, before hundreds of other people, over a $50 debt. The killer politely handed the knife to a corrections officer, handle first. Young had never witnessed anything like it. His friend died instantly, and then "people were stepping over him to get to the salad bar."
Young's trial was such a strange experience that he finds it difficult to describe. One would have to be very stoned, he thinks, to appreciate how absurd it felt. He hardly knew Ernest Montgomery and had met Claude Atkinson only twice, spending a total of less than an hour with him. He had never visited the farm where the marijuana was grown, and to this day does not know its location. Most of the people who testified in court were people whom Young had never laid eyes on before. It makes no sense to him that the law should give him a life sentence for conspiring to cultivate marijuana. Young is quite candid about a lot of socially unacceptable things he has done, and he admits to finding a buyer for the Indiana group, but he ridicules Atkinson's efforts during the trial to depict him as a major broker, a Paine Webber of pot. The truth, according to Young, is much less dramatic. He was in Florida, fishing with a buddy and sharing a joint. His friend praised the marijuana, which Montgomery had given to Young as a free sample. A few days later the friend called Young and asked if there was any more of "that good stuff." Young thought there was. His friend then called a friend, who called another friend: a buyer in New-York. Young claims that he actually received only a fraction of the $70,000 fee alleged in court. He did not really know either the buyer or the seller. Once the two got together, they did the natural thing -- eliminated the middleman. "They cheated me!" Young said, laughing hard.
Although he has always loved to smoke marijuana, Young never thought much about it until coming to prison. Now he is an authority on the subject, a fan of the authors Jack Herer and Chris Conrad, who believe that growing hemp can help protect the environment. The use of its fibers for paper, Young thinks, could save millions of trees, and its distillation into alcohol-based fuels could end the world's energy shortage. Young is busy in prison designing a Harley Davidson that will run entirely on marijuana -- "the Hempster." Much to his family's distress, Young was recently sent to "the Hole," Leavenworth's disciplinary building, for smoking marijuana in prison. The marijuana at Leavenworth is quite good, though expensive, he says. Most illegal drugs are easily obtained in Leavenworth, including hashish, a rarity elsewhere in the Midwest.
I asked Young the question that had been on my mind for weeks: Why didn't he cooperate with the prosecutors, when refusing to talk seemed to guarantee a life sentence? "It crossed through my mind a lot. trying to decide," he said. "But there's two ways I look at it. I feel kind of proud to have principles. And I'm glad I never lost that. But on the other hand, I can't really brag too much, because I didn't have anybody to give them. Who was I going to give them?" I suggested that they just wanted a name, some token of cooperation. The only name Young could provide was that of his fishing buddy; and in the end, he could not do it. "This guy has nothing," he said. "This guy couldn't buy half an ounce of marijuana, okay" Young understands why the other defendants behaved as they did: "When you're talking the kind of time that they were passing out, you expect anybody to do what they can to fend for themselves." As for him, "No, I wouldn't do it any other way."
The worst thing about Leavenworth, for Young, is the noise, "the constant roar of hundreds of people talking." His cell offers no escape from it, from voices echoing off the steel and concrete, day and night. Should Young ever be released, the first thing he plans to do is go fishing -- "I'm sure now that I'm locked up, the bass have come out." He feels great bitterness toward his prosecutors. "Someone who'd do what they're doing is capable of doing anything.... They've only proved I'm capable of smoking a joint, or of introducing a guy to another guy who needs some pounds. That's the most they've proved me capable of. What they're doing, they're destroying these families and passing out life sentences, taking people's lives, putting children on the street -- I mean horrendous acts." He laughed. "I don't know of anyone that would do anything that malicious for a salary." He has no complaints about the corrections officers -- men with families, working toward a pension, who daily walk unarmed amid scores of violent inmates. "I wouldn't take their job for nothing in the world," he said. "Sometimes I wonder if they realize how bad a situation they're in -- you know, really." Despite it all, Young expressed a touching faith in the Constitution: "We're just going through a bad period . . . but I believe the Constitution can whip that." When our time was up, a prison official gave Young a friendly tap on the shoulder and said, "Come on, buddy." Moments later a heavy door closed, and Mark Young was gone.
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