Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

In May 1988, Jim Jones asked Skip Dyer, the FCEDC’s executive director, what the community’s response would be to a larger complex, one perhaps containing as many as three facilities. “They’d hug you a lot harder,” Dyer replied.

Although the BOP was being wooed by depressed communities all over the West and was studying sites in at least five of them, Fremont County had the inside track. Just when it appeared that all systems were go, however, the Colorado state legislature refused to authorize the gift of land to the Feds. “We’d had reasonable confidence that we’d get that state land,” Dyer says. “When it fell through, we felt we had to strike while the iron was still hot.”

The iron was struck by the owner of Jim’s Clothing in Florence. Jim Provenzano is a heavy-set man with soft brown eyes and olive skin. His father, an Italian tailor, came to Florence in 1916 and built a business by taking the measurements of miners entering the local shafts, sewing while they mined, and delivering their suits when they emerged from their shift. Provenzano fils was a member of the countywide prison steering committee, and he knew that there was an alternate site, just south of Florence, that Jim Jones had deemed adequate. The asking price was a hundred thousand dollars. Provenzano told a friend at the Rocky Mountain Bank & Trust that he would put up a thousand dollars to buy the Florence property if the bank would put up a thousand, too.

“I could sooner put a man on the moon than afford a thousand dollars,” Provenzano says. “But we only had two weeks, and I knew the Fed was interested in that property. So I said: Let’s buy it. My main purpose was to bring our store into its seventy-fifth year. I hoped we could provide local employment and give our kids a place to work if they wanted it.”

With Provenzano’s impetus, the FCEDC quickly organized a fund-raising drive. “It was like a disease that everybody caught,” Provenzano says. “It was like an auction. Everybody else was pledging; you had to pledge too.” Within two weeks the FCEDC had eighty thousand dollars in the bank and another sixty thousand in pledges. By the summer of 1988, it was able to send the title for three hundred acres of desert to the BOP — thus fulfilling its promise of free land.

Ground was broken in Florence on July 14, 1990. Out-of-town dignitaries made appearances at a barbecue in the town park. A pickaxe commemorating the event now hangs on the wall at the Florence Chamber of Commerce. Also on the wall are framed watercolors of the four prisons in the complex. Twin garlands of steel are taped to the plywood paneling above the paintings. A calligraphed card identifies the garlands as RAZOR WIRE FROM FEDERAL PRISON.

FOR THE NATIONAL and international media, ADX is the showcase of a new millennium, but just east of Cañon City there is a new Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP) that opened fifteen months earlier than the federal ADX, is identical in its principles, and is easily as carefully designed. You have to admire the Feds for persuading people that ADX is newsworthy.

My guide at the CSP, Administrative Officer Dennis Burbank, could hardly be more different from Louis Winn. Mr. Winn is a transfer to the area; Dennis is a local. Mr. Winn is smooth and well-spoken, a master at passing up obvious opportunities to volunteer information. Dennis expresses feelings, opinions. He’s an individual who utilizes the words “utilize” and “individual” with an ease that makes them sound almost slangy. He can get all glowy on the topic of the federal ADX (“I love their isolation cells”) and yet visibly shudder at the thought of corrections in Oklahoma (“a model of how not to do things”). When I meet him he’s wearing a red-white-and-blue necktie of considerable hideousness. The tie bears a single word: LIBERTY.

As Dennis presents it, the CSP is designed to provide a kind of tough love: to be the stern, corrective parent that most of its residents presumably never had. If you follow the rules and learn to control your antisocial impulses, you proceed from the very unpleasant Level I (no privileges, a two-guard escort for a trip to the shower) to the less unpleasant Level III (more spending money, more personal freedoms) and finally, after six months or a year, back to a prison where you can interact with fellow prisoners. It’s a theory of in loco parentis . What CSP sets out to do is to impress on the childlike, acting-out prisoner that the world around him is real and that he has responsibilities to it.

The staff at CSP devotes considerable ingenuity to tailoring “behavior management plans” to particular offenses. The punishment for throwing feces at a guard, for example, is to be deprived of the usual prison food. The thrower is put, instead, on a “special management diet”: a squishy high-protein loaf that Dennis describes as “not very tasty.” With as much delicacy as I can, I ask if the special management diet changes the nature of its consumers’ feces. Dennis says no. The diet is simply a message: stop misbehaving, and we’ll put you back on real food.

When I express uneasiness about the possibility of sensory deprivation disorders at CSP, Dennis has an expert paged, a social worker named Gene Espinoza, who tells me that prisoners are not, in fact, all that isolated. Besides the staff-intensive daily contacts, inmates also call to each other from their cells, tap on the walls, and, when they think no one’s looking, fashion their bedsheets into “rat lines”—long cords that they push under the doors of their cells and attempt to snap like a whip and reach the doors of other cells with. If you’ve managed to “keister in” some tobacco (this is Dennis’s jolly phrase; it means “secrete in your rectum out of sight of a simple spread-your-cheeks check”) and wish to sell it to a neighbor, the rat line is the preferred means of conducting the transaction.

My relationship with Dennis suffers a moment of awkwardness when I point out that the contacts which Mr. Espinoza calls a boon to mental health are in fact against the regulations and routinely punished. This is how Dennis resolves the paradox: “Inmates are not allowed to communicate with each other. Nevertheless, they communicate.”

CSP is operating at full capacity. As of June, 486 men and thirteen women were imprisoned here. Each of CSP’s four “units” has its own medical exam room and barber room (the latter doubles as a mental-health counseling area); the idea is to minimize the time an inmate spends outside his unit. At the center of the unit is a two-tiered control area from which eight “pods” radiate tangentially. The upper floor of the control area is glassed in and contains a couple of guards who oversee large color monitors controlling locks, lights, intercoms, water flow, and the like. Dennis says that the controls were originally touch-screen, but guards would find themselves opening up doors with a sneeze or the brush of a sleeve. Now they use trackballs and clickers.

Each pod has sixteen cells arranged on two tiers and looking out on a “day hall” with a waxed concrete floor. The first principle of a control unit is that no inmate should ever have direct contact with another inmate, and the electronics here serve an elaborate choreography of comings and goings. Prisoners at disciplinary Levels I and II must be cuffed and escorted by two guards whenever they leave their cells; the big carrot of Level III is being allowed to walk the fifty feet to the shower or exercise room or telephone without escort. Prisoners at the different levels are mixed together in each unit, so that the privileges of those in Level III are visible to all.

Eight or ten of the cells are quiescent at any given moment. Silently, behind glass, a blond-bearded inmate is working out in the lower-tier exercise room, whose equipment consists of a chin-up bar. In the upper-tier exercise room an inmate with a half-grown Afro can be seen with his face pressed to the window as he peers out at the late-afternoon nothing. (CSP has no outdoor recreation area.) One or two other inmates have their faces pressed to the windows of their cell doors. Yet another is showering. Through the glass door of the pod’s narrow shower room I can see his head and torso not real clearly in honey-colored light. The water will run for no more than ten minutes before the pod computer turns it off. If he needs a razor, a guard brings it before the shower and takes it away after.