by J. Kevin Cool
Deep underground at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Mo., lives a man who has not seen sunlight for 11 years. A decade has passed without his hearing a bird or feeling a breeze or walking on grass. Every day, for more than four thousand days, his life has consisted of this and nothing more: 23 hours in his cell and one hour of exercise in an adjoining cell. There are no windows. No conversation. No pictures on the wall. There is only silence and time.
He has been there since October 1983 and has had one visitor: David Ward '55.
David Ward figures his life could have gone either way: studying criminals or being one. Were it not for the intervention of a couple of Colby professors, he says, it might have been the latter. "It wouldn't have taken much of a push to put me on the other side," he says half-jokingly.
Professor of sociology and department chair at the University of Minnesota, Ward has been moving in and out of America's darkest places almost since the day he left Mayflower Hill 40 years ago. During a career of unprecedented access to the country's most dangerous criminals, his research has produced four books, scores of articles and appearances on television documentaries. He is a major authority on the effects and effectiveness of long-term isolation, and his new book, Alcatraz: America's Devil's Island, to be published later this year, is sure to add another layer to the raging debate about crime and punishment. His findings, Ward says, show that "no-nonsense" incarceration-ala Alcatraz-greatly diminishes the chance that a criminal will repeat his offense once released. Even the most hard-core criminals are, in a sense, rehabilitated after years with nothing to do but think, Ward says. "Alcatraz worked."
Ward extends this thesis only to the roughly 1 percent of prisoners in super-maximum custody, or what he calls "the all-star team of crime." Based on exhaustive research of former inmates at Alcatraz and its successor, the federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., Ward's study focuses on prisoners like the one in the underground chamber in Missouri, John X (not his real name). A man whose violent behavior has been deemed so ambitious and so remorseless that he is, according to one judge, "wholly beyond the deterrent reach of the law," X is Ward's private project. Ward is the only person outside the prison system who sees him.
After 40 years of research in America's fiercest
prisons, Ward has as much enthusiasm as when he
began. "This work is so intrinsically interesting that
sometimes I can't believe I'm getting paid to do it."
X's crimes are notorious even by prison standards, according to court documents. He was originally sentenced to life imprisonment for killing his Marine drill instructor, subsequently was charged in the separate killings of three federal prisoners, and in 1983 stabbed to death a prison guard. His legacy of brutality is well documented. In 1979 at the federal penitentiary at Marion, the country's super-maximum custody facility, X-an alleged associate of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang-and another inmate stabbed a prisoner 57 times with sharpened rods, say court reports. When the man was on the floor, the documents say, X continued to stab him in the head and back, shouting "Die, you son of a bitch." In 1981 X again participated in the murder of another inmate, allegedly in retaliation for an insult against a member of an allied gang. Then, on an October day in 1983, X killed again. He was being escorted back to his cell from a recreation area when another inmate slipped him a shank through the bars of his cell. X attacked his three guards, killing one and leaving the other two permanently disabled. When other guards arrived to drag the injured men away, X raised his arms in a boxer's gesture of victory and walked back to his cell laughing. He was convicted and sentenced to life-again. By this time he had accumulated four life sentences plus 150 years, prompting the judge's comment that the law was no longer a deterrent.
X was transferred to the federal hospital in Missouri and placed in a specially constructed isolation cell, where he remains to this day. He leaves the cell just once a year, shackled and escorted by six guards, to attend his annual physical check-up. His furnishings include a mattress on the floor of the cell and an elevated cement platform that he uses as a desk. He has a word processor, books and a five-inch black and white television; no photographs or personal belongings are allowed. He is monitored 24 hours a day by surveillance cameras. He sleeps during the day and stays awake all night, reading law books, science-fiction novels and accounts of prisoners who have survived long-term confinement.
At 39, X has spent most of his adult life in prison and most of that with almost no human contact. He is, Ward says, "a stone killer," whose dispassionate one-hour account of the slaying of the Marion prison guard reduced his case worker to tears.
When Ward arrives to conduct an interview, a guard slides open the food tray slot, an orifice two feet wide and perhaps ten inches high, through which Ward and X converse. Ward questions X about his childhood. They talk about his mother, who came to visit once but has never returned and who X says he never wants to see again. But mostly they talk about what it's like living in total isolation. "I recently asked John to provide me with a detailed minute-by-minute account of how he spends his days over a period of about two weeks," Ward said. "I want to know how he does this, how he survives in this setting.
"As a criminologist, I'm interested in him as a prisoner. I want to know what makes him tick."
"I owe everything to Colby," said Ward, whose later interest in criminology was foreshadowed during his undergraduate study of American economic history. "I was more interested in labor riots than in federal fiscal policies," he recalled.
Ward credits the late James Gillespie, professor of psychology, with providing the vision that launched his career. A self-described "hell-raiser" at Colby, Ward says Gillespie and other Colby professors offered direction and motivation. "I was put on social probation and was skating on pretty thin ice. Gillespie and some other professors took me in hand, paid attention to me, and that made all the difference," he said.
Gillespie encouraged Ward to attend graduate school and expand on his interest in behavioral science. "He actually typed up my graduate school applications," Ward said.
Ward spent his first year after graduation at Tufts University, where an internship at the Massachusetts State Prison solidified his career plans. He entered graduate school at the University of Illinois and in 1958 began an 18-month study of prison misconduct at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. A year later, he went to Leavenworth Prison in Kansas and there met and interviewed former Alcatraz convicts, one of whom was in solitary confinement. Ward recalls how the prisoner from solitary came into the interview room squinting and blinking as his eyes tried to adjust to the first light he had seen in weeks. That interview, Ward says, was the genesis of a research project that has spanned more than 30 years.
Following his research at the School of Public Health at UCLA from 1961 to 1964, Ward's studies of men's and women's prisons in California resulted in the publication of two books, Women's Prison: Sex and Social Structure and Prisoner Treatment and Parole Survival. In 1962 he wrote to the director of the Bureau of Prisons, James Bennett, and asked that he be allowed to conduct research on prisoners at Alcatraz. No person outside of the prison system had ever been allowed on Alcatraz Island, let alone inside the prison, but Bennett was familiar with Ward's research and granted the request. Ward arrived 36 hours after the most famous escape in Alcatraz history-later dramatized in a Clint Eastwood film-and boarded a boat with FBI agents who were searching the bay. Once on the island, he was taken immediately to the cell block, where he witnessed the tense interplay between guards and prisoners in the escape's aftermath. "It was an incredible experience," he said.
Pressure from the Kennedy Administration, coupled with the facility's deterioration, led to the prison's closure in the spring of 1963. The government adopted a policy opposing so-called "last resort" penitentiaries, and Alcatraz inmates were scattered at federal prisons throughout the system. Ward's research project appeared to be over before it started.
For the next several years, Ward kept Alcatraz in the back of his mind while completing a fellowship at Harvard Law School and a Fulbright fellowship studying prisons in Sweden and Denmark. His interest in Alcatraz reemerged in 1975 when the island opened as part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The National Park Service, drawing heavily upon prisoner testimony, depicted Alcatraz as brutal and sadistic, Ward says. At a dinner reception for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in Washington, D.C., Ward was approached by Bennett, who was chafing at the Park Service's portrayal. He encouraged Ward to pursue a follow-up study of Alcatraz inmates, a project that Ward knew would require years of research and the cooperation of hundreds of people. With help from the FBI and parole officers across the country, he was able to collect rap sheets on all 1,550 Alcatraz alumni. Almost immediately he recognized a significant pattern. "Early on it became clear that half of these guys weren't in prison anymore," he said. "Although they had been described as habitual criminals, incorrigible, many of them had re-entered the free world and been successful. This was a stunning line of research."
"I watch their hands. There are guys who might
try to pull you through the bars if they saw
a chance, but the other prisoners will usually let
me know if there is somebody I should
keep an eye on."
Ward tracked down every former Alcatraz prisoner and reconstructed his history. He located several who had "important jobs" in towns where nobody knew they had ever been convicted of crimes and who had wives and children who never knew about Alcatraz. The clear conclusion, Ward says, was that "the presumed effects of long-term confinement were wrong."
No federal prison came close to matching the conditions at Alcatraz for the next 20 years. But by the early 1980s mayhem among prisoners at the nation's maximum security lockup in Marion, Ill., had become so routine that even inmates privately pushed for harsher rules. "They were in fear for their lives every day," Ward said.
Twenty-five inmates were murdered at Marion over a span of 25 years. A circuit court judge who heard appeals of prisoners convicted for the murders of fellow inmates wrote: "All things considered, to many inmates at Marion's Control Unit the price of murder must not be high, and to some it must be close to zero."
It got so bad, says Ward, that prisoners were running out of ways to one-up each other in their culture of machismo. Finally, he says, the challenge became "let's see who can take out some staff." The result was X's infamous "mad dog" attack on the three guards.
Marion went into a "lockdown," a euphemism that describes the imposition of restrictive prisoner conditions similar to those used at Alcatraz. Most privileges were revoked, including opportunities to meet with other inmates. Again, the government called in Ward to investigate.
Since 1983, he has conducted extensive interviews with inmates at Marion, nine of whom have been there since the lockdown began. One thousand prisoners have passed through Marion's lockdown-the average stay is a little over three years-and been transferred to other prisons. None of them has assaulted an officer or attacked a fellow prisoner with the intent to kill him, Ward says. Only 16 percent have been returned to Marion because of misconduct. Ward says these findings were "completely unexpected" and added weight to his thesis that confinement in deprived environments produces positive results. "This is the study that shows punishment works," he said.
Ward is pretty sure he knows why recidivism at Marion is so low. "The one thing that is clear is that these prisoners think a lot about the consequences of their behavior," he said. "The thing that works-in addition to aging, which is the best cure for crime-is being locked up in a place where you have plenty of time to think. You start thinking about things you've missed. Your dad died three years ago and you couldn't go to the funeral. If you have a wife she's living with somebody else. If you have kids they're being raised by somebody else. Your energy starts to wind down."
"The entire time these guys are locked up they're basically doing cost-benefit analyses," Ward said. "Most of them come to the conclusion that the crime ain't worth the time."
While these prisoners come to regret their actions, Ward says, he stops short of calling their attitudes remorseful. "They're sorry because what they did put them in this situation, but they don't view their crimes the way you or I would. They will tell you, for instance, that when they killed a guard they weren't killing the man, they were killing the uniform."
These prisoners often have a "warrior mentality," Ward says. They are intelligent, charismatic leaders. "These are men you would want with you if you were in combat. They are fearless. It takes an exceptionally strong individual to psychologically survive in this environment," he said.
When confronted with the austere conditions under which these men live, Ward said, "most people assume they're all going stark, raving mad. In fact, there is no mental illness among this population."
"People naturally put themselves in a prisoner's place and say to themselves, 'I'd crack up,' and they're right," Ward said. "I can tell you that the staff at the facility where John X is kept are amazed that he is as strong mentally and emotionally as he was when he arrived 11 years ago. I mean, here you are in this little cell, you don't see anybody except a guard who hands you food three times a day, you never go outside, you have no family members who visit you, the lawyers have given up on you, and you're in here for the rest of your life. How could anybody survive that?"
Prisoners like X see their incarceration as a personal challenge set for them by the federal government. "The tougher the government is on them, the tougher they get," Ward said. "They see it as a test of character and they're going to be up to the challenge."
While Ward admires the personal strength of men who can survive such conditions, he does not excuse their violent pasts, nor does he advocate turning them loose. "In my opinion, John X is someone who does not deserve to get back to the free world. John X's goal in life is to get out of this isolation unit. That has to be his goal. I would like to see him moved to a less restrictive environment to see how he handles it. I'm not talking about releasing him, I'm talking about putting him back in a place where there is some interaction, however limited, with other human beings. Otherwise, how will we know whether this treatment works?"
Ward says he is able to separate his professional and personal lives and not allow his research environment to affect his own outlook. "It's a question I've been asked hundreds of times-how do you keep this from getting to you? I guess in part it's because I've done this for so long that it has become routine in some respects." Ward says he decided early on to demonstrate he was not afraid to enter the prisoners' environment. "The first thing I did when I went to a new place was walk around in the yard [where prisoners congregate], although I probably would not do that now," he said.
"I'm on a first name basis with most of these guys and they like talking to me. It's in their best interests to talk to me because I'm the guy who might make them known to people outside the prison system."
Even so, he is not reckless about his own safety. Although he usually interviews prisoners in an office, he makes exceptions for the group at Marion who insist on staying in their cells. (Policy dictates that these men must be handcuffed and shackled before being allowed out of their cells). Ward goes to the cell and sits a few feet from the bars while a baton-wielding guard stands nearby. "I watch their hands," he said. "There are guys who might try to pull you through the bars if they saw a chance, but the other prisoners will usually let me know if there is somebody I should keep an eye on. When they say, 'So-and-so is crazy,' I tend to listen."
When interviewing a prisoner in an office Ward instructs guards to remove the man's shackles and handcuffs and wait outside. "I tell them I don't do interviews with officers in the room," he said. "It's important that the prisoners see me as somebody representing the free world and not as part of the prison system."
Surprisingly, Ward says, most of these prisoners advocate harsh measures to deter crime. "They are as concerned about what's happening in our society as everybody else. They are disgusted by child molesters and rapists and drive-by shooters. If anything, their remedies for crime are harsher than the general public's."
"The entire time these guys are locked up
they're basically doing cost-benefit analyses.
Most of them come to the conclusion that the
crime ain't worth the time."
Inmates play to the prisoner-sensitive attitudes of civil libertarians who malign facilities like Marion as inhumane, Ward says. But privately, he says, they want the protection that Marion provides. "They are concerned about personal safety. They're willing to give up some of the freedoms of a more open environment to feel safer."
Ward has great confidence in his research but is cautious when asked about its influence on public policy. He recently presented a report to the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons prior to the opening of a super-maximum facility in Florence, Colo., but even this high-level access is no guarantee his findings will be acted upon. "You've got a university professor telling you one thing and Congress or a judge saying something else. Policy makers will act according to political considerations. That's life," he said.
He is outspoken about the penal system. "The field of corrections is a misnomer," he said. "As far as I'm concerned inmates [in the general prison population] are living in hotels with amenities and people to wait on them. The staff takes care of their every need. There is not enough time for reflection."
Ward says the parole system is "terribly flawed" and he supports mandatory fixed sentencing. "Parole boards have to make a guess and that's exactly what it is, a guess," he said.
He also is bothered by what he views as a too-heavy dependence on behavioral counseling as a method of rehabilitation. "I'm convinced by data," he said, "and there is not a shred of evidence that psychological treatments work. That doesn't mean that we do away with mental health programs but that we acknowledge we don't know what works."
Ward intends to write a follow-up book about Marion and is working with a publisher on a second Alcatraz-related book, Voices of Alcatraz. He says Voices may be produced as a book-on-tape as well, using actual taped interviews with former Alcatraz inmates. He also hopes to write a book comparing X's experience with that of Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz. Stroud, who was incarcerated for 55 years, most of them at Alcatraz, wrote an account of his prison experience that was never published.
Meanwhile, he is working to secure the release of a 75-year-old former Alcatraz inmate who is dying of cancer. "The government is still convinced he's a threat to society," Ward said incredulously.
After 40 years of research in America's fiercest prisons, Ward has as much enthusiasm-perhaps more-than when he began. "This work is so intrinsically interesting that sometimes I can't believe I'm getting paid to do it. To have had the opportunity to go into these prisons and ask all the questions that Geraldo [Rivera] would ask has just been enormously rewarding."
The thousands of research hours also have provided Ward with a poignant reflection. "If you talk to old guards and old inmates from Alcatraz, their stories sound the same," he said. "In the end, you can't tell them apart."
So Farr, So Good/Table of Contents/Faculty File