How to Be Alone

  MR. WINN: (to a lieutenant passing by) How’s it going?

  LIEUTENANT: (worried, bending closer) What did you say?

  MR. WINN: (wearily, disappointed) I said, How’s it going?

  LIEUTENANT: (obviously relieved) Oh, fine, fine.

  —but I can hear him without straining. I’m tempted to say that the ambience of ADX is one of sensory deprivation. But the impression that ADX leaves on visitors is one of peace, not deprivation. Indeed, more than once on my tour, I find myself thinking that this would be an excellent place to read and write. However, I’m suspicious enough of large systems of control to believe that this is exactly what Mr. Winn would like me to feel.

  Each time we encounter a checkpoint, he passes one of the Polaroids that Donna took of me through a metal drawer to a guard behind heavy glass, and the guard slides back a carrot-size portable black light to check my stamp. It’s apparently enough that something on my forearm glow.

  Here is how a prisoner enters a “contact” visit room at ADX. Mr. Winn and I are standing on the free-world side of the cast-concrete table that divides the room, and the door behind us has been locked from outside. Through the tiny window on the opposite door I hear rattling and clinking and glimpse some heads and shoulders. The door opens, and Mutulu Shakur steps in, hands cuffed behind his back. The door closes behind him. With a complex expression of nonchalance, anger, and dignity on his face, he places his back against the door, crouches, and lets the guard outside open a shoebox-sized slot and reach through to uncuff him. The cuffs disappear, the slot is closed and locked.

  Mr. Winn props himself against the wall behind me. During the interview I don’t look back at him, not once, but the vibe I get is that he’s glancing at his watch a lot.

  Shakur is wearing a knit watch cap and generic black plastic eyeglasses. There’s some gray in his dreadlocks. He asks me where I got his name and prisoner number. I reply: from a prison-watch group in Boulder that has close ties with political prisoners. Shakur is active in the Republic of New Afrika movement and was convicted of, among other things, complicity in a 1984 armed robbery that left two cops dead; the prosecution held him responsible under RICO statutes because the robbers had held meetings in his acupuncture clinic.

  Shakur explains that he ended up in maximum security, first at Marion and now at ADX, because the warden at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he was first confined, felt he had too much influence on young black men and too much outside contact. Shakur’s message to me, in our too-brief interview, is that black men who have been in trouble with the law have guidance to offer their communities, and that the System locks them up to keep the country’s black communities rudderless. “The prisons are placed in isolated areas around the country,” he says. “People like myself who have a background in communities have a hard time feeling connected to the world. Imagine a kid who gets twenty-five years for a half ounce of crack cocaine: he’s isolated. The potential for mental damage is tremendous.”

  Standing up to leave, Shakur asks me to send a copy of my story to his son. “Tupac Shakur,” he says. “You know who that is.”

  I promise to get a copy to Tupac.

  When Mr. Winn and I are alone again, he gives me a lecture. He says that ADX is being “completely open” with the media, and that he has no control over what I might make of my tour. (He cites, with a chuckle, the headline for the piece the London Times did on ADX: America’s Wild Men Jailed in “Tombs.”) However, he wishes I’d told him that I’d called the human-rights people in Boulder. “All you would have had to do was mention that,” he says. “It would have helped me understand what you’re doing.”

  I explain that I called Boulder only because I needed the names of inmates willing to talk. But by now his disappointment with me seems to have hardened into judgment.

  Mr. Winn next announces that our tour must be finished by 3:30. It’s now 2:15, the tour hasn’t even started, and I have a second interview to do. What a shame, he says, that I didn’t come in the morning. Then we’d have had all day.

  “But I could have started any time you wanted,” I say. “You asked me to pick a time. I said one o’clock off the top of my head.”

  He shakes his head sadly. He was under the impression that I couldn’t come until one. He’s a morning person, himself. If only he’d known . . .

  Ray Luc Levasseur is a working-class French Canadian from Maine. He’s powerfully built and well tattooed, and he exhibits the reined nervousness of a man who could smoke half a cigarette in a single drag. He has a mustache and eyebrows so broad and dark it’s as if he has three mustaches.

  From 1974 to 1984 Levasseur lived underground and worked with an organization that specialized in bombing the military and corporate enemies of the global working class. After a stint on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, he was captured in 1984.

  “I watch very little TV, mostly news and an occasional ball game,” he says. “When the radio is working—which it hasn’t been for the past few weeks—I’ll listen to NPR sometimes.” The only time he sees a fellow prisoner is during his three weekly outdoor-recreation hours. He has a wife and three daughters whom he last touched in 1989.

  Every prisoner in the federal system is expected to participate in some kind of rehabilitative “program”—drug or alcohol treatment, vocational training, factory work. To get out of ADX, a prisoner must not only follow the rules but do “programming” as well. Part of what makes Levasseur a “political” are his refusals. At Marion he refused to work in a factory that manufactured coaxial cable for the military. “They can step on me and keep me as long as they want,” he tells me, “but I’m not making military or police-related equipment, period. Never.” As for working in the furniture factory that recently opened at ADX: “I think using prisoners as indentured servants or slaves is fundamentally wrong.”

  I ask him about the guards at ADX.

  “I haven’t met one yet that’s from this area,” he says. “They’re all imported. The good thing about that is that, unlike Marion, they don’t have that good-old-boy network. It was terrible at Marion, everybody’s working for their cousin, you know, and they would do some real brutal nasty shit to you and they knew they could get away with it. Here it’s not so bad because they’re all new here. My feeling is that, over time, that old-boy shit’s going to settle in. I think prisons foster that kind of thing.”

  Mr. Winn, standing at my shoulder, is sighing at precise five-minute intervals.

  I ask Levasseur whether he considers himself the worst of the worst.

  “People like Robert McNamara,” he says, “they’ve killed a hell of a lot more people than I have. That’s the problem. If you want to define crime as somebody with a crack pipe, or somebody’s B and E or something like that, it’s always going to boil down to very black and very poor people. OK? But you get these monstrous crimes committed by somebody like McNamara. And Union Carbide, what they did in India, they killed eight thousand fucking people.” He lowers his voice a little, reflectively. “Of course, I was convicted of bombing Union Carbide.” He snickers and then, rubbing his face, regains his composure. “Small price to pay for the lives of those people.” He points at Mr. Winn. “He probably idolizes somebody like Robert McNamara. He doesn’t see what they do as a crime.”

  Mr. Winn takes this opportunity to say to me, coolly, “Do you have any final questions you’d like to ask?”

  I shrug.

  Levasseur shrugs.

  I tell him I’ll write to him.

  Once he is gone, a guard releases us from our side of the contact visit room. We have twenty-five minutes left to tour ADX. Time enough to walk down a great many climate-controlled corridors; to inspect the cast-concrete indestructibility of the fixtures of an empty cell (the cell is gray, about seven by twelve feet, and it has an integrated sink-toilet-fountain, a concrete bed and desk, a built-in electric cigarette lighter, and a narrow window offering a fragment of blue sky); to drop in at one of the law libraries and the lei
sure library (mass-market paperbacks only; lots of Louis L’Amour and Robert Heinlein); and to have one brief conversation verging on the pleasant. I ask Mr. Winn how ADX has managed to attract the attention of CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, NPR, the BBC, French TV, Yorkshire TV, Der Spiegel, the New York Times, the London Times, and Details. He replies that the attraction is partly the high-tech stuff but mainly “the mystique of Alcatraz”—the romance that inevitably surrounds whatever prison holds the worst of the worst.

  Still hoping to win him over, I venture the opinion that romanticizing prisons is a sick thing. He nods. “Just work in one for a day,” he says. “They’re not happy places.”

  I’m moved by his sober tone, but only briefly. The violent political warfare which shook America in the sixties and seventies and which has lately resurfaced—in the Unabomber case, in Oklahoma City, in the Philadelphia of Mumia Abu-Jamal—is most active in the prisons that hold a million and a half people, almost all of them poor. That the vast majority of these people are unpolitical takes nothing away from the state of war. Rare is the war that is fought on principle; jailers and jailed are simply blood enemies. And the roots here are deep. Mr. Winn grew up on Army bases, whereas Shakur grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and Levasseur in a depressed mill town in Maine. Their war is hidden from public view by teal and salmon and phrases like “worst of the worst.” Those who are losing it are, in the main, sociopaths. Those who are winning it wear nice suits and talk of sadness.

  I’d like to believe I’m not implicated in this war.

  TO FREMONT COUNTY, Colorado, prisons mean one thing and one thing only: dollars. The county seat, Cañon City, may have been the first community in America to recognize incarceration as a growth industry. In 1868, having supported Denver in its successful bid to become the permanent state capital, Cañon was offered its choice of payoff: the state prison or the state university. It took the prison.

  More than a century later, the town and its environs have a lock on state corrections. Nine of Colorado’s eighteen prisons are located within five miles of Cañon City’s Wal-Mart. The Colorado Territorial Prison Museum, housed in a decommissioned cellblock at the west end of town, is a rallying point for Cañon’s high society. In the yard outside the museum are picnic tables, a rusting octagonal gas chamber, and a pair of cells in which sunburned British tourists ham it up as desperate convicts. Prominent Cañonites contribute to the Museum Foundation at the Warden level (five to ten thousand dollars); lesser lights may choose, say, the Sergeant level (one hundred to five hundred dollars). To raise further money, there’s an annual golf tournament and an occasional Big House Bash—a fancy-dress affair at which, a few years ago, arriving benefactors dropped their invitations into a plastic scale model of the gas chamber.

  A few miles east of Cañon, on the banks of the Arkansas River, is the one-stoplight town of Florence. Elks, Eagles, and Legionnaires call bingo here three nights a week. At the corner of the road to the FCC is a new Hardee’s that everyone in town is proud of. Ranged along Main Street are one bank, one drugstore, one grocery store with a permanent-looking billboard welcoming the FCC, and a wealth of vacancies and For Sale signs. Here the mayor of Florence, Merle Strickland, a seventy-two-year-old Texan lady with diamond stud earrings and a white Ford pickup, liquidated her furniture store because she could make better money on Wall Street and (she quips) the stock is easier to carry.

  Concrete-clad irrigation ditches line Florence’s side streets, greening the cottonwood-shaded lawns of stuccoed pillbox houses and a few brick Victorians. Cyanide Street, on the western outskirts, dead-ends in a dismal RV park called Last Mile Estates. The Arkansas, roiling and bucking just beyond, is the color of steamed artichokes.

  Florence was once a town of thirty thousand and the center of a booming extractive economy. Coal, oil, gold, limestone, gypsum, fuller’s earth, and alabaster all were mined or processed here. Florence’s No. 42, the country’s oldest continuously producing commercial oil well, still draws four barrels a day. By the 1980s, however, most of Fremont County’s mineral wealth was exhausted. Ruined hillsides and unnatural-looking gulches scarred the local landscape, and Florence’s population had taken a free fall to three thousand.

  “We were like a dry lakebed, an area of clay full of cracks,” says Skip Dyer, the former executive director of the Fremont County Economic Development Corporation. “The money was the water, and the water had just disappeared. It was a rather desperate time for many, many people and many, many businesses.”

  To economically parched Fremont County, a federal correctional complex represented the terminus of a pipeline through which federal money, in the form of payrolls, could flow at upwards of fifty thousand dollars a day. There would also be one-time cash cloudbursts when facilities were built or renovated. Boosters of the prison envisioned thriving custom for their businesses, and a population rising to the critical mass that would draw new employers to the area.

  Fremont County’s tapping of the new federal resource began in 1986, when a local pencil salesman named Tom Schryver saw his chance to make a good old American killing. It happened that Schryver’s brother worked for the BOP, and he mentioned to Schryver that the Fed was seeking troubled colleges, monasteries, and convents that might be convertible to minimum-security prisons. It happened, further, that Cañon City possessed just such a property: the Holy Cross Abbey. Holy Cross sat on 220 acres just outside the Cañon city limits, near the Wal-Mart, and was outfitted with dormitories and a dining hall that could feed three hundred. Its finances were rumored to be precarious.

  There was abundant evidence, moreover, that Fremont County did not mind hosting inmates. On a Sunday morning after my visit to ADX, I pick up a Florence town councilman named Jimmie Lloyd who has promised to introduce me to Schryver. Lloyd, a retired air force lieutenant colonel, summarizes the Cañonite attitude toward prisons this way: “Escapees don’t stick around, and who’s going to burglarize a house that’s potentially a prison guard’s? You get caught and go to jail, you may wind up with the victim as your guard. You also run the risk of getting your head blown off. There’s probably more guns in this area than in half the state.”

  Driving through the unincorporated town of Penrose, Lloyd and I pass a house with ostriches in the back yard, and he offers his opinion that ostrich farms are a Ponzi scheme. On a dusty street where the house numbers follow no evident logic, we succeed in locating the modest one-story home of Tom Schryver.

  Schryver is a good-natured man, his face open and smooth. He has a big belly but a slender man’s handsome features. He meets us at his door in sandals and chocolate-colored polyester slacks. “I’m just an old hick,” he tells me happily. “I was selling pencils when I met Steve Stewart.”

  Steve Stewart arrives moments later. He’s a realtor and he looks it. He has the extra pounds, the trustable face, the ease in weekend wear. He has driven down from Colorado Springs and brought along three commemorative clocks for the coaches of his son’s little league team. Tom Schryver has engraved brass nameplates for the clocks. “It’s a sideline of Tom’s,” says Stewart.

  Tom Schryver had met Stewart when he peddled personalized pencils and other commercial souvenirs to Stewart’s agency. In late 1986, Schryver acquired a realtor’s license and immediately paid a visit to the Holy Cross Abbey. The abbey’s business manager confirmed that the monks were indeed prepared to sell. The manager and Schryver agreed on an asking price of 12.75 million dollars, and Schryver got exclusive rights to the property for seventy-five days. He began to petition the BOP’s head of property acquisitions, a man named Jim Jones.

  What finally swayed Jones was the twelve-minute video Schryver made. In Schryver’s living room, drinking Storebrand diet cola, the four of us watch the video. Schryver can’t hide his pride in the zooms and pans and soundtrack. “It’s not as easy as it looks to match up what you’re saying with the pictures,” he says. “When I wasn’t talking, I turned up the volume of my stereo, and then I’d turn it back down when I had
to talk.”

  The music sounds like Mantovani.

  “It’s a Reader’s Digest record,” Schryver says.

  The video purports to be an overview of the abbey’s buildings for any potential buyer. Schryver subtly geared it, however, to the Justice Department. “I make a joke about prisons,” he says. “See if you can catch it. It’s just a joke between me and my mind.”

  “Between you and your mind,” Steve Stewart echoes in comic awe.

  There are, in fact, several jokes. On the soundtrack, Schryver describes the abbey’s gymnasium as “a very pleasant place to spend time.” (He appeals to us gleefully: “Get it? Spend time?”) He goes on to mention that the abbey’s buildings are set back from Highway 50, thus providing “a buffer zone to the outside” (“Buffer zone! Hee-hee!”) and he notes that the abbey’s single entrance “can easily be outfitted with a gate to restrict access.”

  “This whole town has a lot in common with Dachau,” Stewart remarks slyly.

  “The last pan was especially hard because I had to do it from a car,” Schryver says. “It came out beautifully. You see how there’s a truck coming out just perfectly when I get to the entrance? This is a lot harder than you might think.”

  “‘And now let’s take a look at the crematorium,’” Stewart voice-overs.

  In February 1987, Jim Jones flew to Florence and pronounced the abbey the best site he’d seen yet. More than a thousand Cañonites sent copies of a form letter urging the BOP to buy it. According to Stewart, Jones was overwhelmed by the response. He announced publicly that the Bureau was acquiring a property in Colorado.

  “I was already counting the three hundred seventy-five thousand that was my share of the commission,” Schryver says. “I was getting Mercedes-Benz literature.”

  “It was a done deal,” Stewart says. “And then a week after the final appraisal I get up on a Saturday morning and there’s a banner headline in the paper: DEAL OFF FOR ABBEY. That’s how the exclusive agents for the property got their notice that the deal was off.”