Hot House Life Inside Leavenworth Prison Book Review

Entering a maximum security joint gets to you. The sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and dreariness of a prison envelope you even if you are an outside observer.

Readers often ask me if I posed every bit a convict when I went into Leavenworth for what turned out to exist a one year-long menses and the answer is no. Convicts survive by reading others, quickly identifying who they should be suspicious of and who can be preyed on. While Hollywood might think posing as a predator is possible, hard-core convicts can tell instantly if someone is faking it.

Consider how Carl Bowles, a triple killer who has spent nearly all his life in prison, knew from asking a new captive merely 2 questions that something was odd.

"First time in a penitentiary?" Bowles asked.

"Yes."

"Where you from?"

"A state articulation in Michigan."

That was plenty.

"There are merely two reasons why the federal prison organization (Leavenworth) accepts a land prison," Bowles told me. "The guy is either such a mean son-of-a-bitch that the land articulation tin't handle him or the state has to get rid of him because he'll be killed by convicts if they put him in a state joint. Now, fifty-fifty an idiot could run across that this guy ain't no ruthless motherfucker, so I figured something was wrong with him."

It turned out that the convict had kidnapped, molested, and murdered several children — crimes so monstrous that state prison officials had hidden him in Leavenworth only as Bowles suspected.

Of all the guards and convicts in my volume, I'thousand asked the most questions well-nigh Thomas Silverstein, who stabbed a guard to death in 1983 and has been kept under "no human contact" ever since. When I met him, he was locked in a basement prison cell buried so securely under the prison that the merely sounds were the buzzing of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Those lights were kept on twenty-four hours a twenty-four hour period. Imagine being locked up in total isolation inside four walls since 1983 — your just contact is with guards who hate y'all — and the entire time the lights are kept burning non-stop.

That is Silverstein's world. Picayune wonder that he spends much of his fourth dimension cartoon disturbing sketches.

Even though I saw fist-fights, guys stabbed, and acts of tremendous bravery and savagery, my most frightening moment in the Hot House came while I was talking to a convict about his dreams. Information technology was his words that scared me:

When I first came in back in '78, I was always in the free world when I dreamed at night, but recently I stopped dreaming near beingness exterior. Now, fifty-fifty in my dreams, I'm in the penitentiary.

I've been dreaming a lot lately and having this same dream a lot. I'm coming up the tier and there is a riot and guys are sticking all the snitches and burning the prison. In my dream, I go into this room where in that location are 4 or five of these little turd guards. You know, the ones that e'er act so tough and ever give yous a hard time by messing with your mail service. Super cops.

These pigs are crying and moaning and begging for their lives and I walk up and down looking at them, and suddenly I take hold of one of the fat hacks by his curly hair and I jerk him out in front of everybody and I tell him to pull down his pants and he is begging me not to kill him and he is crying about his wife and kids and telling me how he is sad for everything he has done.

Later on he drops his pants, I order him to plough around and bend over, and when he does, I rip off his shorts and I start fucking him… so out of nowhere I suddenly accept a pocketknife and I start stabbing him in the back over and over and once again.

What's wild about this dream is, it's black-and-white until I start sticking this pig and and so everything shoots to Technicolor. Bright colors, human being. Bright reds, yellows, greens.

I used to dream about women, beautiful women with great big tits.

I used to dream almost existence on the street or in the backyard with my onetime lady and kids.

Just this is what I dream almost now. I dream about fucking a fat prison house baby-sit and stabbing him in the back. It's scary man.

I wonder what I'll be dreaming a year from now, y'all know, or maybe 5 years from now. I wonder what I'll be dreaming when I finally become dorsum on the streets.

The Hot House was a regional best-seller in hardback (number 6 in Chicago) and a all-time seller regionally in paperback (number one for three weeks in Denver).

The Hot House

Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

With the cooperation of the Agency of Prisons, Pete Earley spent much time from mid-1987 to mid-1989 at Leavenworth, a maximum-security institution whose nickname, the Hot House, derives from its lack of ac despite the searing Kansas summers. An explosive eyewitness portrait of life inside the notorious prison, Earley spent two years among 1,400 of the nation's nearly unsafe criminals to write this gripping, New York Times bestseller investigative report.

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Source: https://www.peteearley.com/books/the-hot-house/

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