In 1969, John Burke, WSP warden since 1938, retired. Elmer Cady took Burke's place before Patrick Lucey was elected governor. Cady warned staff members at our annual All-WSP staff meeting that change was coming, and we'd better prepare for it. Hardly anyone, including me, took our new warden seriously. We should have. Lucey's Citizen Committee on Offender Rehabilitation descended upon the prison, its staff, and its inmates like blue bottle flies, landing on fresh pile of dog excrement on an extra hot and humid July day. At once, Committee members let us know by their reactions and responses to what we told them that we were buffoons, fresh off the redneck farm. They warned us we'd soon be forced to seek jobs in community-based treatment centers because the prison was so past tense. We probably wouldn't get hired anyway because committee members perceived us as cave dwellers with knuckles dragging on the grotto's floor
They were suspicious of anything we told them about prisoners. They said they didn't like our negative attitudes. They obviously misread our practicality in dealing with the criminal justice system's crème de la crème. Furthermore, since I was an English teacher, what did I know? However, whenever those same committee members interviewed inmates, I watched them take copious notes, nodding and smiling all the while, urging inmates to really speak their minds. And did those inmates ever respond. Naturally, much of it was pure B.S.
The Committee's lead attorney, a woman in her thirties, articulated the committee's feelings toward staff: "We don't trust you because we're going to close down this place and that's threatening to your welfare." When I told her that many of my students were different from law abiding citizens, illustrating my point by saying that when I desired a brand new Mustang fastback with a 351 cubic inch Cleveland engine, I'd either take out a loan and pay for that car in monthly payments for the next three years or I'd work and save portions of my paychecks in order to eventually buy a used Pony car with cold, hard cash. However, the inmates I taught and thought I understood, would look at the same car, desire it, and steal it. They wanted it. They took it. And that was that.
"No, you're wrong," she retorted. "They, like you, haven't learned how to work the system."
"Work the system?" I nearly shouted. "Inmates are experts at working the system. And they're playing you as if you're a Hammond organ." I also told her that when an inmate reaches thirty-five years of age, he knows one thing for certain: He doesn't want to die while locked up in a cell. That age is when many lawbreakers finally realize they're mortal and they have a limited time left on earth. That's when they make up their minds to stop their criminal ways. Some, however, never stop.
She told me I was a reactionary. Perhaps I was. It took a while but I finally concluded that the governor, most committee members, and that attorney thought they and other folks like them could "love the inmates to healthy, law-abiding life styles."
In order to prove her point, she prompted committee members and their spouses to apply to get on the institution's "Approved Visitor list" for inmates they had interviewed and especially liked. Most of those inmates were above average in intelligence. Sometimes, a great deal of friction occurred between them and non-approved convicts.
A pathologist from Beaver Dam, a small city fifteen miles south of Waupun, was an articulate committee member with a definite point of view. An ardent Lucey backer and believer in community-based treatment centers, he persuaded his wife to become a VIP (Volunteer in Probation). Soon, she requested to be placed on the approved visitor list. It didn't take her long to fall in love with the inmate she visited, a kitchen worker who had successfully escaped from WSP some years earlier. She sought a divorce. Her estranged husband gave her a lucrative cash settlement, but he retained custody of their children. As she saw it, she then waited all alone in her lover's tower for her "real man" to be released from the hoosegow. Actually, It wasn't a tower but an apartment. Upon his release, she picked up her man in a brand new car she purchased in a cash deal because he had written that's exactly the car he wanted. I was told they promptly headed to Vegas.
After she and her lover spent all her money, our former kitchen worker promptly dumped her and took off for God knows where. She returned to Beaver Dam and asked her former husband to forgive her and to take her back. The good doctor told her to take a hike. Smart man.
The Committee's chief lawyer and her assistant, also an attorney, both women whom I assumed had a modicum of intelligence in order to successfully maneuver their way through the University of Wisconsin law school, fell in love with a couple of inmates as well. Both married their love objects, but within two years' time, sought and received divorces. Their ex-husbands landed back in prison with new convictions and a lot more time. Ain't love grand?
At one point in the committee's heyday, select staff members were requested to attend a committee conference at Johnson Wax's Wingspread, a former Johnson family estate, designed by our famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. The request was a demand. (Some people who read this blog will be shocked by my belief that Frank Lloyd Wright couldn't design very many buildings that didn't leak although those edifices were and are viewed by those in the know as eloquently deliberate. I guess I'll never understand people in the know. I thought the first reason for which a shelter was erected was to keep its dwellers from having to deal with precipitous weather).
The very first speaker at Wingspread made a big deal that the prison assigned inmates, many of them Milwaukee residents prior to their incarceration, to work on Farm #1 before they were released. "What could a city dweller learn, working on a farm?" inquired the speaker before offering his acerbic reply, "Absolutely nothing." He smiled appreciatively as fellow believers stood and applauded. I also rose from my seat but instead of applauding, I went outside for a smoke, thinking those folks were far too clever for the likes of me. I didn't go back in the building until lunch was served. After lunch, I returned to my outdoor spot, taking an extended smoke break before heading home, continually shaking my head in disbelief.
They were suspicious of anything we told them about prisoners. They said they didn't like our negative attitudes. They obviously misread our practicality in dealing with the criminal justice system's crème de la crème. Furthermore, since I was an English teacher, what did I know? However, whenever those same committee members interviewed inmates, I watched them take copious notes, nodding and smiling all the while, urging inmates to really speak their minds. And did those inmates ever respond. Naturally, much of it was pure B.S.
The Committee's lead attorney, a woman in her thirties, articulated the committee's feelings toward staff: "We don't trust you because we're going to close down this place and that's threatening to your welfare." When I told her that many of my students were different from law abiding citizens, illustrating my point by saying that when I desired a brand new Mustang fastback with a 351 cubic inch Cleveland engine, I'd either take out a loan and pay for that car in monthly payments for the next three years or I'd work and save portions of my paychecks in order to eventually buy a used Pony car with cold, hard cash. However, the inmates I taught and thought I understood, would look at the same car, desire it, and steal it. They wanted it. They took it. And that was that.
"No, you're wrong," she retorted. "They, like you, haven't learned how to work the system."
"Work the system?" I nearly shouted. "Inmates are experts at working the system. And they're playing you as if you're a Hammond organ." I also told her that when an inmate reaches thirty-five years of age, he knows one thing for certain: He doesn't want to die while locked up in a cell. That age is when many lawbreakers finally realize they're mortal and they have a limited time left on earth. That's when they make up their minds to stop their criminal ways. Some, however, never stop.
She told me I was a reactionary. Perhaps I was. It took a while but I finally concluded that the governor, most committee members, and that attorney thought they and other folks like them could "love the inmates to healthy, law-abiding life styles."
In order to prove her point, she prompted committee members and their spouses to apply to get on the institution's "Approved Visitor list" for inmates they had interviewed and especially liked. Most of those inmates were above average in intelligence. Sometimes, a great deal of friction occurred between them and non-approved convicts.
A pathologist from Beaver Dam, a small city fifteen miles south of Waupun, was an articulate committee member with a definite point of view. An ardent Lucey backer and believer in community-based treatment centers, he persuaded his wife to become a VIP (Volunteer in Probation). Soon, she requested to be placed on the approved visitor list. It didn't take her long to fall in love with the inmate she visited, a kitchen worker who had successfully escaped from WSP some years earlier. She sought a divorce. Her estranged husband gave her a lucrative cash settlement, but he retained custody of their children. As she saw it, she then waited all alone in her lover's tower for her "real man" to be released from the hoosegow. Actually, It wasn't a tower but an apartment. Upon his release, she picked up her man in a brand new car she purchased in a cash deal because he had written that's exactly the car he wanted. I was told they promptly headed to Vegas.
After she and her lover spent all her money, our former kitchen worker promptly dumped her and took off for God knows where. She returned to Beaver Dam and asked her former husband to forgive her and to take her back. The good doctor told her to take a hike. Smart man.
The Committee's chief lawyer and her assistant, also an attorney, both women whom I assumed had a modicum of intelligence in order to successfully maneuver their way through the University of Wisconsin law school, fell in love with a couple of inmates as well. Both married their love objects, but within two years' time, sought and received divorces. Their ex-husbands landed back in prison with new convictions and a lot more time. Ain't love grand?
At one point in the committee's heyday, select staff members were requested to attend a committee conference at Johnson Wax's Wingspread, a former Johnson family estate, designed by our famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. The request was a demand. (Some people who read this blog will be shocked by my belief that Frank Lloyd Wright couldn't design very many buildings that didn't leak although those edifices were and are viewed by those in the know as eloquently deliberate. I guess I'll never understand people in the know. I thought the first reason for which a shelter was erected was to keep its dwellers from having to deal with precipitous weather).
The very first speaker at Wingspread made a big deal that the prison assigned inmates, many of them Milwaukee residents prior to their incarceration, to work on Farm #1 before they were released. "What could a city dweller learn, working on a farm?" inquired the speaker before offering his acerbic reply, "Absolutely nothing." He smiled appreciatively as fellow believers stood and applauded. I also rose from my seat but instead of applauding, I went outside for a smoke, thinking those folks were far too clever for the likes of me. I didn't go back in the building until lunch was served. After lunch, I returned to my outdoor spot, taking an extended smoke break before heading home, continually shaking my head in disbelief.