A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIAL
ENVIRONMENT IN A COED PRISON

Dissertation for the Degree of Ph. D.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
JOHN ORTIZ SMYKLA
1977

 

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Michigan State
University

 

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
OF THE SOCIAL ENVIORNMENT
IN A COED PRISON

presented by

John Ortiz Smykla

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

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ABSTRACT

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIAL
ENVIRONMENT IN A COED PRISON
By

John Ortiz Smykla

The Issue

 

A qualitative approach to the study of the social
environment in a coed prison is the issue here. Cocor—
rections, as coed prisons are called, is advanced under
the ideology of being a more normal social environment
than one-sex prisons. The social environment and its
dimensions were chosen for discussion because they were
considered important issues by the staff and inmates at
the Federal Correctional Institution at Pleasanton,
California. I also wished to compare with other litera-
ture on cocorrections and single-sex prisons some major
issues of relevance for administrative and legislative
policy makers. The issues treated here include sexual
adaptation in a sexually integrated prison, the role of
cocorrections in reducing prison violence, and the organi-

zation of staff-inmate communication and relations.

John Ortiz Smykla

Study Design

 

The method of study for this dissertation was
primarily participant observation. For seven months of
intensive fieldwork, I became a participant observer at
the coed Federal Correctional Institution at Pleasanton,
California. I interacted on a day-to-day basis with
inmates and staff learning how they make sense out of
their world. I attended staff and inmate meetings and
gatherings in private and public places within the insti-
tution. I formally and informally interviewed staff and
inmates. In addition, I used informants, made use of the
institution's facilities, and distributed questionnaires
to inmates to tap some of their attitudes about the social
environment. Phenomenology is the major theoretical
perspective guiding the collection and analysis of the

data.

Interpretation

This research project brought about several inter-
esting descriptions and explanations. On the patterns of
sexual adaptation I found that in comparison with same-
sex institutions the predatory type of homosexual activity
found in same—sex prisons is virtually absent at Pleasan-
ton. The majority of the inmates are heterosexually
oriented and they find fewer putative differences between

themselves and staff. Hence, they question the label,

John Ortiz Smykla

the assumptions, and identities the institution has
designed for their control.

On the role of cocorrections in reducing prison
violence, I describe a model of inmate adjustment to
FCI Pleasanton that encourages inmates to talk with
staff while reinforcing traditional and individualistic
patterns of "doing you own time." However benign,
relatively little inmate collectivism is found to exist.

Lastly, the organization of communication and
staff-inmate relations is discussed. The use of formal
and informal arrangements in creating staff-inmate rela-
tions is presented. Inmate pressure groups in these
arrangements are found to be minimal. In the end, the
concept of cocorrections as a normal environment is
rejected because communication seldom goes beyond the

point of an exchange of information.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIAL

ENVIRONMENT IN A COED PRISON

By

John Ortiz Smykla

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

College of Social Science
School of Criminal Justice

1977

Dedicated to the
Concept of Making
Prisons Better

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Hopefully these acknowledgments are only making
public what has already happened in a more private and
personal way.

I am indebted to Dr. Ralph Lewis for more than
chairing this dissertation. He has given me another piece
of the perspective and I think I learned much more from
him than he suspects. Dr. Barrie Thorne has been a source
of inspiration since we met. I am indebted to her for
'what she laid before me on matters of female and male
liberation and participant observation. Her effect on my
career will be forever. And to Dr. Robert Trojanowicz,
'who supported my idea from the beginning and gave me the
research time to check it all out, I am most thankful.

Implementing the project would have never hap-
pened, as the reader will soon learn, without the entry
that was paved by Norman Carlson, Director of the Federal
Bureau of Prisons, and Howard Kitchener, Director of
Research with the Bureau. They recognized the timely need
for the project and supported me all the way. Kitch has
since become a good critic.

At Pleasanton there are so many to thank. Among

them are former Warden Walter Lumpkin and the present

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Warden Bill Garrison; Associate Warden Jay Alman and then—
Associate Warden Ann Weist; Jim Meko, then-Case Management
Coordinator; Chief Correctional Supervisors John Brown and
Ray McCroskey; then-Unit Managers Bert Ricks and Ron
Morgan; Correctional Officers Greg Liska, Aloyne Wilkins,
and Reuben Troncoso; and Helene Cavior, Programs Research
Analyst, who became my sponsor, my critic, and my counsel.
For living in wonder for seven months of whatever I was
doing, I hOpe you find this report easily read, a true
picture of what it was like then, and a source of issues
to consider in decision making. Its intentions and pur-
pose are quite simple--namely, to describe and offer some
explanation of what inmates and staff say and do as a
product of how they interpret Pleasanton. That I add to
it theory and relate it to other issues are tangents I
have taken for academic purposes. Hopefully they serve to
illuminate the issues here. I especially thank Jim Meko
and Ron Morgan for having read and critiqued this manu-
script several times. Their help was most valuable.

The inmates. My chief debt is to the inmates
themselves. A few I would like to acknowledge here are
T.C., Lew, Randall, Jeannie, Theresa, Cathy, Larry, Marna,
Bob, Anita, Jeannie, J.J., Mike, Mary, Carolyn, Carl, Coty,
Rosalind, Sheila, Robin, Steve, Zulu, Terry, Veronica and

the Family, and the 230 others.

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I also want to thank the Faculty at the Criminal
Justice Systems Center and the School of Criminal Justice
at Michigan State University for awarding me an Institu-
tion LEAA Fellowship for the fieldwork phase of this dis-
sertation. A special thanks goes to Dr. John Hudzik for
teaching me about grant writing and helping me earn a
Competitive LEAA Fellowship for the period of dissertation
writing and analysis. The U.S. Department of Justice, Law
Enforcement Assistance Administration, was generous in its
funding. And especially to Jan Baggett at the Systems
Center a hearty thanks for handling all my university
affairs while I was in California.

Penny Beckerson has been a great typist. That she
was looking for work was really to my advantage.

The person who gave me the most in all of this was,
and still is, Evelyn, my wife. She agreed to all the
travelling and cheap living. She put up with my shuffling
prison schedule believing in my research strategy of see-
ing the field under a variety of times and conditions.
With few complaints she listened to my boring voice and
transcribed field notes for seven months. Her stamina is
phenomenal. Her part in how I felt about myself, my
research, my data, and my relationships at Pleasanton is
central to this dissertation and should not be lost in the

methodological forest. I also thank her for teaching me

the art of eavesdropping. I learned from her a new and
exciting research strategy.

I realize that what I say here may sometimes
appear sharply critical of corrections and cocorrections,
and this may disappoint some of the readers. At the same
time, however, for every person who winces at these words
of description and explanation there will probably be
others who will protest that I am too charitable. This
happens in part from the problem of having to describe in
general terms a system that is so broad that anything at
all can be said about it and still be correct for some
part of it somewhere. All that appears here should be

taken as representing no other person than myself.

vi

The material in this project was prepared under a
research grant under Grant No. 77-NI-99-0034 from the
(Office of Education and Manpower Assistance, Law Enforce-
Inent Assistance Administration, U.S. Department of Justice.
Researchers engaging in such projects under Government
sponsorship are encouraged to express freely their profes-
sional judgment. Therefore, points of view or opinions
stated in this document do not necessarily represent the
official position or policy of the U.S. Department of
Justice. ‘

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
LIST OF TABLES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x
LIST OF DIAGRAMS . . . . . . . . . . . . .‘. . . . xi
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter
I. STUDY DESIGN, THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES,
AND THE NATURE OF THE QUESTION . . . . . 4
Selecting Cocorrections . . . . . . . . 4
The Phenomenological Perspective . . . . 6
Choosing Participant Observation . . . . 12
Gaining Entry to Pleasanton . . . . . . . 15
A New Warden . . . . . . . . . . 20
Meeting Inmates and Staff . . . . . . . . 23
Becoming a Participant Observer . . . . . 27
Collecting Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
The Social Environment Framework . . . . 42
II. WOMEN'S PRISONS, MEN'S PRISONS, AND ‘
COED PRISONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Cocorrections History . . . . . . . . 52
Review of Core Literature on Female and
Male Prisons and Prisoners: Some
Suggestions for Cocorrections . . . . . 59
Cocorrections Literature . . . . . . . . 67
III. THE PHYSICAL STRUCTURE OF FCI PLEASANTON
AND ITS STAFF AND INMATES . . . . . . . . 77
Physical Structure . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Staff and Inmates: Who Are They? . . . . 99
Staff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Correctional Services . . . . . . . . . lOl
Inmates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Inmate Offenses . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Inmate Demography . . . . . . . . . . . 113

viii

Chapter

IV. PATTERNS OF SEXUAL ADAPTATION IN A
SEXUALLY INTEGRATED PRISON

Assumptions and Policies About the
Sexual Interaction in a Sexually

Integrated Prison . . . .
Commitment Source as a Critical
Variable . . .

The Nature and Extent of Homosexual,
Heterosexual, and Bisexual Inmate

Relations . . . . . . .
Definitions

Role Differentiation . . . . .
The Dynamics of Prison Sex .
Married Inmates . . . . . . . .

V. THE ROLE OF COCORRECTIONS IN REDUCING

PRISON VIOLENCE . . . . . . . . .

Definitions and Explanations .

The Development of the Underworld .

Sources . . . . . . . . . . . .

Places . . . . . .
Some Final Notes on Violence at

Pleasanton . . . . . . . .

VI. INMATE-STAFF COMMUNICATION AND RELATIONS

The Organizations of Staff-Inmate
Communication . . . . . . . .
Formal Arrangements . . . . . .
Inmate Pressure . . . . .
Informal Inmate-Staff Contact .

Impact of Institutional Goals and
Perspectives . . . . . . . . .

Living With Staff . . . . . . . .

VII. SUMMARY . . . . . . .

Cocorrections . . . . . . . . . .
Is It Normal? . . . . . . . . . .
Methodology . . . . . . . .
A Final Note on the Analysis
ENDNM‘ES I I O O O O O O O O O O O I O O
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . .

The Prevalence of Sexual Activity .
Techniques and Places for Prison Sex
Social-Psychological Bases of Sexual

Page

118

121

126

128
129
132
136

139
141
146

152
152
157
159
166
175
178
180
180
182
187

191
193

197
197
201
203
204
206

210

Table

LIST OF TABLES

Department Staff by Sex .
Salary Range by 6.8. Rating . . .

Crime Categories by Sex for 1974, 1975,
and 1976 I I O O I O O O O O O O I

Selected Inmate Demographic Variables by
Sex for 1974, 1975, and 1976 . . .

Page
100
102

114

115

Diagram

LIST OF DIAGRAMS

FCI Pleasanton Physical Layout .

Aerial Demonstration of the Second Floor

Housing Unit . . . . . . . . . .
FCI Pleasanton Organizational Chart
Correctional Services Organizational

Chart Including G.S. Rating and
Distribution of Employees by Sex

xi

Page

82

84

101

103

INTRODUCTION1

Since May 1955, the Federal Correctional Institu-
tion at Terminal Island, California, has been a quasi-
cocorrectional environment housing female and male inmates.

On July 14, 1971, the Robert F. Kennedy Youth
Center in Morgantown, West Virginia, became the first
Federal correctional institution to operate a coed (cocor-
rections) program. Three months later, on October 18,
1971, the United States Bureau of Prisons having assumed
ownership of a former mental health "narcotics farm" in
Fort Worth, Texas, run by the Department of HEW, converted
it into a Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) and
reopened as the first cocorrections adult prison for women
and men.

In 1974 two more coed FCI's Opened. The first, an
adult facility, opened at Lexington, Kentucky, and the
second, a youth facility, opened at Pleasanton, California.

In the summer of 1975, four years after becoming
a cocorrectional institution, the Robert F. Kennedy Youth
Center (KYC) transferred out all of its female inmates to
other Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities in light of opera-
tional and programmatic problems and some staff's atti-

tudes about coed corrections in Operations there.

In January 1977, Wardens from coed FCI's, together
with regional and national Bureau of Prisons administra-
tors, met in conference at Terminal Island (TI). They
focused on cocorrections and among other things they dis-
cussed the issue of the separation of the sexes at T1.
They concluded that FCI Terminal Island should plan to
overcome the operational and programmatic barriers
presently blocking the integration of female and male
inmates. Suggestions in this regard were made but no time—
table was planned.

Temporarily excluding the facility at TI, then,
there are three fully operational cocorrectional FCI's:
Ft. Worth, Texas; Lexington, Kentucky; and Pleasanton,
California. This dissertation is an ethnography of one of
them--the FCI at Pleasanton, California. It is the first
attempt to meet the needs for recording and understanding
life for prisoners and staff in a cocorrectional setting,
on their grounds and on their terms. The data were col-
lected primarily by participant observation. Other sources
of data collection, however, were used. Semi-structured
interviews were asked of about half the staff and a social
climate questionnaire was given to the inmates. Some
inmate files were read and access to other institutional
documents was obtained. Inmate poetry, letters, dances,
and talent shows add yet another dimension to the data.

The bulk of the data was gathered over a period of seven

months of intensive field work. Data analysis deveIOped
along with data collection to avoid structuring data col-
lection in ways that were alien to the data itself. I
have taken the social environment of the coed institution
as the framework for the presentation and analysis of the
data. The data were not collected with this framework in
mind, but the material falls quite nicely into it.
Research on prisons quite forcefully points to negative
environmental conditions--the boredom, pettiness, repeti-
tive meaningless activities, and the deprivation of hetero-
sexual contact. To some extent the coed concept was
brought forth to counter these degrading environmental
conditions as well as to serve some pragmatic needs of the
federal prison system: where to put the increasing num-
bers of women being sent to prison; higher construction,
operation, and program costs for separate female and male
institutions; and some thoughts about mixing adults with
youths and offenders with varying degrees of criminal
background.

What interpretation do women and men, inmates and
staff, give to a cocorrectional environment and how does
that process of interpretation shape their beings, their
actions, and their associations is the subject of this
dissertation. To that end, I have woven together data

from many sources to present my findings.

CHAPTER I

STUDY DESIGN, THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES,
AND THE NATURE OF THE QUESTION

Selecting_§ocorrections

Back in the summer of 1973, I chaired a workshOp
on the treatment of special offenders at a midwest col-
lege. One of the workshop speakers was the Warden from
the Illinois State Penitentiary for Women at Dwight,
Illinois. He spoke with the group about female offenders
and coed prisons. It was then I began mentally to out-
line this dissertation.

About a year later I read an article on "Coed
Incarceration" in Tgmg (September 16, 1974). The one-page
report included a photograph of "Boy Meets Girl at
Pleasanton. . . ." The article reported on female and
male prisoners in their twenties strolling arm in arm
around a lake, watching movies, listening to quadraphonic
stereo, or playing pool in their glass-and-redwood housing
complexes. Despite the physical luxuries, however, the
Warden there remarked, "A prison is still a prison."

The article identified several substantive and
theoretical issues in cocorrections. Among them were the

banning of sexual activity, the move toward creating a

4

more normal prison environment, inmate custody apprOpriate
for classification in a cocorrectional facility, modern
architecture, new patterns of staff's exercise of authority,
street clothing for inmates, inmate job training, inmate
responsibility, drug trafficking, and a reduction in homo-
sexual prison rapes. The article was also informative,

in that it listed the names of three other coed federal
prisons besides Pleasanton.

During the next few weeks I talked about cocorrec-
tions with the criminal justice faculty at Michigan State
University. For the most part they, too, were unaware of
the developments in coed prisons. To build my own knowl-
edge on the subject, I wrote the coed federal prisons at
Morgantown, West Virginia; Lexington, Kentucky; Fort Worth,
Texas; and Pleasanton, California. I made known my inten-
tions to conduct my doctoral research on cocorrections and
asked them to share with me sources of information on
cocorrections. I received back analyses of several sur-
veys on cocorrections at the FCI's at Lexington and Morgan—
town by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) research staff. I was
pleased to learn what research was going on in the field,
but was disappointed with the fact that almost without
exception the research I had before me was limited to the
positive aspects of cocorrections, its atmosphere, and
staff interaction. I planned that a phenomenological

perspective would give insight into the negative outcomes

of cocorrections, whether overt or unintentional. I knew
that if cocorrections was so successful in improving beha-
vior as Warden Charles Campbell of the coed Fort Worth
facility reported 13.3129 (op. cit), then it must be due
to the meaning inmates and staff were giving to cocorrec-
tions. What was this process of interpretation and what
behavior did it bring about were issues in cocorrections

I began to consider.

The Phenomenological Perspective

Phenomenology is central to qualitative method-
ology and hence, to participant observation. What partici-
pant observers choose to research, how they go about that
research, and what they choose to say about that research
all depends upon their theoretical perspective.

As phenomenologists, we commit ourselves to view-
ing human behavior as a product of how people interpret
their world. Schutz tells us that "The phenomenologist

. . does not have to do with the objects themselves; he
is interested in their meaning, as it is constituted by
the activities of our minds" (1962, p. 115). As phenomen—
ologists we begin with the assumption that social phe-
nomena are negotiated and sustained through the
intersubjective process of meaning construction. Behavior
is the contingent product of these processes. The problem

for phenomenology is to describe the nature of social

phenomena as it is experienced by people in their every-
day activities. This is to be done by examining how mem-
bers construct their realities, how they account for them,
and what they account.

The two most dominant forces in social science
supporting this view of human behavior are symbolic inter-
action and ethnomethodology. Advocates of both approaches
agree that if the goal of social science is the under—
standing of human behavior, then researchers need to
shrink the gap that exists between them and the empirical
social world that contains the ultimate test of that
understanding.

Scholars like George Herbert Mead (1934, 1938) and
Herbert Blumer (1962) have laid the fundamental premises
and methodological implications of symbolic interaction,
‘while Garfinkel (1967) and Douglas (1970) have done simi-
larly in ethnomethodology. The term "symbolic interaction,"
as defined by Herbert Blumer, refers to the peculiar and
notable character of interaction as it happens between
human beings (1962, pp. 179-192). Peculiar in the fact
that this interaction is mediated by a process of inter-
pretation (self-indication) and definitions as people
move from one situation to another. This process of
interpretation should not be cast aside as esoteric or
swallowed up in psychological categories. Blumer des-

cribes it as a dynamic process "in which the individual

notes things, assesses them, gives them meaning, and
decides to act on the basis of the meaning" (1962, p. 142).
It is to influence the individual to action. Blumer says
that
Environmental pressures, external stimuli, organic
drives, wishes, attitudes, feelings, ideas, and the
like do not cover or explain the process of self-
indication. The process of self-indication stands
over against them in that the individual points out
to himself and interprets the appearance or expres-
sion of such things, noting a given social demand
that is made on him, recognizing a command, observ-
ing he is hungry, realizing that he wishes to buy
something. . . . By virtue of indicating such things
to himself, he places himself over against them and
is able to act back against them, accepting them,
rejecting them, or transferring them in accordance
with how he defines or interprets them (Ibid.,
Behavior in the symbolic tradition, then, is not under-
stood by simply turning to the environment, attitudes, or
other stimuli, but arises instead from how people inter-
pret and define these conditions in the behavior they
construct.

The methodological implication (If this approach
is to catch the process of interpretation through which
actors construct their behavior. The process is not
understood by merely turning to conditions like sex, race,
attitudes, offense, or SES for explanation nor inferring
its nature from behavior itself. "To catch the process,
the student must take the role of the acting unit whose
behavior he is studying . . . the process has to be seen

from the standpoint of the acting unit" (Ibid., p. 145).

The valued marks of traditional scientism—-neutrality and
detachment--run a greater risk of distortion and subjectiv-
ism in learning about system linkages, participants, and
their interactions. Researchers who operate in this tradi-
tion run a greater risk of error than qualitative research-
ers either in the process of omitting the interpretation

in their research; subsuming it under other conditions

like sex, race, attitudes, offense, SES; inferring it from
the behavior itself; or filling in the process of inter-
pretation with their own surmises.

In a very similar way, Harold Garfinkel (1967), a
pioneer in the ethnomethodological approach, tells us to
"bracket" our own assumptions in research to study how
common sense is used in everyday life. He advises that we
suspend our belief in the existence of an external objec-
tive social world and learn to step outside of it in order
to reflect upon it and its construction. In this manner
the everyday world of common sense becomes topic for
examination.

Ethnomethodology refers not to a style of doing
research but rather to the methodology by which peOple make
sense out of the conditions in which they find themselves.
Scholars like Garfinkel (1967) and Douglas (1970) write

that the social world is not a reality sui generis. It

 

does not exist apart from its members' definitions of it.

Societal members make social reality in the course of

10

their everyday activities. The ethnomethodological task
is to study those processes by which members assemble
their social reality and social structure. From this per-
spective, "meaning" is always problematic for both the
members of society and for the researcher attempting to
understand it. Ethnomethodologists, symbolic interaction-
ists, and phenomenologists attempt ideally to "cleanse"
their minds of presuppositions before observing and des-
cribing the behavior of individuals in social situations.
No one can ever completely rid himself of presuppositions
and preconceived notions before entering the field, so the
issue is really one of a matter of degree. For instance,
throughout my academic studies I have been heavily influ-
enced by the social-psychological writings of Erving
Goffman (1961b) on "total institutions." His insight into
the formal and informal worlds of staff and inmates was a
source of ideas for the ways I collected and analyzed data
on staff-inmate interaction and communication and on the
inmates' sexual adjustment and violence at FCI Pleasanton.
Goffman's notions of the inmate underworld influenced my
thinking about inmate social systems in a much broader way
than those authors who write about prison subcultures.

In spite of this knowledge that I took with me to the
field (some ethnographers would call it "baggage"), I
claim I fairly observed, described, and explained inmate

and staff behavior.

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The literature has also been a source of precon—
ceived ideas about what to research in cocorrections. So
much of the literature on prison life points to negative
environmental conditions. The scant cocorrections litera-
ture made claim that cocorrections alters these negative
environmental conditions. Did it and if so how, were issues
I carried in to the field with me. From the beginning of
my fieldwork I raised issues like sexual adaptation,
violence, and communication. The staff and inmates at
Pleasanton were raising them to me. Bureau officials in
Washington, D.C., impressed upon me the concern in these
areas by legislative and administrative policy makers.
Could I address them and would I address them were ques-
tions they asked me. Hence, I began this research with a
sense of the salient issues that my supporters and infor-
rnants were raising to me prior to and during my fieldwork.
The choice of topics for discussions did not emerge in a
purely grounded or natural way as Glaser and Strauss
(1967) would have us think. What I observed, describe,
and explain have been influenced heavily by these sources.

To say, then, that we, as phenomenologists, should
"bracket" or "rid" ourselves of presuppositions or pre-
conceived notions would be to point out the degree to which
these presuppositions or preconceived notions have affected
our research. What I demonstrated here is that my choice

of tOpic, the method I choose to go about understanding

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that topic, a sense of the issues raised in the exist-
ing literature, a desire to appeal to a university and
agency audience, and a framework for the analysis of the
data were issues that I carried into my fieldwork that have
affected this research. Subsequent checks on validity
suggest that these pre-fieldwork experiences did not
radically alter my observations, descriptions, or explana-
tions of the facts at FCI Pleasanton.

As phenomenologists we share a common goal in
understanding the process of interpretation and the ways
in which people apply order to their lives. The phenomeno-
logical perspective uses symbolic interaction and ethno-
methodology to understand human behavior better. Their
application in this dissertation is central to the ways
women and men, staff and inmates, define, interpret, and
order their behavior, their lives, and their associations

in a cocorrectional institution.

Choosing Participant Observation
For the past five years I have been instructing
courses in social science research methodology. Through
my Masters program I had been trained in quantitative
approaches to research. In the spring of 1973 I enrolled
in an advanced research methods seminar at Northern
Illinois University. The course requirement was either

to analyze the July 1972 survey data gathered by the

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National Opinion Research Center at the University of
Chicago or the field notes that someone else collected on
a group of local male university students who grouped
together socially and called themselves the Power Ports.

I might have chosen the former had it not been for the
fact that I lived far enough away that I could not commute
as required for extra computer time. By forced choice,
then, I analyzed field notes and this was my first formal
introduction to qualitative methodology. I grew to appre-
ciate the contribution qualitative researchers give to
science. The feature I liked most then, and appreciate
even more now, is the commitment they make to data collec-
tion and analysis. Give the reality of human bias in
research, whatever the methodology, qualitative research-
ers collect data in ways that are more sensitive to
on-going phenomena being investigated. Unlike surveys and
experimental designs which are generally preconceived and
then taken to the group under study, techniques like
participant observation and unstructured interviewing are
more adaptable and fluid in the research process. The
notion of a "working hypothesis," that is, a process of
turning observations into hypotheses for verification,
modification, or deletion by checking with the group

under study, is a salient feature of this approach. How-
ever, the approach has met with resistance. Qualitative

researchers have been put on the defensive by quantitative

 

 

 

 

 

as

‘L

1

14

researchers. The two have split in often fiery competi-
tion. The latter, with their valued marks of scientism
such as separate and distinct research phases, politics,
economics, and deterministic attitudes to replicate the
prestige of the natural sciences, and the qualitative
researchers' insistence on their own criteria for assess-
ing the credibility of their approaches in generating and
verifying theory, has kept the two approaches regrettably
distinct.

The choice to use the qualitative approaches of
participant observation and unstructured interviewing as
the major data-collection methods for this dissertation
provides greater knowledge in the linkages between vari-
ables, and hence, in the subjects themselves and their
interactions. This means that the researcher must view a
culture in the same way that the people see it, not as
functions or experimental causes as would the quantita-
tive researcher. It also means that the qualitative
researcher sees people in the reality in which they pre-
sent themselves in daily experiences, not as abstractions
as would the quantitative researcher.

When I began my research I had no specific hypoth-
eses to test. In this sense, there were few inferences of
what was or was not relevant. The focus was to be on
cocorrections and to describe and explain what goes on in

a cocorrections institution. I entered the field with

"‘u
.
s"

 

 

15

an awareness of the official lines of justification for
cocorrections.
The correctional programs offered at the Pleasanton
Federal Youth Center are designed to provide an atmos-
phere for personal change in an environment that is
as close to "community normal" as possible. In order
to decrease the socially debilitating effects of a
traditional institutional setting, Pleasanton's sup-
portive milieu will stress the acceptance of personal
responsibility and positive interaction between staff
and residents. The process will utilize several
differential approaches in establishing programs for
the care and resocialization of offenders committed
to our custody. All available resources will be com-
bined to provide a total, cohesive program for resi-
dents in an effort to increase their social effective-
ness (Pleasanton Master Plan, February 1975).
GainingEntry to Pleasanton

A few of the major theoretic and conceptual issues
and problems encountered by researchers using qualitative
inethodology in their research that affected this study
included issues of access, sponsorship, establishing field
relations, field work roles, and the collection of data.
Each of these issues will now be discussed, noting the
adjustments made in this research as they affect issues of
reliability and validity.

Getting access to conduct my fieldwork at the FCI,
Pleasanton, was not a smooth nor expeditious set of events.
In January 1976 I wrote Norman Carlson, Director of the
Federal Bureau of Prisons, and Warden Walter Lumpkin, FCI,
Pleasanton, about my research in cocorrections. I asked

their approval to conduct my field work at the Pleasanton

16

Facility. In my letter I said, "Because of its relatively
small size, distribution of the sexes, residents' age,
proportion of residents to staff and geographical location,
the Center at Pleasanton is a unique facility." I asked
to enter Pleasanton as a resident (inmate) but not in any
disguised sense. I planned that all staff and inmates
would know my true identity as a researcher/doctoral stu-
dent from Michigan State University and my purpose for
being there. I also shared some personal history in my
letter as well as past and present work experience and
future goals. My letter was accompanied by a letter of
support from my dissertation advisor, Dr. Ralph Lewis.

A month later I received a phone call from Howard
Kitchener, Director of Research with the BOP. He shared
with me the Bureau's interest in my research project with
one exception--I could not enter Pleasanton as a resident
nor could I live in the institution. He told me the
Director had written "No" near that paragraph in my letter.
Otherwise, the facility would be open to me and I would
have the freedom to interact with staff and inmates. He
explained that the sense of the Director's recommendation
at this point is positive and it would be up to me to firm
up the arrangements with Warden Lumpkin and his staff. A
formal letter of BOP interest followed, suggesting I con-

tact Warden Lumpkin at Pleasanton. Within a week of

17

hearing from Washington I received a letter from Warden
Lumpkin. He wrote,
Although it is not possible to conduct research
here using the participant-observer method, this
need not eliminate Pleasanton as the site for
your study. I would be willing to consider a
research proposal utilizing an observer-oriented
data collection procedure or one employing a tra-
ditional experimental design.
He suggested I phone the institution's research analyst
for further information.

A week later I spoke with Helene Cavior, Program
Research Analyst at the FCI, Pleasanton. Her concerns
were threefold: first, what would I be studying sub-
stantively; second, what is my theoretical perspective;
and third, how would I support myself.

I addressed her concerns succinctly. First, given
my exposure to the scant amount of published material on
cocorrections, I mentioned research topics like inmate
sexual behavior, instructional milieu as it affects
inmate responsibility and staff-inmate interaction, coed
programming, dating, cultural-ethnic and sexual bonding
patterns, and issues of social control. Second, my
theoretical approach I told her would be phenomenology,
including symbolic interaction and ethnomethodology. I
claimed this theoretical perspective is central to the
concept of qualitative methodology. I explained I would

be interested in what inmates and staff say and do as a

product of how they interpret their world. And third,

18

I informed her that I was making application for an
Institution LEAA Fellowship to be administered through
the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State Univer-
sity that would support me and my wife, Evelyn. Helene
was aware of my prior conversation and correspondence
with the Central Office in Washington, D.C. She also
told me that since the Director hinted approval for the
project it would probably be approved by the Research
Committee at Pleasanton. She told me I would receive a
letter in a few weeks after the Research Committee met
and discussed my proposal.
Mid-March 1976 I received a letter from Pleasanton.
All of my prior conversations cultivated an expectation of
institution approval. I was stunned to read:
The Research Committee at Pleasanton has disapproved
your request to carry out your dissertation research
at this institution. Two factors contributed to
this decision. They felt that the design of the
study was not specific enough and in particular,
were concerned about the absence of identifiable
hypotheses. Secondly, they had reservations regard-
ing the amount of time you want to spend at the
institution and the potentially disruptive effects
on program Operation.
The letter was signed by Warden Lumpkin. .I shared my
disappointment with Dr. Ralph Lewis, who assured me that
we could, if necessary, develop specific hypotheses and
more clearly define and provide sound justification for

the time needed in the field. "It's odd," I remember

him telling me, "that the Central Office in Washington

 

 

I

L.‘

I

’L I

19

would recommend approval to the hosting institution and
its Research Committee and then receive this kind of
response." He suggested I wait.

Later that same day Howard Kitchener, Director
of Research with the Bureau of Prisons, phoned me at
home. He received a copy of the letter Pleasanton sent
me and asked me to wait patiently until he phoned
Pleasanton. He phoned me back shortly and apologized for
the letter. He explained that the thrust of the Direc-
tor's suggestion for approval of the project was not clear
to Pleasanton's Research Committee. He assured me that
the project iself was worthy and would add to the grow-
ing body of the literature on cocorrections. On the
politics of it all he told me I would have to establish
my own rapport and overcome whatever institutional road-
blocks were set up for me. I was on my own.

My final step in gaining access was to fly to the
Pleasanton FCI in California and meet with the Warden and
his staff. I phoned ahead for an appOintment, followed
it up with a letter, and phoned once again to confirm
the meeting and hotel accommodations. Still the meet-
ing was not held as planned. The day I arrived at
Pleasanton in April 1976 a defendant of considerable
notoriety had been temporarily moved to the Pleasanton
FCI. I conducted some preliminary field work on the

operations of the institution per that person's arrival

20

rather than become disappointed with the "catch what you
can" type of itinerary. Additional security measures
were implemented. Armed correctional officers patroled
the outside prison perimeter. I listened while inmates
complained about the tight security and the staff's pre-
occupation with that person's case.

The morning I was scheduled to leave Pleasanton,
I met briefly with Warden Lumpkin. We talked about my
doctoral program and what I expected to do at Pleasanton
and for how long. At the end, I presented him with a
letter I had composed that approved my research plans at
Pleasanton. I explained that I needed such a letter as
part of the supportive materials for a fellowship award.
He read the letter and turned to the Chief of Psychologi-
cal Services, who accompanied me, and asked, "Is this
okay?" .Affirmative. I left Pleasanton with formal site

approval and a taste of my field work.

A New Warden

 

Before I returned to Pleasanton in August 1976, I
knew Warden Lumpkin had transferred as Warden to the
Metropolitan Community Center (MCC) in San Diego. His
replacement was William (Bill) Garrison, a more conserva-
tive administrator than Warden Lumpkin according to staff

and inmates who knew and worked under both Wardens.

cult:

.. .34

21

This was Bill Garrison's first assignment as
Warden, coming to Pleasanton from the Central Office in
Washington, D.C., where he had been Correctional Manage-
ment Administrator. He had started with the Bureau about
14 years earlier as a correctional Officer.

My first day at Pleasanton, Helene escorted me to
Bill's office, where Bill and I talked for about 40 min-
utes. We discussed my doctoral studies, what I planned
to research at Pleasanton to which I responded "Cocor-
rections, in general," the length of time I would spend
in fieldwork (about seven months), prior research on
cocorrections, and what I would offer the Bureau in return
for granting me access. Without pause, he suggested I
give him something like the research done at the coed
FCI, Fort Worth, Texas. I assured him he would receive
copies of my final product.

Bill also covered a list of "don'ts" with me.

He told me if my presence became disruptive to the orderly
running of the institution, our relationship would be
terminated. He advised me against becoming a "social
champion" for the inmates. "The staff can take care of
the inmates' concerns," he said. "Regarding contraband,"
he continued, "the rule is simple. Take nothing in.

Take nothing out. See, isn't that simple?" I nodded

in agreement. "And don't take up staff's time." He

also requested I collaborate with the institution before

 
 
 

I

V!-

22

I publish my material. I reinforced his last concern,
adding, "That type of feedback is a key feature in my
methodology that brings about validity in what I do."
Bill also had a few more concerns about my methodology,
specifically my sources of data collection. "Don't
overfocus with a few inmates. Don't let a handful of
inmates color your perspectives. You'll have to sift
through talking with the same inmates."

During my next seven months at Pleasanton I would
observe and listen to staff and inmates as they compared
program and operation similarities and differences between
Wardens Garrison and Lumpkin. A few months under
Garrison's administration, inmate and staff perception of
Pleasanton changed. Bill came to Pleasanton only six
weeks before me and I had the advantage of systematically
observing the planning and implementation of new and modi-
fied prison policies. Whereas inmates used to comment,
"This place is a kiddy farm. It's so petty here it
reminds me of junior high school," and similarly staff who
would at first describe Pleasanton as "The Disneyland of
the North,” soon changed their perceptions about
Pleasanton. Over the next seven months, inmates became
increasingly angered over formal social control mechanisms
such as more restrictions and loss of movement. They
would complain to me, "This place is a real bitch now.

I: want out. It used to be so cool but now it's like any

23

other joint. I'd rather by at TI." Staff differed in
their attitudes toward the two Wardens. Some said, "We
used to give them everything they wanted and if we didn't
Walt would. You just can't take it back after you give
it all out. We had no power. He [Walt] was on their
side more than ours. It's different now. Bill's showing
direction and it's going to change even more." Some
staff, however, were not so pleased with the changes
coming about. They felt Pleasanton was moving away from
its mission. They interpreted operation and program
changes far more negatively than they ever admitted to
their supervisor. They vociferously challenged the
institution's policies on the level of implementation.
Observation suggests that their interpretation and beha-
vior added significance to inmates' interpretation and
behavior in light of the latter's increasing negative

attitude toward Pleasanton.

Meeting Inmates and Staff

 

My contact person at Pleasanton was the Program
Research Analyst. I am not certain why it was she, but
probably because the nature of both of our work was
research. This sponsorship caused staff and inmates to
ask if I worked for the Research office at Pleasanton.
My answer was always "No. I am from Michigan State

University doing research for my degree." I elected to

24

be introduced to various department heads for my first
two half days in the field. She presented me as a crimi-
nal justice graduate student from Michigan State Univer-
sity doing research on cocorrections. Sometimes she
would add, ". . . he's been approved by the Bureau," and
I would notice a bit of heightened reception from the
person to whom I was being introduced. Her sponsorship,
I learned, important as it was in establishing a network
of staff contacts, had its limitations for me in estab—
lishing relations with inmates. Inmates would approach
and ask, "Do you go back and report to the Warden?"
I would explain that the Bureau was kind enough to give
me access to Pleasanton for my research, and other than
that I was on my own, reporting only to my faculty back
at the university. Some would then get excited, pat me
on the shoulder and say, "All right, you're on our side!"
My role as a criminal justice graduate student
from MSU doing research on cocorrections was not clear
to everybody at Pleasanton in spite of my or others'
efforts at explaining my presence there. Because I
was approved by the Bureau, some staff and inmates
thought I might be from the Central Office in Washington,
D.C. If they hinted at that association I would explain
inoffensively that I worked at Michigan State University,
teaching and taking courses in criminal justice, and not

with the Bureau of Prisons. I knew I didn't convince

in

.-

.~.~

25

them all. For instance, one evening, after three months
in the field, while watching TV in one of the men's
living units I overheard one inmate lean and loudly
whisper to another inmate, "Watch what you say. The
researcher from the Bureau is behind us." The inmate who
warned the other had been present on several occasions
when I was introduced to other inmates and staff but
never to him directly. I also sat in on his parole hear-
ing and the parole examiner introduced me as a student
from Michigan State and asked if he had any objections

to my sitting in on his hearing. Still he chose to asso-
ciate me with the Bureau and not the university. Through-
out my fieldwork he overtly ignored me and perhaps
because he seemed to be "an organizer" in his counselor's
estimation, no doubt he influenced what other inmates
also thought about me.

There were other techniques I used to make staff
and inmate contact. I supported the idea that a memo be
sent from the Warden announcing my identity, university
affiliation, and my research interest in cocorrections.

The memo included my picture. It read:

26

To: All Department Heads
From: William L. Garrison, Warden
Subject: John Ortiz Smykla

Mr. Smykla, a graduate student in Criminal
Justice, Michigan State University, will be
conducting research into various aspects of
cocorrections at Pleasanton between now
and February 1977. Please extend him the
usual courtesies.

 

PHOTOGRAPH

 

 

 

In addition to department heads, the memo was posted in
the staff lounge, control room, and the glass house
(known as the glass house because of its walled glass
structure, this building is the entry into Pleasanton).
The memo also showed up on unit bulletin boards and the
business office bulletin board. "Yea, I saw your pic—
ture," was always a warmer introductory cue than "Who
are you?"

The most common strategy I employed in developing
staff and inmate contacts was to be direct without being
offensive, to introduce myself to inmates and staff.
This is not a strategy I employed just for this research
but is part of my way of living and meeting people. I
am a direct type of person who will often make the first
introduction with a stranger. This method got me started

and put me at ease with a growing number of familiar

27

faces and names at Pleasanton. From then on, establish-
ing relations was easy-~a combination of the direct
approach and inmate and staff sponsorship.

Within a month my field notes suggested that I
'was known to most of the peOple at Pleasanton. I felt
I had an easy time making contacts quickly. I became
known as "John the research guy" or "the writin' man"
because of my constant note-taking. Inmates and staff
began to include me in their activities without my ask-
ing. And, if I was absent from Pleasanton for a few
days, they questioned me on my whereabouts, joking that
they were going to write my teachers back at Michigan

State and tell them that I was playing hookey.

Becoming a Participant Observer

The skill in becoming a participant Observer cor-
responds with the everyday rules about inoffensive social
interaction (Bogdan and Taylor, 1975, Chapter 3). Entry
into the field is passive. You come on slowly and learn
to meddle inoffensively. I learned to expose myself to
inmates and staff in order for them to meet me, trust
me, and feel at ease in my presence. I started my field-
work by joining women and men, inmates and staff, on
their jobs. We would talk about the weather, my research,
motorcycles, camping, California, drugs, other prisons,

with whom they worked, their supervisor, the details of

28

their work, job satisfaction, and with inmates I tried
to uncover their feelings relating their institutional
work to their outside work. On other occasions I just
"hung around" with inmates or staff, doing whatever they
were doing. Sometimes it meant just passing the day

and experiencing their boredom and repetitive activities.
On more structured occasions inmates would invite me to
attend their remedial, college, and vocational classes
with them. I would, like they, sit and listen and enter
in on class discussion. I assisted some inmates in
reading and writing assignments and tutored others in
math and sociology. With their permission I sat it on
their classifications, their 90-day reviews, their study
and observation sessions, their parole board hearings,
and their unit disciplinary hearings. With some I
observed the intake process to Pleasanton and joyfully
with others I experienced their "merry-go-round” (obtain—
ing signatures and checking out the day prior to release)
and discharge process. I accepted their invitations to
attend Teen Challenge and Seven Step Meetings. I ate
their food and let them treat me to tea, avocadoes, and
health foods in their rooms. We went to their movies
together and I cheered for them in basketball, baseball,
and football. With some I played tennis and with others
I played pool and ping-pong. Evelyn and I honored their

invitations to attend their dances, their discos, their

 

I}.

nut

 

29

talent shows, and their pizza parties. With others I
was an only friend. To some I gave lay advice on legal
matters. I walked the compound and "spinned the 100p"
hundreds of times, talking about whatever came naturally.
I entered in on serious political, educational, moral,
and corrections debates with inmates. I sat in their
rooms and comforted some with problems. I made many
laugh and probably a few cry. I sat with them in crafts
and passed away several evenings. I helped them move
furniture in their rooms and complimented them on their
appearance. On visiting day I was proud to be intro-
duced to some of their family, friends, and spouses. On
other occasions I wondered about their marital relation-
ship with their spouse on the outside when I observed
them dating inmates inside. With some I just sat in
detention and segregation providing them company. In
the units I watched their TV, listened to their music,
played cards, stayed late, and arrived early. I shared
joy in their rewards like furloughs, restored good time,
parole, transfer, babies, and new friends. I shared the
pain with the decision of no parole, or an unwanted
transfer, or a friend's shot (disciplinary report), or
leaving. They took me in to their confidence and I
learned about prison sex, drugs, escapes, fights, and
contraband. They clued me in on playing prison games

with staff and proved to me that it sometimes works. As

30

I became more involved with inmates, however, I learned
that some of the staff were becoming suspicious of me.
Was I bringing in contraband? I learned from all levels
of staff in conversation that suspicions and hunches are
important in prison work. "You never know when they may
turn in to the real thing," the Captain once told a group
of us during our institution familiarization week. I
grew to feel the suspicions as inmates and their rooms
were routinely or on a hunch shaken down for contraband.
I observed first hand and heard about other accounts of
staff-on-staff investigations for suspicious behavior.

In this environment it was difficult for me to take the
role of the acting unit as Herbert Blumer (1969) suggests
in catching the interpretive process. However, by under-
standing the interpretive process of some staff who
thought in this regard, I was able to use that knowledge
and overtly avoid transgressing those limits in their
presence. I, too, learned how to play prison games.

My involvement with most staff was limited to my
contact with them in their work and at Happy Hour on
payday drinking beer. I did develop a few close friend-
ships with staff but I never escaped the guilt feelings
that other ethnographers have felt when, acting as a
"friend," I found myself "doing research."

I had countless opportunities to talk with staff

on their jobs. Some of these conversations were casual

31

and others were guided by either them or me. I would
‘walk the compound with the yard officer, one of the less
desirable of the correctional posts because of the

square mile of constant walking and surveillance involved
under all weather conditions. I would walk and chat with
the unit officers as they performed their unit duties
such as looking for inmates to deliver a message, answer-
ing the telephone, searching for counselors and unit
.managers and other nearby staff, and supervising inmates
in unit housekeeping duties. The unit officer was
expected to encourage responsibility and develop sound
work habits. Not all inmates, however, accepted this
correctional goal for themselves. And therein, between
the two, problems developed.

No staff person ever refused me conversation,
although some behaviors like quick replies, disapproving
head shakes, and turned—away bodies seemed to reveal their
unwanted feelings about my presence. In these situations
I never pushed my role but would find reason to go else-
where. In the end, several of them came around to me "to
be included in the research." "What are you finding
out?" "Where have you been hiding out? I've been look-
ing for you." "You've been here long enough now to
probably know that. . . ." Or, "Maybe we should get
together before you leave," they would offer. When we

did sit down to talk, their revelations did not appear

32

much different than the data I already knew. That it
provided a good check on my reliability and validity,
though, was useful. What they did tell me was shared

by other staff with like social conditions such as length
of the time with the Bureau, current rank, sex, and
department. I still heard about "The problemwwith these
kids is they just don't want to work [referring to both
inmates and staff]. . . ," or they told me about young
officers who turn corrupt, or the pushy college graduates
who want to get promoted without first putting in their
time, or the female staff who "couldn't handle the men"
if a riot ever broke out, and about the inexperienced
administrators who give inmates too much, or the reasons
for the low staff morale and a shared feeling of "how it
used to be" in corrections.

I managed to collect staff data in other ways. I
attended unit and departmental staff meetings as an
observer with their permission. I was a regular at the
Warden's monthly staff meeting to which some department
heads, it was told to me, questioned my presence there and
by whose authority. I sat in on unit discipline commit—
tees with staff and inmates' permission and observed
staff relate with inmates, inmates relate with staff,
and staff relate with staff in the decision-making pro—
cess. I lunched and spent breaktime with staff. I

walked repetitively the miles spent surveilling the

33

internal and external compound. I rode over 50 miles
on the mile perimeter patrol with staff and learned more
about inmates and other staff.

Staff also saw my role in a consulting, profes—
sional way. I was asked to give feedback regarding the
"goings-on" in their units or departments. Correctional
officers would ask me about research in prison and cocor-
rections work. One ethnic college-graduate corrections
officer believed my research plans and strategies were
so unique and would be of such benefit to the Bureau in
the end that he offered to become one of my consultants
and was instrumental in keeping me up on what happened
in my absence and provided me with as much data and
detail as I cared to know. With his sponsorship I met
other like staff and few similar ethnic inmates who
identified themselves with their ethnic staff, and I
enlarged my pool of informants.

I was also fortunate to participate in a Bureau
task group to examine the role of the correctional
counselor and the issues that surround that role. I
was not asked to be in the group, but after I saw a copy
of the project on a counselor's desk I recognized the
timeliness of it for my research and received the
Warden's approval to participate with a few other staff
he chose to review and comment on the document. In the

group I tried to speak with moderation, noting that my

34

silence in an observer role only made the task force
group uncomfortable. Beyond appendages like "That's a
good point," or "Yes, I've been thinking about that
myself." They would say to me, "You're a neutral observer,
what do you think?" and I would pull in all the preceding
points of thought and find credit in them all. I hoped
not to change the focus of the work group or affect their
perceptions of the counselor's role at Pleasanton with
my observation data. I sometimes felt they wondered why
I did not offer any great insight. They seemed to expect
clarification or something substantive from me because of
my role. They would turn to me and ask, "What do you
think?" I explained to two members of the group that I
saw my role as an observer not as a participant, and one
of the two turned to me and chastised me with, "But it's
important enough to use your help." I think that I
remained general and noncommittal affected their percep-
tions of me as uninvolved, unwilling, and maybe even
unacquainted with the issues.

Perhaps I learned the most about the staff at
Pleasanton as "working units" within one institution with
problems, jealousies, rumors, expectations, disappoint-
ments, and feelings of being "in prison" during my period
of semi-structured staff interviewing. During the 1976
Christmas season, I left the field to spend a few days

with friends and relatives. I was able to pull away from

35

the data and think about some of the recurring themes
and those which were not so recurring. I asked myself
basic sociological and anthropological questions about
groups, members, characteristics, norms, controls, sanc-
tions, rewards, values, etc. The biggest void I noted
in my data was from staff. I returned with a plan to
interview staff on issues related to their role func-
tions, job satisfactions, attitudes concerning cocorrec-
tions and management problems, and their feeling for the
environment at Pleasanton.

I obtained a list of employees from Personnel and
guided by what Glaser and Strauss (1967, Chapter 3) call
"theoretical sampling," whereby the researcher stOps
sampling when no additional data are being uncovered
to develop properties of the category, I built my sample.
I did, however, intentionally select all department heads
save one, who regularly attended the Warden's monthly
conference meeting as part of my sample. I enVisioned
about 50 to 60 staff interviews that I would probably
have to complete in order to saturate the multiplicity of
work groups at Pleasanton. All staff I approached granted
me interviews, except one. However, toward the end of
my fieldwork he hinted at the interview so I asked him
again and he consented.

Interviews were conducted with staff on their

jobs, walking the compound, sitting in the units, during

36

lunch, or in their offices. I came to the interviews
with key phrases of the issues I wished to cover on a

3 by 5 index card. Interviews lasted anywhere from

40 minutes to over four hours, with about one and a half
hours an average. I prefaced each interview saying it
would give me a chance to know about the backgrounds of
the staff, allow me to check my ideas with them, and
hopefully offer me new ideas and insights. I promised
each staff person total anonymity, to which most of them
responded, "That's okay. I don't care." With their per-
mission, explaining that it was an easier method than
recall, I kept notes during the interview. If they
started to talk about something that they wished I
didn't record, I stopped writing but remembered to note
it later for future reference. In the last part of the
interview I asked staff to react to a series of agree/
disagree statements concerning the environment at
Pleasanton. The 18 statements were similar to the ques-
tionnaire items I was asking inmates. With these data

I intended to compare inmate and staff responses to the
social environment at Pleasanton at a later date beyond

the scope of this dissertation.

CollectingrData
My method of data collection employed seven major

approaches.

37

1. Observation. Observation was my primary tech—
nique. I tried to stay alert at all times, trying to
learn something about cocorrections and life at Pleasanton.
I seized whatever opportunities came my way as leads on
subjects in which I had interest.

2. Attendance at Inmate and Staff Meetings,
Gatherings, and Public and Private Places. I attended
as many staff and inmate meetings as I knew about and
could get access to, mostly as an observant spectator.

I walked the compound frequently and accepted invitations
to talk and party in inmates' rooms.

3. Informal Interviewing of Inmates and Staff.
Most of my interviewing with inmates was informal and
semi- to nonstructured. And, to the extent that I
observed at Pleasanton daily for seven months, many of
my interactions with staff were also informal. I also
had the opportunity to talk informally with inmates'
families and friends and staff's families.

4. Formal Interviewing of Staff. I formally
interviewed almost one-half of the staff (about 60 out
of 130), including the Warden, Associate Wardens, Warden's
secretary, all but one department head, most assistant
department heads, and a selection of department employees.
I also talked with volunteers in informal ways.

5. Use of Informants. About a dozen of the

inmates and staff became close informants besides

.—

38

respondents. They kept me up to date on Pleasanton
activities with which they were most familiar and offered
insight, opinions, and leads on matters of general and
specific interest to me.

6. Inmate Questionnaires. I distributed to over
half the inmate population a questionnaire designed to
tap some dimensions of the social environment at Pleasan-
ton in which I was most interested.

7. Use of Pleasanton's Facilities. I ate in the
inmate and staff cafeteria and used its recreation,
education, and leisure facilities. ‘This afforded me the
opportunity to observe inmates and staff's behavior as
actors in the environment.

The data that I collected from most of these
methods were written down in field notes. Excluding
staff interviews, which alone filled seven 5 by 7 note—
pads, I collected 1,500 pages of typed, double-spaced
field notes. Luckily, my fellowship allowed me to rent
dictating, transcribing, and typing equipment, which
made the copious and laborious job of writing field
notes an easier task. I would use the 30-minute drive
home from Pleasanton to start dictating my field notes
and Evelyn, my wife, would transcribe and type them while
I was at the prison.

Until I had established myself at Pleasanton I

did not write field notes with staff or inmates around.

39

If I needed to jot down a few ideas or a quote, I would
go to the men's room and sit in a stall or find someplace
alone. In prison, those places are few or locked. After
the first month, however, I was active in jotting field
notes and ideas as I crossed the compound or in conver-
sation with inmates and staff. Soon inmates and staff
would perceive me as a constant writer, and this picture
of me caused them to call to me from across the compound,
"Hey writin' man, whatcha doin'?" Or they would approach
me and look in my shirt pocket to see if I was carrying
my pocket recorder, notebook, and pencil. If they didn't
see them there, they asked where they were. I soon
learned that some of the staff's inquiry was not so
casual as I first thought. A few staff hinted at my
recorder and once at my camera as sources of carrying
contraband into the institution. I recall one evening
around 10 p.m., the lieutenant and yard officer came to
Unit 3 to unlock the unit doors for my exit. That par-
ticular evening I was trying some group interviewing with
my conference microphone, which I had carried into the
institution earlier that day. Outside the Unit, I
remembered leaving the microphone in one of the inmates'
rooms, and asked the lieutenant to go back for it. I
came back carrying it in my hand, and I caught the lieu-
tenant staring at the small leather case in which I

carried the microphone. His stare made me consider his

40

suspicion about contraband, and I wanted his unspoken
doubt cleared. When he asked me how my research was going
as we walked toward the glass house, I replied, "Fine.
Doing some group interviewing now; that's why I need this
(holding up the recorder)." Ikeshowed his suspicion by
asking, "Anything else in there?" "Here. Care to look?"
I offered, holding out the microphone case. "No, you're
too willing," he smirked.

Besides taking field notes, I developed more under-
standing of Pleasanton's programs and operations by
"shadowing" a few key staff members. I asked one of the
Associate Wardens and two unit managers if I could follow
them through their daily rounds of activity. For about
one week with each, I started and ended my fieldwork. I
learned about their personal lives, their Bureau careers,
and their attitudes about cocorrections. In front of
me, I encouraged them to think aloud so that I could sense
what was going on in their minds. Seeing me shadow a few
staff, other staff began to ask when I would be "calling
on them.” One was quite insistent I shadow him (a term
one staff member coined for this phase of my research),
giving me his dates of availability. I considered his
request, and to make him feel included, I planned to
shadow him for a few days. But about that same time I
had retreated from the field for a few days to take stock

of my fieldwork and I judged "shadowing" too time

41

consuming for the product received. I moved instead to
the semi-structured staff interviews. However, the indi-
vidual I did not shadow told me he was disappointed that
I would not get to know another part of the "key staff."

Without knowing that I would be using the social
environment of Pleasanton as the framework for the presen-
tation and analysis of my data, I distributed to inmates
a self-abridged version of Rudolf H. Moss' Correctional
Institutions Environment Scale (CIES), a forced-choice
(true/false) instrument designed to tap nine dimensions
of the social environment in a correctional institution.
At that time, I was only using the questionnaire to vali-
date some of my hypotheses about the institution's envi-
ronment and generate some new ideas. Deciding later,
however, to view phenomenologically the social environ-
ment of Pleasanton as the subject of this dissertation,
these questionnaires became subsequent sources of com-
parison with my observations.

Other data were collected in institutional docu-
ments and prisoners' artifacts. Policy statements, memos,
inmate payrolls, handbooks, population trends, space
study projections, the BOP Director's transition paper
to Attorney General Bell, position descriptions, organi-
zational charts, and commissary lists, together with
inmates' letters and poetry, shed more understanding in

describing and explaining the social climate at Pleasanton.

 

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42

The SOOial Environment Framework

The purpose of this dissertation is to view phe-
nomenologically the social environment of the coed
prison at Pleasanton in reference to the dimensions of
female—male inmate interaction, inmate sexual behavior,
tension and violence, and formal and informal mechanisms
of social control. The environment, to be sure, can be
viewed from other indicants as well. As Weber (1947)
suggests, there is almost an unlimited number of ways
that social phenomena can be described. The ones I have
chosen were some of the dominant themes while I was at
Pleasanton, and have the added advantage of being some
of the more salient issues surrounding cocorrections of
interest to legislative and administrative policy makers.
Further, choosing the environment and organizing the data
around female-male inmate interaction, inmate sexual
behavior, tension and violence, and formal and informal
mechanisms of social control are ways the inmates and
staff might organize the data itself.

Still a further advantage of the environment frame-
work organized around indicants commonly recognized as
salient features in prison research and by legislative
and administrative policy makers is that it lends itself
to comparison with other cocorrections and traditional

prison models.

 

uni

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It!

 

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III
I

43

The attempt here is not to describe any coed prison
other than the one at Pleasanton. To what extent this
description and explanation are applicable to coed prisons
elsewhere is a matter for further research. I do not sug—
gest that this prison is so unique with its problems,
staff, and inmate population that it lacks transfer—
ability. 0n the contrary, the weight of the data sug-
gests comparisons with other coed and noncoed prison
models. Hopefully, other researchers will find merit in
some of the analysis offered here and test it elsewhere
for its validity and range of applicability.

The idea to write a phenomenological analysis of
the social environment in a coed prison was dictated by
my choice of the phenomenological perspective from the
outset. Reading my field notes, so much of what I
learned from inmates and staff was directed to the social
environment at Pleasanton, both positive and negative.
0n the positive side, staff were telling me that Pleasan-
ton is "a mellow place to work." Inmates are young and
nonaggressive; they're not too criminal; the institution
is coed; it's an open institution; it's colorful, bright,
and clean; inmates have private rooms and wear their own
clothes; inmates aren't cohesive and don't join cliques;
staff authority and power are not threatened; there are
few escapes; there's not too much inmate assaultive

behavior; other staff are young and have more education

44

than at other federal prisons; staff and inmates are
involved in Pleasanton's programs and Operations; they
help one another; they say what's on their minds; "all
in all, it's just a mellow place to work."

Other staff were negative about the environment.
They complained about the older and more criminally
sophisticated inmates coming to Pleasanton. They sensed
a lack of inmate involvement. They saw problems with the
coed concept. They saw problems with overcrowding and
double bunking. They observed inmate power groups and
racial tensions. They saw injustice in having prison
abortions and prison babies.2 They complained about a
lack of inmate respect. They complained about staff
discrimination in writing inmate discipline reports
(called "shots"). They opposed overuse and misuse of the
institution's segregation and detention facilities. They
felt a lack of consistency and pride in their work. They
saw and felt themselves like "cops."

Inmates were just as ambivalent about their feel-
ings concerning the environment. Because Pleasanton is
coed and new, at first it seems like an easy place to
do time. But inmates soon complained that work was boring,
meaningless, and repetitive. They felt their spontaneity
was stifled and their creativity criticized. Unit spirit
seemed fractured. Inmates cared little about other

inmates and even less about staff. Inmates expressed

45

what staff wanted to hear. Inmate autonomy was encour-
aged if it "seemed appropriate." Inmates felt a lack of
job skills. They discussed their problems, for the most
part, more with correctional officers rather than with
their counselors. Female dependency was accepted as a
fact of life and staff did little to effect change.
Inmates felt staff condemned heterosexual relations but
ignored homosexual relationships. Inmates told me
Pleasanton was like their junior high school days.
"Staff have all these petty rules about work, sex, edu-
cation, and becoming a productive citizen. They treat
us like kids."

Other inmates, however, felt differently about
Pleasanton. For them, Pleasanton offered many advan-
tages. The programs gave them time to think. They felt
a young staff ready to help. They saw a small, coed,
modern prison. They felt no threat of a shank (knife)
in the back. They found time to write and read. Women
found it easy to get "the pill." Medical, dental, and
mental care was provided free of charge. Food was good
and abundant. Other inmates didn't force anything on
them if they didn't want it. Recreation was good.
Visiting was informal and often. Access to telephones
was nearly unlimited. Dating was fun. They told me

they looked at themselves and decided to change.

46

Back in the early seventies, when the Bureau was
just talking about it, the social environment of Pleasan-
ton was conceived as a break with the past. The facility
was first intended to:

1. place the emphasis of correctional programming
on the young and the first offenders where
opportunities for effecting change seemed best.

2. reduce the overcrowding in existing institu-
tions. I

3. provide smaller institutions with environments
designed to facilitate correctional programs
and meet human needs for privacy and dignity.

4. replace the most antiquated institutions in
the system.

The mission was to create a new kind of social environ-
ment with a small, coed, young population in a modern
facility. That this dissertation should describe and
explain that social environment, then, is most logical.
To view it phenomenologically is to understand it from
the perspective of those it most affects: its inmates
and staff.

Almost by intuition, everyone agrees that the
social environment has an impact on the peOple function-
ing in it; and conversely, that the people functioning in
it affect the social environment. Families, clubs,

churches, armies, classrooms, laboratories, political

47

conventions, mental hospitals, and prisons all arrange
environmental conditions that they hope will maximize
conformity and minimize deviancy. Many scholars have
described social environments in great detail and
reached conclusions regarding the importance of the set-
ting in influencing individual behavior. Several
authors (for example, Moos, 1975) have written about the
"personality" of an environment, but I consider that bad
animism and do not subscribe to that school of thought.
I do believe that an atmosphere is created within which
inmates and staff work and spend part or all of their
lives, but I do not believe that this atmosphere takes on
attributes of conscious life as some writers suggest.
Socio—anthropological accounts have been written
of college and university environments (Riesman and
Jencks, 1962; Bushnell, 1962; Rare and Stern, 1958; and
Hughes, Becker and Geer, 1962); work environments
(Litwin and Stringer, 1968); mental institutions (Green-
berg, 1964; Kesey, 1962; and Goffman, 1961); correctional
facilities (Cressey, 1965; Clemmer, 1940; Giallombardo,
1966; and Moss, 1975); and prison camps (Solzhenistyn,
1963). The relationships in these studies between
human environment and human functioning vary, but they
all agree that the social environment within which an
individual Operates may have a significant impact on

his/her attitudes, moods, health, behavior, overall sense

48

of well being and the social, personal, and intellectual
development. Moos (1975, p. 10) tells us, "The systematic
assessment of social environments is important precisely
because people do vary their behavior in accordance with
the characteristics of their social and physical setting."

The environment at Pleasanton is striking. It
contrasts sharply with lay views of how prisons are
programmed and operated. Still, it is a "total institu—
tion" in Goffman's terms. In it, inmates are regimented,
surrounded by other inmates, and unable to leave the
premises. As with Goffman's research, the most important
factor in forming a prisoner is the institution, not the
offense, and that the responses and adaptations are simi-
lar to those of inmates in other types of total institu-
tions.

The most obvious feature of FCI, Pleasanton, is
its sexually integrated inmate population. Women and men
stroll the compound arm-in-arm and hand-in-hand. 0n the
walk or off in the grass they will embrace, kiss, touch
genitals, and interweave their arms, legs, and heads.
Some will develop serious love affairs with one person,
others will "play the field," some just want to have mem-
bers of the other or same sex as friends, some say they
want nothing at all; however, most do.

Dating can be problematic at Pleasanton. The

small inmate population carries a powerful "grapevine,"

49

and friendships and love affairs are sometimes destroyed
or seriously affected. Dating and friendship rituals
become a part of the coed environment, and whether an
inmate subscribes to them or not, she/he is confronted
with them and is forced in a position to deal with them.

A second most often mentioned feature of the
Pleasanton environment is its lack of tension, violence,
and assaultive behavior prominent in other prisons,
especially compared with those that are not sexually
integrated. Inmates and staff agree that at Pleasanton,
unlike any other prison, you are not preoccupied with
physical survival. It is difficult to ascribe this con-
dition to some other condition, like cocorrections per se,
in light of the mix of other factors at Pleasanton.
Cocorrections may be most visible but there is also a
high staff-inmate ratio; a more youthful inmate popula-
tion with supposedly less propensity for violent beha-
vior; a sexually integrated staff; a more educated staff
than at most prisons; and a modern "open" institution.

In spite of an environment that appears nonviolent
and nonthreatening, Pleasanton is not the antithesis of
the negative environmental conditions that surround
prisons today. Pleasanton does have its share of inter-
and intra.— racial and sexual problems. Violent and assault-
ive behavior occurs and it seems to be increasing, evi-

denced by the increased use of segregation and detention

50

for these kinds of offenders. That the relationship is
spurious, a product of an emphasis on security brought on
by the new Warden or changes in methods of reporting, is
yet another possibility. Pleasanton's track record on
these issues is difficult to know. Where records exist,
observation suggests they reflect only a small prOportion
of the actual behavior. The system values individual
treatment and discretion at all levels of staff-inmate
contact. Similar or same kinds of inmate negative beha-
vior are likely to be handled differently, depending on
who handles it. This ideology, however, raises other
issues such as staff control and inmates' feelings of an
unjust system in the face of observable differential
modes of individualized treatment.

A base for comparing the nature and rate of vio-
lence and tension between coed and noncoed prisons could
be developed but befOre that is attempted the coed inmate
world as it existed at Pleasanton with its own percep—
tions and definitions of violence and tension needs
examining so as not to compare grapefruits with grape—
nuts.

A third feature of the Pleasanton environment that
occupies a lot of staff and inmate conversation is inmate
sexual behavior. Where social norms support heterosexual
relationships, it becomes difficult, from an administra-

tive control standpoint, to keep women and men from

51

engaging in sex. Heterosexual and homosexual relations
at Pleasanton are proscribed. Policy exists which warns
inmates of the seriousness and consequences of being
caught "in a compromising situation." Inmates are gen-
erally aware of the policy, but more importantly, they
recognize some staff's discontent with the policy and

are more likely to risk homosexual and heterosexual
activity with those staff around. The official reporting
of sexual activity at Pleasanton is not what observation
suggests. This author finds substantially more unreported
than reported sexual activity, in spite of the institu-
tion's effort to decrease sexual activity by decreasing
conditions favorable for sexual relations to occur.

Any prison ethnography would not be complete with-
out discussion of the formal and informal mechanisms of
social control in the prison designed to maximize con—
formity and minimize deviant behavior. Some of the most
obvious in this regard are the institution's staff and
its policies. Pleasanton's staff, being sexually inte-
grated, is as unique as its population. Female and male
staff are co-workers in all line functions, including
supervision in other-sex living units. Staff's relations

with inmates become sine qga non in the institution's

 

mission to provide for the custody, care, and corrections

of its inmates.

CHAPTER II

WOMEN'S PRISONS, MEN'S PRISONS,
AND COED PRISONS

Cocorrections History
In the mid-seventeenth century, Philadelphia's

Walnut Street Jail--considered to be America's first
prison--mixed women, men, children, the aged, the mentally
ill, the vicious, and the sick together in the same large
prison cells. There was no sexual differentiation and
prisoners lived, ate, and slept amidst unhealthy condi-
tions. Because of its mixed inmate population, it is
known as the ”congregate system." Reporting on prison
conditions in the eighteenth century, Gray writes:

It is represented as a scene of promiscuous and

unrestricted intercourse, universal riot and

debauchery. There was no labor, no separation

of those accused, but yet untried, nor even of

those confined for debt only, from convicts sen-

tenced for the foulest crimes; no separation of

color, age, or sex, by day or by night. . .

(Gray, 1947, pp. 15-16).

Believing that the criminal's freedom should be

further deprived, the Pennsylvania Quakers began the
separate and silent prison system. Women were not only

separated from men, but also from each other. Each

inmate had her/his own cell to maximize penitence.

52

53

Cressey reports that "A legislative commission in 1824
investigated the institution (Auburn) and recommended that
the practice of solitary confinement be abandoned at once,
and this recommendation was followed" (1973, p. 122).

From these origins the Auburn system of ”congre-
gate but silent" came to be the accepted form. This
represented a compromise between the separate and congre-
gate systems, for it combined the presumed virtues of
solitary confinement during evening hours with the effi-
ciency of communal dining, working, and recreation.

The first separate prison for women, the Indiana
Women's Prison, opened in 1873. Female prison reformists
argued that women should be rehabilitated apart from men,
away from the corruption and chaos of the outside world
(Burkhardt, 1973). Among the reasons behind the develop-
ment of separate institutions for women were: sexual
exploitation of female prisoners by male guards and male
inmates; development of programs to foster independence
in women by giving them responsibility for maintaining
the Operation of their own institution; and to develop
career paths for female employees. By 1971, when the
coed federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, opened, there
were approximately 40 state institutions for female
offenders (American Correctional Association, 1971).

It is most obvious to ask what would be the result of

54

restoring the sexual mix of inmates that existed almost
a century ago?

After a century of sexually segregating prisoners,
female and male inmates are subject to differential treat-
ment, according to O'Connor (1975) and Arditi (1973),
for two reasons: First, differences in population sizes
mean gross differences in facilities for each sex. 'We
find, for example, more female than male facilities geo-
graphically remote, offering fewer institutional programs,
and grouping women together in one institution without
regard to security risks as is done with male inmates.
And second, sex-role stereotypes result in unequal treat-
ment given women and men prisoners. They find, for
instance, more female than male prisons display a home-
like atmosphere with private rooms and an emphasis on
decor. Women's prisons tend to be more commodious and
display less concern with security. Staff-inmate ratio
at female prisons is higher and more sexually integrated
than at male facilities. Women's prisons have fewer
recreational facilities and fewer recreational programs.
Educational, vocational, and industrial programs are
also fewer in number and variety in women's prisons.

Some have suggested that the idea to "go coed" was
to counter the negative environmental conditions that
existed in prison and/or smooth the running of male

institutions. We learn from the Bureau of Prisons second

55

conference on cocorrections held at the coed FCI at
Terminal Island, California, January 12-13, 1977, that
there was no conceptual framework for the design and
implementation of cocorrections. The push to cocorrec-
tions was based on the pragmatic needs of the Bureau.

It was noted that co-corrections had its beginning

in the Federal Prison System at Morgantown, not
because of a particular committment at that time

to the co-corrections concept but rather to increase
population at Morgantown, which had previously been
for young male inmates only. Some time later, after
a disturbance at Alderson, a group of difficult
female inmates was moved to Fort Worth, and thus
began the first co-correctional adult institution
(Cocorrections Conference Summary, January 26, 1977).

Most of the cocorrections history is well docu-
mented in a paper authored by Charles F. Campbell, one
of the precursors of cocorrections, coiner of the term
"cocorrections," and now retired Warden of the coed fed-
eral prison at Fort Worth, Texas.

It [Ft. Worth] was rushed into use with consider-
able haste after acquisition of the facilities from
HEW in October 1971.

A task force set up by the Director early in
1971 identified the needs upon which the mission
of the institution was based and roughed out ideas
for a program model developed around five or six
functional units. Otherwise, the task force had
its hands full in dealing with all sorts of adminis—
trative and logistical complications. Virtually all
of the detailed planning of FCI Fort Worth programs
was done in something of an improvisatory manner
after the institution opened.

. . . During the months preceding activation
of the facility in the Fall of 1971, we engaged in
long hours of cogitation about the problem of how
to manage men and women in the same institution.
There was nobody of knowledge to rely on. Thus we
knew we would need to proceed cautiously and learn

56

from trial and error. We made certain assumptions
about the type of behavior we would be prepared to
deal with, but I can think of only a few of these
assumptions that haven't proven to be wrong. The
assumption that a viable institutional program

could be developed for such a varied mix of offender
types, including men and women was one which has
proven to be right. This was an assumption the
Director of the Bureau of Prisons and his task force
had before I came on the scene in March of 1971.

We engaged in no systematic theorizing as to what
might be encountered in a cocorrectional experi-
ence. Instead, all we had was a shared conviction
that different kinds of things needed to be tried.
We had certain pragmatic needs; we had the prospect
of a new facility at our disposal, and we had some
good experience with innovations like the unit sys-
tem, the correctional counseling program, and work
and study release. Thus it was logical to view

Fort Worth as an opportunity to be seized.

. . Four months before FCI Fort Worth opened,
the first contingent of young women arrived at the
Kennedy Youth Center (Morgantown, West Virginia).

. . The advent of the coeds at Kennedy created
little public stir, perhaps because for many years
there had been a state training school for boys and
girls there. Kennedy's program was erroneously seen
as similar to these. The fact is that 18, 19, and
20 year olds are men and women, most especially
where their sexuality is concerned.

. Whether the country's first "coed prison"
was the Kennedy Youth Center at Morgantown, West
Virginia, the Federal Correctional Institution at
Fort Worth, Texas, or someplace else, let it be
said that the decision to launch cocorrections was
made by Norman Carlson, the Director of the Federal
Bureau of Prisons. He has given full support to the
experiment and has subsequently activated cocorrec-
tional programs at Lexington, Kentucky, and Pleasan-
ton, California.

. . The FCI experiment has undoubtedly served
to alleviate some of the concern over what might
happen in a "coed prison," but is it fair for us
to be asked, what are the advantages? What antici-
pated benefits justified such a controversial depar-
ture in the first place. I have already referred
to the pragmatic aspects of FCI Ft. Worth's begin-
nings. If a definitive rationale for cocorrections
existed prior to our being involved in it here, it
was never related to me. A conviction on the part

of the Director and some of his colleagues, includ-
ing me, that this among other innovations needed to
be tried, was what we were going on. Especially at
that time, early in 1971, there seemed to be a lot
of evidence around that what we were doing wasn't
working very well. We were acutely aware that the
confinement of offenders under conventional circum-
stances had an inescapably dehumanizing effect on
people, despite strong, well trained staff and a
heavy emphasis on helping programs. We were con-
vinced that isolation from the community was a major
contributor to the deleterious effects of confine—
ment and we had been talking determined about the
"normalization" of our institutions. For several
years we have moved not only toward deveIOping
better ties with the community, but also toward nor-
malizing prison settings by bringing volunteers and
even before this, by the use of female employees in
men's institutions. We had lived fretfully for many
years with the knowledge that situational and preda-
tory homosexuality in institutions was prevalent.
These factors, together with a pressing need for
more space for women offenders went in to the mak-
ing of the decision to have women and men at Ft.
Worth. I have come to feel strongly that men need
women and women need men, quite aside from their
sexual needs and desires. It has become obvious
that some of our women residents, who had never before
had a relationship with a man other than on the basis
of sexual exploitiveness, are now finding out what
it means to have a friend who is also a man. And
men residents are making similar discoveries about
women. Deprivation of this kind of relationship may
be one of the more destructive things about confine-
ment. Inability to have this kind of relationship
may be a contributing factor to behavior which

leads to confinement. But before we got underway

at FCI Ft. Worth, I don't think any of us could

have articulated this notion. In all candor, we
weren't sure what we were getting in to, but we
could hardly visualize its being worse than some
things we were already tolerating (Campbell,
unpublished paper, n.d.).

Today, criminal justice rhetoric for "going coed"
seems to mix the economics of scale with a few assump-
tions about a more fair and just treatment of inmates and

their prison environment. We advance it as being a

58

"more normal social environment” than same—sex prisons
and more economically feasible to handle against a back-
ground dominated by rising costs of separate—institution
operations and programs. The range of rationales behind
the planning and implementation of cocorrections reflects
divergent goals and sometimes under circumstances with
little planning. In spite of all this, however, coed
prisons are becoming popular and part of state and local
corrections agencies.
. . . Over a dozen states have either already
opened a coed correctional institution, or are at
the operational planning stage of opening one,
whether by opening the doors of a traditionally
single-sex institution to the opposite sex, or by
expropriating a facility previously used for non-
correctional purposes. Moreover, severalstatesand
other jurisdictions have a coed facility "on the
drawing boards”. . . (Issues Paper, February 4,
1977).
Associated with the advance of cocorrections is a commen-
tary on the failure of single-sex institutions. This
position was formally articulated at the national level
by the National Advisory Commission, Criminal Justice
Standards and Goals, which argued that coed institutions
have more program impact on reducing criminal behavior
than single-sex institutions.
Institutional programs that provide a single sex
social experience contribute to maladaptive behavior
in the institution and the community. In sexually
segregated facilities it is very difficult for
offenders, particularly juveniles and youth, to

develop positive, healthy relationships with the
opposite sex. A coeducational institution would

59

provide a more normal situation in which inmates
could evaluate their feelings about themselves and
others and establish their identity in a more posi-
tive way.

. . The correctional system should abandon
the current system of separate institutions based
on sex and develop a fully integrated system based
on all offenders' needs. The coeducational pro-
gram can be an invaluable tool for explaining and
dealing with social and emotional problems related
to identity conflicts that many offenders experi-
ence (National Advisory Commission, 1973, p. 179).

Review of Core Literature on Female and
Male Prisons and Prisoners: Some
Sggggstions for Cocorrections

Having identified the social environment as the
framework for the presentation and analysis of the data
on cocorrections, the focus here is to discuss similar
dimensions that are found in the social environment in
same-sex prisons, namely, inmate sexual behavior, tension
and violence, and formal and informal mechanisms of social
control.

The most widely cited research on the social envi-
ronment of male prisoners and prisons is by Sykes and
Messinger (1960). From data collected at a maximum,
all-male prison in New Jersey by Sykes (1958), the authors
develop an analytical scheme that describes the male
prisoner's social system, which will be shown to vary
considerably from the female prisoner's social system
described by Ward and Kassebaum (1965).

The male inmate social system, Sykes and Messinger

explain, is a code of conduct in response to prison social

60

conditions to which the population of prisoners must
respond or adapt itself. The chief tenets of the code
are: (1) don't interfere with inmate interests;

(2) don't lose your head; (3) don't exploit inmates;

(4) don't weaken (be tough; be a man); and (5) don't

be a sucker (treat guards with suspicion and distrust)
(1960, pp. 6-8). In light of the presumed validity of
the code, the authors and others who have studied male
prisoners have developed a typology of the patterns of
inmate behavior for conformity to, or deviation from,

the inmate code. The inmate who betrays a fellow prisoner
is labeled a £23 or sguealer. Prisoners who exhibit
aggressive behavior, who quarrel easily and fight without
cause are referred to as toughs. The prisoner who uses
violence as a means to gain ends is called a gorilla.

The inmate who exploits other inmates by manipulation

and trickery of goods and who sells or trades goods that
are in short supply is called a merchant or peddler.

The prisoner who is unable to withstand the rigors of

prison life is referred to as a weakling or weak sister.

 

The inmate who enters into a homosexual relationship is
termed a wolf or fag, depending on whether the role is
active or passive. And if the inmate becomes allied with

the prison administration, the inmate is a square John.

 

The inmate who most nearly fulfills the norms of the

society of prisoners is called the right guy. There are,

61

however, other authors (for instance, Becker and Geer,
1960; Ward and Kassebaum, 1965; and Giallambardo, 1966)
who argue that the social environment described by Sykes
and Messinger lacks transferability into the female
inmate world. They argue against explaining female
inmate behavior solely in terms of internal sources of
stress, and urge consideration of factors that predate
the prison experience. In her ethnographic study of the
female inmates at the Women's Reformatory at Occoquan,
District of Columbia, Heffernan (1972) notes that

". . . the key to understanding the [female] system at
Occoquan and other prison systems may well be the orien-
tation that typical offender types bring to their
imprisonment" (p. 17). All of these authors agree that
the inmate code is rooted in subcultural norms and per-
sonality characteristics developed in the outside commu-
nity. Becker and Geer (1960) use the term "latent
culture" to describe this process. ". . . [Latent cul-
ture] refer[s] to ideas and understandings which have
their origin and social support in a group other than
the one in which the members are now involved" (p. 306).
In prison, some of the adjustment problems faced by
inmates may be countered with norms and personality char-
acteristics carried in from the outside world. Contrary
to what Sykes and Messinger suggest, to explain inmate

behavior solely in terms of its being a response to the

62

pains and deprivations of imprisonment does not take into
account the fact that inmates are differentiated along
dimensions which are not related to prison life but which
are rooted in their lives outside prison. For example,
some prisoners are black and some are white, some are
female and some are male, and some are upper class and
some are lower class. Among the male prisoners, some

are married, others are single, some are fathers, and
others have no children. And with the women, some are
married and others are single, some are mothers and
others have no children.

Female and male inmates respond to the experience
of prison life not only because they are reacting to the
deprivations of imprisonment, but also because their
personalities differ and they have internalized, to
varying degrees, the values of criminal subcultures, of
prisoner codes, of the conventional society; and they
also react as women and men.

Gresham Sykes (1958, pp. 63-83) has delineated
the pains of imprisonment which male prisoners must bear.
Summarized briefly, these are: (1) deprivation of lib-
erty; (2) deprivation of goods and services; (3) depriva-
tion of heterosexual relationships; (4) deprivation of
autonomy; and (5) deprivation of security. In their
research on female inmates, Ward and Kassebaum (1965)

and Giallombardo (1966) tell us that all these deprivat ions

63

differentially apply to women in prison. Women are con—
fined in an institution which is not as harsh in appear-
ance or function as those for men, but their isolation
from family and friends and the outside world is just as
great. Material deprivations are somewhat less, but the
dispossession of the familial roles (sister, wife,
mother, daughter, grandmother, aunt) and separation from
family are more severe. Other research studies explain
this phenomenon, reporting that female offenders tend to
be submissive, complacent, lack self-respect, and mani-
fest a low self-concept (Washington Department of Social
and Health Services, 1971; and Park, 1963).

There is one sense, Ward and Kassebaum note
(1965, p. 14), in which imprisonment is harsher for more
mother prisoners than father prisoners. In their data
at the Frontera Prison for Women, 59% of the women had
minor children and 68% were mothers. The impact of
separation from children was considered most difficult
for an average of 40% of the women. They report that
this frustration did not appreciably lessen over time.
They suggest that whereas the male husband-father prisoner
finds comfort in the traditional values of wife-mother
caring for children while he serves his prison term, the
confined mother's concern at Frontera is not only with
the separation from her children but also with how they

will be cared for while the father works. Whereas the

64

father in prison presumes his wife will, despite econ-
omic hardship, continue to play her role as mother, the
mother in prison asks her husband to assume primary child-
care responsibility in addition to his employment outside
the home. For cocorrections one might wonder what

effect it will have on a prisoner's attitudes concerning

a spouse's ability for child care and outside employ-

ment simultaneously; and secondly, what effect will
cocorrections have in causing suspicion in the minds of
spouses and lovers on the outside.

After analyzing the data on the female prisoners'
reactions to the pains of imprisonment, Ward and Kassebaum
conclude that ". . . These maxims and norms [that is,
those of the male inmate code delineated by Sykes and
Messinger, 1960] are not as salient for women as they
are in prisons for men" (1968, p. 48). The female inmate
respondents at Frontera tended to see themselves as more
similar in outlook to the staff than to their sister
inmates whereas the opposite was noted by Sykes' research
on male inmates. Ward and Kessebaum note that ". . . The
inmates held views which can hardly be characterized as
bitter, cynical or those held by criminally mature or
con-wise persons” (1965, p. 50). This criminal immatu-
rity makes more understandable the widespread practices
of female inmates in switching and acting like staff.

Female inmates reveal more information than male inmates,

65

with less likelihood of feeling guilty over betraying

others. Ward and Kessebaum report:
While there is support of the inmate coed by right
guy types in the female prison community, our data
indicate that this "hero of the inmate social sys—
tem" is in the minority and does not, by any means,
represent the approved role model for the majority
of female prisoners. The fact that the women do
not endorse more strongly norms which characterize
male prisoner ideology and, in particular, that
they do not feel bound to maintain group solidarity
by no-ratting rules, thus has important implications
for inmate roles. The lack of importance attributed
to the ideals of inmate loyalty and solidarity means
that less importance is given to the right guy type
of role and at the same time less criticism is
directed toward stool pigeons and center men types
(1965, p. 53).

Other differences between female and male prison-
ers reported by Ward and Kassebaum include: (1) fewer
female prisoner merchants which may partially be
accounted for by the wide variety of goods and personal
belongings available to female inmates than to male
inmates and a lessened ability to organize illicit mer-
chandising of goods due to the greater number of female
than male inmate informers; (2) fewer female inmate
politicians due in part to more conversation between
female inmates and staff; (3) fewer women inmate toughs
or gorillas in the sense of employing physical force or
violence to get what they want. "In short, the only
roles similar to those of male prisoners which are preva-
lent among the women are the roles which deny support to

the inmate code--the snitch and the related center man

66

role type, and the square john or prosocial type of
prisoner" (1965, p. 54).

In terms, then, of the length and kind of involve-
ment in criminal activities in the free world, and the
latent roles and identities prisoners bring to prison
with them, we find (1) cultural expectations of female
and male roles diverging along orientation of life goals,
acceptability of public expressions of affection toward
members of the same sex and differential degrees of
passive and aggressive behavior; (2) differences in
female and male inmate social systems; and (3) differ-
ences in the nature of female and male inmate codes and
the allegiance women and men prisoners give to them.

For the field of cocorrections, then, it is legitimate
to ask how these differences will manifest themselves
once prisons become sexually integrated.

In summary, then, a review of the literature on
female and male prisoners and prisons suggests variations
in the degree of support of the prison social structure
and the inmate code. It has also been suggested that the
quality of prison life and inmate-staff relationships
between female and male prisoners and staff is based in
large part on sex-role differences. The values embedded
in prison research by Sykes (1958), Sykes and Messinger
(1960), Clemmer (1940), McCleery (1960), and Schrag

(1954) do not fit the women's prison because they are

c ..
a]:
k’. )
' C

n
.‘ A
‘II'.

Hm;

67

directed to features of imprisonment concerning the male
and his culturally prescribed role. Traditionally,

women in our society have not been taught to "play it

cool," "to be objective," "to take it like a man," "to
use force when provoked," "to fight for one's rights,"
or "to hustle." These codes have traditionally been part

of the male culture, reflecting male needs for status,
autonomy, independence, power, and prestige.3 A study
of cocorrections, then, must focus on sex-role differences
and the cultural expectations of female and male roles
that are brought in from the outside as well as those

arising from within the cocorrections institution.

Cocorrections Literature

Research in cocorrections is, like the field
itself, new and expanding. In the early years of cocor-
rections, the only research conducted was by the BOP
research staff at the coed prisons, and most of that was
done by the research staff at the coed facility at
Morgantown, West Virginia. Surveys were used to tap
inmate attitudes toward cocorrections, and, overall,
inmate responses were fairly positive toward the coed
situation there (see, for example, Cavior, 1972; and
Karacki, 1972). In a reflection paper on their experi-
ence with the coed program at the Kennedy Youth Center,

Morgantown, West Virginia (now known as the FCI

68

Morgantown), Cavior et a1. (1972) discuss the reasons for
establishing a coed program, what steps were taken to
prepare for the arrival of females at KYC, initial experi-
ences, and further expectations. They note that the pro-
gram objective was to promote a more normal environment
by introducing female inmates to an all-male institu-
tion, to foster contacts with the outside community and
develop work-study, and volunteer programs. Female

staff were hired for the women's units and the educational
program was expanded. Close surveillance, it was thought,
would run contrary to program objectives and defeat the
purpose of the coed program. The authors note that no
final administrative approval was given, and instead the
position taken by the staff in the women's cottage was
more restrictive than with the rest of the institution.
The authors report that introducing young female inmates
to a previously all young male inmate population created
a more normal environment, improved personal sanitation,
lessened vandalism, and increased competition among
students in the education area. In the summer of 1975,
however, four years after KYC became a cocorrections
facility, the female inmates were transferred out of

KYC to other BOP facilities to once again make KYC an

all young male inmate population. Some BOP administra-
tors and staff at Pleasanton who had worked at both

FCI's told me that cocorrections did not get out of

69

hand at KYC; rather, it was some KYC administrators' and
staff's personal attitudes against the coed concept that
affected the cocorrections outcome there. It is inter—
esting to note that after the female inmates were trans-
ferred out of KYC to other BOP facilities, KYC staff
reported an ”uplift," elimination of the cocorrections
problems, an improved prison environment. Data are cur-
rently being gathered by the BOP Research Office to
compare T1 (the time when FCI Morgantown was an all-male
institution) with T2 (female and male inmates) with T3
(a return to an all-male prison) on institution opera-
tions and program variables.

From February 1973 through March 1975 research
on cocorrections was conducted by Sisters Esther
Heffernan and Elizabeth Krippel at FCI Ft. Worth, Texas.
Their tasks were to develop a descriptive analysis of the
internal characteristics, relationships, and structures
of control at Ft. Worth, in order to understand the
processes involved in the development of a medium
cocorrectional, "open" institution. And second, to
explore the question of the degree to which the
approaches to corrections embodied in the programs at
Ft. Worth can be reproduced in other institutional set-
tings (Heffernan and Krippel, Interim Report, 1974).

Beginning in June 1973, one of the researchers

(Krippel) lived in staff housing on the institution's

70

grounds. She spent her first few months becoming
acquainted and explaining the research to inmates and
staff. "The more structured research began in August,
1973" (Ibid., March 28, 1975, p. 7). A random sample of
105 residents (19% of the total pOpulation) was selected
for structured interviewing along with the study of the
inmate's "jacket." Heffernan supplemented these inter-
views during her visits to Ft. Worth.

The research question was, ”. . . to what degree,
if at all, would the internal dynamics of inmates and
staff relationships revealed in single sex, 'closed'
institutions be found in a cocorrectional, 'open' insti-
tution" (Ibid., p. 9). The authors approached their
research using three analytical adaptive patterns to
prison life that Heffernan developed earlier in her
research at the D.C. Reformatory for Women. These are
the "square," "cool," and "in the life." They are
similar to those adaptive patterns described by Irwin
and Cressey (1962) in their work in male California
prisons as "square Johns," "thieves," and "convicts."
Unlike this dissertation, the work of Heffernan and
Krippel and Irwin and Cressey does not focus on the
dynamics of the institution or on the interrelationships
and interactions that occur within it. Theirs is limited
by the nature of their questions and research designs

to a normative orientation of categorization of the

71

inmate social system on variables like offense, per—
sonal and institutional history, and prior involvement
with the criminal justice system.

The second focus in their research, the degree
to which the approaches to corrections embodied in the
programs at Ft. Worth can be reproduced in other insti-
tutional settings, discusses correctional philosophy,
staff recruitment, staff-inmate ratios, selection
criterion for inmates, female-male inmate ratios,
inmates' programs, institutional size and facilities,
geographical resources, and community involvement. The
issues are broad, topical, and of particular interest
to the fields of criminal justice and corrections. Ways
of thinking and dealing with them, however, occur against
a political and economic background, which is left mute
in the Heffernan and Krippel report.

Perhaps the first published article on cocorrec-
tions was Barry Ruback's "The Sexually Integrated
Prison: A Legal and Policy Evaluation" (1975). .Setting
out to discuss which standard is presently appropriate
to test the constitutionality, under the equal protec-
tion clause, of the current practice of sexually inte-
grated prisons; and second, to describe and evaluate the
merits of sexually integrated and nonintegrated prisons,
Ruback collected interview data in federal coed and

noncoed prisons. He concludes that the advantages of

72

the sexually integrated prison are largely intangible.
Creating a more natural social environment has not been
to any large degree a measure of a prison's success.
The disadvantages, he reports, are fairly great:
increased costs, pregnancies, prostitution, and pimping.
Thus, the decision is between intangibles and
observable phenomena. That is, whether the sum
of the benefits to each individual resident is

greater than the collective disadvantages. From

a policy standpoint, one must decide whether the
individuals are worth the trouble and expense
(1975, p. 329).

Viewing sexually integrated prisons at the level
of constitutional rights, Ruback argues that coed
prisons have helped eliminate or reduce problems which
have plagued the prison system for years. He says,

It may be persuasively argued that legiti-
mate state interests are substantively furthered.
Absent grossly inferior facilities for either
sex and a lack of alternatives except integration,
the present system would undoubtedly withstand a
challenge under the equal protection clause.
Although the prospects for constitutional support
do not seem sanguine, nevertheless the sexually
integrated prison offers a means to reduce some
of the violence and alienation currently rampant
in prison systems (1975, p. 330).

Ruback Opined earlier that constitutional support for
the sexually integrated prisons is not sanguinary due
to the unintended negative consequences that are brought
about, such as pimping, pregnancies, increased costs,
and prostitution.

Campbell's reflections as Warden at FCI Ft. Worth

after three years of being a cocorrectional facility

73

give a well—written historical account of the cocorrec-
tions concept and its operation at Ft. Worth. The author
admits with candor that cocorrections was designed to
fill the pragmatic needs of the BOP: Where to put the
increasing number of offenders, especially women?
Besides the historical narrative quoted earlier in this
dissertation, Campbell discloses a sense of failure in
the prison system for the ill-effects of same-sex con-
finement. He suggests that inability to have a relation-
ship with a member of the other sex and deprivation of
this kind while in prison may be a Contributing factor
which leads to confinement and, at the same time, is
one of the most destructive things about confinement.
He speaks out openly about the advantages and disad-
vantages of the coed concept in operation there. He
proselytizes the reader to examine some of the old
shibboleths in corrections and see how foolish some of
them are. "Logic," he says, "is on the side of change
and if the correctional process is to serve as it should,
surely we must know change is imperative" (Campbell,
unpublished paper, n.d., p. 24).

One of the first ethnographies on corrections is
Jane Patrick's "Doing Time: An Ethnography of a Cocor-
rectional Institution" (1976). Written for an under-
graduate senior anthropology seminar, Patrick became a

participant observer at the Ft. Worth FCI. The paper

74

lacks any analytical and conceptual framework, but it
does nicely describe the nature of the institution, the
kinds of people who work and stay there, and the ebb
and flow of daily prison life. She says her research
". . . permits a picture of FCI through the eyes of the
inmates. . . . It relates their experiences and strate-
gies; it speaks of their responses to the atmosphere of
the facility and the programs" (1976, p. 4). The
paper is more descriptive than inferential and it relates
the inmates' perceptions of a coed prison, "doing time,"
cocorrectional programs, furloughs, parole, staff, bore-
dom, commissary, hassles, incident reports, and release.
From her research, the author concludes that,

In view of what traditional prisons are like, FCI

Ft. Worth is a step toward making prisons less

harmful to the incarcerated person. Furloughs,

work and study release, and involvement with the

community are most helpful in eliminating isolation

from the outside world (1976, p. 69).

Joellen Lambiotte's ethnography, "Sex-Role Dif-

ferentiation in a Cocorrectional Institution" (1976) is
a recent addition to the cocorrections literature.
Written for her Masters degree in sociology from the
University of California at Santa Barbara, she takes with
her to the field some of the ideas on sex-roles deveIOped
by feminists like Juliet Mitchell (1973) and Jo Freeman
(1971). She collected data to accept or reject the

hypothesis that sex-role structure and differentiation

75

in a cocorrectional institution is maintained in an even
stronger way than the traditional division between the
sexes. Through observation and interviews with inmates
and staff she finds that sex-role structure at the FCI
Pleasanton duplicates and reflects the social division
between the sexes in society, both by behavior and beha-
vioral norms and adherence to traditional societal
sexual standards.
Thus we see most women residents focusing their
energies on men and their coed relationships . . .
male residents at Pleasanton are better able than
female residents to define the nature of the rela-
tionships. Even though the general structure of
the men's lives is controlled by institutional
factors, they control the way in which female
residents relate to them through labelling, ver-
bal harassment, violation of women's physical space,
initiation of relationships, and leadership (1976,
p. 45).
Although her methodology forces the research problem
into an a priori scheme and seems merely to illustrate
the generalizations from the literature on sex-roles
with prison data rather than observing it in the con-
text of the empirical world being investigated, she
offers some interesting ideas that have up until now
passed unresearched in cocorrections. Her research
questions suggest the need for further investigation on
sex-roles and inmate subcultures.
In conclusion of the cocorrections literature, a

summary statement of the second cocorrections conference

attended by administrators of the federal prison system,

76

January 12-13, 1977, at the FCI Terminal Island,
California, seems appropriate.

The conference concluded that cocorrections is

obviously not a panacea, that it is not apprOp—

riate for all or even a significant proportion

of the over 28,000 inmates in the Federal Prison

System, and that it is not apprOpriate to give

it a visibility higher than a balance of its

advantages and disadvantages warrants (Cocorrec—

tions Conference Summary, January 26, 1977).
Their expressions of these concerns are salient issues
that I, too, have noted in my research. Among them are:
homosexuality among women and men in cocorrections is
significantly reduced. Predatory and violent homo-
sexuality is virtually absent. In cocorrections, there
is also a reduction in administrative control problems,
more staff-inmate involvement, a reduction in the use of
psychological medication, and an easier transition for
inmates back to the outside coed community upon their
release.

However, cocorrections is not without its prob-
lems and negative consequences. Public skepticism that
cocorrections coddles its inmates, pregnancies, possible
staff-inmate romantic and sexual involvement, and
increased staff surveillance and supervision at the
expense of creating a more normal social environment are

no less problematic for corrections than are the problems

in same-sex prison settings.

CHAPTER III

THE PHYSICAL STRUCTURE OF FCI PLEASANTON
AND ITS STAFF AND INMATES

Physical Structure

The Federal Correctional Institution at Pleasanton,
California, was built in 1973-1974 and opened in July 1974
just 20 to 30 miles east of Oakland and San Francisco.
This facility is under the jurisdiction of the United
States Department of Justice, Bureau of Prisons. It is
one of the 48 federal facilities, including 15 halfway
houses, across the country, serving specific categories
of offenders and offering a variety of correctional pro-
grams.

FCI Pleasanton was envisioned as part of a West
Coast network of new federal correctional facilities.

Lack of community support elsewhere in California,
however, dimmed that hope and the Pleasanton facility
opened on its own.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons purchased 93 of the
over 1,000 acres belonging to the U.S. Department of
Army's Camp Parks Military Base for the FCI site at a
cost of $25,000. The prison rests unnoticed and out of

sight on 29 of the 93 acres in the northeast corner of

77

78

Camp Parks. Rows of boarded-up Army barracks, a cyclone
fence, and a deserted gate house hint at a once-active
military base that now functions with only a few Army
personnel as a recruiting, training, drill, and educa—
tion center. Camp Parks does not advertise the FCI in
its corner, and only about four small blue FCI signs
curtly guide the first-time driver through the abandoned
military maze to come upon the correctional facility.
It lies in a shallow corner of Camp Parks with rolling
hills to the north, east, and west. Due south about one
mile past the rows of empty barracks starts the small
industrial section of Pleasanton. About four miles
southeast of FCI Pleasanton lies the Santa Rita Rehabili-
tation Center, the County Jail. To mention that one
works at FCI Pleasanton generally gets the reaction,
"Oh, you mean at Santa Rita." The jail, with its old-
style barracks facilities, is highly visible from
heavily trafficed Interstate 580, east-west, and is often
in the public eye for its escapes and institutional
problems. The public identity of FCI Pleasanton is not
separate from the Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center.
There has also been speculation that the state
of California may construct correctional facilities on
the Camp Parks land that might add to some already nega-

tive community attitudes toward FCI Pleasanton.4

79

At first sight, FCI Pleasanton seems to resemble
a modern junior college complex. The redwood and glass
architecture departs from the stone, fortress-like
appearance of most female and male prisons. Inmate
activities facilities consist of two housing units (one
each female and male), segregation and detention unit,
education and vocational training facilities, covered
recreation area, multipurpose building, visiting room,
hobby shop, indoor recreation area, outdoor recreation
field, an outdoor covered recreation area, and service
facilities such as administration building, medical
facility, laundry and clothing, food service, receiving
and discharge, warehouse, mechanical services, and a
small armory located on the outside perimeter road at
the north end of the institution. Each of the two
housing units holds two functional units for a total of
four functional units: one building (two functional
units) for women and one building (two functional units)
for men. Each functional unit at one time had two large
multipurpose lounge areas. For better control and obser-
vation of inmates and spatial considerations, however,
it was decided to remove the wall dividing each pair of
lounge areas, essentially providing one large multi-
purpose lounge area for each functional unit. These
changes in the physical structure of the housing units

were directed and forwarded by the Warden and staff.

80

Most inmates opposed the structural changes in their

housing unit as a loss in privacy and experienced defeat

in top staff's insistence with the comment ". . . It's
not negotiable.” After the walls were removed, however,
inmate attitudes moved to neutral to positive. "It's

okay," to "It sure looks bigger," were frequently heard.
From 1974 through 1976, FCI Pleasanton was
enclosed by two fences: a 12-foot cyclone fence and an
electronic field fence. The latter, however, proved
unsuccessful because it would sound alarm when the elec—
tronic field was broken by blowing brush or roaming
rabbits and cats. In the winter of 1976-1977, then, the
electronic fence was replaced with a second 12-foot
cyclone fence separated by about 12 feet of grey stone
from the first cyclone fence. The second cyclone fence
evoked community concern that FCI Pleasanton was chang-
ing its mission from working with first-time youthful
offenders to becoming a penitentiary for more hardened
criminals. To counter this reaction, FCI Pleasanton
offered the Pleasanton Chamber of Commerce a tour of the
facility to see firsthand that Pleasanton was not chang-
ing its focus with inmates but merely replacing the
dysfunctional electronic fence with a more functional
12-foot cyclone fence. The facts are, however, that the
inmate population at FCI Pleasanton was changing. A

more heterogeneous population developed in terms of

81

security levels, discipline problems, age, offense
background, and length of time to be served which
impacted overtly and covertly on the security of the
institution.

The grounds outside the 29 acres are tilled earth,
grass, trees, and shrubbery. A one-mile, well-worn
perimeter patrol road outlines the circumference of the
institution.

From 10 miles south on Interstate 680, FCI
Pleasanton at night glows bright orange in the sky.
Thirty-three codium vapor lights, each about 35 feet
high, environ the 29 acres at 160-foot intervals.

There is no entrance sign that directs the first-
time visitor. One seems to intuit from the huddle of
cars and the walkways leading to the "glass house" the
prison entrance. As its name suggests, "the glass house"
has glass walls, save one-half of one wall. Inside sits
the receptionist, usually female, who directs all phone
calls and visitors. Two orange and black naugahyde
benches, a stack of small lockers for visitors' use, and
a second-hand American Airlines metal detector are about
the only props in the 15 by 20 foot room. Entrance to
the prison compound is through a series of two glass
doors opened from the Control Room, 100 feet away, at
either the receptionist's shout or by the Control Room

officer's knowledge of the person seeking entrance.

82

The doors are referred to as "four” and "five," respec—
tively, and the receptionist will shout toward one of the
small speakers in the glass house, "Hit Four," and the
door will click. After passing through Four, and only
after it closes behind, one stands in a small 4 by 5 foot
chamber waiting for Five to click. Passing through, you
are now "on the compound."

The compound layout is shown below.

 

 

 

 

 

A
/ ‘K’A\
/ C \
:[r—J “/ \»’>
. B d_,
I D I J
E [III
F

 

 

 

Diagram l.--FCI Pleasanton physical layout.

A and g (female and male housing units, respectively):
Each of the two housing units is separated into two
wings with a central core which provides a sun deck and
space for recreational and leisure time activities,
offices, and special programs. Each wing is designed
for 56 inmates with single rooms. The single room

design of the housing units was to avoid an institutional

83

feeling and offer each inmate personal space and the
privacy which comes from being able to enter one's own
room through one's door, with one's key, closing it firmly
behind. The View from the unbarred window in each room
is not a wall, but a fence and rolling hills surround—
ing the institution. Each room has a single bed, a
private wet area with commode, sink and mirror, desk
and chair, and a five-foot high closet for clothes that
hang. Rooms are color coordinated in orange, blue,
green, and purple. Half the inmate rooms (28) are on the
ground floor and half (28) are upstairs in each of the
four wings. The upstairs rooms are bordered with a
hallway overlooking the open-air downstairs lounge area
and are, in general, preferred to the downstairs rooms
where there is more noise and greater correctional
officer supervision. Presently each wing has two tele-
vision viewing rooms on the second floor at opposite
ends of the hall. Which room inmates choose to watch
TV is generally guided by their race/ethnicity. Black
inmates dominate in one TV room and nonblacks dominate
in the other. There are also four single shower stalls
upstairs and four on the ground floor. One telephone
booth with direct hook-up to telephone operators for
collect calls only is on the second floor. In addition,
there are also two offices on the second floor, one

each for the correctional counselors and case manager.

84

The diagram below is an aerial demonstration of the

second floor.

TV [_ Inmate Rooms I] TV
[r4 1....

 

 

 

Sh Sh
Sh = Shower
Pb = Phone Booth
= Office
Open Space
Views
. Pb
Sh Downsta1rs Sh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diagram 2.--Aerial demonstration of the second
floor housing unit.

Directly below the TV rooms on the ground floor
are the unit manager's office and a combination inmate
stereo room/leisure room/ironing area. Opposite the unit
manager's office is the unit secretary's office. And,
below the correctional counselor's upstairs office,
therei£;also a ground-level correctional counselor's
office. On the first floor there are also two washers
and dryers for inmate personal use for items not wishing
to be institutionally laundered. Each wing also has a
storage room for bathroom, bedroom, and cleaning supplies
and women's kotex appropriately.

Each open lounge area has two pool tables,
suffleboard, ping pong, some exercise equipment, lounge

chairs and sofa, card table, and reading materials.

85

Bulletin boards note unit and institution activities,
orders from the Bureau, daily room inspection evaluation
scores, monthly movie listing, education, vocation, and
recreation notes, and whatever else inmates may decide
legally or otherwise to post. The unit officer has
her/his desk Opposite the unit front door and is
expected to control and supervise the flow and flurry
of inmate activity inside the unit. Behind the correc-
tional officer's desk is a small kitchen area with an
automatic ice machine.

The two wings each of units I and III are joined
together by an area of housing referred to as A and O
(Admissions and Orientation). New inmates are housed
here until they are cleared medically and classified
according to Jeaness Interpersonal Maturity Level
(I-Level). They are required to sign out and in when
leaving or returning to the unit. A and 0 may take, on
the average, two to three weeks to complete. Meanwhile,
an A and 0 inmate will attend institution familiariza-
tion sessions visiting all institution departments,
complete a series of psychological tests, meet with
unit managers, correctional counselors, and psycholo-
gists, and work in her/his unit as a unit orderly doing
housekeeping chores like vacuuming, washing floors and
windows, waxing, dusting, cleaning shower stalls, pick—

ing up cigarette butts and papers outside the unit,

86

sweeping, etc. Inmates tire quickly of this routine and
can be heard to complain of the monotony and perceived
meaningless activity while waiting to be classified.
Above A and O is an outside sundeck. Inmates from
both wings of Units I and III share their respective
sundecks for chats, talk, sunshine, or general relaxa-
tion. They bring their blankets, radio, cigarettes,
Tang jars, candy, books, and except for the missing
sound of crashing waves, one may lose one's self some-
where on a beach. Water comes sometimes, but from a hose
down below when an inmate will squirt friends on the deck
above.
9: Proposed housing unit for another 117 inmates to be
constructed by November 1977.
2: Food service, indoor recreation, commissary, hobby
shop, laundry/clothing issue, warehouse, and mechanical
services. Food services is a cafeteria-style dining
area for inmates and staff with round, cafe-style tables
and chairs. Observable groups by race/ethnicity, sex,
working partners, and coedding inmates sit and eat
together. Food is generally plentiful but seconds are
sometimes limited. A food services employee or correc-
tional officer generally supervises the line and repri-
mands inmates who seem to take more than what they can
eat. Taking seconds when not allowed is cause for an

incident report (shot), so inmates learn techniques for

87

the cOllection and storage of foodstuffs from food
services. At times I fell prey to blocking an officer's
view as hamburgers were wrapped in napkins and put in
pockets, or pies, chips, steaks, and crab meat were
carried back to the units. Indoor recreation is the
outside corner room with the hobby shop on the west and
commissary on the north. It houses a pool table and
card tables. Staff say it is difficult to supervise

and has become a coed hangout.

The commissary is between food services and
indoor recreation. Inmates at Pleasanton are not per-
mitted to carry or have in their possession any form of
money. Any money that an inmate has upon arrival at
Pleasanton and any money which he/she might receive,
either as a gift from outsiders or which he/she may
earn while at the institution, is credited to his/her
Trust Fund Account which is maintained by the Commissary
Office. Inmates are permitted to spent up to $50 per
month for a variety of articles including candy,
cookies, ice cream, instant coffee, tea, fresh fruit,
cigarettes and tobacco, slippers, magazines, greeting
cards, radios, organic health foods, chips and snacks,
canned soups, soaps and shampoos, toiletries, deodorants,
oral hygiene items, ladies' hygiene items, lotions and
powders, shaving accessories, combs and brushes, hair

preparation and other miscellaneous items like writing

88

tablets, pens, playing cards, sunglasses, watches,
shoes, laces, and polish. The commissary is open for
inmates Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 4:30 p.m.
to 6:45 p.m. Avon sales are directed through the rec-
reation unit every other Tuesday.

Commissary sales are part of the inmate economic
organization. A few inmates, because of their prison
capital worth, can loan other inmates good and services
(such as purchasing them something from the commissary)
who are short of money "on the books" and hence unable
to purchase items themselves. Repayment is not only
the item initially borrowed or one like it that the
borrower returns, but also an item of like worth to the
lender's liking. In this way, lenders have ready sup-
plies of commissary items available and their capital
stock continues to grow. The free enterprise system of
supply and demand adds to an inmate's status from peers
and some staff. On the other hand, however, an inmate
lender can accumulate too much wealth and be reprimanded
by staff for an abundance of nuisance contraband. It
also happens sometimes that an inmate-lender exerts too
much pressure on other inmates and may eventually be
"snitched-off." The institution frowns on inmates who
pressure other inmates. "They're just too sophisticated
for this immature population. They just don't fit it,”

not only tells what happens to inmates who pressure

89

other inmates, but underlying this comment is the assump-
tion that inmates at Pleasanton are immature and it is
the administration's duty to protect these inmates from
more mature, experienced offenders. Bought, sold, loaned,
and transferred were not only commissary items but also
personal clothing, and contraband like drugs, including
alcohol, and sex.

The hobby shop is located adjacent to the laundry/
clothing issue. Inmates do mostly pottery and ceramics
in the evening. The hobby shop is also a place to coed,
exchange information and sometimes contraband, and plan
for the future.

Laundry/Clothing: Inmates at Pleasanton may wear
their own civilian clothing if they so desire. If not,
the institution will issue clothing for each individual.
Men receive surplus khaki issue and women are brought
blue jeans and blouses and jerseys. Inmates are not
permitted to accumulate excess clothing in their rooms
and are required to adhere to all institutional policy
statements regarding the number of items that may be in
their possession at any given time. The actual number
of some pieces of clothing, however, is problematic.

For example, women inmates contend that during their
menstrual cycle they require more than the seven pieces
of underpants the institution allows without having to

wash clothes daily. Still the policy stands unchanged.

90

Towels, washcloths, pillowcases, and sheets are
furnished by the institution according to posted sched-
ules. Inmates are responsible for all materials issued
them by the institution and charged for any lost or
destroyed items at the time of their release.

Warehouse holds the supplies and materials for
FCI Pleasanton. It receives truck deliveries at the
rear sally port (rear gate). The demand for more
storage space is increasing with the inmate population
increase.

Mechanical Shops houses offices and work space
for inmates and staff working in this department. It
includes operations like landscaping, construction,
plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning. Next to food
services, it employs a large number of inmate laborers,
mostly males.

E: Covered Outside Recreation Area lies between mechan-
ical shops and vocational training. This area is pri-
marily used as a basketball court, tennis court, and
weight-lifting area. The small room in the back that
holds the weight-lifting equipment is rumored by inmates
to be a place for sex. Not many inmates I talked with
ever used this room for sex, only two for sure. Its
reputation seemed to have exceeded its actual use.

F: Control Room, Administration, Education and Voca-

tional Training. The control room Operates 24 hours a

91

day. Encased by bullet-proof glass on three sides,
entrance to it is through doors One and Two, with a small
waiting chamber between them. Inside, the office Opens
and closes doors and gates with the push of a button.
She/he monitors on TV screens traffic at the glass

house and the rear sally port. She/he coordinates the
intercom system, the emergency phone system, "the hot
line,” and most importantly, validates the accuracy of
the official counts at 12 midnight, 2 a.m., 5 a.m.,

4 p.m., and 9 p.m. These are labelled the official
counts. From time to time, unofficial counts are taken
and inmates are expected to adhere to the same regula-
tions connected with the official counts. When count is
called ("Count timet") inmates must go to their respec-
tive rooms. They must remain quiet. They are not to be
loud, play radios or musical instruments. Shots are
often written on inmates for interfering with count.

The Administration Building is crowded with
staff, inmates, and visitors. Offices for the Warden,
Associate Wardens, Operations and Programs, Warden's
secretary, Warden's conference room, personnel offices,
business offices, cashier, mailroom, computer terminal
room, and visiting room seem to have outgrown the exist-
ing spacer- A present space study has recommended physi-
cal changes to accommodate the expansion of operations

and services here.

92

Educational and Vocational Training offer a
range of programs from remedial subjects through an
Associate of Arts Degree from a local community college.
A high school general education equivalency course is
available and a certificate of completion may be obtained.
Educational classes are taught during daytime and even-
ing hours and are taught by instructors from FCI Pleasan-
ton and those on contract through the community college.
Some inmates are also enrolled in correspondence courses
from nearby universities. In these cases, the inmate
must assume costs for tuition. The Education Department
also sponsors self-improvement programs like Weight
Watchers, AA, Jaycees, Teen Challenge, 7 Steps, and yoga.
The department also operates and maintains the inmate
library and legal law library.

Inmates in Admission and Orientation are given
a General Aptitude Test Battery and the Kuder Vocational
Interest Survey and "I-Level" classification tests.
The results are used by unit staff to discuss an inmate's
strengths and weaknesses as they apply to learning
various trades per the inmate's enrollment in vocational
training.

Several vocational training programs are avail-
able to inmates: clerical—secretarial, auto mechanics,
welding and small engine repair. One finds more female

than male inmates in clerical-secretarial classes and

93

almost exclusively male inmates in auto mechanics,
welding, and small engine repairs. When I asked why, I
was told bluntly, "That's how it is on the outside. If
we didn't prepare them for how it really is, we'd be
doing them an injustice." The problem, however, as
inmates perceive it is that more male inmates than
female inmates leave Pleasanton with a job skill that is
more marketable on the outside. So as not to err with
false consciousness, it should also be noted that not
all inmates perceive vocational training in terms of it
being a marketable skill upon release. Some inmates
become involved with it for a lack of something better
to do and for others it's under psychological pressure,
real or fantasy, from staff and hints that the parole
board will view education and vocational training posi-
tively and hence, improve an inmate's chances for parole.
More female inmates than male inmates, however, com-
plain about a lack of opportunities for themselves.
"Sure the guys got weights and most of the recreation
and all the V.T. stuff. We got classes to be a secre-
tary and everybody's pushin' us to be good mothers and
wives. I'm not goin' back to that. I think I'm here
cuz of that. When I get out it'll not be because of
this place but in spite of it. Don't ask me what I'll
do later though," was the kind of female complaints

about Pleasanton very often voiced and supported with

94

"me too!" from other women. The implications in this
area of sexual inequality are significant for cocorrec-
tions. Are women being afforded constitutional rights
in institution work and job training? Is the sexism
that appears to exist noted here and elsewhere (for
instance, see Lambiotte, 1976) an unintended consequence
of Pleasanton's programs, operations, staff, and inmate
pOpulation? And, on a very personal level that con-
tributes significantly to successful adjustment on
parole, are women and men leaving FCI Pleasanton with an
equal number of resources at their disposal? It appears
male inmates are more advantaged. So, while Ruback
(1975, p. 329) suggests sexually integrated prisons
could withstand a challenge under the equal protection
clause, closer inspection in the areas of prison work
assignments and training for release suggests benefits
are skewed more for men than for women.

9: The Multipurpose Building is used for movies, dances,
inmate parties, religious services, and provides a prac-
tice area for musical groups. The chapel function is
located on the stage and is separated from the large
multipurpose space with a sound rates folding partition.
The room spaces on the east and behind the chapel are
occupied by the Chaplain, Research, and Mental Health.
H: Hospital. The hospital at FCI Pleasanton is staffed

by a hospital administrator, three physician assistants,

95

and one full-time dentist. As in other departments of
the prison, inmates are a substantial part of the hos-
pital staff, performing clerical duties, scheduling
appointments, and running routine laboratory work. A
consulting phychiatrist, optometrist, gynecologist, and
dermatologist provide inmates services on a weekly to
bi-weekly basis. FCI Pleasanton also employs two full-
time staff mental health psychologists and has a work-
ing relationship with contract community medical
facilities.

The clinic includes an X-ray room, pharmacy,
laboratory, physical therapy, ward, dental facilities,
and examination room. At present, some hospital space
is occupied by nonhospital staff such as the training
officer, safety officer, and correctional supervisors
(lieutenants).

To use the hospital resources an inmate must
request her/his staff supervisor to phone the hospital
for an appointment. This is done to control the flow of
inmates in and out of the hospital as well as to deter
some inmates from faking an illness and wasting hospital
time.

‘1: Detention and Segregation, Receiving and Discharge,
Chief Correctional Services and Case Management Coordi—
nation. This unit is comprised of nine single rooms,

each with its own commode and sink. Three more such

96

segregation rooms are available in the hospital adjacent
to this facility. An angular wood slatted wall has been
constructed along one side of this unit that has the
most detention and segregation rooms to eliminate the
problems of passing contraband and observations and
conversations between detention and segregation inmates
with the general population, and to provide additional
security and comfort to detention and segregation
inmates. Observation also suggests that prior to the
construction of the outside wall and of the architec-
tural modifications like securing beds, and removing
objects that could be used in suicide attempts inmates
did not perceive "the hole" as such a bad place to be.
"The hole here is better than my cell at Englewood or
TI,” inmates would tell me. Similarly, staff told me
that the hole "just isn't a deterrent to writing shots.
It doesn't scare 'em." The hole was not a dehumanizing
deterrent factor that the old shibboleths in corrections
deemed it to be until structural changes were made in
line with tradition that affected staff and inmates'
attitudes toward the hole. The unit houses both female
and male inmates for segregation and detention purposes.
It has two shower stalls and an outside circle for exer-
cise of its inmates.

New inmate admissions and discharges enter and

leave FCI Pleasanton through this unit also. In an

97

inside office, U.S. Marshals hand over transfer papers
and federal inmates to the R and D officer. On the day
of their parole, inmates strip search and sign out here
upon their release. Their personal goods and money from
their account are handed them once they are in the glass
house.

Once an incoming inmate's goods are inventoried,
a medical clearance given, and a photograph and finger-
prints taken, the R and D officer escorts the inmate to
either the female or male A and 0 unit, where the unit
officer assigns the inmate a room, bedding and towels,
relates what to expect in the next few weeks, and answers
inmates' questions about visiting, packages, coedding,
and telephones. Introduction to the inmate social sys-
tem designed to cope with coed prison life is the great
socializer. The process and inmate's reactions to it
are discussed in the next four chapters.

In addition, the Case Management Coordinator,
Chief Correctional Services, Records Administrator, and
three clerk/secretaries, along with two inmate employees,
occupy space in the front of this building.
J: Recreation Field. Outdoor recreation includes a
football field, baseball diamond, handball areas, tennis
courts, an earth-trodden track path, and an unused minia-
ture golf area. The recreation field is located along

the east and northeast perimeter of the compound just

98

behind the male housing unit. The frequency with which
the recreation yard is opened varies with the number of
staff employed. Several times during this fieldwork the
administration was short-handed and could not supervise
the recreation yard on a regular basis. Inmates were
bitter. When the recreation area was Opened regularly
on schedule, however, inmate reaction was courteous and
favorable and one area of prison life--recreation--was
made more tolerable.

K: Communal Area. For lack of a better name, I refer
to the Open space in the center of the building complex
as the communal area. Here inmates walk the paths,
lounge on the grass, sit on the benches, and stroll up
to their own or another's housing unit. A thin yellow
line has been painted in front of each living unit that
serves as the boundary past which inmates not living in
that housing unit cannot go, especially for inmates of
the other sex. Experience with women and men congre-
gating in the foyers of the housing units was considered
a control and security problem. The new boundaries have
eliminated that problem. At the time the boundaries
were being considered, inmates were angry over the
incurred loss of their freedom and the administration's
insistent remark, ". . . it is not negotiable.” It has

since been forgotten and staff are happy that a control

99

problem has been eliminated. Other areas that are out of
bounds include:

. . the recreation field is out of bounds after
dark and when no staff supervision is provided.
Other peripheral areas are identified as out of
bounds to inmates except when they are on official
work details. The area West of Mechanical Services
Building is out of bounds after normal working
hours. Areas out of bounds after dark are the
areas East and South of the Segregation Building.
During daylight hours, the area directly South of
the Segregation Building is also out of bounds to
inmates. The areas noted in front of each living
unit are out of bounds to male and female inmates
as noted (FCI Pleasanton Policy Statement Number
20001.5, Subject: inmate boundaries).

FCI Pleasanton was initially built at a cost of
$5.5 million. The third housing unit, located between
Units I and III, will cost slightly over $2 million.
Escalation in construction costs, engineering fill,
better materials, and tougher specifications make the
construction costs higher today than four years ago
when Pleasanton was built. "Still," the Business Manager
explained to me, "construction costs are cheaper here at
Pleasanton than, say, at Morgantown, because there you

have to pay for Winterizing."

Staff and Inmates: Who Are They?

 

may;

The staff at FCI Pleasanton is comprised of about
143 individuals. By sex, 44 of the 143 employees are
female and 99 are male. Semi-structured interviews were

conducted with 56 staff, and observations were made

100

with practically all. The various departments at Pleasan-

ton total 13. Their composition is shown in Table 1.

Table l.——Department staff by sex.

 

 

 

Department Staff Complement Females Males
Warden's Office 5 2 3
Personnel 2 2 0
Training 1 0 1
Business 9 2 7
Education 11 4 7
Religion 1 0 1
Hospital 5 2 3
Mental Health 5 4 1
Case Management 6 3 3
Functional Units 24 8 16
Food Service ’ 9 l 8
Technical Service 8 0 8
Correctional Service 57 16 24

Total 143 44 99

 

The Warden is the Executive Administrator at
Pleasanton. He maintains total administrative control
over inmates and staff. A simple chart of power and

authority levels at FCI Pleasanton is shown in Diagram 3.

101

 

 

 

 

 

Warden
(15)
Training Personnel
Officer Officer
(11) (11)
Associate Associate
Warden Warden
Operations Secretary Programs
(14) ' (7) (14)
I J
Education Supv. (12)-4 (12) Unit Mgrs.
Mental Health Chief (13)__, (12) Case Mgmt. Coord.
Food Supv. Admin. (12)... (12) Chief Coord. Sves.
Safety Mgr. (ll)—— (11) Chaplain
Business Mgr. (12)-—
Hospital Admin. (12)-—
Mech. Sve. Supv. (12)—A

 

(Numbers in parentheses are the Civil Service 6.8.
ratings for those positions.)

Diagram 3.--FCI Pleasanton organizational chart.

Salaries vary with a lO-step increment in each
G.S. level. The range of pay for the positions shown
in Diagram 3, plus G.S. 5 and G.S. 6, clerks and cor-

rections officers, respectively, are shown in Table 2.

Correctional Services

 

From the standpoint of most inmates and staff,
Correctional Services has the most important continuous
contact with inmates. Similar observations are made by
Giallombardo (1965, p. 29) in a federal all-women's
prison and by Cavior (March 1976, p. 4) at the Pleasanton
FCI. Because of its importance, then, it will be dis-

cussed here.

102

Table 2.--Salary range by 6.8. rating.

 

 

G.S. Rating Salary Range
5 $ 9,303-12,093
6 lO,370-l3,484
7 11,523-14,979
8 12,763-16,588
9 14,097-18,327

10 ‘ 15,524-2o,177
11 l7,056-22,177
12 20,442-26,57l
13 24,308-3l,598
14 28,725-37,347
15 sense-43,923a

 

aExecutive salary is limited to $39,600 by
section 5308 of Title 5 of the U.S. Code to the rate for
level V of the Executive Schedule.

Correctional Services at Pleasanton employs
about 57 persons, of whom 16 are female and 41 male.
The department carries the dual responsibility of custody
and treatment of the entire inmate population. It
employs the largest number of employees at FCI Pleasan-
ton. The lines of power and authority are depicted in
Diagram 4.

Federal laws governing access to employee files
limited this researcher's ability to collect demographic
data without the written permission of each staff member.

Discussing this research limitation one day with one

103

Chief Correctional Officer
(12) (male)

Receptionist I Clerk
(4) (female) I (6) (female)

 

5-Correctional
Supervisors (ll) (9)
(1 female; 4 males)

 

 

 

12-Correctional (Reporting to
Counselors (9) Correctional Supervisors)
n.b.a (1 female)
(11 males)
lZ-Senior Officers 36-Correctional
Specialists (8) Officers
(2 females; 10 males) (10 females; 26 males)

aCorrectional counselors have dual supervision
from correctional supervisors and unit managers. Often-
times, the treatment goals and the primacy of custody
conflict and correctional counselors are asked to both
secure and treat. More will be discussed later in this
chapter.

Diagram 4.--Correctional services organizational
chart including G.S. rating and dis-
tribution of employees by sex.

department head, he told me frankly that he would not
let anyone in his file unless he knew what they wanted,
". . . and by the time they tell me what they want I
will have told them what they wanted to know so then
there'll be no need for them to use the files." I
extracted from his conversation not only his perceptions
of his privacy but also a glimmer of the interview pro-

cess that I would four months later put into practice.

104

Correctional officers begin employment at a
starting salary of $10,370. At the end of one proba-
tionary year, she/he is promoted to the level of G.S.
at a salary of $11,523. Within each grade level step
increases are earned as long as the employee maintains
an acceptable level of performance. The general com-
plaints of beginning correctional officers are salary,
staff morale, and the nature of the work. The saliency
of any or all of these seems to vary with marital status,
age, and education. Officers with more education seem to
verbalize considerably more about the nature of the cor-
rectional work than do officers with less education.

Some of their reactions are:
"I went to school for this?"

"I'm in to working with people, not being a
guard."

"I think it's good to get the experience but you

burn out fast doing nothing for a minimum of 3

years. We should be able to use our skills

sooner."

One of the major staff splits at Pleasanton is a
philosophical argument about the custody and the care
and corrections of inmates. Sometimes, in conversation,
it will get referred to as the "new and old philosophy."
It basically points to differing assumptions about the
nature of criminals and hence, to different methods of

controlling and rechanneling their deviance while in

prison. The controversy is well documented in Cressey's

105

"Limitation on the Organization of Treatment" (1960,
Chapter 4). Suffice to note, however, that the contro-
versy deals with the conflicting implications on con-
temporary attitudes about punishment and treatment in
our society for prison organization. The call for a
dramatic break with the past in prison architecture, its
programs and operations, and in its staff-inmate inter-
actions is documented in literature about FCI Pleasanton
and in the correctional officer's position description
serving the Bureau cited earlier. "The Challenge,"

the corrections officer's position description reads,

is to:

*enforce the rules and regulations. . .

*supervise the various work assignments. . . .

*counseling inmates on personal and family goals

and problems, and

*participating as a member of the corrections

team of Case Workers, Psychiatrists, Psycholo-
gists, Teachers and others working to help
institutional inmates.

Before long, correctional officers feel repri-
manded by supervisors and sometimes by other department
heads for doing "too much counseling and not enough
supervising. Remember we have correctional counselors
for each inmate." The officer feels pushed back to
traditional, unchanging, and impersonal views of correc-
tions. In a system where custody, control, and security

are, and have been, primary goals that are more opera—

tionally defined and measured and more related to

106

showing success than goals like care and corrections,
there is a sense of validity in Cressey's position that
. [guards] do not use inmates productively
any more than they themselves are used produc-
tively by prison managers. Guards manage and are
managed in organizations where management is an
end, not a means (1960, p. 79).
Correctional officers soon learn that not only are they
supposed to limit their counseling functions, but that
they are not a continuous member of the corrections team
to help the individual inmate. Seldom is the correc-
tional officer a regular working member of an inmate's
team, say as are psychologists, teachers, and counselors.
Ironic is the fact that even the Bureau notes in the
Correctional Officer's position description that "The
largest group of line staff who also have the most
direct day-to—day contact with inmates are the Correc-
tional Officers." As Cressey opines, officers are no
more used productively by prison managers than they use
inmates productively. One male officer expressed this
quite succinctly:
I've been told by the Lieutenant not to get involved.
You shouldn't be jokin' and laughin'. After eight
years in the service I expected this place to contain
professionalism. You get here and get your staff
who don't give a fuck, counselors who sit around
and drink coffee and managers who run around putting
toilet paper in bathrooms. Shit! I expected
Pleasanton to have top notch people. I expected
community involvement. We got nothing. Community
doesn't know we're here.

. . . I think this place is unique in that we
don't do anything with inmates. Kids get 180 hours

107

in food service and get VT welding or small engines.
NObody's involved. Nothing here is unique. People
from other institutions have the same things there
and more.

As the unit officer I'm the go-fer. Call food
service, get sugar for some staff's coffee, pass
this out, answer the phone, wake inmates up, nurse
'em. For what I feel I can do here, I'm doin' a
damned good job. I like the inmates. They like
me. They know I reSpect them. I don't consider
them mother fuckers, homosexuals, perverts or queers
who are sent up for life. I don't enjoy the over-
all programs and policies set up, however.

Not all staff, however, believe that line correctional
work is boring or low status. The problem they see is
the correctional officer's overzealous need for immediate
gratification. One department head, for example, who
influences many new correctional officers, felt that

age, value orientation, and education were critical
variables in becoming a successful correctional officer.
His comments about the young, educated officer are com-
mon to other interviews with older, less educated staff:

Part of the problem with today's correctional
officers is that they're young people, your age
group, mid—20's, fresh out of the military or
college with 3 to 4 years experience, and some
limited work experience. People in this age
bracket, in this generation, have different con-
cepts of values. Their values are different than
mine. They want it today. They feel their poten—
tial is now. They don't want to develop it. A

lot has EEEn given to them. They all had cars and
hi-fis. In my day, if you had shoes and a bike you
were lucky. Everythin is immediate. When you
[correctional officers? come here, you're on proba-
tion for one year and if you put your heart and
soul in becoming a good CO then we'll show you a
good career ladder. But they see the cart before
the horse. They see career opportunities and want
it now. They feel someone owes them something. . . .

108

The other thing wrong is with education.
They come in sayin' "We want to be counselors."
But you can't start at that level. We want you to
be a correctional officer and work from the bottom
up on a day-to-day routine, supervise, washing
windows, scrubbing down showers. After a few months
they'll tell you, "Hell, I didn't go to college to
do this!" They become dissatisfied because they
don't make case worker overnight. Why? "Because
you don't have what I want, soon enough," they say.
It falls back on their values of wanting it all
now. They don't know what it's like to start at
THE bottom and work up. Work! It's a now society--
everything is now. We're not going to make them
counselors. The ones satisfied here have no educa—
tion. They married early and know the value of a
dollar. They got out and had to work for it. These
are the ones who are more mature and have made a
more mature commitment to life. In the long run
they'll come out on top. I know this is not the
whole picture but it's a big hunk of the pie.

Today you hire 12 and within 6 months to 1 year
you're lucky you have 2 left! I needed a job when
I started with the bureau [12} years ago]. I had
a family. I was scared they'd fire me. I wasn't
going to let them do it. I worked hard. Today
you say to someone, "You're fired," and they say,
"I quit." It's values, that's what it is. So
we'll keep on hiring and they'll keep on quitting.
I've seen some come here just to see California and
they're here like it's a vacation. Once they see
California they quit. They want it all now.

The same department head suggested that criteria for a
good correctional officer is not college, but a high
school diploma and some experience with people. "We're
not lookin' for someone who works in a flower shop making
bouquets for 6 years." He continued,
A person who comes here knows basically what they're
getting into with pay and job expectations. If
they don't they're wearing blinders. When you come
through that door [pointing to the glass house]

and it slams behind you, well what do you think
this is? This is the DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, BUREAU

109

OF PRISONS. They're just fooling themselves. I
just look at them and laugh. It'll be one dis-
illusionment after another for them.

A second concern correctional officers discuss
is salary. The cost of living in and around Pleasanton
is relatively high. The Pleasanton Chamber of Commerce
reports the average Pleasanton income as $20,000.
Livermore, another popular nearby town, reports a median
income of $14,000 for its residents. Whether one rents
or buys, housing costs are prohibitive. About half of
the probationary (less than one year) correctional
officers are married. They tell me either they spend
all they have to live close by waiting for the year's
end and a salary increase; move farther away where rent
is cheaper and end up getting frustrated with the com-
muting; encourage their spouses to work, which adds
additional hardship where small children are present;
or they start to look for work elsewhere. Most depart-
ment heads will admit that a correctional officer's
beginning salary is low per the surrounding cost of
living, especially if a family is being supported. The
ultimate reaction, however, is "there's nothing I can
do. The government sets the salary schedule." Hence,
correctional officers perceive defeat in face of an
undefinable system removed from the realities of what

it's really like.

110

What struggling correctional officers lack in
salary and job satisfaction they try to make up in a
group esprit de corps. When new correctional officers
arrive at Pleasanton they experience a sense of estrange-
ment from senior correctional officers. One put it this
way: "They make you feel like they're too good for you.
They'll test you first to see your real colors." At
the same time, inmates are testing new correctional
officers and department heads, especially unit managers,
ask new correctional officers not to be too harsh with
inmates. "Get to know who they are before you react,"
one unit manager advised a new correctional officer in
the unit. So new correctional officers feel a bind of
being alone. They learn to cope with these feelings by
a sense of group affection for each other's situation.
For instance, newer officers are often found at lunch
or dinner together in either the staff lounge, visiting
room, or food services. They also tend to talk more
frequently and longer with each other than they do with
more experienced staff. They share not only complaints
about salary but their experiences in "being taken and
learning the ropes." And quite frequently newer cor-
rectional officers will seek each other out for a beer
after work, dinner together, or some other social occa-
sion. I was asked to join their activities on several

occasions.

111

Inmates

During the period of this research the inmate
population at FCI Pleasanton varied between 230 and 250
inmates. Distribution by sex is about equal. The kinds
of inmates that Pleasanton was designed to incarcerate
were offenders whose records generally do not include
assaultive behavior and who do not represent significant
escape risks. The anticipated age range is 18 to 26
years at the time of commitment. The position descrip-
tion for Warden at FCI Pleasanton says about the inmate
population: "Because of their volatile nature combined
with youthful energy and immature judgment, this age
group presents a most challenging opportunity for con-
structive treatment and rehabilitation." The inmates
are also seen as unable to make it in other BOP facili-
ties because of their age and lack of criminal SOphisti—
cation. When asked about the mission of Pleasanton,
the Warden replied that "It's a place safe for inmates
who couldn't survive in other institutions. It's for
inmates who aren't so far down the road in crime. It's
the 'nip in the bud' theory--to prevent their graduation
into lives of crime."

Reference to inmates also reflects an attitude
of incarcerating a youthful, less criminally sophisti-
cated population. "Kids" is the most popularly used

reference to inmates, in spite of the fact that

I12

biological age is about 225. The inmates themselves do
not share staff's perceptions of inmates as "kids."

"It really bothers me to hear staff call us kids. Then
they turn around and treat you otherwise. It's petty.
It's really petty. One minute they say 'kids' and the
next they're demanding adult things like parole, deten—
tion and obedience." Campbell mentioned a similar status
problem regarding the age of youth at FCI Morgantown:
"The fact is that 18, 19, and 20 year olds are men and
women, most especially where their sexuality is con-
cerned (Campbell, n.d.). The origins of this age dis-
crimination may not only lie in the Bureau's expectation
of the ideal inmate profile but also in what was once
the name of FCI Pleasanton as the Federal Youth Center.
What began in July 1974 as the Federal Youth Center (FYC)
at Pleasanton was changed by the U.S. Attorney General's
Office in 1976 to a Federal Correctional Institution
(FCI) to standardize the terminology of federal correc-
tional facilities by reducing the number of categorical
descriptions of the over 40 federal facilities. Still
the institution receives over 70% of its inmates on the
Federal Juvenile Delinquency Act and the Youth Correc-
tions Act, labels which predispose the staff to perceive

and treat inmates like "kids."

Inmate Offenses

 

Table 3 was constructed as a comparative summary
chart reporting percentages of broad crime categories by
sex for the years 1974, 1975, and 1976 on inmates incar-
cerated at FCI Pleasanton.

The following observations can be made from the
data contained in Table 3. First, more female than male
inmates were incarcerated for drug-related offenses
during the years 1974, 1975, and 1976. The direction
and strength of this finding appears relatively consis-
tent. Second, just about as many women and men were
incarcerated for property crimes not involving force
during the years 1974, 1975, and 1976. Third, approxi-
mately 100% more men than women were incarcerated for
Offenses involving force against persons during the
years 1974, 1975, and 1976. Fourth, no pattern can be
established between women and men for crimes against

persons.

Inmate Demography

 

Several demographic variables describing some
some characteristics of inmates at Pleasanton by sex for
1974, 1975, and 1976 are presented in Table 4. Rather
than select aggregate data and report on demographic
averages for the entire year, I have chosen to report

snapshot profile demographic characteristics of the

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116

inmate population on December 31, 1974, and December 31,
1975, the last day of the fourth reporting quarter. For
1976, however, this piece of data was not available.
Instead, population demographic data on all admissions
for the fourth quarter of 1976 were chosen representing
October 1, 1976, through December 31, 1976. Any differ-
ences between the 1976 end-of-year snapshot profile
characteristics and all 1976 fourth quarter admissions
would seem to lack direction and strength.

The table shows that the average age for female
inmates at Pleasanton is almost two years older than
male inmates. The data do not show it here; however,
there was a small group of women inmates in their late
twenties to early thirties that skews the mean data
reported here. Commitment source from court is higher
for women than men. That more men than women come to
Pleasanton from other institutions, particularly same-
sex prisons, impacts of the values they have assimilated
in other institutions that they bring to Pleasanton,
and the socialization of court commitments to these
values, including issues of inmate social systems,
inmate codes, and homosexuality. That FCI Pleasanton
began in 1974 with over two-thirds of its inmate popu—
lation from other Bureau facility transfers, mostly
same-sex prison transfers, suggests that the origin and

nature of Pleasanton's coed inmate social system was a

117

forced fit between the differences that earmark women
and men prisons and prisoners discussed earlier. The
fact that the current coed inmate social system evolved
from these roots adds more insight into the nature of
the present sexually integrated inmate social system.
Several of the original inmates were still at Pleasanton
during the course of this study and provided the author
with historical data and impressions of the evolutionary
cocorrectional inmate social system. The nature of that
system as part of the prison social environment at

Pleasanton will now be discussed.

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CHAPTER IV

PATTERNS OF SEXUAL ADAPTATION IN A
SEXUALLY INTEGRATED PRISON

One of the most painful conditions of confine-
ment which female and male prisoners in one-sex institu-
tions must bear is the deprivation of heterosexual con-
tact. As one of the "pains of imprisonment," as Sykes
(1958) has referred to them, the deprivation of hetero-
sexual contact has been the unit of both policy and
research analysis. Correctional administrators have
had to deal with the problems created by the abnormality
of these environments in operating their institutions.
They have had to develop and implement policy to counter
the homosexual response inmates make in order to deal
with the deprivation of heterosexual contact.

As the unit of research analysis, authors have
described and explained the inmate social system that
has developed in response to the deprivations to which
the population of inmates must respond or adapt itself.
As noted earlier, female and male prisoners react dif-
ferently to these deprivations. It was reported, for

example, that while female inmates tend to establish

118

119

extended familial homosexual networks, male inmates
develop more nuclear homosexual alliances. The use of
force and violence in these situations between female and
male prisoners has also varied. There is more preda-
tory and violent homosexuality among male than female
prisoners. One explanation revolves around stereotyped
assumptions about female and male roles. Males in this
society are taught and encouraged to play it tough,
don't give in, don't weaken, take it like a man, display
their macho. These same norms are recorded in male
prisons. The use of force in a prison homosexual affair
among men may be one of the male responses in maintain-
ing their machoism and their male identity. The fact
that another male is involved is excused by the absence
of the other sex.

It was also noted in research on women in prison
by Giallombardo (1966) that staff seem more tolerant of
homosexuality among women. A mix of factors like cul-
tural expectations of female and male roles, a greater
acceptance of public expression of affection among women,
differences in the nature of female and male inmate
homosexual patterns of adaptation, and the less harsh
and more commodious design of the female prison add to
this greater degree of tolerance. At Pleasanton one
may wonder what degree of tolerance female and male

staff give female and male homosexuality. As a result

120

of my interviews and observations with staff, the majority
are still more critical of male homosexuality than female
homosexuality. And by sex it appears that many more male
staff than female staff criticize male homosexuality
while both female and male staff "excuse" or "understand"
female homosexuality. The issue of the degrees of toler-
ance of homosexuality in a sexually integrated prison
by a sexually integrated staff has policy implications
that reach beyond the scope of this dissertation. I
raise it here only to suggest its importance for further
investigation.

The question posed for cocorrections, then, is
to describe the patterns of sexual interaction among
female and male inmates and to note the similarities and
differences with single-sex prisons in this regard. It
is important to note that at the time of this study,
two years after FCI Pleasanton opened, statistical data
were not yet available with which to make observation or
interview comparisons. In discussing issues related to
sex and violence at Pleasanton, I attempt some ballpark
estimates which offer some feel for the frequency of
those behaviors. It will be interesting once those
statistical data are available to compare research find-
ings. It is in this kind of situation, one where sta-
tistical data are not available or cannot be readily

obtained, that participant observation offers the kind

CI

121

Of understanding needed by viewing the phenomenon from
the participants' perspectives.
Assumptions and Policies About the Sexual
Interaction in a Sexually
Integrated Prison
Before policies are developed and sanctions are

enforced, groups develOp, intentionally or not, under-
lying propositions that influence program development
and implementation. This proposition itself is neither
trite nor esoteric. We can see, for instance, that five
years before FCI Pleasanton's policy statement on physi-
cal contact between the sexes was written, the BOP
envisioned the manageable existence of a coed correc-
tional institution. Recounting the corrections history,
Warden Campbell from the FCI Ft. Worth facility reports:

We made certain assumptions about the type of beha-

vior we would be prepared to deal with, but I can

think of only a few of these assumptions that

haven't proven to be wrong. The assumption that a

viable institutional program could be developed

for such a varied mix of offender types, includ-

ing men and women, was one which has proven to be

right (Campbell,n.d.).
Some of the assumptions articulated during interviews
with FCI Pleasanton staff that influence sexual contact
policy and sanctions at Pleasanton include the belief
that men need women and women need men, quite aside from

their sexual needs and desires. As Warden Garrison

explained it to me:

122

One of our major concerns is to teach inmates that
other relationships besides physical and sexual
ones do exist. . . . It's their learning to have a
number of relationships. To enlarge their limits
and meet people of different racial, ethnic, sex
and socio-economic status. There's more of that
interaction here. It happens here more than it
does in one-sex institutions. There there's
strength in numbers. Racially, sexually, and SES,
there's more interaction here. In a one-sex
institution that doesn't happen.

As Warden Garrison is pointing out, most of the
one—sex institutions in our correctional system are large
institutions. Overpopulation in the Bureau of Prisons
has reached critical proportions in several institutions
and it is a serious problem throughout the system.5 It
has made the work of the Bureau more difficult in pro-
viding a safe and humane environment for its inmates.
In these settings there is strength in numbers. Warden
Garrison is arguing that where a maximum number of people
congregate, it becomes easier to share characteristics
on a variety of personal, social, and cultural dimen-
sions. At Pleasanton, however, where we find a minimum
number of people of any group, it becomes more difficult
to find all these characteristics within one group so it
becomes necessary to go outside traditional group boun—
daries and develop relationships with several groups.
Examples at Pleasanton are numerous.

Take the Family, for instance, a group of Mexican

women. I asked one of its members, Veronica, about its

membership and she told me that it's not just for Mexicans

123

because there weren't enough at Pleasanton. "Anybody
who likes what we like can join us," she told me. The
Family consisted of about 12 Mexican women, 4 white
women, and 1 black woman. The group shared clothing and
room keys, watched TV together, ate together, disclosed
their personal lives to each other, and relied on each
other for emotional support.

Dating, too, crosses traditional boundaries in a
small population.

Do your friends here ever get down on you for
dating a black woman? (asked to a white male)

No, not really, I don't know what'd happen out-

side but here you make do. Know what I mean?

If you put yourself on front street someone

always says something. But you learn to live with

it. We all do.
The incidence of mixed racial dating among Hispanic,
Oriental, and American Indians was more because of
their fewer ethnic numbers. Among blacks and whites,
however, because they were one-fourth and one-half of
the pOpulation, respectively, dating was mostly intra-
racial. However, as can be sensed in the above quote,
inter-racial dating between whites and blacks when it
occurred was accepted.

Group activities in motion is another way to

observe what Warden Garrison is suggesting about the

‘benefits of a relatively small, heterogeneous inmate

population like Pleasanton's. At unit parties and dances

124

a mix of ethnic, education, and poor to rich inmates work
on decorations, printing invitations, setting up stereos,
serving cokes, setting up tables, dancing, kissing, and
hugging. So many admitted to me how amazed they were
that they got involved with a coke and cookie party.

"I'm so used to gettin' buzzed this is a trip," is
typical of how inmates perceived themselves learning

to have a number of relationships and experiences that
they did not have before coming to Pleasanton.

Another obvious display of what happens in a
relatively small and heterogeneous inmate population
can be seen daily in Food Services, where inmates mix
perceptions of their ethnicity, sex, education, and
wealth with a large batch of others with whom they
share bits and pieces of their lives. And for the
staff this means less of the racial and cultural group-
ing with its accompanying defensive and aggressive ten-
sions and pressure groups.

Once the belief in the assumption of other sex
interaction is rooted, other assumptions follow. From
my interviews with department heads, two additional
assumptions emerged which reinforce the coed concept and
relate to policy development and implementation. These
assumptions parallel those expressed by Campbell.

First, an inability to have a heterosexual relationship

xnay be one of the contributing factors to behavior which

125

leads to confinement; and second, deprivation of this
kind of relationship may be one of the more destructive
things about confinement.

Part of my interviews with two department heads
was done together at their request over lunch and they
concurred that:

Pleasanton tries to socialize its inmates into a

lot of things besides sex. If we can get them to
get along with each other we're doing good. I

know from working at Englewood that the younger men
there didn't know how to react with women. You
could tell that by listening to them. They couldn't
get along with their teachers, or any woman in
authority. That's half the population they couldn't
deal with! That's significant to why they were
there. But really what can you do about it when
you don't have women around to teach them how to

get along. Here we can guide them along and do

what their early socialization didn't do.

Over seven months of fieldwork I found that the
nature and extent of homosexuality at Pleasanton is sig-
nificantly less and nonpredatory than what I had read
in research on one-sex prisons. This finding was also
confirmed by cocorrectional Wardens and other Bureau
administrators at the Corrections Conference held at
FCI Terminal Island. They agreed that in cocorrections

(l) homosexuality, particularly violent homosexu-
ality, among males seems to be virtually nonexis-
tent; and (2) that homosexuality among females
(thought to be mostly consensual even in all-
female institutions) is significantly reduced
(Cocorrections Conference Summary, 1977, p. 3).

The preponderance of inmate sexual activity at Pleasanton

is heterosexually oriented. Within the limits of this

126

research some basic information about the nature and
frequency of homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual
adaptations found at FCI Pleasanton are discussed along
with social and psychological factors which influence
the assumptions of particular homosexual, heterosexual,
and bisexual roles, and the process and dynamics on the
phenomenological level of the behavior and actions of

the participants.

Commitment Source as a Critical Variable
The source of an inmate's commitment to FCI
Pleasanton either from the federal courts or transfer
from other federal same-sex correctional facilities is a
factor that not only influences the inmate social system
at Pleasanton including issues of sex and violence,
but also staff's perceptions of inmates and the kinds of
programs and prison controls they design. One unit
manager described these differences from an organiza-
tional control perspective, noting that transfer inmates,
having already tasted "what a real prison was like,"
better appreciate a place like Pleasanton.
Inmates who transfer in are easier to work with
because they know what a Terminal Island or Lompoc
is like. The stabbings, assaults and rapes here
[at Pleasanton] don't happen to the same degree.
They really appreciate a place like Pleasanton.
Inmates who are committed here from court think
this place is jelly. They think it's easy. They

really don't appreciate it. I don't think it's
really hit them that this is the BUREAU OF PRISONS.

127

When this place first opened it was with all trans-

fers. My job was easier then. After six months

I saw a difference with the pool tables and equip-

ment. Transfer inmates took.care of them. Inmates

from the streets didn't appreciate them. . . . My 6

biggest headache is working with court commitments.

At the time of this study, 24% of the woman and

41% of the male inmates were transfered to FCI Pleasanton
from other federal nonsexually integrated prisons.
Almost 70% of the staff interviewed told me that the
source of an inmate's commitment to Pleasanton is a
critical factor in projecting the initial success of the
inmate's adjustment. As in the interview with the Unit
Manager above, staff report that transfer inmates are
more likely to do better at Pleasanton upon arrival than
court—committed inmates. The majority of all staff
expressed value in an inmate's exposure to a traditional
one-sex prison. "If they get a feel that this is what
prison is like, then what's to deter them from coming
back?" one staff person asked me. In his question is
an underlying belief in the notion that incarceration
should be a painful experience to deter criminal beha-
vior. To some extent this attitude can be seen else-
where in the institution. The hole, discussed earlier,
was not perceived by inmates as a negative experience
until structural modifications occurred which made the

hole more like what a prison hole should look like:

bare, secure, minimal, and austere. Part of what the

128

staff believe about correctional reform at Pleasanton is
rooted in the pleasure—pain principle. Until the threat
of pain and prison deprivations overcomes the pleasure
derived from criminal activity, inmates will continue

to return to prison.

Transfer inmates were predominant among a small
number of bisexual and homosexual prisoners. They car—
ried in to Pleasanton experiences in dealing with a one-
sex prison population to which they had already learned
to respond and adapt. Their numbers will be discussed
later in this chapter. The issues concerning us here,
however, are the categories of sexual adaptation they
have helped develop and sustain at Pleasanton. From
their past experiences in one-sex institutions they
have legitimized their homosexual activities as a sexual
adaptation under forced prison circumstances and at
Pleasanton they gather along the way court-committed
inmates who, too, are inclined to engage in homosexual
and bisexual activity.

The Nature and Extent of Homosexgal,
Heterosexuangand Bisexual Inmate
Relations

Any attempt to describe the nature and extent
of homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual inmate rela-
tions is difficult. One problem is that the definition

of these terms varies not only between staff and

129

inmates, but also among members of each of these groups.
A second problem is that not only are all three forms
of sexual behavior considered illegal behavior in prison,
but it is private behavior, and most inmates try to con-
ceal their activities from others.
FCI Pleasanton's policy statement on physical
contact between inmates reads:
Hand holding and arm-in-arm contact is permitted
between male and female inmates. All other physi-
cal contact between male and female inmates is
not acceptable and will be the subject of disci-
plinary action (FCI Pleasanton, Policy Statement
No. 7400.33, Subject: Physical Contact Between
Inmates, September 22, 1976).
As will be discussed, however, not all staff interpret
and enforce the policy similarly. The latitude of dis-

cretion is wide, and hence inmate sexual activity is

considerably more than official records might suggest.

Definitions

Differences between all subjective definitions
of sexual behavior should be kept in mind in consider-
ing the estimates of the incidence of homosexuality,
heterosexuality, and bisexuality made by inmates and
staff. The issue at hand is the degree of tolerance
for the varieties of sexual behavior and how inmates and
staff categorize behavior on the basis of knowledge of
any given act. What might be considered unacceptable

sexual behavior in the outside community may become in

130

prison more or less acceptable. The distinction
between the types and degrees of sexual involvement is
as difficult to make for a prison community as it is in
the outside community. For purposes of this study,
homosexual behavior refers to sexual relations between
members of the same sex; heterosexual behavior refers to
sexual relations between women and men; and bisexual
behavior refers to sexual relations with both women and
men. One reason for the broadness of these behavioral
definitions is that there exists at Pleasanton a greater
degree of tolerance in deciding what is a violation of
institutional rules. Becker has suggested that what is
regarded as deviant depends on more than_the behavior
itself:

[Deviant behavior] is the product of a process

which involves responses of other people to the

behavior. The same behavior may be an infraction of

the rules at one time and not at another; may be

an infraction when committed by one person, but not

when committed by another; some rules are broken

with impunity, others are not. In short, whether a

given act is deviant or not depends in part on the

nature of the act (that is, whether or not it vio-

lates some rule) and in part on what people do

about it (1963, p. 14).

Inmate definitions of what constitutes homo-
sexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality at FCI
Pleasanton vary considerably. Some inmates believe in
heterosexual relationships to the exclusion of all else.

"You're either straight or you're not!" they would tell

'me when I would ask how they felt about bisexuals. In

131

the most common response from inmates in describing what
actually happens at Pleasanton there exists an assump-
tion that condones homosexuality and under prison circum-
stances bisexuality.

We all know this place isn't real so we experiment.
Try it all! I've made it with guys in my unit you'd
never think would. But they did.

Most everybody here is in to coedding with the other
sex. But still, there's so much time you're locked
down together with your own sex something usually
happens.

And in interviews with staff it is possible to see that
behavior they might condemn on the outside becomes tol-
erable under prison circumstances.

Yea, they [2 female inmates] sit very close, kiss
and embrace. But I wouldn't say they're homosexuals.
Karen seems happily married with a boy and Laura
coeds in here. I think the forced confinement draws
them together. That's all. Nothing more. You
can't get excited over that.

I can't tell them no, not when we put women and men
in here together. It's crazy. This isn't normal
it's bizarre! I can't condemn them for having sex.
We have to expect it or we're fooling ourselves.

I don't know if they're bisexual, homosexual or
whatever. It doesn't pay to know. Just do what

the lieutenant says. Sometimes they're [the inmates]
queers so you're told to write shots. Another lieu-
tenant will tell you to come down on women with men.
It just all depends, you know?

At issue is the interpretation and'categoriza-
tion of certain behavior by staff and inmates. At times
there may be direct evidence Of deviance, for example,
finding a male in a female's room or two women lying in

bed. But more commonly interpretation and categorization

132

arise over indirect evidence such as gossip, rumors, and
stories about an individual, couple, or group. Such
information then forms the basis for what Kitsuse

(1962, pp. 250-53) calls "reprospective interpretation"
of the behavior. Staff review and reinterpret the beha-
vior of female and male inmates and find that hand
holding and walking arm-in-arm, which is permitted by
policy and did not arouse suspicions in the past, may
now be viewed as evidence of a sexual relationship that
has been going on all the while. Once overt display of
affection is defined as meaning more than friendship,
suspicious attention is drawn on the inmates and refer-
ence to particular inmates' sexual activity is common in
staff conversation.

The Prevalence of
Sexual’ActiVity

 

Once having defined what is meant by homosexuality,
heterosexuality, and bisexuality, it is still very dif-
ficult to determine accurately the amount of these
behaviors at FCI Pleasanton. Sex, in general, is a pri-
vate affair and even more private and concealing in prison,
where it is illegal. Some inmates are fearful that staff
will report their sexual activities to their families on
the outside. Other inmates feel that staff knowledge of
their sexual involvement will hurt chances for parole

and draws extra staff surveillance. These concerns, as

133

discussed earlier, are not groundless, for the label of
homosexual or being caught in a heterosexual situation
has important consequences for the inmate. Female and
male inmates learn that violation of Pleasanton's policy
on sexual contact is grounds for transfer to a one-sex
institution, a fate for the majority of inmates who have
never been to prison before that conjurs up notions of
cement walls, fights, sexual assaults, and "doing hard
time."

To be designated "unable to handle a cocorrec-
tions environment" becomes a permanent part of the
inmate's file. It may affect decisions about institu-
tion, security, psychological classification, housing,
work and recreation, and as a violation of prison policy
it calls for an appearance before the unit and institu-
tion disciplinary committees, who will likely order
transfer. To be found guilty means punishment and
labeled a rule violator. For these reasons, homosexuality,
bisexuality, and heterosexuality take place, for the most
part, behind closed doors in remote places with only
the participants knowing what actually happens.

In my effort to judge the number of inmates who
participate in homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual
affairs at Pleasanton, I involved myself with a core of
known homosexuals at Pleasanton. I learned their pro-

cess of "getting it on" but more importantly, I became

134

familiar with female and male homosexuals on a one-to-one
basis and knew the extent to which homosexuality was
active at Pleasanton. Distinguishing between pre-prison
and prison-turnout homosexuals, it appears that about
less than 10% (N-about 25) of the inmates at FCI Pleasan-
ton are pre-prison homosexuals who try to stay homo-
.sexually active during their imprisonment. Talking about
his homosexual involvement at Pleasanton, one of the
pre-prison homosexuals told me:

It's hard for us because the staff know we're gay.

It's in our jacket. So it brings extra police on

us at the slightest hint. But you know Gary

[another inmate]. He's up front with it all and

we get it on quite regularly.

The remaining 90% of the inmates are mostly
heterosexually oriented, with about 10% staying bisexual
in prison. Of this latter group, most are prison-
turnout homosexuals who were transferred to Pleasanton
from one-sex federal prisons. They carry into Pleasan-
ton an already established response to the deprivation
of heterosexual contact and most will continue with both
homosexual and heterosexual activity.

As is being suggested, the most frequent sexual
activity at Pleasanton is between women and men. The
deprivation of heterosexual contact is missing at
Pleasanton. Instead, however, a new deprivation

develops--physical contact between the sexes is limited

to arm-in-arm and hand holding. As inmates in same-sex

135

prisons respond to the deprivations of the other sex,
inmates at Pleasanton respond and adapt to the policy
limitations regulating sexual conduct between the sexes.
Inmate comments in this regard are revealing:

How in the hell can you put men and women in here
together and expect nothing to happen?

This is like giving a kid a sucker and saying don't
lick it.

This place is cruel. It's in violation of my con-
stitutional rights. It's cruel and unjust punish-
ment.

What do they expect you to do? I met my girl in
here a few months ago and we're really in love.

We plan to be together after release in spite of
the parole board's rule against associating with
other felons. But now, though, what do we really
do? We have to sneak off like little kids and do
it in some corner. All the time you wonder if
you're going to get caught so we never really enjoy
it. We're relieved after but emotionally still
charged. You can't be up front here. You have to
stay low. You can't give 'em [the staff] a hint at
what you're doing or you'll get shipped. They put
you in here and expect you to stay virgin. It's

no different in here than out there, you know that.
But they think they can make it different. Bull
shit! All they Can do is make this place more
repressive by having us in here together. They put
you in a situation to break the policy. So sure
you'll get screwed. I've been down before [meaning
to be in prison] and sure coed is better but shit
they got to give and take or else they're making
new places no better than old places.

Inmate and staff reaction is quite forceful in suggest-
ing that cocorrections policy against sexual contact may
be merely replacing the sexual deprivation in one-sex
prisons with the myth that women and men can be con-

fined together in an open institution believing they can

136

coexist apart from sexual involvement. There is no
right or wrong to this issue per se, but rather varying
perspectives on cocorrectional policy with the dominant
perspective being that the total benefits to each female
and male inmate include developing relationships apart
from sexual ones that this population of inmates cur-
rently lacks the skills to do. As one staff suggested,
These kids can have sex anytime, anywhere, with
anybody or with themselves. That's a very easy
thing to get in this society today. It's a lot
harder though to talk, to get along, to become
empathetic, to take on social skills, to learn
independence or to make it on your own. That's what
I see us doing in here. I'm not trying to keep
these kids from having sex. I'm trying to teach
them to get along, to respect each other. I think
controlling their sexual limits is only our way of
letting them know that we too are working within a
society that would frown on open sex in prison.

This staff person's attitude reflects one of the
major cocorrections assumptions, namely, to teach inmates
that other relationships besides physical and sexual ones
do exist.

Techniques and Places
for Prison Sex

Data gathered from observation and interviews
with staff and inmates suggest that homosexual and hetero—
sexual behavior at FCI Pleasanton is characterized by
the need to employ a variety of sexual techniques,

including simulation of intercourse, and breast and

genital fondling. Although banned by policy, the

137

movements of intertwined legs can produce a climax in
both partners (inmates claim). The salient score for
inmates, then, is to figure out where and under what
circumstances it is possible to engage in sex. Staff
surveillance and negative sanctions are designed to dis-
courage sexual activity. Opportunities for intimacy are
learned and require the cooperation and silence of other
inmates, characteristics not often found in a prison
population of first-time youthful offenders. Still,
however, sex abounds and all the staff surveillance and
negative sanctions are less effective deterrents than
casual observation suggests for several reasons. First,
inmates outnumber staff. Second, ". . . we're [inmates]
in here 24 hours a day thinking of ways to win. Staff
are only here 8.” Third, threat of punishment is less
valued than the demonstration of affection. And fourth,
inmates can always find "lookers," as they are sometimes
called, who will help them and keep secret their friends'
sexual meetings.

The most popular place for inmate sex at Pleasan-
ton corresponds to the most popular place for sex in the
outside community--on one's bed, in one's room. The
single room design of Pleasanton, with each inmate having
her/his own room key and staff's tolerance of covering
the 4 by 12 inch glass panel in the wood doors from

inside with a sign, material or something decorative,

138

adds to an inmate's perception of one's own room as pri-
vate and the most frequent locale for sexual activity.
It is especially convenient for homosexual activity for
inmates residing in the same unit. To the outsider it
may seem problematic for a woman or man wanting to
rendezvous in the room of the other, where the partner is
an obvious standout in an all-too-familiar group of
same-sex residents. However, inmates learn to utilize
a close friend to move the unit officer elsewhere in
the unit while the other-sex partner is brought in.
I learned of this practice in detail from one couple
who were spending time in the hole for being caught in
her room. "It's nothing new. It's just we're more
careful about doing it than staff are about noticing
it." I asked them about the frequency of their meetings
and the male told me that for the past four months they
have alternated weekly going to each other's rooms.
"I think our batting average is high," he concluded,
adding they plan to continue with their sexual rendezvous.
I asked him how they got caught and he felt they had
been snitched off by a jealous inmate.

Besides an inmate's room, heterosexual relations'
Lhappen in the weight room and in various service and
industries buildings and bathrooms such as education,
vocamional training, food services, chapel, and janitors'

closets. There are also those inmates (so they claim)

139

who copulate in the dark evening a few hundred feet from
the heavily trafficed compound walkways despite the
efforts of staff to prevent them. Inmates know that
there are not enough stafftx>supervise each inmate con-
stantly, and with that in mind, lovers will risk sex
when the demonstration of affection is socially more
valued than the denial of it.
Social-Psychological Bases of
Sexual Role Differentiation

In the foregoing pages I have reported from my
observations and interviews that heterosexuality is the
major sexual adaptation employed by women and men at
FCI Pleasanton. Relative to its resemblance with the
outside world, a sexually integrated prison is a better
social environment. An examination of homosexuality in
this setting contrasts sharply with the relative impor-
tance homosexuality assumes in a same-sex prison environ-
ment. None of the butch types, femmes, stud broads, and
drags that arise in one-sex prison settings developed at
Pleasanton. The few stud broads and male queens that
were imprisoned at Pleasanton were transfers from single-
sex prisons where they had either been assaulted or were
in fear for being so.

Other issues like prostitution and pimping at
Pleasanton are likely more rumor than fact. My most

valued inmate sources found no basis for the existence

140

of regular inmate pimps or prostitutes operating at
Pleasanton. I learned from staff about several female
inmates with prostitution histories and I asked these
women about the frequency of prostitution at Pleasanton.
Three out of five I talked with claimed it doesn't exist
and the remaining two described it happening only occa-
sionally and with a payoff mostly for heroin. All of the
five described the inmate population at Pleasanton as
"just too immature. You don't sell it to kids. They
tell their mommies,” one woman told me. The same woman
also admitted that she sold her sex to male inmates at
Pleasanton only about three times in her five months
there. "The first time it was just for marijuana. That
was before I learned who had it. But for heroin though,
that's a bigger cost and sex is a goin' price." She
estimated three other women she knew who were prosti-
tutes on the streets before their imprisonment at Pleasan—
ton were probably no more sexually active than she. "Any
others here who say they are are not up front with you

at all," she said, evaluating the prostitution issue at
Pleasanton. When I asked her about pimping she said
emphatically "no." "There's nobody here who can handle
me or anybody like me. We all just kind of do it alone,"
she added. A mix of factors like the youth of the inmates

committed on drug charges, first offender types, the

141

availability of sex, and a majority of white, middle-
class offenders makes regular pimping and prostitution

unlikely.

The Dynamics of Prison Sex

 

By dynamics I refer to the analysis of influ-
ences involved in the movement and processes of sexual
behavior over an interval of time. Until further
research is conducted in cocorrections, the present talk
is more a careful description than sophisticated analy-
sis, although what is described is organized in terms of
an analytical scheme, namely phenomenology.

Depending upon the source of commitment to FCI
Pleasanton, inmates hear about Pleasanton's unique coed
inmate population from either their judge and attorney
or the grapevine at other federal correctional facili-
ties.

New inmates to Pleasanton are told that the
sexually integrated inmate population is an experiment
in the Federal Bureau of Prisons system. "If too many
of you get caught in compromising situations, then the
experiment fails," inmates are generally told in orien-
tation. Inmates themselves are outspoken with other
inmates and assertive in lending advice and information
to new commitments who might be candidates for a homo-

sexual, heterosexual, or bisexual affair. On plenty of

142

occasions I watched one particular homosexual inmate
carry some of his commissary items to new residents in
his unit. On several of these occasions our eyes caught
and as if the inter-subjective process of what he was
doing was clear we would smile and nod as he passed.

On other occasions he openly told me that before certain
immates left, he "planned to have them."

Most inmates arrive at Pleasanton with some
exposure to the folklore of prison homosexuality. The
majority of all inmates have served some jail time
besides the one-third who have transferred in from other
federal facilities. For the majority, however, notions
of prison homosexuals and violent homosexual rapes
make the prospect of imprisonment frightening. Some are
fearful of homosexual pressure and associations. Others
who hear homosexuals discuss the satisfactions of their
sexual orientation become concerned over what their own
reactions to homosexual advances might be.

The pains of imprisonment focus on anxieties
about homosexuality and the loss of family and friends
as first-time offenders arrive at Pleasanton. I made it
a point to talk with as many new commitments to Pleasan-
ton as possible about their losses and initial reactions
to Pleasanton. They would tell me that their first few
weeks at Pleasanton are characterized by a host of

deprivations of which the most serious is loss of contact

143

with one's family and friends. The deprivations of

goods and services, security, autonomy, and heterosexual
contact, so typical and reported in the literature on
large single-sex prisons, they reported as absent at
Pleasanton. The loss of family and friends, however,

for this age group is no less serious than the other
deprivations are in traditional prison settings. The
pressure to respond and adapt to this loss of family

and friends starts almost immediately upon arrival. A
number of critical incidents occur which put the new
inmate in a position to rely on peers. Inmates find

they need the information, advice, attention, and support
of other inmates in their first few weeks at Pleasanton
that many inmates are wanting to provide. For example,
inmates learn the physical layout of the prison from

each other and the identification of staff. As the first
few weeks are orientation, inmates need other inmates for
advice on where to go and whom to look for. Staff
encourage this inmate network, if only by default for

not making the introductions themselves. Inmates also
learn from other inmates about places, times, and days
for clothing issue, commissary sales, recreation, visit-
ing, mailing procedures, and telephone calls. Soon they
learn about the staff from inmates and whom they can and
cannot befriend. And similarly, they learn about the

availability of sex from other inmates. They learn who

144

coeds with whom. They develop a sense of the lasting-
ness of coed partners. They recognize new faces or they
hear about them in conversation. They find the process
of dating comparable to that system operating in the
outside community. A time for knowing each other and
the exchange of personal goods and services is a broad,
two-step process in the Pleasanton dating system. The
use of material goods in the dating period includes the
giving of services like laundry, ironing, and food
preparation.

It is not clearly known whether the limitations
on sexual contact are more clearly recognized as time
served increases. But it can be said, however, that
during the first few weeks at Pleasanton the frustra-
tions of the limitation on sexual contact are only one
of the many frustrations and it is during this time that
the tendency for prison homosexuality is greatest while
inmates learn the sub rosa system of carrying out hetero-
sexual activity.

To test this out I quantified 10 interviews I
conducted in November 1976 with court commitments to
Pleasanton. Seven were male and three were female. All
10 admitted being frightened of Pleasanton and frustrated
over the separation from family and friends. Two of the
seven men freely talked about the potential threat of

homosexual advances and three more men and one woman

145

admitted with more conversation that they too wondered
if they would be approached by a homosexual and how they
would respond, considering themselves heterosexually
oriented. Two of the seven men later admitted being
approached by a hOmosexual with food stuffs or offers of
marijuana or direct homosexual request. One male further
admitted he had wondered what homosexuals were like and
would not see it going against his "manhood" if he tried
it out. These comments not only point to the importance
of quickly becoming adjusted to the flow of inmate activ-
ity at Pleasanton but it raises the issue discussed
earlier that under prison circumstances the degree of
tolerance for sexual experimentation increases.
Heterosexual affairs begin much in the same way.
At first there are problems in reading and understanding
cues that are offered by one or both inmates. Words,
phrases, and actions are tested to see if they are
favorably received, rejected, or modified. Meeting for
meals, spending evenings together, and physical contact
are the norms that inmates expect in a developing hetero-
sexual relationship. One way to view the importance of
these norms is to examine the deviant cases. Quite often
I would hear women complain that the only reason a male
was showing her affection was for sex. "I'm not going
to do that [have sex]. Not now. I just won't jump

into that. But that's expected here. If you don't do

146

that here you might not coed. So I won't coed. I

won't be the only one." Similarly, not eating together
in the dining room or not together in the evening was
often an invitation to other inmates that a heterosexual

relationship had broken up and both inmates are free.

Married Inmates

 

Before ending this chapter, it is necessary at
least to identify the issues affecting the smaller, but
no less important, group of married inmates who too are
adapting and responding in a sexually integrated prison.
The variable of marital status was not part of the insti-
tution's end of quarter or end of year reporting.

Hence, there is no official summary statistic to use.

The best possible statistic comes from data I collected
on imates in questionnaire form on their attitudes

toward the social environment which is not part of this
dissertation. With almost 70% return rate, one of

the items on that form asked inmates to check their
marital status. I found that approximately 28% of the
inmates were married (including common law). Thirteen
percent were women and 15% were men. Married inmates,

in proportion to nonmarried inmates, were in the minority.
They perceived special needs for themselves that a cocor-
rectional institution like Pleasanton was not designed

to deal with.

147

When an inmate first arrives at Pleasanton
she/he, assuming a heterosexual orientation, begins the
first of two broad processes in the inmate coed system,
namely, to get to know other inmates for the purpose of
exchanging goods, services, and dating. Married inmates,
like single inmates, have no way of identifying them-
selves as married (wedding rings I found lost in a hand-
ful of rings among married and nonmarried inmates or not
worn at all) to another inmate's first advances. I'm
told it doesn't come up in all conversations and to do
so one married woman told me, would be personally defen-
sive and offensive to the inquiring inmate. As a result
married inmates feel caught in a bind of either using
their marital status as a way of stopping a coed advance,
or, should the advance continue, facing criticism from
staff for coedding because they are married. Cathy,
Rita, and J.J. are three women in point. Cathy and Rita
are around 26 years old and J.J. is about 20. All three
have children and a spouse they will return to on parole.
Their spouses live too far away and are not regular
visitors. Cathy began this particular two-hour session
over the faults of a cocorrectional system for married
inmates.

The men that come here not married, or how many
come here married and say they're not [Rita and
J.J. nod in agreement], think we should give them

whatever they want. If my husband was here he'd
kill these little bastards. They're so fresh.

148

They really think they're cute. "Oh, come on.

Just once," that's common. "Or, they won't know,"
J.J. added. What is it with them? They're just
kids. I've been through that. I don't want to
deal with it anymore. Outside I wouldn't have to.
We have our house and it's obvious we're married.
Even when I was at TI I didn't have to deal with
these kids. I'd rather be in prison with all women.
The men here [howls by Rita and J.J. ”men?"], well,
if they're men, haven't left puberty and I'd rather
not be around them. That should be my choice not
the Bureau's. There's nothing we can do. The
staff tell us, "Don't let it bother you. Help them
out and teach them." Shit! I'm not their mother.
I don't want anything to do with them. So here we
sit. We play a lot of cards, talk, eat and exer-
cise in the evening. You know we don't walk the
compound like most of the broads here. That's what
we're forced to do. When we go out in the evening
it's for a short walk or to the pill line. That's
about it.

While we talked we played cards. Until the 9 p.m. count
time the three of them talked mostly about their spouses,
their children, their parole plans, and avoiding the boys
at Pleasanton.

Another common response to a sexually integrated
prison was written down and given to me by a 27-year-old
white married women who asked me if we could sit and
talk. After we did I asked her if she would be willing
to write down some of Inn: feelings for me. I guaranteed
her anonymity and that the document would be used for
no other purpose than research. She agreed, and a week

later handed me three written pages.

]49

10—22—76

Help! I Am Being Held Prisoner
in a Nursery School

. I came here from [FCI] Terminal Island
against my will and, I am now in the process of
transfering back . . . most of the "boys" here
are very immature. It's just like being back in
High School. They like to see who can be the "big-
gest" and "baddest." Constantly playing mind games.
They try to win you over to their side and then talk
about you like a "dog." I have been married for
five years now and, I do not have any children of
my own. Most of the time I feel like a mother
image to other prisoner's. I am not ready to take
on this type of relationship with people.

There is really nothing here to offer me as
far as schooling or a vocation. I graduated from
High School and, took business courses in both High
School and Junior College.

It's really a heavy burden to carry when every-
one comes to me looking for a solution to their
problems when I am still search for answers to my

problems.

These four women are expressing similar concerns
and problem areas being in a cocorrectional institution.
They have no way of keeping "boys" away. They find the
male inmates childish and similar to their experiences
with boys in high school, 10 years earlier.

A related issue that concerned me with married
inmates is somewhat moral. What about a married inmate
whose spouse (and children possibly) visit on visiting
days and after the latter leave the inmate is observed
coedding? What problems does it present to the inmate,
her/his marital relationship, and the institution? I
do not have answers to these critical questions. I

Will suggest their importance with some anecdotal

comments but leave the issue for research designed to
investigate these phenomena more thoroughly.

Take Carlos, for instance, a Mexican male with a
common attitude that "I won't coed in here because I'm
married," upon admission to Pleasanton. It took only
three months and Carlos was walking arm-in-arm, eating
males with, and spending his evenings with the same
female inmate for the last three months of this field-
work. On Sundays, Carlos' wife and two children would
drive 20 miles from Oakland and spend the afternoon
visiting. After they left, Carlos coedded. I knew of
at least 10 married inmates who were coedding with an
inmate over a period of several months. Whether their
spouses actually know, I never asked. Indirect evi-
dence, however, suggests they didn't. For instance,
the visiting room officer suggested to me regarding one
married inmate who had been coedding with the same female
inmate for about two months that if his wife every saw or
caught wind of that relationship she'd tear the visiting
room apart. "She already has accused him of playing
around in here. She got so loud about it I had to ask
her to be more quiet and she threatened to have me
removed as the visiting room officer because I'm too
strict." The same officer conjectured the inmate's

Wi fe would tear the other woman's hair out.

151

The issue is very delicate, to be sure. Any
research strategy investigating it must be attuned to
that. To place doubt in the minds of spouses on the
outside by asking questions is not the job of researchers.
Nor would it be fair to legislate morality to married
inmates who coed. This research, however, does suggest
that the issue itself is quite salient and warrants

further investigation.

CHAPTER V

THE ROLE OF COCORRECTIONS IN REDUCING
PRISON VIOLENCE

Definitions and Explanations

Almost without exception, every inmate and staff
interviewed during this seven months of fieldwork com-
mented on what to them was a lack of violent behavior at
FCI Pleasanton. Again, there were no official records
with which to make observation and interview comparisons
on the frequency of official violent behavior. The esti-
mates given here were based on collaboration with staff
and inmates.

The definition of what is violent behavior is
less confusing than definitions of sexual behavior. It
seems to be a more agreed-upon issue because of its overt
harmful and threatening display of behavior. One Asso-
ciate Warden offered me this definition of violent beha-
vior: "It is an attempt to do bodily harm with fists,
knives, mugs, or throwing a blanket over and beating
someone up." The element of "doing bodily harm" was
central to how most staff and inmates defined violent

behavior.

152

153

The amount of violent or assaultive behavior at

FCI Pleasanton during this fieldwork was probably no more
than 12 to 15 incidents. By comparison with one-sex
prisons, the Associate Warden reported,

It's not all so significant here. The introduction

of cocorrections makes you play cultural games not

prison games. The game to play here is show off

in front of the other sex. When that gets out of

hand, and you know it sometimes does, you just step

in and say excuse me and that settles it.
Other staff generally agreed with this description of
the nature of the fights that broke out at Pleasanton.
The majority of all the fights that I knew about were
over dating. The majority of these were among male
inmates. Talking about it with one unit officer and
inmate, they agreed that

If this was an all male or female institution,

we'd have assaults over everything. Those persons

have emotional problems and should be moved. Here

though we're all culturally attuned to mixed envi-

ronments like Pleasanton. It's what we're used to.

The atmosphere here lends itself to experiences we

all have daily. In most places [one-sex prisons]

there's a struggle to survive and dominate. In

here it's just to show off over some broad.
This staff member and inmate agreed that the fights
between male inmates at Pleasanton were mostly over
women. The nature of other fights occurred over what
they referred to as "petty incidents" like demanding an
inmate to move in order to see TV better or cutting in

line at Food Services. As far as my observations and

interviews show, there was none of the racial violence

154

or homosexual assaults that are reported in one—sex
prisons. I focused on this issue during my interviews
with staff and in casual conversation with inmates. Some
of the reasons for this, they told me, can be explained
by population characteristics. The majority of inmates
are nonviolent. Their offenses are crimes against
property or drug related, not against persons.7 Their
commitment to Pleasanton is their period of incarceration,
excluding jail time. Their sentences are relatively
short.

A second explanation is structural. The small
physical plant at Pleasanton sets the tone for expected
inmate behavior. Glass and redwood housing complexes
require inmate upkeep, not inmate destruction. The
availability of personal possessions, wearing one's own
clothes, goods and services, and the other sex generate
less tension and violent behavior.

A third reason is the staff complement at Pleasan-
ton. During my interviews with department heads I asked
them if a staff has an effect on inmate violence. The
majority of their responses were affirmative, pointing
out that a high staff-inmate ratio increases the availa-
bility of staff to inmate contact and reduces the poten-
tial for violence to erupt. (Pleasanton is about two
inmates to each staff.) A second feature about the staff

they suggested important for minimizing the potential of

155

inmate violence is the sexual composition of the staff.
Pleasanton, with its 44 female and 99 male employees, is
more able to provide a variety of care, custody, and
control of a sexually integrated inmate population.

As a man I can recognize the groups men form and the
language they use when women are around. I don't
have that insight for women and probably only another
woman is attuned to that. I think men could learn
it but it's more natural for women, so why not
employ them. I know how a man feels about sex.

I've been involved with a few fights myself as a kid
over a girl. So all that I can identify with and
help cut down on those pressures in here before it
becomes violent. I think women add the same stabil-
izing force.

Less agreed on features about the staff's poten-
tial for minimizing inmate violence included issues like
education and years of Bureau experience. About half of
the department heads suggested education exposes one to
cultural variety which is needed in prison work. On the
other hand, some complained that an educated prison staff
is too inconsistent with policy interpretation. A simi-
lar feeling was explained with the variable "years of
Bureau experience" as a potential for minimizing inmate
violence.

If a person is here with over 2; years of Bureau
work, you know he's probably worked in a one sex
prison. That alone generally conditions you to
expecting some kind of assaults to happen. If you
look around you'll see how these transfer staff
try to make Pleasanton like every other Bureau
place. They're the first ones with a list of
"don'ts" for the inmates. These kids need more
than staff saying "don't." That's written around

here everywhere. If we say we are trying to have
them build relationships they didn't have before

156

then our staff must begin to see Pleasanton as a

very unique facility. As it is now you can trans-

fer here with 17 years in at Atlanta and you'll not

be given any kind of special training. I'm not so

sure that a person's experience with the Bureau is

all that critical in minimizing inmate assaults.
Other department heads were not so sure either way.
Most, however, agreed that Bureau experience gives the
staff person the exposure needed to handle inmate vio-
lence. But the issue advanced here is not whether one
can handle inmate violence, but also what can one do in
communicating with inmates to minimize inmate violence.
The issue of communication is discussed in the next
chapter.

A fourth reason for the niminal number of inmate
assaults at Pleasanton I considered one day while sit-
ting and listening to a staff person from Case Management
talk with new inmates about what was expected of them at
Pleasanton and later I asked about it in my interviews.
The staff person emphasized what seemed to me an assump-
tion about the identity of an inmate's self that the
cocorrections innovation was designed to help. This is
not the same as pointing to inmate characteristics dis-
cussed earlier that seem to minimize the tendency for
inmate violence, but rather it is the institution's
attempt at designing programs and policies that reinforce
that image of a nonviolent self.

You're at this particular institution because we

believed you could handle a cocorrections environ—
ment. You already see the freedom you have here

157

but remember that this is still an experiment in

the Federal Prison System. What you do here will

either be to your advantage or not. We designed

this place to get your cooperation. If you or it

fails, it's reasonable to assume you'll go to a one

sex institution.
These inmates are reminded that they are the kinds of
persons who can make it in this setting and live up to
house rules. Some staff could not comprehend my idea of
how an institution generates assumptions about inmate
identity or they had given it little thought. Those who
did agree or those who challenged my explanations admitted
not having considered the issue before. They felt, how-
ever, that the other explanations were more salient in

considering why tension and violence were far less at

Pleasanton.

The Development of the Underworld

 

Goffman tells us, "whenever worlds are laid on,
underlives develop" (1961, p. 305). His point is this:
In every kind of social organization, there are official
expectations as to what the actor Owes the organization.
But the deeper we look in the organization, the more we
find a counter to this theme. We find actors decline in
some ways to accept the official organization's view of
what they should be doing and getting out of the organi-
zation. For example, in most arrangements between formal
and informal organizations where honesty is expected,

there will be deception; where a cherished image of fair

158

mindedness, there will be some unbalanced presentation
of opinions; where credulity, doubt; and where cOOpera-
tion, some resistance. The former are primary or formal
adjustments actors are expected to make in social situa-
tions. The latter are secondary or informal adjustments
viewed on a continuum of tolerance by the actors to the
formal setting. I agree that simply to argue that secon-
dary or informal adjustments arise as makeshift means of
satisfaction when individuals are confined in settings
that deny certain needs is overly reductionistic. But
that has been the sense of the literature that describes
the inmate social system as a mere reaction to the pains
of imprisonment, forgetting, like Goffman reminds us, this
recalcitrance is an essential constituent of the self
(1961, p. 319). As Goffman suggests, this mechanistic
approach fails to explain the importance actors give to
these undercover responses for preservation of the self.
What this chapter attempts is a description of
the inmate underlife at FCI Pleasanton as they encounter
and adapt to sources of tension and strain. Here inmates
do not feel the kind of seclusion, degradation, nor lack
the means of personal expression more commonly found in
single—sex prisons. These conditions exist in our tradi-
tional prisons and in line with their existence the
organization's actions tend to be in keeping with the

individual who warrants these conditions. I am not

159

suggesting that FCI Pleasanton is the correctional utopia
either. The variability in the degree<xfsupport staff
give cocorrections and the organization's expectations and
actions toward the kind of inmate who can benefit from
this kind of cocorrectional setting are two of the closer
influences that impact on inmates and make them wish to
keep their distance and serve their time. That they
don't see themselves as violent individuals is the impor-
tant structure of the self that has consequences for the
ways they handle what to them are tension, strain, and
conditions for violence at Pleasanton.

The conceptual framework for this chapter is
quite shmple. Its simplicity is its biggest advantage.
It follows the conceptual scaffold Goffman (1961) builds
in studying the underlife of a mental hospital. It
focuses on the sources of materials inmates employ in
their informal prison adjustment and some of the places
in which these activities of the underlife occur. I
happened on this conceptual scaffold after considering
these aspects myself in some grounded theory on the
inmate social system. I now turn to the sources of

adjustment inmates employ in prison.

Sources
In almost all social organizations individuals

use the organization's resources in ways that the

160

resources were not originally intended for use. Some of
these makeshift means of satisfaction are more destruc—
tive than others, some are more socially accepted, and

so on. Examples come from mental institutions where, for
example, patients used freestanding radiators to dry
personal clothing they had washed or rolled up pieces of
clothing patients would use between their necks and wooden
benches when lying down (Goffman, 1961, p. 208). And

from prisons we learn about carving weapons out of uten—
sils or exploiting other inmates and staff. In some cases
the resource may be reconstituted into a new form or in
other cases it may just be an illegitimate use of the
context.

I consider now a set of those inmate activities
that imply more of an interaction with the formal world
of the institution. Here we have an innovator who
exploits the legitimate prison means-ends schema for
private ends. Goffman refers to this as "working the
system." Inmates at Pleasanton call this "playing the
game." The means of playing the game profited usually
only the individual. Any kind of collective means of
playing the game at Pleasanton was not too common. Some
staff claimed cocorrections as the influence that breaks
down collective game playing. Others considered the

phenomenon more of an individual enterprise. I suggest

161

that both are equally true, depending upon one's per-
spective.

Some of the most frequent ways inmates at Pleasan-
ton played the game for personal gain included faking an
illness and getting hospital clearance for a lay-in;
stockpiling their private food supply with what they could
take from the kitchen during their first ISO-hour manda-
tory kitchen assignment; demanding and receiving food
preparation kosher-style; getting "the pill" on the claim
of menstrual irregularity; befriending the evening and
morning unit correctional officer with a friendly chat,
food stuffs, or a game of pool or cards which was illegal
activity for the unit officer; the development of a sexual
or romantic involvement with correctional officers; or
easily convincing (inmates claimed) the psychiatrist of
the need for psychiatric medication. In these cases
inmates had what was necessary to play the game: knowl-
edge and timing. For instance, hoping to get some
"downers" or other psychiatric medication, the inmate
knew that she/he would have to see her/his psychologist
and demonstrate a need for medication past the usual
counseling type of psychological help available. And,
if the drugs were wanted soon, timing was important as
the psychiatrist consulted at Pleasanton only one day a
week. Another instance where timing and knowledge were

important for females was in getting access to "the pill."

162

Approximately 50% of the female inmates at Pleasanton
were on the pill. Legitimate medical authorization for
the pill was to be for parole or furlough and to develop
menstrual regularity. The latter, however, was frequently
claimed (as female inmates admitted) as a prelude to
engaging in prison sex and prevention of pregnancy.

Another interesting way inmates played the game
had to do with their assOciations and contacts with com-
munity volunteers. It was likely that inmates could plead
the prison routine to community volunteers and have the
latter exhibit empathy. Inmates also considered commu-
nity contact a way to forget the prison culture and
temporarily disassociate themselves from their inmate
status.

Goffman reports that the most important way
mental hospital patients worked the system was by obtain-
ing a workable assignment, ". . . some special work
that alone could make available certain secondary
adjustments—-and often a whole set of them" (1961,

p. 219). Such assignments could be sought out with these
personal gains in mind or develop after the assignment
was obtained and then act as a reason to hold on to the
assignment. In either case, having a work assignment was
demanded of every inmate by the institution and choosing
the one with most personal gain was important to the

inmate. From other inmates, inmates learned what work

163

implies to the official prison world. Coupled with the
fact that the institution demands inmates work, one learns
to develOp a sense of working within that system and
finding work suitable to one's own motives. Unit manage—
ment staff expect cOOperation and a sincere effort on
the part of inmates to work. Inmates talk about giving
this appearance to the institution because it acts as a
buffer between the inmate and the institution's expec-
tations of the inmate. Accepting work assignments with-
out quibbling about the nature and length of the work,
especially for all new inmates who are assigned to a
unit labor pool who are then used wherever their ser-
vices are needed throughout the institution, begins the
development of positive staff attitude to the inmate.
Let me elaborate on the point in this process
that heightens inmates' acceptance of work assignments.
If there is likely to be a product that they themselves
can take advantage of in their work assignment, then the
work is considered more or less favorable and builds on
an inmate's status of herself/himself as playing the
game and winning because personal rewards for the self
are being gained, sometimes and oftentimes illegiti-
mately. Take, for instance, food services. All inmates
work 180 hours in food services. During this time they
avail themselves to increasing their own food supplies

in their rooms. Past the 180 mandatory hours, some

164

inmates request a permanent work assignment in food
services. Some of the rewards are great: eating first,
ample servings, second stashes of supreme food stashed
in one's room, time to prepare one's favorite food,
treating a friend to a specially prepared meal, or extras
given out to friends in the line. Similarly, inmates who
worked landscape found secondary adjustments in "being
able to sit on my duff" (an inmate phrase meaning to
sit back, take it slow, don't hurry, relax, etc.).
Inclement weather was considered a personal victory,
not having then to work. Enjoyment of the outdoors,
getting a tan, keeping up on what's happening on the
compound were still other secondary adjustments to land-
scape work assignments. Other examples could also be
found in laundry and clothing issue, driving heavy
machinery, working in the Business Office or working with
Case Management, or making out the staff working schedule.
In all these cases it seems that if the inmate worker is
able to avail herself/himself of the fruit of her/his
labor, especially if it is legitimately derived, then
the structure of the self an inmate conveys to the staff
implies congruence with the assumptions staff make about
inmate behavior in a cocorrectional setting.

Pleasanton being a coed facility, as it might be
expected, work assignments give inmates a chance for

legitimate contact with the other sex, for some a

165

secondary-type adjustment gain relative to the expected
heterosexual deprivation they thought they would encounter.
Sometimes the work assignment would require the inmate to
be in the living unit of the other sex. When this hap-
pened the inmate became the object of sexual advances,
given small foodstuffs like crackers and cookies, became
privy to secluded information on how the other sex was
living or how one particular inmate appeared and, in
general, became the object of much attention. These,
then, are some of the sources of materials inmates at
Pleasanton employed in their secondary adjustment to
prison life in a cocorrectional institution. As was
stated earlier, the character of adjustments in a place
like FCI Pleasanton where life really is not too secluded
away from family and friends; where inmates are not seen
as a degraded class of citizens through the institution's
assumptions of the kinds of inmate selves that are con-
fined there; and where ownership of personal possessions
for personal expression, heterosexual contact, security
and the availability of goods and services are perceived
high by inmates and assumed so by staff, then the need to
rely on an inmate social system that rejects its rejec-
tors and counters the pains of imprisonment by advancing
the concept of inmate solidarity which in one-sex prisons
is all too often built right in the institution's assump-

tions and identities about its inmates, affects the

166

character for individual rather than collective secondary
adjustment. In turn, the acquisition and maintenance of
this individual rather than collective structure of the
self is an important notion to consider when understanding
and comparing the nature and frequency of violent behavior

between correctional institutions.

Places

Having discussed some of the elementary sources
of material for secondary adjustment at Pleasanton, I
now turn to an analysis of the setting, for if the
development, acquisition, and maintenance of these activi-
ties of underlife are to occur, then they must occur in
some place of the institution. The range of places
inmates have control varies from free places to group
territories to personal places. The first are areas
inmates share with any other inmate in which the indi-
vidual feels as safe as is possible in the setting. The
second, group territories, are shared with a select few.
And personal places are those private rights or claims to
space that an inmate shares with a select few only by
her/his invitation. Again, the point being investigated
is the relationship between the character of the places of
secondary adjustment and its relationship with tension

and violence.

167

Goffman tells us that in many institutions, each
inmate tends to find her/his world divided into three
parts. These are spaces that are off limits (out of
bounds), open surveillance space, and free places——areas
where staff did not know of their existence, or knew but
either stayed away or tacitly relinquished their authority
when entering them (1961, pp. 227-30). Similar places
or regions could be found at Pleasanton to varying
degrees;

First, there was space at Pleasanton that was
out of bounds. Here mere presence was the form of con-
duct that was actively prohibited and seen as cause for
a disciplinary report, ". . . except when they are on
official work details" (Pleasanton Policy Statement
Number 20001.5, Subject: Inmate Boundaries). For
example, as the second lZ—foot cyclone fence was being
erected in November-December 1976, rules were posted
in the living units that made "construction areas out of
bounds" unless inmates were part of an authorized work
group. And similarly, policy to keep men and women away
from each other's living units banned their presence not
only behind the living units but clearly marking with a
yellow painted line on the ground the point past which
the other sex could not go, presumably as both security
and custody and chastity measures. So, too, every unit

was out of bounds for inmates not living there.

168

The second kind of general space in total institu-
tions is surveillance space, the region inmates need no
special excuse for being in, but where she/he is sub-
ject to staff supervision. This area included most of
the facility at Pleasanton.

The third kind of total institution space Goffman
identifies in total institutions is free space——areas
ruled by less than usual staff authority. These are
the spaces that inmates search out for secondary adjust-
ment. Some are more successful than others in finding
free space. The majority are constrained by the rigid
out-of-bounds policy that foils the search for finding
free space. The latter, by virtue of their incessant
inmate preoccupation, will be discussed here. Often,
free spaces are characterized by their marked reduction
in inmate population density, contributing to features
of peace and quiet.

Free places at Pleasanton were often employed
for either partaking in specifically taboo activities or
for no other purpose than getting away from it all.
Thus, the chapel-multipurpose building provided such a
place for inmates who finagle a staff person to unlock
the door in order to practice their music, rehearse a
number, audition, or practice some upcoming activity.
During such times, the chapel area was perceived with

inmate feelings of relaxation, solitude, and

169

self-importance, in contrast to the sense of the flurry
of activity happening out on the compound. Like Goffman
describes about similar free places patients employed in
his study of a mental hospital, "Here [in free places]
one could be one's own man” (1961, p. 231).

A few other free places inmates employed, though
not as secluded as the chapel area, were the indoor
recreation area and the visiting room during nonvisiting
hours. The indoor recreation area, although enclosed by
glass walls giving staff from the outside direct obser-
vation of activities within, the general absence of
staff's presence inside provided inmates with a feeling
of a free turf. Here inmates could not flagrantly par-
take in illegal activities for too long a time in fear of
some staff stopping in or standing up close to look in,
but the indoor recreation room did draw a large number of
inmates and large numbers alone shielded illegal activi-
ties happening in the background. Mostly the illegal
activities were kissing, fondling and sensual in nature
for the participants. Still, it was behavior that
couldn'ttmadisplayed with openness and relaxation else-
where.

Another free place for some inmates was the visit-
ing room in the administration building, which doubled
as a staff cafeteria for brown-baggers and a routine place

for staff conversation. Only inmates who worked in that

170

building or had a visitor were to be found there. How-
ever, inmates were quite willing to hang around this area
to get some air-conditioning, to get out of the rain, to
walk with a friend who was conducting business, or to chat
with the control room officer who, if an inmate was
lucky enough, would ask the inmate to purchase a cup of
coffee from the vending machines inside and possibly earn
a coffee or coke for himself/herself. Officially, inmates
were not supposed to hang around these areas and were
often reprimanded for doing so. However, a few inmates,
well known to the staff, some having official business
there and others not, frequented the area sometimes press-
ing their claim. A

Some types of work assignments also provided
inmates with free places. This was so with inmates whose
work skills took them on building roofs where they could
dally to stay away from it all below or engage in some-
thing illegal like smoking marijuana. Similarly, inmates
who operated machinery outside the fence enjoyed free
spaces that gave them the secondary adjustment of peace
and quiet and the opportunity for engaging in illicit
activity. Although the acquisition of a free space was
incidental to the work assignment itself, it was appar-
ently the main gain of Some work assignments. One

inmate recounted his work day in this regard to me:

171

You know what I did today [laughing]?
NO. What?

First I went to town with my boss and got out of
here a few hours. That's not so bad, huh?

No. It sounds good. What else?

By then we came back and it was almost lunch. So

before lunch, I've been workin' on the roof above

the women's unit, so I went back up there. I told

my boss I was checking something out. He's okay.

Then I got high up there. [Laughs.]

You're still high?

Yea. I didn't go to lunch. Didn't want to handle

all those people so I came back here [in his unit],

drank some tea and listened to some tunes. Not so

bad in here if you know how to do it.
Clearly the above inmate was not only able to develop
sources of secondary adjustment, but also had an array
of available places in which to carry out his adjustment
to Pleasanton. The character of this process is above
all else individual. He claimed to me on other occa-
sions that he shared the sources of his adjustment, pri—
marily his marijuana, with his girlfriend.

Relative to our concern about tension and vio-
lence, Goffman offers this hypothesis, which I find
equally true for Pleasanton: "It may be suggested that
the more unpalatable the environment in which the indi-
vidual must live, the more easily will places qualify as
free ones" (1961, p. 238). To the extent that free

places at Pleasanton were held by few inmates with some

kind of status accorded them by staff, as the examples

172

just cited, suggests to this writer after much conversa-
tion with inmates that the Pleasanton environment, on
the whole, is palatable and the need for free space out-
side one's personal territory is minimal. The depriva-
tions experienced in traditional correctional settings
conjur needs for the variety of space Goffman suggests.
However, the environment at Pleasanton is claimed by‘
staff and inmates to be more palatable.

Like in Asylums, group territories seemed very
little developed in Pleasanton. When they did appear they
are more appropriately described and explained as a
group's extension of rights regarding use of a particu-
lar space that is legitimately accorded all inmates. The
most obvious in this regard at Pleasanton was the ethnic
differentiation between unit TV rooms. Here, black
inmates illegally extended their rights to make one TV
room in each unit a black inmate TV room, while white,
Hispanic, and Indian inmates illegally extended their
dominance and control to make the second TV room in each
unit their territory. There were in this separateness no
accounts of assaultive or racial violence. To be sure,
inmates crossed these territorial boundaries; some were
invited, some were not. In the case of the latter, some-
times a comment like "Your room is filled?" or "What you
doin' here?" was made to the transgressing inmate with

the aim of embarrassing her/him to leave, not necessarily

173

to result in verbal or physical confrontation. There
were, in fact, strong sentiments against forcing anyone

to leave either TV room. "I think we all know that if we
bring the heat down on someone else, it'll come down on
all of us. This place is just too small and too unsophis-
ticated for that kind of action," one inmate related to
me. His comment was supported with "Yeas" and affirma-
tive head nods from a racially mixed group over lunch.

One unit manager explained that the ethnic differentiation
in the TV rooms is not something for the institution to
destroy without a valid basis in knowing it's bad.

I see what happens in these TV rooms quite like
what I see happen outside. Blacks have their bars,
whites have their bars. Whites go to their dances,
blacks go to their dances. They're separate yes.
But they are equal. Hey, why should that be any
different than our prisons on the whole being
sexually separate but supposedly equal? And the
same identification groupings are found among
Indians, Mexicans and all ethnic groups. But our
first reaction in prison when they develop is to
extinguish them. No, that's wrong. If we're giv-
ing these kids an environment that's supposed to be
different than at any other prison, then we need to
carefully scrutinize those ethnically balanced TV
rooms. I don't really see what goes on in them as
similar to the racial tension that fosters prison
riots. But a lot of us here are scared of that so
we'll react from our guts. That's wrong. That's
what the old-liners will want us to believe and
before long they'll have everybody together in one
big TV room and the sense of togetherness and pri-
vacy often associated with TV viewing will be

gone and inmates will start to look for those emo-
tions elsewhere rather than watch TV in an audi-
torium. That's just how our old prisons are run.
This place is supposedly run different. So it's
important we analyze those situations [pointing to
the TV rooms] carefully. If you think I'm wrong,

174

just consider this: observe what programs blacks

watch most often and note at the same time what the

other TV room is watching.
That I was unable systematically to make these observa-
tions is unfortunate. That I walked between TV rooms and
noted different shows more times than I noted the same
show being watched, however, is hereby noted for future
observation.

Why no racial violence in all this? The issue
is complex but some of the more critical variables for
FCI Pleasanton include the small number of inmates who
share fewer characteristics with their own group, inmate
demography including a propensity not to be a violent or
assaultive kind of person to begin with, structural
accommodations with fewer prison deprivations, a sexually
integrated inmate and staff population, staff demography,
and an organization that implies a nonviolent conception
of the inmate and generates assumptions about inmate iden-
tity and inmate behavior in the development and imple-
mentation of programs and policies.
A final place to which inmates can retreat

to develop some comforts, control, and reciprocity that
they share with no other inmate except by invitation is
their own rooms, what they feel to be their personal
territory. Unlike other correctional institutions and

mental facilities, the personal territory at Pleasanton

is more private. There are no large wards or multi-inmate

175

cells. Terminology is different. At Pleasanton inmates
are assigned to a room and given a key to the door. Once
obtained, a room could be stocked with objects that lend
personal satisfaction to an inmate's life. Pin-up photos
from Playgirl and Playboy, radios, illegally made speak—
ers, books, journals, other popular magazines, candy,
teas, honey, brown sugar, avocadoes, warm pies, steaks,
potato chips, cookies, crackers, reworked hanging space
for clothes, photographs of family and friends, birthday
and other occasion cards, makeshift room dividers, prison
certificates, plants, macrame hangers, posters, Indian
spreads adorning the walls or ceiling, humorous comic
strips--these were some of the objects brought in by
inmates, many of them illicit and subject to being con-
sidered nuisance contraband by some staff more than by

others.

Some Final Notes on Violence at Pleasanton

The study of the prison underlife at Pleasanton
cannot be studied with the same social system perspec-
tive developed in other prison studies. Not only are
the institutions themselves radically different in archi—
tecture and design that affect the flow of that system,
but the people in these contrasting scenarios seem dif-
ferent. Their youth, their criminal backgrounds, their

shorter sentences, their self—images, and the structures

176

of their beings vary from the population characteristics
that describe inmates in other prison settings. Ordi-
narily these conditions are taken for granted as part of
one's involvement with the official prison world. Seeing
them twisted, turned, and bent out of their relations with
staff through "playing the game," we can see their impor-
tance anew.

Traditional prison problems of assaultive beha-
vior, tension, and uneasiness that an experienced staff
person can claim "to feel in the air" in a traditional
prison setting are all but negligible at Pleasanton to
that contrasting degree. There is instead an adjustment
to prison life at Pleasanton that stresses individualism,
being alone, and doing your own time.

The prOper study of FCI Pleasanton falls midway
between several correctional issues. The first is the
old model of being alone, doing your own time, talking
with no correctional guards. In this kind of system
peddlers, merchants, and gorillas developed in male
institutions. The second, a more recent development in
corrections, can be seen in prisons with inmate unions.
In these settings there is more talking with correctional
guards in opposition to the old model. Solidarity exists
but it is benign. You recognize that the peOple you are
with are not really your sisters or brothers. Between

these two, FCI Pleasanton stands midway, tugging and

177

pulling at both ends. Inmates at Pleasanton talk with
staff. They are encouraged to do so, and the structure
maintains that arrangement. However benign, though,
there is no inmate collectivism. If anything, Pleasan—
ton reinforces traditional individualistic patterns of
doing your own time.

Furthermore, there appears to be in all these
adjustment patterns undertakings to lose one's self, to
escape temporarily the reality of being in prison.

When staff complain that these kids don't realize this

is the BUREAU OF PRISONS and when inmates describe and
explain Pleasanton like a boarding school, or a vacation,
I begin to agree that inmates here quite often find ways
to escape the reality of their confinement. Systemic,
individual, and implementational conditions in Pleasanton
make more probable a reduction in the kind of assaultive

behavior commonly found in single-sex prisons.

CHAPTER VI

INMATE—STAFF COMMUNICATION AND RELATIONS

Correctional administrators often find that
abstract analyses of prison social organization present
an obtuse view of relationships between staff and
inmates. However, to develop principles that explain
the varieties of human behavior in a complex organiza-
tion we sometimes start with a broad theoretical base.
Applying them to the everyday world, then, we learn how
these abstractions must be qualified to fit the particu-
lar situation. Take, for instance, Erving Goffman's
point when speaking collectively of prisons and mental
hospitals; he is really addressing the binary character
of total institutions in general.

In total institutions there is a basic split
between the large managed group, conveniently called
inmates, and the small supervisory staff. Inmates
typically live in and have restricted contact with
the outside world outside the walls; and are socially
integrated with the outside world. Each grouping
tends to conceive of the other in terms of narrow
hostile stereotypes, staff often seeing inmates as
bitter, secretive and untrustworthy, while inmates
often see staff as condescending, high-handed and
mean. Staff tends to feel superior and righteous;
inmates tend, in some ways at least, to feel infe-
rior, weak, blameworthy and guilty.

Socialized mobility between the two strata is
grossly restricted; social distance is typically
great and often formally prescribed. Even talk

178

179

across the boundaries may be conducted in a special
tone of voice. . . . Although some communication is
necessary between inmates and the staff guarding
them, one of the guard's functions is the control
of communication from inmates to higher staff
levels. . . . Just as talk across the boundary is
restricted, so, too, is the passage of information,
especially information about the staff's plans for
inmates.

All these restrictions of contact presumably
help to maintain the antagonistic stereotypes. Two
different social and cultural worlds develop, jog-
ging alongside each other with points of official
contact but little mutual penetration (1961,
pp. 18"21).

The broad base is useful. Applying it to the
Pleasanton facility, we can locate some of the same fea-
tures of total institutions to which Goffman makes men-
tion, while others seem absent. (hue of the features
Pleasanton shares with other total institutions is
reference to the large managed group as inmates and the
smaller supervisory group as staff. Inmates live inside
their fences and have restricted contact with the outside
world. Pleasanton staff work eight-hour shifts and are
socially integrated into the outside world. All aspects
of inmates' lives are conducted in the same place and
under the same authority. Inmates' day-to-day routines
are carried on in the immediate company of 250 other
inmates, most of whom are treated alike and are required
to do similar activities together. Daily activities are

scheduled around times of official counts. Where Plea-

santon is less on the continuum of total institutions

180

may be observed to be in the arena of day-to-day staff—
inmate contact. Talk across the staff-inmate boundary
is not so restrictive. Inmates are generally included
in making decisions about their fate. In fact, staff
interpret the communication between themselves and
inmates as a rather unique feature about Pleasanton.
The organization of that system of communication con-
cerns us here.
The Organizations of Staff-
Inmate Communication

The literature on total institutions suggests
there are three main ways in which communication between
staff and inmates is organized. The first is by formal
arrangements between staff and inmates; the second by
inmate pressure; and the third by informal inmate-staff
contacts. The focus here is to test these out at FCI

Pleasanton.

Formal Arrangements

 

The major way in which communication between
inmates and staff is organized is through formal arrange—
ments deliberately created for conducting communication
between staff and inmates. These arrangements are
countless and are most meaningful to the prison career of
inmates who are looking to parole. Some of these include

casework interviewing, classification testing and

 

 

181

interviews, classifcation committee interviews, review
committee interviews, counseling, staff-inmate council,
unit disciplinary and institution disciplinar committees,
as well as individual meetings often called by staff for
an inmate. In these situations staff get information
from inmates on which to base reports to guide others.
These contacts are generally staff initiated, and inmate
participation varies along a continuum of playing the
game.

The human need to communicate, however, beyond
the point of exchanging information with staff, is so
well recognized and so often stated that it becomes trite
to belabor the point. But this ordinariness, this fact
of life that everybody so well knows, becomes significant
when we note that what is so utterly taken for granted
in society is conspicuous for its absence in prison.

The ways in which it is organized at Pleasanton suggest
that although the deprivation of communication is not
altogether resolved here, attempts in this direction are
made by some staff who recognize that real communication
is composed only partly of the exchange of information in
formal arrangements. It is more importantly a sharing

of presence, moods, and feelings. But for most staff,
the usual prison policies screen out these qualitative
conditions and permit only the exchange of information.

They complain of too much to do. They cite prison policy

182

that cautions staff against becoming involved with
inmates. They hear supervisors express distaste for
staff who share their personal lives with inmates. They
perceive the formal arrangements as collecting sufficient
data necessary for them to do their job. Once, in a cor-
rectional services monthly meeting, this issue was being
discussed and the Captain warned the group sternly, "Any
information you give inmates about yourself, well, just
wait and see. They'll use it against you. I advise you
keep your personal life out of your work and deal with

inmates only in the way necessary to get your job done."

Inmate Pressure

 

A second major influence on the way inmate-staff
communication has been organized is the development of
the inmate society. A goal of inmates in traditional
one-sex prisons was to achieve independence from official
pressures and sanctions. In order for inmates to feel
this relief, it was suggested that inmates enforce con-
formity to their own social system by imposing their own
set of sanctions more severe than those used by offi-
cials. Describing this relationship in a prison where
the administration was highly authoritarian in its
approach to inmates, McCleery noted:

Defying formal premises of equality, contradict-

ing official discriminations against recidivists,

lacking familiar symbols of class in position or
possessions, inmate society developed a power

183

hierarchy as sharply defined and immobile as that
of the administration. The survival of that inmate
hierarchy and the process by which it was sustained
depended on a basic rule of the inmate code: Never
talk to a screw.

By constant emphasis on the idea of a rat, and
the use of isolation as a sanction, inmate society
retained its maximal valuation of power and still
restricted the most obvious recourse to power--
the appeal to official sanctions by individuals in
their own interest.

Leadership in the inmate society involved the
ability to explain, predict, or control to some
degree a situation in which others were uncertain
and helpless. Other inmates gained protection and
security by attaching themselves to the leaders
and rendering them the petty tributes that conveyed
status. This type of dominance depended on access
to informal communications, whereas in a free
society in which information is a free good, leader—
ship normally depends on the functions that one per-
forms in meeting the needs and problems of the
group. . . . The problems of the prison society
were not those of food, shelter or management but
of uncertainty and ego threat in an environment of
arbitrary power. Hence, leadership there meant hav-
ing contacts with the "grapevine" and with official
sources. Whether the leaders actually manipulated
power or simply manipulated belief, they were
expected to mediate between the official forces and
their own followers, and were given license to talk
with officials that were never extended to men of
unproven dependability (1960, pp. 57-59).

The communication arrangement in this setting is confined
to a few inmate elites. They occupy positions between
the inmate system and the formal administration system,
bridging them and binding them together. It is said

they are not oriented toward revolt; rather, they

espouse a conservative ideology, stressing maintenance

of the status quo as they become upwardly mobile in these
prison settings, suppressing behavior that might disturb

these arrangements. This illustration of inmate patterns

184

of communication with staff is not so universal, particu-
larly when we look at FCI Pleasanton. The cohesive kind
of inmate social system that employs inmate pressure as
one of the ways in which communication between inmates

and staff is organized was not one of the ways or organiz-
ing communication between staff and inmates at Pleasanton.
No doubt cliques developed and they sometimes appeared to
carry much inmate support, hearing staff refer to the
action as some kind of "code." For the most part, however,
the prisoners at Pleasanton did not move together in the
direction of solidarity. One of the few times during

this fieldwork when inmates collectively reacted (a group
of about 30 inmates) against administrative decision making
by staging a 20-minute sit-in opposing an increase in
inmate boundaries, inmates quickly withdrew themselves
after the Associate Warden spoke with the group and
explained that the gathering was against institution and
Bureau policy. The threat of discipline reports, trans-
fer to one—sex institutions, and the loss of good time
promoted the inmates to break force and accept the new
boundaries. Inmate solidarity at Pleasanton often broke
at the threat of discipline. The inmate population at
Pleasanton cannot be described with the same sense of
cohesiveness that characterized other institutional set—
tings.. Neither is it the Hobbesian notion of "a war of

all against all." Pleasanton inmates know of the "code"

185

from the media, the literature, and experiences at county
jails and other facilities. But for themselves, however,
the sense of "not being the kind of person who needs the
code" comes through in conversation. They don't see
themselves as the "hard core" type doing long time in an
institution that requires this kind of self-survival.
They admit to being a prisoner only because they got
caught. Basically, though, they feel themselves as
"okay" and not deserving of the hard prison time in one—
sex prison settings. Their commitment to the Pleasanton
facility they say is proof that they are not such bad
people. That they can somehow rise to the level of their
surroundings and be the kind of person Pleasanton wants
them to be in prison is because they are those kinds of
people to begin with and do not need or want the support
of a group in which they do not believe. They also fear
the threat of transfer to other Federal facilities if
they are labeled as "putting pressure on other inmates."
They do not value the code's maxim that proscribes "never
talk to a screw." Quite the contrary, staff report that
the majority of the inmates are "snitches." They have
been talking with law enforcement, judicial, and correc-
tional personnel and for some that is why they are at
Pleasanton. They are, like the Warden described, inmates
who could not survive in other correctional institutions.

Inside Pleasanton they continue talking with staff.

186

Communication and relationships therefore do not develop
merely between inmate leaders and staff. These exchanges
happen between the majority of all inmates and all staff.
Cocorrections is said to be a major influence in this
regard. It would be more accurate to say that a mix of
favorable interpretations like unit management, cocor-
rections, correctional counseling, architecture, inmate
and staff demography, a relatively small inmate popula-
tion, a high staff-inmate ratio, and a sexually inte-
grated staff bring about this desired correctional
effect. But at the same time it would not be fair to
suggest that Pleasanton lacks something like a code.
Recalling Goffman's lucid observation that "where worlds
are laid on, underworlds develop," we find at Pleasanton,
probably because of the inmates' young age, self-image,
and criminal inexperience, an adaptation to prison that
is fluid and ever-changing. I do not refer to that as a
code, for that would conjur up notions of solidarity and
rules of conduct. What we have instead is a prison that
falls midway between the traditional "don't talk with
the guards and do your time alone," and benign inmate
collectivism and talking with the staff. At Pleasanton
the norm is to talk with the staff and still do your own

time.

 

187

Informal Inmate-Staff Contact

 

A third major impact on the organization of staff-
inmate communication develops in the work situation and
often acts to deter developing inmate pressures. Con-
siderable staff-inmate communication on a personal level
does develop at Pleasanton in spite of formal arrange-
ments, especially where a supervisor is dependent upon
the inmate's technical skill or responsibility or even
when the goal is more staff self-centered, like proving
to one's supervisor that one has the ability to manage
inmates only showing an absence of trouble. The institu-
tion's responsibility in protecting society by giving its
inmates a philosophy of deterence, incapacitation,
treatment, and punishment and providing for its own opera-
tion and maintenance fosters personal ties between staff
and inmates despite the administration's warning to
staff not to get involved with inmates. However distant
staff try to stay from inmates, inmates become objects
of feeling and even affection. There is always the danger
of finding out that inmates are human. If hardships are
inflicted on a favorite inmate, sympathetic staff will
suffer vicariously alongside. And, if an inmate breaks
a rule, and staff senses an injury to their own moral
world, staff may feel affronted and disappointed that an
inmate did not conduct herself/himself properly.

Instances in this regard were many at Pleasanton. I

188

present one example from my fieldnotes where the sympa-
thetic staff is a case manager serving about 50 to 60
inmates. It is the duty of the case manager to collect,
verify, and analyze factual information in the prepara-
tion of inmate social histories and progress reports and
also to assist inmates in utilizing the available
resources within the institution and the community.
They are not responsible for delivering direct counsel-
ing services to inmates. However, case managers can
develop, like other staff, a liking, a sympathy, or
empathy with inmates.

Leroy is really the best case manager here and we

know it. He's been through a lot of what we've

been through and when he comes down on you, you

know it. You'll know you fucked up royally then.

He doesn't put you on front street often but when

it happens it's deserving. We're just all pretty

close and disappointing him is like disappointing

somebody in your own family.

The capacity of inmates to become objects of
staff's sympathetic concern is linked with what Goffman
(1961) calls the "involvement cycle" that is sometimes
recorded in total instiutions. I observed evidence of
it at Pleasanton. Beginning at a point of social dis-
tance from inmates the staff person finds she/he has no
reason to refrain from building up personal interests in
some inmates. Sometimes shared interests in race/

ethnicity, religion, children, and romantic or sexual

involvement laid grounds for warm staff-inmate relations

189

to develop. Sometimes this involvement would bring the
staff member in a sympathetic position to be hurt by what
an inmate says and does as well as threaten the social
distance taken by other staff members for themselves.
In response, the staff member may feel "burnt out" and
retreat from people-centered work to object-work like
schedules and paper work. This feeling was very common,
especially with correctional counselors who were respon-
sible for delivering direct counseling to inmates. This
deficit in their job satisfaction was detailed in a
Bureau—wide study on correctional counseling.8 Once
removed from the dangers of inmate countact, however,
the staff member may gradually feel she/he has no reason
to be wary and start anew the cycle of involvement and
withdrawal. The following interview with one department
head on "being burnt" and starting anew is illustrative.
What happened to Karen?
You know she was working for me for two months. I
didn't care if she and Cathy were lesbians, I just
didn't want her getting caught in here. She was up
for parole consideration and now what will happen
between her and her kids, I don't know. It's just
as hard for me, you know. I know other staff feel
the same way. We're supposed to be socializing
them into acceptable roles, but the problem is
someone forgot to tell them.
On the outside you'd befriend some of these people.
You think of that in here and I guess it starts to
develop. Now I'm angry with her and she knows it
so she's not at work today. I know she's not sick.
She's too embarrassed to see me, that's all. So

I'll just do something else for awhile and it'll
all blow over.

190

There are still other informal kinds of contacts between
staff and inmates that impact on communication and rela-
tions. Sponsoring inmates on town trips, attending with
them a play, a movie, a dinner, a concert, or together
buying Christmas trees or caroling, or sponsoring inmate
activities inside the institution, which may mean extra
trips to the institution during one's off time, were
still other ways to break down staff-inmate communication
barriers that are rooted in antagonistic prison stereo-
types between the two groups. When asked why they would
involve themselves with inmates, staff would respond
showing their feelings that inmates are human and worth
affection. Their concern for individual inmates points
to filling basic human needs that the minutiae of manage-
ment and control denies or overlooks. However, this was
not the attitude of most staff; probably not more than

a third of the staff felt this way. Most wanted no
informal contacts with inmates outside the formal arrange—
ments designed by the institution. "I won't take inmates
out on town trips. It's a matter of principle. Not on
my own time," or "My attitude is bad. I mean bad, man.
From the Warden to everybody. I take no shit from staff
or convicts. No town trips, nothin'. Inside the walls
though I'll work my ass off for them," were the kinds of
responses staff often made when we talked about their

feelings on sponsoring inmates in the community.

191

The ways just cited in which communication and
relations between inmates and staff are organized at
Pleasanton not only form a unique correctional environ-
ment inside the institution but are also carried out in
a special cocorrectional climate. When we combine the
fact that staff may come to view inmates as humans fit-
ting for emotional involvement and affection with efforts
to frustrate further deviancy, we must look to the
rational perspectives of the institution within which

staff meet inmates.

Impact of Institutional Goals and Perspectives
The goals of FCI Pleasanton are the same goals

of the Federal Bureau of Prisons: to incarcerate, treat,
punish, deter, and incapacitate sentenced criminals.
The Bureau further recognizes that inmates cannot be
coerced into participating in correctional programs.
They know that correctional programs can only provide
opportunities for change. Thereafter, it is up to the
offender to take advantage of work opportunities, job
training, education, and counseling. Not all staff,
however, hold such a complacent view about how inmates
should involve themselves in the organization. Some call
for more or less inmate involvement, and depending upon
the staff person's position to influence inmates in this

regard, inmates feel subtly coerced. .During an inmate's

192

orientation she/he is expected to consider Pleasanton's
programs and begin to choose one or more for herself/
himself. Meanwhile, the unit staff consider the inmate's
needs and also begin to develop an appropriate program
based on custody and the resources of the institution.
Inmates are not told outright that they must avail them—
selves of Pleasanton's resources, but they indirectly
learn from inmates and staff that programming is essen-
tial at Pleasanton, and that unless they make use of the
educational or work opportunities at Pleasanton they will
find themselves being transferred. After all, if they
don't need the programs, why else would they be there?

This prima facie evidence that one must be the kind of

 

person the institution was set up to handle is not just
trivia; it is central to the basic means of social control
in the prison. For unless inmates accept the assumptions
and identities offered by the staff, they are labeled a
"classification transfer" and find themselves being
transferred. The resulting dilemma for inmates is this:
On one hand they are moved by the Bureau's attitude of
allowing inmates personally to choose work, education,
and counseling opportunities; but on the other hand they
hear from staff and other inmates that the parole-
granting board will want to see change in inmate beha-
vior and attitudes and have relative assurance that

inmates are leaving Pleasanton less criminally inclined

193

that they were when they entered. There is between the
two a force that compels inmates "to do something." The
something they learn to do can be simple or complex. It
can be learning a trade for the first time, completing

the high school GED, enrolling in college courses, becom-
ing involved in counseling, or demonstrating sound work
habits. This list is not exhaustive. It merely illus-
trates the fact that inmates at Pleasanton are compelled
to do something in prison and the ways they organize

their relationships with staff often manifest their desire
to show staff they are doing something. They are, in this

way, playing the game or working the system.

Living With Staff

Inmates at Pleasanton report that it is a daily
struggle to retain their self-pride in their interactions
with staff. Prison life is a "put down," even in cocor-
rections and even with staff who do not intend it to be
so. The emotional impact of being in prison, whatever
the inmate composition, restricts contact with the out-
side world. To the majority of Pleasanton inmates who
have never "been down" before, prison life, with all its
cocorrectional and architectural amenities, is still a
put down, day after day. Cocorrections, the architec—
ture, staff, and other inmate relations and prison pro-

grams help inmates deal with their incarceration and

194

give the staff fewer control problems. Even then, how-
ever, prison depresses the human spirit. When coercion
becomes psychological instead of physical, when it is
supplied by well-intentioned staff who do not mean to
abuse, it is then even worse for it does not appear to
other staff as evil and it seldom becomes the subject of
investigation and ameliorative efforts. Staff may not be
at all mean, but rather lack the sensitivity to the
special features of the imprisoned person, and this has
the effect sometimes of being more offensive than sheer
malice might be. Brutal or sadistic staff at Pleasanton
is not the problem for inmates. They complain about the
staff's insensitivity to their feelings, sexual, racial
or ethnic slurs, and nonverbal gestures of power and
privilege between status nonequals9 that seem innocuous
to the staff person who utters them but which are deeply
galling to the inmates themselves. There may not be the
slightest rancor with them, and the staff may be in a
friendly, laughing mood. But for the inmates this is
very little comfort. Over seven months of fieldwork I
observed many staff joke with homosexuals, especially two
male transvestites, about their homosexuality. The jokes
were always funny to staff and other inmates and their
jokes were expected to draw laughter. For one of the
transvestites to show anger or somehow retaliate brought

on staff power to forget it because it was only a joke.

195

The problems faced by these transvestites were never
physical, but the mental pain they suffered is no less
harmful. All inmates can do is swallow their pride and
inwardly seethe. What inmates say and to whom they say
it are well guarded. Most staff agreed to this in inter-
views, responding negatively to the statement, "Inmates
can say what they want around here." If an inmate loses
her/his temper in a setting where self-control is demanded,
that behavior is quickly sanctioned so as not to invite a
general loss of order for staff in running the institu-
tion.

Perhaps the put down that inmates feel most from
staff is the staff's insistence on the correctness of
their judgments and actions. Every day staff give orders,
write disciplinary reports, and admonish inmates.

Inmates feel helpless to protest because they fear the
staff has the administration on their side. Even if an
administrative remedy is favorable for the inmate, the
inmate then worries about staff backlash. At one point
about midway in this fieldwork, one top-level staff
person was discussing with me the fact that BP-9's
(inmate complaints against the institution or its staff)
were fewer now because inmates were becoming more satis-
fied with the institution. My observations, however,
made me ask about apathy and the backlash theory. I

was told I believed too much in what inmates say. To be

196

sure, there are staff who are eager and professional in
their desire to operate Pleasanton with fairness. How-
ever, they have admitted to me that although their fair—
ness along with programs like cocorrections, unit
management, correctional counseling, and a sexually
integrated staff seem to reduceifluaput downs and insensi-
tivities in prison, they recognize that a mix of other
human factors prevents their elimination. The implica-
tion.<xf this, one practitioner writes, ". . . speaks
profoundly about the near futility of offering treatment
in this context" (Keve, 1974, p. 52). All of their com-
ments reinforce the view that prison defeats our most

humane intentions.

CHAPTER VII
SUMMARY

Cocorrections

Prison for inmates under any circumstance is
generally not an agreeable experience. The deprivations
inmates experience in heterosexual contact, goods and
services, autonomy, security, the loss of one's job,
one's community, one's family and friends are difficult
adjustments to make. Fron an inmate perspective, status
dependency is created and institutional programs sustain
that role. Much has already been written about that
phenomenon.

In cocorrections, however, imprisonment is not
so stark, austere, deplorable, or hard to manage from an
inmate's outlook, and I have tried to show that it makes
the staff's job of control easier also. It would be
hard to deny that a cocorrectional environment is better
than a one-sex prison environment. Cocorrections at
least sustains a mixed population perspective within

which the imprisonment imposed by the courts can be

carried out and not contend with the abnormal environments

of one-sex prisons with the homosexual and violence prob-

lems they so often create for inmates and staff. This

197

198

is not universally true, and it has been suggested here
that cocorrections is questionable for some kinds of
inmates, for example, married inmates. It may also be
helpful only for certain kinds of offenders, perhaps
first—time offenders or offenders with relatively short
sentences to serve. These issues require more experimen-
tal research designs of the kind not employed here. For
whatever the population, though, cocorrections as it
existed at FCI Pleasanton during this fieldwork was a

far superior correctional environment within which to
control inmates without the added punishment and frus-
tration of a nonsexually integrated prison. I make this
summary statement on the grounds that sexual patterns of
adaptation at Pleasanton in general parallel those in

the free community and that the incidence of violence at
Pleasanton was minimal. Some may balk at this and point
to a population of youthful, white, middle-class offenders
who probably would not become involved or caught in
sexual or violent deviant behavior regardless if they
were at Pleasanton or in any other prison. It is probably
true in light of what I learned from staff that most of
the inmates at Pleasanton were chosen for placement

there because they were not the kinds of violent or
sexually deviant inmates who need the control provided

by more secure facilities, which are usually of the one-

sex kind. Not being a classification specialist myself,

199

with the broad knowledge of all the offender types at
Pleasanton, I cannot deny that assumption. However, the
assumption is rooted in psychological perspectives that
are not the real issue here. Rather, the focus here is
on the social environment created at Pleasanton. If my
critics claim that Pleasanton is only succeeding because
of selective population characteristics, then I applaud
the Bureau of Prisons' efforts in identifying this select
group of inmates from the general pool of federal defen-
dants as not needing the single-sex correctional environ-
ment as we have come to know it. If cocorrections is an
experiment in the Bureau, it has succeeded, qualitatively
speaking, in designing an environment in which the prison
pains of sexual and violent deviance are mitigated for

most prisoners. In their Final Report on Research con-

 

ducted at the coed FCI Ft. Worth, Texas, Heffernan and
Krippel (1975) draw findings about the social environ-
ment at the Ft. Worth facility similar to those made here.
They report that cocorrections is favorably viewed by
female and male staff and inmates. The nature of our
data collections and analyses follows different methodo-
logical styles, but we agree that cocorrections seems to
produce a more favorably balanced correctional environ-
ment within which the frustrations of sex and violence
in prison are mitigated. Other impacts accrue that are

equally important for staff. Both of our research

 

200

projects in cocorrections suggest that where threats and
fights exist, they occur without the frequency and preda-
tory nature often found in single-sex prisons. This
means that correctional officers and other staff have
fewer<xfthe control problems found in desegregated
correctional settings.

Our research differs in some respects, however.
The inmate population at Ft. Worth was older and more
criminally mature. More of them had families and had
already completed their education. And more of that group
had prior prison experience. I believe these facts are
relevant in light of my interpretation of where our
analyses differ. Heffernan and Krippel note that
Ft. Worth inmates develop more collective than individual-
istic styles of adapting to Ft. Worth. I have been
reporting that inmate adaptation at FCI Pleasanton falls
midway between the completely isolated inmate who never
talks with staff and does her/his own time and the more
collective inmate group who talk frequently with staff.
At FCI Pleasanton, inmates borrow from the latter group
the openness to talk with staff and from the former group
an orientation to prison to "do it alone."

Another part of the differences in our institu—
tions, and hence in our findings, lies in the model of
community integration that each of our institutions

supported. Ft. Worth is characterized by an engagement

201

with the free world. This includes over 200 volunteers
who come in to the institution and opportunities for
inmates to enter in to the community with friends, and
work and study release programs. Pleasanton, on the
other hand, Operated with limited contact withiflueoutside
community. School and study programs operating from
within the institution that would allow inmates contact
with the outside world were discontinued shortly after
the beginning of this research. A mix of factors like
peer_pressure and contraband brought new policy that
urged the placement of inmates in the community when they
were eligible for these community-oriented programs.

That did not solve the frustrations inmates experience

in total institutions, but it did render the staff's job

of controlling inmates easier.

Is It Normal?

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons advances cocorrections
as being a more normal correctional environment. For
years prior to this social intervention, prison litera-
ture continued to describe sameésex prisons as abnormal.
It is only fitting, then, that the Bureau would call
its first venture into cocorrections normal. Normalcy
is being offered along a continuum of private living
conditions, a sexually integrated staff as well as an

inmate population, modern architecture, and a milieu that

202

stresses the acceptance of personal responsibility and
positive interaction between staff and inmates. In
addition to these key features, what makes a population
normal is the level of communication carried on between
its members. In most societies, what is normal is a
qualitative condition of communication that is composed
not only of the exchange of information but more impor-
tantly the sharing of moods, feelings, and nonverbal
behavior like facial and emotional expression, touching,
personal space, demeanor, and shared silence. It is this
"togetherness of the spirit" that we as human beings
hunger for in what we define for ourselves as normal.
Communication is the real quality we seek out, whether or
not substantive information is exchanged in the process.
A more general thesis was stated earlier suggesting that
impediments to this in prison are rooted in the nature

of prison work. I believe there is truth in that regard,
even in cocorrections. So is it normal? If we are ulti-
mately concerned with human quality, the answer is no; but
then, neither is any prison if the thesis is correct.
Prisons only permit the exchange of information in pre-

scribed ways.

 

203

Methodology

 

Now completed, this research faces questions
about its reliability and validity. Let me address those
issues here.

When we ask if this research is reliable, we are
really wanting to know if we can replicate it. Can we
take it and use it elsewhere and expect to find similar
analyses? The response is, of course, it depends. It
depends on who is doing the research, the nature of the
research project, the groups under study, and other theo-
retical issues like entry, support, sponsorship, and
acceptance. For practical reasons I doubt one could
ever approximate those settings. Inherent in the method-
ology reliability is minimal. There are, I believe, an
infinite number of ways to describe any given phenomenon.
As Weber tells us, ". . . even the smallest slice of
reality can never be exhaustive" (1964). Letting data
analysis flow along with data collection may make the
reliability test more problematic in some research
projects.

The key to understanding, however, lies in
validity, not reliability. It is this researcher's
opinion that in all research validity is consensually
based and is a minor form of inter-subjectivity as is
anything given empirical significance. To ask if this

study is valid could be to ask if it is reasonable. Is

 

204

it a reasonable description and explanation of events?

It is not to be mistaken as the only explanation. There
are an infinite number of other valid descriptions and
explanations, as Weber suggests. Notions of validity
here were checked against time, varying conditions,
social distance, language familiarity, communication, and
social consensus. Post-field work analysis kept close
social consensus with field personnel who offered sugges-
tions during the more intense analysis phase of this
research. All of the measures employed in this research
project to offer adequate interpretations suggest that

this is how it was then.

A Final Note on the Analysis

I noted first thing in this research that some
readers will probably feel I have been sharply critical
of the correctional institution at Pleasanton. Others
will protest I have been too charitable. Truly, my
intent was never to be either. In the end, however, I
see where I have been both. I have described FCI Pleasan-
ton from an inmate perspective as a more agreeable prison
environment than they would otherwise want to experience.
I have noted the reduction of homosexuality and violence
at Pleasanton and said nothing about the issues of sexism
among inmate and staff or the feelings of power staff

feel they hold over inmates. Some inmates and staff

205

would contend these issues are most important. I have
singled out only three issues for discussion that I
think are questions generally asked about cocorrections
by educators, policy makers, and institution adminis-
trators. I have presented my analysis from an inmate
perspective (some will call it a bias) because it is on

this level that issues like a one-sex prison, violence, 9

 

and communication become problems. Hence if the issues
are not perceived as problems, part of the reason lies

in the interpretation inmates give to the condition of

their imprisonment. This is the perspective I have

tried to develop here.

ENDNOTES

206

ENDNOTES

1I owe a special thanks to Jim Meko, Unit Manage—

ment Coordinator with the BOP Central Office in Washington,
D.C., for having set me straight on cocorrections history.
2As of January 28, 1977, two and one-half years
after FCI Pleasanton opened as a cocorrectional institu-
tion, 16 pregnancies occurred inside the institution. Of
these 10 women chose therapeutic abortions, 4 women
carried the baby for a full delivery, and 2 women were
yet undecided. Of the 16 women, 4 were married with
spouses on the outside, and of these 4, I became pregnant
twice, having abortions unknown to her spouse on the out-
side both times.

3The reader is directed to Jessie Bernard's article
in the American Journal of Sociology (January 1973), who
draws parallels between oners choice of research method-
ology and gender. "In sociology," she says, "a mascu-
line bias has been embedded in the structure of inquiry.

. . The specific processes involved in agentic research
are typically male preoccupations; agency is identified
with a masculine principle. . . . The scientist using
this approach creates his own controlled reality. He
can manipulate it. He is master. He has power. He
can add or subtract or combine variables. He can play
with a simulated reality like an Olympian god. He can
remain at a distance, safely invisible behind his shield,
uninvolved. The communal approach is much humbler. It
disavows control, for control spoils the results. Its
value rests precisely on the absence of controls. . . .
Carlson (1972) found corroboration of this observation
comparing work by men and women psychologists: men pre-
ferred the agentic, women the communal approach" (pp. 767-
72).

 

4Community reaction to a perceived changing FCI
Pleasanton can be seen in newspaper articles. Septem-
ber 19, 1976, on page one headlines, The Oakland Tribune
read: "Pleasanton Prison: Changes Cause COncern."' The
article focused on the second cyclone fence and third
housing unit under construction, prisoners older than 26,
and more inmates there committed with crimes against
persons, for example, armed robbery. The Independent, a

 

207

208

local Pleasanton newspaper, printed a similar article
four days prior on September 15, 1976, with this headline:
"Youth Prison Turning Into Penitentiary?"

5This issue is the focus of Overpopulatign in the
Bureau of Prisons: Summer 1976, a U.S. Bureau of Prisons
publication. The task force investigating overpopulation
in BOP facilities reported that "Overpopulation in the
Bureau of Prisons is reaching or has reached critical
proportions in several institutions, and it is a serious
problem throughout the system." The "critical point,"
as a factor in causing disturbances the report says, for
FCI Pleasanton, is 115 females and 115 males. At the time
of this study the numbers of both had increased only
slightly and administrators there were not concerned with
that slight overpopulation.

6In 1974, when FCI Pleasanton first opened, about
65% of the inmate population were transfers from other
BOP facilities. Since then, this figure has steadily
decreased. In 1975, about 38% of the inmates were
transfer inmates and in 1976, about 31% of the inmates
were transfers. The number of court commitments to FCI
Pleasanton without prior BOP incarceration has been
increasing annually.

7The data given in Chapter III show that in 1976
83% of the women and 53% of the men inmates at FCI Plea-
santon were incarcerated for drug-related offenses or
property crimes not involving force.

8See "The Final Report of the Task Force to Evalu-
ate the Counseling Programs and Practices in the U.S.
Federal Prison System," September 1976, a task force
report which examines the role deficits of correctional
counselors and suggests remedies for improvement.

91 am grateful to Dr. Barrie Thorne for having
given me a summary sheet of Nancy Henley's "Women and Men:
The Silent Power Struggle," a paper presented at the
Seventh Annual Conference on Applied Linguistics, 1976.

I analyzed one week's worth of field notes per month in
terms of gestures of power and privilege between status
nonequals (staff and inmates) on the dimensions of
address, whether familiar or polite; general demeanor,
whether informal or circumspect; eye contact, whether to
stare or avert eyes; emotional expression, whether to
hide or show; and self-disclosure, whether to disclose

or not. In my summary percentages I found that anywhere
between 50 and 67% of the time the patterns used by staff

 

 

209

with inmates in address were familiar; in demeanor,
informal; in eye contact, to stare; in emotions, to hide;
and not to self-disclose. Inmates with staff were more
polite in address (Mr. or Mrs.); more circumspect in

their demeanor; stared at staff less; and manifested more
emotion and disclosure.

B I BLI OGRAPHY

210

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