The Big House Read online

  It can’t be forgotten that despite all of the positive elements, Oak Park Heights is still a prison. It’s not a playground or a summer camp. It’s not a place where complacency can exist or a place for officers who are not committed to their work. People get hurt if policy and procedure aren’t carefully followed. In prison–especially one housing high-risk inmates–there will always be problems. Running a prison takes constant review and fine tinkering. It requires professional staff at all levels that are serious about their work and, most of all, believe in the philosophy that supports them.

  Ninety-five percent of the inmates here have committed a physical act of violence against their victims. More than fifty percent killed someone. A quarter or more are first degree murderers, and a significant number are serving life without parole. This is a distilled population of the very worse offenders who have ended up at the end of the line. They have committed despicable acts against society, been a major management problem at another institution, or both. Yet how they are treated and managed sets the tone for the environment that exists. States and countries that operate prisons where violence is present every day and the mood is volatile don’t have worse inmates, they just manage them poorly.

  Playing the Game

  From my first day in a supermax prison, I knew this was not going to be easy. I was walking down a corridor when I observed four inmates pointing at me from the other side of the staff dining area. These inmates were all in the Big House for murder, and they had the tough look of men who had spent much of their life in prison-tattoos decorating their forearms, beefed-up bodies from too much time with barbells, and hard expressions on their faces. As they pointed at me, they talked quietly among themselves, staring me down. They were playing the game, cold-blooded killers trying to threaten me. Their intimidation was working, but I could never let them know it.

  The game had begun, and I was one of the players.

  I started in the corrections business when I was just twenty-one years old. After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor of science degree in education, my first job was at Minnesota’s Ramsey County juvenile Woodview Detention Home. I didn’t know much about offenders, but I quickly learned. Through the ensuing years, I worked as a juvenile and, later, adult probation officer, became superintendent of Ramsey County’s Correctional Facility, and served on the state parole board. On June 30, 1982, I left my job as parole board vice chairman and on July 1, 1982, began working in Minnesota’s new supermax prison at Oak Park Heights as Internal Affairs Investigator. In 1996, when Frank Wood retired as the state’s Commissioner of Corrections, I left my post as his deputy to become Oak Park Heights warden.

  Going to work each day in a supermax prison was different from anything I had previously experienced. It was tough for me at first. I had always been confident of my surroundings and sure of my work responsibilities. My new workplace, however, was extraordinary.

  Nothing was as it seemed. The inmates existed in a society where they fought against each and every rule with cunning and wiles, or simple brute physical force if need be. The aura of violence, the cons, the hidden agendas, the deceits, and the intimidations—it was all part of playing the game.

  Warden Jim Bruton surrounded by the prison’s perimeter of cyclone fencing, barbed wire, and razor ribbon. (Photograph © Layne Kennedy)

  In my previous job assignments, I had become acquainted with numerous offenders and was one of the reasons many of these inmates were in prison in the first place. As a state parole board member, I sat at their parole hearings, turned down their parole requests, and held their fates in my hands, determining how much of their sentences they would serve. For many, it was several decades–if not their whole lives–and they didn’t look kindly on me.

  Inmate Allan Mariano was one. He was a long-term felon who had been convicted of butchering his family. I first came face to face with him sitting across a table at his parole hearing as I reviewed his case. He was a plain person, indistinguishable from anyone you’d pass on the street. Yet he watched me that whole hearing, his cold eyes never leaving my face. At the hearing’s conclusion, Mariano was told he would be doing every single day of his twenty-year sentence. I looked him directly in the eye and said that given his history and these gruesome murders, he would never have the opportunity for parole. He presented too much of a risk to public safety.

  I shuddered when I passed this judgment. Twenty years was too long for me to realistically comprehend–two decades out of a lifetime locked away without a taste of freedom. Yet Mariano seemed unperturbed, and his response sent a chill down my spine. He stared back at me and didn’t blink as he replied, “Twenty years ... that’s not that far away.”

  I was never sure if his response was simply calm and cool nonchalance, or if it was a threat–“Just wait: When I get out in twenty years, I’m coming for your blood.”

  I certainly was not about to ask him.

  Mariano was at Oak Park Heights when I began work. I don’t know if he remembered what he said at the hearing a few years before, but I certainly did. Mariano’s case and numerous others like it were the source for some of my discomfort at my new job.

  Inmate Howard Melton was another. Melton was a classic felon who lived a life devoted to lawlessness. Yet the first time I met him, I felt empathy for him. It’s a good thing, too, as our careers–his of crime, mine of corrections–were intertwined for more than thirty years in the system.

  I first met Melton when he was ten years old. When I began my career at Woodview Detention Home, I used to lock the cell door behind him and wish him “Good night.” I frequently tucked him in for the night, as he was charged to the center continuously, usually for non-violent crimes.

  I never felt Melton was dangerous, just a crook. He always had a smile on his face and a sense of humor. Being locked away from his home never seemed to bother him. It also didn’t seem to bother him that he lacked a sense of right or wrong when it came to taking items that didn’t belong to him.

  After I moved to juvenile probation, Melton and I soon became reacquainted: I was now his probation officer. I dealt with school issues and theft problems throughout his years in the juvenile system. Melton came from a pretty good home, and I got to know his parents well. They were nice people, but didn’t have a clue how to control their son.

  Five years later, I transferred to adult probation and Melton graduated to adult court. It wasn’t long before he was on probation to me again, now as an adult offender. Nothing much had changed for Melton; he had only grown older. The smile was bigger, his charisma even stronger, and he was now a better thief as well.

  After I joined the state parole board, I was soon sitting across the table from Melton during a parole hearing. He had now hit the big time by ending up in prison. He still had his smile, even from inside the prison walls. It didn’t look like he was ever going to change.

  When I came to Oak Park Heights, there was Melton again. Here he was in a supermax prison, yet the smile lit up the first time he spotted me in this new setting. He acted as if we were long-lost relatives, reunited at last.

  Inmate Herbert Cummings and I had also risen through the prison system together. But whereas Melton had some warmth to his soul, Cummings was pure hatred. He had spent his life in and out of institutions, always making his stays miserable for everyone who knew him.

  I had heard about Cummings long before I ever met him. His mean disposition was legend among officers, yet I thought most of it had to be made up or at least embellished. I was wrong. He wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone said. He was worse.

  I first met him when I was the Ramsey County Correctional Facility superintendent. I was walking by his cell and said, “Good morning.” Cummings replied, “Fuck you!”

  It was the start of a relationship that never got any better.

  Cummings found ingenious ways to get in trouble. One of his favorite schemes was to take a job as a room attendant at a motel. Waiting until a patron left
, Cummings used his master key to unlock the door, ordered massive feasts from room service, devoured the meal, and as a result, got fired and sometimes prosecuted.

  Cummings was obese and suffered numerous maladies, often with oozing sores plaguing his body. His poor health was attributed to years of living on the streets and poor health practices. He was in constant need of care yet gave the medical staff a rough time. Nothing was ever good enough for him, and he always felt there was a conspiracy against him. He complained to me once that the guards spied on him as he sat on the toilet having bowel movements. I always investigated complaints against staff, but this one I knew wasn’t true. Still, Cummings believed it was–all part of a deep-seated paranoia.

  On my first day as Oak Park Heights warden, I was in the Segregation Unit only a few moments when I heard a loud hammering on a cell door. Accompanying the banging came a long, bellowing stream of obscenities. I asked one of the officers who was making all the noise. The officer replied, “Oh, that’s Cummings.” He had been a small-time hood, and I couldn’t believe he was now at Oak Park Heights. Convicted of terroristic threats, he had been sentenced to prison, yet because his behavior was so disruptive, he was now at the Big House. I hadn’t seen him for several years, so I walked up to his cell and looked in the window. Cummings stopped his yelling and banging, and said to me in a growl, “Bruton, what are you doing here?”

  I told him that I was the new warden.

  Cummings replied, “Bullshit! You’re not the warden here!” I told him to calm down, then advised him I had just been appointed.

  For a moment, we actually started to have a calm conversation as he asked a few more questions. He suddenly stopped his line of talk and said, “No shit, you’re really the warden here?” He then burst into one of his obnoxious fits of rage, banging on his door like a wild animal and screaming at me, “Then where the fuck is my toilet paper?”

  To be a warden or prison officer, the first trick is to not let inmates intimidate you–or at least, not to show it in any way, shape, or form. There can never be any doubt as to who is in charge of the prison.

  Intimidation and fear–it’s all many inmates know. Every encounter, every conversation, every walk down a hallway is part of the game of intimidation. They give you a cold stare for long periods of time, daring you to break eye contact. Or conversely, they completely avoid you, pretending you don’t exist in their world. Aggression, loud voices, swearing, and invading your personal space are all part of their tactics–if you let them.

  I learned this lesson quickly. You cannot become a part of their world and allow the intimidation to begin. But it’s not always a game of subtle violence; you can also disarm them with politeness. When the four murderers tried to intimidate me on my first day on the job, I walked directly up to the group and asked if there was something I could help them with. Not expecting this approach, they became embarrassed and the group broke up. The more I walked around the prison and the more contact I had with inmates, the more comfortable I became. This was my job, and I intended to do it responsibly and effectively.

  To demonstrate that officers were always in control of every aspect of the prison, I used to walk into the most potentially hostile areas where there were numerous inmates present, such as the corridors, outside yard, or gym. This wasn’t intended to be an act of superiority or bravery, but a way of demonstrating this was “our” prison and we would go wherever we wanted to, when we wanted to. Like so many other things that we did as officials, it was a message as part of the game.

  Inmate Joseph Daniels was a long-term felon with a grisly history of violence. He had been shuffled between federal prisons due to his ongoing extreme behavior and was now transferred to Oak Park Heights, delivered directly from a Segregation cell at a United States penitentiary. He had seen nothing but isolation for seven years and had refused to converse with a prison officer in all that time. He was not a nice person. Daniels was built like a wrecking ball and had a disposition to match. He was surly and uncommunicative, yet he let it be known that he relished the opportunity for a fresh start in new surroundings. We decided to give him that chance.

  Initially, Daniels’s adjustment was good. He did what he was told without complaint. Soon he was going to work every day in the industry shops and doing well.

  Then I started hearing rumors about his behind-the-scenes activities. I had no proof, but had been told that he was using what he’d learned as a dangerous convict to muscle, terrorize, and bully. It was a part of who he had become over the years–and he was good at it. Daniels was a monster of a man with massive arms decorated with ferocious tattoos shown off by shirts that he had ripped the sleeves out of. Intimidation was his means of survival.

  I decided Daniels needed a little reminder of who was in charge. It was within our authority to transfer Daniels back to the Federal Bureau of Prisons without any explanation; he was only with us because we allowed him to stay.

  I knew Daniels well from the short time he had been with us and we got along civilly. I stopped him in the corridor one day and told him I wanted him to listen to what I had to say and not respond. He agreed.

  I told him that we had been hearing things about him, and he immediately interrupted to explain his side. I reminded him to listen until I was finished, and he agreed again. I started and was stopped a second time by his defensive interruption. I politely asked him a third time to wait until I was finished before responding.

  We started over again and this time he listened.

  I said to him, “Look, we are hearing things about you strong-arming other inmates and extorting money from them. We don’t know if it’s true and have little concern at this time about proving it. All we know for sure is this: If we hear one more negative comment about you from any of our sources, this is what is going to occur. You will be awakened the next morning at 5 A.M. You will be asked to pack your belongings and will be escorted upstairs to the holding room to await transfer back to the federal system. And you know where you will go from there–right back to a Segregation cell. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” he said quietly.

  Daniels never caused a problem again and stayed to the end of his sentence several years later. He just needed a reminder about the rules of the game.

  Sometimes the game takes on all the appearances of chess. There were feints and attacks and diversions, setups and phony routines and carefully laid out schemes that kept me and my officers always on our toes.

  One afternoon, I walked into a housing unit and immediately an inmate came up to talk to me. This wasn’t necessarily unusual, but it could have been an attempt to distract me from something else. Inmates frequently came to talk to me, but his hurried manner was suspicious.

  I looked around and noticed a second inmate casually standing at the top of the stairs leading to an upper tier of cells. This was also not unusual. However, my first thought was that he was a lookout, watching over the unit to be sure that no staff entered an area so as to protect drug or sexual activity, illicit tattooing, gambling, an assault, the hiding of weapons, or some other illegal goings on.

  I immediately told the inmate who approached me that I would talk to him later and climbed up to the inmate on the steps. I figured if he moved quickly in retreat, he was going to warn someone.

  He didn’t move, so initially I thought my suspicions were unfounded. However, it could have been set up for me to think exactly that and respond the way I did. Maybe the real activity, with another lookout stationed elsewhere, was at the other end of the cellblock.

  Each of these inmates was positioned like a piece in a real-life chess game, guarding their king from danger. I had broken up this play–but I never found out exactly what I had halted.

  I prided myself on having a pretty good handle on what was occurring inside the prison, but deep down I always knew there was a lot that we didn’t know. As the saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know,” and it’s important to always recognize
that fact. I wasn’t so presumptuous as to think I knew what all the inmates were up to at a given time. Sometimes, I remembered back to fishing as a kid and wishing that all the water surrounding my boat would disappear so I could see just for an instant what fish might be swimming there. As warden, I often wondered what was really going on deep within the prison. What were the inmates doing that we didn’t know about? What escape plan or assault were they plotting?

  It was often difficult to turn off all this cloak and dagger paranoia when I walked out the front door at the end of a long day and entered the free world.

  There is a cardinal rule in running a prison–no unnecessary surprises. It is never in the facility’s best interest to surprise a population of dangerous felons. These people are used to settling their problems with violence, and thus everything must be kept under consistent control. When a surprise is sprung on inmates, you never know what might happen.

  Another cardinal rule in prisons is to never give bad news to inmates when they are not secured in their cells, and never give it on a Friday or a weekend. The reasoning behind the Friday and weekend rule is simple: Don’t give bad news on these days unless you want to work through the weekend to control an incident or riot when fewer staff are on duty.

  Several years ago, the Minnesota Department of Corrections’ prisons were severely overcrowded. As a result, we began to rent cells in county jails to house prisoners. For the most part, this worked well. In one of the jails, however, these cardinal rules were not understood.

  It was a Saturday morning and many of the inmates were out of their cells and in the main part of the cellblock. For whatever reason, the staff decided it was a good time to notify the inmates of some significant changes that required more lock-in time and less programming. If someone had asked me what I thought the response would be to this announcement at this particular time with the inmates out of their cells, I would have warned, “They are going to tear your jail apart.” And they did. The message given by the jail was legitimate. It was just given at the exact wrong time.