Word: leavenworth
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Rick Sikes, 47, has been in just one prison, the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kans., where he went nearly eleven years ago after a bank robbery conviction. Unlike many inmates, he can compare prison life only with life in "the free world," where he was a country and western guitarist, and not to regimens in other joints. "For a prison," he figures, "Leavenworth is all right. It's not at all like home, and nobody likes being here. But I believe this is as good as prison gets." Still, "you got all kinds of foolish people in here...
...teacher asks her class of ten young black men, "And who won World War II?" In permissive California, San Quentin's main visiting room has the look of a junior high school make-out party where they forgot to dim the lights: dozens of couples, hugging, smooching, oblivious. In Leavenworth's vast mess hall, inmates grab their silverware from a miniature Conestoga and eat off red-and-white checkered tablecloths; the hoe-down amenities seem almost too perky to bear. In one dim passageway leading to an Illinois cellblock, some wry convict has painted a skillful trompe l'oeil escape...
...prisoner's days can be spent productively?a queer industriousness, to be sure?or endlessly loafing. At Leavenworth, he might do his time making pig bristles into paintbrushes, and earn about 60¢ an hour. In Texas, the director of prisons says he runs "quasimilitary operations," and his close-cropped inmates in uniform white cotton must work for nothing. Rick Sikes was eligible for a parole hearing after his first 120 days at Leavenworth, but he waived the opportunity; a second bank robbery conviction, and its 50-year sentence, await him in Texas. "I don't care nothin...
...Leavenworth, Kans. Opened 1895 Capacity: 1,595 Inmates: 1,351 males
...following photographs offer views from the inside of seven maximum-security prisons. With the exception of Leavenworth, all are state institutions. Most of these places are famous in American folklore and in grim modern history. Their names evoke images of riots in the yards, of searchlights and sirens, of tin cups banged in unison on the tables of gothic mess halls. The normal reality of prison life is, of course, calmer, but no less extraordinary. These are societies made up largely of people who have robbed, attacked and murdered other people, after all, and of those who oversee them...