This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration 9781512823509

Table of contents :
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction. Whose Good Intentions?
Chapter 1 The Least Human of American Institutions
Chapter 2 Forgotten Men
Chapter 3 A Model Detention Camp
Chapter 4 Games of Political Power
Chapter 5 Control Comes First
Chapter 6 More and More Jails
Epilogue: The Persistence of Good Intentions
Notes
Archives Consulted
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

This Is My Jail

POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA Series Editors: Keisha N. Blain, Margot Canaday, Matthew Lassiter, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.

This Is My Jail Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration

Melanie D. Newport

U n i v e r si t y of Pe n ns y lva n i a Pr e ss Ph i l a de l ph i a

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Hardcover ISBN 9781512823493 Ebook ISBN 9781512823509 A Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

For my parents and for all people harmed by jailing

Contents

List of Abbreviations Introduction. Whose Good Intentions?

ix 1

Chapter 1. The Least Human of American Institutions

17

Chapter 2. Forgotten Men

43

Chapter 3. A Model Detention Camp

74

Chapter 4. Games of Political Power

104

Chapter 5. Control Comes First

132

Chapter 6. More and More Jails

160

Epilogue. The Persistence of Good Intentions

189

Notes 197 Archives Consulted

241

Index 245 Acknowledgments 251

Abbreviations

AAPB AAPL ACLU-­IL ADW AER AMK BGA BOP BS CA CAC CAR CCBF CCDOC CCPA CCSBP CD CDN CDT CES CHM CORE CPD CPL-­HW CST CSTC

American Archive of Public Broadcasting (WGBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA, and Washington, DC Afro-­American Patrolmen’s League America Civil Liberties Union Illinois Division Records Atlanta Daily World Alliance to End Repression Papers Anna Moscowitz Kross Papers Better Government Association Bureau of Prisons Baltimore Sun Chicago American Comer Archive of Chicago in the Year 2000 Citizens Alert Records Chicago Community Bond Fund Cook County Department of Corrections Combined Counties Police Association Cook County Special Bail Project Chicago Defender Chicago Daily News Chicago Daily Tribune Charlotte E. Senechalle Papers Chicago History Museum Research Center Congress of Racial Equality Chicago Police Department Chicago Public Library, Harold Washington Library Center Chicago Sun-­Times Chicago Sun-­Times Collection

x Abbreviations

CT CUL DCSI DFP DNC DOJ DUF EG ETRC EWB FKH GFPL GIU HTLM HWM ILAC ILDOC ILEC JHA JHAP JR LAT LEAA LWVCC MIPP MRC NU NYT OLEA PACE ROR SCSC SJP SORT

Chicago Tribune Chicago Urban League Records Department of Community Supervision and Intervention Detroit Free Press Democratic National Convention Department of Justice Detroit Under Fire Digital Archive, Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, University of Michigan Elmer Gertz Collection Educational Television and Radio Center Ernest Watson Burgess Papers Fred K. Hoehler Papers Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library Gang Intelligence Unit Harry S. Truman Library and Museum Hans W. Mattick Papers Illinois Academy of Criminology Illinois Department of Corrections Illinois Law Enforcement Commission John Howard Association John Howard Association Papers Julius Rosenwald Papers Los Angeles Times Law Enforcement Assistance Association League of Women Voters of Cook County Records Mothers in Prison Project Municipal Reference Collection Northwestern University, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections New York Times Office of Law Enforcement Assistance Programmed Activities for Correctional Education Release on Recognizance Smith College Special Collections Stanley J. Pottinger Papers Special Operations Response Team

Abbreviations xi

UC-­SCRC University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center UIC-­SC University of Illinois Chicago Special Collections UM-­SW University of Minnesota Libraries, Social Welfare History Archives WCMC Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago Papers WP Washington Post WSJ Wall Street Journal

Introduction Whose Good Intentions?

All politics are local, and the politics of mass incarceration depend on local jails. Between 1955 and 2019, the annual number of jail admissions exploded from approximately one million to 10.3 million people, with a peak of 13.6 million in 2008. As of 2020, there were more than thirty-­one hundred jails nationwide with budgets that have reached $25 billion a year. Jailing is a vast and costly enterprise. In contrast to state and federal prisons, jails are managed at the local level, whether in big cities, sprawling suburbs, or small towns. Metropolitan areas contain the largest jails, including Los Angeles County Jail, with almost twenty thousand prisoners; Rikers Island in New York, with approximately fourteen thousand prisoners; and Cook County Department of Corrections (CCDOC) in Chicago, with nearly six thousand prisoners.1 While national data shows that 33 percent of jailed people are Black and 14 percent are Latinx, jail demographics differ dramatically from place to place. For example, in the CCDOC, which includes prisoners from the city of Chicago, 75 percent of prisoners are Black and 16 percent of prisoners are Latinx. This makeup is the consequence of racist policing, high bails set by courts, and, perhaps most importantly, the politically contested, racialized ideas about what jails can do for people of color.2 Over the course of the twentieth century, going back to the Progressive Era, local jail reformers and politicians have relied on racist ideologies to promote jails as rehabilitative institutions that could solve their cities’ social ills, an effective argument that has ensured continued jail expansion. Focusing on the racism that shapes jail policy undermines one of the most enduring myths of criminal justice: that policymakers are informed by their “good intentions” and that anything else that happens, including the disproportionate jailing of people of color, is an unintended consequence.3

2 Introduction

That racist ideologies fueled the changing nature and functions of local jails over the course of the twentieth century is essential for understanding the national scourge of mass incarceration. Taken for granted as just another carceral institution, a temporary way station en route to more serious confinement in state prisons, jails, with their history of aggressive growth, have been portrayed as endpoints of urban inequality rather than as intentionally perpetuating it. Beliefs about the benevolent intentions of jailing, particularly the capacity of jails to ensure rehabilitation, became increasingly important strategies for laundering the illegitimacy of racist policing and judicial practices through other institutions. In modern urban America, jails developed a particular utility as institutions of racial benevolence that rationalized the racism of policing and local politics through active transformation of the lives of prisoners. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, concerns about the political demands of marginalized people, particularly jailed people, fueled the growth of jails that could enforce racial regulation in postwar cities. To be purely punitive in response to crime was never enough. The triumph of racialized criminalization and repression of prisoners’ rights fostered a political culture in which mass jailing was not only possible but viewed as necessary. The story of mass incarceration begins in American jails. And the story of American jails begins with local politics.4 The entwined stories of Alsana Caruth, Winston Moore, and Claudia McCormick illuminate the influence of local politics in shaping the institutional culture of violence and domination within jails, against which jailed people have struggled, as well as the long-­standing hopes for the abolition of jailing altogether. “Pre-­trial detainees are merely political slaves,” Caruth declared in 1975, referring to those held in jail with a presumption of innocence after being charged with a crime.5 Caruth, awaiting trial in in CCDOC, submitted his testimony to the federal courts in Duran v. Elrod, a class action suit filed in Chicago on behalf of prisoners by legal aid lawyers in 1974, documenting “the dehumanizing abuse involved in every day and night’s existence, as a pre-­trial detainee.” The suit aimed to hold the Cook County Sheriff and executive director of the CCDOC accountable for conditions in the overcrowded jail. Although most prisoners retained a presumption of innocence as they awaited their day in court, many slept on floors and tables; prisoners were seldom let outside and were allowed only two visits from adults each month; their mail was heavily censored if it came at all. Jailed people in the suit claimed they were subject to harsh punishments, ranging from beatings to being put in solitary confinement without knowing why.



Whose Good Intentions? 3

After nineteen months in jail, Caruth could not get over the fact that he experienced “subhuman conditions due to his inability to pay the Cook County Criminal Courts $1200.50 dollars in American currency, for his liberty.” Here Caruth was referring to his inability to make bail—he could not pay the bond amount set by a judge to guarantee he appeared at trial. He wanted the courts to protect his due process rights—the right to a speedy trial and the presumption of innocence—as well as to ensure he was free from cruel and unusual punishment. Caruth was part of a long procession of jailed Black people, from Charles Pile, who tried to burn the jail down in the 1860s, to Dick Gregory, jailed with the civil rights movement in the 1960s, who experienced such conditions. Caruth begged the courts to understand what jail meant to him and other “poor black and brown detainees”: rather than an institution of reform, it was a symbol of racist practices that pervaded the entire criminal justice system.6 Caruth was jailed by a man named Winston Moore, who had gained national renown as a jail reformer and was perhaps the nation’s first Black jail warden. As head of the CCDOC, Moore often talked about how the makeup of his jail was 90 percent Black. He hired a nearly all-­Black guard staff and hosted jail concerts that featured performers such as B. B. King and Stevie Wonder. Implementing his Building Program and Master Plan, Moore carried out the largest single-­site jail expansion project in American history. “This is my dream,” Moore said of his many reforms.7 He was not unusual in dreaming of jail reform. In the early 1900s, Cook County Jail warden John Whitman had imagined the jail could be a benevolent institution where prisoners were transformed. In the 1950s, sheriff Joseph Lohman believed jailers could rehabilitate people only if they responded seriously to prisoners’ concerns about the injustices they faced. Coming to power amid the unrest and tragedies of 1968, Moore had come to his own conclusions: “You cannot have rehabilitation without control, so control comes first.”8 Moore’s belief in control meant his personal authority was paramount; it left little space for resistance. A protester arrested during Chicago’s Democratic National Convention in 1968 recalled Moore telling him, “You are a forgotten man! This is my jail!”9 Guards remembered these kinds of comments too. Testifying in court in 1977 after Moore was charged with aggravated battery, official misconduct, and perjury, a corrections officer recounted that Moore had shouted, “Why are you trying to break out of my jail?” before punching a prisoner in the face.10 But Moore knew that his sense of personal ownership did not matter much in the larger scope of county politics. “As long as everything was

4 Introduction

fallen down over here, I could be in charge,” he mused as he faced being fired. The jail expansion had changed everything. To Moore, the reasons were clear: “Too much power for a black man to control.”11 Other visions of what the jail was for and could do for people were reflected in the actions of Claudia McCormick, a Black woman hired by Moore to run the women’s division that opened in 1973. The author of a landmark report asserting that women in jail were often victims of crime themselves, McCormick looked for ways to use the jail to help women. Some of the jailed women were skeptical about this kind of power and what it meant—“they got the black woman’s face and the white man’s image,” prisoner Sherron Jackson wrote in a poem about the jail matrons.12 McCormick gave space in the new Women’s Division of CCDOC to the Mothers in Prison Project (MIPP), a project of the American Friends Service Committee. In their little corner of the jail, MIPP’s volunteers and a few full-­ time staff coordinated with McCormick and outside agencies to ensure women avoided charges of neglect and termination of their parental rights while they were incarcerated. MIPP’s work depended on fulfilling many seemingly small requests: calling family members to tell them bond money was needed, getting women clean clothes for court dates, and arranging to “bring the small children to court so their mother may have a glimpse.” When one jailed mother, Dorothy, faced loss of custody of her seventeen-­day-­old baby as he recovered from surgery, MIPP found a friend who could pay half of her $100 bond. Women in the jail donated their commissary money to pay for the rest.13 MIPP called its work “a start—a citizens’ initiative to ease the pain, to increase public concern, and to show that there are ways to solve some of our society’s most difficult problems.”14 In the case of MIPP, prisoners, community members, and an administrator understood that a woman’s freedom was the best solution to the problems jail caused in her life. By the late twentieth century, jails and jail reform had become essential to the exercise of carceral power in the urban United States. Alsana Caruth, Winston Moore, Claudia McCormick, and members of MIPP were part of a constellation of local political actors who, from the nineteenth century to the present, have been concerned with what jailing means for people who are incarcerated while awaiting trial and serving short sentences. Over the course of the twentieth century, jails expanded their functions to facilitate racialized criminalization.



Whose Good Intentions? 5

Sheriffs and jail administrators frequently asserted that they had no control over whom police and courts sent to jails even as they created new mechanisms for the preservation and perpetuation of racial inequality. Tensions over the jail’s subordinate status among criminal justice institutions and the commitments of local leaders to expanding its functions established the conditions for the local escalation of the mass incarceration of poor people of color.

What Are Jails? Jails are significant arbiters of local racial politics and play an important role in criminalizing the poor. Unlike police lockups, which briefly detain people initially after arrest, or prisons, which house people after felony sentencing, jails typically incarcerate adults after arrest, as they await trial after bond hearings, and after sentencing for misdemeanor or petty offenses. Unlike prisons, freedom from jail often has a price: who can pay bond amounts set by a judge reflects the broader contours of racial capitalism, through which our economic system, underpinned as it is by the history and practice of “slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide,” is defined by a “tendency . . . to differentiate” according to race.15 Other functions of jails include holding people while they await transfer to prison, detention of immigrants, incarceration of children, and punishment for parole violation or nonpayment of fines. Through jails, cities and counties become custodians responsible for the detention and care of individuals for periods of time that can range from a few hours while awaiting bail bond payment to years awaiting trial. That jails range from having a few beds to over ten thousand speaks to their varied functions across localities. As jails are locally contingent institutions, the proportion of the jail population that is pretrial or sentenced has varied according to time, place, and local politics; so too has the proportion of prisoners who are people of color.16 For as long as there have been Black people in Chicago, they have been disproportionately represented in its jails. Chicago’s jails began as places for outsiders excluded from the affluence that made Chicago such a vibrant, prosperous metropolis. Operated by the city, the Bridewell, the House of Correction, and the House of Correction farm originated in the nineteenth century to detain people who worked to pay back fines to the city and those awaiting trial for

6 Introduction

petty crimes, particularly immigrants and Black southern migrants. Multiple iterations of the Cook County Jail, established in the 1830s and moved to the West Side in 1929, served to detain people accused of crimes, those serving short sentences, and, in an unusual practice specific to Illinois jails at this time, those awaiting execution in the jail’s gallows and electric chair. Since the mid-­twentieth century, Black people have made up a majority of its prisoners. After the merger of the House of Correction and the Cook County Jail into the Cook County Department of Corrections in the late 1960s, pretrial detention has been the primary reason people are jailed in Chicago; since the late 1980s, those who are not trusted with complete pretrial freedom have been incarcerated in their homes using electronic shackles. Jail governance reproduces the priorities of local governments whose power is shaped by a broader white supremacist political system. Jails are subject to influence that can include that of city or county commissions, mayors, judges, prosecutors, and elected sheriffs. Sheriffs operate many of the nation’s jails, making jails exceptional as the only incarcerating institutions directly controlled by elected officials. Patronage politics, in which partisan loyalties shape who gets jobs and contracts and how much oversight there is, remain an underappreciated influence on jail conditions. While many texts have emphasized the premodern origins of jails, the modern jail is a vestige of Jim Crow politics that has been continually reconfigured since Reconstruction.17 Understanding jails as historically contingent institutions constituted by Jim Crow logic calls into question common assumptions held by corrections experts over the past century.18 Observers throughout the postwar era perpetuated the idea of the timeless, enduring quality of jails and their largely poor populations. The most prominent critical jail study of the last forty years, John Irwin’s The Jail, remains the bedrock of how experts have viewed the functions of jails. Irwin understood jails as places for “the rabble”—people who were not criminals, in his view, but who were consigned to society’s lowest class because they were disorderly. While Irwin noted that “race often overrides all other visible qualities in the assignment of disrepute,” he did not connect race to one of his most significant provocations—that “the jail, not the prison, imposes the cruelest form of punishment in the United States.”19 Attention to the political development of jails over time shows how the purposeful racialization of jails shaped efforts to determine and justify their evolving functions. Put simply, when it came to jail politics and policymaking, it mattered when people in jail were Black.20



Whose Good Intentions? 7

The Importance of Reform and Intent To gain a full picture of the motivations that fueled jail reform, this book considers the intentions of jail administrators and reformers alongside those of prisoners and their advocates. As people have asserted their visions for carceral institutions and their own lives within them, they have made calculated choices about how to transform them. The experimental quality of American incarceration is a product of this continual pattern of deliberate change. For example, historian Rebecca McLennan has shown that early prisons existed in a “permanent state of crisis” and became legitimated as institutions only through ongoing “destructive and creative” attempts at reform.21 Abolitionist scholars have argued reforms serve to strengthen the relationship between everyday carceral policymaking and entrenched historical processes of capitalism, settler colonialism, and racial state building.22 Ruth Wilson Gilmore has shown that many “reformist reforms” tend to “tweak Armageddon” instead of finding ways to improve the circumstances of people within the carceral system.23 Fusing these approaches makes clear that the relentless reform of jails and their position as institutions of perpetual harm is inextricable from the undeniable role of race and racism in the institutional and political development of jails. Historical critique of the role of reform reveals the workings of racial statecraft at the local level. In the contemporary criminal justice reform moment, policymakers have promoted “right-­sizing” or “optimizing” carceral populations, budgets, and processes as an objective and race-­neutral means of restoring credibility to a carceral system undermined by rampant racial inequality. As policymakers promote their embrace of “evidence-­based” solutions, it is critical that the complex role of race is centered in conversations about how to approach jail reform and decarceration more broadly.24 Tracking the relationship of local politics to jailing offers a more nuanced approach to the idea of mass incarceration because it brings into clearer view just how significant the state’s awareness of the racial makeup of jails was to their growth.25 In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration is a “racial caste system” through which the criminal justice system’s “laws, policies, customs, and institutions . . . operate collectively to ensure the subordinate state of a group defined largely by race.”26 Other scholars, including David Garland, have famously claimed that “mass imprisonment” is a historically specific shift marked by both the rates of imprisonment and its extension to groups, not

8 Introduction

only individuals, a transformation that occurred during the late twentieth century.27 Incorporating a deeper historical and local perspective illuminates how the logics of mass incarceration became enmeshed with institutional development. As Dylan Rodríguez has shown, the political discourse around mass incarceration often implies a “dysfunctional state” built through unintended consequences rather than a state working as intended.28 As local institutions of confinement, jails are well suited for identifying points of planning, deliberation, and conflict over whose good intentions matter most because they offer a localized perspective on the workings of cause and effect in racial statecraft. Thinking about mass incarceration less as an outcome and more as a component of an ongoing process of local governance helps us to appreciate that mass incarceration is a feature of a broader approach to racial statecraft manifest in the formation of a “carceral state.” Tracking the ongoing development of the carceral state, an evolving set of political tools used by historical actors to negotiate power through mass incarceration, brings into view how laws, policies, linked institutions, and agencies are manipulated in the service of the interconnected goals of controlling crime and remaking criminalization of marginalized populations through policing, detention and incarceration, education and rehabilitation, punishment and sanctions, and surveillance. The occurrence of mass incarceration does not mean that the carceral state has operated in a singular, coordinated manner; rather, it reflects perpetual negotiations about what government can and should do, negotiations that are constrained by preexisting institutions and ideologies. As a project grounded in liberalism, twentieth-­century jail reform hinged on creating urban spaces that gave substance to promises about what the government could do for citizens. This book focuses on the development of Chicago’s jails as urban regulatory institutions for the control of immigrants, political radicals, and people of color. As historian Nathan Connolly shows, the liberalism that emerged during the long era of Jim Crow was preoccupied with “the controlled placement of black people” that “preferred to keep the regulation of black life in the hands of powerful whites.” The liberal history of jailing began with the determination that jails, as bastions of this paternalistic approach, were essential facets of racial regulation in American cities.29 Over time, reformers and public officials continued to rationalize jails as institutions that offered social benefits because of their role in maintaining racial control. Looking closely at jailing during the 1950s through the 1970s shows the development of an explicit



Whose Good Intentions? 9

commitment to racialized institution building as jailers faced new civil rights demands. Imposing normative ideals about gender on prisoners was a central feature of this project. The pivot to neoliberal racial innocence in the 1980s and 1990s was intertwined with efforts to consolidate white political authority amid Black political ascendance in municipal politics. This liberalism has faced challenges both from corrupt politicians who have sought to keep jails in service of political patronage and from prisoners, reformers, and abolitionists who, with varying degrees of success, have attempted to constrain the most virulent expressions of local carceral power.30 From the establishment of Chicago’s first jail in the 1830s through World War II, transformations to jailing responded to European immigrants and Black migrants and justified a broader commitment to white settler profiteering and corruption in jail governance. The rise of city workhouses, the Bridewell and the House of Correction, relied on carceral labor for the management of the urban poor. From their earliest years, jails were important sources of political jobs that were distributed to those who turned out votes. The House of Correction was developed as a self-­sustaining institution that would profit off the labor of people working off city fines. The fee system, through which government paid jailers per capita and allowed jailers to keep funds that were unspent, made Cook County Jail a site of personal financial gain for sheriffs. In response to these functions of jails, Progressive reformers debated jail abolition and the possibility of replacing jails with new state-­run institutions for pretrial detention. Amid urban development and exploitation through capitalism, Chicago’s early jails played an important role in disciplining men who failed to conform to their prescribed roles as workers in the system of urban wage labor. The 1919 Race Riot served as a crucial turning point for the acceptance of jailing as a necessity that outweighed concerns about political self-­dealing. The removal of Cook County Jail from downtown to the West Side was part of a larger attempt to protect white wealth and improve the capacity of the city and county jails to isolate and control people who existed outside the white mainstream. Amid the Great Depression and World War II, jails remained potent symbols of white authority even as many beds remained empty. The era of racialized institution building took shape in the 1950s as those who operated Chicago’s jails, and those in other large counties and cities across the United States, faced the fact that they lacked the spatial infrastructure—not to mention staffing and programs—to sustain a postwar political order aiming to

10 Introduction

defend democracy through crackdowns on perceived menaces to the legitimacy of the state: drunk drivers, narcotics users and sellers, “career criminals,” gangs of “juvenile delinquents,” and even people demanding civil rights. Jailers during the 1950s rapidly realized that the long-­standing austere governance of jails made it difficult to legitimate the social exclusion needed to sustain the goals of idealistic, law-­abiding white Americans conditioned to the fruits of post–New Deal America.31 It was in this era that Cook County sheriff Joseph Lohman hoped to make the jail a place of rehabilitation and racial assimilation through a program to improve race relations. He aimed to bring the jail into postwar liberalism by expanding the rehabilitative capacity of Cook County Jail but feared that public knowledge of the race of prisoners would diminish the appeal of his political project. Reframing the jail’s predominantly Black population as “the community of the condemned,” Lohman hoped individual rehabilitation would make it easier for formerly incarcerated people to rejoin society and avoid the structural inequalities that he believed caused crime in the first place. At the same time, jailed people responded to the dominant political assumptions about their criminality through development of a new prisoner consciousness in which they sought access to the humanity and dignity so implicit in the Cold War worldview. Jail newspapers, radio, and television—venues created to engender harmonious race relations— gave prisoners a platform to articulate how jailing harmed them and to stake claims to citizenship as “forgotten men.” In this, prisoners demanded a rethinking of the mission of jails, a departure from the warehousing premise their jails had been designed for, and yet they did so while constantly asking policymakers to value their freedom. These appeals established a jail politics in which prisoners demanded to be heard and believed even as their claims were manipulated in the service of a reform agenda that cast the jail in race-­neutral terms. Amid the transformation of Chicago’s jails into sites of majority Black incarceration in the late 1950s and the 1960s, jailed people contested the notion that jails were an ideal form of implementing urban racial uplift as jailers and sheriffs alike traded on patriarchal benevolence and their ability, as men and fathers, to civilize people in jail. In the early 1960s, Cook County Jail death row prisoner Paul Crump drew on his status as a rehabilitated prisoner to fight for his life and freedom. The state’s unwillingness to offer Crump his freedom did not deter other efforts. As the city of Chicago, Cook County, and the state of Illinois took on urban renewal and catered to the “metropolitan” interests of



Whose Good Intentions? 11

suburbanites, Black prisoners joined with the civil rights movement to critique the racism and appalling conditions they encountered in the urban jail.32 With the help of comedian Dick Gregory, prisoners used sit-­ins, hunger strikes, and new coalitions to challenge jail governance; jail staff organized in opposition to the racism of administrators. Suburban interests mattered deeply to the broader struggle for jail reform. Through the Cook County League of Women Voters, questions about the government’s obligations to jailed people reached the level of legislative and state constitutional reform. The concerns of these suburban activists centered on making jails symbols of good government as they attempted to formalize the jail’s mission to correct behavior and remove jails from the corrupt oversight of local politicians. Organizing for and not with prisoners, those working for such reforms sustained a broader agenda of “municipal housekeeping” prevalent among affluent white women who sought to produce political accountability across city boundaries.33 Merging the Cook County Jail and Chicago House of Correction became the focal point of a jail reform movement fixated on reform to patronage politics that diverted attention from the concerns of Black prisoners and staff even as it centered racialized justifications for jailing. Using gendered pathologies around Black manhood that framed men in jail as psychologically damaged and lazy, white liberals proposed a new, intergovernmental corrections agency that would merge the jails into a rehabilitative institution controlled by experts and accountable to community members. The struggle for jail reform took new forms amid the fires of urban unrest in the late 1960s. The context of perceived escalating urban violence—“crime in the streets”—gave greater purchase to concerns about the dangerous situations developing in urban jails as judges filled them with large numbers of pretrial detainees.34 Again facing the consequences of intensified policing amid President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Crime initiated in 1965, overcrowded jails in the 1960s confronted the consequences of state-­sanctioned violence. Chicago’s best-­known instances of urban violence during this time, including the murder of Chicago Black Panther Party chair Fred Hampton, the police riot at the Democratic National Convention, and the uprising after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, were mirrored by shocking murders and beatings within jails.35 Such violence—inside and outside jails—led to depictions of Cook County Jail as a jungle of Black brutes and white victims that created new pressures for policymakers to reconsider the functions of city and county jails.

12 Introduction

Sheriff Joseph Woods used the dehumanization of prisoners and civil rights protestors as a means of destroying the political legitimacy of prisoner appeals for reform. In the name of law and order, Woods hired a Black warden, Winston Moore, and made jail reform as much a referendum on Moore’s humanity as on the operations of the jail. Winston Moore’s tenure reveals how racialized carceral expansion in American cities was fueled by federal largess, individual ambition, and community ideals. As warden and executive director of the new CCDOC, Moore embraced the political opportunity that jail expansion presented through both sympathy to him as a Black person trying to help Black prisoners and through new grants and support for localities looking to pursue jail reform. His ideals, especially antiradicalism and heteronormative masculinity, informed a penal philosophy that emphasized control over Black prisoners as an important goal of jail reform. While carving out a political space for himself as a reformer, however, he faced new modes of carceral governance that were being tested in the courts and the public sphere. As accountability made control tactics such as beatings less tenable, Moore discovered the limits of representational politics as a means of claiming authority to transform the jail. He would be held responsible in ways that his white peers were not. The major transformations of Moore’s tenure—the creation of the CCDOC in 1969 and the massive jail expansion that followed—lay bare the complex relationship between the War on Crime and racialized urban incarceration. Although jailing remained a local governing responsibility, new intergovernmental projects reconfigured the political terrain in which prisoners struggled for recognition of their rights as people awaiting trial and people serving short sentences. By this time, liberals believed that corruption of local governance could be checked through intergovernmental cooperation, which could also lead to the provision of better and more comprehensive services for incarcerated people.36 This assertive localism was both sustained and undermined by the mission of the federal War on Crime in the 1970s. In centralizing local crime control authority and in funding local projects, most counties, like Cook County, retained autonomy, maintained aging buildings that failed to meet new jail standards, and resisted external efforts to regulate jail conditions. The local implementation of the War on Crime revealed that any jail construction could be rationalized as rehabilitative and that federal funds could be used for the training of staff who continued to harm prisoners. That it established a pattern of circumventing prisoner and community visions for reform was the War on Crime’s most enduring contribution to jails. However,



Whose Good Intentions? 13

federal funds also created capacity among local reformers, particularly activists who targeted the criminal courts through court watching and pretrial interviews to pressure judges to avoid jailing altogether. In this way, the closure of the federal agency tasked with the War on Crime, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, became a catastrophe as groups were forced to stop work that had curtailed yet more incarceration. Overcrowding was an immediate result.37 Such shifting modes of racialized jail reform established the context in which federal courts began to recognize the constitutional rights of jailed people in the late 1960s and 1970s. The outcomes of class action lawsuits in the 1980s, which did eventually yield changes to violent and dangerous conditions, were constrained by a local political commitment to ensuring that Black defendants were incarcerated before trial. As oversight of jail conditions was outsourced to federal courts and local politicians resisted those judicial interventions, jailed people and their allies were left with fewer modes of appealing to the public concern about violence and mismanagement. Ultimately, the incorporation of prisoners’ demands and sensibilities into jail reform discourses served to legitimize and expand, rather than diminish and improve, the conditions of jailing that predominantly poor Black and Latinx people encountered.38 By the 1980s, policymakers had learned how to deploy prisoner rights to justify policies that ensured their own institutional legitimacy in ways that extended carceral capacity beyond jail walls. The diminishing of prisoners as rightful individuals proved central to the political construction of the jail as a racially innocent institution charged with incarcerating a “population” of “serious” offenders, an idea that informed the construction of maximum-­security jails in the 1990s and the rise of electronic monitoring and alternatives to incarceration across the county. The continued position of the CCDOC as a predominantly Black institution reflects nearly two hundred years of racialized justifications for jailing. Chicago has endured as a carceral city because the dominant and most successful vision of liberal jail reform sustains a politics of racial regulation.

Jailing Chicago There was always mass incarceration in Chicago. Chicago offers one of the most profound examples of how the racial makeup of the jail population that was disproportionately and predominantly Black informed the creation of jail policy in

14 Introduction

different moments. Locating the narrative of the transformation of the American jail in such a setting highlights how anti-­Blackness structured jail expansion, as well as how race and racism worked with other ideologies to shape complex institutional dynamics between prisoners, staff, and policymakers. That Chicago and Cook County were always on the vanguard of political efforts to implement jail reform—be it through forced labor at the Chicago House of Correction, attempting rehabilitation in the Cook County Jail, or home-­jailing through electronic monitoring—mattered deeply for the credibility of this project.39 Certainly, American jails offer many examples of carceral experimentation. New York City, for example, pioneered jailing on islands, in neighborhoods, and on boats. Los Angeles County built jail farms for drunks and jails for women decades before other large metropolises. Yet it is precisely because New York City and Los Angeles County offer stories of the emergence of massive, multisite carceral archipelagos across vast urban expanses that Chicago offers a more representative example. The path dependency of jails, in which what can be done in an institution is shaped by what already exists, is best assessed through a centrally located institution. Chicago’s city and county jails in the postwar period developed at a single location under the administration, ultimately, of a county sheriff. Like many American jails, this single site became not only a touchstone in local political culture for its centrality in the lives of marginalized people, but a place with profound meaning in representing the obligations and priorities of local government. As with many sites of state violence, the jail archive is riddled with silences. Lies about jail conditions and the erasure of information, particularly about the motives and actions of prisoners, have been and remain central to jail governance. Jails are fundamentally political institutions. The entrenchment of corruption, efforts to resist oversight and considerations of prisoners’ rights, and the concealment of the true nature of their operations are defining qualities and constraints on demands for jail reform. When I began research for this book, the Cook County Sheriff ’s Office told me that the Illinois Records Retention Act allows it to destroy all records related to the jail after ten years.40 Although there have been hints that the county may retain some of these records, subsequent records requests to the county have gone unfulfilled.41 That is why it is so significant that Chicago offers a rich available collection of archival sources on postwar jail life and policy. To tell this story, I relied on repositories of municipal records and the collections of activists and advocacy



Whose Good Intentions? 15

organizations to recover the worlds and voices of prisoners and track the activities of sheriffs and jail administrators. Until recently, the Chicago Sun-­Times, Chicago Daily News, and Chicago Tribune maintained close coverage of the jail; a bevy of small Cook County newspapers covered the realm of county politics. With Chicago as its headquarters, Johnson Publishing devoted special attention to covering Black life in Chicago’s jails in outlets like Ebony, Jet, and the Chicago Defender. Generations of skilled photographers have made the changing nature of Chicago’s jails visible. The large footprint of the jail became clear as I found its story in presidential libraries and personal collections across the country, in alternative newspapers, and in books, television, and music created at the jail. I supplemented these sources with a number of interviews. The extensive and carefully preserved record of jailing in Chicago makes this history impossible to suppress and promises that there is yet more to recover. As the histories of crime, policing, courts, and incarceration come into view in Chicago and Illinois more broadly, Chicago’s jails represent a distinct rendering of local experiences of criminal justice institutions that enrich the emergent history of the urban carceral state. As the CCDOC remains a leader in shaping jail reform discourse nationwide, there is a profound need to place the institution in a deeper historical context. Situating the stories of the House of Correction, Cook County Jail, and CCDOC within the local milieus of city and county allows this story to be more clearly connected to the changes wrought in jails across the country during the postwar era. Focusing on Chicago allows us to meet a diverse cast of characters who have sought to alter and reconfigure jailing in America’s second city. They include people like Vincent Ciucci, who repeatedly endangered Cook County Jail guards in violent riots, and Jesse James, head of the Correctional Officers Association, who used labor organizing to press for administrative change at the House of Correction during the civil rights era. This story includes activists Hans Mattick and Charlotte Senechalle, who spent decades advocating for jail reform and who amassed dozens of boxes of records in the process, as well as women such as Jessie Houston and Consuella York, who ministered to prisoners and carried their needs beyond jail walls. It also includes political figures such as state’s attorney Richard M. Daley, who believed in using jailing to quash ascendant Black political power. But many in this story appear nameless in the records, known to us only through the eyes of others. As we consider people who were shackled to their beds, people crowded together in tiny cells, and people who faced the

16 Introduction

loneliest and most vulnerable nights of their lives, this story demands that we remember those who lived and died in jail. The racialized, benevolent goals of jailing have sustained mass incarceration and diminished the effectiveness of calls for freedom. As jail reform yet again takes the national stage, the story of race and jailing in Chicago pushes us to engage more substantively with prisoners’ struggles for their lives and dignity.

Chapter 1

The Least Human of American Institutions

The young man stands front and center in a photograph of one hundred Black men crammed together in one of the congested rooms of Cook County Jail (Figure 1). He finds himself in a crowded, unventilated “bull-­pen,” the very name of the space suggesting that someone, somewhere, had considered people like him akin to the animals that filled Chicago’s profitable stockyards and slaughterhouses. With blankets laundered every two years and an open drain in the floor for a urinal, the air is thick with odor. Like the rest of the men, the young man is wearing his own dirty clothes. This fresh-­faced young person wears a vest and hat that suggest he had left his home with a sense of purpose and with ideas about how he wanted the world to see him. His mouth, on the edge of a smile, suggests a little amusement at this unusual occasion for a photo. His posture tells us that he must have walked the streets with confidence before the police picked him up. Many of the men around him read newspapers; the reflection of the camera’s flash off the newspapers reveals that there are yet more men in the shadowy margins of the photograph. Most of the men face away from the camera. We do not know the young man’s name, but we know that he had a name and that there were probably people outside the jail who missed him.1 This young person’s arrival at Cook County Jail would have been the culmination of an exceptional journey through Chicago’s carceral machinery. His was likely one of 125,843 arrests made by the Chicago Police Department in 1921.2 He had probably first been taken in a “Black Maria”—a paddy wagon—to a police lockup where he awaited arraignment before the criminal courts or, more likely, the municipal court. Had he been among the 117,912 people who came before the municipal court in 1921, there was a 66 percent chance that he might have had his charges

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Figure 1. “A ‘Bull-­Pen’ in the ‘New’ Jail.” Photograph by F. P. Burke. Newberry Library.

dropped.3 He had not been one of the 8,566 arrested people sent to the House of Correction that year.4 If he felt lucky to be spared the hard labor and crumbling Victorian cell houses of the House of Correction, we cannot know. As one of the 10,642 people sent to Cook County Jail, he waited anywhere from fifteen to thirty days for the municipal court to dispose of his case. It may have taken up to a month for the state’s attorney, the local prosecutor, to have the young man’s case processed by a grand jury that determined if there was evidence to indict him.5 Whether he was one of the eighty-­two prisoners between the ages of thirteen and sixteen who had fallen through the cracks of the new juvenile court, or part of the larger category of “thugs and desperadoes” under twenty-­one years old who made up a fifth of the jail population, the young prisoner would have found himself detained with men of all ages, including those accused of sexual crimes against children.6 If the young man received one of the sixteen hundred indictments handed down each year by the grand jury, it might take still more time for his family or friends to pawn some household goods or secure a bail loan from a “loan shark” to secure his freedom. The bail amounts could vary wildly—$400 for disorderly conduct, $50,000 for murder—but for a young person, like the young man in the photo, paying the average $250 to $500 for bail was likely out of the question.



The Least Human of American Institutions 19

If his case went to trial in the criminal courts, most likely for a felony, it might take anywhere from another week to ninety days for a jury or judge to return a verdict. And then, if he was among the 25 percent of those who were found guilty and received a sentence, he might be in the jail for up to a year. All this while sharing a ten-­foot-­by-­five-­foot cell in the “New Jail” with up to four other men for twenty hours a day and living on a monotonous diet of bread, coffee, and split pea soup. Removed from the context of his life, and absent records that might help us know more about who the young man was and what his life became after his time in jail, we are left to imagine his hunger, loneliness, and frustration. But his eyes challenge us to know who he is.7 The photograph was featured in a 1922 book, Reports Comprising the Survey of the Cook County Jail, edited by George W. Kirchwey. Kirchwey wrote that people like the young man in the photo who experienced “forced confinement” at Cook County Jail found it “cruel, if not unusual, punishment. If unnecessarily prolonged, it becomes a form of oppression that no civilized community would long tolerate.”8 Kirchwey was hired as a consultant by the Chicago Community Trust to figure out what a civilized community would tolerate. As the former warden of Sing-­Sing Prison in New York and dean of the Columbia University Law School, Kirchwey was tasked with creating a report that would accurately and scientifically depict conditions in Cook County Jail and make recommendations for how the county should proceed with its plans to replace an institution that played such a vital role in urban governance. “The County Jail is not a self-­ contained unit in our community life,” Kirchwey argued, “but an integral part of the system of criminal justice which the community maintains.”9 Kirchwey had been summoned from the East Coast to broker disagreements between some of Progressive Era Chicago’s most powerful political constituencies: fiscally conservative businessmen who wanted the jail out of downtown; social scientists and settlement house workers who wanted to better use the jail to manage the city’s poor; and the county politicians who sought to ensure the jail remained a source of political jobs and occasional graft. He hoped to enlighten his audience of powerful people about what they were up against: “The truth is that the County Jail is the very worst feature of the American penal system—worse than the workhouse, worse than the penitentiary.”10 Jails, he found, were “worse because more neglected, and therefore, filthier, viler, more degraded and demoralized.” When Kirchwey called the jail “neglected,” he invoked a popular characterization of jails: political neglect. The result, he

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charged, was that among the hospitals, schools, asylums, and even prisons that preoccupied Progressive social reformers, he found jails were “the least human of American institutions.”11 For Kirchwey, the stakes of inspiring political engagement with the nation’s jails could not be higher. If his generation of jail reformers got it wrong, their vision would endure for decades through dangerous buildings. He felt great pressure to “determine what the Chicago of 1972, or the year 2022, will want in the way of detention quarters.”12 Since the founding of Chicago and Cook County, how to jail and who to jail have been central questions of local governance. Observers in the early twentieth century wondered: Are jails necessary? Are jails more harmful than good? Can jails be changed? How do we plan and build jails that will serve an unknown future? The early history of jailing in Chicago shows that jails have long been flexible in purpose, administered through discretion, and budgetarily austere institutions. Efforts to modify these traits of discretion, flexibility, and austerity—often regarded as features of twenty-­first-­century neoliberal governance—preoccupied Progressive jail reform efforts in the first half of the twentieth century and laid an enduring foundation for subsequent discussions about the nature of jail governance. These features endured as political actors pursued jail construction, created new knowledge, imagined rehabilitative purposes for jails, fought corruption, and operationalized racism. Prisoners, especially prisoners of color like the young person in the picture, were often used to illustrate the problems of jail governance, but their concerns seldom factored into decision making. This chapter tracks the origins of jailing in Chicago, the rise of Progressive Era contests over jail governance, and the consequences and limits of Progressive Era institution building and reform into the 1950s. The political development of urban jails was defined by the emergence of the belief that jails were harmful to both prisoners and cities because they increased criminality. The coercive solutions reformers offered to address these harms sustained class inequality, promoted criminalization through gendered and ethnic constructs, and expanded racial regulation.

The Rise of Urban Jails Cook County’s first jail was built in 1833. The jail opened three years after implementation of the Indian Removal Act forced  Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi,



The Least Human of American Institutions 21

Miami, Ho-­Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, and Illinois peoples from their lands and two years after the county was chartered by the state legislature.13 Established in newly incorporated Chicago, a town of nearly 250 people, the first Cook County Jail was “a small primitive looking structure built after the manner of frontier stockades, with logs as the principal material.”14 Early Americans did not believe that jails had a role in correcting criminal behavior. Frontier jails were typically small, house-­like buildings where prisoners were held near the residence of the jailer and his family. In some of these small jails, detainees were kept in the basement or locked in upstairs rooms of the jailer’s home until they could be delivered to a magistrate for trial. In communities where people knew each other, they did not see the point of detaining their neighbors for lengthy periods before a trial or the meting out of a physical punishment.15 The new stockade-­like jail in Chicago represented a significant shift: congregate jails replaced the household jail as urban governments tried to deal with strangers, people they regarded as potential social contaminants whose removal from the community for a short period was of benefit to everyone, including the incorrigible individual. This was a distinct development apart from prisons, which saw the innovation of the penitentiary emerge in the early republic to protect the new nation from the assaults on democracy represented by crime and to separate democracy from the barbarism of physical punishment. New models of incarceration emerged from this experiment. At New York’s Auburn Prison, men lived and worked together in silence. At Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, men lived alone in solitary cells said to mimic the grave. These approaches meant little to jailed people who continued to experience incarceration in wide-­ open rooms, left largely to their own devices. Jails served to temporarily separate the disorderly from their neighborhoods, to punish those who owed debts, and to briefly hold people awaiting the speedy trial that the Constitution offered. Records that would help us understand how this worked at the earliest iteration of Cook County Jail do not appear to have survived.16 Cook County Jail played a central role in upholding racial capitalism in the frontier town. Among the few surviving stories about people jailed in this “very uncouth structure” is that of Edwin Heathcock, a free Black man who was arrested in 1842 for being “unconstitutionally free.” Seen as violating a law that required free Black people like Heathcock to file paperwork with the state and demonstrate financial security, lest free Black people become public charges, the county jailed Heathcock for six weeks to provide his master with an opportunity

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to come forward. When no master came forward, Heathcock was sold at auction across the street from the jail. Being jailed was key to Heathcock’s legal transformation from free man to commodity. With community members shocked at “the selling of a Methodist brother . . . as a piece of property” in Chicago’s first slave sale, no one placed a bid, and the sheriff threatened to jail Heathcock indefinitely. Mahlon Ogden, brother to the city’s first mayor, purchased Heathcock for twenty-­five cents and immediately freed him. “The first instance in which any expense had been made to the county on account of the negro being in our midst,” one witness recalled, “was the expense of arresting, imprisoning, advertising, and selling Edwin Heathcock.”17 The criminalization of Edwin Heathcock’s freedom demonstrated a pattern that would play out again and again as the jail served as a backdrop for white elites to debate whether Black people could be trusted with their liberty. Chicago’s rapid development was attended by innovations in jailing which, in 1850, prompted the construction of a new county courthouse with a jail located in its basement. The casually governed jail was a site of chaos despite its spatial connection to the formal disposition of justice. This was abundantly clear in 1869 when Charles Pile set his cell on fire. Locked into the “little five-­by six hell-­hole,” with four other African American men, Pile lit his pipe from a scrap of paper and then threw the paper onto his straw-­filled mattress. His response to the protests of his cellmates communicated both indifference and despair. “Let it alone,” he allegedly said. “Let the damned jail burn up.” According to the Chicago Tribune, “Everything combustible in the cell was soon on fire, and the inmates literally stood in the flame.” After hearing the cries of “agony and pain,” a guard struggled to unlock a metal gate. The prisoners “threw themselves against the bars” in a vain attempt to force it open. When the door finally yielded amid the heat, smoke, and smell of burning flesh, the men emerged “wild, blistered, and with hair on fire.” Freed from the flames, they ran up and down the hallways as their fellow prisoners heard them “howling piteously.” All of the men died. That detention in Cook County Jail had fostered the impulse to burn down the jail was, in the eyes of the Tribune, part of a larger problem. It called the jail “an abomination in the sight of man; a pest house in which the living decompose.” Maybe, the Tribune surmised, Pile’s retort to “let the damned jail burn up” had not been so very wrong. “Would it have been a loss if the entire structure had gone up in smoke and flames, so long as no lives and records were sacrificed?”18



The Least Human of American Institutions 23

The county jail was one of two jails in Chicago. Increasing numbers of immigrant settlers inspired the city to establish a workhouse, the Bridewell, in 1851. City fathers hoped the workhouse would fulfill the charge of the 1837 city charter, which empowered Chicago to “erect and establish a bridewell, or house of correction . . . [to confine] . . . all rogues, vagabonds, stragglers, idle or disorderly persons.”19 Modeled after British workhouses, the Chicago Bridewell was more of a “city prison” than a jail because it held people who owed the city money for municipal fines or had been convicted of petty crimes. The institution would be sustained by the labor of the prisoners rather than public funds. An 1853 report by the Bridewell’s keeper showed that most of those in the eighty-­five-­cell wooden jail were serving short sentences for fines under five dollars for drunken or disorderly conduct after being arrested by either part-­time constables or members of the city’s newly formed police department. Prisoners included people like John Morgan, who served twenty-­four days to pay back a twelve-­dollar fine for “making a row at the Theatre.”20 The Bridewell workhouse was removed from downtown when city leaders came to view warehousing prisoners as undermining its goal of controlling rising numbers of new Irish and German residents. Critics found that only a small number of the men were employed preparing materials for public school construction; the rest sat idle. In August 1871, facing the rot of the wooden Bridewell and hoping for more constructive uses of the jail, the city replaced it with the Chicago House of Correction. Inspired by the Detroit House of Correction, which operated a profitable on-­site chair factory, and not unlike convict labor schemes that aimed to rebuild the American South following the Civil War, the new House of Correction promised a jail funded not by taxpayers but through the yields of unfree labor. People arrested for violations of city ordinances were sent to a separate court of police justices, who handed out fines. Those who could not pay their fines were sent to the House of Correction; only the poor needed correction. After the city jail was removed from its valuable riverside location to the end of the line of the city’s one-­horse streetcar, its familiar Bridewell moniker endured. It was safely established on the city’s western edge when Chicago burned two months later.21 The vast complex of brick buildings that emerged at 26th and California reflected the basic imperatives of feeding and housing the jail’s unfree workers, a class that came to include the free Black people, hobos, and eastern European immigrants who made their way to the young city after the Civil War. Charles

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Felton, superintendent of the House of Correction, quickly became frustrated with the difficulties he faced as rising numbers of the city’s poorer classes chose working off their fines through incarceration instead of raising money to pay them. Forced labor, he hoped, would make incarceration a less appealing option. As with the Bridewell before it, prisoners usually spent less than a month, if not less than a week in the jail to pay the money owed to the city. In the meantime, Felton struggled to implement a system of classification to organize transient prisoners in the crowded jail and feared the contaminating effects of intermixing during incarceration as a prisoner could have “a variety of cell-­mates varying in ages from the youngest the oldest, and including possibly, the active thief or burglar, and also the most idiotic and imbecile octogenarian.”22 Felton’s plan for a coercive regime of hard work to induce people to pay their fines yielded a profitable system of jail labor that became central to the city’s growing infrastructure. As Chicago rebuilt and expanded in the wake of the Great Fire, prisoner labor made the House of Correction a competitive player on the city’s burgeoning market for brick. By 1921, prisoners were making 2.3 million bricks a year, suggesting that prisoner labor supplied the city of Chicago with millions of bricks over the course of its operation. Prisoners laid bricks made of clay from the jail yard to establish the first sidewalks linking the jail to the surrounding neighborhood. The city used jail bricks for its sewers. Prisoners used the bricks to construct a new wall around the jail and additional cell houses and work buildings at the House of Correction site. Prisoners also grew food at a jail farm and orchard, made cane furniture, and discovered a lucrative limestone stratum that was turned into a quarry. But bricks were not the only export from the House of Correction to the city. The jail’s proximity to the county smallpox hospital meant that many ex-­prisoners were exposed to the disease on streetcars immediately after being released, carrying it home with them (Tables 1 and 2).23 As Gilded Age Chicago became the center of the western frontier economy, Cook County Jail was increasingly used to disrupt the lives of impoverished outsiders who dared interfere with its operations. After the Great Fire of 1871 damaged the county courthouse and basement jail, the new Cook County Jail, with its four-­story block of 136 cells, opened in 1874 adjacent to the county building in the center of the city’s downtown business district (Figure 2). The jail’s expansion occurred at the dawn of a decade defined by rising tension between Chicago’s businessmen and wage workers, an influx of two hundred thousand



The Least Human of American Institutions 25

Table 1. Ages of Cook County Jail Prisoners, 1876 Age 10–15 15–18 19–22 23–25 26–30 31–35

Age 183 591 376 344 435 213

36–40 41–45 46–50 51–55 56–65 Over 66

117 114  66  45  33   6

Source: Charles Kern, Cook County Jail: Statistical Report, Dec. 31, 1877, CHM, 4–5.

Table 2. Parentage of Cook County Jail Prisoners, 1876 American, including colored persons Negroes Belgian Austrian, Bohemian, Hungarian Canadian Chinese English

624 141   9  64  31   2 147

French German and Swiss Irish Italian Scandinavian Russian and Polish Scotch

54 417 1,191 8 90 17 69

Note: Terms used are from the source. Source: Charles Kern, Cook County Jail: Statistical Report, Dec. 31, 1877, CHM, 5, 7.

new residents, and the costs of rebuilding a devasted city during the depression caused by the Panic of 1873. Amid the chaos, city elites looked to police to establish order.24 Cook County Jail supported the criminalization of poverty and mobility as most of the crimes that landed people in the county jail were those against private property: 65 percent of people were in jail for larceny, another 6 percent were in jail for various forms of fraud and property destruction, and 2 percent of prisoners were incarcerated for vagrancy. Those captured for not working, cheating, or stealing were among the city’s most vulnerable and least rooted. Nearly 30  percent of the prisoners held in 1876 were under eighteen. Seventy-­seven percent of the prisoners were of immigrant extraction; 43 percent claimed Irish parents. Black people made up 22 percent of prisoners with American-­born parents.25 For most people who were released, Cook County Jail was a site of brief detention before release on bail, acquittal, pardon, or dropped charges. Only

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Figure 2. Map of jail locations in Chicago. Map created by John Wyatt Greenlee.

125 of the 2,773 released from the jail in 1876—4 percent—had served sentences there. For 13 percent of those released, the jail was a way station to other sites of confinement, including state asylums, state reform schools, penitentiaries, and the House of Correction.26 The incarceration of labor organizers cemented the jail’s place in the protection of capitalism and the political status quo. After the 1886 bombing of a labor rally for the eight-­hour workday in Chicago’s Haymarket Square and attendant police riot that killed eleven people, eight Chicago anarchists charged with the bombing were held in Cook County Jail as they awaited trial; four were later executed there. “The United States of America are nowadays simply and purely the land of capitalistic tyranny and the home of the most brutal police despotism,” Louis Lingg wrote in his jail cell before meeting his death.27 Eugene Debs, president of the American Railway Union, was incarcerated in Cook County Jail with other labor leaders during the 1894 Pullman strike. The experience of seeing the gallows where the anarchists accused of the Haymarket bombing were hanged and hearing the “sobbing and screaming” of the women prisoners left Debs with a newfound affinity with jailed people. “I felt myself on the same human level with



The Least Human of American Institutions 27

those Chicago prisoners,” he recalled, later noting that he viewed incarceration to be “used as a club to intimidate working men and women . . . used as a silencer upon any expression of opinion.”28 Interviewing Debs inspired Nellie Bly, a pioneering stunt journalist, to bribe a turnkey to let her into the jail and interview the prisoners. While her reporting yielded short-­term improvements to conditions, the jail’s reputation for political repression hardened. This was evident in the 1905 novelized exposé of the meatpacking industry The Jungle when Upton Sinclair depicted the incarcerations of Jurgis, the main character, in both Cook County Jail and the House of Correction after attacking his boss. Looking at his life in the city and in the jail, Jurgis concluded, “There was no justice. . . . It was only force, it was tyranny.”29 The desires for racial, ethnic, and political control that informed Chicago and Cook County’s approach to jailing through both detention and workhouse labor was similar to that of other industrializing cities during this time, particularly in the North and Midwest during the post–Civil War nineteenth century. St. Louis had a separately operated city jail, a city workhouse that operated a limestone quarry, and a county jail.30 A new jail built in Baltimore in 1859 was dedicated to holding people who had escaped slavery and those who assisted them until 1864. In Baltimore, emancipation gave way to a new policing culture in which policemen were the “new vigilantes,” replacing the city’s mobs as the central engine of racial oppression. Reformers and racists alike embraced using Baltimore’s jails to hold an increasing percentage of Black prisoners.31 Panics around white male hobos during the “Tramp Era” between 1870 and 1910 contributed to jail expansion as municipalities pursued carceral solutions. In Los Angeles, jail capacity grew tenfold, from a small jail built in 1881 to two large facilities, the Los Angeles City Jail and the Stockade, leading to the jailing of more than four hundred people. A chain gang of displaced laborers worked to build the infrastructure of the frontier city.32 While local political conditions and the development of policing and legal institutions played a critical role in ensuring that America’s jails were distinct from city to city, there was growing consensus that jailing in the Gilded Age and Reconstruction represented a dramatic problem. In his pioneering study of incarcerated people in the 1880 census, minister and prison reformer Frederick Howard Wines reflected, “The unanimous opinion of experts in penology condemns the American jail system as costly, inefficient, and very corrupting in its influence.”33 The shift from believing that criminals were contaminating the

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community to the idea that jailing was creating crime in cities produced another major reform proposal: the elimination of jails altogether.

Abolition, Reform, and Expansion By the early twentieth century, Gilded Age muckrakers, widespread critiques of urban capitalism and governance, and a class of politically active woman experts made Chicago a hotbed of the Progressive movement. Progressive reform of governing institutions aimed to displace corruption and balance the scales, to some extent, in terms of how poor people were treated when they encountered the state in a world defined by disproportionate wealth. In the name of social responsibility and a commitment to order, Chicago’s Progressives remade every facet of government’s response to crime as they advanced court reforms, endeavored to curb police corruption, and created new institutions for incarcerating children. Shifting the mechanisms for the social control of race, class, and ethnic governance to experts, the consolidation of power was at the heart of these benevolent contributions. It was in this context of ideological diversity and social activism that some Progressive thinkers began calling for the abolition of jails.34 One of America’s most influential attorneys, Clarence Darrow, argued that jails at the turn of the twentieth century were powerful symbols of Gilded Age wealth inequality and that the rampant jailing of poor people demonstrated how citizens put their property before the humanity of others. “There should be no jails,” Darrow declared in a famous speech to prisoners at Cook County Jail. Darrow interpreted the lack of moral distinctions between people in jail and people in the city beyond its walls. “A jail is evidence of the lack of charity of the people on the outside who make the jails and fill them with the victims of  their own greed.”35 The city made Darrow himself a victim of inescapable crimes. There were pickpockets, to be sure, but there was also the crime of high streetcar fares controlled by “a body of men [who] have bribed the city council and the legislature.” Paying for heat, he noted, required choosing between payment to the criminal “gas trust” or for monopolized oil from Standard Oil. In an era marked by “the mania of money-­getting,” Darrow found, people went to jail because they could not afford a good lawyer. “I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be,” Darrow told the gathered men. They were incarcerated “on account of their circumstances which are entirely beyond their



The Least Human of American Institutions 29

control and for which they are in no way responsible.” Darrow concluded that the best way to “abolish crime and criminals” was to “make fair conditions of life. Give men a chance to live.” Absent the achievement of greater equality in the means of production, Darrow asserted, reformers preoccupied with “building jails” were wrong. Instead, he proposed that jails should be eliminated. “They do not accomplish what they pretend to accomplish. If you would wipe them out, there would be no more criminals than now.”36 Few Progressives echoed Darrow’s plea to fully eliminate jails; most preferred removing and redistributing power to eliminating jails altogether. In the Midwest, Progressive resistance to corruption surrounding jail governance fueled a movement for local jail abolition that sought to abolish local jails and replace them with “state ownership and control.”37 Evoking “abolition” in reference to the movement to end slavery, jail abolitionists emphasized the incapacity of local administrators to reform the institution and the inhumanity of jail conditions.38 Speaking to the American Prison Association in 1913, Demarchus Brown of the Indiana Board of State Charities noted, corrupt jails endured “because the people in the locality feel that they should have control of the jail and that somebody should make some money out of it.” Brown detailed the outcomes of the creation of a state jail farm for people serving sentences for misdemeanors that provided a vital opportunity for rethinking jailing (although it appeared to be a northern equivalent of southern prison farms).39 In another influential tract, Edith Abbott, Chicago-­based chairwoman of the Committee on Crime for the Illinois State Conference of Charities, argued, “it is folly to hope that any attempt to reform the county jails of Illinois . . . can be even measurably successful” given that “any humanitarian legislation that is left to a hundred and one different local authorities to enforce will simply not be enforced.” Given that such reforms would have centralized authority over jails in the hands of state officials and removed them from cities where more diverse constituencies might influence their trajectories, the commitment to white political authority constrained the most idealistic manifestations of progressive abolitionism.40 Cook County Jail warden John Whitman, a self-­styled reformer who had invited Clarence Darrow to speak at Cook County Jail, was representative of Progressive institutionalists who argued for the racially beneficent uses of jails instead of abolition. His profile in McClure’s, the famous muckraker magazine, appeared in the same issue as a chapter from Ida Tarbell’s history of Standard Oil and part of Lincoln Steffens’s famed depiction of urban political corruption that would come

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to be known as The Shame of Cities. In stark contrast to muckrakers’ accounts of political self-­dealing, McClure’s celebrated the jailer who “does all his wonderful work by kindness.”41 Whitman was most proud of his work with a prisoner he referred to as “Uncle Charlie,” who was “a colored man” of “about sixty years of age, partly blind and somewhat broken in health.” After Leonard had been jailed multiple times, Whitman advised Leonard to leave Chicago. “This he did, but with his age, his poor sight and broken health, he found it difficult to make a living, and at intervals wandered back.” Leonard, whom Whitman called “my old fake tailor,” returned to the jail in a snowstorm. “He is a shrunken little fellow—weighs maybe a hundred pounds—but that day he had on a suit of clothes built for a man that must have weighed three hundred,” and he walked with bare feet on the icy ground. Two weeks later, a judge found Leonard guilty of taking a deposit for a suit of one dollar—“never any more and never any less”—without producing the garments on at least six occasions. The judge sentenced Leonard to a year in the House of Correction for each dollar. Whitman begged the judge to change the sentence, arguing “the county has got to take care of him” because he was “a public charge.” Whitman promised “to make him comfortable at the jail, and I’ll get some good use out of him. . . . I want him for his influence over the other colored men.” Leonard organized Black prisoners to keep spaces clean and ensure men were not spitting. The result, Whitman claimed, was that “we are getting those colored men so they are the best-­behaved prisoners in the jail.” Charles Leonard, Whitman claimed, was “as happy as if he had been born here.”42 Dressing up coercion and punishment as reform and rehabilitation, such propositions depended on the example of compliant Black people for their legitimacy and gained greater power when propagandized alongside more clear-­eyed critiques of white political and economic power. Calling Leonard “Charlie,” not Charles, emphasizing his frailty, disability, and diminutive, shrunken stature, and framing his unpaid labor as beneficial to both Leonard and the institution, the story suggests that jailing was, in Whitman’s eyes, a means of delivering social support for society’s outcasts. In contrast to abolitionism, Progressive institutionalists believed jailing might give a person purpose, and that Cook County Jail might be a place for long-­term correction and confinement.43 Whitman’s belief that urban jails could transform people was not well received by everyone in the community. “The humanitarian foolishness in the County Jail is being carried too far,” the Illinois Staats-­Zeitung reported in 1901. The German-­language newspaper said Whitman extended “too much pity for



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the evil doers,” which included those accused of murder, robbery, and “predatory attacks.” His practices of “a concert and a lecture every week is philanthropy carried to excess.” Acknowledging that Whitman had asked the county board for a piano, the paper sarcastically suggested “the installation of a gymnasium, a concert hall, and a ballroom. Thus, these fine members of the human race—murderers, robbers, and burglars—could meet and dance with their equals, namely, women shoplifters and ‘lady’ kleptomaniacs.”44 Concerns about the plausibility of jail abolition and the excesses of rehabilitative programing faded as racism came to dominate Progressive jail reform. Between 1910 and 1920, a 140 percent increase in the city’s Black population occurred as 56,442 new migrants over the age of ten arrived in Chicago.45 In the words of historian Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s social scientists and reformers cast Black Chicagoans as the opposite of white “industriousness and productivity” who were in need of “adjustment, containment, and discipline.” Black efforts to enjoy urban spaces were met with white boundary demarcating projects across the city, marking Black spaces as a “social threat.”46 White home-­owner organizations on the South Side organized against what they saw as a Black “invasion.” White anxieties about a postwar crime wave fostered extralegal violence and hyperpolicing of Black communities. Throughout World War I, white “athletic clubs” beat Black people in the streets; future Mayor Richard Daley became one of their most famous members.47 Progressives understood that Black prisoners were disproportionately confined for failures to abide by the raced spatial norms of the city. The first fact presented in the 1913 book The Colored People of Chicago proclaimed that “although the colored people of Chicago approximate 1/40 of the entire population, 1/8 of the boys and young men and nearly 1/3 of the girls and young women who had been confined in the jail during the year were negroes.” The report’s author, Hull House patron Louise de Koven Bowen, found that overall, Chicago’s “high percentage of negro criminals” made up 10 percent of the jail’s population.48 Trying to appeal to Chicagoan’s liberal attitudes on race—she even invoked the 1842 sale of Edwin Heathcock as evidence—Bowen attributed Black incarceration to racism in hiring, broken homes caused by working Black mothers, and arrests and convictions on flimsy evidence, conditions that led her to conclude that Black life in Chicago was “circumscribed” by “race limitations.”49 In contrast to efforts to portray Black incarceration as social scientific fact, Black prisoners repeatedly demonstrated their agency and political awareness

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through jail uprisings. In July 1917, two hundred Black prisoners in Cook County Jail were placed on lockdown after they yelled in protest of a police officer killing a Black man in East St. Louis, Illinois. “The negroes refused all appeals of the guards to quiet down,” the New York Times reported of Cook County Jail’s “negro mutiny.”50 Two years later, the killing of Eugene Williams, a Black teenager who crossed an invisible color line at a segregated Chicago beach, triggered an explosion of violence between white and Black residents. Beatings, murders, and property destruction spread across the city over the course of a week. At Cook County Jail, “one of the most serious riots” came on the third day, July 29, when one hundred black prisoners “overpowered a negro guard” and took on a common room full of over six hundred white prisoners. The fighting ended after an hour when prisoners “were beaten into submission with clubs.” In the wake of the brawl, Black prisoners were locked in their cells, and both the prisoners and the entrance to the jail were placed under the protection of guards with machine guns amid worries about an “attempt to storm the jail from the outside.”51 From these incidents we can see Black prisoners’ fears of becoming victims of racist violence and their unwillingness to accept it as a condition of their lives, particularly their incarceration. Such unprecedented efforts to control Black prisoners’ speech, physical resistance, and outside support reflected growing white anxieties about the continued downtown location of the jail and its capacity to regulate Black behavior. Progressives fused their hopes of confining Black people for assimilative purposes with the development of the jail as a tool for asserting greater control. They hoped to reform the built environment of Cook County Jail, with its criminogenic properties, by building a new county jail outside the Loop. As the county tried repeatedly to pass a bond for the new jail, Progressives in government adapted the language of abolition as a means of describing plans to demolish old jails and build new ones. A set of recommendations from the Bureau of Public Efficiency suggested they “abolish the inhuman and criminal conditions at the jail by erecting a new building with decent provisions for prisoners awaiting trial and suitable grounds for exercise and the conservation of health.” For those serving sentences, proposals included building a county prison in the form of “a correction farm” where prisoners could “be trained in useful trades and occupations, employed on the farm or in work-­shops under healthful conditions and made physically fit for employment.”52 A 1915 bond proposal sought voter approval for $2.5 million for a new criminal court and jail building to support the bodily control of prisoners.53



The Least Human of American Institutions 33

This distortion of abolitionism failed amid concerns by Progressive clubwomen that the bond represented a blank check and that there was a need to figure out what kind of jail people wanted. In a pamphlet called The Real Jail Problem, sociologist Edith Abbott called the interconnected challenges of needless arrest, high bail amounts, and jail conditions “much too complicated” to be solved through jail construction. With 90 percent of people in Cook County Jail awaiting trial, and over 80 percent of people in the House of Correction incarcerated to pay back fines, she called for new solutions, such as supervision, to prevent the “moral degradation” of incarceration in jail. “No one believes that our present system is preventing crime,” she said of the bond’s failure, and indeed, she believed the jail caused crime. “Is it not true that unjustifiable arrests and imprisonment create a contempt for the law that in turn breeds lawlessness?”54 Because a new jail for the poor was not appealing to voters, by 1918, the bond had failed three times.55 The 1919 Race Riot broke Progressive white women’s resistance to jail construction. At a meeting of “various social settlements,” penological experts and jailers, and the Chicago Woman’s Club, the Union League Club, and Political Equality League, activists who had organized against the jail bond expressed regret. Louise de Koven Bowen, author of The Colored People in Chicago, gave a speech defending her disregard for the downtown jail’s bull pen system. She conceded that clubwomen “only fought the bond issues because we did not want the same kind of jail.”56 In the wake of the race riot, Progressive organizers conceded to the necessity of a new jail that could better ensure racial control. Chicago’s attempt to uncover the causes of the riot and assess its outcomes, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot, revealed Cook County Jail and the House of Correction had already reoriented jailing toward the punishment of Black southern migrants. Directed by Charles S. Johnson, a Black sociologist trained at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations in 1922 released The Negro in Chicago, which documented that the racist attitudes of judges filled the jails with Black prisoners. “One judge frequently assumed an attitude of facetiousness while hearing Negro cases. The hearings were characterized by levity and lack of dignity. In one instance the judge was shaking dice during the hearing of the case.” Consequentially, over half of the Black people sent to jail were jailed because they could not pay their bond.57 In the House of Correction, such disparities in judicial treatment and financial capacity meant that 1,151 of 5,723 prisoners—over 20 percent—were Black. In

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Cook County Jail, 1,655 of 8,616—19 percent—were Black.58 The jails accepted and intensified the experience of racialized incarceration. Both institutions kept Black prisoners in segregated cells, and Cook County Jail, the report’s authors noted, reflected “the greatest discrimination” among any local institution studied as Black people were kept on separate floors of the jail with their own “‘bull pen’ for exercise” and only were supervised by guards who were also Black. Aware of the rising numbers of jailed Black people and the discrimination they faced in the justice system, a coalition of businessmen and reformers relied on social scientists to rationalize their fervent desire for a new jail. Hired by the Chicago Community Trust, George Kirchwey gathered a cadre of Progressives to contribute to Reports Comprising the Survey of the Cook County Jail. On the face of it, their essays reflected a jail pushed to its limits with overcrowding: holding 10,642 people over the course of 1921, it was a jail where men and boys often slept three to a cell. It is impossible to separate the Progressive preoccupation with the criminogenic effects of jailing reflected in Reports Comprising the Survey of the Cook County Jail from the racism described in The Negro in Chicago. Privileging depictions of white people who they viewed as worthy of protection from the social contaminants of jailing, the authors of Reports cast this category broadly to include ­people who were likely innocent, especially women, boys, and non-­English-­speaking immigrants who might fall prey to the criminogenic effects of jailing. George Kirchwey stated that sexual assault, venereal diseases, and other “filthy talk and filthy practices” meant that within the jail “the general atmosphere is one of anxiety and depression alternating with feverish hopes of speedy release.”59 Kirchwey believed that new institutions had to be built to protect certain populations of the jail from the possibility of increased criminality. This perspective was reinforced by former jailer John Whitman, by then a renowned warden who had worked at several Illinois prisons. He called attention to “the dangers which lurk in this indiscriminate herding of men together” in the jail’s large bull pens, “not only the dangers of physical infection and of moral contamination but the danger that the nervous tension and irritability spreading through the mass will break out in riot.” The jail’s capacity for inspiring depraved masculinity was manifest in descriptions of the potential for sex and violence among prisoners.60 Characterizing white women as needing rescue from the jail amplified white reformers’ sense that the new jail would be born of racial necessity. Adena Miller Rich, a prominent sociologist and leader of the Immigrants’ Protection



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League and the League of Women Voters, recounted the struggle of an Italian mother of four who was arrested after a fight with a neighbor. Arrested by police and processed by jailers who did not speak Italian, the woman was jailed because she faced a bond amount of $1,000. Her family had been distressed not only by their inability to meet the bond but also by the pressing need to find someone who could breastfeed her six-­month-­old baby. The presence of interpreters and a social work apparatus would have “obviated the unfortunate commitment to jail,” Rich argued, suggesting that such occurrences could be prevented by removing women to a joint city-­county “detention home” that was operated by women and focused specifically on providing services to women. Abolition, manifest in ideas about building separate institutions beyond the jail, was still a political possibility for white women.61 There was nothing race neutral about the move to build large urban jails in the 1920s. Efforts to stall bond issues to ensure that transparent and democratic planning occurred meant that desires to abolish the downtown Cook County Jail fused with a new crop of concerns about the role city and county jails would play in confining African Americans who moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Progressives knew that jails reinforced racial inequality and political corruption; in this context, abolition of local jails came to mean imposing systematic, expert governance of jails, not getting rid of them. Progressive reformers worked to create scientific rationales for institutions that were better equipped to meet the demands of anti-­Blackness and resolve the problems faced by white prisoners. The legitimacy of jails hinged on their capacity to protect white ­people from the destructive effects of jailing.

Corruption and Diminishing Accountability Progressive jail reform was complicated by the Democratic political machine, with its system of favors, bribes, and self-­dealing, and with its capitalist aspirations to develop Chicago’s downtown. Daniel Burnham’s 1908 Plan of Chicago had persuaded businessmen that a more beautiful metropolis would “anchor” the wealthy to the city and result in greater order that would promote health and continued prosperity. The downtown jail was unfortunately visible to the patrons of the countless hotels that sustained the city’s place as the capital of the Midwest and the famous department stores that fueled retail innovation across

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the country. The old jail, as a vestige of unregulated growth, had no place in the heart of the “dream city on Lake Michigan” that Burnham imagined.62 Cook County Board of Commissioners president Anton Cermak, a Czechoslovakian known as an “intimidator,” faced the problem that Prohibition Era corruption was made more visible through the unusual activities of wealthy white prisoners in the jail such as “millionaire beer makers and peddlers” Terry Druggan and Frankie Lake.63 Newspapers publicized that the “debonair” men were serving one year sentences in Cook County Jail and allowed Druggan and Lake to make public complaints about their segregation in the downtown jail’s hospital.64 In reality, Druggan and Lake enjoyed trips to the bank and the dentist while they were supposed to be in jail. More salaciously, Druggan had gone “out on pleasant parties and sometimes he has gone home to comfort his wife.”65 A federal judge found warden Wesley Westbrook and sheriff Peter Hoffman in contempt of court over “the amazingly lax conditions at the county jail” after Druggan and Lake made at least $20,000 in bribes to jail staff, including Westbrook.66 Sheriff Hoffman was found liable as sheriff and sentenced to thirty days in DuPage County Jail in addition to a $2,500 fine; Westbrook served four months at DeKalb County Jail. The scandal fueled Progressive criticisms that the downtown jail, as a structure and an institution, was beyond repair.67 While visible county corruption was compelling, racial subtexts shaped the jail’s removal from downtown. An ally of Cermak’s articulated plans to choose a new jail site from “the point of view of taxation and the proper and necessary expenditure of large sums of money for our growing needs.”68 The authors of The Negro in Chicago explained how such approaches shaped urban space: “No single factor has complicated the relations of Negroes and whites in Chicago more than the widespread feeling of white people that the presence of Negroes in a neighborhood is a cause of serious depreciation of property values. To the extent that people feel that their financial interests are affected, antagonisms are accentuated.”69 To carry out this task of choosing a jail site, Cermak chose people who added credence to the negotiation of racial space in Chicago. Among the bankers and businessmen on the committee was Sears, Roebuck and Company head Julius Rosenwald, whose Rosenwald Fund was building schools for Black children all over the South. Other representatives came from groups that had previously clashed over jail proposals, among them Harris Keeler of the Chicago Bureau of Public Efficiency and Adena Miller Rich, as well as the renowned Black dentist Charles Bentley, who was a founding member of the NAACP.70



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Cermak’s desire to limit the presence of Black people in the Loop was expressed through the prioritization of the site’s potential as a business district. The president of the Chicago Community Trust—the organization that had funded Kirchwey’s study of the jail—argued most clearly for moving the jail to Chicago’s West Side. The jail’s location near Michigan Avenue, he argued, “is therefore destined to become a high-­grade shopping, business and hotel district. A County Jail and Criminal Courts Building would be quite out of place in such an environment.” The jail threatened to sabotage the entire development of Chicago’s downtown. “Who would want to build a retail store or a hotel, or a high-­ grade office building across the street from the Jail?”71 Pushback against moving the jail centered on how its distant location would alter its functions and the disposition of justice. “The new jail should be a place of temporary confinement and not a prison,” attorney Thomas Marshall argued in the Chicago Bar Association Record. Fearing that removing the criminal courts outside the city represented a “vicious plan to slow down prosecution” that depended on “a commodious jail to take care of the larger jail population” awaiting trial, Marshall anticipated that “evils that will surely flow” as decent lawyers, witnesses, and jurors avoided the remote location. “The proposed move  . . . would be an unnecessary hardship upon every person brought into contract with a criminal prosecution.”72 The notion that the new jail, in both location and practice, would sustain an unequal system of justice was well understood when Cermak’s committee decided to build the new jail and courthouse on city-­owned property next to the existing House of Correction. Cermak’s plan cheaply and effectively erased people accused of crimes, especially Black people, from Chicago’s downtown landscape and removed them to a neighborhood of stockyards, factories, and railroads. Cermak’s own Czechoslovakian neighborhood of “Bohemian California” in South Lawndale was home to the new jail, making it easy for his cronies to work there. The new jail opened in 1929.73 The buildings’ designers believed in both the eugenic obligations of their roles as architects as well as the democratic purposes of separating prisoners from each other. The design of the jail represented such a break with past approaches to congregate jailing that Western Architect devoted an entire issue to it. The jail’s design referenced its industrial neighborhood through a “telegraph-­style” jail where “the prisoner must expect an absolute confinement, on the other hand he should not be antagonized by rotten exposure to social diseases, poor light

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and foul air.” As evidenced in Jules Hericourt’s 1920 book The Social Diseases, there was great concern that “voluntary” disorders like syphilis and alcoholism made men “architects of their own misfortunes” and that diseases like tuberculosis, borne of close contact, would “diminish the social value of the sufferers.”74 Because only 7 percent of the prisoners were sentenced, and “the old jail was a school of crime,” it was decided to design the jail “to make inmates no worse during their imprisonment.” The 1,302 individual cells were intended to prevent every mode of possible corruption: between Black and white, old and young, male and female. Half of each floor of the four-­story building was called a tier. Each tier had a central hallway lined by five-­foot-­by-­eight-­foot cells, each with a bed, bench, drinking fountain, and guard call button. Each floor had a twenty-­ by-­thirty-­foot dayroom for eating, and a dumb waiter, toilet, shower room, and guardroom, making tiers contained so as to limit the number of contacts a prisoner could make during his or her incarceration.75 Although the jail’s design was unusually strict, the Western Architect declared it had a “great deal of dignity.”76 Given that the new jail had cost $7.5 million to build and given that the jail was built so solidly, the county’s jail policy appeared to some as frustratingly fixed. “The most valid criticism that may be made of it is that it is too complete; too uniform,” the Central Howard Association, a prison reform organization, argued: “1,300 men who differ as widely as though they were in a college or factory, are all placed in precisely the same kind of cage.”77 It appeared that Anton Cermak and the jail reformers had succeeded both in separating prisoners from each other and in separating the jail from the city. Yet the suicide of warden Edward Fogarty called this success into question. Fogarty had been hired by an advisory committee of reformers—many who were involved with the jail construction campaign—in 1926 after a judge “uncovered many irregularities at the jail,” including a prisoner who had been brought to court drunk by a guard who was himself drunk.78 Amid pressure for the sheriff “to obey the demand of a public completely fed up with flagrant abuses of political office,” Fogarty’s credentials and commitment to taking on the machine inspired confidence.79 A fourteen-­year warden of an Indiana penitentiary, ­Fogarty had been driven out of Indiana by the “machinations” of the Ku Klux Klan.80 Although the downtown jail had been crowded with 1,400 prisoners in space for 350, Fogarty dramatically reduced the costs spent per prisoner and established the jail as “a model of cleanliness and order.”81 He gained praise for making the jail “cashless,” so that “well heeled gangsters” could not bribe the



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guards.82 Yet within a few years, Fogarty was threatening to quit. “At the direction of Democratic patronage bosses,” a new sheriff aimed “to replace trained men on the staff. . . . A bootlegger, an ex-­convict, crippled men, and deaf men were assigned to be jail guards.”83 A month later, Fogarty fled to his nephew’s home in South Bend claiming a nervous breakdown. Three months after the new jail opened, Fogarty took his own life with a gun. Adena Rich, head of the Immigrants’ Protective Association, called him “a jailer with the highest ideals . . . broken by an extremely trying situation.”84 Fogarty’s death demonstrated that despite the attention of Progressive reformers, jail expansion had only helped the patronage system to grow stronger. Even with the inclusion of prominent citizens and experts in deciding on the form and location of the new Cook County Jail, a more democratic process had not kept jailers from using the jail for their own ends; indeed, the racism of the Progressives facilitated their collaboration with and co-­optation by machine politicians. The political expectation going forward was that machine loyalists, not professional penologists, were best equipped to manage the jail and, more importantly, could conceal the jail’s role in sustaining corruption that benefitted white citizens. If prisoners’ correction had been an inspiration for discussions around jail abolition and building a new jail, by the 1930s, that moment had passed.

Jailing in Depression and War When a sociologist named Joseph Lohman was elected Cook County sheriff in 1954, he made an awful discovery: in the basement of the county building “were 44 barrels and 7 baskets of records, dumped helter-­skelter.”85 During his first visit to Cook County Jail after his election, he discovered that his predecessors had stripped the offices bare, taking every last filing cabinet. Given the paucity of records from the early decades in the new jail, it seems possible that the documents at the jail met a fate similar to those at the county administration building. That documents are similarly scarce from the House of Correction during this period further reinforces the theory of deliberate archival erasure by warden Frank Sain. The brother of a Chicago alderman, Sain served as warden of Cook County Jail from 1934 to 1949 and, after being fired from the jail to be replaced by a different patronage warden, was warden of the House of Correction from 1949 to 1958. Newspapers noted that “wise from experience” Sain

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was “close mouthed concerning his administrative handicaps.”86 A judge charged with inspecting the jail told the press that Sain “should have a free hand in the operation of the jail” because of his “efficiency.”87 Sain’s capacity to shunt transparency, and the confidence and autonomy he enjoyed, helps to explain why Progressive interest in the jail appears to have diminished, and with it many of the records that might better illuminate the contours of Chicago’s jail policy during the 1930s and 1940s. Surviving documents and broader carceral trends of the period show that the features of jail governance pioneered in the 1910s and 1920s largely endured to the 1950s. This was due, in part, to the structural constraints of funding local government during the Great Depression and World War II. What historian Simon Balto has called the era of “relentless city-­sanctioned police violence” during the Great Depression did not necessarily translate into large numbers of people in jail.88 Amid policy gambling and vice crackdowns in the 1930s, both the munici­ pal and criminal courts carried out docket-­clearing campaigns that ensured 85 percent of Cook County Jail prisoners had their trials resolved within thirty days of indictment. This meant that by 1937, the jail held 544 people on a given day and had reduced its annual population by over five thousand.89 At the House of Correction, the mayor’s embrace of pardons drove population reduction. At Christmas in 1935, superintendent Edward Denemark secured the pardons of 132 prisoners as part of a nationwide holiday release campaign.90 Publicity for the pardons emphasized that some prisoners “don’t want to leave because they like the food and haven’t any place to go.” Other stories emphasized the imperative to “make room for more important hoodlums who are likely to be seized in the mayor’s drive against gangsters.”91 Concerns remained about the relationship between what one observer called “that working alliance between crime and corrupt politics” evidenced in the “secret favors” of early court releases from the House of Correction and Cook County Jail.92 It was further indicated in the incarceration of Al Capone at Cook County Jail in 1931—which prompted a federal investigation over allegations that Capone was entertaining female visitors, paying off the warden, and hosting catered dinners—that corruption during this period came with few political costs. Capone’s favored treatment in jail was indicative of a broader shift in the interwar period to a criminal justice system in which, as Khalil Gibran Muhammad argues, “privileges of victimization, rehabilitation, and decriminalization” were “for whites only.”93



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The Great Depression created the legal space for the House of Correction to reclaim its founding function as a workhouse. Although Cook County Jail maintained a low population through the 1930s and early 1940s, the Bridewell took on a greater punitive function. Expanded categories of crime meant large numbers of drunk drivers and hit-­and-­run drivers were sentenced to a year in the Bridewell during this period. Another element was that the press touted the Bridewell as a genuine alternative to the conditions of unemployment that ravaged the city. The twenty-­five hundred prisoners were put to work repairing and making toys and clothing for the poor. “The depression has come to the rescue in providing tasks for the Bridewell Prisoners,” one reporter gleamed.94 The philanthropic quality of this work was celebrated because it was not in competition with free labor, which would violate state labor statutes, because the free labor market was so limited. With little city revenue to sustain the deteriorating nineteenth-­century complex, unpaid prisoners were employed to repair falling brick walls, to paint, and to clean. The emphasis on self-­sustaining jail complexes was carried forward through World War II as prisoners farmed a three-­acre victory garden at Cook County Jail.95 That on one side of the crumbling brick walls, the Cook County Jail operated at 25 percent capacity, while on the other side, the Bridewell was filled with displaced workers, speaks to the ways that Chicago was changing and continued to change when war broke out. The city’s population boomed. The Bracero program alone brought 15,000 Mexican workers to Chicago between 1943 and 1945.96 Some 65,000 Black war workers from the South moved to the city and settled in the South Side.97 As 130,000 women entered the workforce, observers feared unsupervised children would become delinquent. Although the war laid bare the contradictions between fascism and democracy, movements against police brutality and poor jail conditions appear to have been limited as Chicago residents benefitted from full employment.98 Yet jailing still held a prominent place in the consciousness of people in Chicago. This was most evident in the bestselling 1940 novel Native Son by Richard Wright. Cook County Jail was the final stop for the character Bigger Thomas, a young Black man who had killed two women and was sentenced to death in the jail’s electric chair. Having traversed a series of confining landscapes—his rat-­infested tenement, his white employer’s mansion, the racialized spaces of police lockup and courtroom—jail punctuated Bigger Thomas’ inability to fully determine his own destiny. As white Chicagoans battled over whether Black

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Americans deserved punitive or benevolent treatment, the Bigger Thomases of Chicago could do little but look out of their cells toward a skyline that represented their exclusion from the city. That the jail was portrayed as an end point of Black life in the most successful Black novel of the era speaks to how central Cook County Jail was becoming to the experience and imagination of poverty and anti-­Blackness in Chicago at midcentury.99 From its origins, jailing in Chicago served to control and incarcerate poor people, particularly poor people of color. Progressives had succeeded in justifying this institutional function by building jails that were underpinned by an ideal that jailing could change people even as they negotiated the place of jailing in a broader context of urban racial regulation. Yet in the years after World War II, the frustrations of Chicago’s diverse poor and working-­class constituencies were boiling over. They operationalized a “liberal idealism” that shaped their modest demands of the state: a little mobility, protection, fairness, predictability.100 Although the modern jail was largely accepted by people at midcentury as a permanent feature of urban governance, this liberal idealism among jailed people meant that institutional order in the jails was tenuous at best. Even as influence over jail governance had been claimed by the political machine amid depression and war, it was becoming clear in the postwar period that it was prisoners who held the keys. In 1947, warden Frank Sain looked at the men in a Cook County Jail dayroom and acknowledged the fragile order he maintained there: “Let them sense things aren’t right and this place would light up like a bomb.”101

Chapter 2

Forgotten Men

“This is the community of the condemned, the story of the forgotten ones, the world in which they live.” Voiced over music that sounded like the theme from the popular cop program Dragnet—horns in a minor key conveying a plodding sense of dread, timpani drums suggesting the ongoing march of justice—the opening scenes of the 1958 television show Community of the Condemned invited viewers to look behind the bars of Cook County Jail. Hosted by Cook County sheriff Joseph Lohman, the twenty-­six-­episode show was one of the first documentaries about the criminal justice system to air on television. The nationally distributed program offered sociological analysis of the world of imprisonment, especially in the nation’s jails, from Lohman and other experts. Advancing Lohman’s agenda to portray the jail as an “instrument of the community and an instrument of the criminal world,” Lohman reminded viewers that Cook County Jail’s problems were “the same as the problems of every jail in America.”1 Even more novel, it included perspectives from incarcerated people. Seated on a cot in a cell, masked prisoners told Sheriff Lohman their opinions on their incarceration and its impact on their lives, bringing the concerns of the “forgotten ones” into homes across the United States. It was a stark contrast to conditions in Cook County Jail four years before, when guards used fifty cans of tear gas to subdue an uprising that broke out on March 3, 1954. Tear gas was among several weapons used. First, guards armed with shotguns threatened a small protest that began in a dayroom on a tier that held people awaiting trial in federal court, along with a few others awaiting electrocution in Cook County Jail’s electric chair, who were angry that other ­people in the jail were held in better conditions. When the guards failed, firemen were summoned to soak the dayroom—and the people in it—with hundreds of

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Figure 3. Journalist Ray Brennan from the Chicago Sun-­Times speaks to jailed men during a September 1954 uprising at the Bridewell. Photograph by Mel Larson. © Sun-­Times Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

gallons of water from high-­pressure hoses. The wet prisoners remained defiant as guards donned gas masks and began lobbing volleys of tear gas into the caged area. Then, armed with shields, the guards retook the dayroom.2 The uprising was not the only disturbance in Chicago’s jails in 1954. Six months later, thirteen hundred prisoners erupted into a food fight and brawl



Forgotten Men 45

after House of Correction staff served hot dogs for dinner for a third night in a row. According to newspapers, the men and women made sixteen demands, which ranged from “better food to more cosmetics in the commissary.” Soon after, when 108 members of “a coal shoveling gang” refused their “spaghetti and meat sauce” in a short-­lived hunger strike, city jail warden Frank Sain denied allegations that guard brutality had inspired the resistance.3 Criticizing a “mob spirit” at the House of Correction, the Chicago Daily Tribune rejected the notion that “prison rioters are unfortunate people driven to desperation by discomforts” (Figure 3).4 The prisoners’ political sensibility and critique of the jail implied in coverage of the rebellions was, four short years later, made clear to a national audience on Community of the Condemned. The 1954 rebellions and the 1958 television show bookend the unique tenure of Cook County sheriff Joseph D. Lohman. The prisoner protests had caught the attention of Lohman, a University of Chicago–trained sociologist who ran for sheriff months later. Lohman and his “professional nucleus” of former graduate students aimed to apply Progressive approaches to imprisonment in the urban jail. While Progressive reformers had focused their reform efforts on “abolishing” archaic old jails and building a new jail that could isolate prisoners, especially Black prisoners, from the city and each other, Lohman picked up the corrective approach advocated by people like warden John Whitman. In taking on the troubled and overcrowded Cook County Jail, Lohman and his team sought to create an institutional culture in which rehabilitation helped prisoners overcome their identification with the criminal community and create new identities as law-­abiding citizens. As a scholar of race relations, Lohman hoped to create racial harmony within the jail while also downplaying the jail’s racial makeup to the public. Most significantly, Lohman’s tenure as sheriff radically reconfigured the political landscape in which prisoners raised their concerns. Programs that Lohman and his staff created to defuse tension, break down criminal culture, and prevent riots had a secondary effect of promoting political discourse among prisoners. Prisoners used the jail radio station, a public television show, and a jail newspaper to assert their own preexisting and developing opinions about who they were and what jailing should accomplish for them. Although Cook County Jail was unusual in its public engagement under Lohman, prisoners’ contributions to jailhouse media show how people made sense of their incarceration as urban governments across the country came to terms with the need to modernize jail facilities and practices. Broadcasting for

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themselves, their jailers, and even the public, prisoners worked to ensure that changes to jail programming and spaces had their concerns at the center. As prisoners used new platforms to make the harms of jailing a public issue, they challenged narratives of reform that their jailers sought to control.

Policing and Jailing at Midcentury In the 1950s, Chicago was creating what historian Arnold Hirsch famously called the “second ghetto.”5 Between 1947 and 1955, reformist two-­term mayor Martin H. Kennelly undertook projects of slum clearance and public housing construction after decades of corruption and neglect. Kennelly’s efforts to separate his office from the power of the Democratic machine by setting himself apart as “above politics” helped him to garner political support from white elites for ambitious urban redevelopment, even as it exacerbated tensions with African American constituencies, white neighborhood residents and politicos, and machine politicians within the Democratic party.6 At the county level, the new chairman of the Cook County Democratic Central Committee, Richard J. Daley, was looking to capitalize on this fracture in local politics. Daley took great care in choosing candidates for a 1954 “blue ribbon” county ticket that were undeniably qualified. This included balancing machine candidates with “good government” reformers like Lohman.7 Looking to the population growth of the Cook County suburbs, Daley calculated the need for a stronger Democratic presence in the traditionally Republican county environs. Republicans clearly feared Lohman; in mid-­October, governor William Stratton released a tape in which, he claimed, Lohman said that police often married former prostitutes. Lohman handily beat his Republican opponent, a Cicero-­based owner of an electrical supply company. Having secured this victory, Daley secretly plotted to run against Kennelly in the Democratic primary for mayor in the early months of 1955. Who could manage Chicago in a period of tumult was a defining question of Daley’s campaign.8 As tension between white and Black Chicagoans rose over neighborhood spaces, disputes raged over whether police were protecting communities from crime. Struggles over how to maintain order and power in neighborhoods through policing emerged in tandem with increased Black migration to the city; much of the chaos of Chicago and its suburbs reflected white resistance to Black wealth acquisition and the integration of neighborhood space. Friction increased as



Forgotten Men 47

Kennelly encouraged police to wage an onslaught against jitney cabs and policy gambling in Black neighborhoods that machine politicians had long protected from police interference. Facing the demise of a Black political machine sustained by underworld income, white crime syndicates aimed to overtake criminalized industries in Black neighborhoods. Meanwhile, state police and sheriff ’s deputies waged war on illegal horse betting, dice games, slot machines, and organized crime in the Cook County suburbs through raids on gambling establishments as they too sought to prove that they were addressing organized crime.9 Questions about the legitimacy of law enforcement and political responsiveness to racial intimidation marked the 1950s. Contests over neighborhood racial boundaries accompanied the rise of white youth gangs who made Black residents targets of violence. Meanwhile, the “housing mobs” of the 1950s in Fernwood Park, Park Manor, Englewood, Trumbull Park, Calumet Park, and Cicero were encouraged by the ambivalence of police who stood by as white rioters destroyed Black property and beat Black citizens with impunity. Both shifts demonstrated how police sustained the politics of white supremacy as they ensured Black people remained confined to certain areas. For Democratic politicians such as Richard J. Daley and Joseph Lohman, these conflicts created a political opportunity for claiming urban political power.10 Wavering public confidence in law enforcement extended to Cook County Jail. Between 1949 and 1956, the jail cycled through eight different wardens thanks to political turnover with sheriff elections and allegations of bribery. After firing warden Frank Sain in 1949, sheriff Elmer Walsh formally integrated Cook County Jail, blaming Sain for the continued commitment to segregation long criticized by Black Chicagoans. The jail remained rife with corruption and conflict. In 1950, a federal grand jury investigation charged that “Cook County Jail is rotten from top to bottom” after prisoners accused guards of accepting funds from prisoners to smuggle women into the jail for nightly trysts in jail offices.11 One warden admitted it was “no secret” that guards facilitated a booming trade in narcotics, alcohol, razor blades, hypodermic needles, and knives.12 Looking at the crumbling guard towers and the poorly paid guards, and with prisoners housed in every possible space, administrators feared another riot in the unsafe and unsecure jail. The jail had thirteen hundred beds and a seasonally variant population ranging from sixteen hundred to twenty-­four hundred people. Without a system of classification according to maximum-­, medium-­, or minimum-­security status, prisoners serving sentences and awaiting trial were

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housed together, wherever there was room. The plans for isolation that had been built into the building’s architecture broke down with overcrowding. Jail overcrowding was the result of the intensification of selective criminalization in postwar America. By the mid-­1950s, counties and cities across the nation turned to jails to contain the threats that one magazine called “a brand new crop of sociological horrors” such as “the sex offender, the dope fiend, and the criminally insane chronic alcoholic” and “the tensions engendered by modern life and compounded by racial and nationalistic bigotry.”13 In Los Angeles, the city’s main jail facility held twenty-­nine hundred people in space for sixteen hundred; in New York City, seventy-­nine hundred filled space for forty-­two hundred.14 According to the Bureau of Prisons, over a million people a year were going to jail by 1951.15 In Chicago, criminologists and police focused their concerns on two politically constructed categories of people: juvenile delinquents and career criminals. Although delinquency took the national stage in the 1950s amid rising rates of crime by people in their teens and twenties and fears that failures of postwar institutions were giving rise to a criminal subculture, it had long been a focus in Chicago. Efforts to create juvenile courts at the turn of the century were followed by persistent efforts throughout the 1920s and 1930s to study and intervene in youth crime. As a young researcher, Joseph Lohman had worked with Ernest Burgess and Clifford Shaw on the Chicago Area Project, which contributed to the belief that young people fostered crime through learning criminal behavior in groups. Social scientists in Chicago used delinquency as a broad term to describe young people found by the courts to have been involved in an array of activities, including truancy, fighting, vandalism, and narcotics possession and sales. Although often used to describe teenagers under eighteen, in Chicago the term was applied to young adults up to the age of twenty-­one. While many of the youngest prisoners were sent to the Audy Home, the county’s jail for children, judges used their discretion to send some minors to the adult jail. In the Chicago school framing, juvenile delinquency was as much about criminalizing space as it was about criminalizing individuals; the emphasis on space allowed Chicago school sociologists to cloak their analysis in a veneer of racial neutrality. It just so happened that delinquency areas overlapped with the Black and brown neighborhoods of Chicago’s South and West Sides.16 The delinquency policing that fed the jail was intertwined with a nationwide fight against drug sales and possession. The Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) formation of a new narcotics section in 1951 sparked mass arrests of Black



Forgotten Men 49

addicts and sellers alike. That same year, the state of Illinois adopted one-­to five-­ year minimum sentences for narcotics to address the “emergency” presented by the “ominous and ever-­present problem of narcotics.”17 By 1955, 87 percent of people arrested on drug charges were categorized as “colored.”18 Notably, possession accounted for 89 percent of narcotics sentences to Cook County Jail in 1955; sales accounted for 3 percent.19 Juvenile delinquency intersected with cultural constructions of victimhood to emphasize that adult drug “pushers” preyed on young drug users. Drug “peddlers” were often classed among adult “career criminals” who were targeted for repeatedly committing crimes, especially theft and the resale of stolen items, that supported and encouraged juvenile crime.20 Looking to the racial makeup of Cook County Jail, these framings contributed to the disproportionate incarceration of people identified by local statisticians as “non-­white.” Because statisticians noted they categorized at least some Mexican and Puerto Rican prisoners as white, it makes sense to understand “non-­whites” here as predominantly Black. The only age groups in which white prisoners constituted a majority of prisoners was in the forty-­five to fifty-­four and over fifty-­five categories, even though white people made up 88 percent of Cook County’s population and 86 percent of Chicago’s population.21 Staggeringly, the category with the greatest disproportion was the twenty-­five to thirty-­four age group, where over 73 percent of prisoners at the jail were Black.22 Again, as only 12 percent of Cook County’s population was nonwhite, and 14 percent of Chicago’s population was nonwhite, this was a significant disjuncture. That the only comprehensive racial data on the jail’s population during this era comes from an outside study suggests that administrators did not want to highlight it (Tables 3 and 4). Cook County Jail held people awaiting trial and people serving longer sentences for a wide array of crimes, although most were sentenced after being found guilty of larceny and narcotics charges, with the majority serving nine-­month to four-­year sentences.23 The population was skewed toward these offenses because people incarcerated for more petty crimes and fineable offenses were being sent to the House of Correction. While not everyone who was arrested went to jail, those who ended up in Cook County Jail shared a common trait: among the 33 percent of the population awaiting trial, a 1956 study found “the distinguishing feature . . . is that they are indigent and cannot afford bail.”24 Yet for all of the diversity in crimes committed, a majority of the prisoners were nonwhite men from Chicago, under the age of thirty-­five, and serving sentences of less than one year (Table 5).25

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Table 3. Cook County Jail Prisoners by Age Group and Race, June 20 and 21, 1955 All Races

Whites

Nonwhites

Age Group

Number

Number

Percentage

Number

Percentage

Under 20 years 20–24 25–34 35–44 45–54 55 and over Not specified Total

  221   424   749   332   111    53     6 1,896*

116 154 199 136  58  34   1 698**

52.5% 36.3% 26.6% 41% 52.2% 64.2% 14.3% 36.8%

  104   270   549   195    51    19     1 1,189

47.0% 63.7% 73.3% 58.7% 45.9% 35.8% 14.3% 62.7%

Note: Terms used are from the source. * Includes 9 with race not specified. ** The category of “whites” included 52 Mexicans and Puerto Ricans; their distribution by age was not specified beyond 1 white female in the age group 25–34, identified specifically as Mexican. Source: Statistical Department, Tuberculosis Institute of Chicago and Cook County, “Distributions of Inmates X–Rayed at Cook County Jail, Chicago, June 20 and 21, 1955 by Age Group, Race and Sex,” July 18, 1955, box 159, folder 2, HWM, CHM.

Table 4. Cook County Jail Prisoners by Age Group, Race, and Sex, 1955 White Males

Under 20  years 20–24 25–34 35–44 45–54 55 and over Not specified All Ages

Nonwhite Males

White Females

Nonwhite Females

Number

Percentage

Number Percentage Number Percentage Number Percentage

115

52.0%

 100

45.2%

 1

0.5%

 4

1.8%

141 188 127  52  34   1 658*

33.2% 25.1% 38.3% 46.8% 64.2% 14.3% 34.7%

 250  520  181   48   19    1 1119

59.0% 69.4% 54.5% 43.2% 35.8% 14.3% 59%

13 11**  9  6  0  0 40

3.1% 1.5% 2.7% 5.4% 0 0 2.1%

20 29 14  3  0  0 70

4.7% 3.9% 4.2% 2.7% 0 0 3.7%

Note: Terms used are from the source. * Includes 51 Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. ** Includes 1 Mexican. Source: Statistical Department, Tuberculosis Institute of Chicago and Cook County, “Distributions of Inmates X–Rayed at Cook County Jail, Chicago, June 20 and 21, 1955 by Age Group, Race and Sex,” July 18, 1955, box 159, folder 2, HWM, CHM.



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Table 5: Cook County Jail Prisoners by Type of Offense, March 31, 1956 Total Larceny offenses Narcotic offenses Civil offenses (e.g., bastardy, nonsupport, contempt) Contributing offenses (e.g., contributing to delinquency of   a minor) Assaultive offenses Fraudulent offenses Traffic offenses Sex offenses Robbery offenses Destruction of property offenses Burglary offenses Intoxication offenses Miscellaneous offenses (e.g., vagrancy, attempted crime,   accessory to crime) Total

Percentage

582 285 82 94

 29.5%  14.4%   4.2%   4.7%

207 101 49 95 223 51 139 26 40

 10.5%   5.1%   2.5%   4.8%  11.3%   2.6%   7.0%   1.3%   2.0%

1,974

100%

Note: Includes both prisoners serving sentences and those awaiting trial. Source: “Cross-Sectional Comparison of All Cook County Jail Inmates by Type of Offense as of March 31, 1956 and March 31, 1958,” box 159, folder 2, HWM, CHM, 2.

The heterogeneity of Cook County Jail’s population was less the result of where crime was happening or even what crimes were criminalized than where police arrested the greatest numbers of people who could not afford bail. According to a map created by the Tuberculosis Institute of Chicago and Cook County in 1955, which identified the home neighborhoods of all prisoners who received chest x-­rays, the neighborhoods with the highest proportions of Chicago residents incarcerated at the jail were the Bronzeville community areas of Grand Boulevard and Douglas and areas that were experiencing white flight or urban renewal, such as the Near West Side (amid construction of the Chicago Circle Expressway), North Lawndale (where Jewish residents were fleeing to the suburbs and being replaced by Black residents), and Woodlawn, which was 89 percent Black. To put this in perspective, a prisoner at the jail was more likely to come from Bronzeville than from one of the thirty Cook County townships outside of Chicago.26 If a Black person was arrested in a Black neighborhood, they would likely end up in Cook County Jail (Figure 4).27

Figure 4. Map of Chicago community areas home to prisoners screened for tuberculosis, 1955. Map created by John Wyatt Greenlee.



Forgotten Men 53

The jail’s death row presented an additional administrative challenge. Illinois was the only state to require counties to carry out their own death sentences. Throughout the 1950s, administrators were faced with a group of five to twelve people sentenced to die, most of whom felt they had nothing to lose because the warden was responsible for ending their lives in the electric chair located in the jail’s basement. As the longest-­term residents of the jail, they were largely cut off from participating in the existing programs that occupied the time of other prisoners. Most of the time, at least half of the death row prisoners were Black, and all were convicted of murder. The group included Vincent Ciucci, who maintained his innocence after being found guilty of killing his wife and children, and Paul Crump, convicted of murder during a robbery.28 Larger numbers of people serving sentences, prisoner challenges to institutional authority, a robust death row, and the difficulties of managing corrupt staff meant Cook County Jail was operating more like a prison than it had in the past. Without control over who the courts sent to jail, and with little flexibility because of the jail design’s reliance on heavy steel bars and cells meant for solitary confinement, Sheriff Lohman set out to remake jailing in Cook County.

The Sociologist Sheriff By the time Joseph D. Lohman was elected Cook County sheriff, he was a distinguished sociologist and consultant committed to applying his training in the field of “race relations” to policing and imprisonment. As a student of sociologists Ernest Watson Burgess and Robert E. Park, Lohman understood the city as a place where sociologists could research and intervene to improve urban social worlds. Although his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago went unfinished after a “gang of killers” rescinded access for his ethnography, he worked as a researcher and consultant while continuing to teach as a lecturer in the sociology program. Lohman’s adjunct status meant that he could not formally mentor students, but he nonetheless advised students pursuing studies in applied criminology, an emerging sector of sociology where academics took jobs in police departments, jails, and prisons. Students especially appreciated his critiques of the corruption that fueled local law enforcement. Although the field of sociology was moving away from the “social ecology” experiments of Park and Burgess, the University of Chicago remained a bastion of applied sociology at the cost of its national

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reputation. The courses Lohman taught turned away from more eugenic or stigmatizing views of criminality to emphasize the many contingencies that led people to commit crimes. Lohman worked as director of race relations for the Rosenwald Fund and as a police trainer for the Chicago Park District. He earned an appointment as chairman of the Illinois State Pardon and Parole Board by governor Adlai Stevenson. Imparting sociological practice into the systems of prisoner release, Lohman hired multiple University of Chicago graduate students to work as actuaries evaluating prisoners for release as he handled the political side of the job. His renown was global; in 1953, Lohman made three trips to Korea on behalf of the United Nations to direct the repatriation of Chinese prisoners of war.29 Robert Park’s theory of “race relations” was the most important influence on Lohman’s approach to applied criminology. Park was not trained as a sociologist but instead came to prominence first as a journalist reporting on the terrors of King Leopold’s Belgian Congo, then as hype man and ghostwriter to Booker T. Washington. Through a friendship with the chair of the University of Chicago sociology department, Park was hired and subsequently trained as a sociologist by his colleagues. Park relied on his close connections to the Progressive philanthropic complex and to Black Americans, especially Washington, for his credibility. All this informed his work on the “race relations cycle” where Park theorized there was a cycle of contact, competition, accommodation, and assimilation between racial groups on “racial frontiers.”30 Sociologists in the race relations school accepted the “racial status quo” and focused on repairing racial relationships; their evocation of the frontier was an explicit nod to their belief in the inevitability of conquest and imperialism in race-­making processes.31 While Lohman relied on the race relations cycle to structure his small body of research, he was also influenced by the work of the Black sociologists trained by Park at the University of Chicago. Collaborations—with Charles S. Johnson, lead researcher for The Negro in Chicago and the first Black trustee at the Rosenwald Fund, and E. Franklin Frazier, a classmate of Lohman’s—helped Lohman fuse Park’s systemic critique with “attention to capitalist exploitation, oppression, and power relations.”32 Believing that education and contact between races were important to reducing prejudice, Lohman advocated for structural remedies to encourage interaction, reduce competition, and foster accommodation and assimilation. In his work as director of race relations for the Rosenwald Fund, a main financial backer of “black uplift,” Lohman helped to oversee the National



Forgotten Men 55

Committee on Segregation in the Nation’s Capital. A collaboration that included Johnson and Frazier, as well as one hundred other notable members, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, the committee’s report uncovered the role that real estate interests, employers, and segregated education played in making Washington, D.C., the “capital of white supremacy.”33 Lohman saw the committee’s work as crucial to “minimizing these undemocratic practices” of segregation that undermined America’s position in the world.34 A commitment to maintaining the legitimacy of democracy informed Joseph Lohman’s pioneering work in incorporating systemic analysis of race relations into police training. The professionalization of policing was rooted in the technocratic priorities of Progressives who sought to bring academic expertise to bear on professional contexts. One famous example of this was “police intellectual” August Vollmer, the police chief of Berkeley, California, who in 1931 was invited to establish a police education program at the University of California, which incorporated law, psychology, and biology into a curriculum that created, as one criminologist has put it, “not just cops, but cop managers.”35 After World War II, as tensions rose in the field of criminology over the field’s relationship to public policy, police departments looked to experts like Vollmer and his protégé Orlando Wilson for advice as they addressed widespread corruption.36 This approach had natural appeal to Lohman. “Lohman was a policeman at heart,” one friend later remembered, noting Lohman’s “strong belief that the police could and should be a positive force.”37 This was manifest in an influential training manual Lohman created in 1947 for the Chicago Park District, The Police and Minority Groups. The manual gained greater importance as Lohman funded police training through the Rosenwald Fund. In Chicago, Lohman convened a 1952 police training seminar at the University of Chicago called “The Police and Racial Tension” that drew participants from over thirty police departments.38 Lohman discussed police racism without directly calling them racists, a point that allowed him greater access to police and capacity to shape policing. In The Police and Minority Groups, he synthesized research on race relations to argue that police could reduce racial tension in communities through increased awareness of myths about racial superiority, treating people of different races and nationalities fairly, and adopting tactics that did not intensify the conditions of race riots or undermine police credibility. The challenge Lohman laid out in The Police and Minority Groups was to replace “unwarranted police conduct” with police who acted with a “complete sense of personal and social responsibility.” In

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giving police practical tips on how to “achieve true impartiality and neutrality,” Lohman believed that education could help policemen to overcome, or at least submerge, their “private views” about race in service of peace and democracy.39 The Police and Minority Groups relied on the work of Black sociologists from the Chicago school to situate the racism of police in a larger societal critique.40 It drew directly from Sinclair Drake and Horace Cayton’s 1945 book Black Metropolis to provide police with extensive evidence that Black Chicagoans faced a range of “basic economic insecurities,” among them housing segregation and lack of education, that might lead to “questionable conduct” but were not evidence of racial inferiority.41 Interchangeably using terms like “racism,” “racial superiority,” “race prejudice,” and “race relations,” Lohman also used Nazism as an example of racist views. Regarding individual racism as behavior that was an “ill-­considered defense” against threats, Lohman felt it was incumbent on policemen to base their approach to race in social scientific fact. As police gained a reputation for empathy, Lohman believed they could make the most of their “symbolic importance” as “guarantors of public order and our personal liberties.”42 While this report was written for an audience of policemen, it shows how Lohman viewed racism as a systemic problem to be addressed by working with, not against, agents of state power. Lohman was not color-­blind in his framework, but neither did he bring up race when it might compromise his larger agenda or vision. Lohman’s approach reflected an inclination among sociologists of the postwar era of Lohman’s association who, as historian Leah Gordon argues, “advocated reforms that did not reflect the true complexity of their scientific theories.”43 Lohman believed that the postwar emergence of “mass society” was structuring racial contact in new ways as collective participation in interest groups reshaped how white people responded to minority groups in certain situations. Read in the opposite direction, it is apparent Lohman believed he could manipulate “the policy, strategy, and tactics of deliberately organized interest groups” as a politician.44 This helps to explain Lohman’s silence on race as sheriff: where he did bring up race, it reflected a careful calculation of the costs. In this light, that Lohman did not publicize the jail’s racial demographics indicates that he was concerned that the white public would not care about jail reform if they saw the jail as a predominantly or disproportionately Black institution. Recasting the predominantly Black incarcerated population as members of the “community of the condemned,” the outcasts of society, he attempted to



Forgotten Men 57

encourage white public sympathy. That he did want the Black public to know what he was doing to repair race relations in the jail, through careful publicity in Black news outlets, suggests his awareness of the jail’s demographics and this strategic focus. As a politician, Lohman saw Black people as an important political constituency, and he hoped to address Black Chicago’s concerns about racial animus in the jail and around law enforcement generally. The race relations goals of accommodation and assimilation informed Lohman’s innovative plan for reducing rioting in Cook County Jail. Lohman was most focused on professionalization of staff, creating programming to occupy prisoners and provide outlets for discontent, and building out new spaces to serve prisoners, such as recreation areas, a chapel, and a hospital area. He was not alone in trying to address the causes of uprisings among incarcerated people. The 1950s were marked by uprisings in prisons and jails across the country in widespread response to poor food, overcrowding, idleness, sexual and physical violence, and tensions between prisoners, guards, and management. While prisons turned to rehabilitative counseling and to educational and occupational programs, riot prevention in jails was constrained both by the limited time most prisoners spent in jail and the small budgets provided by cities and counties. In a monthly column for Prison World, a magazine about “progressive administration” put out by the American Prison Association and National Jail Association, Bureau of Prisons assistant director Myrl Alexander touted the accomplishments of jail reformers across the country, such as the jailers who occupied prisoners with “tinker toys” in Marin County Jail in San Rafael, California.45 Lohman knew that toys were not enough to restructure social relationships between people working and being incarcerated in jails, but he had confidence that training and professionalizing guard staff could help. Cook County Jail staff participated in the Bureau of Prisons’ “Correspondence Course for Jailers.” The course advised jailers with aging buildings to adopt a policy of “let’s make the most of what we have!” The Bureau of Prisons’ advice on infrastructure could be extended to staffing and programming as well, as jailers made do “through sound planning, rigid economy, and a bit of imagination and improvising.”46 To Lohman, Cook County Jail represented an opportunity to experiment with better race relations even as he faced the same budget, staffing, and overcrowding problems as jailers elsewhere. Informed by his practical and theoretical work on race relations, Lohman intended to use rehabilitation as part of a larger project of teaching prisoners how to assimilate back into society and to

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give society a way to justify their assimilation. Through creating new points of contact between prisoners, staff, and the public, he hoped to remake the interest groups that structured the political possibilities of jail reform. Lohman believed education about prisoners was as important as the education of prisoners. He did not bring up race, it appears, because he did not see an emphasis on links between incarceration and racism as furthering his political agenda. Stressing the common humanity of prisoners with society and their capacity for assimilation into society was one of Lohman’s primary goals.

Reform and the Making of Prisoner Political Culture Sheriff Joseph Lohman embarked on a highly publicized campaign to reform Cook County Jail. He knew how to harness the power of the press from his work with the Rosenwald Fund and sought to make the most of cheap and incremental changes. When the county board failed to fund more guard positions, he complained about staffing shortages to the Chicago Daily News.47 When he hired John Stroger, an African American who eventually became the jail’s personnel director, he told the Chicago Defender it was “part of his campaign to find and hire qualified officials regardless of race or creed.”48 With the appointment of Henry Montgomery as captain of the guard—the first Black man to assume such a position in Illinois—the Chicago Defender amplified Lohman’s priorities of “merit and devotion to duty” in promoting Black staff to positions of authority.49 When he hired an African American matron, Helen Clay, he persuaded Hue, part of the Johnson Publishing empire, to do a profile.50 Good race relations was good jail administration, and good jail administration made for good press. Unlike administrators in previous decades who shielded the jail from public view, Lohman allowed the press access to the jail in good times and in bad. Photographers captured images of him frowning over rubble created by a riot. The press covered the public opening of a new hospital. More than in decades past, Lohman’s efforts to professionalize the staff and build out new spaces for rehabilitative activities garnered headlines across Chicago, and occasionally in national newspapers. Many of Lohman’s reforms did not make it into the papers—directives banning brass knuckles among guard staff, for example, remained under wraps. He did not have complete control over the press, as was evidenced when reporters published the testimony of a Black woman, Johnnie Mae Flac, about



Forgotten Men 59

guard brutality. “They beat the girls, hitting them and kicking them,” she said of a how fifteen guards put down an uprising over loss of privileges in the women’s section.51 Nonetheless, Lohman aimed to portray a respect for public accountability as he considered the next steps for his political career. When issues like prisoner violence or discoveries of guard corruption threatened to sully his reputation, Lohman maintained control over his image.52 As part of this campaign to improve race relations, Lohman allowed prisoners to create two outlets for disseminating information to each other, a radio station, and a newspaper: The Grapevine. Both formats were part of a larger movement to provide people in jails and prisons with creative outlets. Although the first jail newspaper, Forlorn Hope, emerged from a New York debtor’s prison in 1800, prisoner media was not popularized until the late nineteenth century. A print shop at the Chicago House of Correction in 1906 provided printing of forms for the new municipal courts; a monthly newspaper called The Corrector began publication in 1915 and persisted through midcentury. As in-­house newspapers became common features of midcentury prisons, administrators claimed that newspapers and magazines gave prisoners perspective and allowed them to practice literacy, writing, and printing skills; prisoners valued the forum for expression and conveying news and culture with audiences inside and outside of institutions. Although less common, prison radio stations in the 1930s and 1940s allowed prisoners to participate in and contest popular culture, state building, and racial formation as they conducted interviews and performed and played music for themselves and audiences beyond jail walls.53 Responsibility for The Grapevine’s weekly publication fell to Hans Mattick, one of Lohman’s graduate student protégés from the University of Chicago. Mattick met Lohman while he was a teenage hobo and later worked for Lohman at the Illinois State Pardon and Parole Board. Mattick found his work for the state left him “a little desperate and despondent.”54 He felt eager to assume a position where he could achieve more substantive change. “I can’t live on good intentions alone,” he told his coworkers when he gave his notice. “I would not fool myself that I was doing a man good by putting him in prison,” Mattick opined; “but I think more than custody is possible, and I mean more than words about rehabilitation.”55 Mattick joined Lohman’s staff as assistant warden at Cook County Jail shortly after Lohman became sheriff. Part of Mattick’s rehabilitation project at Cook County Jail involved founding a prisoner-­run radio station that presented uncensored programming. In 1956,

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prisoner Tom Yen-­lo Wong, serving time on a narcotics charge, and two of his peers had proposed using the jail’s loudspeaker system to play music and to interview the warden on a program called Administration Speaks. Wong, a favorite of Mattick’s, became the most popular disc jockey, “spouting a running, often philosophical ad-­lib and whirling tapes and platters.”56 Wong’s program played music from “jazz to the classics—except rock’n’roll” because, as Wong told the Chicago Daily News, “it’s dead—nobody likes it here.” Prisoners also performed “poetry set to music and dramas like ‘The Death of Caesar.’”57 Prisoners requested over five thousand songs a week. Hue magazine even featured a photograph of two women, one blonde and one Black, dancing to piped-­in music under the watchful eye of the jail matron in a tier dayroom. Coverage of the radio station emphasized that it inspired prisoner creativity and relief from the stress of incarceration while also demonstrating that it engendered positive race relations among jailed people.58 In his efforts to give substance to rehabilitation and achieve harmonious race relations, Mattick launched The Grapevine in September 1955 with the tagline “Published for the Inmates and by the Inmates of the Cook County Jail.”59 Although Mattick retained editorial control and wrote a number of articles for the newspaper, The Grapevine’s rotating staff of incarcerated reporters enjoyed increased freedom of mobility in the jail as they worked to document their lives and concerns under Sheriff Lohman’s administration. The Grapevine found a larger audience as Mattick sent issues to a mailing list of over one hundred politicians, journalists, reformers, and social scientists across the country.60 The Grapevine promoted a consensus politics that upheld Lohman’s initiative for “cooperation” and “fairness” in the jail.61 Prisoners supported this project through publication of poems, stories, and cartoons dedicated to other prisoners or depicting daily life. Touting their status as insiders, prisoners took pride in using the newspaper as an outlet for promoting their own identities as supporters of Lohman’s reform program and as incarcerated people. In one series of cartoons styled as wanted posters, “Jailbird of the Week,” an artist affectionately depicted different types of prisoners, such as eager-­for-­release prisoner “Out-­ date Dave,” and “Dead Letter Dan,” known for his “wild eyed antagonistic countenance” as he waited for the mail and complained about the mail he received (or did not receive).62 Through the different sections of The Grapevine and an upbeat tone, its editors portrayed the jail as a dynamic, contested place full of interesting people.



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Prisoners did not uncritically accept this rosy portrait of life in jail, as a battle over charges of censorship reveals. The editors of The Grapevine drew criticism from fellow prisoners after they published a series of particularly complimentary issues celebrating the achievements of the administration and guard staff. Identifying himself as a former journalist, S. Singer bemoaned the shift from “intelligent constructive criticism” to “corny jokes” and “maudlin love doggerel bouquets to the brass.” Pushing back against the “distinct country weekly flavor” of the paper, Singer was particularly frustrated that “trivia” had replaced “general inmate welfare” including the outdated library and “such abuses as the policy of not notifying inmates when warrants are filed against them.”63 A tier clerk calling himself O. Sain (an homage, perhaps, to the warden of the House of Correction) wrote in on behalf of “interested inmates” when he suggested that “I thought we were to set an example working together and never to criticize one another, especially publicly.”64 Prisoner responses to Lohman’s reforms were positive, but contests over them reflected conflict among prisoners about the power dynamics of participating in programming uncritically. Tensions over censorship called into question the mission and purpose of The Grapevine and revealed the degree to which prisoner self-­interest and access to administrative attention guided editorial priorities. The editorial board responded to the debate with a heavy-­handed piece entitled “Put Up or Shut Up!” From their perspective, every week people told them, “the GRAPEVINE is slipping. One fellow said, ‘When the GRAPEVINE first came out, there was a brand new gripe in it each week[.]’ Others have stated . . . that it is now just a tool for the administration.” Defending themselves against charges of censorship clearly frustrated the editorial board. “Certainly there were a lot of gripes that the GRAPEVINE carried when it began. But before you say it is a tool of the administration, take a look at the good it has done, then take a look at the petty gripes that you, the readers, have turned in recently . . . if you want something done about a gripe you have let’s hear from you. . . . The GRAPEVINE is for the inmates of CCJ and there are a lot of things that happen around here because of what is printed therein that the average inmate does not know.”65 That The Grapevine editors felt obligated to defend the administration’s responsiveness indicates that they may have been part of conversations about how to improve the jail, particularly given Mattick’s close oversight of the newspaper, but to some extent, also that they felt the need to defend their proximity to power and their privileges against critique.

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Notwithstanding The Grapevine’s contested role among prisoners, in asserting their humanity on every page, its editors created space for prisoners to engage directly with the conditions of everyday life in the jail. As scholar Nan Enstad has shown, political subjectivities or expressions of political subjecthood are dependent on collective contexts, individual resources, and access to cultural models, meaning that the social production of identity proves fluid, “unfixed,” and even incoherent.66 As Lohman saw the refashioning of prisoner identities as a central project of controlling the conflicts endemic to a “racial frontier” like the jail, reading The Grapevine against the grain to draw out the internal conflicts this agenda produced shows that in a single article, prisoners could self-­consciously move between coercion and resistance as they worked through what being an “inmate” meant. Front-­page articles, most of which were editorials, often commented on the interplay between the programming and feelings of prisoners. In an article entitled “Prejudice and Intolerance!!” that encouraged prisoners to adopt new feelings that helped them to avoid tensions manifest in yelling and a “busted head,” the sympathetic author noted, “We are all prejudiced and intolerant. . . . Being human we can’t help it.”67 Prisoners emphasized this sense of frustration as a defining motive for their critiques. Even as they reiterated Lohman’s language of democracy and cooperation, they understood their criticisms as part of an oppositional politics intrinsic to living in the jail. Prisoners’ conceptions of their rights were based on their own identities, their connection to their obligations as citizens, and ultimately, how connected they were to the jail’s burgeoning sense of community. In many of the descriptions of civil rights, such as the right to a public defender, awareness of civil rights was presented by the editors of The Grapevine as a step toward becoming a full citizen. Justifying a reprint of an article by an Illinois Supreme Court justice from the Menard Times prison newspaper entitled “Rights of Individual Have Highest Importance in Law,” the editors of the paper noted, “An inmate better informed as to his rights as a citizen is less likely to return to a penal institution.”68 Given the limited attention of the U.S. Supreme Court and local mechanisms of accountability to the civil rights of people in jail, prisoners drew on more expansive assertions of their humanity. Human rights offered more space for a prisoner as a whole person: “We are inmates and we are men,” The Grapevine’s editors argued on one occasion as they defended themselves against criticism from other prisoners.69 Although The Grapevine was not prone to engaging directly with news events, even as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other



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nonviolent activism took hold contemporaneously to the heyday of The Grapevine, the paper’s silence around the intersections of race and civil rights perhaps reflected pressure to accommodate to the ideals of the “race relations” framework Lohman advanced. The all-­male editorial staff articulated their humanity through gendered language. Evoking Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 “forgotten man” speech, where he proposed that the American economy “build from the bottom up and not from the top down,” the “forgotten men” of the jail tiers complained in letters to the editor that they were being denied rehabilitation and resources they were entitled to. “This is in behalf of the unfortunates and forgotten men in this jail,” one prisoner declared as he sought, like jailed people in Milwaukee and Detroit, provision of a bag of tobacco per week for those without commissary funds. “I was born in Chicago, but have been in many states and cities, and this is the only one that I know where the unfortunates are really forgotten men.”70 Prisoners from a range of maximum-­security tiers signed their letters to the editor “the forgotten men” as they launched a months-­long campaign for access to programming. Prisoners who lacked movement privileges were cut off from new programs like book distribution and Adult Education Program lectures. For them, the “forgotten man” had a certain literalism to it; they claimed to have been forgotten in the roll out of the jail’s new programming. Aware of what was happening in the jail through the Grapevine, prisoners used the newsletter to agitate for their inclusion in a jail that suddenly seemed to have more to offer. “We fellows on F4 seem to be the forgotten men. We are not allowed to go to the chapel on Tuesday to hear the speaker, yet you tell us about it in The Grapevine. . . . Couldn’t we go to night school or get pocket books. Try and help us. We’d like to participate in the jail activities.”71 In this framing, rehabilitation emerged as a protoright: not quite constitutional, and certainly not a reward for fulfilling the obligations of citizenship, which prisoners had violated or had been accused of violating. They saw programs that would make jailing tolerable as an entitlement for all human beings inside the jail. Through The Grapevine, prisoners modeled strategies for the kinds of thought processes they saw as necessary to learning how to do their time. Yet, as they asserted that they were the people to whom their jailers were most accountable, they articulated a politics that extended beyond Lohman’s theories of self-­work and the newspaper’s assertion that it was foremost a paper by and for prisoners. The Grapevine’s authors used the newspaper to document the full

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complement of emotions tied to being in jail. A sense of futility was woven up in prisoners’ assertions of who they were and how they felt about jail spaces. “The men . . . are willing, overeager to go much further but they are hampered—not by a deficiency of imagination or ambition but rather by a lack of materials,” the editors of The Grapevine argued.72 Nonetheless, they tried to be diplomatic in their interpretations of challenges they encountered. In packaging their frustrations for a broader readership, jailed writers attempted to offer thoughtful and systemic interpretations of problems in the jail. “One more little gripe, while we’re griping,” one prisoner announced as he laid out a series of complaints about the linkages between clothing shortages, laundry delays, and the jail’s constant bed bug infestation. No facet of the problem was left unexplored; he critiqued the dark color of the blankets because it made it more difficult to see and kill the bugs, which led to a greater number of bites. The author conceded that, despite his assessment, “If there weren’t a dis-­satisfied customer or two, gentlemen, this couldn’t rightly be called a jail.”73 Prisoners used the newspaper to document how they tried to make their everyday lives better for each other. They privileged depictions of the jail that advanced the goals of the jailed community. The Cook County Jail of The Grapevine affirmed the cooperative ideal advanced by Sheriff Lohman. After Lohman and his staff established a recreation area in the jail yard, baseball equipment donated by the Chicago Junior Chamber of Commerce made an inter-­tier and inmate and staff baseball league possible. Prisoners played on tier teams that competed for jail-­wide championships. In 1958, the “Out of the World Series,” umpired by warden Jack Johnson, brought the media to the jail to demonstrate the “sense of good will and sportsmanship” engendered by the game.74 Making their joy visible both through outside press coverage and coverage in The Grapevine, prisoners demonstrated their personhood to the world (Figure 5). Such portrayals of prisoners’ expressions of their humanity and the complex milieu of the daily life in the jail worked in stark contrast to media portrayals of the jail on the outside. This was particularly evident in newspaper accounts of an uprising in 1956. On March 15, 1956, Vincent Ciucci and eight other death row prisoners spent five minutes breaking windows and lightbulbs. According to newspapers, Ciucci claimed he set fire to a wooden table, three wooden benches, and a trash container because he wanted to see the warden about a guard’s efforts to frame him by putting bullets under his mattress. Desperate to be believed, Ciucci wanted to give warden Jack Johnson the bullets before he got in trouble



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Figure 5. In the shadow of Cook County Jail, Joseph D. Lohman serves as umpire and warden Jack Johnson as catcher during the 1954 “World Series of the World Apart.” © Sun-­Times Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

for having them and compromised his appeal. As the fire burned, eight other prisoners huddled in a corner, terrified. After putting out the fire himself, Johnson assured the public that death row was completely fireproof and that the uprising had nothing to do with conditions.75 While popular accounts of unrest largely accepted the narrative offered by the sheriff and warden—transparency created trust, after all—The Grapevine was a crucial site for counternarratives. Again, situating the violence in context in the days after the rebellion, The Grapevine published a scathing front-­page editorial asserting that conditions were entirely the problem. “That we are in need of a new County Jail to replace this antiquated monstrosity, not even fit for animals, let alone to house humans, now packed in far beyond and above normal capacity, like sardines in a can, is without question.”76 Struggling to recenter the public conversation on the broader issues driving unrest, prisoners characterized themselves as human beings in a fundamentally inhumane urban institution.

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Both The Grapevine and the jailhouse radio station reveal something of the individual experiences of people who came through the jail. Tom Yen-­lo Wong, the lead disc jockey for the radio station, was touted as being college educated and able to speak five languages; he exchanged barbs in The Grapevine with Hans Mattick in French and German. Images in a Hue profile show him looking at books in the jail library and playing the guitar on the radio with a smile on his face. His time in jail presented Wong with unusual opportunities. He met Sammy Davis Jr. when he visited the jail radio station and gained a reputation for expressing himself freely in the jail’s public forums. These opportunities made him a target of racist jokes in The Grapevine, where a cartoon depicted Wong— who presented as mixed race—as a Chinese person with hair in a queue and long fingernails. In the fake biography of Wong’s passage from China to the United States, one of the less offensive passages suggested that the unlikely prisoner “King Yen-­Lo” was a “royal person . . . committed to the walled off CCJ City, whose inhabitants are so pure of heart and naïve they must be segregated from society for fear society will take advantage of them.”77 But most of the time, his peers wrote loving accolades about “the personality kid with the golden smile” who was “Mr. America” among the prisoners as he visited the tiers distributing books in his role as head librarian.78 They acknowledged his “ready wit and intelligence” and assured him, “you are an acknowledged player.”79 There was space in the jail for friendship, for mobility, for popularity and admiration, and the prisoners documented it because it was important to them. But the conditions of Wong’s release also show us how the jail factored into an individual’s life. In 1958, Wong argued his case before a criminal court judge. Wong asserted that his five-­year narcotics sentence violated his rights because changes in sentencing law made him eligible for release.80 As much as Wong seemed to have enjoyed his participation in the programs, viewing these activities alongside his more submerged efforts as a writ writer indicates that his primary concern was getting free. It was always better to be free. As prisoners struggled to make sense of their incarceration and their place in Cook County Jail amid profound change, The Grapevine reflected the terms through which a “community of the condemned” developed as a political constituency. In a social world of local imprisonment alive with critique and reflection made up of people who understood themselves as both inmates and men, they used everyday criticisms and demands to convey the expectation that they would be heard. Much like Chicagoans in the free community, they created



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meeting spaces, established means of disseminating information, and engaged in dialogue about their relationship to the world around the jail. The Grapevine advanced Lohman’s goals of carrying out the race relations cycle by creating a space of contact for mediating competition and performing accommodation and assimilation, but prisoners participated on their own terms.

Community of the Condemned Prisoners further advanced their claims to humanity as they articulated the harms of jailing to the public on Community of the Condemned. A twenty-­six-­part television series, Community of the Condemned was among sheriff Joseph Lohman’s most significant achievements. While his efforts to promote cultural change within the jail achieved modest success, at least according to the authors of The Grapevine, his broader efforts to transform jail policies and spaces had been limited. He had struggled to get the state of Illinois to embrace “good time” policies that would allow well-­behaved prisoners early release.81 The county board, ever tightfisted, denied his requests for funding for more and better qualified staff. While he tried to emulate Myrl Alexander’s low-­cost approach to jail reform, Lohman’s successes were mostly superficial: music piped through the jail hallways, the baseball field behind the cell block, the new style of the uniforms incarcerated women made for themselves. He offered barn bosses, the prisoners who ruled the tiers, a more formal position as “tier clerks” in an attempt to fold their power into the bureaucratic hierarchy. As a scholar and a public official, Lohman appreciated the limits of what his staff could achieve in the jail. As a politician, he emphasized which issues lay beyond his control but continued to propose solutions to them. Despite his struggles to gain influence within Richard Daley’s machine-­driven local Democratic party, Lohman aspired to statewide office. He was assertive in creating an image for himself and Cook County Jail that linked its challenges to its architectural design and state-­level policies. He enlisted prisoners in his efforts to publicly celebrate the outcomes of his brief reform regime. Lohman conceived Community of the Condemned as a venue for communicating his vision for jail reform. In the Educational Television and Radio Center (ETRC), a precursor to public television founded in 1952, he found a willing partner in using television as a medium for disseminating information about how government worked. ETRC, with local broadcast partners such as

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WTTW, distributed programs aired on public television across the country and sent film reels to libraries and schools to ensure its programming reached the public after it aired. Proposals described Lohman as sheriff of “one of the largest and most complex metropolitan communities in the world.” Unlike typical sheriffs, “unable to use words of more than two syllables and . . . held in office by patronage . . . Lohman is exactly the reverse.” Touting Lohman as “objective, polished, respected for his ability,” and “a fearless though high-­principled crusader,” materials celebrated the unusual but well-­regarded “articulate sheriff.”82 Lohman produced Community of the Condemned after he had made several other shows, including WBKB’s fifty-­three-­week series Your Sheriff Reports, WNBQ’s crime documentary series Shadows of the City, and the nationally recognized WTTW show Searchlights on Delinquency. Community of the Condemned was a pinnacle achievement for Lohman, who received a National Service Award from the National Broadcasting Company in 1958.83 Lohman used television to advance his belief that crime was more of a social outcome than a result of individual criminality. Searchlights on Delinquency was a thirteen-­episode program aired in 1957. It was designed to cut through sensational headlines by providing expert analysis of the causes and contexts of teenage crime, including broken families, neighborhood blight and instability, and, as Lohman put it, the “shattered community” in which “youngsters make a world for themselves in the streets.”84 Featuring teenagers who had been incarcerated in Cook County Jail, Lohman used the teens’ narratives to challenge lingering Progressive assumptions about criminality rooted in eugenic thought: Lohman portrayed juvenile delinquents as intelligent, dynamic individuals who had been shortchanged by their lack of more constructive experiences in their families, neighborhoods, and communities instead of any inborn deficiencies. Characterizing criminality as a process through which young people had “unfortunate” but “prized experiences” and developed as young people exchanged “little waywardnesses,” Lohman offered a sometimes tender portrayal of his subjects even as he condemned the crimes they committed.85 Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people on the show continually resisted Lohman’s efforts to criminalize their friendships and emphasized their attempts to improve the circumstances of their lives. Lohman framed American cities as home to two societies: a “conventional society” that abided by laws and a “criminal society” where lawbreakers adopted distinct ways of seeing themselves and found solutions to the deprivations they faced as part of



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an impoverished urban undercaste.86 This perspective was reinforced by interviews that a member of the Sheriff ’s Juvenile Bureau, a coordinating branch of the sheriff ’s office, conducted with incarcerated teenagers. With nonchalant, frank answers, the teens shared an exuberant perspective on what crime had offered them. “My old neighborhood had everything!” a white teen recalled as he celebrated the drunks and gamblers who made up his world.87 Another white teen described how the friends he committed crimes with “wanted the same things I did.”88 Lohman tried to spin these enthusiasms as negatives. In an episode called “Emotionally Disturbed,” Lohman set out to explain how anxiety and the lingering effects of abuse gave rise to delinquency. A teenage guest, recounting the troubling tale of his parents’ neglect and alcoholism, offered his own narrative of triumph: he had finally been able to rent a room outside his chaotic family home. He had done so with support from his friends, who the interviewer repeatedly reminded him were delinquents. “My friends were all that I had! We went through this together,” the young man insisted.89 Their narratives highlighted the zero-­sum game of the so-­called juvenile delinquency problem: if everything was a cause of crime, should, and could, local governments do anything to prevent it? What if crime had a social benefit? Platforming teenagers’ interpretations of their experiences reveals Lohman’s cynicism about jailing as a means of addressing crime as a social problem. This was evident in the story of a teenager who enthusiastically shared that after being arrested for stealing a car he had been sent to Cook County Jail at fifteen, where he found old friends and made new friends. “I felt at home with them,” he recalled. He improved his criminal skills as he learned how to knife fight more effectively, how to play dice, and how to play cards. At the end of his four-­month sentence, he and his jail friends went on a “crime spree” of armed robberies they had planned in jail.90 “Imprisonment makes the delinquent self-­consciously at war with society,” Lohman noted, charging that the degradation and objectification prisoners experienced through incarceration, coupled with the knowledge exchanged among prisoners, undermined the “good intentions” of administrators.91 Community of the Condemned was distinguished from Searchlights on Delinquency by the extent to which adult prisoners shaped and challenged Lohman’s broader narratives. Lohman designed each episode of Community of the Condemned to educate the public about the individual harms of jailing and how jails produced forms of toxic communitarianism and social alienation that produced crime in the first place. Over the course of twenty-­six half-­hour episodes,

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the series focused on how carceral spaces fostered crime and how jails could be reoriented toward rehabilitation.92 With a mix of description of how jails and prisons functioned, editorials by Lohman about proper reform approaches, and interviews with corrections experts from Cook County Jail and across the nation, Lohman showcased his own work in the jail while situating himself within a larger carceral project. Similarly, in relation to the experts he invited to speak on the program, Lohman positioned his reform projects in a longer history of Progressive penology and social science research. His guests included people like Kenyon Scudder, superintendent of the California Institution for Men at Chino and author of the influential 1952 book Prisoners Are People, which celebrated the outcomes of administrative collaboration with prisoners to achieve forms of self-­government.93 Prisoners appeared on Community of the Condemned in several different ways. They appeared in shots of groups participating in everyday jail activities, such as lingering in the dayroom or digging a hole outside. Such shots emphasized the anonymity of prisoners as none of the people in these shots engaged the camera. More intimately, they appeared in one-­on-­one interviews with Lohman to discuss their perspective on the show’s topic. In these interviews, prisoners wore black masquerade masks to conceal most of their facial features. People who appeared on the show multiple times used different aliases, further concealing their identities. Wearing their uniforms, they sat with Lohman on a cot in a cell and responded to his leading questions. It is unclear how prisoners were selected to appear on Community of the Condemned or whether they were coached on relevant talking points before their interviews, but appearing on the show made jailed people visible to the public. As their remarks were taken in concert with experts, the policy issues Lohman presented featured a clear link to their human consequences. Yet Community of the Condemned allowed prisoners to do more than serve as props in Lohman’s policy agenda; it gave them an opportunity to publicly narrate their experiences of jailing as members of the “community of the condemned.” “Sid,” a dark-­skinned Black man who had spent nine years incarcerated in different institutions, was willing to reinforce Lohman’s argument that “the institution makes a professional criminal.”94 But he resisted efforts to blame the institutions over the broader context of exploitation. “If you happen to be the type of individual that hasn’t got the money, the necessary funds to hire some of these better lawyers in the state to get him out, then he’ll have to balance off the sheet. . . .



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He’ll have to keep the guards employed,” he argued. Among people doing time, “everybody agrees on one thing . . . get yours and get out.”95 While Lohman emphasized that jailing promoted social relationships that intensified criminality, prisoners carried forward his more systemically informed opinion that crime was a consequence of lifetimes of poverty and distress. Prisoners on the show centered the importance of their own power in ensuring peace within the jail. A light-­skinned Black man called “Tom” asserted that “the inmates are straightforward, blunt, and always endeavoring, not just for themselves but for the inmate populace as a whole, to better the conditions and do something progressive.” Prisoners’ commitment to improving their conditions, he argued, was a source of tension within the jail: “The officers don’t like that, and as a consequence, they begin to sabotage all our plans. . . . I don’t care what good intentions a man must have; he must face reality . . . and then the inmates will go along.”96 In another episode, Tom pushed back against Lohman’s assertion that the harms of imprisonment were wholly unintentional, suggesting it was deliberate that imprisonment “creates monsters.” “Monsters?!” Lohman replied. Tom affirmed that this was a deliberate outcome. “In my humble opinion, society is blind and sightless.”97 As prisoners articulated what they lost because of jailing, they complicated Lohman’s effort to show the Progressive idea that jailing could be used for social benefit. Masked prisoners bemoaned that the “old style” techniques for crafts like shoe repair they learned inside had no practical application outside the jail. Worse still, the stigma of incarceration made the training a moot point. “John” revealed he was released from prison and jail seventeen times. He found he had to lie about his record to get hired in a job doing menial labor, and that usually his boss fired him within a week or two once a coworker revealed his past incarceration. “I have yet to run into somebody that would help me out,” he complained.98 Prisoners felt jailing isolated them from society; to Lohman, the evidence suggested that society had a role to play in ensuring that jailing was the extent of punitive isolation. As with The Grapevine, prisoners used Community of the Condemned to articulate how their relationships to each other were a bulwark against administrative efforts to control their subjectivities. “Jim,” a white prisoner who had served five years in prison, recounted that prisoners exercised control over institutions in opposition to poor management and unqualified staff. “We have to have a sort of defense against the administration,” and exercising it, he said, ensured prisoners could “preserve our own identity.”99 But even as prisoners

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candidly described that they had learned more about how to commit crime through their incarceration, they resisted the notion that social contamination rendered their otherwise supportive and humane relationships with other prisoners purely evil. Complicating Lohman’s broad categorization of “the community of the condemned,” prisoners reframed their relationships as normal, largely congenial, and a means of enduring the challenges of jail time. Prisoners resisted any effort to oversimplify their complex personhood and insisted on their own humanity. A Black prisoner called “George” warned Lohman that the object of most wardens was to “try to suppress the man and their job is to hold him there regardless” or to handle him as part of a group. George challenged Lohman to accept that prisoners had their own ideas of what their incarceration should be like. In the best conditions, people who successfully dealt with their incarceration were not “pushed around.”100 In the worst case, a man called “Will” told Lohman, prisoners would dwell on the deprivations of diet and lack of exercise and health care. A riot, he argued, is “something that snaps within ’em and they just go berserk.”101 This frustration, in part, prisoner Tom argued, was a result of the fact that incarcerated people did not see their experiences of jail as separate from the rest of their lives. “He is bitter, and he becomes more bitter as time goes on. He can’t help but become more bitter because society doesn’t do anything for him inside the institution, nor outside the institution. They believe that society, on the whole, all they think of, are building bigger and better institutions to hold inmates.”102 Like the jail, Community of the Condemned was a controlled space that ultimately served the agenda of the administration. Prisoners were not allowed to speak without Lohman sitting next to them. Incarcerated women did not appear in speaking parts. While many of the people housed in the jail were people of color, most of the prisoners interviewed on the program appeared to be white. Few of the prisoners channeled the emotional intensity or sense of betrayal that regularly graced the pages of The Grapevine. But even Lohman could not deny the power of prisoners’ voices. He believed that prisoners were the main drivers of reform. “More often than not, our progress has followed riots and disturbances, political exposés. It has been the prisoners themselves calling attention to the inequities of the penal system, and only after they have done so, have the governing bodies . . . [started] to evaluate present circumstances and propose future corrections.”103



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Taken together, Community of the Condemned, Searchlights on Delinquency, and The Grapevine represented a significant break from the past as people incarcerated in Cook County Jail claimed new media venues for articulating their experiences of crime and jailing. Within the confining framework of Lohman’s blend of Progressive penology and the race relations cycle, prisoners used these new venues to contest common knowledge about the place of jailing in their lives. In these texts, prisoners’ voices became central to the legitimacy of the plan to transform Cook County Jail as well as Lohman’s efforts to influence jail reform across the United States. While the limits of reform under a single sheriff were highlighted in Lohman’s departure, incarcerated people continued to assert political pressure for recognition of their humanity. At the Cook County Jail and the House of Correction, the coming of the 1960s made clear that Lohman’s framing of reform as an exercise in positive race relations was becoming a more tenuous position. As white liberals looked to carry forward Lohman’s jail reform vision, Black prisoners faced new constraints for asserting their personhood.

Chapter 3

A Model Detention Camp

Comedian Dick Gregory made Richard Daley’s Chicago the target of his act. The famed Black nightclub performer had made the city his home around the time Daley was elected mayor and built his career around jokes about the racism Black Americans faced. To the laughter of a white audience in a comedy club featured on the 1961 television special Walk in My Shoes, Gregory observed, “We have a lot of racial prejudice up north, but we’re so clever with it,” he said, “when Negroes in Chicago move into one large area and it looked like we might control the votes, they don’t say anything to us. They have a slum clearance.” The white audience howled and clapped as Gregory nodded knowingly, a smirk crossing his face.1 Entrenched as city policy in the decade after World War II, urban renewal as “negro removal” had dispossessed thousands of Chicagoans, with approximately 125,000 Black people removed to deliberately segregated public housing by 1967 and thousands more pushed into deteriorating slums on the city’s western and southern margins. Fearing integration, Chicago public schools superintendent Benjamin Willis began installing portable classrooms at overcrowded Black schools in 1963 to ensure Black students were kept out of less crowded, nearby white schools.2 Efforts to hold Mayor Daley accountable fueled dramatic resistance among the Black Chicagoans who made up the city’s civil rights movement. Of those participants, Gregory was intimately familiar with what removal as urban policy meant for Black Chicagoans: he had seen the faces of people in the Chicago House of Correction. As part of the movement, Gregory was incarcerated there at least three times and had seen firsthand what the removal of alleged drunks, delinquents, and other perceived “quasi-­criminals” by police from city



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neighborhoods to the city and county jails meant for Black communities. At the place still referred to as the Bridewell, Gregory found a jail that contributed to the clever project of northern racism. “I thought I was fighting racial prejudice and corruption on the outside, but that was nothing compared to in here,” he wrote in Jet after a summertime stint in 1963. “They call it a model detention camp,” he recalled in a nod to the Bridewell’s shining new hospital, educational programs, and integrated staff. “A model for where they would like to put all of us.”3 Gregory was not overstating the sense that all Black people were at risk of going to jail. Anyone who had been to the House of Correction and Cook County Jail at midcentury would have known that most of the people in them were Black. In a 1953 report, 38 percent of the faces in the dayrooms and cells were identified by House of Correction administrators as Black.4 Cook County Jail had identified 60 percent of prisoners fuzzily as “non-­whites” in 1955.5 Amid the Chicago Freedom Movement, the institutions were no longer disproportionately Black, as they had always been; they were majority Black. By 1960, the number of sentenced African Americans jumped to a clearly identified 52 percent of p­ eople in Cook County Jail.6 By 1964, the number of Black people admitted to the House of Correction had shot up to 1,161, almost 73 percent of the 1,597 people caged on a given day; Black women represented 84 percent of women incarcerated there (Tables 6 and 7).7 While no one involved with the far-­reaching efforts to reform jailing in Chicago would have called it their goal to create “a model detention camp,” liberal efforts to remake the jails into rehabilitative institutions drove and rationalized the mass incarceration of Black Chicagoans in the 1960s. Local transformations to the criminal justice system, including the gradual expansion of the police force and new policing tactics, incidences of judicial corruption, and the continued difficulty Black prisoners faced in paying fines and raising bail money to secure their release, all remade who was in jail. As liberals looked to rehabilitation as an Table 6. Race by Year, Cook County Jail

Negro White

1925

1940

1960

25.7% 74.3%

24.7% 75.3%

52.0% 48.0%

Note: Terms used are from the source. Source: Charles O’Reilley et al., Men in Jail, 20.

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Table 7. House of Correction, Male Population, 1964 Race / Ethnicity Caucasian Negroid Brown (Mexicans and   Puerto Rican descent) Red Yellow

Age at Time of Admission 24.100% (384) 72.700% (1161) 2.800% (45) 0.030% (6) 0.006% (1)

Under 20 years 20–24 25–29 30–35 36–40 41–45 45 and over No age given

321 405 278 228 156 82  91  36

Note: Terms used are from the source. Source: Report of Findings to Cook County Department of Corrections Commission (Chicago: House of Correction, 1964), MRC, CPL-HW, 5, 6.

ideology that could give meaning and purpose to the jail’s role in perpetuating racial inequality, the jail came to play a vital role in constructing ideas about the pathologies of Black prisoners.8 Individual rehabilitation in jails had long been a fraught proposal because many people in jail were only accused of crimes or were serving time to pay off fines. With reforms to the punitive sentencing policies of the 1950s, by 1964 Cook County Jail had returned to its primary task of pretrial detention, with 70 percent of prisoners awaiting trial.9 Although ten to twelve people remained on the jail’s unusual death row, in most cases where people were serving sentences, a vast majority of those were for petty crimes. That same year, only a quarter of prisoners at the House of Correction were sentenced to time; 42 percent were serving short terms to pay back fines at a rate of $5 per day, nearly all for violating city ordinances.10 Liberal rehabilitation ideology raised questions about the jails’ missions of warehousing pretrial detainees and people sentenced for misdemeanors. Why devote large amounts of educational and therapeutic resources to people who were not convicted and retained their presumption of innocence? Why rehabilitate people who owed the city ninety dollars for a fine? Through institutional reforms, legal changes, and activism, white liberals recast jails as vital components of the postwar welfare state. Heirs to the Progressive Era idea that jail could fulfill a benevolent purpose of social transformation, liberal jail reformers tested the possibilities of postwar bureaucratic change. Working as city and county officials, politicians, activists, and correctional officers, they



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waged an expansive campaign to rethink the purposes of modern, urban jails. Liberal reforms relied on proposals that were both punitive and coercive. While efforts to rethink jailing were constrained by budgets, patronage politics, and the fundamental problem of why, exactly, they promised to rehabilitate people who had not yet been convicted of a crime, the campaign to implement a cohesive jail correctional program nonetheless lent legitimacy to increased incarceration of Black Chicagoans in the 1960s. The latter problem was especially vexing, and white liberals worked hard to develop the belief that jails could rehabilitate those detained within them, whether convicted or not. As white liberals centered their own demands for professionalism, programs, and new ideas about who was in jail and their welfare needs, they cast this “rehabilitative ideal” as a color-­blind or race-­neutral project. In creating legislative, cultural, and institutional barriers to prisoner appeals for improvements, the political construction of the rehabilitative jail relied on racist tropes: that Black people in jail were welfare cases, emotionally unstable, and needed to be taught how to work. Symbols like the rehabilitated prisoner and the misdemeanant offender worked as racial ideologies that informed broader demands for municipal reform. As Black prisoners and their allies contested the racism that informed jail governance and rejected the notion that going to jail meant they needed rehabilitation, prisoners mounted a direct challenge to white supremacy.11 These disparate struggles, linked at times by a few of the same actors but taking place in multiple venues, reveal how far-­reaching attempts at jail reform relied on the renewal of benevolent racial ideologies that in turn influenced broader demands for municipal power. Together, they show that the creation and expansion of an idea of jailing that Dick Gregory satirized as a “model detention camp” during the civil rights movement required new racial paradigms through which jails were both imagined as and functioned more like prisons regardless of whether prisoners were sentenced or not.

Modernizing Jails in Daley’s Chicago Postwar desires to formalize jailing by better sorting and treating prisoners were similar to efforts in state prison systems to implement corrective programming and create new “departments of corrections.”12 Los Angeles and New York City provided models for people who imagined jails could be more like prisons. By

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1958, the Los Angeles County Jail in downtown L.A. was widely regarded “as a firetrap, health menace, and disgrace to the community.”13 With the support of the California State Board of Corrections, sheriff Peter Pitchess expanded Los Angeles County’s jail farm, Wayside Honor Rancho, and opened two new jails—one for men and one for women—with capacity for four thousand prisoners and a price tag of $24 million.14 In New York City, corrections commissioner Anna Kross declared in 1954 that in order to ensure people did not come back to jail, “we must abandon the notion that we are merely jailers or keepers. . . . We must do a job of human engineering.” Blending a Progressive emphasis on technocratic optimization, a confidence in psychiatric expertise, and a more modern jail, she believed, could “enable the prisoner to discover himself and acquire greater competence in the arts of social living.”15 Toward this end, she succeeded in closing Brooklyn’s 125-­year-­old Raymond Street Jail in 1963. That same year, she opened the New York City Correctional Reception and Classification Center at Rikers Island, off the coast of Queens.16 In the case of Chicago, politics proved a major constraint for the pursuit of rehabilitative programming, bureaucratic reorganization, and construction that was occurring in other large cities. Since his election in 1955, Mayor Daley had overseen the massive expansion of O’Hare International Airport and spent over $800 million on streets and highways. Daley’s preference for demolition and construction meant urban renewal came to the jail in a similar, albeit smaller way, as Daley began to address the House of Correction’s crumbling brick walls and cell houses. The mayor was under pressure from the House of Correction Commission to incorporate a building to complement the new dormitories opened in 1954. In 1958, he swung a sledgehammer to begin the demolition of the South Cell Block, built in 1871 (Figure 6).17 Viewing Daley’s construction regime as antithetical to the jail reforms happening in other places, in 1956 sheriff Joseph Lohman organized the Citizens Conference on the Cook County Jail and Correctional Treatment. Participants included religious leaders and members from groups like the League of Women Voters, the Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago, the CIO, the American Legion, and the Cook County Democratic Organization. Convening both a conference and series of subcommittee meetings, the sheriff charged participants with creating “A Blueprint for ACTION.” Under Lohman’s direction, subcommittees on jail construction, rehabilitation, and prisoner release drafted an expansive set of proposals for a minimum-­security county jail farm, a separate



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Figure 6. A 1964 annual report showcased the mix of nineteenth-­and mid-­twentieth-­century buildings at the House of Correction. Chicago Public Library.

jail for women, a separate jail for people awaiting trial, and for limiting the existing Cook County Jail to maximum-­security prisoners awaiting trial. Through a new entity, the “Cook County Correctional System,” the conference proposed that the city and county jails be combined into a centralized bureaucratic unit to provide rehabilitation, education, counselling and therapy, and social services by professional staff employed through a civil service system. Additionally, they recommended parole and “good time” statutes, as well as restricting use of the new correctional system to people seventeen to seventy years old. Cook County Jail’s death row and electric chair would be moved to state prisons. A Citizens’ Advisory Council, they hoped, would institutionalize the activities of the Citizens’ Conference into an oversight body. Although the best Lohman could accomplish in his limited four-­year term as sheriff was to convince a state senator to propose legislation for a feasibility study, the Citizen’s Conference convinced many politically active people that a comprehensive plan for jail reform must include plans for rehabilitation.18

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Daley’s political machine made such reformist visions difficult to realize. The guiding ethos of the machine, political scientist and Democratic Organization man Milton Rakove wrote, was that “every man has his price.” As head of the Cook County Democratic Organization, Daley extended these operations beyond the city. Members of the organization served at his pleasure in the state legislature, governor’s mansion, and Congress. While the machine’s tendency to throw its weight around was best known, Daley nonetheless understood the value of “the need for compromise, for tempering of goals, and for retreat.” Daley was renowned for using committees and commissions to diffuse controversy.19 He favored responsive government that took accountability at the lowest rung and worked to neutralize and co-­opt dissenters. As a result, the “good government” reformers, liberal heirs to the Progressive tradition known in the city as “goo goos,” criticized Daley even as they served on Daley’s commissions and welcomed him to speak at their meetings. As one of his foremost critics, alderman Leon Despres, later put it, “The effect of the machine’s systematic repression is the muting of protest, incalculable stagnation of the general citizenry.”20 The stagnation encouraged by the Democratic machine influenced the administration of both jails. Frank Sain, brother to an alderman and former warden of both the House of Correction and Cook County Jail, was handpicked by Daley to replace Lohman as the Democratic candidate for sheriff in 1958. With none of Lohman’s reform ambitions, Sain won an easy election and left Cook County Jail in the hands of Lohman appointee warden Jack Johnson, a former Chicago cop who made a reputation as a peacemaker after diffusing tensions at the white race riot in Cicero in 1951 before being appointed at the jail by Sheriff Lohman in 1955. Johnson did little to challenge the status quo during his tenure in the 1960s.21 Daley’s efforts to balance his technocratic tendencies with machine priorities were evidenced in his hiring of Fred Hoehler to replace Sheriff Sain as superintendent of the House of Correction in 1958. Hoehler was a distinguished social welfare administrator who had worked in various philanthropic organizations across the Midwest and as director of the Division of Displaced Persons for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration during World War II. A trusted Daley adviser, Hoehler reluctantly filled the position at the House of Correction. “Even as superintendent, I find myself unable to secure my ‘release,’” he quipped to a lawyer friend, jokingly asking for advice on how to get out of jail.22 Hoehler’s professional credentials brought prestige to the House of Correction,



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certainly, but situating his hiring amid the other work he had done as a consultant for Daley helps to make Daley’s intentions clearer. In 1955, Hoehler had been hired to help Daley to reduce the power of civil service and to restore patronage power to hiring under the auspices of professional personnel practices. With about 130 guard positions at the jail, and other administrative and social service positions, the House of Correction could be a significant source of political jobs if Daley could get ahold of them. Hoehler’s major task was reclassifying many of the jail’s positions to make it easier to hire machine loyalists and undermine union organizing efforts among public employees. This led to tension with Black guard staff especially, as the initiation of civil service testing under Mayor Martin Kennelly had helped them to gain access to jobs at the Bridewell since 1947.23 As with the city jail, Daley’s hiring of credentialed leadership at the police department aimed to diffuse criticism of the department’s practices of police brutality and torture. Although police were targets of newspaper exposés and lawsuits, nothing curbed the violence and corruption. Indeed, “payola,” or bribes, were a normal feature of urban policing.24 After the so-­called Summerdale scandal, where an arrested burglar claimed he had been assisted by eight policemen, Daley fired police commissioner Timothy O’Connor. In 1960 he hired Orlando Wilson, the dean of the Berkeley School of Criminology at the University of California, to run the department of ten thousand officers.25 Not unlike Joseph Lohman, who replaced Wilson as criminology dean at Berkeley, Wilson’s “scholarly” appearance and performance captured the imagination of people like Fred Hoehler, who helped to select Wilson for the job. Hailed as an outsider above local politics, Wilson’s reform agenda was funded with what at that time was perhaps the richest increase in resources to any carceral project in the city’s history: the police department’s budget rose from $72 million in 1960 to $186 million in 1961. Over the course of the early 1960s, Wilson used these funds to buy new police cars, renovate police headquarters, and adopt new technologies. Wilson’s technocratic passions provided cover for the expansion of stop-­and-­frisk searches and the saturation of neighborhoods with police. Increased searches meant that disorderly conduct and loitering were the leading charges in 1961 among people in the House of Correction for fines and awaiting trial without bond. The new police cars facilitated arrests for infractions of “motor vehicle law,” making these the most common sentences served in the House of Correction. Throughout the early 1960s, the House of Correction’s annual admissions ranged from twenty-­five thousand to thirty thousand people a year. These strains

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on the jails did not lead to an equal rise in budgets; in 1960, the House of Correction claimed a $2.8 million annual budget and Cook County Jail operated on $2 million a year.26 The city jail’s austere governance gained attention in 1960, when the Chicago Daily News launched an investigation into the House of Correction following the suicide of prisoner Pedro Ramos while he was held on $15 bail. The six-­part exposé centered on reporter Ted Smart’s going undercover as a prisoner at the jail. Assuming the persona of “Theodore Small,” Smart went to court posing as a Skid Row wino who had turned himself in to a judge under the pretense of wanting to straighten out. Sentenced to a “ten and ten”—ten dollars in costs and a ten dollar fine—he was sent to the House of Correction to pay back the money with his time, at a rate of two dollars a day. Smart spent five nights and six days at the decrepit city jail and the suburban jail farm. On his second day, he woke in the North Cell House to find his mattress bloodied by bedbug bites. When prisoners flushed the toilet in the cell, “launching water spilled the bowl’s contents out under the lower bunk.” As the days wore on, a prisoner called “Peanuts” who worked in the jail kitchen told Smart that a low-­paid guard at the visitor’s area was the source of “marijuana, money, and liquor” in the jail.27 At the jail farm, where he was moved on his fourth day, Smart found cleaner facilities and fresh blankets in a large dormitory room that housed ninety men. He slept better after long days digging out tree stumps and weeding onions, his “hands, blistered and bleeding.”28 On his sixth day, Smart was transferred back to the North Cell House at the House of Correction after a mix-­up in names. At that point, he begged his editors to have him bailed out and released.29 Facing public outcry, Daley used every tactic in his machine arsenal to diminish the impact of the scandal. On television, the mayor lashed out at Smart, calling the articles “irresponsible and malicious” and suggesting the “untrue, unsubstantiated, uncorroborated” accusations were “unfair” to House of Correction employees.30 He also denied Smart’s critique of the boredom prisoners faced. “I thought they had a real program of rehabilitation under way.” Daley set Hoehler to work on a quick cleanup of the jail, after which Smart was brought back for a tour. “I almost didn’t recognize it. It sparkled with new paint,” he recalled.31 Daley convened the Mayor’s House of Correction Commission to discuss new plans. Chairman Edwin R. Eckersall complained, “We’re practically under a directive from the mayor to come back with recommendations to construct [new units] to replace the North Cell House.”32 Although Daley announced plans to seek



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an appropriation to replace the North Cell House and build a new dorm, nothing happened. Amid austerity at both jails, an escalation of policing, and Daley’s influence over jail governance, citizens took up the challenge to find a place for rehabilitation in Chicago’s jails. They set their sights first on Cook County’s death row, and it was in the context of this clash between reformers and politicians that the spotlight shone on one prisoner in particular: Paul Crump.

The Symbolic Power of a Rehabilitated Prisoner The greatest symbol of jailing’s rehabilitative potential was a person who, anywhere else, would have been in prison. Paul Crump was twenty-­two years old when he arrived at Cook County Jail in 1953. Crump had been arrested for murdering a security guard during a daytime payroll robbery at the McNeill and Libby Food Products Company, his former workplace. Although his four accomplices received 199-­year sentences each, Crump was singled out as the shooter and sentenced to die in Cook County Jail’s electric chair. Crump entered Cook County Jail in the wake of Harry Williams, a Black death row prisoner who killed a guard and escaped from the jail in August 1951. After a two-­day manhunt by one thousand policemen with shoot to kill orders, Williams was captured on a streetcar. His escape was seen as a necessary cost of housing prisoners with nothing to lose in a jail that was poorly designed and understaffed. While Williams’s execution in the electric chair in March 1952 was widely celebrated as restoring public safety, inside the jail it left a vacuum for a young person eager to challenge the power structures of the jail from death row.33 In those early years, there was little to suggest that Paul Crump’s battle for his life would become both a national indictment of the shortcomings of Cook County Jail and an example of its possibilities as a rehabilitative institution. Crump quickly made a name for himself as the ringleader of escape attempts and rebellions, including the uprising that guards had ended with tear gas in 1954. At that time, his mother told Ebony magazine, “He was mean. He had it in his mind he was sentenced to die just because he is a Negro.”34 Cook County Jail was the only jail in America with an electric chair. Executions were built into the functions of Illinois jails because the state charged county jails with carrying out their own executions. Efforts to deter crime through the spectacle of urban executions persisted in the 1920s, when one Cook

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County Jail warden began a short-­lived practice of “matinee hangings” in front of the incarcerated population in the hope that it would have “a good moral effect on the prisoners.”35 In 1927, state law replaced the gallows with the electric chair, and the device was moved to the basement of the new Cook County Jail when it opened in 1929. A legal exemption for counties of over one million residents meant that Cook County retained its capacity to execute even as other Illinois counties were relieved of the duty. In all, 171 executions occurred at Cook County Jail between 1840 and 1962. Sixty-­seven of those people were killed in the electric chair. Warden Jack Johnson was responsible for flipping the switch and managing the death row alongside his more pressing concerns of detaining people awaiting trial and serving short sentences.36 Facing imminent death, Paul Crump turned his life around. Under Hans Mattick’s tutelage, he read Moby Dick, and with the encouragement of an Episcopal chaplain, he started writing an autobiographical novel called Burn, Killer, Burn! The novel focused on Crump’s experiences growing up in the Morgan Park section of Chicago’s South Side and his encounters with the law. A fictionalized account of his own struggles, the coming-­of-­age novel tracked the story of Guy Morgan Jr., whose journey as a bitter Black teenager in Morgan Park took him through the South Side’s churches, pool halls, homes, and segregated hospitals as he found himself, somewhat unwittingly, caught up in a life of yearning that took him toward crime. The book was inspired by Native Son but was distinguished by the intense feelings of its main character, especially toward his family, and sympathetically explained how a person might arrive at a place of profound alienation and loneliness. The book’s bloody end, with Morgan’s escape of his execution by taking his own life, was marked by a critique of criminal justice: “The whole damn system’s murderous,” a fellow prisoner says to Morgan. The act of agency, rather than submission to execution, was another quality that distinguished Guy Morgan Jr. from Bigger Thomas.37 Johnson Publishing, the famed Black publisher of Ebony and Jet, found out about Crump’s manuscript circuitously. Crump had shared a copy with author James Baldwin during a visit. Baldwin gave his copy to a friend, who shared it with a writer from Jet, who shared it with Doris Saunders, director of Johnson’s new book division.38 Responding to a market that publisher John H. Johnson saw as ready to see models of “responsible daring,” Johnson hoped to help Black people imagine “attainment of whatever a person set out to do.” Crump’s book was published in 1962. Publicity for the book was featured in Johnson



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Publishing’s magazines, which had a circulation of three million copies by the mid-­1960s.39 With this platform, the book was not a risky bet, particularly given the commercial success of California prisoner Caryl Chessman’s four best-­selling books before his execution in May 1960. A product of California’s prison program of “bibliotherapy” in which prisoners were encouraged to read and write their way to release, Chessman had become a national symbol of the promise of rehabilitation as he paved the way for incarcerated writers.40 Because Crump’s voice was subsumed both through the marketing coverage of his book and the novelization of his story, any ideas about his own humanity were manipulated through images that situated Crump as a promoter of the jail’s rehabilitative capacities, not a subject of its domination or control. In centering Crump, these images worked to erase other prisoners and their concerns, as well as Crump’s own belief in the capacity of prisoners to resist domination, replacing the empowering framework of “forgotten men” that had been advanced by prisoners in The Grapevine with a submissive, saved prisoner as Chicago’s new carceral everyman. Johnson Publishing featured Crump in multiple stories across its magazines alongside symbols of his transformation: a typewriter; a copy of Negro Digest; his two jailhouse cats, Gigolo and Rocky. In a 1962 Ebony feature, “15 Dates with the Chair,” only two of the ten photos featured Crump with other Black prisoners, faces obscured, with bars between them, or looking away. In contrast, he was featured in other photos laughing with his “best friend” Warden Johnson and “one of his best friends,” head nurse Ulette Goodloe, a Black woman who helped him deal with his stress by giving him tranquilizers.41 A blurb for the book from James Baldwin further emphasized that Crump was “one of the few people alive” for whom Baldwin felt “an uncompromising respect,” as a man apart from the rest of the prisoners. “He has endured much, but what is even more important, he has understood what he has endured, and, like a great blues singer, tells us of his story and at the same time, stands outside it.”42 Although there was a critique of jailing, and imprisonment more broadly, in Crump’s text, it was not touted in the publicity. The media narrative emphasized that Crump’s encounters with a series of white saviors, among them Hans Mattick and Crump’s personal mentor, warden Jack Johnson, had helped him shed Black pathologies. In Johnson, Crump found that for the first time that “I had a father. A white father.” Through writing the novel, Crump recalled, “some old distortions were swept away.” He came to believe in “the good will of people and their belief in the basic goodness of man.”

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Figure 7. Paul Crump reads in his cell. Tribune Archive Photo/TCA.

Highlighting the shift from Black-­dominated environments to white-­controlled ones, corrupt to pure, a guard who had observed Crump’s work as an orderly on a convalescent tier said the rehabilitated Crump became “mother, father, priest and social worker” to the other prisoners.43 Through Cook County Jail, Crump was “transported, by benefit of tragedy, from a savage social jungle to an enlightened, civilized peace” (Figure 7).44 Crump’s narrative of rehabilitation ensured that early publicity for Burn, Killer, Burn! overlapped with efforts to secure clemency for him. The main engine of the project was Lois Solomon, a well-­connected arts and culture publisher, who took it upon herself to save Crump as soon as she heard about his novel and case. She had helped Crump hire a new lawyer, Elmer Gertz, who launched an extensive campaign to rally the forces of the many media contacts. She marshalled the talents of her friend William Friedkin, who made a documentary about Crump’s plight. Black groups such as the African-­American Heritage Association and the Citizens Action Committee for the Abolishment



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of Capital Punishment declared their support for Crump. The Citizens Action Committee collected signatures in the Kenwood neighborhood to send to governor Otto Kerner. A front-­page photo in the Chicago Daily Defender showed comedian Rudolph Browner with a sign saying “paul crump deserves to live.”45 Questions over whether Crump deserved to live or whether saving him was “glorifying the criminal” were major themes in the almost daily stories that saturated newspapers throughout the state throughout the summer of 1962.46 Although Crump’s advocates succeeded in appealing his death sentence, Governor Kerner did not find that Crump’s transformation made him worthy of freedom. Kerner commuted Crump’s sentence to 199 years in prison. Yet forestalling the execution was heralded as an international victory for rehabilitative penology. “A prisoner still but no longer alone, Paul Crump has rejoined humanity,” Ebony magazine declared triumphantly.47 Crump was removed to Pontiac Prison, where vindictive officials blocked publication of his second book and destroyed his mental health. “I had been publicized as a symbol of rehabilitation, and I guess symbols are made to be destroyed,” Crump said.48 Promotion of Crump’s individualism and exceptionality—as a Christian, as an author, as a friend and servant of the jail—suggested the possibility that other prisoners might find rehabilitation in jail. The campaign to save Paul Crump reflected the broader challenges Black prisoners faced in controlling how advocates received and translated their personhood to the public. If there had been a brief golden age of prisoner voices at Cook County Jail in the late 1950s, by the early 1960s it was subsumed by the belief that jails were untapped resources for promoting social welfare. Although the electric chair remained in Cook County Jail, the outcome that Crump’s release was unimaginable, even as an ideal prisoner, strengthened the idea that jail might be an effective place for rehabilitating Black people whom policymakers believed could not be trusted with freedom.

Welfare in Jail as a Liberal Racial Ideology Paul Crump’s fight to prove his rehabilitation occurred in tandem with the emergence of a consensus about the need to reorient jailing to sustain the welfare and rehabilitation of prisoners. This involved work on three fronts: expansion of rehabilitative programs within the House of Correction, efforts to reform the separate bureaucratic organization of Cook County Jail and the House of

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Correction through a merger, and revisions to the Illinois state criminal code to provide for the release of poor pretrial detainees. Confidence in jails as rehabilitation sites was fueled by the postwar emergence of a belief that rehabilitation of individuals through comprehensive services, such as counseling, psychological testing, and vocational training, could change behavior and reduce dependency on the state. The mobilization of affluent white liberals in favor of individual rehabilitation established a dominant valence for what jail reform would be and what jail should do for people locked inside.49 The liberal emphasis on individual rehabilitation in jail indicated that corrections and social support could be scaled up only if they were institutionalized as part of the mission of jailing in Chicago and Cook County. Small scale philanthropic efforts to promote prisoner welfare had struggled to get off the ground in the late 1950s. This difficulty was exemplified by the efforts of the Citizen’s Committee for Employment at Cook County Jail, founded in 1958 by John and Dorothy Drish, a Catholic couple from Evanston. The Drishes mobilized after a jail chaplain’s presentation at a PTA meeting about the dearth of job support services for people leaving jail.50 The Committee—made up of the Drishes, business leaders, and more powerful allies, like former Stateville prison warden Joseph Ragen—coordinated the activities of an army of volunteers who counseled men at Cook County Jail who had committed “less serious offenses,” administered aptitude tests, and worked to place them in jobs after release. Finding jobs one by one for about 150 prisoners was not very efficient considering that approximately sixty thousand people were released from Cook County Jail in the committee’s first four years. But the individualism at the heart of this approach was a feature of white urban and suburban liberalism in this moment. People like the Drishes, who came to the jail from their large Evanston home, represented a metropolitanism that allowed voluntarist do-­gooders to traverse liberal landscapes without necessarily bringing more emotionally intense confrontations over racism and inequality into their own neighborhoods.51 Jail reform advocates who favored Joseph Lohman’s plan to consolidate the city and county jails understood that building a unified, rehabilitative jail posed practical and political problems in a context where patronage, and Daley’s authority especially, were dominant. No one was more concerned with this matter than Hans Mattick, the former assistant warden of Cook County Jail. Having become convinced that the jail was “an institution designed to maladjust and destroy human beings,” Mattick quit his job after Frank Sain became sheriff.



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During the early 1960s he worked as a researcher on juvenile delinquency prevention with the Chicago Youth Development Project and as an organizer with the Illinois Committee to Abolish Capital Punishment, and he served as president of the Illinois Academy of Criminology (ILAC).52 It was through a speech to ILAC that Mattick laid out his proposal for a “Unified City-­County Department of Corrections.” He framed two intertwined problems: one, that government needed to respond to and reform the inefficiency of the city and county jails, and two, that the inefficiency of jails and their rehabilitative programs was contributing to recidivism and thus expanding crime. “The prospect for the future is a further increase in inmate populations unless something is done to make them function in a manner that is more responsive to community expectations.” Mattick’s core demand for “metropolitan corrections” involved operating separate institutions, with pretrial detainees at a downtown court and jail complex and sentenced misdemeanants jailed with access to work, therapy, drug and alcohol treatment, and release through probation and parole at the current jail site and new sites across the county. “The community is contributing to the future delinquency of its present misdemeanants by maintaining them in inappropriate institutions, in stultifying idleness and in unproductive degeneration.”53 Mattick avoided direct criticism of Daley’s piecemeal additions to the House of Correction and the sheriff ’s control over patronage jobs at the Cook County Jail. He delicately framed the problem as one in which the “political struggle for power, patronage and survival” would “require the act of statesmanship and the compromise of vested interests” if jail bureaucracy and functions were to be reorganized in the best interests of prisoners.54 Mattick’s position highlighted a key distinction from his earlier project of creating venues that uplifted prisoner voices: he did not believe that prisoners should be empowered to influence jail policy. The movement for metropolitan corrections relied on the assumption of a “new” kind of prisoner. Because, Mattick argued, the “anonymity, transiency and recreation patterns of diverse, young, predominantly masculine, semi-­skilled and mobile populations is soon reflected in crime rates and penal commitments, Chicago and Cook County must plan a rational correctional system.”55 Dismissing prisoners as young and socially alienated young men, Mattick’s depiction reflected how the “rational” served to exclude prisoners from their own struggle for being too emotional. Similarly, in emphasizing that prisoners were disproportionately mentally ill and in poor health, Mattick presented prisoners as incapable of shaping governance,

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because of either their low level of well-­being or their perceived lack of intelligence or maturity. Instead, he hoped that media and “a variety of organized interest groups” might serve as “the midwife” to the “statesmanship” necessary to “enable Chicago and Cook County to practice twentieth century penology.”56 Mattick’s proposal for a new political entity as a rational choice came with implicit assumptions about who was entitled to a political voice. Feeling that pursuing a massive overthrow of local power over jailing required sensitivity, the League of Women Voters deployed their femininity and whiteness to advance Mattick’s vision. They hoped to resolve major impediments to the project: political control over the jails and the lack of state legislation to make the unification of the city and county jails possible. An article in The Austinite, the community newspaper of a West Side neighborhood bordering the suburbs, featured an image of three of the women behind bars at Cook County Jail. Dressed like carbon copies of Donna Reed, with fresh beauty parlor perms and New Look dresses, the women in the staged photo laughed as warden Jack Johnson stood outside the cell, also laughing, holding the key. The caption stated that the women, identified by their husbands’ names and community—like Mrs. Leonard Willer of Hillside—were being teased about “their repeated visits” to the jail: “They might as well have their own cell” (Figure 8).57 Playing on the unlikeliness of a white feminine presence in jail, the women made space for their political entitlement to drive reform. That they had seen the jails with their own eyes became a source of political authority. The idea of the suburban housewife worked to soften the fact that League members were professional, full-­time activists. In the 1950s and 1960s, the League of Women Voters of Cook County ran educational programs, observed government meetings, and used local phone trees to tap into the political clout of a statewide network of forty-­five hundred League members. Like other white suburban women from a range of political perspectives, the League of Women Voters hosted coffee klatches, staffed polls during elections, and contested issues from education to foreign policy. The Cook County League described its “persistent purpose: To let the people know. To make the people care. To help the people act.”58 Disentangling the dueling purposes of the two jails fit squarely with their desires to make government knowable and reformable. Echoing Mattick, they valued “the ability to return people to useful living, instill self-­confidence and self-­respect,” and they believed this could be achieved only through “a unified program with scientific analysis of individual potentialities, adequate structures



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Figure 8. Members of the League of Women Voters visit Cook County Jail. University of Illinois, Chicago, Special Collections.

and equipment, and trained and qualified personnel. Divided administration such as we have now,” they believed, “means extensive and expensive duplication, with unequal opportunities for rehabilitation of inmates.”59 Local liberals would have understood their emphasis on the redundancy of the two jails as an explicit effort to connect crime to the patronage system’s emphasis on holding onto as many political jobs as possible. Throughout the 1960s, the League advanced letter-­writing campaigns, and League members served on state commissions to research and advocate for merging the jails.60 The suburban housewife trope allowed the women to play up their interest in jailing as unlikely and countercultural. Jails were dirty, unseemly, overcrowded; the women were clean, coifed, and dignified. Katherine Jaynes, who lived thirty miles away from the jail in Glencoe, had attended Lohman’s Citizens Conference in 1956 and found it to be a transformative event that upended many

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of her priorities. As the mother of two adult children, she had found conditions during her visits to the House of Correction and Cook County Jail “shocking” and found it “embarrassing” that the United States was so far behind other countries when it came to local penology. In 1960, she took her first trip abroad with a United Nations delegation of one hundred Americans to tour British prisons and halfway houses. “Such places help a person regain his self-­respect,” she told the Chicago Sun-­Times. “That, I feel, is essential in making sure that a discharged prisoner becomes and remains a free and law-­abiding citizen.”61 Framing their political work as mothers and wives, the press and allies such as warden Jack Johnson held up the League of Women Voters as worthy, cosmopolitan arbiters of what citizenship should look like and how jails might facilitate it. The League’s political authority was contingent on their ability, as affluent women, to maintain a constant presence in the political process. Throughout the 1960s, members of the Cook County League regularly drove over two hundred miles to Springfield, the Illinois state capital, to lobby legislators. In 1961—after sending thousands of letters to state legislators; mobilizing a coalition of good government groups including the City Club, Civic Federation, Citizens of Greater Chicago, and John Howard Association; and testifying to the bill’s merits with only twenty-­four hours’ notice—the League succeeded in convincing the legislature to pass Senate Bill 108 creating a Cook County Department of Corrections Commission. Public protection from crime was at the center of their new proposal. “We believe that the citizens of Illinois need protection from acts of crime so much of which is committed by repeaters. We believe that offenders against society should have an opportunity for rehabilitation so that they become contributors to the public welfare instead of a drain on public money.”62 Ultimately, the commission—which included two League members—was not entirely convinced a CCDOC was necessary and the effort to create a CCDOC stalled.63 Ongoing pressure from white activists fostered mayor Richard Daley’s embrace of individual rehabilitation at the House of Correction in the early 1960s. Although it is not clear that Daley explicitly resisted efforts to create a county-­level correctional unit, he had to respect that the leadership and growing political authority of the League of Women Voters represented a challenge to the autonomy of the House of Correction. The best case against a unified system of “metropolitan corrections” was to show that rehabilitation was already happening. To carry out this task, Daley hired Arthur Ward, an insurance broker who had made a career working on various initiatives for both Daley and mayor



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Martin Kennelly, including running Chicago’s Alcoholic Treatment Center. On offer among jail programs for the “pathologically disordered” were religious services, Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous, monthly “Character Guidance” lectures, and metalwork, art, and pottery courses.64 Where the South Cell Block had once stood, a three-­story, eighty-­nine-­bed hospital, Cermak Hospital, opened to provide internal medicine and routine medical exams for all admitted prisoners. The hospital was named for mayor Anton Cermak, the great Democratic boss who had moved Cook County Jail to the West Side when he feared the jail and its Black prisoners would detract from urban development in the Loop. With the goal of turning “transgressors” into “useful citizens,” Daley wrote in an annual report, “we seek for them better living through compassion, enlightenment and assistance.” All this, Daley claimed, made jailing an essential part of guaranteeing an optimistic future for Chicago. “By so doing we assure for our city a tomorrow that will see all of us living better in every phase of our existence.”65 The effort to reframe Black people, the primary targets of Orlando Wilson’s stop-­and-­frisk policing program, as welfare cases was evident in the psychological research conducted at the House of Correction. As the League of Women Voters continued to pressure the legislature, one of its accomplishments was passage of a bill to support the creation of a pilot program to carry out “diagnostic, psychological, psychiatric” services in the two jails. Each jail was granted $85,000.66 The House of Correction implemented psychological testing, held group therapy and addiction meetings, and touted the Cook County Department of Public Aid’s Jail Pre-­Release Service, claiming that prisoners left the jail “clean and presentable, knowing they have lodging and food, with a job referral . . . [and are] secure until their first paycheck.”67 The program was part of the Public Aid Department’s program of “social discipline,” which aimed to cut welfare dependency by fostering the “prisoner’s proper psychological adjustment” and resolving “family problems” that put prisoners’ dependents on the dole.68 Additional jail psychiatric services supported the social discipline program, which reached a third of the people admitted to the House of Correction and provided services to about half of those.69 The social scientists and doctors tasked with studying prisoners saw these vulnerabilities as predictors of crime that demanded remedy. In one category, the personality evaluation, they categorized prisoners according to “normal,” “borderline,” and “inadequate.” Most prisoners reported feeling “anxiety” and experiencing “depressive fluctuations.” At least 60 percent of prisoners reported “resentfulness,” “aloneness,” and “incompleteness.”70

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Detached from race as the key determinant of whether someone would end up in jail, pathologizing prisoners reimagined the jail as a place that could heal individual the emotional and social disabilities that led to joblessness. It was a political construction that good government activists and city officials could agree on because it focused on individual culpability rather than institutional failings. Psychologists did not distinguish between whether prisoners’ feelings were a consequence of being jailed or whether they were feelings at the core of prisoners’ personalities—although their plans for treatment suggested the latter. That prisoners with “emotional sensitivity” felt touchy, or that prisoners felt “a barrier between the individual and the world” seem like human responses to the deprivations of incarceration.71 Strangely, amid the cataloguing of feelings of prisoners while they were incarcerated, nobody seems to have asked them if they thought any of the ­services in jail would change how they felt. And although the report framed prisoners as people in need—they documented that 30 percent of prisoners were themselves beneficiaries of welfare or indirectly through their wives, mothers, or other family members—they did not ask prisoners if their worries or depression stemmed from their life circumstances, especially while incapacitated in jail and cut off from their capacity as wage earners. But that was the framing of this welfarist approach to jail reform: the project of rehabilitation, achieved through therapeutic interventions, reduced prisoners to common sets of feelings, to poor people predisposed to ­criminality, to needy addicts who had to go to jail for help.72 The framing of jail as a necessary social support was bolstered through the bail reform movement, which intensified the distinction that there were some people who belonged in jail and others who did not. National interest in bail reform had its origins in the court-­watching research of law professor Caleb Foote, first published in 1954, who found that “custom or intuition” was a central feature of bail decisions, and given this, “bail was often used for punishment purposes.”73 Foote’s research inspired programs like the Manhattan Bail Project, a pioneering effort to raise bail funds and persuade judges to eliminate bail altogether and prevent needless jailing. In Chicago, the movement intersected with existing efforts to challenge judicial corruption in 1959, when the Chicago Sun-­ Times found that a judge in the municipal court of Chicago had wiped out over $250,000 in forfeited bail bonds, meaning that bail bondsmen were released from their obligation to produce a person for trial or reimburse the city for their failure to appear. Initially, the scandal revealed the extensive power concentrated



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in the hands of commercial bail bondsmen and the extent to which they profited off the courts without providing a promised service. Over time, bondsmen revealed that their fees were so high because they had been paying kickbacks to corrupt police and judges to keep their doors open. Coupled with new research on how bond was used, the Illinois Bar Association included major revisions to bail practices in its 1963 revision to the state code of criminal procedures.74 Under the new policy, pretrial detainees were allowed release on their own recognizance (without any money guarantee) or 10 percent bond payment, ending reliance on commercial bail bondsmen. Illinois’s new policy established it as a leader among states as interest in federal bail reform coalesced under the leadership of attorney general Robert Kennedy in the 1960s with near unanimous passage of the Bail Reform Act of 1966. The Bail Reform Act marked a sea change in bail culture, even though its direct impact was limited to those on federal charges. While the act did not eliminate payment of bail altogether, especially locally, it did encourage attorneys and judges to consider defendants’ social context and discourage pretrial detention.75 In Cook County, any effectiveness bail reform might have had in reducing jail populations was hampered by the fact that the Chicago Police Department was arresting more people. Coupled with patterns of charge reductions from felony to misdemeanor, more people were being sentenced to jail than to prison. Yet, in emphasizing that there were people in jail who did not need to be there, bail reformers unwittingly bolstered the idea the jails could be reconfigured to address the needs of those who remained once bail reforms were initiated.76 The demands of “citizen experts” like the League of Women Voters for rehabilitation programs in jails and the scholarly and political movements to reform bail institutionalized the idea that needy individual prisoners could look to jails for help in overcoming poverty, character flaws, and psychological problems. Reimagining the purpose of jailing and offering categories of people who did not need to be jailed reinforced the notion that the primary obligations of jails were to sentenced misdemeanants who repeatedly committed crimes. Importantly, the vaunted ideal of jailing as a place of individual transformation legitimized jailing amid demands for civil rights and diminishing confidence in the police. As white activists, lawyers, and scholars moved in a political world that was responsive to their visions, they bounded the possibilities for citizens who challenged the carceral premise of their reforms.77

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A Civil Rights Movement for Prisoners In contrast to white liberal reformers, civil rights activists in Chicago attacked the notion that jailing had a welfare benefit and that it offered rehabilitation to individual prisoners. While benevolent liberal reformers had used both the symbolic salvation of Paul Crump and attempts at bureaucratic, institutional, and legal reform to bolster the political legitimacy of jailing, jailed participants in the civil rights movement represented growing Black resistance to political constructions of institutional function and criminality that drove the escalation of mass incarceration in American cities like Chicago. While much has been said of mass incarceration as a backlash against civil rights, less has been said about civil rights as a backlash against mass incarceration. The Chicago example reveals that Black activists, prisoners, and guards used Mayor Daley’s tolerance of segregation and racial inequality in city institutions to paint a more complete picture of the political foundations of rehabilitation as an urban political ideology: that jailing was a means of controlling and coercing Black citizens.78 By the time civil rights activists ended up in the House of Correction in 1963, jails had become critical sites of contest in cities across the country. Jailed people found allies in the political prisoners held on charges related to civil rights protest. The strategy gained potency through the organizing of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in South Carolina. For sit-­in activists, leader Thomas Gaither recalled, the “only thing they had to beat us over the head with was a threat of sending us to jail.” In electing to go to jail and rejecting release by bail, “we disarmed them by using the only weapon we had left. . . . It was the only practical thing we could do.”79 Some of the highest profile declarations of rights stemmed from activists’ detention in local jails. In April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. penned his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in Birmingham City Jail. King claimed moral high ground as an activist and as a prisoner and witness to the political struggle within jails himself. How people were treated in jail, King believed, undermined any praise given to the Birmingham police for keeping order. “I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail.”80 After King’s release, young people in the Children’s Crusade willfully surrendered to police amid some of the most dramatic scenes of anti-­Black violence during the civil rights movement as Bull Connor targeted them with hoses



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and dogs. Over the course of the confrontation, more than twenty-­five hundred ­people filled the city and county jails. Among them was comedian Dick Gregory, who had been with King when he wrote the famed letter. Less fearful of police brutality and jail than he had been before, Gregory returned to Chicago with a sense of urgency.81 Gregory joined with CORE in its confrontations with Mayor Daley and superintendent Benjamin Willis over the segregation, overcrowding, and underfunding of schools for Black children. Picketers used what the Chicago Tribune called a “new tactic of ‘hit-­run demonstrations’” at the homes of public officials. The homes of members of the board of education, including embattled Superintendent Willis, and Mayor Daley, were targeted by the 71st and Stewart Committee, CORE, and the NAACP youth division. Calling the protestors “irresponsible people” and emphasizing that a number were from out of state, Daley hoped to sufficiently diminish the protesters’ credibility. When Gregory was arrested outside Daley’s home on August 12, 1963, Daley did not anticipate that Gregory would move the protest into the House of Correction.82 The House of Correction became a stand-­in for Daley’s home, and the ensuing protests, inside and out, highlighted Daley’s indifference to civil rights. Rejecting a recognizance bond that would have let him out of jail without bail, Gregory annexed the House of Correction for the struggle. He anticipated staying in jail into September for his trial date for disorderly conduct even as organizers of the March on Washington planned for his attendance. Supporters brought the protest from Bridgeport to the jail’s sidewalk at 26th and California, where picketers from the Student Advocates for Negro History, a “direct action group” of students from Wendell Phillips High School, marched silently outside the jail. Leon Despres, a Hyde Park alderman, went back and forth with Daley, trying to force him to release Gregory, but Daley said Gregory was free to accept the recognizance bond whenever he wished.83 Prisoners helped Gregory to set the terms of his incarceration. Gregory refused an assignment to do clerical work in the Bridewell’s records room as he asserted his presumption of innocence. Superintendent Arthur Ward immediately retaliated by placing Gregory in solitary confinement. Revealing that they were prepared to protest, prisoners organized a sit-­down strike at dinner, refusing to eat or move, until Gregory was removed from isolation. When he was released, Gregory took a work assignment on the House of Correction newspaper, “for the good of the prisoners.” As his wife, Lillian, shared a statement that

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was distributed nationally by the Associated Press, she and Dick were careful to credit prisoners for their assistance. In doing so, Gregory revealed a new framework for jailhouse demands distinct from the “forgotten men” of the 1950s: “I’m not an entertainer, first, nor am I an American first. First, above all else, I’m a Negro fighting for the rights that every Negro should be fighting for.”84 With a platform that allowed Gregory to amplify their concerns, the politics of jailing had shifted suddenly, Gregory claimed. “The Negro prisoners feel they have a voice.”85 Situating his critique of both the patronizing quality of the rehabilitation program and the racism he saw inside the jail from the vantage point of Blackness, not celebrity or patriotism, Gregory’s statements to the Chicago Daily Defender highlighted that remedies to internal jail problems had been missing from white liberal jail reform efforts. The public focus on rehabilitation of prisoners meant that racism inside the jail had been unchecked. “Warden Arthur Ward and Chief Security Officer Stanley Demski breed racial prejudice and contempt for Negro prisoners 24 hours a day,” Gregory declared. Further, Gregory challenged the notion that Daley’s rehabilitative program was doing what he claimed. “A man has to come out of here more poorly prepared than when he went in.”86 Amplifying the linkages between southern confrontation and Daley, Martin Luther King Jr. visited Gregory a week before the March on Washington. Offering a depiction of jailing distinct from its portrayals of Paul Crump and his cats, Johnson Publishing’s Jet magazine published a photo of the visit, featuring a confident Gregory in an ill-­fitting uniform and boots next to King. “It has been a real eye-­opener to be a prisoner,” Gregory told Jet, asserting that life at the “model detention camp” left people “filled with bitterness.” Gregory also lifted up the concerns of Black correctional officers, telling Jet it was “a hard cold fact that Negroes with top seniority are passed over for advancement in preference to some white guy.”87 Although Gregory chose to be released so he could attend the March on Washington, the consequences of jailhouse civil rights organizing were evident in the subsequent mobilization around House of Correction superintendent Arthur Ward’s failure to promote Black staff according to civil service rules. The Correctional Officers Association had organized in 1961 as a unit within Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police. Although their stated agenda was to “better working conditions and to improve social relations between the Negro and



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white employees,” as president and sergeant Jesse J. James put it, the group’s organization had paralleled Daley and Ward’s expansion of the House of Correction’s rehabilitative mission and pressure to stay a step ahead on conditions. As a union, the group was not recognized by Ward because it did not have 100 percent membership; by 1964, it claimed 110 members of the jail staff. Its demands, in addition to being recognized as a union, included seeking raises and clothing and transportation allowances.88 Gregory’s time in jail, with his public criticisms of the jail’s racist administration, galvanized the organization and helped them to connect to one of Gregory’s advocates, alderman Leon Despres. With Timuel Black, president of the Negro American Labor Council, Despres led a campaign to have Ward fired on behalf of eight Black employees at the House of Correction (including one woman). In April 1964, seven months after Gregory left the jail, the Chicago Daily Defender ran the headline “Jail Boss Accused of Racism on Job” on the paper’s front page.89 Despres reinforced Gregory’s explicit connections between racism and Democratic politics: “The House of Correction is a backwards penal institution which has become infected by the Cook County political patronage system.” Implying that Daley’s position as head of the Cook County Democratic Organization as well as his position as mayor had tainted opportunities for Black staff, Despres charged that the best solution was merging the House of Correction jail and farm with Cook County Jail “headed by a man the caliber of Warden Jack Johnson.”90 Further reporting charged that the “mental duress” of working for the “autocratic” city jail warden had destroyed the “dignity of employees.”91 It is unclear whether Ward chose to resign or was forced by Daley, but after acknowledging civil service promotions of Black correctional officers, Ward left his job. Stanley Demski, the House of Correction’s chief security officer, replaced him. That summer, Tommy Wells was promoted to assistant superintendent of the House of Correction, making him the highest-­ranking Black administrator in the jail’s history. As he had been slighted for the top position, Wells’s promotion was regarded as a failure for the campaign and an indicator that little would change at the House of Correction.92 Where Gregory’s first incarceration at the House of Correction in 1963 proved effective in raising issues around racism in the management of the House of Correction, his second incarceration in 1965 as part of the Chicago Freedom Movement sparked more intense activism among prisoners. This happened for

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several reasons. By this time, Gregory was an experienced prisoner. A 1965 FBI memorandum noted that thirty-­two-­year-­old Gregory had been jailed at least twenty-­four times.93 The brutality Gregory and his fellow activists encountered in jail was remaking the sensibilities of the nonviolent movement. Where jailed people had in prior moments considered themselves in the language of their captors—as people with protorights who to a degree got what they deserved—the rights framing of the civil rights movement proved critical to reconceptualizing being in jail as a source of power. In using jails as sites of protest, the civil rights movement critiqued the treatment activists and prisoners faced together in local jails as a form of political repression, even though the movement did not yield a broad-­based effort to address jail conditions.94 Gregory’s 1965 arrest on disorderly conduct for protesting school segregation outside the home of Mayor Daley occurred under similar circumstances as it had in 1963, but it took on new significance as prisoners, Gregory, and the public revealed an increased militancy. As twenty protestors picketed outside the criminal court building, Gregory declined to pay the $400 fine and chose incarceration in the House of Correction. Gregory announced that he would go on hunger strike to protest the hostility of “the power structure in Chicago” to its African American residents, comparing the magistrate who sentenced him to ­ regory’s segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace.95 Within hours of G booking in the “black stone”—the decrepit North Cell House where Pedro Ramos had died—hundreds of prisoners launched a hunger strike. Although prisoners had waged hunger strikes with regularity over the years, the 1965 hunger strike was different. As reporters visited the cell house during the hunger strike, two hundred incarcerated people crowded around them. They were eager to reveal their daily realities to the public: the difficulty of sharing a five-­foot-­by-­ seven-­foot cell with another man, the pain of sleeping on a straw mattress, the indignity of living without hot water in a space overrun by roaches. According to the Chicago Daily Defender, prisoners took advantage of “Gregory’s personal spotlight that was lighting up the mildewed city prison,” particularly as they made twelve demands of the administration.96 Like their movement counterparts, prisoners abandoned the notion of “fighting for one reform at a time” and pursued what activist Bayard Rustin called “the package deal.”97 In emulating the movement in this way, prisoners pressed for their inclusion in broader urban struggles over integration,



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public accommodations, employment discrimination, and police brutality. Their demands centered on improving the day-­to-­day experience of jailing, including new paint jobs in the cell block, new mattresses, more public aid consideration for released prisoners, lower prices in the commissary, newspaper deliveries to prisoners, improved recreational facilities, installation of a library system, and regular inmate council meetings. But several of their claims, especially demands for improvement of visiting facilities, twice-­monthly visitation instead of only one visit a month, and better hospital care, spoke to remedying the conditions of isolation that had contributed to Ramos’s death. In calling for safety in jail, the capacity to maintain their health while incarcerated, and support in preserving connections with their families and the outside world, prisoners were asking for recognition of their full humanity, not to be pathologized and treated. Temporary incarceration did not make them “inmates.” Jailed people understood themselves as more than criminals, quasi criminals, or delinquents; they challenged the city to do the same.98 It is critical, too, to note what prisoners were not asking for: Prisoners were not asking to be rehabilitated. They were not advocating for the jail as a place that could transform them from welfare cases to free citizens. They were seeking a more humane experience of their time in jail and recognition of their critiques of their conditions. In asking for little, they offered perhaps a more potent critique of Daley’s jail than they may have realized: seeking fresh paint and new mattresses from within a building built in 1871 suggested that despite all the efforts to reimagine jailing by white activists, the experience of jailing had remained much the same. As people who moved in the world of postwar liberalism, prisoners did not need to be rehabilitated to persuade the city that it had obligations to them as citizens. Within days, the hunger strikers secured guarantees from administrators that eight of their demands would be met because, as one member of the House of Correction’s board of inspectors put it, the prisoners’ requests were “justifiable.”99 Following his release, Gregory gave a speech to fifty gathered protestors outside. Although his remarks were aimed at people who practiced the jail-­in strategy, they might have resonated with prisoners who got their hands on a newspaper. The framing of his exhortation had changed since he was jailed in 1963, when he had claimed he was simply a man. “Remember that the outside does not have a monopoly on demonstrations,” he said. “Work just as hard for

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freedom in jail, and make sure that you have all the rights the Constitution guarantees you.” Civil rights had become prisoner rights in Chicago.100 Dick Gregory’s incarceration at the House of Correction brings into view prisoner resistance to rehabilitation as a mode of jail reform. Gregory helped to amplify existing concerns of prisoners and guards about the racist nature of jails both as sites of incarceration and as workplaces. The activist engendered a shift in representation of Black prisoners from humble subjects to political actors, and more than that, it marked an explicit challenge by prisoners to the authority of mayor Richard Daley and his machine. Black correctional officers too claimed the moment for both organizing to protect their labor interests and to push back against the racist administration of Arthur Ward and Daley’s repeated efforts to protect the House of Correction from critique. The House of Correction was a crucial battleground as Daley began to shift from breadwinner liberalism to a more openly charged white supremacist conservatism. While the Chicago Freedom Movement did not necessarily deploy intentional jailing as a key part of its tactics or as a target of its demands, its influence on Black prisoners and correctional officers increased political tensions over the role of jails and the Democratic machine’s control over their governance in the late 1960s. Whether jailing could withstand Black critique, and what politicians and administrators could do to dampen it, were major questions that attended the rise of majority Black imprisonment in Chicago’s jails. The shifting political landscape around jail reform in 1960s Chicago reflected contests over the degree to which ideas about rehabilitation could be imposed on predominantly Black jails. For prisoners like Paul Crump, vulnerability in the face of state violence, evidenced in the effort to save him from the jail’s unusual electric chair, proved a dramatic constraint for finding a voice in debates about the purpose and impact of jailing. For white advocates, their pleasure at Crump’s survival—despite his continued imprisonment—reflected a win for human dignity. This belief that jails could expand the welfare of incarcerated individuals animated efforts to advance reform of both the Cook County Jail and House of Correction during the 1960s. Welfare and rehabilitation often served as proxies for color-­blind approaches to race, legitimizing jailing as a public good even as more Black people were detained and serving sentences in jail. While the city jail was often peripheral to more visible struggles over housing and education during the Chicago freedom movement, prisoners and correctional officers nonetheless increased the pressure on Richard Daley to account



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for racism at the jail and the patronage system writ large. The civil rights movement’s success in mobilizing prisoners and guards to critique jail governance from inside the House of Correction represented a tactical escalation that white liberals had neither the power nor inclination to support. As Daley was losing his hold on Chicago and the House of Correction in the late 1960s, it was not a question of whether there would be mass incarceration in American cities, but what its character would be and who would be accountable for it.

Chapter 4

Games of Political Power

A few weeks before Christmas 1967, a group of Black prisoners gathered in a dayroom in Cook County Jail to draft a letter to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. For over a year, King had used direct action to pressure mayor Richard Daley to desegregate housing in Chicago. The prisoners hoped that King would turn his attention to the jail, which, on the day of their writing, December 7, was the focus of a grand jury panel investigating murders and violence. The men might have discussed what would go in the letter, and perhaps they passed around drafts hoping to get it right. In the end, one of the prisoners likely sat at one of the wooden picnic tables that furnished the dayrooms, where he wrote on a small piece of lined paper in a beautiful, evenhanded cursive with a ballpoint pen. An abundance of commas gave their letter a halting tone, as line by line their collective voice shifted between a declaration of the men’s willingness to fight back and a cautious, deliberate cry for help. King, they hoped, could ensure they “be allowed a chance to stand up and fight for justice within this criminal institution and its system.” They aimed to inform the grand jury and the public about “facts and simple truths, about this institution, the officials and criminal courts system.”1 For weeks, the men had followed, in newspapers and on the tiny dayroom television, the development of a scandal over who was responsible for violence in the jail. “See, in these games of power, once again, we are the scapegoats,” they explained to King. As public discourse shifted away from blaming neglectful wardens and staff to characterizing the jail as a “big jungle” of barbaric prisoners, the men of tier D-­1 vacillated between empowerment and fear. In echoes of “we the people,” they repeatedly declared themselves “we the inmates,” asserting a collective personhood and citizenship that made them worthy of due process



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and justice, in need of more powerful advocates, and vulnerable to “games of political power, by the almighty power structure.” Despite support from two Black women pastors, Juanita Whitfield and Jessie “Ma” Houston, they feared Black people had abandoned them. “We have tried in vain to reach the concience [sic] of respectable Negroes.” In contrast to the depictions of relentless, dehumanizing violence that the grand jury would hear, the letter documents the fervent wishes for deliverance that prisoners held as Christmas drew near. It is not hard to imagine that letters with this tone of desperation were sent out from all the jail’s tiers as the public came to know their plight. Twenty-­nine men signed their names and their prisoner identification numbers to the letter’s back page on behalf of the “Inmates of D-­1.”2 Prisoners understood that the creation of political will for the transformation of jail governance was linked to partisan ploys for power by the sheriff. Their testimonies proved foundational to public understandings of Chicago’s jails as sites of violence. However, as the public came to understand local jails as a feature of the urban crisis through media depictions of jail violence that centered white victimhood and Black scapegoats, the characterization of Black prisoners as especially brutal and beyond control created space for punitive politics. In this culminating moment of decades of jail reform discourse, an enterprising sheriff deployed mechanisms for jail reform to publicize and naturalize racist ideas. Law and order politics, manifest in concerns over disorder in Chicago’s jails, coalesced in explicit backlash to protest movements and came to narrow the possibilities for assertions of prisoner rights. The intersection of the nascent prisoner rights movements and the sheriff ’s desire to control jailing in Chicago reveals that political power over jailing hinged on whether politicians could successfully dehumanize prisoners and delegitimize their struggles.

Sheriffs and the Opportunity of Uprisings Between 1964 and 1968, hundreds of uprisings occurred throughout the United States. In cities large and small, from Newark to Los Angeles, Black residents manifested mounting frustration with police brutality and a growing impatience with nonviolent protest strategies. The uprisings marked a pivotal moment for policing power in the United States. With the uprisings came growing political support for law and order, the acknowledgement of the need for structural

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solutions in the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (also known as the Kerner Commission Report), and the signing of the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act to expand president Lyndon Johnson’s federal War on Crime by channeling funds to police departments. The civil disorder of the mid-­1960s and the political response to it assuredly contributed to the diminished power of liberalism and the ascendence of conservative politics.3 Even as civil unrest across the country was attended by demands for community control over the police, experiments with police demilitarization, and highly visible images of police violence, the Jim Crow resonances of sheriffs’ power— undergirded as they were by self-­interest, corruption, and racist violence—were becoming less tenable. Sheriffs governed many of the nation’s estimated three thousand jails, and there was growing evidence that they were not doing a very good job. In 1964, a federal Bureau of Prisons official charged that some two thousand of these jails had been “red tagged as disapproved” for housing federal prisoners following inspections.4 Sheriffs saw riots as opportunities for consolidating their power over policing and incarceration regimes at the metropolitan level amid concerns that unrest would continue in urban jails. One of the best-­known urban uprisings, the 1965 Watts rebellion in Los Angeles, occurred in the jurisdiction of sheriff Peter Pitchess. Sparked by a drunk-­driving arrest, the Watts rebellion saw the burning of Black Los Angeles for six days and nights, during which city police officers arrested nearly four thousand people. By this time, Sheriff Pitchess had gained a reputation as “the consummate white collar cop.”5 Press reports suggested Pitchess’s college education placed him above the old-­school corruption that had once defined the office, and like his colleague Joseph Lohman in Chicago, he advocated for jail reform through professionalization and expansion of his jails’ treatment capacities. The rebellion had been presaged by the opening of the Los Angeles Men’s Central Jail and the Sybil Brand Institute for Women in 1963, and the Mira Loma Detention Center in 1964. In the wake of Watts, Pitchess seamlessly shifted his rationale for jail expansion from institutional modernization to sustaining law and order. The demand for sheriff ’s deputies during the riot was so great that in its wake, Pitchess eliminated the position of “correction officer” and made it so that his jails were staffed by sheriff ’s deputies who could respond to unrest at a moment’s notice. Eliminating the distinction between sheriff ’s police and guards was an innovation not widely copied—most sheriffs could not and did not want to pay jail guards as much as they paid



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sheriff ’s deputies—but it was a telling example of how urban rebellions intensified the relationship between policing and jailing. Pitchess’s habit of bullying the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors for pay raises, hiring, and jail expansion depended on his ability to raise concerns about crime. Declaring in 1967 that Los Angeles was “a hot bed of agitation and civil rights tension,” he demanded more resources. If not, he charged, “we are at a point of no return.”6 In 1970, an expansion of the Men’s Central Jail sparked a new wave of jail construction. Pitchess’s image of professionalism and political acumen made him a model for other sheriffs facing the fires of urban unrest.7 In Cook County, the one-­term limit on the office of sheriff remained a major constraint in accumulating the clout that Pitchess had in Los Angeles. During a two-­day uprising by over one thousand Black citizens in suburban Dixmoor in 1964, Republican Cook County sheriff Richard Ogilvie brought 142 sheriff ’s police to put down the unrest that emerged after allegations that a Black woman had been beaten by a liquor store owner for shoplifting. In the moment, Ogilvie told sheriff ’s deputies to tell rioters over loudspeakers, “If you shoot, we’re going to fire back.”8 Believing the Dixmoor uprising showed the sheriff ’s police force was too small, Ogilvie tried unsuccessfully to convince the county board to increase the number of sheriff ’s police by one-­third and increase his $6.5 million budget by $1 million.9 In 1966, as the struggle for “good government” and the creation of the Cook County Department of Corrections (CCDOC) persisted in the state legislature, Joseph Woods, a Republican, was elected Cook County sheriff. Woods had worked as an agent in J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1951 to 1961, during an era when Hoover was preoccupied with maintaining its mythical “professional, nonpartisan” reputation. Woods was a perfect “G-­man” for the moment: a white Irish Catholic father of ten who followed the rules in an FBI charged with fighting internal threats to democracy. Woods returned to Chicago to work as a corruption investigator for the Better Government Association (BGA). Founded in 1923, the BGA was, according to the Chicago Tribune, a “privately-­financed watchdog organization” that had, since the late 1950s, helped reporters root out corruption in Daley’s machine.10 As part of a Republican ticket advanced as challenge to the machine, Woods ran against Minor Wilson, a seasoned attorney and former assistant to Orlando Wilson in the Chicago Police Department who had been handpicked for the Democratic ticket by Daley himself. Winning by 23,100 votes, Woods was part of a Republican sweep

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of county positions in 1966 that elevated his Republican predecessor, Richard Ogilvie, to president of the county board. Ogilvie touted the Republican victory as a response to “the arrogance and the failures of Democratic administrations from Chicago’s city hall all the way to Washington.”11 First on Woods’s agenda was to pressure the state to unify the Cook County Jail and House of Correction as a means of expanding his authority. Woods suggested that Daley’s resistance to unifying the jails was part of the self-­serving corruption of his Democratic organization. With support from Republican legislators, Woods and Ogilvie advanced a revised version of the CCDOC legislation: while governed day to day by a nonpartisan director and board, the CCDOC would be under the control of the sheriff. Resistance to the bill was swift. The Correctional Officers Association of the House of Correction questioned whether a sheriff should be responsible for jailing; the whole point of the CCDOC proposal had been to depoliticize jail governance. They looked to the record of previous sheriffs, noting that despite rhetorical support for rehabilitation, no such program had been permanently established at Cook County Jail. As to Sheriff Woods, they argued that an inexperienced politician had no business involving himself in penology. If Woods valued his anticorruption commitments, he would keep rehabilitation programming “under the jurisdiction of professional and civil service employees.”12 Woods’s anticorruption platform belied a commitment to law and order politics that became apparent amid challenges to police brutality and the rise of the Chicago Freedom Movement. Over the course of 1965 and 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King united with Chicago activists in a direct-­action campaign to end racial discrimination in real estate by trying to pressure Mayor Daley to implement an open housing ordinance. King’s presence was not enough to curb unrest. In August 1965, just a day after the Watts rebellion, police arrested 150 people in West Garfield Park after African Americans protested and broke windows when an accident with a fire truck killed a young woman. The following year, in June 1966, Puerto Ricans on Division Street protested for four days after the police killed a young person. Less than a month later, in July, disturbances spread across the Black West Side after police stopped children from playing in a fire hydrant. As the culmination of over a decade of rising tensions with the city, and police especially, the uprisings had highlighted Mayor Daley’s struggle to maintain control over the city. As Daley and city officials downplayed the grievances of nonwhite people, Woods resisted making public statements about



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the violence during his campaign. But after his election, he went on a junket to white communities with histories of violent rejection of civil rights activism whose votes had supported the Republican sweep. No longer needing “Daley” as a shorthand for talking about race, Woods explicitly fomented the politics of white backlash against civil rights and in defense of police racism. Like Los Angeles County sheriff Peter Pitchess, Woods came to understand that uprisings could be used to increase his political power as sheriff.13 Woods reserved his most scalding words for Cicero, where Cook County Jail warden Jack Johnson had tried to stop white rioting over integration in 1951, and where sheriff Richard Ogilvie had led calls to send in the National Guard to stop the civil rights marchers in 1966. After Martin Luther King Jr. suggested that marchers might return to the suburb in 1967, Woods told a Republican gathering that while he believed in the rights of marchers, he might need to call up members of a one-­thousand-­person Republican supper club and “every adult in Cook County” to maintain order. “There is only one way to control a mob— through fear,” he said. Echoing Ogilvie at Dixmoor, he declared, “If they shoot, we’ll shoot back.”14 Woods’s law and order politics gained further renown as he became the Illinois point man for the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon. Publicity said Woods was “regarded as a straight-­shooter by lawmen and the public alike,” a man who had already anticipated Nixon’s punitive platform.15 Woods’s efforts to foster suburban fears of Black protest were not unique. In Philadelphia, white framings of their own “proud neighborhoods” cast against Black “urban jungles” made conservative law and order politics appealing to white suburban communities in the wake of Black uprisings.16 Whether Black communities were worthy of protection and accountability was an animating question in 1960s municipal politics across the United States. With Sheriff Woods eager to leverage uprisings to enhance his political authority, he put protecting white communities from Black people at the top of his governing agenda. It was in the jail, not the streets, that this would happen.

Politicizing White Deaths in Jail Where the civil disturbances of 1965 and 1966 had failed to elicit much in the way of white public sympathy for those who bore the brunt of the Chicago

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Police Department’s fists, batons, and guns, deaths in the city and county jail drew immense public concern. They provided a political opportunity to assert the value of white life while diminishing distinct Puerto Rican concerns about carceral violence, and ultimately, to assert a means of addressing guard neglect and brutality with limited accountability. As sites of continued unrest, the jails were front lines for the political construction of anti-­Blackness. Gruesome killings in 1967 led to the creation of political discourses that turned Chicago’s jails into a metaphor for Chicagoland: if Black Power, and the Nation of Islam in particular, were allowed to proceed unchecked, white death would certainly follow. Following a beating in the House of Correction, fifty-­seven-­year-­old Anton Novotny died on May 17, 1967. Although his siblings had helped him to check into the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute on May 5, Chicago police officers had arrested Novotny “for safekeeping” on May 8 after he was found drunk and “incoherent” while seated in the middle of the street. Eight days later, Novotny refused to go into his cell in the West Cell House.17 According to witnesses, Johnie Hunt, who had served for eighteen years as a guard at the House of Correction, “hit Novotny several times in the head with his fist” and then allowed two prisoners into the cell with him. A teenage prisoner, Ronald Little, testified that he was playing cards nearby when he heard the attack. “I heard a lot of noise. . . . I could hear the man screaming and groaning like he was in pain.” Little told the court that Novotny was dragged up a flight of stairs as prisoners were “all the while beating and punching him.”18 Court records stated that Hunt relied on prisoners to pull Novotny from his cell into a gallery, where “the defendant slammed down on Novotny’s chest with his feet and ‘stomped him.’” Doctors who examined Novotny’s body confirmed that the “injuries to Novotny’s right eye, chest wall, abdomen and thighs” were consistent with death “from a beating or a kicking.” Guard Johnie Hunt maintained that he played no part in the killing.19 Little, the prisoner, claimed he saw Hunt and the prisoners return from the strip cell with satisfied faces: “I guess you could say they were kind of grinning.”20 Although Hunt, an African American, was convicted of the killing, public blame for Novotny’s death fell on other prisoners. Initial reports focused on the killing as evidence of “the existence of a terror squad of Bridewell inmates” on “a reign of terror” in the West Cell House.21 The Chicago Tribune suggested the prisoners had support from three guards who were members of the Nation of Islam, which the newspaper alleged was an “an all-­Negro, violently anti-­government



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and anti-­white organization.”22 In reports on the “goon squads,” newspapers presented a succession of faceless and often nameless prisoners as both victims and perpetrators of the attacks. The Chicago Tribune asserted that guards allowed “goon squads” to “keep mentally disturbed and drunk inmates quiet while the guards slept on the job,” using tactics such as “holding a pillow over the face of a victim while he was beaten unconscious with a bar of soap wrapped in a sock.”23 Although nearly 17 percent of people in the House of Correction in 1964 were hospitalized at some point during their incarceration and annual reports showed there was death almost every other week, the lawless “goon squads” and their possible connection to the Nation of Islam made jail death newsworthy because it seemed to confirm white anxieties about Black violence.24 Depictions of the events surrounding Novotny’s death in the House of Correction resonated with other reports of “goon squads” and “terror squads” in 1960s America that linked race, radicalism, and violence. Accounts of the 1965 uprising at Menard Prison in Illinois centered on a group of prisoners that assisted guards with discipline. “They break your bones, crack your teeth out,” one prisoner testified. “They kill you in some cases.”25 In the 1967 best-­selling novel On the Yard, released that fall, formerly incarcerated author Malcolm Braly used the term “goon squad” to describe a multiracial group of intimidating prisoners who helped a prison sergeant with a prisoner who resisted a strip search.26 The term fostered a perception of extralegal prisoner authority and subversive power. At the time, the term “terror squad” was regularly applied to the Ku Klux Klan and the Nation of Islam; it was also used to depict Viet Cong guerrillas fighting Americans abroad.27 Both terms imbued descriptions of violence at the House of Correction with an exotic mystique manifest in racial otherness even as they reflected a broader carceral culture in which jails and prisons relied on trusted prisoners that, as one historian put it, “forged an ethic of violence.”28 The death of Ismael Solano Nieves at Cook County Jail offered a similar case of white victimhood that was steeped in anxieties about masculinity and sexual violence. Nieves was arrested on burglary charges after neighbors found him in their apartment; he had lied to his mother about going to his night school class and was looking for a place to hide. While in Cook County Jail, he sent his family letters detailing sleepless nights and horrific beatings. The impoverished Nieves family scraped together the $200 required to satisfy 10 percent of the $2,000 bond required to guarantee his freedom. After their lawyer ran off with the money, Nieves was forced to await trial in the county jail.29

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On September 7, 1967, a fire broke out in his third-­floor cell. His family conveyed Nieves’s deathbed account to the Chicago Sun-­Times. Nieves told his parents that he saw a cellmate light matches and stuff them under his mattress, running out and closing the cell door behind him. Within minutes, “there were flames dancing all over the place, on the walls and floor like a liquid was burning.” Nieves had “screamed and begged and shouted and called—the bars burned his hands they were so hot—but nobody came.” He hid in the corner waiting for the fire to go out; eventually another prisoner gained access and covered him with a wet blanket. Nieves died from his burns at Cook County Hospital after eleven days of suffering.30 His deathbed testimony was a final act of resistance against the violence he had faced. “Barn bosses”—noted as “tough prisoners with informal administrative control in their tier”—were implicated in the killing.31 The dominant valence of reports of Nieves’s death at the hands of the “goon squad” was the invocation of his innocence to downplay concerns about his sexuality. The Chicago Daily News reported Nieves was set on fire after he threatened to report eleven prisoners who forced him to participate in “perverted sex acts.” Emphasizing he had a pregnant seventeen-­year-­old wife, he was presented as masculine and heterosexual. Lest readers dismiss the eighteen-­year-­old as a juvenile delinquent, the Chicago Daily News depicted him as a poor young man, expelled from the seventh grade, who was not a criminal and had lacked the opportunities to do more with his life because of his family’s poverty. A photo of Nieves in the Chicago Daily News presented him as slight, with a handsome face, narrow shoulders, and pale skin. Community efforts to draw attention to his Puerto Rican identity were unsuccessful as newspapers focused on his all-­American youth, innocence, and whiteness. Coverage largely erased the culpability of guard staff, focusing instead on the victim and his ill-­defined, unknown assailants.32 The emphasis on victims’ whiteness was in stark contrast to Black prisoners’ efforts to draw attention to the loss of Black lives in the jail. On October 24, prisoner Donald Smith, awaiting trial with his brother, was found hanged in his cell. Smith had shared his fears for his life with a judge hours before, but injuries to his body were overlooked in the subsequent investigation into his death.33 Newspapers did not link the death and an uprising on tier E-­2 two days later, but given the crowding and the jail’s tight confines, it is likely Smith’s death added to the tension prisoners felt. Blame for the riot was instead placed on a Black detainee who refused to go to court for charges of assaulting a fellow prisoner. In warden Jack Johnson’s telling, sixty-­six prisoners were “armed



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with sharpened spoons, knives, and buckets of scalding water” as they resisted attempts by guards to remove the man to court. The Chicago Tribune depicted prisoners as “members of a black power group” who “chanted anti-­white oaths during the melee.” Prisoners resisted forty-­two guards attempting to retake the tier, allegedly “using 12-­inch plates as shields” and “pounding on the walls and cell bars with broomsticks.” The account did not explain why prisoners had felt it necessary to arm themselves. Yet their use of the tools at their disposal—everyday items like plates and utensils—suggests prisoners were desperate and fearful as they faced a response to their protests that included weapons of war. After “a canister of nausea gas was thrown into the tier,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “the prisoners combated this by throwing water-­soaked blankets over themselves and the doors to the tiers.” Guards ended the uprising by shooting “two pellets of tear gas” into the tier and setting up “two large fans . . . to keep the gas in the prisoners faces.”34 While the depiction of the uprising was clearly intended to undermine prisoner unrest, especially by characterizing it as a race war between white guards and radicalized Black prisoners, the realities reflected in the uprising suggested that prisoners’ lives were becoming increasingly destabilized amid questions of why so many people were dying in Chicago’s jails. Any action jailed people took was seen as a portent of coming riots in the streets. Emerging tropes of “goon squads” that centered power beyond the state’s control sustained the perception of both Novotny and Nieves as victims of prisoner brutality, even though guards had been involved or complicit in both incidents. The emphasis on the vulnerability of the two prisoners—one, a white, mentally ill alcoholic, the other, a light-­ skinned, handsome teenager—marshalled racial sympathies not available to most prisoners in Chicago’s jails or to Puerto Ricans clashing with police outside them. With lingering questions surrounding Ismael Solano Nieves’s death, prisoners, reformers, and politicians mobilized to use public pressure for accountability to their own ends.

The Big Jungle Discourses of white victimhood set the backdrop for efforts to delegitimize prisoners’ concerns about jail conditions. Without recourse in the jail, prisoners sent letters to the John Howard Association ( JHA) to draw attention to their plight.

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The JHA was a philanthropically funded prisoner advocacy organization that had been active in jail oversight since the Progressive Era. Prisoners found an advocate in Joseph Rowan, the new head of the JHA, who attempted to persuade the public that prisoner testimony provided valid perspective on the jail conditions that had contributed to the 1967 murders. Over the course of seven months, Rowan’s assistant Charles Kehoe interviewed prisoners recently transferred from Cook County Jail to state penitentiaries. His findings were released in an “Interim Report” in October 1967. To lend credibility to prisoner narratives, Rowan stressed that prisoners told the same stories repeatedly, even though they were “interviewed separately in separate settings.” Significantly, the interim report stated that prisoners did not attempt to conceal abuses committed by members of their own ethnic groups because “principles are put before race.” Prisoners were desperate to be heard, even if it put them in danger.35 In accounts to Rowan’s investigators, prisoners believed the barn bosses, goon squads, and terror groups were not the most pressing issue in the jail. “Inmates have repeatedly said that the main problem at the Cook County Jail is staff.”36 Prisoners felt staff were bringing in contraband and were “on the take.”37 The report stressed that “even with inadequate staff and a poor physical structure greater protection could have been provided inmates by following commonly accepted custody practices.”38 Prisoners were not naive. They knew the limitations of the jail; many of them had been incarcerated in other prisons and jails across the state and the nation. But given the chance to influence the jail’s trajectory, prisoners demanded that staff try to keep them safe by meeting basic standards. Prisoners testified that violence among prisoners was a central part of the jail experience and that guards had allowed and encouraged it. In a section of the report entitled “Dehumanization Practices,” the JHA noted that former prisoners “all tell pretty much the same story about beatings, sexual attacks, inmate ‘shakedowns’ on each other and other abuses.”39 Guard neglect mattered as much to prisoners as direct abuses; prisoners did not feel they could call for help when guards would not come or when more abuse might follow.40 The questions on the minds of prisoners bleed through the litany of jail conditions. Why did warden Jack Johnson allow barn bosses to run the jail? Why were his goals for expanding and training the guard staff so limited? Why had he ignored complaints about jail conditions for over a decade?41 Rowan downplayed the report’s emphasis on prisoners and their voices as he appealed to the white public’s fears that had animated their responses to urban



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uprisings. At a press conference detailing the interim report’s findings, he called Cook County Jail “the worst jungle” he had witnessed in his twenty-­six year career.42 Lest there be any confusion about what Rowan meant by his “jungle” analogy, Warden Johnson confirmed that the accusations in the interim report were true. “We have a racial problem, but it is based merely upon the fact that there are white and Negro prisoners in the jail,” he dismissively told the Chicago Tribune.43 In support of Johnson, Woods suggested that the report was “kind of late” given that the JHA had reported on similar jail conditions in 1964 and suggested that the report further underscored the need to consolidate the jails.44 Reports across the country characterized jails as “jungles” amid shifts in the demographics of local jail populations. In one case, the white son of a police chief arrested on drug charges was sentenced to solitary confinement in Los Angeles County Jail owing to fears that otherwise “the law of the jungle will take over.”45 Another critique of a Los Angeles jail depicted it as an “inhuman zoo” where “blacks are numerous.”46 A front-­page story in the Wall Street Journal described conditions in Philadelphia, where a young man was freed to await trial without bail because “the jungle jail” full of sexual predators placed young prisoners at risk for rape.47 As with the story of Ismael Solano Nieves, the language of sex panic overlapped with the racist language of the jungle and descriptions of unruly Black people. Within a month of the JHA report’s publication, the “jungle” analogy overshadowed prisoners’ critique of how politicians and jail administrators had failed incarcerated people. Television station WBKB ran a thirty-­minute-­long special called The Big Jungle. Host Joel Daly challenged viewers to watch: “If you do not care to hear the shocking eyewitness details of what has been happening behind the walls of the Cook County Jail, the savagery, sadism, deviation and discrimination that strips from a man his last vestige of self-­respect, you may prefer to pass up this brief, bare look at reality for something more fanciful.”48 According to producer Dick Goldberg, the program took its title from prisoners who referred to the jail as “the Big Jungle.” Goldberg related how an ex-­prisoner had told him, “The law of the County jail is the law of the jungle. The strong survive. The weak get busted heads.”49 As visual media, The Big Jungle relied on former prisoners to reinforce the narrative that Black prisoners were brutes and white prisoners and guards were passive observers and victims. The men’s faces were concealed, as their shadows, surrounded by cigarette smoke, were projected on the wall while they narrated

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their experience. The former prisoners featured on the program agreed that the guards were completely ambivalent. Several of the prisoners noted that wire toilet brushes were the most common weapon in beatings between prisoners, and a Black former barn boss recalled, “If you don’t go by my rules then you get jumped. That’s the law.”50 Fearful of getting paint and scalding hot water thrown at them, one white former prisoner recalled that the guards cooperated with the requests of the barn bosses. Another ex-­prisoner recounted that a friend had been told to “submit to these deviate sexual acts or they’d kill him.”51 As prisoners on The Big Jungle added to previous accounts of jail conditions, both sheriff Joseph Woods and warden Jack Johnson denied the presence of barn bosses in the jail and used the attention to renew calls to hire more guards and merge the two jails. The want of civilization among Black prisoners, The Big Jungle’s host concluded, was the most compelling argument for jail reform. “If we’ve learned one thing this past half hour, it’s that iron bars do not a prison make. It’s still a world of people, a society outside society.” What made Cook County Jail “the Big Jungle” was that “the web of rules upon which a society is built is gone, broken, swept away by familiar circumstances: lack of space, lack of money, and the resulting lack of adequate supervision.” Reviving the Progressive idea of political neglect, he surmised, “the destruction of human dignity inside the institution is not surprising.52 Daly argued that local wardens, the sheriff, and even the grand jury were inadequate to the task and called on the Illinois state legislature to act on the proposals to create a Cook County Department of Corrections. “When we take away a man’s civil rights, we should protect his human rights,” Daly opined. The only way to achieve this, he surmised, was greater security, otherwise “the scandal will pass, but the jail will remain.”53 The Big Jungle reflected emerging white public consensus surrounding the jail as symbol of Black barbarism and the perceived need to reclaim its governance from Black prisoners. Prisoner appeals for protection and safety were met with dehumanizing rhetoric that worked to reconfigure the political landscape in which prisoners made their demands. Jail guards were presented as opaque, unprofessional, and passive actors who acted as reflections of a more totalizing administrative failure. The victimization of the white dead and allegations of violence by Black prisoners pointed to a political opening for anyone who might offer a solution. Sheriff Joseph Woods was ready.



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Justifying a Punitive Approach Public pressure for jail accountability reached its apex when Cook County state’s attorney John Stamos, a Democrat, convened a grand jury in December 1967. As with past grand juries, the 1967 grand jury functioned more as a political tool deployed by the county to formally respond to scandal than as a governmental authority to hand down indictments. Across the country, “perfunctory visits” by grand juries comprising ordinary citizens were the dominant, if ineffective, means of jail oversight because few states had enforceable jail standards, and prisoner rights class action suits found little traction in the courts.54 The twenty-­ three-­member Cook County grand jury convened in an unusually grandiose public format, eschewing the tradition of secret meetings to include press attendance, exposure of over forty witnesses, and a widely circulated published report. The unconventional, public accounting of jail conditions released a torrent of information about violence at Cook County Jail. The nature of the information, which included graphic accounts of violence among prisoners and rampant negligence by guards, could find a place in the public sphere only because of the political tension between Daley’s Democratic organization and Woods’s seemingly potent law and order Republicanism. The absence of such material from earlier public accountings of life in the jail should not be read as portraying the jail as absent of violence, but as reflecting a deeper pattern of social relations between prisoners and guards for which a political purpose had not been found. The grand jury’s findings reinforced the JHA report’s finding that jail staff had played an essential role in deploying and sustaining violence. It is not clear how prisoners were chosen to give testimony, but those who testified were identified by the press as being white. A white businesswoman from Evanston jailed in 1964 on contempt of court charges had seen a woman called Shirley “tormented by inmates” who “constantly yelled at her.” The harassment, the widowed mother of nine told the Grand Jury, drove Shirley to try “to drown herself in the toilet in her cell.” Afterward, guards shackled Shirley to a bed without food for several days.55 Another white prisoner told the grand jury he had witnessed a guard beating an elderly man—“a skid row bum”—in a receiving area. The attack was so severe that blood from the old man’s forehead and broken nose covered the receiving area. Even the most privileged prisoners focused on how vulnerable prisoners suffered from staff neglect and violence.56

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The most widely publicized accounting of Black prisoners came from a Black youth psychologist and self-­styled gang expert who worked for the state, Winston Moore. Moore offered the grand jury a new way of thinking about the stakes of political inaction. As a professional and member of the Black middle class, his perspective gave credence to the interpretation that the lawless jail was a site of racial disorder. Moore claimed that the jail’s predominantly Black population made it “a training ground for black power advocates.” Appealing to the old Progressive idea that the jail had criminogenic properties, Moore explained, there were “extreme racist feelings among white and Negro inmates. You put these punks over in county jail under the barn boss system and they learn violence works.” Moore did not work in the jail and had maybe never been to the jail, but he argued that as barn bosses, gang leaders tested new tactics for domination. “They find that thru terrorism, they can get what they want. Then they ask themselves, why can’t this work in the community?” Suggesting that the jail helped gangs consolidate their control, Moore argued, “I personally know most of the gang leaders in Chicago and they don’t mind spending time in the jail. They get away with more in the jail than they do on the street because inmate control is absolute and there is no interference from guards.”57 Moore’s implication that the warden, and by extension, the sheriff, were contributing to lawlessness in the streets clearly unsettled the grand jury. Its report depicted Warden Johnson as falling short in his civilizing mission in the years since he had helped to rehabilitate Paul Crump. “An inmate awaiting his trial does just that—waits and little else,” the grand jury observed.58 Amid staffing shortages, prisoners were largely unsupervised day and night, spending their time lying around or playing dominoes and checkers. Without structured recreation and ­little access to educational programs, the monotony was broken up by three meals a day, taken in the dayroom of the tier, and visiting days twice a month for adult friends and relatives. Children were not allowed to visit. Without a chance at reformation, the grand jury claimed, prisoners were preoccupied with violence. Even through the jail bars, prisoners spit, hit, and threw buckets filled with hot water at guards with impunity. Guards taking bribes did not dare interfere.59 The grand jury concluded that Johnson had given control over the jail over to the barn bosses and gang members. In one example, Johnson had put a leader of a gang, awaiting trial for murder, in charge of a tier because “the nightly beatings were so bad.” The result was horrifying. Within four days, “a young Negro boy was severely beaten by six inmates, including the leader. Both his eyes were



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swollen shut and his body was covered with bruises.” The grand jury returned an indictment of aggravated battery for the prisoners and cited it as another example of how Warden Johnson relied on barn bosses to control the jail. “A barn boss can create a riot or quell one, depending on his mood,” the grand jury noted.60 The administration’s reliance on barn bosses to teach other prisoners rules, assign cells, and distribute blankets, mattresses, and medicine was a source of corruption and extortion. The grand jury depicted extensive powers of surveillance and control across the jail as barn bosses observed doctors conducting medical exams in an open clinic, meaning prisoners lacked a confidential means of reporting who attacked them. Barn bosses intercepted complaints from an open box in each tier’s guardrooms and exacted reprisals on people who reported abuse. Without adequate training, an inexperienced guard on a protective custody tier who “was new, and didn’t know what to do” unlocked the cell of a seventeen-­year-­old boy for two prisoners who then sodomized him.61 The grand jury indicted the prisoners. None of the guards were held accountable for the rape. Because of these incidents and practices, the grand jury found, many victims took to complaining to judges about the violence they were experiencing in jail during other court proceedings.62 Observers who knew Warden Johnson and the recent history of the jail questioned the timing of Johnson’s emergence as the scapegoat. Hans Mattick, former assistant county jail warden and then associate director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago law school, charged that the grand jury represented new modes of political opportunism. Reinforcing Woods’s law and order framings, he saw the emergence of a new union between the “traditional jail population” with its “small proportion of . . . professional criminals” and the politically incarcerated “Black Nationalists, the left wing ideologists, and the social dissenters and critics” incarcerated after civil disorder and protests. The result, he believed, was that prisoners mobilized as a “community of seriously aggrieved, overcrowded, neglected, and exploited, banding together as a group against the system and the upper caste” in an “unholy union.” While Mattick worried that prisoner organizing might yield “violent explosions in the community,” he did not see Johnson as a blameworthy target. The scandal, he recalled, had started at the Bridewell, a point forgotten in the public conversation about the barn bosses at Cook County Jail. Given the overlap of both p­ eople who were jailed repeatedly in both jails and guards who had worked at both institutions, the problem seemed to be jailing in general. As a result, Mattick saw

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the grand jury as a “diversionary movement” timed to ensure “many persons get public exposure. . . . They ride the issue for the opportunities it provides.” This included the Chicago Tribune, which used Mattick’s comments to suggest a “brewing racial war.”63 Mattick was not alone. A profile on warden Jack Johnson recalled he had been “among the jail’s severest critics” and suggested that “the buck-­passing has been frenzied—from the County Board to the sheriff, to the courts, to the Legislature.”64 A grassroots campaign relied on this record to defend Johnson. On December 11, “a small band of Southsiders” marched outside the jail on his behalf. Organized by the group “We Care for Inmates,” the organization helping the prisoners who wrote to Martin Luther King, protesters wanted to show support for both Johnson and prisoners. They reminded the Chicago Defender that Johnson had helped to promote “racial equality behind bars.”65 If it was true, as Winston Moore and Hans Mattick had argued, that prisoner power and organizing could contribute to urban violence, then Woods’s law and order credentials were in jeopardy if he did not intervene. While Woods had shied away from shooting protestors amid civil disorder, he had few qualms about undertaking a massive escalation of violence to assert his power over the jail. While the grand jury met on December 7, Woods began a series of repressive shakedowns while Johnson was away from the jail. With the help of twenty-­two sheriff ’s police and the member of the state’s attorney’s office, the raid targeted the tier of death row prisoner Martin Tajra, a known barn boss. While Woods told the press that he had found weapons and a refrigerator, prisoners offered a different perspective on what had occurred.66 The prisoners’ letter to Martin Luther King was one of a flurry of letters sent from the jail in the wake of the shakedowns. In the larger scope of the publicly available archive on jailing in Cook County, there are few letters from prisoners, which makes the fact that letters about the shakedowns were saved an indication of how significant and unusual they were. In a letter to the Civil Legal Aid Service, prisoner Edward Arthur recounted that because there was no contraband for Woods to take, “it was more than just a raid—it was all out destruction and taking.” Arthur’s letters and ID cards were confiscated, as were his soap, toothbrush, and toothpaste. He was incredulous. “We are waiting for trial because our bond is too high. . . . Does it mean that we have no rights?”67 According to prisoner Thomas Hale, prisoners were “stripped and searched” as Woods “pillaged and tore up our tier.” Prisoners returned to find “each cell looked like a



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hurricane went through it.” Hale wrote a Sun-­Times journalist that the sheriff ’s police took his copy of the 1963 code of criminal procedure that he used to write writs of habeas corpus and complaints against officers who carried out assaults. The shakedown bore no resemblance to the shakedowns Hale remembered from maximum-­security prison. “This was nothing short of wanton destruction and punitive harassment,” he wrote. Rule by “despotic political prostitutes” left Hale unwilling to comply with authority. The letter was shocking enough that the journalist sent a copy to the ACLU.68 Prisoner testimony shows that while Woods was using civil unrest to enhance his carceral power, he was also actively fomenting unrest in the jail so that he could further repress prisoner power. In another letter to the journalist describing a shakedown of tier C-­4 on December 27, prisoner Richard Agnew described the humiliation of losing the little comforts he had laid by from the commissary, including cigarettes, coffee, and “packs of bullion soup.” Still worse, in the middle of winter, the sheriff ’s police took the blanket given to him by the jail for use during his incarceration. “It was more of a robbery to me,” he wrote. “Something has to be done to protect us from a man who hates criminals. . . . Something has to be done to stop him.”69 With little recourse, frustrated prisoners “set fire to a television set, bedding, books and tables in protest” of Woods’s shakedowns.70 Woods’s punitive actions against prisoners and his efforts to assert and expand his carceral power coincided with his efforts to prepare the jail for the protests planned for the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Anticipating mass arrests of demonstrators, event planners and city officials secretly met in February to determine how many people they needed for security and where to jail protestors. Woods had begun agitating for more sheriff ’s police and jail guards in November 1967 as he anticipated further confrontations over civil rights and the Vietnam War. Denied staffing by the county board, Woods called for the formation of a thousand-­man “civilian riot control posse” to keep the peace not only during the DNC but also in anticipation of possible race riots during the summer.71 The explicit racism of Woods’s strategy drew criticism from groups Woods had hoped to recruit deputies from, including the Urban League and the NAACP, as well as mayor Richard Daley, who was already in a precarious situation with Black voters and likely did not wish to add to his problems through bipartisan collaboration with Woods, whom he described as “hysterical.”72 Woods’s plans to release a “posse” on protestors to manage civil unrest— something he had openly pledged to do in Cicero nearly a year before and not

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unlike what he was doing in the jail—was received as a decidedly racist proposal. Depicting “Woods’ vigilantes” as members of the Ku Klux Klan in a political cartoon, the Chicago Defender interviewed Black Republican Dave Reed, who compared the idea of a posse “to the initial program which resulted in the annihilation of six million Jews in Germany.” Fearing the “annihilation of black people,” Reed, an aide to county board president Richard Ogilvie, asserted that “the plan appeals to racism rather than reason and justice.”73 Instead, Reed suggested addressing unemployment as a root cause of rioting. While Woods’s plan for the citizens’ posse failed to hold up in court, he continued to ready the jail for a summer of protests and riots. Given the grand jury’s scrutiny of Black prisoners’ power and the pressure Woods faced from the county board president’s office to dial back his overt racism, Woods sought to shift the optics of his pursuit of greater carceral power. He would hire a Black warden.74 Winston Moore, who had linked Black prisoners to urban gang violence for the grand jury, was an appealing candidate for the job. Moore was born in New Orleans and made his way north to earn degrees from West Virginia State College and the University of Louisville. After working for the Louisville juvenile court in the 1950s, Moore moved to Chicago to work for the Illinois Youth Commission while he pursued a doctorate in psychology from the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1966, he took a job with the state employment service, where he worked on youth gang issues. The combination of Moore’s college education, his work with juvenile delinquency, and his race made him an ideal candidate in the eyes of the press, which noted he was “regarded by associates as a ‘hard liner’ who would use severe measures to enforce discipline.”75 Seen as a reformer, he had recommendations from the John Howard Association and Bridewell superintendent William Ruddell, who had worked with Moore at the Illinois Youth Commission. While working for the state, Moore cultivated an identity as a nonpartisan public servant, despite his Republican leanings. Given Woods’s tensions with Black Republicans, Moore’s hiring may have been a peace offering to critics within his party. Three months after prisoners appealed to Dr.  King, the Chicago Tribune ran a large front-­page headline celebrating the new warden’s credentials: “Negro Psychologist Is Youth Gang Expert.”76 Moore’s many credentials made him a promising representative of the possibilities for Black ascendance into political power. Amid urban unrest in the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights leaders across the country, especially in Chicago, had demanded hiring of Black police to mitigate tensions between communities



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and cops. More broadly, the Chicago Urban League asserted the need for African Americans to “make and enforce decisions for their own communities” to overcome the “subjugation [that] is the glue that joins together the web of urban racism.” The prescient cautions that the Urban League offered—that “including more Negroes in policy-­making positions does not guarantee fundamental alteration of the racist nature of these institutions”—did not enter into the enthusiastic public discourse surrounding Moore’s hiring.77 Moore’s hiring resonated with Joseph Lohman’s pursuit of the professionalization of jail staff, the belief that Black jail workers could improve race relations in the jail, and psychologized appeals for the rehabilitation of prisoners in the 1960s. Given that Black corrections officers at the House of Correction had facilitated the firing of a racist warden four years before, a Black warden was a remarkable symbolic shift. Yet it was also an untidy one: this particular Black administrator had come to power with the help of a sheriff who had been roundly condemned for his racism and who had spent a month using police brutality to conduct shakedowns and strip searches of prisoners. Moore’s acceptance of the job suggested that he sanctioned, or least felt he could work with, Woods’s tactics and attitude toward the jail. Regardless of what Moore may have imagined for his administration or chose to do, he was entering a white-­dominated political and institutional world that shaped the meanings and possibilities of his work.78

Resisting the Punitive Turn Prisoners did not trust racial representation to solve the jail’s problems because they were losing faith in local remedies. Having seen that only prisoners were indicted for violence by the grand jury and having witnessed the punitive shakedowns by Sheriff Woods that precipitated the administrative shakeup, prisoners expressed skepticism about political and administrative remedies to dangerous jail conditions in individual and collective lawsuits against jail administrators. Prisoners were uncertain about the power of the courts but were too concerned about the fragile climate of the jail not to try. In a letter smuggled from Cook County Jail to a friend, a death row prisoner living at the jail since before 1954 speculated that the efforts of those who “know enough law to file motions” would be “ignored by the other arm of Big Brother; his courts” as Sheriff Woods

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denied press access. He too feared the worst: “In my estimation, the jail is only inches away from a big riot. Of course, the inmates will lose; but sometimes it is the battle, rather than the war that is important.”79 Fearing a riot and seeing that outside awareness of jail conditions did not necessarily mean their concerns would be addressed, prisoners notified the ACLU and National Association of Community Counsel in March 1968 that they had drafted a class action suit, Inmates v. Tierney, and were looking for representation. Forty-­five federal prisoners being held in the jail signed onto the motion. They co-­opted the language that had been used to dehumanize them, claiming the Cook County Jail, nationally known as a “house of horrors, a jungle of depravity, a human jungle,” failed to meet federal jail standards and violated Fourth, Eighth, and Fourteen Amendment protections.80 They documented a jail experience that remained rife with indignities. The galleries were “indescribably filthy,” prisoners’ belongings “whimsically confiscated by jail functionaries.”81 The plaintiffs made repeated invocations of jailing as akin to or worse than being an animal. Prisoners were “herded” into cells, and the food, they reported, “is not edible; it would turn the stomach of a dog.”82 They found no sympathy from jail employees. Prisoners recounted that “capricious” night raids of cells and threats by sheriff ’s police with billy clubs created “an aura of tension and anxiety.”83 The lessons of the recent scandals clearly weighed upon people incarcerated in the jail. “A prerequisite to medical attention would seem to be that one have a knife sticking in one’s back.”84 The prisoners of Cook County Jail’s tier E-­1 made a concerted effort to garner support from local legal aid agencies. In a letter to the National Association of Community Counsel, prisoner John Varelli recounted that the motion for declaratory judgment in Inmates v. Tierney had been smuggled out of the jail and presented by a prisoner to a judge during other proceedings. Varelli feared that the actions of jail officers might push prisoners over the edge. “These men are slowly provoking an inferno which will erupt soon if action is not taken to stop these men from violating and forcing the inmates of this tier beyond their dignity.” The “goon squad” carried out strip searches requiring full nudity and, he believed, “men are sprayed with ‘mace’ to fulfill the sadistic tendencies of the goon squad.”85 Knowing there had been little success among prisoners’ rights suits brought on behalf of people in local jails, as opposed to state prisons, the prisoners who filed Inmates v. Tierney did so out of hope that there was a way emerging to work



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around the inefficacy of local accountability measures evidenced in the grand jury proceedings. Inmates v. Tierney drew inspiration from successful suits filed by prisoners across the country. Locally, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Cooper v. Pate ensured that freedom of religion protections were extended to incarcerated members of the Nation of Islam in the Illinois State Penitentiary. Cooper v. Pate also demonstrated the wider possibilities for prisoners who sought redress in the federal judiciary. From prisoners fighting segregation in Alabama prisons all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington v. Lee to an appellate ruling in Wright v. McMann that found the federal court had jurisdiction over state prisoner rights concerns about cruel and unusual punishment, prisoners and their allies tested the waters of gradually expanding legal notions of prisoner rights.86 Cook County Jail prisoners and their lawyers tried a range of legal strategies to bring attention to the inhumane conditions they faced in jail. The case was initially brought by federal prisoners being held in the jail against Joseph Tierney, the U.S. marshal in charge of federal prisoners in local jails, reflecting hopes that federal prisoners could directly appeal to the Department of Justice for enforcement of detention standards set by the Bureau of Prisons that were supposed to govern the contract incarceration of federal prisoners detained in local jails.87 Prisoners found little support from federal judge Julius Hoffman, who told prisoners the complaint—which was largely based on the grand jury report—represented “just a bunch of statements” that were unverified.88 After Hoffman threw out the case, prisoners and their lawyers revised the suit to include a broader range of appeals. Seeking a set of reforms more expansive than single-­issue cases, Inmates v. Tierney charged that jail conditions undermined the “integrity” of the entire criminal justice process. As Winston Moore took the helm of Cook County Jail, he faced a prisoner movement that was mobilizing support for its civil rights (Figure 9).89 Moore was adamant that the jail had a role to play in advancing law and order and that his race did not cloud his vision. Within weeks of taking his job, arrests during uprisings following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, pushed Cook County Jail’s population to twice its capacity. Mayor Richard Daley’s police department had not carried out his notorious “shoot to kill” order against the protestors—an order that followed in the tradition of Cook County sheriffs—but Chicago police brought nearly fourteen hundred people to the jail over the course of the uprising, at least 90 percent of whom were Black.90 The worst of what the jail might have faced was curbed

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Figure 9. Winston Moore stands next to a bus during the transfer of death row prisoners to state prison. Author’s private collection.

by efforts to apply lessons from the Kerner Commission’s report released a few months before, leading to reductions in charges and lower bond amounts than in the West Side and Division Street disturbances in 1966. Yet it was a terrible experience for people arrested, who found themselves sleeping on bare floors or in shifts as five cellmates shared two beds. Served only two bologna sandwiches a day and denied showers, jailed people found the jail became an extension of the ghetto; as one prisoner recalled, it was “like living in a slum building. Everywhere it was dirty, nasty, smelled like piss.”91 Many jailed people were lost to their families and lawyers, who waited in long lines outside the jail as they sought information from the jail’s dysfunctional records office; prisoners had no access to phones. Some prisoners were released over two days after their bond was paid.92 Moore met with Black clergy from Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference “to discuss plans to improve the lot of jailed negroes” but offered little sympathy.93 Moore embraced the common sentiment that preventative detention was an effective riot control tactic and that rioters must be punished. When pressed by the U.S. Commission



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on Civil Rights to reflect on his role in suppressing unrest during the beginning of the long, hot summer of 1968, Moore was unrepentant: “There was hardly anyone in that jail who did not belong there.”94 As the unrest outside the jail made its way in, prisoner rights suits did little to reduce the escalating desperation among prisoners in the summer of 1968. During shift change at the end of the Fourth of July 1968, five prisoners from a second-­floor tier climbed into their tier’s dumbwaiter, which was used to distribute food between the floors. For the most part, this was not a group of young men. John Homes and Osborn Forstan were in their late twenties; Charles Dennis was thirty, and Frank Ross was the group’s oldest member at thirty-­five. Only Clyde Gunn, age twenty, represented the dominant age demographic of the jail. The men were unified in the seriousness of their changes and convictions. As they exited the dumbwaiter on the ground floor and snuck through the courtyard in the dark, they might have been nervous and exhilarated; maybe they felt like they had nothing to lose. They made their way toward the parking lot, where a twenty-­foot wall was all that kept them from freedom.95 The men’s covert march to the parking lot was interrupted when they encountered a guard in the courtyard. It is unclear which of the men “throttled” the guard “with a two-­foot length of steel wire,” but once he was unconscious, the men pressed on, armed with the guard’s .30 caliber rifle. It was there that two guards heading home for the night saw the men making their escape. “I saw this guy on the wall,” guard Norman Dunigan told the Chicago Tribune. “I walked over and said, ‘What are you doing here?’” According to Dunigan, prisoner John Holmes cried out, “Get out of here or I’ll shoot you.”96 As Holmes began shooting, the guards ran for cover, one guard turning around to fire a single shot. Struck in the chest, Holmes fell off the wall, landing hard on the gravel parking lot. After what was more of a two-­hour standoff than a gun fight, all five men were captured and returned to the jail (Figure 10). The account of John Holmes facing a siege on the jail wall offers a coda to the stories of jail deaths of the 1960s. In the wake of the white political culture’s preoccupation with the “jungle” narrative, Holmes had no humanity to be protected. Facing a sentence for murder, he had already ceded his life to the system’s demands for justice—however racialized they were. Standing there on the wall, John Holmes was willing to shoot and be shot for the chance that he might make it back into the city one more time, even though his sentence showed the city did not

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Figure 10. Two of the men captured after their escape, gunfight, and standoff, July 6, 1968. Author’s private collection.

want him back. The shoot to kill order against him exposed the escape for what it was: a little uprising that the state would use all available means to suppress. While there had been some justice for the dead, the living were on their own.97

The Triumph of Punitive Politics Like sheriff Peter Pitchess and sheriff Joseph Woods, Moore linked urban unrest and jail conditions to create favorable conditions for expanding his power. In



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the wake of the gunfight, Moore found the public ready to support him. On July 16, the John Howard Association reported that Moore’s reforms were “tangible and significant,” suggesting that the barn boss system was in decline.98 With narrow voter approval of a $5 million bond initiative to remodel the forty-­year-­old Cook County Jail, Moore began planning construction of new jail facilities. As he publicly fired incompetent guards for negligence and abuse, Moore succeeded in persuading the public that he was finally and completely in charge of the jail. Moore claimed that the jail was a “living hell” when he started, but by the end of 1968 he believed it was “close to being in the top 10 in the country.”99 The dismissal of Inmates v. Tierney based on Moore’s efforts in December 1968 gave further legitimacy to Moore’s authority. By June 1969, the state legislature dropped its resistance to legislation to create a Cook County Department of Corrections by merging the House of Correction and the Cook County Jail. Advocates, politicians, and Moore himself were all eager to prove that the merger marked the end of struggles to improve jail conditions in Chicago.100 Yet there was one notable detractor. Mayor Richard Daley interpreted the jail merger as a Republican plot against him in the state capital. “Strange things today are going on in Springfield—stranger than anyone has ever seen,” he remarked.101 Seen alongside Governor Ogilvie’s effort to create a state Department of Corrections to control the state’s twenty-­four prisons for adults and children, Daley was not entirely wrong that centralization would consolidate Republican power over the two jails.102 Daley used the one tool he had left to assert control over the situation: the merger would not include the House of Correction jail farm. In April 1969, Daley carried out a rushed campaign to sell the three-­hundred-­acre farm, which had only had at most one hundred prisoners on-­site under the leadership of warden William Ruddell. Daley pitched it as “a suburban housing colony for the city’s poor” that was proposed to him by the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council of Chicago. The plan was met with resistance on all sides. Residents of the area charged the site was restrictively zoned for five-­acre homesites to preserve the “character” of the area.103 Supporters of the jail merger on the city council, among them alderman Leon Despres, charged that Daley was stealing the land from the county. But the most critical assessments of the plan came from Black community leaders who charged that removing poor people from the city to live on the former jail farm represented “a genocidal act.”104 The sale was completed in July 1969, and the development was never built. Losing the jail farm proved an

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important constraint on the CCDOC moving forward: if the unified jail system wanted to expand, it would have to do so on the West Side jail site.105 The consequences of the jail merger were for one, at least, deeply personal. Passed over for the position of head of the CCDOC, warden William Ruddell resigned as superintendent of the House of Correction over “basic differences with the sheriff in penal administration.”106 He took a job working for his friend Joseph Rowan at the John Howard Association. Six months later, in August 1970, Ruddell died by suicide when he leapt from the tenth-­floor offices of the John Howard Association. Ruddell left no note, but it was clear that Woods’s politics had taken a toll.107 Sheriff Joseph Woods appeared victorious. He eagerly embraced the political opportunity presented to establish a Republican jail regime. To run the House of Correction, he hired a Republican, Daniel Weil. Weil was a graduate of Northwestern University Law School who had briefly worked as an assistant state’s attorney with the 1967 grand jury. As he lacked expertise in corrections or management, Weil’s hiring represented a renewed commitment to patronage power at the CCDOC and the Bridewell. Notably, Woods made the appointment without presenting it to the CCDOC board, immediately negating one of its most significant functions. Displacing Daley’s prioritization of expertise sent a clear message: the new CCDOC would be subject to the whims of the sheriff.108 With the House of Correction farm sold, the Bridewell and Cook County Jail administrations turned over to loyal Republican leaders, and the City of Chicago divested from jail governance, Cook County boasted the largest single-­ site jail in America. Filtered through the law and order politics of a one-­term sheriff, the role of the grand jury in creating the political will for such a dramatic change was undeniable. As a process for accountability, the grand jury investigation and its subsequent report submerged concerns about prisoner survival as the political discourse became a referendum on the inhumanity of jailed people. Interest in jail deaths triggered an unprecedented public conversation about jail conditions. Local officials gained political capital as they spun jail deaths as a symptom of instability that could be remedied by law and order politics. Both patronage and dehumanization represented a profound constraint for prisoners whose capacity to organize was already limited by their relatively short stays in jail. Prisoners’ pursuit of alternatives to the grand jury, including attempts to shape public sentiment, a class action lawsuit, and even daring escape attempts, proved less and less successful at marshaling political support for their concerns



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because of the successful use of the jail in support of punitive politics. In this political culture, prisoners could find a platform for their concerns, but it did not guarantee they would be believed. Dehumanizing portrayals of prisoner deaths, rioters, and jail violence convinced the public that jails were deserving of political investment both because of and at the expense of prisoner welfare. Since the failure to control jail violence had left jails without legitimate function, law and order politicians reclaimed violence for the state even as they harnessed new possibilities for the merged jail. It was in this context that Winston Moore made his move to rethink the form and function of the newly created Cook County Department of Corrections.

Chapter 5

Control Comes First

When Winston Moore took charge of the Cook County Department of Corrections (CCDOC), the institution’s name was something of a misnomer. Without a central office or operations, the two neighboring jails operated separately. Nor was there a cohesive corrections program in either jail. Nonetheless, a superlative profile in Ebony magazine celebrated Moore as “the warden who reformed ‘the world’s worst jail.’” Ebony lauded Moore’s status as “the best educated, best qualified man ever to hold the post and one of the most effective and respected men in the field of corrections and penology today.” The piece rendered Moore as the fulfilment of a communal commitment to take responsibility for jail deaths and violence. This was illustrated for Black America through staged pictures of the warden in a variety of poses: playing horseshoes with prisoners, enjoying a soul performance with a brotherly arm around a prisoner, and doting on Blitz, the giant schnauzer who lived at the jail. Although it presented Moore as a man of “genuine compassion,” in this piece and others, Ebony also made sure that its readers understood that Moore and his reforms represented a new form of Black political power, touting the support he enjoyed from the Republican sheriff and the county board, which continued to increase his budget and hire more guards.1 A former prisoner, Toni, recalled another side to Moore’s authority and vision for the jail that the Ebony profile looked past. She had been incarcerated with 1,670 people in Division 1, the 1929 maximum-­security building. The women’s liberation magazine Black Maria described Toni as the “manager of a suburban boutique” with “bright, intelligent eyes glinting out of a clever face, proudly framed by an Afro.” Toni told Black Maria about her ten-­day imprisonment in Winston Moore’s jail. “I’m afraid of Cook County Jail,” she stated. Remembering



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her time in jail as marked by sickness, boredom, fear, and vulnerability, Toni could not believe all that she had seen. “Laughing wryly,” Black Maria recounted, Toni said that during fights, “they brought in the men guards—the ‘goon squad’ we called them. They just beat whoever was fighting into submission.”2 The beatings Toni described were part of Winston Moore’s strategy from day one. When women at Cook County Jail staged a protest five minutes after Moore was installed as warden in March 1968, they were met with the full force of the new guard staff. According to Moore, the “very small disturbance” began during dinner service on the women’s tier. Thirty-­five women threw food and “began shouting complaints about bad meals.” Moore believed the women “had read accounts of his strong disciplinary attitudes and were trying to test him.”3 One of the new guards hired by Moore, Clarence Richard English, wrote of this period in his memoir. He recalled that the guards worked long days with “fists and billy clubs blazing like hell.” The suppression of the women’s uprising on the first day was part of efforts to constrain prisoner dissent and retake control from the barn bosses, during which English recalled that he broke an incarcerated woman’s arm and participated in other brawls to foster “intimidating powers.” “We weren’t taking any bull shit from any convicts,” English remembered, “but would kick ass, and put people in their place, until they got the message.”4 Commenting on the response to women’s protests on his first day, Moore assured the press, “I will use whatever force is necessary. . . . There will be no reservations.”5 Reassuring Black Chicago that he was “no Uncle Tom,” Moore promised that rehabilitation programming was coming. “You cannot have rehabilitation without control, so control comes first.”6 In a period often described as the “punitive turn,” Moore’s tenure reveals the interplay between the rhetoric of rehabilitation, administrative violence and neglect, and the assumption of control-­based penal frames during the 1970s. From 1968 to 1977, Moore directed one of the most incredible transformations in the history of jailing in Chicago. First as warden, then as executive director of the CCDOC, Moore oversaw a jail merger that allowed the county to undo the redundancy of the separate city and county jails. Coupled with expansion, greater efficiency meant that the number of people jailed per year during this period rose to over fifty thousand annually in 1978.7 And in all this, Moore pushed the limits of carceral power as he ran a new local agency designed to ensure public accountability and influence over jail policy. As administrators like Moore advanced law-­and-­order ideals, they worked within local political

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cultures that continued to demand rehabilitation and accountability. In Moore’s case, within the white supremacist power structures of Chicagoland’s politics, the price of Black political ascendance was rationalizing and carrying out the control and subjugation of a predominantly Black prisoner population. As prisoners and advocates demanded more humane conditions, Moore’s goals of control and rehabilitation remained firm.

Jailing the Revolution When Fred Hampton said, “You can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution,” Winston Moore had proven he was not above trying.8 Like many Panthers, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party was a former prisoner who had had been in and out of police lockups, Cook County Jail, and Menard Prison. As Hampton tried to build coalitions between gang members and the Black Panther Party on the outside, Moore worried radicalization was happening in the jail. Moore appointed a member of the Chicago Police Department’s Gang Intelligence Unit (GIU), formed in 1967 to destroy gangs and surveil their connections with activists, as deputy superintendent of Cook County Jail in 1968. Such efforts made Moore a prominent symbol of police power and antiradicalism. “The Black Panther Party is not going to be suppressed no matter what the pigs like Hanrahan, Daley, Buckney, and Winston Moore do,” Hampton said defiantly as he classed Moore with the state’s attorney, mayor, and head of the GIU.9 Yet in Hampton’s death, much turned on the jail. The murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark at the hands of police in December 1969 were aided by an informant, William O’Neal, whom the FBI had cultivated in Cook County Jail. In the wake of the killing, three of the survivors of the raid on Hampton’s apartment were jailed on charges of attempted murder, aggravated battery, and unlawful use of weapons to destroy their credibility. More revolutionaries would end up in jail as Hampton’s killing pushed them toward violence.10 Moore’s reputation as an antiradical took on increased significance after police riots at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August 1968. Nearly six hundred people were arrested during the demonstrations, with Dick Gregory the last to get out of jail after the initial arrests. The jailing of the Yippie leaders of the protest at the DNC, known as the Chicago Seven, during their trial drew further attention to Moore’s repressive inclinations. Bobby Seale,



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cofounder of the Black Panthers, made it the Chicago Eight. Famously bound and gagged during the trial by order of Judge Julius Hoffman, who had denied prisoner rights in Inmates v. Tierney, Seale modeled a cool accommodationism during his incarceration, Yippie Jerry Rubin recalled. “When you are in the command of the pigs you got to live with them.”11 Seale’s approach irked Moore, who called Seale into his office to intimidate him. Conflating all the avenues for Black radical critique of the criminal justice system, Moore told Seale, “We haven’t got any Panthers in this jail, we haven’t got any Muslims in this jail, we haven’t got any gang members in this jail. We got inmates. You understand that?”12 Moore’s belief that jail might wash away radical identities and oppositional politics was evident in February 1970, after thousands gathered outside the jail to protest the treatment of the men.13 Several days later, Moore forcibly gave five of the men haircuts in a calculated political stunt that made him and sheriff Joseph Woods, who was running for the county board, national figures. Moore asserted this reflected his approach to jailing political prisoners: “They will not be abused, and they will not be coddled.”14 The Washington Post shot back that these blatant attempts at “breaking the will” of the accused were “vulgar, offensive, indefen­ sible.”15 For Moore, it was a rare, open display of his alliance with Woods and his comfort with—and even enthusiasm for—personally imposing physical control over prisoners who refused to conform to his ideals. In this high-­stakes moment for jailing in Chicago, Moore understood that everything he did would be scrutinized as a success or failure of Black leadership. Around Moore, there were models of what his work might mean for local politics. John Stroger, the jail’s personnel director in the late 1950s, rose from ward committeeman in Richard J. Daley’s Cook County Democratic Organization to election as the first Black member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 1970. Like Stroger, Moore was a pragmatic individualist who worked with the power structure as it existed. But Moore was distinct from Stroger in a critical way: as a public servant, he kept quiet about his partisan allegiances. As a Republican, at least for a time, Moore used Nixon’s law and order politics a means of explaining his frustration with Black crime, especially crimes committed by Black people against other Black people. Moore did not believe that liberation, in the sense advanced by Black Power advocates, offered Black communities the same protections of decency and public order. As such, he aimed to provide opportunities for male prisoners, especially, to transform themselves into respectable workers. He would do this by turning guard staff into role models

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by expanding the ranks of Black men working in the jail and making those jobs better paying.16 Moore used essays in Ebony to position himself as both a leading Black anticrime advocate and commentator on Black morality more broadly. “Unfortunately, what has happened in the black community is that whites have taught us to hate authority. . . . So-­called militants and radicals . . . exploit blacks.”17 This vision made him distinct from another renowned Black carceral worker in Chicago, Renault Robinson, leader of the Afro-­American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL). Founded in 1968, the AAPL was an organization of Black policemen in Chicago that aimed to resist police brutality, Black gang violence, and being deployed in service of white supremacist power structures. Moore was not unlike the type of Black policeman the AAPL called “the good mercenary” who participated in brutality because they liked exercising power over other Black people and because the higher-­ups incentivized it with promotions and higher pay.18 Moore fit within a longer tradition of Black politicians identified by Charles Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael in their 1967 book Black Power. “Black visibility is not Black Power,” they charged. Classed among “captive leaders,” they viewed people like Moore as playing “colonial politics” that put self-­interest above collective benefits. In doing so, such “figures mislead the white community into thinking that it has the sanction of the blacks.”19 Moore’s presence in county government bolstered the open white supremacy of state’s attorney Edward Hanrahan and Chicago police superintendent James Conlisk, who were not shy about using force and corruption to undo the police reforms of the previous decade, as evidenced in their involvement in directing the raid that killed Hampton and Clark.20 Moore feared that jailed leftist revolutionaries would form alliances with members of Chicago’s gangs and expand the power of both groups. There was ample evidence that people were being radicalized in Chicago’s jails. As leader of the Young Lords gang, Cha Cha Jiménez was incarcerated in the North Cell House of the House of Correction (HOC) amid the turmoil of 1968. Facing abuse from guards, forming connections with ordinary and politicized prisoners, and reading books like The Autobiography of Malcolm X changed the course of Jiménez’s life; he emerged from jail eager to transform the Young Lords into a Puerto Rican political organization modelled after the Black Panther Party.21 To Moore, the oppositional politics of gangs embedded in the Blackstone Rangers’ motto “Stones Run It” represented an existential threat to carceral infrastructure.



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He feared the jail might become “turf ” in the city’s notorious gang landscape. Moore’s sense that radicalism was a menace to the jail, and by extension his authority, was on display in May 1971 when it was announced that he had uncovered a plot by the Stones for a “street commando type raid” of Cook County Jail with “machine guns and other heavy weapons” to free their leader, Jeff Fort. In the same announcement, Moore said that Wisconsin police had also alerted him to a plot by the Weathermen, a white radical leftist group, to blow up the jail. To Moore, increasing control over prisoners could defend the jail against radical attacks and politicization more broadly.22 Moore’s suspicion that radicalized men represented a challenge to his authority was intensified by the escalation of jail protests nationwide. Among the claims made by eight hundred men in New York’s Manhattan House of Detention during rebellions in the 1970s were that conditions harmed prisoners “for life, physically and mentally.” In contrast to jail administrators’ belief that prisoners were prisoners first, the men claimed, “We demand as human beings the dignity and justice that is due to us by our right of birth.” Although they distanced their language from prisoner radicalism, members of both the Young Lords Party and the Black Panther Party organized the jail rebellions in Manhattan and Queens.23 After prisoners involved in the New York jail rebellions carried out the four-­day occupation of Attica Prison in upstate New York, Chicago’s left united in condemning Cook County Jail as another manifestation of “Attika-­Amerikkka.”24 Several weeks after the uprising, four hundred protestors, including the Black Panther Party and the white working-­class group Rising Up Angry, gathered outside Cook County Jail as part of national wave of actions outside prisons from Connecticut to California organized by the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice. Quoted in the Chicago Seed, a woman who had been incarcerated in Moore’s jail found Attica resonant. “I was constantly amazed at the incredible sadism and evilness of the pigs—pure evil that doesn’t account for the humanity of any prisoner.”25 Winston Moore insisted that another Attica could not happen at his jail because he was attentive to racism. Black guards, he felt, modelled heteronormative Black manhood and ensured “humane and fair treatment” of Black prisoners. At CCDOC, he touted the “balanced racial ratio” between prisoners and guards in which guards and prisoners alike were 85 percent Black and 15 percent white. “What American correctional officers must do,” Moore argued, “is offer their inmates consistent, educational, vocational, recreational and spiritual programs

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that provide constructive and realistic alternatives to crime inside and outside of prisons. Any failure to do so is bound to have catastrophic consequences that might dwarf the tragedy of Attica.” This was a better option, he believed, than “grasping at straws” by “throwing up a library overnight and stocking it full of black literature and records.”26 He did not discuss that the Black guards he hired had used beatings and mace to replace the barn boss system. Instead, he proposed that to eliminate radical identities and associations, create opportunities for prisoners to build new identities, and implement tougher controls on prisoner security, he would need new buildings. Moore’s concerns with asserting greater control after the Attica Rebellion reflected fears among prison and jail administrators across the United States. In the wake of Attica, the American Correctional Association gathered to discuss the problems of the “political prisoner.”27 Robert Bright, the head of the Illinois Department of Corrections, suggested that “imprisoned extremists” had declared themselves the “impaled victims . . . unjustly held in involuntary servitude as enemies of the State.” To him, the solution was obvious: “Naturally, in response to such insurrection we apply more force.” But this tendency did not absolve administrators; Bright placed the task of “correcting the incorrections in corrections” in their hands so that prisoners could not claim they were held in an unjust system.28 Another Attica, however, was not Bright’s only fear. His speech was a direct response to Angela Davis, a philosopher detained in California’s Marin County Jail amid police retaliation against the Black Panther Party. Arguably the most famous jailed person in America, Davis asserted the stakes of jailing were not only that incarcerated people would come to appreciate the broader contexts of their experience of inequality, but that they would demand the transformation of society. Administrators like Moore and Bright hoped to control how prisoner identities changed in jail and worked to focus the state’s repressive capacity on prisoners.29 Moore’s fears of radicalization among prisoners occurred in an institutional context where nearly all the jail’s prisoners were Black. Throughout his tenure, Moore regularly referred to the population of the CCDOC as 85 to 90 percent Black. Limited data from Division 1, the original Cook County Jail, makes the particulars of this difficult to confirm.30 Statistical data from Division 2, the former House of Correction, is suggestive of what the CCDOC’s overall population may have been like. In 1973, among the 2,828 people serving sentences in Division 2, 66 percent were Black, 2.5 percent were Puerto Rican, and 2.5 percent



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were Mexican.31 Of the 27,192 people who passed through Division 2 as “holdovers” awaiting trial, 70 percent were Black, 3.5 percent were Puerto Rican, and 2.5 percent were Mexican. Perhaps it was the expansion of racial demographics that made this the only study by this time in the jail’s history that offered distinct categories for Latino people, as well as counting Indians (Native Americans), Cubans, and “other” (likely Asians) (Tables 8 and 9).32 New political priorities were reflected in the demographics for some specific crimes. For example, among people sentenced for Possession of Dangerous Weapons, which reflected almost 6 percent of the sentenced population of Division 2, about 90 percent of 161 people were Black. This was the most extreme racial Table 8. 2,828 Sentenced Males in Division 2, House of ­Correction, CCDOC, 1973

Caucasian Black Puerto Rican Mexican Indian

Number

Percentage

  794 1,875    75    70    14

28.1% 66.3%  2.6%  2.5%  0.5%

Note: Terms used are from the source. Source: House of Correction, Division 2, Statistical Report, 1973, “Regular (Sentenced)—Male,” box 4, folder 1, HWM, CHM.

Table 9. 27,192 Holdovers (Non-Sentenced) Males in Division 2, House of Correction, CCDOC, 1973

Caucasian Black Puerto Rican Mexican Cuban Indian Other

Number

Percentage

6,835 19,026 911 697 36 116 21

23.5% 69.9%  3.4%  2.6%