Most of us are fortunate to know about prison life only from fictionalized accounts - from what we see on television or in the movies, from what we read in novels. But in The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, Pete Earley presents us with an unvarnished view of what life is like inside this maximum security federal prison. The picture that he paints of this home to 1400 of some of the country's most dangerous criminals is built upon visits and interviews that he conducted over a two-year period. Although Earley includes information from the guards' perspective and information on how the prison is run, the primary goal of ht book is to present to readers the perspective of what it is like to be an inmate in such a place.
In this almost ethnographic account, Earley provides an overview of Leavenworth as a place of fiercely competing tribal associations that help provide to their members some semblance of safety in an environment in which personal safety is a precarious proposition. Among the characters that he focuses on are Carl Cletus Bowles, a murderous habitual sexual predator; Dallas Scott, a 42-year-old gang member who has spent nearly three-quarters of his life in jail; Thomas Silverstein, a sociopath who because of his potential for violence had at the time of Earley's visits been confined in the most brutal and dehumanizing form of solitary confinement for six years; and career bank robber William Post, who finds meaning in caring for the cats who have found a home live inside Leavenworth's walls. There is also Robert Matthews, the warden, who seems to be an essentially decent man in an indecent place.
The story that these inmates - and their guards - tell of life in Leavenworth is one filled with rituals of violence (no less potentially deadly because of their ritualistic quality) and an astonishing degree of egotism and self-approval in men who have done terrible things. The inmates in Leavenworth, who have certa...