Dressed in crisp blue uniforms with orange trim, 12 boot campers stood at attention awaiting their graduation certificates as a half-dozen corrections officials walked from man to man barking out their final orders.
“Don’t forget none of what you learned,” Ronald Gray, casework supervisor at the Greene County Impact Incarceration Center, 60 miles southwest of Springfield, told one inmate at the graduation ceremony. “Stay out of trouble. There is nothing good in prison.”
“You be strong in here, you can be strong out there,” said Gray, standing nose-to-nose with another graduate. “Everybody out there is dangerous. You be smart. You be careful.”
“Look me in the eye. Shake my hand. You’re a man now,” Gray told another inmate. “You have a lot to be proud of.”
Five minutes later, with their certificates in hand, the 12 inmates stripped off their prison garb, put on their street clothes, and headed out the boot camp’s front gate. After four months of predawn runs, back-breaking military drills, and ultraclean living, most of the ex-offenders are returning to Chicago’s worst neighborhoods.
“If you make it through here, you can make it through anything,” said Jeff Heath, 19, a graduate from the South Side who entered boot camp instead of serving a five-year sentence for a drug conviction. “I will stay out of trouble. I’m motivated.”
That’s the conventional wisdom-the backbone of what’s essentially been a decade-long, nationwide experiment in criminal rehabilitation. Instead of dumping young, non-violent offenders into the nation’s overcrowded and dangerous prisons-where they’ll likely become unreconstructed criminals-put them in boot camps to learn discipline, hard work and self-respect.
Boot camps have shaped up generations of Americans inducted into the armed forces, the logic goes. They can surely do the same for young punks and gangbangers.
Here at the Greene County boot camp, a 200-bed facility opened in 1993, inmates do whatever they are ordered to do, whenever they are ordered to do it. Pick up the trash on that highway! Do those pushups! Clean that food off your plate!
“Yes sir!” “No sir!” “Excuse me, sir!” and “Request permission to speak, sir” are about the only things inmates can say during their four-month stint. They are prohibited from talking to each other (inmates communicate in a crude form of sign language). And the corrections officers are constantly in their face, calling them “knotheads,” “maggots” and “vermin.”
Mess up and you pay the price. There’s no slack. Punishment ranges from shouldering around a 80-pound log with another inmate for a day or two to several days of non-stop exercises and drills. The guys who can’t cut it are sent to prison where they serve out the remainder of their sentences.
The public and politicians seem to love it. Since 1983, more than 50 boot camps have sprung up nationwide-something that’s expected to increase dramatically with last month’s passage of the federal crime bill, which allocates $8 billion to building new prisons and boot camps.
Last month, the Illinois Department of Corrections opened its third boot camp-a 200-bed facility-in DuQuoin in far southern Illinois. Gov. Jim Edgar also announced the construction of a 100-bed juvenile boot camp in Murphysboro, also located at the southern end of the state.
The Cook County Jail is set to open its first boot camp-a 425-bed facility-in early 1995. And DuPage County legislators are pushing the Illinois General Assembly to allow the county to open its own juvenile boot camp.
Not doing what really works
There’s only one problem: boot camps aren’t working, or at least not as well as politicians and other proponents said they would.
Nationwide, more than one-third of all offenders who enter boot camps drop out before they graduate. And boot camp graduates do not have significantly lower recidivism rates than inmates with similar backgrounds who are put on probation or serve time in regular prisons, studies show.
Criminologists say boot camps put too much emphasis on military training and physical exercise rather than helping inmates improve their low educational and job skills and kick drug and alcohol habits-things experts say are critical for reducing criminal activity.
And while boot camps in Illinois and most states have intensive post-release programs, experts say most graduates return to gang- and drug-infested neighborhoods where there are few legal ways to make a living-and few rewards for staying clean.
“The simplistic view that military and physical training will work (in reducing recidivism) is wrong,” says Doris MacKenzie, a University of Maryland criminologist who is the nation’s foremost expert on boot camps. “Many boot camps use punishment for punishment’s sake. They try to make it look tough for the public, but they are not doing what really works.”
There are no national figures on boot camp recidivism, but a 1994 report written by MacKenzie for the National Institute of Justice found that the recidivism rate of boot camp graduates in five of the eight states she studied were not lower than comparable offenders who spent longer time in prison. The figures in the three remaining states, including Illinois, were inconclusive, she reported.
The Illinois Department of Corrections, which MacKenzie said runs one of the nation’s better programs, found that 17 percent of boot camp graduates returned to prison within two years for committing a new felony versus 25 percent for similar offenders who served time in prison.
But another 25 percent of Illinois’ boot camp grads were sent to the slammer for flunking a drug test, missing a curfew or otherwise violating their post-release probation. Only 4 percent of the inmates who served time in prison recidivated because of violating regular probation, which is less restrictive than boot camp probation.
When dropouts are figured in, only about one-third of offenders who enter boot camps in Illinois are able to graduate and stay out prison.
Howard Peters, director of the Illinois Department of Corrections, says the state’s boot camps are “an excellent program,” while conceding that the public’s expectations of boot camps-stoked in part by lawmakers pushing the concept to appear “tough on crime”-are “unrealistic.”
The idea was to save money
Boot camps began in the early 1980s as the nation’s prison population soared along with the rising rates of violent crime and drug offenses and tougher sentencing laws. The camps were touted as a cost-effective way to ease prison overcrowding and rehabilitate young convicts.
Boot camps would save money because inmates sent to them would serve less time behind bars than if they were incarcerated in traditional prisons. Department of Corrections officials say they’ve saved Illinois taxpayers more than $4.5 million dollars since the state’s first boot camp at Dixon Springs opened in October 1990.
But the reported savings do not include the higher cost of supervising boot camp graduates during their intensive probationary period. Moreover, many experts say boot camp savings are as much theoretical as real because the state’s prisons continue to be packed-running at 158 percent of design capacity.
The eligibility requirements for boot camps differ from state to state, but boot camps generally target first- or second-time offenders 17 to 35 years old and sentenced to less than 10 years in prison. Most boot camps last 90 to 180 days, followed by post-release probation during which graduates continue to receive some drug treatment and education and job training.
In Illinois, convicts volunteer for boot camp, but final approval rests with the Department of Corrections, which tries to weed out inmates it believes can’t hack the program.
“We don’t want anyone who is suicidal,” said Nic Howell, Department of Corrections spokesperson. “Boot camp is hard.”
Most Illinois boot camp inmates are gangbangers convicted of drug trafficking and property crimes. The vast majority are drug users, corrections officers say. There are no women boot campers at Greene County, but Dixon Springs has two dozen women in its program.
Most offenders volunteer for boot camps because it will knock months or years off their prison sentence. A few volunteer because they hope it will to change their lives.
“I feel it will help me out,” said Andre Gibson, 23, a South Side gang member who drew a four-year prison sentence for a drug conviction. “I think I can better myself. And I don’t want to go to the penitentiary.”
Dressed in yellow jump suits, Gibson and 19 other inmates sat in two vans at the intake section of the Greene County boot camp. The inmates had just arrived from the Graham Correctional Center, a medium-security prison 50 miles southeast of the Greene County facility where they had been imprisoned for six weeks awaiting openings at the boot camp.
The inmates acted cool, but looked scared. Suddenly, two corrections officers in black commando uniforms and Smokey-the-Bear brimmed hats walked quickly to the vans and began screaming at the inductees.
“Listen up, knotheads, from now on you will not do anything unless a staff person tells you to do it,” barked one beefy prison guard. “You will get out of the van and walk as fast as you can and line up with your nose against that wall.”
“Do you understand?”
“Yes sir,” the inmates responded.
“I can’t hear you,” growled the guard.
“Yes sir!”
“Now move like your butts are spring-loaded. Go! Go! Go! Go!” the guard screamed as the inmates hustled to the wall.
During the next hour, the 20 inductees stripped and showered. Their heads were shaved. They were fingerprinted, photographed and given physical exams. Nine of the 20 inductees had severe stab or gunshot wounds, officials said.
A dozen officers cursed at them non-stop, told them they were “drug-dealing, pimp-walking, gangbanging, sons-of-bitches.” The inductees no longer had first names, they were told. From now on they would be known only as “Inmate.”
“What are you in here for?” Kim Kramer, a corrections officer, shouted at Everett Chinn, 20, an inductee from Chicago’s West Side, as his head was being shaved.
“Drugs,” said Chinn.
“Oh, I’ll bet you sell drugs to grade-school kids. You sell drugs to old people,” Kramer said with contempt.
“No.”
“You got any kids?,” Kramer asked.
“Yes. A 2-year-old.”
“What kind?”
“A boy.”
“Well, what kind of father have you been? What’s the boy’s mother telling her son about where his daddy is? Think your son is asking where you are?” Kramer said with sneer, as a tear worked its way down Chinn’s face.
“Make something of yourself! Now get down on the floor and clean up your hair,” Kramer screamed, banging an aluminum waste basket next to Chinn, as he scrambled to the floor on all fours.
The inductees also met John McCorkle, the boot camp’s lanky superintendent, who told them that if they tried to escape, “I will track you down like a dog.” There will be no “homosexual street gangs” in boot camp, McCorkle warned, and no bellyaching.
At the end of the induction, each inmate was given a white jumpsuit to wear for the first several weeks. The new inmates are known as “ghosts”-nobodies, nonentities.
“We want to strip away their streetwise attitude,” McCorkle said. “It’s the shock factor. We want them to do what we want them to do.”
The inmates rise at 5:30 a.m. and hit the sack at 9:30 p.m. During the day, there is no down time: They have two hours of tough exercises, including two 1 1/2-mile jogs dubbed by staff as “motivational runs.” They also have six hours of manual labor, mostly painting street curbs, cleaning cemeteries, and doing other things for local communities. The inmates are paid $3 a week.
Boot campers end the day with two hours or so of drug education and treatment and basic education classes, including courses intended to lead to a GED, a high-school equivalency diploma.
Everything at the camp is spit-and-polished, from the manicured lawn and concrete workout area known as the “hard stand” to the mess hall and inmate dormitory, the walls of which are emblazoned with slogans such as “Only the Strong Shall Survive” and “The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday.”
Inmates double-time it everywhere, and march around in groups, shouting military-style cadences. Guards constantly quiz the inmates on the boot camp’s eight “general rules,” which include always asking permission to speak, not “gaping” at visitors, and taking one step back, turning, and waiting for permission to leave after receiving an order.
Miss the answer and you do 15 pushups or some other exercise. Boot campers have no contact with the outside world-except for their attorneys-for the first month, and there is no television, radio, weight lifting, or other form of recreation. Books are not allowed in the dorms except on weekends.
The risks of failure
Inmates who break the rules-and there are a ton of them-get demerits. Too many demerits and you get a day, or two, or three, of non-stop exercises.
If an inmate is really bad, he or she gets tossed from the program. Inmates who voluntarily quit are not sent immediately to prison but are forced to sit on a stool for several days facing a wall under a sign that reads “QUITTER” and the slogan “Quitters never win and winners never quit.”
“I don’t like them getting in my face,” said Anthony Davis, 24, from Chicago’s West Side, sitting at the quitter’s wall a week after entering the boot camp. “I don’t like them yelling at me. It ain’t for me.”
In Florida, more than 51 percent of boot camp inmates never graduate, according to MacKenzie’s report. The percentage of boot campers who drop out or are bounced is 43 percent in Louisiana, 36 percent in New York, and 41 percent in Illinois, the report says-though Illinois corrections officials say the state’s boot camp failure rate is 36 percent.
Both Peters and McCorkle are opposed to softening the program to boost graduation rates, saying boot camps need to be tough to have any positive impact on the inmates. And many criminologists say the strict environment is often beneficial to offenders used to getting their way on the streets.
“There are some positive things,” said Ernest Cowles, director of the Center for Legal Studies at Sangamon State University in Springfield, who also worked on a National Institute of Justice boot camp study. “They do learn some discipline. They are living in a healthy environment. They are exercising and staying away from drugs.”
But Cowles and many other criminologists say the high failure rate shows that many boot camps are too punitive. Cowles said he once saw boot camp inmates outside Illinois forced to move a pile of stones from one side of a field to another for no apparent reason. Slapping the “Quitter” label on inmates who drop out of the program is also counterproductive, experts say.
“Here are people who have failed at many things in life and they are having another failure rubbed in their faces,” said one criminologist. “They get berated. Our correctional system should not leave them worse than when they come in.”
Another strike against boot camps is that they only last for several months. Criminologists say it’s tough for any program of limited duration to change criminal behavior that’s developed over a lifetime-something experts say differentiates military boot camps from prison boot camps.
“In the military, when you finish boot camp you become a member of a pro-social network,” explained Martin Horn, executive director of the New York State Division of Parole. “You get a job, housing, food and health care. It gives you an identity. When you finish a prison boot camp, you go back to the streets.”
Experts say boot camps may have greater success in reducing recidivism if drug treatment, education and other social programs are beefed up during incarceration and after graduation-something that is beginning to happen in Georgia, Wisconsin and other states. Peters says he would like Illinois boot camp grads to report daily to a center where they can get extensive educational, drug treatment and vocational training.
Gray, the Green County casework supervisor, says boot camp grads also need the help of local communities in finding decent employment. Many boot camp inmates have several children. Flipping hamburgers or doing other menial jobs won’t pay the bills-or satisfy those used to raking in several thousand dollars a week selling drugs, Gray says.
At the Greene County graduation, each of the 12 inmates gave brief testimonials thanking the staff, God, their families and other inmates for helping them stick it out. “Hooo-raah!” shouted two dozen boot campers watching the ceremony as they burst into applause. Family members stood nearby, listening, as a gentle wind blew through the nearby cornfields.
Johnnie Johnson, a graduate from Chicago’s West Side, said later that he was confident he could finally kick his decade-long heroin habit, resist the pressures of his homeboys and return to his old job at a nursing home.
“I’ve put everything aside since I came here. I’ve been made a man. I can do the right thing,” said Johnson, 29, who has three kids and got a five-year sentence for burglary.
Other graduates were not so optimistic.
“My worst nightmare is going back to the streets and seeing the boys,” one inmate told Darla Clanton, the boot camp nurse. “They are going to say, `How come you don’t smoke anymore? How come you don’t snort anymore?’ I’m scared.”
