The place is asleep in the mist. The brick wall surrounding it, 33 feet high, doesn’t look menacing from the road. Coming up the mile-long driveway, it could be a university. A rolling campus out in the country.
This is Stateville Correctional Center.
The prison is north of Joliet on Illinois Highway 53. Inside the brick guardhouse with “Illinois State Penitentiary” chiseled in stone above the entryway, inmates are mopping floors. They wear blue. The guards wear ranger green. The sergeant behind the desk is a tough woman:
“I’m here to see Tony Godinez.”
“Who?”
“Tony Godinez.”
“Who?”
“The warden. Tony Godinez.” Your boss.
“Who?”
“Warden Godinez. Salvadore Godinez.”
“That’s what I thought you said.”
We walk 100 feet down a narrow path through the rain to the administration building. It’s like the Loop at rush hour. Inmates, workers, suppliers, visitors. These inmates are short-timers from Stateville’s companion facility, a medium security prison, nearby. The Stateville inmates are up ahead behind enormous steel-bar doors.
On any given day there are 2,400 or more of them here. They’re all men, of course. More than 95 percent belong to one of six gangs (primarily Chicago street gangs), according to prison officials; 44 percent are here for murder; 35 percent for Class X felonies (attempted murder, rape, armed robbery, etc). A year’s tuition in the School of Pain is about $18,000. Taxpayers pay every cent.
Forget anything you ever saw in any movie. They don’t march them in straight lines. They wear denim and white T-shirts, but they don’t wear uniforms or numbers. The place is old, and there’s not much natural light. It’s noisy, and it echoes. It feels like the bowels of an old sports arena. It’s high school without girls, cars, parties or weekends. It’s a small city. It’s a factory with only one product: detention, keeping these people away from you.
Almost two out of three inmates are double-celled, meaning they live with another inmate in a 6-by-9 room built for one person. Two bunks and a toilet. It’s like living in your bathroom with a roommate. Pictures-running the gamut from pinups to family portraits-are taped everywhere. When the place is locked down, the inmates leave their cells-escorted-only for visits or medical emergencies. They eat in their cells. On the eighth day they get a shower.
At any given time, 500 or more inmates are in extremely secure units, not allowed to move out of their cells without an escort.
Even judged internationally, the place is extraordinary. Unit B, housing 500 inmates, is the largest cellhouse in the world. Unit H is the only panopticon (round) prison building in the U.S. and one of only three such units in the world. It is three stories tall with a locked guard tower inside in the middle-like the Hyatt from hell. From the imposing tower, a guard with eyes on four sides of his head can look into all 250 cells at once. It was built in 1983 and was where Stateville’s last riot began, July 13, 1991.
With due respect for those inmates busy mending their ways, a good number are working hard on making hooch, smuggling in drugs, protecting their turf, filing lawsuits, making weapons and, most of all, trying to escape (or at least thinking about it). Warden Salvadore Godinez keeps them busy doing other things. Warden Salvadore Godinez keeps them in.
His office is in the front of the administration building, outside the sliding Purgatory doors. An inmate would need a furlough to come here. None ever has. It’s a large CEO-sized office. Salvadore “Tony” Godinez, 42, sits behind a big desk wearing a UIC baseball cap, a black-and-white tie and a Department of Corrections windbreaker; it’s the straight man’s version of a gang uniform. Two minutes won’t pass without one of four phones ringing or his pager going off. He’s got the energy of a roomful of 8-year-olds. He needs it.
People say, `How can you work at this place?’ I love it,” he says. “It’s exactly what I need.”
Last November, using figures from mid-1993, the National Institute of Justice announced the U.S. prison population topped 1 million for the first time. Illinois currently incarcerates 36,788 inmates in prisons designed for 22,700, according to Nic Howell, spokesman for the Department of Corrections. Two new prisons plus renovations at existing prisons will add 2,244 beds within two years, Howell says.
Will it ever stop? Says Godinez: “If you look at me, you should see that guy on the oil-filter commercial. `You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.’ You want to vote against paying an extra thousand dollars per kid to improve education, and then you turn around and give me $18,000 per inmate to watch ’em for the rest of their lives.”
Everyone knows the political wind blows strong in the direction of “tough on crime,” but Godinez doesn’t buy it. “Tough on criminals? Yes,” he says. “Tough on crime? No way.”
Godinez graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a criminal justice degree 20 years ago. Since then, the public’s attitude toward crime has hardly changed, he says, although circumstances on the streets certainly have.
“No one foresaw the magnitude of the drug problem. An absolute explosion. It’s possible, however, that we have exacerbated the problem by making the laws as strict as they are. You put a dealer away, you make an opportunity for someone else to step in and take his job. Yesterday you had one criminal. Today you’ve got one criminal and one inmate. Are you safer? No. Does it cost you more? Yes.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Godinez says, “I’m no liberal. If someone does a crime and is convicted, they deserve to do their time. I’m just saying, if you treat the symptoms and do nothing about the causes, this is what you get. You build 40 more prisons thinking that’s going to solve your problem, and I guarantee you, you’ll fill the prisons.”
Godinez is Stateville’s No. 1 captive. He is here seven days a week, 365 days a year. He arrived in 1983 as assistant warden, barely 30 years old, a year younger than the average inmate. His first day a fight broke out. Drugs and a letter were intercepted. The letter carried instructions from a gang leader that all three Stateville wardens-the chief warden and his two assistants-should be killed.
“It scared the hell out of me,” he says, “but it also appealed to my ego. Typical machismo. ‘I got a Ph.D. from the streets of Lawndale. No one is going to scare me out of this place.’ “
They only tried a couple times. He and a sergeant were once attacked by six inmates in a dining hall. Godinez was the only one who walked away basically unscathed. He is only 5 feet 9 inches tall, but he is broad and strong. He exercises several times a week. Once, the story goes, while walking past the inmates’ weight-lifting area, he stopped and bench- pressed 300 pounds.
In another episode, Godinez tracked down an inmate who broke his leg going over the wall. He found him in a back yard not far from the prison, carried him over a 3-foot wall surrounding the yard and back through the gates into Stateville.
That escape occurred while Godinez was assistant warden. Three inmates used dummies in their bunks to go undetected during the nightly count. They made their way through Stateville’s tunnels into the prison yards and used tied sheets and a rigged hook to climb the wall. One inmate fell, broke his leg and screamed out in pain. Two were captured in the vicinity. The third was caught the next day. “Knock on wood, there’s never been an escape since I’ve been warden.”
Godinez started his career as a juvenile parole officer, working with kids from the Audy Home before and after they were released. “I thought I was Super Counselor,” he says. “First one to work, last one to leave. . . .” He visited their homes, cajoled their parents, lectured the kids, conned them, believed in them, way beyond the call. To many, he was the only adult male who ever showed an interest. He called them “his kids.” They called him “Pops.”
“Look, it was naive, and I’m still embarrassed to admit it, OK?” He takes a breath. “I thought I was gonna save ’em all.”
Why not? He was busting his butt. None of them came back through the “juvey” system. He got promoted a couple times, and then Howard Peters, currently the head of the Department of Corrections, hired him out to Stateville.
“When I got here, I found all my kids,” he says. “It was the most depressing thing in my life. Seemed like every one of ’em was here.”
It was like a bad sitcom: “Hey, guys, guess who’s running the prison? It’s Dad!” Godinez had an instant bond with dozens of inmates. Over time, he developed a rapport with inmates that is legendary in the Illinois system and beyond. Once an inmate told him, “Godinez, you’re the closest thing to having an inmate running the prison.” It was a compliment.
Behind his desk is a private phone. It is rumored that certain inmates have the number and call him with information. Godinez won’t say one way or the other.
They definitely send him notes, though. Three years ago, when he returned to Stateville after a two-year stint in Nevada, one of his kids sent him a note: “Hi Pops, welcome back.” The note said there were 27 shanks (homemade knives) hidden on the bars in a certain cell block. Godinez sent his men to shake down that section. They found nothing.
Next day, another note: “Hi Pops.” This time there was a diagram showing where the shanks were. They found them all.
“I tell these guys, there’s nothing here Godinez won’t find out about,” he says, chuckling. Several times a month he runs “call line.” He goes into an office in the back and speaks with inmates at their request. The gang leaders are so suspicious of what their members might say, they won’t let them speak privately with Godinez. “I tease them,” he says. “I say, `Who’s this, your lawyer?’ I tell ’em: `You guys are a disgrace as a gang. You trust me immensely, but you don’t trust each other.’ “
He hauls out a huge file of mail. “They come like this,” he says. It’s from an inmate, written like a child on ragged paper.
“Mr. Tio Godinez, My family and I wish you and your family a very beautiful Christmas and a real special New Year! I wish special blessings come to you. Be safe. Your favorite nephew, Joey. P.S. Sorry no Christmas card.”
He does have a Christmas card with a bunny on it from Richard Speck: “Season’s Greetings to a friend who’s very special. The gift of friendship is given from the heart.”
“Richard and I spoke every day,” Godinez says. “He gave me a 30-minute lecture on hooch-making. Everyone knew Richard made the best hooch.”
Also in the stack of mail are death threats, which come at least weekly. They say, “You’re going to die with an ice pick in your back.” Or, “I’m going to kick your (racial slur) ass back to the Rio Grande.”
“You can’t think about it,” he says. “It comes with the job. Like getting sued.”
Godinez is the most sued warden in the state, named in more than 500 outstanding legal actions. The prison is too hot or too cold; the food is substandard; one group or another is discriminated against. One inmate sued for the right to play the Illinois Lottery. “I told the jury that I’ve seen guys stabbed over a pack of cigarettes,” he says. “How am I going to protect some guy holding a winning lottery ticket, even if it’s for a small amount?”ber me?”
Everybody wants something. To amend a visiting list, get a cell changed, a job or a different job, to intercede for a buddy who got in a beef with a guard or to have some disciplinary action removed from their record.
In the roundhouse, a Rastafarian-looking inmate stops him. He says the faucet in his cell has been running for days. Godinez climbs three flights up the metal steps and along the catwalk. It’s hot up here. The roundhouse is not a sweet-smelling place in general, and you can smell this man’s cell 20 feet away. The cell looks like a landfill, the mattress heaped in a corner, debris everywhere. But at the back of the cell a trickle of water does indeed flow from a faulty faucet.
“See, Warden Godinez, man, it’s been like that for three weeks. Drive me crazy.” Godinez writes down the inmate’s name and cell number.
Walking back to his office, he says, “The man’s gonna get his faucet fixed. But what’s really important here?”
He waits a beat. “Perceptions, man. It’s about the perception. I always tell my employees: ‘Don’t assume they live in reality as we know it. You saw that guy’s cell. And he’s worried about the water? But the quickest way to get hurt in here is to forget that it’s about perceptions. It doesn’t go by logic. It goes by pretzel logic.’ “
In the late 1980s, when Godinez was assistant warden at Stateville, three things happened that left him upset and looking to leave Chicago. In 1987 his father died. The elder Godinez was a Mexican immigrant, a lifelong laborer, a Daley Democrat, a strict disciplinarian. Salvadore loved his father and held him as he died.
Then in 1988 and again in 1989, a guard was killed at Stateville by inmates. “All of the enjoyment went out the window,” Godinez says. “I felt like it was time to look around.”
He took a job as warden in Ely, Nev., at a relatively new prison capable of being run as a “supermax” facility-a designation for prisons that can be run completely by automation, where prisoners have no human contact. (The Illinois Department of Corrections is scheduled to open a 500-bed supermax prison Downstate near Tams in 1996.)
“I was almost immediately miserable out there,” Godinez says. “It was too nice. Too clean. Too safe. The job was too easy. I was well respected but not well liked. And why I thought I could make it socially, I have no idea.”
Howard Skolnick, the assistant director of the Nevada Department of Prisons, formerly worked in the Illinois system and was instrumental in bringing Godinez to Nevada. “Styles are different,” he says. “It was frightening (for the Nevada staff) to see their warden alone among the inmates lifting weights. The warden Tony replaced believed in control with guns. They felt Tony was giving the wrong message.”
“These guys weren’t supermax inmates,” Godinez says. “They thought they were, but they weren’t. They think it’s the wild, wild west out there. They want to catch those varmints, lock up all those outlaws. The guards used attack dogs. They had Tasers (electric stun guns). One guy exposed himself to a female guard, so they Tasered him.”
How would Godinez have handled it?
“Through a disciplinary process. You want to get respect for your position, not for that gadget you hold in your hand.”
It’s a question of escalation, he says. A guard who is afraid of being stabbed wears a flak jacket. But if the attack comes, instead of trying to wound him in the torso, the inmate will go for his throat, Godinez says.
Godinez is absolutely clear in his point of view, but it is easy to see why a more normal thinker working here would want to be well-armed. Many of the inmates certainly are. Godinez hauls a huge box of confiscated weapons from a locked closet. The stuff would make James Bond blush. Cleavers, machetes, scalpels, zip guns, hatchets-all made out of loose trinkets and spare parts such as window frames or door hinges. Stateville inmates could hide a missile launcher in a ballpoint pen. “You can’t stop them from making this stuff,” he says. “They know how to get the materials, and they know what to do with them. No one knows more about the prison or the system than the inmates; they use it 24 hours a day.”
In the summer of 1991, while Godinez was still in Nevada, a two-day riot broke out at Stateville. He turns and pops a tape shot by Stateville guards into his VCR. It’s fuzzy, black-and-white footage of the roundhouse gone up for grabs. There are burn marks on the tower where inmates have tried to get inside to reach weapons. Godinez has studied the episode from beginning to end.
“An inmate goes to stab a captain in full view of the tower officer,” he says. “The tower officer grabs his shotgun and shoots the inmate as he is stabbing the captain. The inmate is shot dead and falls forward. It looks like he is still attacking the captain. Another officer grabs the mini-14, a semiautomatic weapon, and begins firing. The inmates went crazy.” He looks at the tape with the fascination of a scientist watching a natural disaster.
Inmates run back and forth. They’ve thrown soap on all the floors. Bedding and clothing hang from railings and metal staircases. Small fires are lit. There is constant screaming.
“It took them all day to get the place back.” he says. “The entire staff was exhausted. They’d worked 20 hours straight. The next day, in an apparent reaction to the inmate being shot dead in the roundhouse, inmates rioted in G Dorm, the honor dorm. “These guys are the best of the best inside here,” he says. “They took over the building. They had hostages. Now everybody had to come back in and take this building back.”
About a week later Godinez got a call from the Department of Corrections. Would he come back to run Stateville?
“My batteries were recharged,” he says. “I’d had enough of the good life.”
He was driving back from Nevada on Sept. 3, 1991, the day before his 40th birthday, to a prison that had been locked down for more than six weeks.
“Tension level was sky high. Morale was rock bottom. That’s what I inherited,” Godinez says. “Which made it all the more enticing.”
In Nevada, the employees considered him unapproachable, and Godinez knew it. Back at Stateville, he went to an open-door management style. He sought counsel from all the employees, even less obvious sources. “If a nurse who has been working here for 20 years can’t tell you what’s going on, who can?” he says.
After a week’s intensive interviewing of the staff, he turned to the inmates.
“I went into segregation and talked to the inmates we were going to indict for the riot. I knew these guys. This one guy says, `Godinez, man, I’m telling you from my heart, I wasn’t involved. I’m not going to lie to you Godinez; if I could have gotten out of my cell, I would have gotten involved.’
“Down in segregation what I’m looking for is, how serious is the threat to retaliate? I have to convince my supervisors I know what I’m doing, but, hey, I have to stop short of saying I trust these guys. The truth is, I have rapport with them, and I have more than enough guys willing to tell me what’s on their minds.
“I told him, `I’ll let you out of segregation and get you a polygraph. If you pass it, you’re out.’
“Word got around, `Godinez ain’t gonna railroad nobody.’ They all pleaded guilty. We got the right guys because I released the wrong guys. There may have been one or two that slipped away, but look: If I got you, I want you right. How can I teach you our system works if I don’t follow it myself?”
Godinez wrote a 27-point plan for restoring Stateville to order and building morale. He told the inmates, “Anything is negotiable, except this: Don’t lay a hand on my people.”
He instituted a “weapon-free” plan loaded with punishment but also incentives. Armed assaults by inmates on inmates are down 30 percent and assaults on staff are down 50 percent, he says. “Now they have their own version of drive-bys,” he says. “They run up and slug a guard they don’t like, then run away. Their attitude is, `Hey, what’s the problem, I didn’t use a weapon.’ Pretzel logic.”
Given who he is dealing with, and given that Stateville can’t run without the inmates, how does Godinez get them to cooperate?
He leans back in his chair and folds his hands. “First, we set a tone that says, `You can be assured that we will run the place in a humane, constitutionally correct, sanitary way.’ We remind them that no matter how dangerous they are, they don’t want to die here. They gain nothing by acting crazy. It behooves them to cooperate.
“Second,” he says, “all the studies of riots tell you lack of communication is the biggest factor. I communicate with them in clear, concise messages. I send these guys memos. I walk back there and talk to them. If the visiting procedure is going to change, I tell them two months ahead of time. They may not like it, but at least it’s not a surprise. You wouldn’t like it if you went to your office Monday morning and everything had changed.
“Third, I’ve always found these guys will do anything I ask. When you get to demanding and expecting things, hey, these are guys who have responded poorly to direction and expectations their entire lives.
“I tell our staff, `If you make your message clear and concise and carry on in a humane manner, you’ll be shocked at what they are willing to do-on their behalf and on our behalf.’
“I also treat them like individuals. If I treat them like gang members, now I’ve got triple and quadruple standards. Behind all that gang stuff, they all want to be treated fairly, equally and individually.
“Inmates never tire of hearing me say we’re the only ones who give a damn. John Q. Public does not give a damn about them. But many of us, the staff, are in this not because it’s a job but because it’s a career. We want to do our best, and if they let us, we’ll advance in our careers, and they’ll reap the benefits.
“But the last thing,” he says, “is if they somehow decide that they have to do some job, create some mayhem, they’re pushing the button requiring me to do my job. In that situation they cannot win.”
In rhapsodizing about Godinez’ insider understanding of prisons, Skolnick, the Nevada prison official, pauses in the phone conversation as if throwing up his hands. “Tony likes inmates,” he says. I ask Godinez if he thinks it’s true that the good people are on the outside and the bad people are locked up.
He pulls out a newspaper clipping as if he is ready for the question. A school bus with faulty tires goes off the road and several children are killed. Both the bus company and the tire manufacturer are shown to be culpable. Millions of dollars in settlement money is doled out. But only one person goes to jail: the Latino bus driver.
“My Uncle Tony is real unconditional with the inmates,” says his niece, Melissa Rios, 27, a former Cook County correctional officer and now a probation officer. “Sometimes I can’t do what he does. Still see them as a human being, knowing their crime and everything.”
Godinez still talks about the kids he counseled 20 years ago, and it hurts him when they are in trouble, Rios says. “He grew up a poor street kid, and he can relate. He knows where they come from. He could have gone that way.”
It makes Godinez nervous to hear people speak too glowingly of his ability to relate to inmates. He’s afraid people will think of him as a liberal. “Let’s get one thing straight,” he says. “I am not a liberal. I deeply believe that everyone at Stateville deserves to be here. I strongly believe in guys doing time for crime.”
Even if the sentence is death? Yes, Godinez says. “If you’ve done something that the law says calls for execution, then that’s the sentence you should serve. He recently testified on behalf of the death penalty at a sentencing hearing for one of the inmates who killed a Stateville guard in the late ’80s. “And believe me,” he says, “I hope I sent him over.”
It is 3 p.m. Godinez is not tired. He eats a banana. “My budget is cut,” he says. “I don’t fool myself about rehabilitating these people. Many of them were never ‘habilitated’ in the first place.
“I’ll tell you this. Prisons are not the answer. Incarceration should be the final, final resort. We’ve got a million people locked up today, more than ever. But ask yourself this: `Do I feel any safer?’ When you get robbed, you’re a victim twice. First, when they take whatever they take. Second, when they’re caught and you’re paying $18,000 a year for them to stay here.
“What’s the answer? As a society, we need to decide if this prison is going to be our answer,” he says. “If it is, then we need to get the police, the justice system and corrections all on the same page. Decide we’re going to convict and incarcerate. Send me all of ’em, but get ready to pay like you’ve never paid before.”
And the alternative?
“There is an African proverb: `It takes a village to raise a child.’ Even in the bad neighborhood I grew up in on Taylor Street, all the kids knew all the adults. Everybody cared for everybody. There I am in the street on Saturday morning, standing next to Francis Sandoval at a rally for Mothers Against Gangs. There’s 20 people there. Where is everyone else? We have so many dysfunctional villages. I don’t know how you get the village back. I know it takes a village, though.”
Godinez’s resume lists 20 volunteer groups he works with-Mothers Against Gangs, Mexican Athletic Youth Association, the Boy Scouts, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, Chicago Area Latino Mentor’s Association. Under the glass on his desk are pictures of a couple dozen kids. They’re children of friends, relatives, kids he has met through programs and his own two children. Godinez takes them to their first White Sox or Bulls game. Raps his optimistic rap to them.
“I was one of those kids,” Melissa Rios says. “I looked up to him. I never heard him say a negative word, and I believed I could do things.”
“Gangs are nothing more than a replacement for the family structure,” Godinez says. “I mean the extended family. We should not be shocked at how young men and women gravitate to a subcultural family if they don’t get recognition and emotional support at home and in the community.
“All the images, all the impressions, all the lessons they get-or don’t get-in those early years, how am I going to overturn all that when they get here?”
The day he testified in the inmate’s sentencing hearing, he left the courtroom and drove straight downtown for one of his mentoring programs.
“I’m at the museum and my beeper goes off. I’ve got a phone. This little kid, about 9, says he wants a beeper and a phone. I tell him, `What are people gonna think if you’ve got a beeper and a phone?’ He says, `That I’m a drug dealer.’ I said: ‘That’s right. You know what? I want you to have a beeper and a phone, too. I want you to have ’em when you’re a doctor.’ That blew him away.”
“I was talking to two murderers today,” Godinez says. “I talk to them like human beings. I said, `You guys are not animals. You made a terrible mistake. Now continue every day to prove you are not animals, or what you are saying is that society is right.’ I look in their eyes. It looks like it sinks in, but as I leave, there come the other influences. But for that five minutes, I brought them down.”
