`Open the cells! Open the cells!” barks a Cook County Jail correctional officer as two dozen guards rush like an invading platoon into one of the jail’s toughest sections to search for knives, machetes, lead pipes, razors, brass knuckles and other weapons.
“Everybody to the front!” snaps another officer to the inmates. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”
Wiping away sleep and pulling on their clothes, the detainees emerge slowly from their cells, sullen and defiant. This is their turf. “What’s going on?” grumbles one prisoner to an officer.
“It’s a shake! It’s a shake!” the officer shouts, using a shorthand term for a shakedown, jail slang for a surprise inspection.
One by one, the detainees are lined up against the steel bars of a common room and ordered to strip to their underwear. Tall and short, powerfully built and rail-thin, they shake out their shirts, pants, socks and shoes as a handful of officers scrutinize their every move.
In the cells, officers carrying flashlights tear into mattresses, flip over books, search inside rolls of toilet paper and boxes of crackers, reach down into lidless steel toilets, peer under sinks and check on top of cell doors and inside light fixtures.
The guards know weapons are here. Just about everybody in Division 1–one of Cook County Jail’s maximum-security sections–is armed, except the guards. They aren’t allowed to carry weapons.
One guard finds two lead pipes hidden in a plastic chair.Another yanks a knife–fashioned out of a metal window frame–out of a mattress.
Twenty minutes later, the shakedown is over. The final tally: nine homemade knives, known as shanks. The officers also find four lead pipes, two razor blades and a plastic garbage bag full of homemade brew.
“Look at this,” says Sgt. William Janak, pulling the top off a Bic pen to reveal a screwdriver-like blade mounted inside. “We find these things every day. We find 50 or 60 shanks a week.”
Spend several days in Cook County Jail’s Division 1–or any maximum-security facility–and you realize that life behind bars is about as nasty and scary as you can imagine.
Built in 1929, Division 1 is the oldest of the 10 divisions that make up County Jail, which sprawls out behind the Criminal Courts building at 26th Street and California Ave. One of the nation’s largest jails, it holds about 9,500 detainees, mostly men and women awaiting trial on various felony charges. Over the years, Division 1 has held everyone from mobsters Al Capone, Tony Accardo and Frank Nitti to alleged gang leaders Larry Hoover, Jeff Fort and Willie Lloyd to serial killers Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy.
Today Division 1 houses more than 1,000 prisoners, the vast majority of them charged with violent crimes such as murder, rape and armed robbery. “The worst of the worst are in here,” says Division 1 Supt. James Edwards. “Some people in here will never see the street again. Some people here will never go home again. Some people here have absolutely nothing to lose.”
Painted off-white and orange, Division 1 looks and feels like one of those old jails or prisons you’ve seen in the movies, like “The Shawshank Redemption.” It’s all stone, brick and concrete, with inch-thick steel bars rising from floor to ceiling in cells and day rooms that resemble large cages at a zoo.
There are no fancy electronic gadgets in Division 1: Guards open individual cells by yanking a lever. And they lock the jail’s thick steel doors with large keys that date back to the facility’s opening.
Division 1 is divided into 33 square tiers or decks, each with 19 two-man cells. Each tier has a day room the size of a tiny studio apartment with a shower stall, a sink, a half dozen plastic tables and some chairs, and a TV set.
One guard watches over each tier from behind a desk outside the day room’s steel bars, periodically strolling around a caged area outside the cells called the catwalk. The officers rarely enter the cells or day rooms, except in force to search for weapons or break up fights.
“You ever had a dream where there is a huge ball of fire and you’re entering hell?” asks Lt. Leroy Moore, a top Division 1 corrections officer, as he walks down a hallway heading to Tier D-4. “Well, this is it. This is worse than hell.”
A group of shirtless inmates covered with gang tattoos sit in front of a blaring TV set in the crowded day room of Tier D-4. At the front, two prisoners sit slouched in plastic chairs talking on telephones. Behind them several detainees are hollering at each other.
Another paces silently back and forth, looking scared and strung out. It’s noisy, dank, humid and smoky in Tier D-4, a typical tier in Division 1. At least 10 of the tier’s 38 inmates are charged with murder.
Word gets around that a reporter wants to talk to some prisoners, and a crowd moves slowly to the front of the day room. Everybody moves slowly in jail. There’s nowhere to go. “I didn’t commit no crime!” they all shout at once. “The witnesses are lying! The cops fudged the evidence! The judge is railroading me!”
“The brothers in here are locked up for nothing,” says Miles Roosevelt, 33, a short, muscular man charged with murder. “The system is corrupt. They ain’t helping nobody, this jail. They are just ruining everybody. The living conditions nowhere.”
Sitting on a plastic chair, a large red crucifix dangling from his neck, Paul Jones, 25, says the toughest part of being in Division 1 is being away from his family–especially his 2-year-old daughter, who was born after he was jailed three years ago on rape charges. It’s also means dealing with the boredom of living day after day locked up, with nothing to do.
A school teacher comes around every once in a while but sits on the other side of the bars and spends most of the time talking to the guard. The last time the inmates went to Division 1’s recreation room–which has pool tables, weights, ping pong and boxing equipment–was more than six weeks ago.
And the guards treat you “lower than dirt,” griped Jones. “They just treat us like animals. How they speak to us–they ignore you. Only thing you are asking for is respect. I am a human being.”
“At one point, I wanted to take the easy way out–taking my own life,” Jones says. “But I couldn’t do it. It’s by the grace of God that I’m still going on.”
Inevitably, the prisoners talk about fear, anger, tension and violence. In Division 1, the most trivial incident can quickly escalate into a knifing or worse.
Arnel Robinson, 26, a tall, mean-looking gang member charged with armed robbery and murder, says the best way to avoid getting attacked is to show no fear, carry yourself with authority and respond immediately with violence if someone tries to “go over on you.” Still, he says, he’s often scared because many prisoners have jammed the locks in their cell doors, allowing them to roam free in the tier at night.
“People out walking in the halls at all hours,” says Robinson, whose 17-year-old brother, Adrian, is also in Tier D-4, facing murder charges. “Damn near everybody has got a knife. There’s a possibility that somebody will stab you up. Two months ago, a guy got stabbed nine times.”
A prisoner with a swollen forehead and black eye who identified himself only as T.D. says he was recently beaten up by three gang members in a jail stairway. “They said I didn’t show him respect,” T.D. says. “It was about stepping on his shoes. I told him I didn’t do it. I told him I was sorry. . . . I could have gotten killed.”
Inmate Brian Booker, 20, lifted his shirt to show a razor slash across his right arm and a dot-like scar in his back, the result of being stabbed last September.
“Some guys were angry over watered-down Kool-Aid, and then they just got into a fight,” explained Booker, who has been jailed for a year on charges of attempted murder.
“Watered-down Kool-Aid,” he repeated matter-of-factly. “I want this to happen to me. I ain’t here trying to hurt nobody.”
The nerve center in Division 1 is a cavernous, darkly-lit basement hallway called The Boulevard. At one end, inmates talk with their attorneys in an area that used to house the electric chair.
Down the hall, a half dozen prisoners line up to buy a maximum of $50 a week in snacks, toiletries and other items at the jail commissary. Nearby is a special tier where Division 1’s most dangerous prisoners–most of them Death Row inmates and lifers back from the penitentiary to work on their appeals–are locked in their cells 23 hours a day.
Running the length of The Boulevard is an unbroken yellow line: Detainees always walk on the narrow side of the line and corrections officers on the other side. The yellow line is a symbol of the division of power in Division 1.
“There is a distinct line between officers and inmates,” says Lt. Edward Curtis, who heads Division 1’s 7 a.m.-to-3 p.m. shift. “There are things that are our authority and there are things that are theirs. . . . I control the jail. They control their people.”
Curtis is a short, stocky, tough-talking man who has seen the jail’s population grow tenfold since he started as a corrections officer in 1968.
Over the years, Curtis says, the biggest change at Division 1 has been the “caliber” of inmates. Because of the growth in violent crime, you won’t find old-time burglars, robbers and other non-violent criminals in Division 1 any more.
Most inmates are young gang-bangers–many of them already convicted of a felony or two–who wouldn’t think twice about killing someone. Because the court system is so backed up, many detainees spend two years or longer in Division 1, adding to the volatile atmosphere here.
In 1994, eight Division 1 guards were attacked by detainees, according to official statistics. And there were 169 reported violent incidents between inmates in 1994, though the vast majority of fist-fights, beatings and other inmate-on-inmate assaults are never reported to officials because inmates fear retribution by other prisoners.
“The first rule of jail is, the big fish eat the little fish,” says Curtis, from his cramped office off The Boulevard. “When someone is beaten up, we ask them to I.D. the person, but they don’t tell us because that will get them in worse.”
“If you get beaten up, you just take the beating,” Curtis added. “There is a reason behind it. We try not to allow it, but in reality it happens.”
As Curtis is talking, he points to a small, paper, pumpkin face hanging from the ceiling. In Division 1, when a detainee gets beaten so badly that his head swells up, it’s called “pumpkinizing” someone, Curtis says.
He then opens a drawer and pulls out a homemade 12-inch knife. He says both items were sent to him as a warning by a jailed gang leader.
“The Latin Kings sent it to me after a stabbing in January,” says Curtis, who was stabbed twice in the 1960s. “It was for me to protect myself.”
Tier C-1 is quiet and well-kept. The cement floors shine, and the prisoners are relaxed and confident. Two inmates sip freshly-ground coffee in their cell while a Muslim detainee is on his knees praying.
Tier C-1 is where many top gang leaders live in relative comfort–though Edwards denies he’s giving anybody a break. It’s perhaps the best place to see how Chicago’s street gangs control life inside Division 1.
“Each family has a table. They have that table, and we have this table,” explained William Valentin, 28, known as “Chipped-Tooth Willie,” a member of the Latin Kings jailed since November 1993 on armed robbery charges. “Here, the Folks have the right side of the room, and we have the left side.”
The People and the Folks are Chicago’s two main gang alliances.
What would happen if a Gangster Disciple sat at a Latin King table? “They won’t do it,” says Valentin, his huge arms resting on a table as he steals a glance at the two men on the other side of the room. “There are things that aren’t done.”
In his cell just off the C-1 day room, Miguel Figueroa, 27, a short, wiry Latin King leader jailed since August 1993 on a murder charge, says corrections officers sometimes assign detainees from rival gangs to bunk together in the same cell. “But we change around,” Figueroa says. “They take head counts, but if I move from one cell to another cell they don’t know.”
Asked if gang leaders in different tiers often control prisoners’ access to each tier’s two telephones, Figueroa replied, “That’s affirmative.” And when food arrives in bulk on each tier before a meal, each gang sends out a member to divide the food and make sure their members get their fair share.
“Everybody has a duty,” says Edwardo Ramirez, 36, a Latin King jailed on charges of armed robbery, drug possession and home invasion. “The organizations divide the food so everybody eats. We clean together. The guards have nothing to do with what goes on inside here.”
“In here, it’s the rules of man,” added Ramirez, as he smoked a cigarette in the C-1 day room. “Certain people have problems because they violate the rules. Then it’s time to put them in their place.”
Detainees who aren’t hooked up with gangs (they’re called neutrons) often must pay gang leaders commissary goods and money to keep from being assaulted, having their personal items stolen, and get access to the phones. Gang leaders horde the goods, along with cocaine, heroin, marijuana and other contraband smuggled into the jail, and resell them to inmates for a huge profit.
“You can’t go to use the phone or you get your head banged in. You get last choice of everything,” says a frightened neutron, jailed on rape charges. “You don’t touch the channel. They extort money. It’s very wild.”
In Division 1, a gang member never touches a gangster from a rival organization, unless he wants trouble. And gang leaders generally don’t take revenge in jail for violent confrontations between organizations in the streets, unless they have a personal score to settle.
But stealing, snitching, failing to pay a gambling debt, “disrespecting” a gang leader (for example, interrupting him while he’s talking)–all bring sure and swift punishment, ranging from being punched in the head for several minutes to getting beaten in the legs or chest with a mop handle to being slashed in the face with a razor.
Breaking some gang rules, such as killing a fellow gang member, brings a death sentence.
Detainees are warned when an attack, known as a violation, is coming their way. A rope fashioned out of a braided bed sheet is hung outside the victim’s cell.
“My own mob thinks I killed one of my own. I’ve got a death contract on my life. I’m innocent,” says a frightened Luis Colon, 28, a Latin King charged with murder who is locked in Division 1’s protective-custody tier with three-dozen inmates, including alleged snitches and sexual deviants targeted by gangs and other prisoners.
“If I go back out to the general population, I’ll get stabbed,” says Colon, who was severely beaten by other Latin Kings before he was put in protective custody. “The guards can’t protect me.”
Supt. Edwards is a soft-spoken man who never seems to get too flustered. In his 25 years as a corrections officer, Edwards has pretty much seen it all.
But as he slams one of Division 1’s huge steel doors, he seems excited.
“Listen to that sound,” he says, as the closing door elicits a deep, “Boooooommmm.” “It lets a person know that when they are locked in here, they are locked in.”
Edwards is saying something else as well. Yes, the gangs have a lot of influence in Division 1. But the inmates aren’t controlling the jail. Edwards says he’s calling the shots.
Still, he says that, “Corrections has evolved from the dungeon state to a new frame of mind.” To Edwards, that means acknowledging the power of gang leaders and sitting down and talking with them to head off major intergang confrontations that could lead to an explosion in Division 1. It also means taking concrete steps–within reason–to try to curb gang influence and reduce the overall level of violence in the jail.
In recent years, officials have increased the number of shakedowns to confiscate weapons, drugs, homemade tattoo guns and crude water-heating devices called stingers and used to heat such things as soup and coffee. Metal detectors also have been placed at the entrance to the jail yard, where detainees sometimes have outside buddies throw weapons and drugs to them over the 25-foot-high stone wall.
Tamper-proof lights, bed frames and other fixtures are being installed in Division 1 as part of a $13.8 million renovation to made it harder for inmates to scavange materials to make knives and other weapons.
And since January, jail officials no longer permit new prisoners to bring radios into Division 1. Inmates sometimes stuff radio batteries into a sock and beat someone over the head with it. For the same reason, officials have also reduced the size of the jail-issued bars of soap.
Bandannas, handkerchiefs and other possibly gang-related clothing are also banned in Division 1. And sneekers, socks, underwear and towels that family members can bring detainees must be white or other non-gang colors–though inmates still crease their jail-issued pants a certain way to identify their gang affiliations.
If a prisoner is causing trouble, Edwards and Curtis say they won’t hesitate to move him to another tier. And an inmate caught fighting or holding a knife, drugs or other contraband gets sent to the jail’s segregation unit, usually for 15 to 30 days.
The segregation unit, known as the Hole, is a separate tier where prisoners spend 23 hours a day locked in their cells without radios or TV. There’s no smoking in the Hole, and no commissary privileges. Detainees have one hour a day to bathe, walk around the sparsely-furnished day room, and use the telephone. The cells here are covered in gang graffitti: A five-pointed star of the Vice Lords adorns one cell, while the five-pointed crown of the Latin Kings dominates another.
In many cells in the unit, the floors are blackened where inmates have set fires to protest their confinement. Other prisoners have doused corrections officers with urine, feces, rotten food and garbage as the officers walked past the cells.
“What’s up brother?” Curtis says sarcastically to Brian Henderson, 23, who is awaiting trial for murder and was sentenced to 58 days in the Hole for punching a jail guard and shattering his jaw.
“You talking to me about being a brother and you whipping on me,” Henderson yells back at Curtis. Pressing against the bars of the day room, Henderson glares at a reporter and lifts up his shirt to show a deep bruise on his back.
“They said I hit him,” Henderson pleads. “I didn’t hit no officer. There was no witness. They beat me with those sticks. They messed up my whole back. They just be whipping on you. It’s frustrating man.”
Pacing behind Henderson is Randy Rainge, 27, a surly detainee jailed on a murder charge who has been locked in the Hole since Thanksgiving for stabbing a jail officer in the throat.
“Your rights are being constantly violated,” says Rainge, who complained of being beaten by officers with batons. “It’s driving me totally insane. I can’t take it, and there is nothing that can be done about it.”
Later, back in his office, Edwards says he doesn’t know if Henderson and Rainge were beaten by officers. But if it happened, Edwards says, the beatings were justified to subdue the prisoners.
“We will not tolerate” attacking an officer, says Edwards, as he fingers a broken mop handle that was confiscated from a prisoner. “If we say that is OK, a sheriff in here might as well hang up his boots and spurs.”
Edwards leans back in his chair and pauses before turning surprisingly philosophical.
“There is so much talent up there that is wasted,” he says, refering to the inmates. “Unfortunately, our society is geared toward putting them away, locking them away, and keeping them away.”
