JOHNSON: Living on the fringe of Colorado's Alcatraz

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published April 25, 2008 at 11 p.m.

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Tyler Jacobs, 18 months, and his brother, Riley, 7, play on a trampoline at their home on the outskirts of prison town Florence, where hardly anyone locks their homes.

Florence's Main Street is dotted antique shops, art galleries, a bowling alley and movie theater. Less than a mile away is the sprawling federal correctional complex.

Artist Rudl Mergelman works on a painting at Sagebrush Gallery, which he owns in Florence's burgeoning downtown.

John Kasman and Darlene Luckett have coffee at the Pour House, a popular place in Florence for retirees to chat.

It is a lovely little piece of earth, this town, a quaint, slow-paced throwback to an earlier time, its Main Street dotted with antique shops and art galleries, a lone bowling alley and movie theater, a place where everyone knows everyone, where one-time high school sweethearts now dotingly tend sweetly to their grandkids.

Few speak of the sprawling concrete, brick and razor wire behemoth that lies less than a mile up Main Street, around a bend and deep in the sage and rock-covered valley.

No, it is only out-of-towners, they say, who ever bring it up.

The United States Penitentiary is considered by many here not unlike your crazy uncle at the Thanksgiving table - barely tolerable and just bound to make everyone sitting around him look bad.

It was, therefore, hardly a surprise that newspaper people came sniffing around this week to ask them of last Sunday.

Two inmates were killed and five others were wounded that day when guards in the prison's towers opened fire to quell a clash between about 200 white and black inmates in the prison's recreation yard.

Though it has been front page news here and in the larger papers farther away, the riot and the killings are barely mentioned here.

People in Florence have conditioned themselves to think of the penitentiary - the "USP," they call it - and what happens inside it as a thing that might as well be a million miles away.

"How many died?" asked Darlene Luckett, 79, as we chatted early one morning inside the Pour House, a coffee shop on the western end of Main Street.

She had been holding forth with John Kasman, 77, and Scott Maddux, 55, at their daily, early morning roundtable chat in which they catch up on each others' lives, gossip a little and comment on the news.

Until I walked up and sat down, the prison killings had not been a topic of discussion. Told two inmates had been slain and five were wounded, Darlene Luckett simply looked away.

"Yes, I think I heard that on the news that day," she later said. "In this town, you go on with your life. It's terrible to be that callous, but you have to."

The table began filling up. The talk now was of Florence and its prisons, the USP and the adjoining maximum-security facility SuperMax.

"Alcatraz of Colorado," spits John Kasman, "the only difference being there is no water.

"And you know," he quickly adds, "we have more terrorists living within a mile of us than anywhere in the U.S. People even say we're now on Osama bin Laden's hit list."

"Oh, my God," Darlene Luckett fake-gasps, "I guess I'm going to have to lock my doors now."

Everyone laughs. What has long been true in Florence is that hardly anyone locks their homes or their cars. It is one of the first things you learn here.

Leave it unlocked

When you park your car at home, the rule goes, leave it unlocked with the keys inside it. The idea is that if someone escapes from one of the four USPs or the 11 state prisons in neighboring Canon City, it is better that he take your car, rather than forcing him to come inside looking for the keys.

"That's really true," confides Scott Maddux, who moved here from Arvada a year ago after working for 33 years in Golden at the Coors brewing plant.

It is the only concession folks say they have made to the prisons.

"Most days, we forget they are even here," Darlene Luckett says. "See, it doesn't matter where you live, but how you live. You hate to see anyone lose their lives, but you have no control over it. The prison is just there. They do their thing, and we do ours."

The construction of the federal penitentiaries in the early 1990s is what brought Bart Hall to Florence. Just released from 17 years of service in the Navy, he was hired to run a new Carl's Jr. fast-food restaurant on Main Street being built in anticipation of a construction and visitors boom.

The boom never occurred. Bart Hall, though, would stay in Florence and end up owning the restaurant. He is now the town's mayor. He agreed to speak with me at the Carl's Jr., which he sold a couple of years ago and which remains the town's only fast-food joint.

The prison, he said, "in all honesty, has very little impact on the town. If you live in a county with these many prisons, you get accustomed to the industry it is and what happens inside them."

Nobody, he adds, wanted what happened last Sunday ever to occur, "especially to have anyone die. It's unfortunate."

News stories of what happened upset him, Bart Hall says. It played out just the way it was supposed to, and he knows because he'd sat in on meetings with prison officials only weeks earlier when they went over how they would handle such an emergency.

"The way it was handled tells me their plan worked," he said. "I feel more secure today, and most of the citizens of Florence feel that way, too."

An image problem

It is the problem with Florence. It has an image problem, he says. No one ever talks of the good schools, the fine police force or the burgeoning downtown with its influx of antique shops and art galleries and restaurants.

"It's an image problem, but only for people who live outside of Florence," Bart Hall said, "not for the people who live here. If you didn't know (there was a prison in town), you would never know."

Yvonne Campbell was behind the bar in the golf course clubhouse at Sumo Golf Village last Sunday afternoon. Her bar is maybe 300 yards from the outer gates of the U.S. Penitentiary.

"None of us heard nothing," she said in an interview Thursday. "With all the shots that were fired, these walls must be soundproof. I didn't know anything was going on."

She is 45 years old, was born in Florence and has never left. She has been a bartender at the golf course for a year now. She has mostly learned to tune out the prison.

"From here, though, you can hear them get on the loudspeakers at times and yell at the inmates," she said. "Sometimes, you can hear shots, but mostly from the gun range they have there.

"And you know, I didn't think something like that would ever happen over there. I always thought they could handle the prisoners better."

John Farris was on the back nine of the course last Sunday. He heard the shots, he said, but didn't think much of it at the time.

"We just all assumed it was a drill or somebody was on the shooting range," he said. "I think I heard a few sirens. I never put it together."

He has been superintendent of the course, which sits across a dirt road from the prison, since it opened in 1993. He helped build it, and a few years ago rebuild it.

"I've been here a long time. You'll hear (the guards) every once in awhile yell at them. Sometimes you hear them shooting over their heads, with the sirens going off, nothing ever too serious."

Sunday was different, John Farris said, now that he thinks of it. Those were M-16 rounds being fired, he said.

"There were maybe four or five shots fired at a time, with a 20-second delay between them. I never really heard them cut loose."

In the end, everyone here, whether they like to admit it or not, knows that this is a company town. Its business is the warehousing of human beings. And business, they know, is good, at least for the local economy.

In the evenings, the bars fill with the men and women who work the various prisons. Many have never worked anywhere else, most donning a uniform and reporting to cellblock "housing units" weeks after graduating high school.

'No comment'

It was around five o'clock in the afternoon when I walked in and sat next to him. He was a big man with a massive presence, a longtime corrections officer whose soft voice belied everything about him.

"No comment," he said almost sweetly when I first asked of the prison shooting.

He was sitting with his girlfriend, and was clearly distracted by my presence once he found out what I did for a living.

He could not talk of what happened, he finally explained. To do so would only get him in trouble over at the prison.

It would take time and more than a few beers to get him to open up.

No, he said, he was not at the prison when the shootings occurred. Yet what happened that day, he said, is not how it has been portrayed in the media.

"The men did good work; they did their jobs," he said firmly.

A prison is unlike anything you think you know, he said. It is a society unlike any other, one with its own sets of rules and protocols and language.

The riot, he said, was not premeditated, certainly not by the leadership of the white supremacists celebrating Hitler's birthday, as it has been reported.

"It was a group of young knuckle heads who might have been excited by the date, who wanted to take on some black guys, but it was not organized."

Why would any inmate persist in a fight when rounds are being fired over their heads?

"It is the culture. If white attacks black, or vice-versa, you don't back down. Either the tower gets you or someone else will."

With the prison now on lockdown, he said, every CO - corrections officer - now must truly work, which is what happens when inmates are not allowed outside of their cells.

So the COs must take every meal to every cell. If showers are allowed, inmates are taken from their cells, two at a time, in handcuffs, to the shower.

"The (Bureau of Prisons) insists it does not segregate based on race," he said. "And maybe that is the official policy. But you should see it now, during lockdown. Blacks and whites will not shower or eat together. That is, at least, the policy now inside the prison."

I ask him if he knew either of the inmates killed last Sunday.

"I didn't know the black inmate so much. The white one, I knew."

He took a sip of his beer and simply looked away.

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763.

• April 27, 2008

  2:49 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  jc7 writes:

  Clearly the small town of Florence had no idea what they were in for when Collumnist Bill Johnson decided to pay them a visit. In one section of the his article entitled "In the Shadow of a Prison" he very plainly describes how he coerced a correctional officer into talking to him through the use of alcohol after he was told earlier in the conversation with this man that he was not allowed to comment because it would get him in trouble at the prison. It plainly goes to show the lengths at which people will go to get a story. Clearly no thought was put into what would happen to this mans family when he is fired from his job because he was told not to make any comment to the media.

  Maybe I'm the only one who finds this article offensive, however, as a dedicated father, husband, and Correctional Officer I along with my fellow officers go to work everyday to protect the public, ourselves, and the offenders under our charge. We live in the Shadow of Prisons every day and not just when something bad happens. We work during good times when everyone goes home safe at the end of the day and we work during hard times when we are assaulted both verbally and physically. We do a thankless job quietly and without complaint, we don't ask for speacial recognition or honor although it is probably more deserved than you can even imagine.

  As Officers we can never predict when prison gangs are going to erupt in violence or disrupt the normal flow of things, but what we can do is, react in a professional manner which reaches the desired outcome to the best of our ability.

  On the front page of the Rocky Mountain News today was a photograph with a caption stating....
  
  "Until something like Sunday's deadly riot forces the issue and brings unwanted attention. Collumnist Bill Johnson pays a visit."

  In my opinion it may be wise to review what unwanted attention really means. Maybe as humans we should review the effects of what we write in the public eye before we damage someone else's life when the information that is reportable should come from sources such as Prison Officials, area locals, and business's who do live in the shadow of the prisons. I feel that this article has shown how as Officers we live in the Shadow of Prisons as well as the clearly defined shadow of Immorality.

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