Behind the Anamosa Prison Walls

ANAMOSA — When you visit the Anamosa State Penitentiary, really kick the tires, talk to guards and lifers, you leave with an odd mix of emotions.

There’s a sense of depression at seeing a caged man, a member of the walking dead in so many ways, as well as a feeling of sheer joy with your own freedom that really hits as you leave the prison and drive south toward Mount Vernon.

Most of all, a glimpse behind the prison walls gives one an insight most people, and many Iowa legislators for that matter, don’t want. It forces you to realize that, like it or not, there are 1,291 human beings in there with stories.

To be sure, the central villians in the life stories of most of these men are the men themselves. But in these tales of crime and lost lives there are plenty of supporting cast members — from abusive parents to head-in-the-sand teachers to under-funded drug and alcohol treatment programs.

Only by forcing ourselves to listen to these stories — and really hear them — can we make them less frequent.

With original buildings dating back to the 1870s, the Anamosa prison is a Gothic structure, and aside from the even older Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison, the most intimidating building in the state. Even if you’ve never seen a prison in your waking hours, it is likely that the image of Anamosa, with its haunting design, could appear in any nightmare related to prison.

The 1938 movie “Penitentiary” was filmed at Anamosa. It’s the only prison movie ever set in this seeming perfect location. Warden Jerry Burt told me that movie industry people involved with the remake of “The Longest Yard” in 2005 considered Anamosa as a location but opted for a closed facility in Long Beach, Calif.

One cellblock at Anamosa – LUC — houses 313 men in single cells, stacked six stories high. Guards use a relic device, a large wheel in a cage, to spin open prison doors. Unlike newer prisons, such as Fort Dodge, guards don’t have the best sightlines of all the inmates. There are blind spots for them in the cellblocks. A visitor with no corrections training can pick this up in minutes in the cellblock.

A few days ago, I toured the facility for the third time, the second with former Iowa Lt. Gov. Art Neu, R-Carroll, vice chairman of the State Board of Corrections and a long-time member of that panel. Neu chaired a corrections board meeting Friday morning before we toured the facility for about two hours.

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One of the issues discussed during the board meeting was the racial composition of the inmate population in Iowa’s prison system — which, according to today’s official count, has a total of 8,882 inmates, about 24 percent of them African-American.

Considering that the percentage of African-Americans in the state is 2.2 percent (according to 2005 figures from the U.S. Census) the prison population percentage is a striking figure.

“Our percentage (per capita) is among the highest in the nation,” says Board of Corrections member Johnnie Hammond, a former liberal state senator from Ames.

Iowa Department of Corrections Director John Baldwin noted that the state is in the top five for percentage of African-Americans based on the overall population.

Baldwin said Gov. Chet Culver has appointed a task force to delve into the “over-representation” of African-Americans in the prison system.

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Having been to all nine of the state’s prisons in the last decade with Neu, I nevertheless learn something on each visit.

For example, prisoners don’t pay what you and I do for phone service.

They pay much more.

Some of that money flows back from the phone companies to the prison budget in the form of “rebates” — to the tune of about $1.2 million in fiscal year 2008.

“If you got our bill you would be surprised by it because it is much more expensive,” Baldwin said.

He noted that added phone costs to inmates include traces and recordings of calls as well as other measures.

“There’s a huge behind-the-scenes operation,” Baldwin said.

For her part, Hammond thinks the inmate phone costs should be lower.

“Most of them are poor — otherwise they would have had a better defense attorney,” Hammond said.

In fact, she thinks inmates should get one free call home each week.

“If you maintain strong families you are more successful when you go back home,” Hammond said.

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At the Board of the Corrections meeting members discussed institutions other than Anamosa.

For example, there is a serious overcrowding problem at the women’s prison in Mitchellville. As of this morning, Mitchellville had an inmate count of 663 for a 443-prisoner capacity.

A few years ago, while touring that prison, I learned that some of the inmates were convicted prostitutes, and that our tax dollars were at work in this way.

Last week at Anamosa, a top prison official who used to work at Mitchellville told me there is a judge in Iowa who is keen on sentencing prostitutes to prison.

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What’s the most common cause of a prison riot?

Bad food or no food.

A few years ago when Neu and I toured Anamosa, the kitchen there was a joke, with terrible floors and cracks and outdated equipment — and a loading dock where good food comes in and bad food goes out at the same time.

Neu made this into a top issue, pressing for a better kitchen at board meetings.

The construction process has started, and during our guarded walk through the prison grounds several prison employees stopped Neu and thanked him for the work on the kitchen issue.

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One of the more depressing areas in the prison is a special treatment unit area.

“It’s really kind of a small nursing-home area,” Neu said.

Some of the prisoners in here clearly appear in deathbed status.

Why not just let them out to die?

First of all, there would be some complications with medical funding.

And then there are the inmates’ wishes.

“Ninety percent of the people I’ve talked to don’t want to go somewhere else to die,” said Jerry Connolly, nursing services director at Anamosa.

Apparently, that scene in the “Shawshank Redemption” in which the aged parolee can’t handle the outside is an informed plot point.

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Neu’s brother, Charles, a Carroll native who went on to become chairman of the history department at Brown University, accompanied us on the tour.

Charles Neu asked to see the prison “library,” which amounted to little more than a closet of old paperbacks.

“There’s a good many things we’re proud of,” Warden Burt said. “The library is not one of them.”

Charles Neu said he believed there is much rehabilitative power in books.

“They could reflect on their lives and examine them,” Neu said. “It deepens their lives in so many ways.”

“That’s pathetic,” he ad
ded as we left the library.