Prisons: Cook County Horrors

These affluent days, most Americans rarely think about what’s going on in the local jail, or they assume that prison reform has worked some quiet miracle of rehabilitation. Experienced in mates know better. Understaffed and undersupervised, county jails often provide terror far more chilling than any thing to be found in a full-scale pen itentiary. Last week the everyday horrors of life in Chicago’s Cook County Jail erupted into public view. A grand jury has been investigating, and the city’s newspapers have started interviewing former inmates. The result is a stomach-turning catalogue of depravity.

Three separate private and official investigations turned up the facts that prompted the grand jury action. So far at least three possible murders have been uncovered. One convict was tied to his cot and burned to death behind the locked gate of his cell; another man was found hanged by his belt after he begged to be moved from his cell for fear of being killed; a third inmate was allegedly beaten to death. The stories of two former inmates, reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, suggested that murder was merely the end result of the constant brutality and venality that prevailed in the jail.

Two Inmates. A 22-year-old college student spent nearly four weeks there earlier this year after being convicted of buying $150 worth of merchandise on someone else’s credit card. He recalls that on his arrival, the “barn boss” of his tier, a Negro con named “Briefcase,” immediately “told me that because I was white and weak, I would need protection.” Briefcase offered to provide it in return for the boy’s shirt and coat. The student reluctantly ponied up, but that night Briefcase and a friend came to his cell, and attacked him homosexually. “I begged them to leave me alone,” he related. “They told me about a prisoner who wouldn’t go along and was set on fire and killed.” Before his sentence was up, he was attacked sexually three more times.

Mrs. Jean IvlacDonald, a 57-year-old widow, went to jail after defying a court order to let a bank appraise her home. It was a matter of principle, she says; she was held in contempt and sent to Cook County Jail. “As I walked through the gates,” she remembers, “I saw female prisoners walking around nude from the waist up—in full view of the male guards.” But the exhibitionism was homosexual, not heterosexual. Open lesbianism was standard. “It was unbelievable,” says Mrs. Macdonald. “Women would take off their clothes, climb on top of tables and indulge in perversions. They never even bothered to clean the tables when they were finished, and then later, they would eat at those same tables.”

Not Alone. Nicknamed “the Wipe Lady” because of her complaints about the jail’s filth, Mrs. Macdonald was soon approached by a Negro woman named “Queenie,” who announced: “I never had a white woman before. Are we going to have fun with you tonight.” She was later told that “money talks, Wipe Lady,” and bought her way out of trouble with cigarettes and candy. But she could do nothing to help a woman in the next cell who was so tormented by her roommates that she tried to commit suicide by putting her head in the toilet and flushing it. After seven days of disgust, Mrs. Macdonald agreed to allow the bank appraisal so that she could get out.

By all accounts, dope is easily available, almost any favor can be bought and only the cunning and the brutal thrive. Moreover, penologists know that the Cook County Jail is by no means the sole or worst offender. In the wake of the disclosures, similar investigations were suggested for the city jail, where a guard recently beat a prisoner to death, and the juvenile home, where homosexuality is also rampant.