The Warden Was a Killer

San Francisco County Jail #3 is the oldest in California, a frightening place with chipped white bars and gray cement floors. The cells are tiny, 5' x 9'. TV sets bolted to the ceiling in the walkways between the cells blast rap videos. Between lockdowns a group of glaring black men in orange sweatsuits huddles under one set, while several glaring Hispanics huddle under another. The inmates here wear sweatsuits in one of three colors--orange for presentenced prisoners, yellow for sentenced prisoners, dark blue for inmates allowed outside the secured areas. "Why do we have to wear orange?" asks a new arrival who has just stepped out of a sheriff's van. "It makes you a better target," replies a guard. "That's not funny," says the prisoner. "It wasn't meant to be," says the guard.

Welcome to County Jail #3. Next door is County Jail #7, a six-year-old (continued on page 134)The Warden was a Killer(continued from page 93) two-story building where inmates live in pentagon-shaped dorms with 30-foot ceilings. There are weight, machines, a ping-pong table and several picnic tables. Outside, in a fenced-in pasture right off County Jail #7, is a herd of eight buffalo. The buffalo used to live in Golden Gate Park, but they contracted tuberculosis and the mayor of San Francisco sent them here to die. Instead they recovered, and CJ #7 inmates dote on them. In an adjacent pasture is a permanent exhibit of conceptual art--plywood cutouts of the buffalo herd. Beyond the pasture is an area where CJ #7 inmates carve marble sculptures, and beyond that are the greenhouses and planted fields of the horticulture program, where inmates raise crops.

Get the picture?

"I'm against building jails, period." says Michael Marcum, the warden and man who helped design CJ #7. "This one was built over my objections and those of a lot of other people, and nobody wanted to run it. But I had a ton of ideas, and a couple of weeks before it opened the sheriff announced that I was going to run it. It was a shock to the department, and a shock to me, but I said OK. It was an opportunity for the inmates to take over the asylum."

Marcum is a slender, literate, wryly humorous man of 48. He wears black wire-rimmed glasses, a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and a gold earring in his left ear. His long, straight black hair is in a ponytail.

He was 19 when he killed his father, after years of being verbally and physically abused. The night in 1966 his father threatened him with a deer rifle, Marcum grabbed for the gun and shot him. Then he called the police.

His mother persuaded Michael to plead guilty, telling him he'd get only two years in a youth facility. He followed her advice and got a five-to-life sentence. He remained incarcerated until 1972. His view of jails and prison, almost 25 years later, is bred of that experience.

"Jail is no deterrent," Marcum says emphatically. "The only people for whom jail is a deterrent are those who aren't at risk of committing crimes. People like you and me have jobs, social skills, educations. We're not going to commit a crime because we don't want to go to jail. The folks who end up in the system couldn't care less. For people who have no hope, jail is the place to be somebody, it's the place to be a honcho."

Being a honcho was how Marcum survived. Prison made him feel as if he were in a room with his father. He was used to living with the threat of violence 24 hours a day, and he had developed instincts to know when it was coming and how to survive it. At Soledad, where he did his first long-term prison stint, he was confronted by a large inmate named Knighton who had just arrived from San Quentin. The man walked up to Marcum in the yard and said, "I heard you are a woman." Knees trembling, Marcum turned his back and ambled off. He'd already befriended an inmate known as Woodchuck, and that night, at Woodchuck's insistence, he and Woodchuck and Woodchuck's friends found his nemesis pumping iron in the yard.

Woodchuck and his buddies threw a blanket over Knighton's head and handed Marcum the bar from a barbell. As other inmates watched, Marcum pounded Knighton to a pulp for 45 seconds, then hotfooted it back to his cell. The next day there were negotiations between Woodchuck's clique and Knighton's. Marcum never had much of a problem with other prisoners after that.

"People want to know if incarceration has any effect on crime," says Marcum. "It does. Incarceration makes criminals much more dangerous than they were before. They were angry before they went in and they're ten times angrier when they get out. It's like putting a tiger in a cage for two years. If you torture it while it's in the cage, what do you think will happen when that tiger is released?"

It's no surprise that Marcum sees no solution in building more jails: "Construction of prisons has no positive impact on crime. That's money that should be going toward prevention. That doesn't mean just drug programs. It means better schools, better housing, much earlier intervention for people who are starting to slip off the track and who feel there's no room for them in society. The only people we should lock up are the ones who are so violent that we can't leave them on their own. We've got to find options for the rest of the convicts. But to continue to build more prisons is stupid. Right now prison construction is close to bankrupting San Francisco.

"Did you know," asks Marcum, "that housing an inmate for one year costs the same as a year's tuition at Stanford?" Once Marcum gets going on the subject of prison reform, he's hard to stop. He is outraged at the waste and muddled logic of the 1994 crime bill. "By the time we have to put somebody in jail, we've already lost the battle. We have to start putting our money at the front end of the system instead of at the back. We're going to spend $15 billion for more police, jails and prisons, and $1 billion for prevention and treatment programs? If we ran our health care system that way, it'd be like putting $15 billion in intensive care units and life-support systems and only $1 billion in preventive measures.

"Cynical criminologists say the only thing that affects recidivism is age," Marcum continues. "People get older and they just don't have the energy to rape, rob and kill. Which is one reason 'three strikes and you're out'--the current favorite political solution for violent criminals--is a poor idea. All that will produce is prisons full of over-the-hill inmates."

Marcum started his prison term in the Sixties. Outside, people were protesting the war in Vietnam. Inside, Marcum was coping with the fundamentals of racism, which, he quickly discovered, was a long-standing prison tradition. Guards in particular used it to their advantage--prisoners outnumbered staff, so playing one group against another was an effective management technique. Prisoners, for example, always voted on which shows the communal TV would be turned to.

One night, Marcum, four other whites and 30 blacks voted to see Julia, a black sitcom popular at the time, outnumbering a group of whites who wanted to watch The Beverly Hillbillies. The guards confronted the all-white group and taunted them: "You gonna let those fucking niggers and nigger lovers watch Julia?" The next thing Marcum and his friends knew, 15 inmates with shanks came into the TV room and started cutting them. "I got stabbed pretty badly," Marcum recalls. "It was exactly what the staff wanted. The white convicts didn't understand how they were being manipulated. A bunch of them ended up in the hole, and the staff had a good old time."

In the mid-Sixties the power in prison was divided between the Black Muslims, the Mexican Mafia and the Hell's Angels--predecessors of the (continued on page 142)The Warden was a Killer(continued from page 134) neo-Nazi Aryan Brotherhood, or AB. In a way he can't quite explain, Marcum felt that he understood neo-Nazis and knew ways to refocus their rage. He'd always had the ability to find something good in people, no matter how monstrous they were, and he began working with the worst racists. He tried to raise their self-esteem and diminish their self-hatred by coaxing them into cooperating with other racial groups to take on the bigger enemy--the prison itself. When an inmate got thrown into the hole unfairly, Marcum would lead everybody out to the yard, where they'd stay until the inmate was released. The tactic began to work. His fellow inmates started to ask for his advice. Some neo-Nazis went so far as to burn swastika tattoos off their hands so they could join his group.

His success at organizing, unsurprisingly, did not make him popular with the prison administration. Often, as soon as he organized a group he would be shipped to another prison. Or if he filed a lawsuit in one location he would find himself moved to another so the local courts would lose jurisdiction. Still, he remained passionate about prison reform not only because he was a prisoner but also because he had begun to see why prisons increase the crime rate rather than reduce it.

"Police and jails have nothing to do with crime until after the fact," he says. "Police apprehend suspects, and the small percentage of those who are convicted are locked up in jails. But psychologically, there's a message to the public that we're doing something about crime. It makes me angry that people in my profession won't tell the public the truth--that our institutions don't work."

Marcum is an idealist, but he also has practical notions of what can reduce crime. "Just as it's important to humanize victims, it's also important to humanize offenders. Because they're people, the same as you and me, and most have the same aspirations we do. They haven't found a way to survive without hurting others, so they've got to be held accountable. But when they're in jail, they're receptive, and you can bring skills and options and programs to them."

Marcum, himself, has long waged war on behalf of prisoners' dignity and rights. In the early Sixties when Marcum entered prison, for example, the two worst legal injustices to inmates were the indeterminate sentence and the civil death statutes. In the former, the parole board decided whether an inmate got out in two years or stayed in forever. The civil death statutes (section 2600 under the penal code) deprived convicted felons of civil rights such as family visitations, freedom to write and keep what they had written, receipt of books and legitimized marriages. Marcum organized against these practices and attempted to get legislators and the press to understand them better. In 1968, thanks to the perseverance of Marcum and his colleagues, the civil death statutes were repealed in California. The indeterminate sentence was finally repealed in the mid-Seventies.

To no one's surprise, Marcum kept getting turned down for parole. He lay low for a while, then went back to the parole board, only to be rejected again. An attorney who had worked with Marcum on prison censorship issues heard his story, filed a petition of habeas corpus and finally, in 1972, got Marcum out. After nearly seven years in prison, Marcum was a free man.

And absolutely terrified. Things were moving too fast. Everybody seemed to know more than he did. He was afraid to ask for help. He had no social skills. He didn't know how to write a check. He avoided going into banks for fear they'd think he was a robber. He couldn't sit in a movie theater unless his back was against a wall. In prison, as long as he was politically active, people saw him as powerful. But the only people he trusted now were guys he'd done time with.

Twice during his first year out Marcum called his parole officer and begged to be returned to jail. The parole officer--a former Soledad guard whom Marcum had befriended--spent half a day with him each time, helping him adjust. Eventually Marcum joined Volunteers in Service to America and for about five years worked in the jails doing alternative programs.

One of Marcum's VISTA co-workers was Michael Hennessey, a fellow progressive who decided to run for sheriff of San Francisco County. Nobody dreamed Hennessey would be elected, but in 1980 he was, and he promptly hired Marcum to run his jail programs.

Hennessey's top problem was overcrowding, but despite Marcum's best efforts, there was no quick solution, and the court forced the city to build a new jail. CJ #7 was completed in 1989 and Marcum was appointed director. It was reported to be the first time an ex-felon had been placed in charge of a jail.

"It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," says Marcum. "It's really hard to change a place that has its own tradition, but we could start fresh. We implemented something called direct supervision, which is happening in jails all over the country but is new in San Francisco."

In a direct supervision facility, staff are locked up in the housing area with prisoners 24 hours a day. "Theoretically," says Marcum, "the more remote staff are, the safer they are. But the truth is the opposite--the closer staff get, the more control they have. They know everything that's going on in a dorm, and people don't get hurt. When you have to retake turf every time you go onto a tier to do rounds, or--as in remote supervision--when you don't even go in there unless there's a riot or a stabbing, you don't know what the hell you are getting into."

Marcum's approach has paid off. In six years there have been only eight injuries at CJ #7. In that same time, there have been 86 injuries at CJ #3. While fistfights have occurred at CJ #7, no weapons have been used. The worst incident resulted in a broken jaw. Next door at CJ #3, fights have started with stabbings and escalated to riots.

Marcum is no longer warden of County Jail #7. In the fall of 1993, he was appointed assistant sheriff of San Francisco County. A firestorm of controversy ensued. Deputy sheriffs picketed and held demonstrations. The outrage focused on the fact that Marcum is not a police officer rather than on his criminal record. Eventually the uproar subsided, and Michael Marcum, ex-con, settled into his job as assistant sheriff.

"I was controversial when Hennessey hired me and I'm still controversial," he says. "What can I say? I'm a round peg in a square hole."

He is outraged at the 1994 crime bill. "By the time we've put somebody in jail, we've lost the battle."