When I was sent to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to attend the Combined Arms and Services Staff School (CAS3) while I was stationed at Eighth United States Army (EUSA) G4, United States Forces Korea (USFK), Yongsan, Seoul, Republic of Korea (ROK). I don’t know how much you know about Fort Leavenworth, or if you’ve ever been there. But there are five prisons in Leavenworth County. You are literally surrounded by prisons. Everybody thinks of the military prison, which is more correctly known as the United States Disciplinary Barracks (USDB), Fort Leavenworth. The USDB houses prisoners serving sentences greater than 10 years in a maximum-security facility. There is also the federal civilian United States Penitentiary, four miles south of the USDB on Fort Leavenworth property. Then, there is the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility, which is a military prison, which opened in 2010 to house prisoners serving sentences of less than 10 years. The military prisons only house male prisoners. Go figure. Female prisoners get sent to the Naval Consolidated Brig, Miramar, California. Lucky dogs. Well, I don’t know just how lucky they are. After all, they are ostensibly behind bars. Which means they aren’t hanging out at the beach. There is another privately run maximum-security federal prison called Corrections Corporation of America, which is owned and operated by CoreCivic. The facility is under contract with the United States Marshals Service, and it is in the southeast corner of Leavenworth. The Leavenworth County Jail is southeast of Fort Leavenworth and lies in between Fort Leavenworth and the Corrections Corporation of America. Finally, there is the Lansing Correctional Facility which is the state prison operated by the Kansas Department of Corrections. It is located in Lansing, Kansas in Leavenworth County, and it is southeast of Fort Leavenworth. The only prison that’s there now that wasn’t there when I was there is the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility. All of those other prisons were there when I was there. And let me tell you that is a hell of a lot of prisons. And if you were counting, you probably counted six prisons, not five, as I stated at the outset. Well, that’s true, but the county jail is technically a jail, not a prison. So, it doesn’t count as a prison. It’s run by the county Mountie and it’s only for the local yokels and the rowdies that get drunk and disorderly in the bars. Now that we’ve got that cleared up. One thing they made us do a lot of at CAS3 was take tours of prisons. Man, oh man, was that ever fun. When you first get to Fort Leavenworth, they give you a briefing about all of the different chain gangs and the different prisoners with the different colored uniforms or jumpsuits. Cuz those guys had different colored jumpsuits on, depending on what they were doing. For example, the guys wearing the blue jumpsuits were considered the most trustworthy crooks. Like you can trust a crook. Yeah. About as far as I can throw a bull elephant. And that ain’t very damn far. That’s how much you can trust a crook. The guys with the blue jumpsuits worked in places like the car wash, and they were not guarded while they were out and about. They did a helluva fine job detailing your car. Now, I had my big old red Chevy van at Fort Leavenworth. That Chevy van had a lot of real estate to get detailed. But I also had some expensive stereo equipment in that van. I didn’t want it to come up missing. My group leader suggested that I tip well to ensure that I get my van back all in one piece. As it turned out, that was a very smart suggestion. The car wash guys took really good care of my van, and I tipped them very well in return. The guys in the blue jumpsuits also worked as baggers at the commissary. It was suggested to tip them well to ensure that your bread and your eggs didn’t get destroyed by your canned goods. Yes. We did have to use the commissary. And we did have to make a somewhat feeble attempt to cook. Unless, of course, we wanted to pay the exorbitant prices that the officers mess charged for meals. I could cook a mean can of beans and I could heat Ramen all day long. And what red-blooded American doesn’t know how to cook hot dogs? Especially, if you’re just throwing them in with the Ramen. Cereal and milk was another specialty of mine. But I digress. Back to the chain gangs and the jumpsuits. There were prisoners dressed in yellow jumpsuits, which were a notch below the blue jumpsuits. They were guarded wherever they went, but not by guards with shotguns and machetes and bazookas and machine guns and shit. Yeah. None of the guards that watched those guys looked like Rambo out on patrol. The guys in the yellow jumpsuits had to do more menial labor like fixing shit in the housing like busted screen doors, leaky pipes, clogged toilets in the barracks rooms, and other assorted facilities repairs. Since they had to go into people’s barracks rooms, and into housing, they needed guards to go with them to make sure they didn’t take shit. Of course, who is to say that the guards were completely honest? Cuz you know all of those guys were privates and specialists. Totally honest and upstanding citizens. Then, there were the guys in the orange jumpsuits. When they were out and about, they had leg chains on, and they were under guard. The guards watching those guys always carried weapons. They were always packing heat. Usually shotguns. I didn’t see anything more serious than that (like an automatic weapon). They also had a side arm. The guys in the orange jumpsuits mowed the grass and chopped all the weeds down and pruned the trees. You know. Your standard area beautification bullshit. Last but not least, were the guys in the brown jumpsuits. Those guys were the baddest of the bad asses. They were the guys that gave meaning to the word maximum in the phrase maximum security. They were the guys that literally made small ones out of big ones. If you don’t know what that means, you don’t want to know. By the way, they didn’t get to use dynamite as an assistive device. Just sledgehammers and pickaxes. The outdoor versions of the brown jumpsuit guys were heavily guarded and heavily chained. And those guards were well armed. By that, I don’t mean they had big muscles in their arms. I mean they had some serious firepower. We were told to stay the hell away from them. They were bad news. There were also indoor versions of the brown jumpsuit dudes. Those were the guys that polished everything inside the damn prison. Now, I have never been in a federal prison before or since I went into the federal prisons at Leavenworth. One thing that impressed the shit out of me was the got-damn floors. Yes Sir. The floors. The floors were concrete, but they shined like glass. You could look down at the goddamn concrete floors and see yourself. That’s how highly polished and buffed they were. And everything was polished like that. You walked into these little cubby-holes that they called cells, and everything shined in there as well. The cells that those guys lived in were as big as a closet. Yeah. Maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but not much. They were not much wider than a closet, with dimensions of about eight feet by eight feet. All I got to say is that I don’t think I could live like that, like one big exercise in futility. Which coincidentally the little over two months I spent at Fort Leavenworth seemed to be.
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