Jimmy the Reformer

While Jimmy Hoffa did his stretch at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, the place probably had the bluest-ribbon prisoners' committee ever seen behind U.S. bars. Hoffa organized it informally to hear and act on complaints. It included, according to him, L.B.J.'s former aide, Bobby Baker, serving one to three years for theft, income tax evasion and conspiracy to defraud the Government, and Tammany Leader, Carmine DeSapio, who went to Lewisburg last year for two years on three counts of bribery, as well as a former Army colonel, several businessmen and a Ph.D. Recalls Hoffa: "We were very active. We'd write memos to the warden, memos to the captain, lodge protests, take up grievances, get briefs filed. One kid came up and told me the guard was going to take away his lawbooks. Can you imagine that? I asked the guard what was going on. He said, 'They've got to go.' I told him, 'Look, friend, you touch those books and we'll file a court case so fast it'll make your head swim.'" The lawbooks stayed.

That was the new Hoffa in action. Even while still inside (for fraud and jury tampering), the teamster boss began fighting for the rights of inmates. Ever since President Nixon commuted his sentence last December, after nearly 58 months of a possible 13 years, Hoffa, with not much else to do, has been crusading for prison reform. Under the terms of his commutation, he must stay out of union business until 1980. This week Hoffa returns for sympathetic hearings to Capitol Hill, where in other times he has occasionally been roughly treated. He will appear before a House Judiciary subcommittee on prison reform. Last week, in his $65,000 condominium near Miami Beach, Hoffa talked with TIME Correspondent Dave Beckwith about his new-found passion.

Spray Mace. Lewisburg is one of the best federal prisons, and Hoffa, assigned to a job of recycling old mattresses into new ones, had one of the easier situations. Nevertheless, he hated prison for its deliberately debilitating effect on mind and body. "Everything that goes on is designed to strip you of your manhood. You only get medical attention if you're ready for an operation. The food is horrible. There aren't sufficient exercise facilities, and a lot of people are afraid to expose themselves to possible violence or trouble, so they stay in their cells and vegetate." The violent or troublesome are taken away to solitary confinement in "the hole," where among other refinements, according to Hoffa, "a guard would walk down the corridor and spray Mace at random.

"There was plenty of dope and tranquilizers available; three times a day they'd bring out the pill tray and 200 guys would line up." On the black market, "there was heroin, hashish, marijuana, plenty of it, anything you want as long as you got money, or you can sell your body. They think you will accept the prison because you're allowed to have things like that. But what about the guy who's stabbed by a guy who's on drugs?

"How does the dope get in? There are two entrances. One's for trucks and that's guarded, and one's for visitors and guards. The visitors ain't bringing in the dope so you figure it out. If the prison authorities wanted to cut out the dope smuggling, they could just tell the quarters officers, 'I don't want any more dope coming into this prison.' But they don't."

Hoffa found the guards, who were union men, generally compassionate, but there were disturbing exceptions. "About 85% were O.K., but 10% were overly ambitious, trying to report somebody and get ahead, get a promotion, and they were always causing trouble. Five percent were sadistic, ornery bastards. They had rules, but they'd never hand them out, because if the rules are known to the inmates, then when a guard does something wrong everybody would know it and could stand up for their rights. I pestered one lieutenant to hand out the rules, so one day he handed a few copies around. When the captain came in and found out, he ordered them all picked up."

Manhood. Hoffa agrees with the common view that such treatment does little to rehabilitate a criminal. He also considers prisons responsible for current waves of strikes and violence; two such strikes took place at Lewisburg while he was there, but he did not participate in either. "It's not worth it, but I'll say this. They may beat a strike, but they'll never win it. It gets to the point where the prisoners don't care whether they win or lose. They simply got to show their manhood."

Hoffa urges prison reform on two levels. One, is to put an end to the practice of jailhouse homogeneity as a way of destroying individuality. "They put rapists in with embezzlers, muggers in with draft dodgers, and they wonder why they're in trouble." The second reform concerns money. "You've got to set up training facilities to prepare men for work after release. You've got to train the guards and pay them more. You're going to spend the money somehow, either in police forces, courts, loss of property and lives, or in reform of the prisons."

The union boss, who was turned down three times for parole before his presidential commutation, would also replace parole boards with new ones composed of warden, caseworker, guards--and other prisoners. "Who knows more about a guy than somebody who's lived with him 24 hours a day?"

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