“Some people can’t understand why anyone would choose to work in a prison,” Warden Matthews explained one afternoon. “They just figure we can’t get jobs anywhere else, but I believe it takes a certain calling just like the ministry takes a certain calling. In fact, I think this is my calling. I’ve always believed that deep down, I am doing exactly what I was supposed to do. My profession is also my ministry.”
It was not odd for Matthews to describe his job as a ministry. His grandparents had raised him, and Matthews’s grandfather was a self-trained Baptist preacher. During the day, the old man worked as a foreman in the Florida citrus groves. At night, he preached. Most nights, his grandson was with him.
“Many times I was the only kid in church. Sometimes I was the usher, other times I would recite verses from the Bible,” Matthews recalled. But as he got older, Matthews began to resent being dragged to church. “I promised myself that I’d never force my children to attend church,” he said. Still, he and his family were regular members of a Baptist congregation in Leavenworth. “I feel I’m missing something if I don’t go to church each Sunday. I feel guilty.”
As a child growing up in segregated Fort Pierce, Florida, the only white man that Matthews ever spoke to was an insurance agent who came by each week to personally collect a few dollars in premiums. At one point, Matthews told his grandmother that he wanted to be a state policeman when he grew up because he liked their uniforms. She laughed. “Honey, only white people can be state policemen,” she told him. Matthews immediately put the idea out of his mind.
Later, in the 1960s when Martin Luther King, Jr., was being jailed, civil-rights workers were being slain, and Southern white sheriffs were unleashing attack dogs and firing water hoses at blacks as they demonstrated against segregation, Matthews told his grandparents that whites seemed more like devils than human beings. They corrected him. It was just as wrong to judge white people by the color of their skin as it was for whites to judge blacks, he was told. In his grandparents’ house, people were judged according to whether they were good or evil, moral or immoral. Race had nothing to do with it.
Matthews enlisted in the air force after high school because he couldn’t afford college. Four years later, with help from the GI bill, he enrolled at Florida A & M University, a predominantly black school in Tallahassee. He didn’t have any idea what he wanted to major in, but when he was a sophomore, an event at the Attica State Correctional Facility in New York changed that.
On September 9, 1971, inmates at Attica rioted. Four days later, the racially motivated uprising ended when 1,500 state police and other law-enforcement officers staged an air and ground attack on the inmate-controlled prison. Nine guards being held hostage and twenty-eight prisoners were killed during the melee. Although Attica was a state prison, Bureau Director Norman Carlson would later describe it as a “watershed” in the corrections field. “Suddenly, the entire country became interested in prison reform and started demanding changes.”
Attica had exploded, in part, because nearly all of the guards were white and many of its prisoners were black. The bureau, Carlson realized, was also largely white. In 1970, 93 percent of its employees were white, while 65 percent of its inmates were white, and 35 percent were minorities. Carlson launched an aggressive minority-recruitment campaign and Gerald M. Farkas, an associate warden at a minimum-security prison in Tallahassee, turned to Florida A & M University for recruits. Matthews was the first student Farkas went after.
“Farkas was a smooth, sophisticated, articulate guy,” Matthews recalled. “He dressed sharp, spoke well, and was intelligent. He changed my image, because before that I figured prison guards were a bunch of knuckle-draggers.” Matthews went to work at the prison as a summer intern and became hooked.
Years later Matthews would describe Farkas as his mentor when he first joined the bureau. At the time, Farkas was an oddity. The son of a prominent, well-to-do Jewish family from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Farkas had set out to study medicine in college, but had become fascinated with the criminal mind and the growing belief that convicts could be cured. The idea didn’t seem farfetched in the idealistic 1950s. After all, Jonas Salk had developed a vaccine for polio, the space age was dawning, and everything seemed possible. Farkas abandoned his medical studies, earned a master’s degree in the new field of “correctional management,” and, much to his family’s dismay, went to work in a state prison as a guard. Farkas was convinced that communication, not brute force, was the key to prison management, but he found few prison officials willing to listen. “No one saw much value in communication when I first started out,” Farkas recalled. “Most prisons operated under the Rule of Silence, which meant convicts couldn’t speak unless a guard asked them a direct question.”
Farkas joined the bureau because it paid more than state prisons did, and when Carlson became director in 1970, he brought Farkas to Washington for a two-year stint as his executive assistant. Carlson then sent Farkas to Tallahassee, and later as warden to the penitentiary in Lompoc before bringing him back to Washington to oversee UNICOR, the prison industries program. Until he retired in late 1988, the liberal Farkas remained an eccentric in the ultra-conservative bureau. He never tired of advocating communication rather than force in dealing with inmates. The notepad for inmate complaints that Matthews always carried was a testament to Farkas’s teaching.
After Matthews graduated from college, he moved to Terre Haute, Indiana, to attend graduate school. Farkas made certain that the penitentiary there hired Matthews full-time as soon as he finished his degree. At Terre Haute, Matthews was confronted for the first time with accusations from black inmates of “selling out to whitey.”
“At first, it bothered me, but I just didn’t buy it,” he recalled. “I’ve always believed there should be a consequence to your actions. You shouldn’t be able to weasel your way out of something simply because of your race or by claiming that you were poor or that you had a lousy home. I’ve always believed in following the law.”
Farkas had told Carlson about Matthews, and the director made certain Matthews was on a fast track. “The thing I liked about Bob Matthews was that he never tried to use the fact that he was black to get ahead,” Carlson recalled later. “But I knew our minority-recruitment program wouldn’t work unless blacks and other minorities saw that they had a future in the bureau, and the best way to show that was by promoting minorities as fast as possible into top jobs. Bob was one of the best minorities we had, so I promoted him quickly.”
Matthews was named the warden at the prison in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1981, after being in the bureau only eight years. His meteoric rise outraged some older whites who were passed over. Matthews reacted by working harder than ever.
In February 1983, Carlson told Matthews that the Reagan administration, smarting from ongoing charges of racism, wanted to appoint a black as the U.S. marshal in Washington, D.C., the largest marshal’s office in the country. The White House had asked for Carlson’s help because it knew that he had actively recruited and trained minorities in the bureau. Carlson had recommended Matthews. But he cautioned the young warden about taking the job. The U.S. marshal and his deputies were supposed to provide security in the district’s courtrooms, take care of prisoners awaiting trial, track down anyone who had escaped or not shown up for trial, and serve eviction notices for landlords. But the office was in disarray. The previous U.S. marshal had lasted only two weeks before being fired by the White House, federal judges claimed the deputy marshals frequently brought the wrong defendants to court or mistakenly freed prisoners, and a ten-month probe by the FBI had revealed that some deputies had accepted bribes from landlords in return for short-cutting the eviction process.
Matthews agreed to accept the appointment, even though it meant transferring from the bureau to another agency within the Justice Department.
“Robert Matthews was walking into a lion’s den,” recalled Roger Ray, now the U.S. marshal in the eastern district of Virginia, who was brought in to serve as Matthews’s top deputy. “Can you imagine how the staff felt when they were told that someone from the Bureau of Prisons was coming in to clean up a federal marshal’s office? Who the hell did he think he was?”
On the first day, nearly all 106 employees called in sick. Ray telephoned deputies in Virginia for help. Matthews was unfazed.
“Bob called all of us in top management into his office one day and told us to write out our goals. Everyone just looked at each other and wondered what the hell this guy was talking about, because none of us had ever been asked to do that before,” said Ray. The next afternoon, Matthews asked each of them what he had done to meet those objectives. Every day after that, in his afternoon close-out sessions, he asked them for an accounting of that day’s activities and how they had met their goals. He was applying the identical techniques to the marshal’s office that he had learned as a warden, the same procedures that he would later use at Leavenworth. “Bob wanted action. He wanted progress, and he demanded perfection, and if you didn’t want to give one hundred percent, he got rid of you,” Ray said.
After several turbulent months, the marshal’s office started operating smoothly. Morale was good. The office was performing its various jobs well. Even the old, dirty cells where prisoners were held by marshals before trials had been cleaned and painted. “He was an absolute stickler for sanitation and renovation,” recalled Ray.
Despite the improvements, Matthews was still not satisfied. He decided to reduce the office’s five-year backlog of unserved eviction notices. Thousands of D.C. residents were living in apartments and houses without paying their rent because their landlords couldn’t get the federal marshals to serve eviction papers. It was an unpleasant, sometimes dangerous task and it had always had a low priority in the office. During the spring of 1984, Matthews devised a plan to serve notices on three thousand tenants. The office had been serving less than one eviction notice per week, and he intended to average three hundred. A special crew of heavily armed U.S. marshals wearing bulletproof vests marched up to the doors of the rental properties and began serving notices to stunned tenants. As the marshals stood by, crews hired by the landlords dragged the tenants’ personal belongings into the street. One tenant was so upset that he fired a shotgun through the locked door of his apartment, killing a landlord. The murder made front-page news, and tenant groups protested to the mayor, but Matthews refused to budge.
“The worst evictions,” recalled Matthews, who watched several of them, “were the ones that involved small kids. Sometimes the kids were home alone and we had to move them and their stuff outside. Other times the kids would come home from school and find their stuff piled by the street curb. That was hard for me to handle.”
Still, he continued his campaign. “I had raised my right hand and pledged to follow the law, and what I was doing was the law. I was acting in my official capacity. I had to get those notices served and that’s what I did.”
Once tenants realized that they might be evicted, hundreds flocked to pay their overdue bills. The media attention subsided and the five-year backlog was eliminated in four months.
In January 1985, Matthews voluntarily resigned as marshal and returned to the bureau. The White House, stunned by his performance, awarded him the highest honor given by the Justice Department for public service.
At the Hot House, Matthews knew that guards didn’t like his focus on sanitation and inmate communication. But he had dealt with disgruntled employees before, especially in the U.S. marshal’s office. “There is always anxiety during my first year, because I have specific goals that I want to accomplish, and while it is not my intent, some of the staff aren’t going to like or understand those goals,” he explained. “But I am certain that over time they will see that what I am doing is in the best interests of everyone.”
At Benny’s the guards weren’t so sure.