Leavenworth no picnic for Vick
Federal prison was designed to intimidate convicts
KANSAS CITY STAR
Published on: 01/14/08
Leavenworth, Kan. _ A UPS van zooms along the four-lane road through the cold winter afternoon. A woman in a black jumpsuit jogs by to the soundtrack on her iPod, never even looking to her left at one of the country's most notorious prisons.
A man in a red Dodge truck goes through Woody's Car Wash, putting his quarters into the machine, enjoying the normalcy that's now gone from Michael Vick's life. From star Falcons quarterback No. 7 to prisoner No. 33765-183, stuck serving a 23-month sentence over that barbed-wire fence and 40-foot wall, past the guards, and through the gates.
He is PETA's public enemy No. 1, by far the most-talked-about man in the NFL over the last year. He's been transferred here to the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., 35 miles northwest of Kansas City, where they're used to superstar convicts.
Hoping to create a sense of awe and fear in convicts, architects designed the prison to look like the U.S. Capitol. Its cells have housed a who's who of convicts, from Machine Gun Kelly to the Birdman of Alcatraz to Leonard Peltier.
Over that fence and wall, past the guards and gates, it will probably be impossible for Vick to truly be treated like the other inmates. He will be asked for autographs and singled out for fights. He will be given first dibs on the weight bench and randomly told to get to the back of the line at supper time.
Take it from someone who knows, the only other NFL player to spend time here.
"He's got to just stay to himself and swallow it," says Byron "Bam" Morris, a Leavenworth prisoner during 2000-03 and a Chiefs running back in the late 1990s. "If you interact with everybody, eventually something's going to happen.
"Because everybody wanna try the football player."
Monte Johnson, the former Kansas athletic director, once had a friend locked up in Leavenworth for five years and four months. Johnson says he visited 192 times.
When he talks about it, the hair on his arms stand up.
"It's the closest thing to what I imagine hell would be," he says.
The prison Johnson and Morris remember, the one worthy of the In Cold Blood killers, no longer exists in some ways. To cut costs and because the design was somewhat outdated, the government downgraded Leavenworth to a medium-security joint in 2005.
LINK
http://www.ajc.com/falcons/content/s...jail_0115.html
Leavenworth no picnic for Vick
Leavenworth no picnic for Vick
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