Women in Prison: Sisterhood Sometimes Penetrates the Bars : At Isolated Federal Institution in W. Va., Inmates Miss Family

Colonial cottages on spacious grounds and lovely scenery greeted Liz when she arrived in West Virginia. A matronly woman held out her arms and said: “Come on in, sweetie.”

Come on in, that was, to serve your 30-year sentence in the place to be if you’re in that kind of a jam. For this was Liz’s welcome to the Federal Correctional Institute at Alderson, the federal government’s only all-women’s prison.

Here, where the Greenbrier River winds among rolling hills, the affluent come to take mineral waters, and farmers bring livestock to market, Liz curls up on the bed in her tiny private room. There’s a fluffy pink rug. Bits of beads and ribbons are draped around the mirror. Snapshots are pinned to the wall, reminders of the daughters Liz left behind in far-off Texas.

Neither Liz nor the prison will specify her offense. “In this place,” Liz said, “you can forget.”

Not entirely.

“This is a prison,” said Jean Gump, a pacifist who took a sledgehammer to a missile silo and must spend eight years away from her 12 children.

The head counts, homosexuality, contraband, snitching, inspections, guards, isolation, lack of privacy, lack of control all are typical of prison life.

Added to that are the absent children.

A social worker said about 80% of the women at Alderson are mothers.

“What happens to the children, the families of the women here, is devastating,” Gump said.

Things go wrong at home. The children get into trouble. They go to jail. Their mothers sit helpless in prison, cut off by the same mountains that make the view so pretty.

“It is so heartbreaking,” another inmate said. “Everyone in the visiting room starts crying. It must be the most intense torture there is--the intense pain of being emotionally helpless.”

Liz’s daughters are growing into strangers. She copes, she said, by not thinking about it.

“You can’t be a mother. You try to be a friend,” said Dora Brown, serving life for murder.

Brown’s husband ran off with a younger woman and left her three sons to fend for themselves. They lasted a month before they got into trouble. Two were made wards of the state. She has seen them twice in the last year.

Sometimes there is sisterhood.

“You’ll see it in people that you think, ‘My God, they’re so violent, they’re so cold, they’re so everything.’ All of a sudden this one woman is going to have a need, and then the goofy one you think is so nuts responds,” Gump said.

“It is so good. It is just so good. You can’t count on it, but it manifests itself.”

But mostly the women shut their turmoil inside. If they didn’t, Brown said, “it would be a mess around here.”

Easygoing as life is in Alderson, compared to other prisons, temptation to escape remains. Charles Manson disciple Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme escaped last Christmas, when she thought her cult guru, also in prison, had cancer, and “I just had to get out.” She was captured after three days. Fromme was sentenced in an assassination attempt on then-President Gerald R. Ford.

Another inmate fled in the winter of 1984 to reach the bedside of her ailing father. Her frozen body was found in an abandoned feed store about a mile from the prison six weeks later.

Alderson’s warden is Ronald Burkhart. At some federal prisons, he said, you can cut the tension with a knife.

“Here, the tone is more relaxed,” he said. “I don’t want it to be tense.”

Sees Staff as First Wall

Burkhart plays it cool. Eighteen prisoners escaped the year he arrived, 1984; five fled last year and only one so far this year.

“Our first wall is our staff,” he said. “Friendly but not familiar.”

More relaxed inmates mean fewer escapes.

When nuclear disarmament radical Helen Woodson tried to “escape” in March, she hung an “end war” banner on the prison fence, walked through the outer gate and poured white paint on the parking lot.

Guards marched her back in. The warden stayed calm.

“She said: ‘I escaped, didn’t I?’ And I said: ‘No, you didn’t,’ ” Burkhart said.

Security at Alderson is not oppressive. On the grounds, maximum security murderers, some holding hands, are chatting with minimum-security embezzlers beneath majestic oaks.

The only gun visible is one carried by a guard who patrols the 159-acre penitentiary’s perimeter, walking along a chain-link fence that doesn’t always keep neighborhood dogs out.

Beyond, however, are the mountains and miles and miles of woods, which make a stroll to freedom much less inviting.

The isolation that keeps prisoners in also keeps their families out.

‘Remoteness Is Barrier’

“The remoteness is a real barrier,” said John Vodicka, who with his wife runs a hospitality house for the few inmate relatives who make the journey to this rural corner of West Virginia, where Greenbrier, Summers and Monroe counties meet.

Amtrak pulls through Alderson, about a mile down the road from the prison, three times a week. A van brings families from Washington twice a month. The only other way is by car.

Last Thanksgiving, Vodicka said, only 65 of the 812 inmates received visitors.

The geographic isolation grates. Alderson’s inmate population is 45% black and 24% Latino. More than 150 inmates are Colombians, and many of the women don’t speak English. Most are from big cities.

Their relatives often find the Alderson environment--rural and 95% white--puzzling.

It’s a tolerant town, however, one of those rare communities that actually wanted the prison there and donated land for it. “I’ve been really impressed with how friendly Alderson is,” said Vodicka’s wife, Dee.

All-Female Firefighters

Inmates, in fact, march in Alderson’s holiday parade. They provide fire protection too; the prison runs the nation’s only all-female firefighting force. Competition is keen among inmates for the tough training required, in part because they then live in a cottage set aside for the firefighters and emergency medical technicians.

The women take special delight in telling about the time they arrived at the scene of a car accident and treated the injured child of a prison guard.

In this rather unusual coexistence, town folk don’t worry when the prison whistle sounds an occasional escape alert.

“You just about expect it,” said a waitress at the Alderson Livestock Market’s coffee bar. “Mostly I never think about it. If it were men, you’d think of more hardened criminals. If a man escapes, you have to watch for it. But women. . . . “

Among the better-known prisoners at Alderson have been Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, serving time for their World War II activities on behalf of the nation’s enemies. Singer Billie Holiday was there once on a drug conviction.

Not Trouble Free

No prison is wholly trouble free. In 1979, inmates complained of mistreatment by guards and inadequate health care. One woman told a civil rights task force that prison doctors didn’t discover her pregnancy until she gave birth to twins, one alive and one stillborn.

In 1982, Haitian refugees--held there while the federal government tried to figure out what to do with them--waged a hunger strike and two were force-fed.

Lesbianism is said to be widespread, but as one former warden noted, “Homosexuality in a women’s institution doesn’t take the same (violent) form it often does in a male facility.”

Alderson was unusual from its beginnings in 1927. Inmates in white gloves served tea and presented plays under the first warden, Supt. Mary B. Harris, who once taught Latin at a girl’s finishing school in Chicago. In typical style, she posed for her warden’s portrait in pearls, fur stole and white, elbow-length gloves.

When the modern Alderson staged a show in 1981, it appeared on TV’s “The Games People Play,” with inmates and staff competing over an obstacle course and criminal lawyer F. Lee Bailey serving as the commentator.

Some to Be Moved

Despite Alderson’s relative sedateness, there are violent prisoners there, and for such hard-core inmates the end of life there is approaching. The Bureau of Prisons is creating a second all-women penitentiary in Lexington, Ky., where violent-prone offenders will be housed in an underground complex. Alderson will be converted to a “camp.”

Inmates at Alderson hate the idea of being transferred to another prison, which is a considerable incentive for good behavior.

Liz, the 30-year termer, said: “If they write a how-to book on prison, the first thing it should say is, ‘If you have to go to jail, ask for Alderson.’ ”