Jimmy Hoffa

It seems to be conventional wisdon that if and when significant numbers of white collar criminals find their way into the nation's prisons, the public might be forced finally into acting upon calls for prison reform.

James R. "Jimmy" Hoffa is one of the few people considered more-or-less successful who has actually served time--for him, five years in Lewisburg, Pa., federal prison. Hoffa has formed a new prison reform organization called the National Association for Justice (NAJ) since his release in December 1971, and he has been traveling around the country promoting it.

The former president of the two-million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters was in Boston recently pressing the message of his new-found cause onto, it seemed, anyone who would listen, and probably many who didn't. The Crimson listened, mostly in Hoffa's limousine, between a speech and reception in Andover and a dinner in downtown Boston.

Hoffa articulates well the rhetoric of liberal prison reform. "We [NAJ] believe that the prison cannot be as large as they are because of the lack of attention given to the individual. We further believe there should be classification of prisoners so they will be compatible with each other in background, education, etc. We believe that the majority of prisoners should be released on parole within a reasonable period of time so they are not indoctrinated into the criminal breeding yard. Hospitalization, recreation, education should all be improved.

"And most of the people in prison, if they were let out, would never commit another crime if they could get a good job." This is standard fare; but it is, of course, worthwhile that Hoffa is publicly adding his own well-known voice and connections with the labor movement to efforts for prison reform.

But it is also disturbing, because it is fundamentally unclear whether Hoffa's approach grapples with some of the real problems confronting prisoners and ex-cons. This does not mean that Hoffa is insincere about what he says, but more that Hoffa has not shared, or allowed himself to share, the problems with which most prisoners, and therefore prison reformers, must deal.

Talking to Hoffa, it becomes clear that he regards his five years in stir as simply an unpleasant interlude, a necessary evil in the normal course of his life. His ability to do this, and the assurance he had that his family, money, and reputation with the Teamster rank-and-file would be waiting for him when he got out meant that he was able to avoid embarassing questions about society and probably about himself.

This security has allowed Hoffa to minimize the personal impact of prison on himself, to deny that the indignity of being in prison actually affected him deeply. "I don't get harassed by nobody in or out of prison. I'm not the kind of a fellow who people want to harass, because I can get along with anybody. But I can disagree with anybody and if it comes to a disagreement I won't be second."

Hoffa is quick to jump to the defense of the system in which he was, after all, a conspicuous success. "I believe in free enterprise 100 per cent. Nothing better in the whole world. You couldn't change me in a hundred years upon that belief."

On a personal level as well, Hoffa insists, and it is not hard to believe, that prison had remarkably little effect on him. Did he ever lose confidence in himself? Did he ever get pushed around? Hoffa answers unequivocably "no." "I wasn't pushed around," he says. "I don't allow nobody to push me around. I had my arguments in prison with the officials for that very reason. When they found out my position, found out what I was willing to do, I wasn't pushed around by nobody." But he denies that this was special treatment. "I'm willing to take whatever comes to straighten [a situation] out; most people are not; I am."

Prison officials didn't search Hoffa's cell, didn't give him trivial orders or try to frame him, Hoffa says, although for the first 15 months of his imprisonment, he worked separately from the rest of the inmates, stuffing mattresses alone in a room.

Hoffa seems to regard the whole unpleasantness of prison life as a personal affront, as an attack on his ego. He considers his conviction on jury-tampering and mail fraud charges the result of a vendetta. Firstly, "I say I am not guilty of the crimes I was charged with, but they used a vehicle of public relations to deny me a fair trial," Hoffa says. He believes Robert Kennedy was out to get him, and his ultimate conviction was the result of the government's single-minded desire to see him put away. And Hoffa is not entirely self-serving in this. People who have studied the Justice Department under Kennedy, particularly Victor Navasky, acknowledge that Kennedy had a long-time grudge against Hoffa, dating from hearings before the McClellan Committee of the Senate in the late '50s. Kennedy served as counsel to the committee.

Hoffa says Kennedy was behind some of the discriminatory treatment he got in Lewisburg, particularly relating to job assignments. When it was pointed out that Ramsey Clark, and not Kennedy, was Attorney General when Hoffa began his prison sentence in 1967, he launched into a diatribe, saying that Clark was just a "puppet" of Kennedy (who was then a Senator from New York). Hoffa cited the Congressional Record, a couple of books and the reporter's common sense to try to bury what had been a small slip, but, importantly, a slip related to Bobby Kennedy: as if catching the mistake was somehow an attack on himself as a person.

But beyond that, Hoffa is trying to restructure his life to regain the office he held before his jailing, and he is suing in a Washington court to have the restrictions on union activity that are written into his parole lifted.

President Nixon commuted Hoffa's sentence, but the parole granted to him bars him from holding union office until 1980. Hoffa believes that former presidential aide Charles Colson was behind the ruling.

"I left the prison December 22, 1971," he says, "when I signed the commutation order that placed me on restriction until March 10, 1973, and I did not learn until the following day of the 1980 restriction. I refused to sign it. I don't think it's enforceable nor can they, 11 days later, issue something that wasn't part of what I signed.."

"We have reason to believe that Colson was the motivating factor in the 1980 provision that was recommended to the president. We also believe he obtained employment as counsel to the Teamsters because he co-operated with [Frank] Fitzsimmons [the current Teamsters president] on this issue."

Hoffa's release and the large contributions that the Temaster's union made to Nixon's re-election campaign are being investigated by the Watergate Special Prosecutors office, recent news reports have said.

But Hoffa still believes in Nixon. "I guess he [Colson] hoodwinked Nixon," he says. Hoffa also defends Nixon on Watergate, saying that the "expose has almost wrecked the entire country."

Similarly, Hoffa sweepingly condemns government transgressions of civil liberties, but seems reluctant to assign blame. He opposes wiretapping, but is unwilling to condemn the Nixon administration directly for asserting its unlimited authority to wiretap without court order: "I'm opposed to all wiretapping, I'm opposed to room bugging, I'm opposed to any kind of spy system against people in this country.

"There's no question that the U.S. is a police state. They've got more investigatory bodies and inquisitory bodies here in this country in the guise of law than anywhere else in the world," Hoffa says, but he is unwilling to make the connection between his case and the ones of leftist political prisoners, one of whom, Philip Berrigan, was in Lewisburg with him.

"I don't compare myself to people who destroy draft records. I don't identify with people who are seeking self-aggrandizement through their acts. I don't compare myself with them."

Berrigan is "a complete stone nut. He got me in trouble for trying to help him and got himself in trouble because he wouldn't recognize the fact that he was a prisoner."

Though Hoffa terms himself a political prisoner, and it is evident that he shares many of the left's criticisms of Gestapo-like tactics, he is unwilling to acknowledge that their use in this country can be politically motivated. He seems to believe all problems are solvable by traditional liberal means, that "social changes come about only by the better education of people and by the way which they learn to live within the education they secure."

While from his perspective such a view is understandable, in the context of the prison reform movement, it is questionable. Most prisoners are not successful people and prison just reinforces a person's lack of self-worth. What Hoffa proposes is attractive, and if adopted would certainly be helpful--jobs and parole and improved facilities are fine.

But to maintain, and probably rightly, that prison had so little effect on himself personally, that his five years did not call into question more fundamental beliefs, simply promotes mechanistic solutions to what is at heart a very complex social problem. For Hoffa the case for prison reform is so intimately tied up with his own ego, that calling for changes in the prison system acts out revenge and does not reflect real political beliefs. Hoffa is playing ego politics; the prison kick comprises one part of his own rehabilitation as a leader and as a tough guy.