Saw

Well last night I managed to get a cuff stuck on some child molester's hand. I was taking him to the hole for protection (evidently other prisoners don't tend to be big fans of such types, hmm)...one cuff came right off, the other's locking mechanism jammed up. Luckily aging old pedophiles tend to be timid and patient in the face of authority. He didn't complain a bit as numerous officers tried every trick in the book to get the remaining cuff off. We went at it with a half dozen cuff keys, paper clips, from every angle possible before we found a newer cuff key that worked on it. This was moments before someone brought back the big pair of bolt cutters. Chop chop. It was doubtful that those were going to work though (cuffs are crafted so as NOT to be cut by something as simple as bolt cutters) so there was talk of having to send this guy outside the facility somewhere (which would be a big headache because officers would be called in on overtime as escorts, there'd be paperwork, etc.).

Damn, the more I think about it, the more glad I am that we didn't have to resort to all of that.

Revolving

Ahhh...gotta love working the intake for parole violators. The first question you need to ask them when they arrive is if they've been out of prison for more than 24 hours...because if they haven't, they don't need to be re-processed.

What's funny is how many haven't been out of the joint for more than 24 hours...

and they're already getting tossed back in again. We had several such subjects tonight actually. Brilliant.

Bugs

We had a guy try to take apart his own face with a razor last night. Luckily, I wasn't present - I was just the one who got a phone call telling me to go unlock the blood spill porter (prisoner worker trained in hazardous waste clean-up) because he had quite the mess to take care of. I saw photos of the aftermath and read the report.

Prison certainly has the potential to escalate a mentally ill person's condition, or the symptoms of their condition. But then again - so does just about every aspect of life.

Though I've also heard some interesting anecdotes about somewhat crazy people thriving in prison - you just have to be crazy enough to gain the respect of other prisoners, but not so crazy that you can't hold it together for less than a few days at a time.

The lesson is: Being mentally ill means you're probably shit out of luck for proper care, and that's the way it will stay in this country for a long time - so hopefully fate tips your way and you find a way to grapple with the illness, because luck will be all the help you're gonna have.

Bone-hawk

While at work tonight I thought of an incident from a few weeks back that's worth sharing...

I was working in a housing unit one night, bone-hawking (this is the oh-so-clever euphemism for watching prisoners in the shower - something we have to do in order to make sure they get in and get out quick so we can get more in there), when one of them approached me before getting into the shower. He was pissed I hadn't let the gallery porters out to pass cleaning supplies earlier. Before I could even respond he was working himself into a rage, yelling about unsanitary living conditions and humans rights violations and all kinds of shit.

Now I'll occasionally lock in porters because most of the time they don't do much work, don't pass cleaning supplies, but instead spend most of their time passing contraband from one cell to another and kickin' it in front of their buddy's cell. Funny thing is, that night, I hadn't locked in any porters - they were all out, free to do their work, but were so exceptionally lazy and undedicated, had barely passed any brooms or disinfectant.

So this kid starts getting right up in my face, a bit threateningly so. I haven't had a chance to even respond, he's just yelling and telling me about the lawsuits and complaints he's going to file. As he gets more angry and closer to me, I'm edging my hand towards the emergency button on my radio. Suddenly, one of the prisoners in the showers yells the kid's name to get his attention. The kid turns around, looking puzzled, and four or five of the older prisoners just verbally browbeat the kid. They mock him, tell him that the porters are lazy and don't care, tell him that it isn't my fault, and mock him some more. When they finish laughing at him and otherwise belittling him, he goes back to his cell, apparently no longer in the mood for a shower, and locks in.

Bam. One minute I'm wondering what the hell is about to go down - the next minute my newest enemy is crushed and defeated, without any effort from me. Another night driving home feeling confused.

I see the kid every once in a while still. He says sir and has never misbehaved or argued with me over anything since.

Things in the shadows

Noteworthy moments of a darker variety:

5. I am floor officer in the prison hospital. As I walk by a room, the ancient fossil of a prisoner inside beckons me in. He is laying down, his body obscured by various books and medical apparatus stacked on a table alongside his bed. He asks me if he'll ever be able to get the little pair of hobby craft scissors back that were confiscated from him upon his admission to the hospital. As I walk around the table, I see that he is completely naked. In his stomach is a gaping hole, about the size of a golf ball. He is holding a piece of plastic sheeting across it. As I look down into his stomach, the edges of the hole yellow and grotesquely wrinkled, a nurse walks in behind me and scolds him for not wearing his gown.

4. I am assigned as a yard officer one night when a call comes over the radio for someone to escort a prisoner from a housing unit to the hospital. I take the call and when I arrive in the housing unit, I find a big African American prisoner standing there, blood dripping down his face and chin, his shirt covered in it. He has some kind of severe bloody nose. When we walk out of the cell block, I'm feeling talkative and ask him what's going on. He tells me has blood pressure problems and proceeds to have some kind of emotional break down. Before I know it he is a sobbing, blubbering mess, talking about his girlfriend and their child, and how he much he misses them.

I tell him to focus on the little stuff, like maybe seeing a pretty nurse in the hospital, or maybe getting better food, or looking forward to tomorrow's chow or something. Don't look around at the bigger picture, don't think about the outside world, just keep your eyes a few inches in front of you. It actually seems to help him a little.

3. My first ever one-on-one, taking place in the prison hospital. A one-on-one is simply you, the corrections officer, sitting and staring at a prisoner through the window in his door for 7.5 hours (there's a wonderful half-hour long lunch thrown into that 8-hour shift). Every 15 minutes, you log what the prisoner is doing in a log book.

Most one-on-one logbooks look something like this:
1430 - Prisoner is sleeping
1445 - Prisoner is sleeping
1500 - Prisoner sitting up in bed
1515 - Prisoner is sleeping

This first one-on-one of mine is with prisoner Mann, a self-mutilator. He can't weigh more than 115 lbs and his sickly, skeletal little body is a sprawling map of scars. He is balding, so pale he looks bleached and has a huge, grizzled wiry beard. His eyes are wild and darting when I relieve the 1st shift officer but he mostly ignores me.

Eventually, Mann begins picking at his left forearm, it is scabbed and bandaged. Before I know it, he is peeling large strips of fresh skin grafts away from his arm, blooding gushing out. After I call for help, he is chained to the bed using four-point restraints. The nurses bandage him up and they have to roll so much bandage around his left arm that its thickness contrasts weirdly with his rail-thin body, like a big white club.

Throughout my one-on-one he picks at himself with his fingernails, as the restraints provide him just enough movement to do so. First he starts in on the top of his bald head, picking away flakes of dry skin until there's a slow trickle of blood inching down his face. We adjust his restraints, medical staff bandages him, and the fun continues. He picks at his fingers next, opening little cuts in them. Meanwhile, I am on edge like never before. It is not only my first one-on-one, but the bloodshed has me extra nervous. I can't just relax and day-dream, he keeps picking at himself so I'm always alert and wondering when I should radio, yet again, for assistance. To top it off, the prisoner in the room across the hall, who began wretching and vomiting when near the start of my shift, keeps it up for nearly six hours. I hear the wet splashing sounds of puke hitting stainless steel, I hear dry heaving, I hear belching, all sprinkled with occasional moans of pain and cursing. Accompanying the soundtrack are the various, sour smells of his stomach's contents. I didn't think it was possible to vomit for that long. By hour number four of it I'm feeling on the brink of joining him in the puking fun. Mann continues to pick and look around wildly, occasionally struggling weakly against the restraints.

Near the end of the night, after medical stuff injects him with something or another, Mann gets talkative. He assures me that one day, he will force them to amputate his left arm. He sounds bound and determined to get rid of it. There is a massive lump in the flesh up next to his elbow and a nurse tells me it's some sort of clot that is home to numerous pins and needles and other sharp items he has rammed in there. Medical hasn't had time to perform the requisite surgery to extract the many, many items he has lodged throughout the arm.

By shift's end I am so nauseous and on edge that I'm almost physically unable to speak. I drag myself out of the hospital and cannot stop thinking about how Mann's arm looked with the thick pieces of skin peeled away from it.

2. Another one-on-one. This one is in the "secure wing" of the local hospital - where the State rents extra space to house yet more sick/disturbed/injured prisoners.

As the elevator doors open I can hear a loud BOOM every few seconds. It shakes the floor. Once I clear through security into where the prisoners are actually housed, I realize it must be my one-on-one acting up. Officers are on phones, radios, running everywhere. A few are clustered around a prisoner's door. The door's window has blood smeared across it. Soon the prisoner pops into view, standing at the window. Wild-eyed and bloody, he is screaming that they better not take him out of here. He grabs a trashed TV off of his floor and slams it down hard - and I realize where the booming was coming from. Eventually, between long diatribes about how he's going to tear the place up if they send him back to his facility, he picks up shards of the tv screen's glass and shoves it into his biceps. I then notice some pieces already visible, sticking out of various places in his forearms. Some officers are trying to calm him down, others seem intent on riling him up. Medical staff have a gurney and other equipment ready for when we rush the room. Phone calls are still being made - no supervisor is present on the floor so no one can be authorized to do much at this point but try to talk him out of it.

Eventually, he stands in front of the window and begins cutting his throat open with a big piece of glass. He trashes his room a bit more, bleeding everywhere, and soon agrees to come out. We open the door, he walks out and flops down on a gurney where we immediately restrain him. He is screaming and moaning in pain - his arms porcupined with glass shards.

The throat wound turns out to be fairly superficial. We also later find out that he swallowed part of a broken lightbulb, inserted a screw deep into his urethra, and swallowed some safety pins. Anything to make sure he didn't get discharged from the hospital, where he had television and nurses to wait on him and better food, back to his facility.

I look up his record that night and find that he has been in prison since around 17 years old (he is in his early thirties now), and will stay there for life, for 1st degree murder. He spends the next several weeks going through various, insanely expensive procedures to have the various foreign objects removed from his body. I am placed on one-on-one's frequently with him during that time. He likes to ask me what I'd do with a million dollars, and often urges me to tell him about the places I'd go and the things I'd do there. His body is, like Mann's', a latticework of scars from years of these incidents.

1. For this last number I simply offer my journal entry for a day in the hospital:

"I worked the hospital again, which is a pretty depressing and nasty place to be. Prison health care, ya know. On our first round this morning we found that a prisoner had smashed the glass on his isolation room door the night before, so it was all spider-webbed. We tried talking to the prisoner and he just swore and said he'd had enough of this place. Later some higher-ups came to talk to him about it. They said when they left he was calm and collected. A little later he started punching the glass more (it has wiring through it so it doesnt come out easily) and screaming. Then he went after the glass in the observation window. Soon he was ripping out the sink, plumbing, and using a pipe to do more damage. Water was spraying everywhere in his isolation room and flooding the hallway, and also spilling down onto the floor below like crazy.

Okay so far so good. But this guy has tuberculosis for starters, and is also HIV+. So his hands are wrecked from punching wire-reinforced glass for long periods of time, and he is bleeding like crazy. The water started carrying the blood out into the hallway and soon that was spilling onto the floor below - talk about a biohazard risk. The ERT team came in (our SWAT team) in full gear and gassed him (tuberculosis isolation rooms are designed to filter and isolate the air inside so it was perfect for getting him without the gas spreading through the hospital) then hauled him out. He left a long trail of blood all the way up to the next floor where they put him in a room designed to house rowdy prisoners (nothin breaks, everything reinforced, etc.). We were slipping in his HIV blood in the hallway and soon I had to suit up and help hold him down. He was spitting and biting and going absolutely nuts for a full hour and a half. We got him drugged up and restrained to the bed. Later we had to deal with feeding him, having doctors stitch him up, give him a tetanus shot, bathroom, etc. - all of which isnt easy when you're trying to keep him mostly restrained and under control. I saw ERT members get spit in their faces, all that. Not good when it's HIV+.

Very very violent crazy day. I left out the story about the guy with a long-infected gunshot wound on his leg (ever seen an oozing calf muscle without the top layer of flesh part on it?) and tales of struggling with many other prisoners while nurses attended to them. What a job man. I'm going to go wash my hands for the ten millionth time."


Plenty more such incidents to be added to the list...

A few misconceptions about the job...

1. Guards carry guns or some type of weaponry.
Nope, we are armed only with a pen and our communication skills. Though we are outnumbered by ridiculous amounts at any given time (and the ratio of prisoners to guards is always getting worse), there is the very real concern that any weapon we had could/would be taken from us and used to devastating effect. While we are all trained with rifles, pistols, and shotguns - they are only used in limited situations, e.g. transporting prisoners, riots/disturbances, and in towers cannot be accessed by prisoners.

The pen can be devastating though. Written discipline can mean that instead of being released next month and finally getting to hug your sweety, see your kids, roll with your boys - you get to sit in a cramped cell for another year. I've used it several times already to great effect.

2. Prisoners are constantly raping each other
Not really. In our facility it is extremely rare. It's so overcrowded that shower time means we herd you in, give you a few minutes to suds up and rinse off, then we're shooing you out so another group can shower. Plus it's the reception center so prisoners haven't been there long enough to start finding alternate ways to satisfy urges. YMMV at other joints.

Spreading the misery

This will be my place to vent some of the craziness and frustration that stems from my job: prison guard.

Most prison guards these days want to be called "corrections officers" or some variation thereof, to lend a sense of professionalism to their occupation, but I tend to stick with the old-school title. It's just a name and the layman seems less confused by the traditional name anyway.

I work in a maximum security, level V state penitentiary. It is massive, sprawling, a city of its own. A lot happens behind the walls, on a very very regular basis, that would shock the hell out of most people. My facility is overcrowded, full of offenders of every persuasion and from every demographic (though they are predominantly young and African American), and is also the reception center for all new male prisoners in the state. We house over 2000 prisoners at a given time, and have about a 3-month turnover rate. So by August, it will be an entirely new group of fun-lovin', friendly fellas behind the razor wire than are there right now. The good times are sure to keep a-comin'.