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...