Corruption Officer

by Gary L. Heyward

  When she’s gone, I unlock Flocko’s cell and he immediately comes to ask me if I want him to take care of this fool. I tell him no, because it’s already been taken care of. By midday our business is going smooth as usual, then I hear my supervisor yell, “On the gate!” I open the gate to see the captain enter with two other “come-walk-with-mes.” When I see this I know that the fix is in and they are here to aid the captain with the transfer of the rude inmate, a transfer where there will be resistance. I unlock the troublemaker’s cell and give the captain his locator card. When the inmate comes up the walkway I hear him bragging to the other inmates, telling them that he’s a handful and that he’s no walk in the park. Then he asks me where he is going. I just look at him as if I am giving him his last rites. Then with a cocky attitude he says, “It don’t matter because I am going to eat wherever I go.” He then looks at the captain and the hired help and yells back to the other inmates in the area, “Y’all see how they have to come get me! They got the whole goon squad out here for ya boy!” Then he laughs, picks up his bags, and tells the captain, “Let’s go!”

  They leave and I go to adjust my books, subtracting the inmate off my total count. Suddenly I hear, “CO! CO! On the gate!” I get up to see what’s going on, thinking that the inmate must have found out where he is heading and decided to put up a fight. I run to my gate and open it, ready to assist, when I see that it is not my inmate that was yelling. It is another inmate trying to get in the housing area across the hall from mine. The crazy thing is that he is covered in blood from his shirt to his pants. He jerks on the bars frantically, all the while looking over his shoulder like he is running from someone. I thought that he had gotten jumped by some inmates and that they were in hot pursuit.

  Another officer comes to the gate and sees the inmate is covered in blood and decides not to let him in because he does not know what is going on. Whatever happened went bad. Then another captain and some officers come running out of a nearby exit and tackle the inmate to the ground and put cuffs on him. Then they apply the “pounce and drag technique” to his ass all the way down the hall. I’m curious as to what happened. Then I get a call from the main control room for me to lock my inmates back in because the jail is going on lockdown. I ask the frantic officer on the other end what had happened and she says, “An inmate was just killed in the housing area where Officer Bryant was working.”

  CHAPTER 28

  TACTICAL SEARCH OPERATION

  “On the gate!” a captain from another jail calls out to me so I can open it for him and his search team.

  Due to the murder that had occurred we were now having a TSO (tactical search operation). That’s when officers from one jail get to visit another jail and catch up with officers that they have not seen in a long time. Oh, and they come to wreak havoc and search the jail, too. It’s a joint effort to search the entire jail, to shake up the inmates and to let them know that we are not going to tolerate this kind of behavior.

  I open the gate. I’m not stressing, because I made Flocko give me all the pouches so that I could put them where I know TSO won’t search—in my jacket or in the officers’ station. I see a few familiar faces. They nod to me. I nod back as they go and line up in front of the inmates’ cells. The men come in first while the females stay outside and wait. The men have to respectfully and professionally strip-search the male inmates. As I crack open the cells all you hear is officers giving the inmates orders politely. “Strip, muthafucka! Hand me your clothing one piece at a time and don’t shake shit out because if you fling anything my way you got a problem.” After the clothing is searched comes the most embarrassing and humiliating part for the inmate, the cavity search. An officer orders an inmate to “open ya cocksucker [mouth] and stick out ya ball licker [tongue].” The officer says to another officer, “Half these punks are fags anyway.” The officer checks to see if an inmate has any weapons such as razors hiding in his mouth. An inmate has been known to hide as many as twenty-two razors in his mouth, effectively eating and chewing with no problem. Then it’s, “Let me see ya dick beaters [hands].”

  “Wiggle the muthafuckas!”

  “Putcha hands up; let me see ya funky underarms.”

  “Now turn around and bend over and spread ya aasssss cheeks!”

  “Let me see if you’re a lover [been having anal sex] or a fighter [been keeping the wolves up off ya].”

  This maneuver is to see if an inmate has a weapon hiding in his butt. You’d be surprised at what you would find in an inmate’s ass. Some of these guys are used as mules to transport weapons and drugs around the jail. I got to give it to them because it takes a lot of discipline to walk around with stuff in your butt like that. Inmates do this on the regular because in some cases they may have beef with a lot of inmates throughout the prison system and have to keep a weapon in their ass at all times. This is another very important reason not to ever come to jail. You don’t want to have to learn ass control 101 in order to save your ass.

  After all that, the inmate is instructed to get dressed and step outside his cell carrying his mattress. I know that this search is going to be ugly and provoking. ESU (Emergency Service Unit), or the goon squad, as the inmates call it, is on standby for any inmate that felt like he was a grown ass man and did not have to be subjected to this type of treatment. At this time the females enter and it’s a joint effort to destroy everything from pictures to sacred items—I mean everything. The inmates are instructed to raise their hands to speak to a captain if they have any questions about how an officer is tossing their cell. A hand goes up and the captain says, “Putcha fuckin’ hand down. I don’t want to hear shit.” The inmate yells, “But, Captain, that’s my legal work. It took me six months to get it all together to prove my innocence and I have court tomorrow.” The captain responds by yelling, “Extraction!” This lets the ESU know that there is a disorderly inmate who needs to be removed from the area.

  When they move in, the inmate continues to plead his case. They try to cuff him. He starts to fight like he’s fighting for his life, yelling, “I just didn’t want her to destroy my legal paperwork.” At the same time the female officer throws the papers in the middle of the floor among some other items and pours a container of milk over them and keeps it moving as he is beaten and dragged out of the area.

  —

  While the search is happening, officers begin to question what happened.

  “I heard an inmate got murdered,” one female officer tells another while still carrying out the search process.

  “Yeah, and the inmate who did it did not belong inside that housing area,” another officer responds while throwing the contents of an inmate’s cell out into the corridor.

  “How the fuck did that happen?” the other officer asks.

  Then a captain walks up and joins the conversation.

  “It looks like a hit of some sort was carried out.”

  The other officer’s eyebrows go up and he asks, “How did an inmate from another housing area get inside an area where he doesn’t belong to kill another inmate?”

  “I got one better than that. The only reason the murderer got caught was because he could not get inside his own housing area after he committed the murder. So not only did he get in but how did he get out without anybody seeing him?” says the captain.

  “Ain’t we suppose to search the inmates every time they exit and enter a housing area?” an officer asks.

  “Tah, what officer you know does that?”

  CHAPTER 29

  JUICY FRUITS

  “Five, six, seven, eight, and pivot and half step and half step. Come on, girl, you have to move your hips!” says one inmate to another.

  The jail was on lockdown for a couple of days after the killing and there was little to no movement throughout the jail. That made it hard for me and Flocko to get money. So I decided to stay for overtime, which landed me in homosexual housing. I�
��m sitting there as the B officer, being forced to watch a jail rendition of “Rip the Runway.” These inmates are placed in here for their own safety and for the good of the jail. Mainly, we segregate the homosexuals one, so that they will not be abused and raped repeatedly, and two, so that the in-the-closet homo thugs won’t be fighting each other over who is going to wife one of them. It helps to keep the jail calm, so to speak. So I was sitting there while Gerald Davis, aka Geraldine, and Sam Brown, aka Shelly, practiced for a show where they are planning to perform. For who and where, I have no idea, nor do I give a damn. Gay or not, they’re just inmates to me.

  While I was sitting there, an inmate by the name of Briggs approached me. He stood across from me and began talking, more like pleading his case, telling me that just because he’s in this housing area doesn’t mean he’s gay. I just nodded like, Ooookay. Then he continued to explain that he signed in here just to stay in the building so that he wouldn’t be transferred again. I nodded, not really giving a fuck. Then another inmate, seeing that I was approachable to talk to, joined the conversation to give his résumé. His approach to homosexual housing was totally opposite. He said, “Heyward, I just got sentenced to double life for a body and I ain’t never gonna see the streets again. My gun game in the streets is no joke and I suck a mean dick.”

  Check, please!

  He continued, while looking into the TV room at the other inmates, “I gives a fuck about what somebody in the streets think of me? If any of these younguns come in here, I’m taking it. Sheeit, I got a ripe one already. He fought it when he first got here but I broke him and now we’re in love.” I just gave him a look like, “Oh, yeah,” and at that moment the A officer yelled out for me to take a count. Thank you, Jesus. I yelled out for all the inmates to stand still where they were so I could get an accurate count without doing it the right way and having them go stand by their cells. I counted all the ones in the dayroom, then proceeded to walk down the tier, looking inside each cell to count the inmates inside. I made a round and came back to the window of the A station and told her my count and she shook her head, saying that I was off by one. I took another count of the inmates in the dayroom, then went back down the tier to count again, but this time slowly. I was halfway done when I looked inside this one particular cell and saw a bed empty but little drops of what appeared to be blood on the floor. I yelled for the officer to electronically open the cell and she did.

  When I went inside I noticed a trickle of blood coming from under the bed to where I saw the drops. I went to the bed and lifted the blanket up and was stunned at what I saw. There was an inmate under the bed wrapped from head to toe in a sheet with nothing exposed but his buttocks, which had blood dripping from them. I also saw that something was lightly cut into his skin, but I could not make out what it was. I panicked and frantically dragged him from under the bed, hoping that he wasn’t dead. I heard him moan, which was a relief. Then I rolled him over and noticed that his whole head was wrapped, with just his mouth exposed. I could see dried-up semen all around his mouth and I could only imagine what they used him for. I knew also the amount of trouble that I along with the other officer were going to be in if we could not come up with some answers for how we allowed this to happen.

  I slowly unwrapped his head so I could get a look at his face and he started trembling and sobbing at the same time. I think that he thought that I was one of his attackers coming back to do him more harm. When I finally finished unwrapping his head, he looked at me and I just turned away and shook my head. I couldn’t look him in the face because it was the loudmouth kid that had invited the female CO to see his private parts the other day. He began to loosen his arms so that he could finish unwrapping himself. I walked out into the hall and leaned against the wall while he got himself together.

  The A officer yelled out to me, “What’s up? Is there something wrong?” I told her I found the one on the count that I had missed. I stood there contemplating my next move, trying to figure out how I, the B officer, allowed this to happen when I was supposed to make a tour of the area every hour so things like this wouldn’t happen. I didn’t know what to feel right then because I was not directly responsible for him being here but I did nothing to stop it either. Was he a kid who a couple of months ago was out in the city running around disrespecting his moms by not going to school, by not working, smoking blunts all day, being with the wrong crowd, and dealing drugs? Or was he just a good kid with good parents raised in a good home that just got caught up at the wrong place at the wrong time due to peer pressure from his friends? I felt that a lot of these young men that come through here really think that jail is some kind of badge of honor and really don’t realize that they are in here with people that have been transformed to individuals that no longer live by society’s rules. I know that whatever the case was with him, he never thought that he would end up like this.

  “Heyward.” He called my name and I came to the front of his cell.

  Now he was dressed and lying on his bed in a fetal position facing the wall so that I could not see his face. I told him that I was going to call the clinic and get him some medical attention.

  “No, please just get me out of here. I don’t want to go to the clinic because then everybody will know what happened to me and I can’t be in here with that out around the jail,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said, and went to the officers’ station to fill out a sign-out form for him, stating that he was no longer gay and did not want to stay in this housing area.

  I explained briefly what happened to the A officer, and she was more than happy to get him the hell up out of her area, wanting no part of his situation to fall on her.

  Moments later, the captain arrived, and I personally escorted the inmate out of his cell and out of the area. He had his head down and his belongings in a bag draped over his shoulders. Gone was the young vibrant loudmouth gangster from the other day. Gone was the disrespectful penis-flashing individual and gone altogether was the gang-banging, I-can-live-anywhere thug known as J-Murder. In his place was a different person, someone who would probably have mental problems and nightmares for years to come from what he’d just suffered. From now on J-Murder, aka Jamal Thomas, would assume a new name. He would be called “Juicy Fruits” by certain individuals. The reason I know this is that it was carved in his back for bend-over purposes—right above his butt cheeks.

  CHAPTER 30

  BIZ IS BACK

  After leaving the little shop of horrors, a Negro was tired. I felt that they had gotten their five dollars’ worth of work out of me that day. So I made a beeline to the liquor store, then to Bryant’s house. When I got there, Officer Z. Jones, another one of the three amigos, was there. She opened the door for me and gave me a look like, “She’s in bad shape,” referring to Bryant. When I went inside I saw Bryant sitting on a couch located in her kitchen, clutching a bottle of vodka. She looked up at me and I could tell that she had been crying.

  “Get a cup, muthafucka,” she says.

  “I already do,” I tell her, and open the bottle of Hennessy that I bought and was about to drink, when Jones yells at me.

  “Neanderthal, get a cup with some ice. Nobody’s going to be drinking behind you!” she explains.

  Then she climbs over the couch, which actually separates the kitchen from the living room, and goes into the fridge. She yells, “Girl, you don’t have any more ice?” Bryant gets up, opens her hall closet that has a deep freezer and an illegal clothes dryer in it—the kind you’re not supposed to have in the projects. She grabs two metal ice trays by their handles and slams them onto the table, then she grabs my Hennessy bottle right out of my hand and takes it to the head while she looks over at Jones as if to say, “You the only bitch worrying about ice.” Then she flops down on the couch and starts crying. While sobbing she says, “Them muthafuckas trying to take my job! I got kids. How are they going to put this shit all on me?”

 
“What are you talking about? What happened?” Jones asks.

  “Check it, I come to the post and the gate was opened with inmates leaving out going to different services. I walk into the bubble where King and Fran are both sitting in there talking. King was supposed to be on the floor watching the inmates. They know that I’m the meal relief, so I ask them which one of them is going to meal first. Then I hear an inmate yelling, ‘CO! CO! Open the gate!’ I look up and I see some inmates scrambling to their cells and some others standing there staring at this inmate on the door who is trying to get out. I buzz the door so he can get out and he stumbles out and collapses, holding his stomach with blood all over him. I run to his side while Fran called the clinic, and far as I know, King is locking the inmates down so that no one goes anyplace. I am on my knees next to the inmate and . . .” Bryant pauses, weeping uncontrollably, with tears coming down heavily on her face.