by Mateo Hoke
But, you know, as they learned how to talk, that changed the tone and climate of the unit. I had a day-shift sergeant who was excellent at de-escalating conflict. I had counselors who were excellent at de-
escalating circumstances. We still had conflicts of course. But after a while, when we’d have to do something like a cell extraction, we might only have to go in and get one guy instead of twelve guys at once. We had to do it sometimes because of safety/security issues, a guy cutting himself, or whatever the case may be.
But the uses of force significantly dropped. We went from two instances a week of use of force to months without uses of force. And then as infractions went down, it was easier for inmates to move through the system.
Everybody is affected though. Whether you’re conscious of it or not. You’re always fighting the “guard versus inmate” experience. You’re always fighting that dynamic, a level of social entropy where things fall back into being a jungle. We’ve had a few staff who have actually gone out and entered into PTSD counseling. People who are emotionally precarious can fall off relatively quickly.
PARALLELS TO MY OWN PTSD
One problem was that some offenders would just get stuck in IMUs. The system was set up so that a person would be assigned to intensive management status, max custody.
Inmates sent to IMUs would come in on a level 2 status—that’s where they’d start. If they didn’t have any behavior infractions after thirty days, they’d get a radio, that’s level 3. And sixty days later they’d get a television, that’s level 4. If they didn’t earn any infractions, eventually they’d be moved out of the IMU, maybe back to close custody.
But at any point in that process, if an individual would get an infraction, it would start the clock over again. So if he’s five months into a six-month assignment, and for some reason or another he gets a serious infraction, then he starts over again—now he’s got another six months. By the time he gets caught up in that cycle, one, two, three, four times, all of a sudden he’s lived in a box for three years.
And that has a big effect. I’ve had a lot of opportunities to talk to these guys once they come out. I recognize some of the signs of how it’s affected them, and there are definitely parallels to my own PTSD coming out of a war zone: the discomfort with physical proximity and sensory overload, the lack of confidence, being unsure about expectations or their capacity to meet them, the desire to go back into an environment that they’re familiar with even though it’s profoundly dysfunctional. A lot of times, that person becomes more comfortable in an IMU than in general population. And many times, the clock would run out on someone’s sentence while they’ve been in an IMU for a long time, and then of course we’d open the door and drop him off on a street corner, and he’d be completely unprepared.
THE MISSION IS THE REDUCTION OF VICTIMS
From 2003 through 2013, Steve worked to revamp the Clallam Bay IMU system, including introducing new programming and more collaborative work with prison psychologists. In 2008, he began developing and implementing a transition program designed to help inmates in IMUs prepare for life in general population. From 2013 to 2016, Steve was coordinator of a nine-month intensive transition program, designed to help prepare people held in maximum-security for life after prison.
I retired in November 2016. It surprised me that I lived long enough for that. Now I’ve got grandkids, a big boat, a good wife. I still volunteer out at the prison, at Clallam Bay. I’ve been alternating with the chaplain on Sunday nights. I coordinate a Bible study on Tuesdays. It’s something I’ve been doing ever since I first volunteered out at Clallam Bay in the 1980s.
One of the reasons I left the IMU and took over supervision of the intensive training program was that a few staff engaged in abuses and would lie about it, then cry to the union when it was addressed. It wears you down. Some people I worked with thought I was too much into giving classes and talking to inmates. But it was really about future victims. That’s what I kept in mind. The changes in these men, when they got out and quit making victims, the good for them personally is almost a side thing.
You can punish people for what they did or work with them now and possibly eliminate or minimize the potential for victims in the future. We have virtually total control over someone’s life while he’s incarcerated, yet we often release him with less capacity to successfully interface with society than when we received him. That may be the greatest crime. It makes future victims. We have an ethical responsibility to do everything we can to minimize the potential danger to society when we drop these guys off on a street corner.
The punitive default is resilient. The punitive norm is self-
perpetuating. We get fixated on making the pain so great that they’ll move away from crime and not want to return to prison. But we aren’t giving them something specific to move toward in terms of hope or a better vision. Or we’ll give them things like janitorial certificates that don’t make much of a difference in the real world.
I’m amazed at the resiliency of the human spirit in many ways, but you don’t have to experience segregation for very long for it to affect you. I would go into a cell for inspections and sometimes it would even catch me in just the moment I was in there. I’d step into a cell and have the control booth close the door so that I could look at the back of the door, make sure nothing’s in there, see what might be written on the back of the door, whatever the case may be.
I would tell the officer I’m with to close it, and I’d be in the cell and that door closes, and it would catch my breath. Just that confinement. I’m a scuba diver up here in the Northwest, and I’m used to diving at a hundred feet with little to no visibility. That’s the same kind of feeling I had when a door closed in a cell.
As an adult, I think I could survive in segregation. The behavior performance bar is pretty low. I mean you stand on the line, you get your tray, you know, you cuff up when it’s time to cuff up, you go to the shower, you go to the dayroom, make your phone call. I mean, it’s not hard to stay out of trouble. But my eighteen-year-old self would have done absolutely terribly in that cell. I would’ve been one of these kids that got stuck in there.
In seg, you can create an environment where the expectations are that you are going to be trouble, or that you will try to get away with anything you absolutely can that disrupts or reflects some level of rebellion, and that’s where a lot of these guys are. I can kind of understand that deep-seated rebellious attitude.
The Bible says, “The Lord has shown you, O man, what he requires of you and that’s to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” That’s the balance: justice and mercy. Justice says that there are repercussions for actions, but mercy says there’s that place and time, that when an individual is willing to learn and grow, that you introduce the space—psychologically, relationally—and the resources to allow them to move into doing and being a different person.
Would I want my grandchildren working in corrections? My answer to that is if you feel called to that, do it. If not, don’t. A person who can enter that arena with vision, intention, and balance can do much good. There are many men and women doing great work in corrections. But there are many doing “eight and the gate.” There are others who cause trouble on both sides of the cell door. One person with vision and balance can more than offset the trouble of the instigators. Corrections is not social work, nor is it police work, although it has components of both. Prison work is a unique profession that calls for unique people.
Right now, there are a lot of aspects about our system that hold people down, even to the exit point. I mean $40 and a bus ticket when people are released from prison? Not to mention the social stigma. It’s incredible. It’s amazing that our recidivism rate isn’t higher than it is. But I think that mercy and justice in proper balance is the key. When that pendulum swings too far to either side, it does real damage. But when it’s done right, it can make an incredible d
ifference in peoples’ lives, both in reconciling the past and giving hope for the future.
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24. Port Angeles is a coastal city of twenty thousand in the north of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.
25. Clallam Bay Corrections Center (CBCC) was opened in 1985 as a 450-bed medium-
security state prison. In 1991, it was converted to a close-custody facility, with additional restrictions on prisoner freedoms and privileges. After adding an additional four hundred beds, CBCC began housing maximum-security prisoners as well as medium- and close-custody prisoners. CBCC is located on the Olympic Peninsula fifty miles west of Port Angeles.
26. Put in a request to transfer to another position.
SHEAROD McFARLAND
age: 48
born in: Detroit, Michigan
interviewed in: G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility,
Jackson, Michigan
We corresponded with Shearod throughout 2016 and 2017 before visiting him at G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility, where he is currently incarcerated. Because Shearod is in Michigan and we were not, interviewing him presented challenges. Interviews on the phone proved to be superficial. Prisons are crowded and loud, so our phone calls lacked intimacy, and because long-distance calls are prohibitively expensive, our calls didn’t spontaneously meander the way good interviews do. So we wrote to each other. A lot. Shearod was able to acquire a tablet that works with the email system at Cotton CF. Though each page of an email costs five cents to send (and an additional five cents for each attachment) and emails can take a few days to arrive, this system allowed us to communicate more easily than we otherwise would have been able to.
When we visit Shearod, he’s dressed in a blue prison-issue jumpsuit with orange stripes on the shoulders and legs. He tells us he hasn’t had a visitor in over two and a half years. Shearod’s voice is gravelly and his face expressive, his brown irises ringed with dark blue. He’s in good shape, especially considering he spent more than eleven years in administrative segregation, which Michigan prisoners simply call “the hole.” Shearod began running away from home at a young age to escape his father’s abuse, which led him to stealing (everything from food to cars), which led him to juvenile detention. In juvie, Shearod met friends who would introduce him to drug dealing and violent crime before his eighteenth birthday.
Shearod was held in isolation at two different facilities in Michigan. His description of the hole is brutal and unnerving, but he’s honest about how his time in isolation gave him the opportunity to find an undiscovered part of himself.
I USED TO PRAY AND ASK GOD TO KILL MY DAD
Whenever I think of the year of my birth, the moon landing and Manson murders always come to mind. I was born in Detroit, Michigan, in September 1969. Back in those days Detroit was still one of America’s great cities, but the next four decades would be filled with much struggle and disappointment. It’s almost as if me and Detroit were bound by the same fates.
My father was a cement mason, and my mother worked for an insurance company. My earliest memories are of spending time with my mother. I loved her dearly. She was my world growing up—my everything.
My father was definitely a presence in my life from the very beginning, but I have no recollection of him until maybe around kindergarten or the year before. He was supposedly teaching me, a three- or four-year-old, the right way to put on my shoes and socks. Only if I didn’t get the toes of my socks perfectly lined up with my toes, he would hit me with his belt a few times, threatening me, and calling me stupid. The same with the shoes: if I didn’t get the bow on the knot perfectly symmetrical, he would hit me a few times with his belt. I don’t know how long that so-called lesson lasted. To my child’s mind it was forever, but in reality it may have only been an hour. What I do know is that the lessons I learned that day have lasted a lifetime. To this very day the line of my socks is always perfectly across my toes, my shoes are always tied with even bows, and violence has continued to shape my life in one way or another.
Outside of my home life I was a pretty normal kid. I enjoyed sports, especially football. I usually played running back. I was good too. I also had an intellectual side. Probably my oldest habit is books. I’ve been reading for my entire life. As nerdy as it sounds, me and my two main friends, Alex and Lamont, we loved Star Wars. Alex and I had all kinds of action figures and other toys. I was always Darth Vader, Lamont was Han Solo, and Alex was Luke Skywalker. I love Star Wars to this very day. Our same trio of friends also liked to imagine ourselves as X-Men. I was always Wolverine. Alex and I both had stacks and stacks of comics.
My mother was very popular, and a real go-getter, too. For instance, when I was eight I wanted to join the Cub Scouts. She volunteered to be a den mother, and before long, because of her personality and organizational skills, she became the head den mother. And not long after that she became the de facto pack leader. I didn’t know it at the time, but my father was jealous of me and all the attention that I got from my mom. That may sound crazy to some, but parental jealousy actually exists. It’s a real thing.
Both of my parents were from well-off families in a small town in Mississippi. I guess that also says something considering that both of my parents are Black and it was very difficult for African Americans to do well during that era in the South. Both my mom and dad went to college, too. My mother graduated from a small business college in Florida, and my father went to Tennessee State University in Nashville. He didn’t graduate. Regardless of my dad’s failure in this regard, I was still expected to get great grades.
The problem was not in my aptitude. Learning came easy to me, except for math. I was a high-energy child who was alone most of the time. So when I went to school I wanted to have fun, play with the other children, and just be a kid. Under those circumstances, academics didn’t hold my attention. So for my very first report card I got bad grades, and my father made me strip completely naked and beat me mercilessly with a leather belt while reminding me of how dumb, stupid, and worthless I was. In his exact words, “You ain’t shit and ain’t never gonna be shit.” Kids getting beatings with belts was nothing new to the Black community. That was and is an old tradition that we probably brought with us from slavery.
“Whoopings,” as they were called, were already a part of my young experience. But school upped the ante. Oftentimes while my father was beating me for some minor mistake he would say things like, “Nigga, you lower than whale shit!” The physical abuse was often enough, but the emotional abuse happened almost daily. Eventually I began to believe the things that he said about me. I began to accept that I was just a bad child. I grew up in fear and even terror. It may sound totally warped and twisted, but when I was nine or ten years old, I used to pray and ask God to kill my dad.
A DIFFERENT PERSON
Sixth grade was probably the beginning of the end. I got bad grades for that year’s final report card, which would mean a brutal beating and at least a monthlong punishment of no television, no going outside, no friends over, no telephone, no nothing. But this time, rather than waiting on my father to get home and give me the beating, I decided to run away from home. I went to family friends for refuge—who immediately called my parents and told them what I was trying to do. Both my mother and father came to get me that evening, and I could feel the violence emanating from my dad.
When we got to our house my father made me strip. This time instead of a belt he chose a thick green-and-red Christmas tree extension cord. Before I actually got my undershorts off he began to hit me with that extension cord, and the pain shot through me like bolts of lightning. After the first few minutes I knew that I couldn’t take it and ran out of the house. The front door was open, but the screen was closed. My father caught me on the porch and was beating me in front of everyone in the neighborhood. I broke loose and ran down the street, but dressed only in my drawers, I had nowhere to go
! After thinking on it by the curb around the corner, I decided to return home. For this second round, my dad took me to the basement and had me take off my last article of clothing, held me by my left wrist, and beat me mercilessly with that cord. The extension cord cut my skin like a knife. When it was over I had little horseshoe-shaped wounds all over my body. I was so terrified that long after my dad went back upstairs I just laid on this red-and-white-checkered couch, motionless and bleeding, scared to make a sound that might attract my father’s attention. My mother didn’t come to attend to me, and to make it even worse, I thought that I deserved this.
When it was over I think that I was a different person. Up until that point I had never been in any real trouble. No arrests, no suspensions from school, nothing that could be called serious. In seventh grade I began to get into fights and have all kinds of trouble in school. For the first time I was not only excluded but permanently suspended from my neighborhood middle school. I basically had given up even trying.
The first report card day of that school year was in a way the start of a new chapter in my life. That day my dad somehow knew that I’d be bringing home my school reports—and I was scared to death! So rather than go home, I didn’t. I remember I had this burgundy and yellow Washington Redskins varsity jacket and I wandered the streets in that jacket for hours, cold, with nowhere to go. I guess being cold and homeless was a better option than that extension cord. Shoot, just about anything was. It eventually got dark, and I actually found an old, stained box spring on the side of a curb with someone’s garbage waiting to be picked up the next day. I dragged that box spring to a nearby park and found a way to get some sleep that night. Just me, the cold, and an empty park, but no beating, no having to be afraid, and definitely no extension cord. I can’t stress that enough—no extension cord.
