by Sid Holt
Your my everything always will be
Love your wife.
This note and its list of pills haunt me all weekend. What if no one else knows this woman tried to commit suicide? I decide I need to tell Miss Roberts, but when I return to work, I sit in the parking lot and have a hard time summoning the courage. What if word gets out that I’m soft, not cut out for this work?
After I pass through the scanner, I see her. “Hey, Miss Roberts?” I say, walking up behind her.
“Yes,” she says sweetly.
“I wanted to check with you about something. I meant to do it on Friday, but, uh …” She stops and gives me her full attention, looking me in the eyes. “When we had a class by the mental health director, she told us to report if there was any kind of suicidal—”
She cuts me off, waving her hand dismissively, and starts walking away.
“No, but it was like a letter thing—”
“Yeah, don’t even worry about that,” she says, still walking toward her door.
“Really?”
“Mmmhmmm. That’s if you see something going on down there,” she says, pointing toward the units. “Yeah, don’t worry about it. All right.” She enters the mail room.
• • •
After Christmas, we take our final test. It is intimidating. The test was created by CCA; we never take the qualification exam given to the state’s guards. Ninety-two questions ask us about the chain of command, the use-of-force policy, what to do if we are taken hostage, how to spot a suicidal inmate, the proper way to put on leg irons, the color designation for various chemical agents. We went through most of these topics so cursorily there’s no way I could answer half of them. Luckily, I don’t need to worry. The head of training’s assistant tells us we can go over the test together to make sure we get everything right.
“I bet no one ever doesn’t get the job because they fail the test,” I say.
“No,” she says. “We make sure your file looks good.” (CCA says this was not consistent with its practices.)
About a third of the trainees I started with have already quit. Reynolds is gone. Miss Doucet decides she can’t risk an asthma attack, so she quits too. Collinsworth goes to Ash on the night shift. Willis works the night shift too; he will be fired after he leaves the prison suddenly one day and a bunch of cell phones are found at his post. Miss Stirling gets stationed in Birch on the day shift. She won’t last either. Two and a half months from now, she will be escorted from the prison for smuggling contraband and writing love letters to an inmate.
Chapter 3: “The CCA Way”
It’s the end of December, and I come in at six a.m. for my first of three days of on-the-job training, the final step before I become a full-fledged CO. The captain tells an officer to take me to Elm. We move slowly down the walk. “One word of advice I would give you is never take this job home with you,” he says. He spits some tobacco through the fence. “Leave it at the front gate. If you don’t drink, it’ll drive you to drinking.”
Research shows that corrections officers experience above-average rates of job-related stress and burnout. Thirty-four percent of prison guards suffer from post–traumatic stress disorder, according to a study by a nonprofit that researches “corrections fatigue.” That’s a higher rate than reported by soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. COs commit suicide two and a half times more often than the population at large. They also have shorter life spans. A recent study of Florida prison guards and law enforcement officers found that they die twelve years earlier than the general population; one suggested cause was job-related stress.
The walk is eerily quiet. Crows caw, fog hangs low over the basketball courts. The prison is locked down. Programs have been canceled. With the exception of kitchen workers, none of the inmates can leave their dorms. Usually, lockdowns occur when there are major disturbances, but today, with some officers out for the holidays, guards say there just aren’t enough people to run the prison. (CCA says Winn was never put on lockdown due to staffing shortages.) The unit manager tells me to shadow one of the two floor officers, a burly white marine veteran. His name is Jefferson, and as we walk the floor an inmate asks him what the lockdown is about. “You know half of the fucking people don’t want to work here,” Jefferson tells him. “We so short-staffed and shit, so most of the gates ain’t got officers.” He sighs dramatically. (CCA claims to have “no knowledge” of gates going unmanned at Winn.)
“It’s messed up,” the prisoner says.
“Man, it’s so fucked up it’s pitiful,” Jefferson replies. “The first thing the warden asked me [was] what would boost morale around here. The first two words out of my mouth: pay raise.” He takes a gulp of coffee from his travel mug.
“They do need to give y’all a pay raise,” the prisoner says.
“When gas is damn near four dollars a gallon, what the fuck is nine dollars an hour?” Jefferson says. “That’s half yo’ check fillin’ up your gas!”
Another inmate, whom Jefferson calls “the unit politician,” demands an Administrative Remedy Procedure form. He wants to file a grievance about the lockdown—why are inmates being punished for the prison’s mismanagement?
“What happens to those ARPs?” I ask Jefferson.
“If they feel their rights have been violated in some way, they are allowed to file a grievance,” he says. If the captain rejects it, they can appeal to the warden. If the warden rejects it, they can appeal to the Department of Corrections. “It’ll take about a year,” he says. “Once it gets to DOC down in Baton Rouge, they throw it over in a pile and forget about it. I’ve been to DOC headquarters. I know what them sonsabitches do down there: nothin’.” (Miss Lawson, the assistant chief of security, later tells me that during the fifteen years she worked at Winn, she saw only one grievance result in consequences for staff.)
I do a couple of laps around the unit floor and then see Jefferson leaning against the threshold of an open tier door, chatting with a prisoner. I walk over to them. “This your first day?” the prisoner asks me, leaning up against the bars.
“Yeah.”
“Welcome to CCA, boy. You seen what the sign say when you first come in the gate? It says, ‘The CCA Way.’ Know what that is?” he asks me. There is a pause. “Whatever way you make it, my boy.”
Jefferson titters. “Some of them down here are good,” he says. “I will say dat. Some of ’em are jackasses. Some of ’em just flat-out ain’t worth a fuck.”
“Just know at the end of the day, how y’all conduct y’all selves determines how we conduct ourselves,” the prisoner says to me. “You come wit’ a shit attitude, we go’ have a shit attitude.”
“I have three rules and they know it,” Jefferson says as he grips the bars with one hand. “No fightin’. No fuckin’. No jackin’ off. But! What they do after the lights are out? I don’t give a fuck, ’cuz I’m at the house.”
• • •
The next day, I’m stationed in Ash, a general population unit. The unit manager is a black woman who is so large she has trouble walking. She is brought in every morning in a wheelchair pushed by an inmate. Her name is Miss Price, but inmates call her the Dragon. It’s unclear whether her jowls, her roar, or her stern reputation earned her that name. Prisoners relate to her like an overbearing mother, afraid to anger her and eager to win her affection. She’s worked here since the prison opened in 1991, and one CO says that in her younger days, she was known to break up fights without backup. Another CO says that last week an inmate “whipped his thing out and was playing with himself right in front of her. She got out of her wheelchair, grabbed him by the neck, threw him up against the wall. She said, ‘Don’t you ever fucking do that to me again!’ ”
In the middle of the morning, Miss Price tells us to shake down the common areas. I follow one of the two COs into a tier and we do perfunctory searches of the TV room and tables, feeling under the ledges, flipping through a few books. I bend over and feel around under a water fountain. My han
d lands on something loose. I get on my knees to look. It’s a smartphone. I don’t know what to do—do I take it or leave it? My job, of course, is to take it, but by now I know that being a guard is only partially about enforcing the rules. Mostly, it’s about learning how to get through the day safely, which requires decisions like these to be weighed carefully.
A prisoner is watching me. If I leave the phone, everyone on the tier will know. I will win inmates’ respect. But if I take it, I will show my superiors I am doing my job. I will alleviate some of the suspicion they have of every new hire. “Those ones who gets along with ’em—those ones are the ones I really have to watch,” SORT commander Tucker told us in class. “There is five of y’all. Two and a half are gonna be dirty.”
I take the phone.
Miss Price is thrilled. The captain calls the unit to congratulate me. The other COs couldn’t care less. When I do count later, each inmate on that tier stares at me with his meanest look. Some step toward me threateningly as I pass.
Later, at a bar near my apartment, I see a man in a CCA jacket and ask him if he works at Winn. “Used to,” he says.
“I just started there,” I say.
He smiles. “Let me tell you this: You ain’t go’ like it. When you start working those twelve-hour shifts, you will see.” He takes a drag from his cigarette. “The job is way too fucking dangerous.” I tell him about the phone. “Oh, they won’t forget your face,” he says. “I just want you to know you made a lot of enemies. If you work in Ash, you gonna have a big-ass problem because now they go’ know, he’s gonna be the guy who busts us all the time.”
He racks the balls on the pool table and tells me about a nurse who gave a penicillin shot to an inmate who was allergic to the medicine and died. The prisoner’s friends thought the nurse did it intentionally. “When he came down the walk, they beat the shit out of him. They had to airlift him out of there.” (CCA says it has no knowledge of this incident.) He breaks and sinks a stripe.
Suicide Watch
On my first official day as a CO, I am stationed on suicide watch in Cypress. In the entire prison of more than 1,500 inmates, there are no full-time psychiatrists and just one full-time social worker: Miss Carter. In class, she told us that a third of the inmates have mental-health problems, 10 percent have severe mental health issues, and roughly a quarter have IQs under 70. She said most prison mental health departments in Louisiana have at least three full-time social workers. Angola has at least eleven. Here, there are few options for inmates with mental-health needs. They can meet with Miss Carter, but with her caseload of 450 prisoners, that isn’t likely to happen more than once a month. They can try to get an appointment with the part-time psychiatrist or the part-time psychologist, who are spread even thinner. Another option is to ask for suicide watch.
A CO sits across from the two official suicide-watch cells, which are small and dimly lit and have plexiglass over the front. My job is to sit across from two regular segregation cells being used for suicide watch overflow, observe the two inmates inside, and log their behavior every fifteen minutes. “We never document anything around here on the money,” Miss Carter taught us a month ago. “Nothing should be nine, nine-fifteen, nine-thirty, because the auditors say you’re pencil-whipping it. And truth be known, we do pencil-whip it. We can’t add by fifteen because that really puts you in a bind. Add by fourteen. That looks pretty come audit time.” One guard told me he just filled in the suicide-watch log every couple of hours and didn’t bother to watch the prisoners. (CCA’s spokesman says the company is “committed to the accuracy of our record keeping.”)
For one inmate, Skeen, I jot down the codes for “sitting” and “quiet.” For the other, Damien Coestly (his real name), the number for “using toilet.” He is sitting on the commode, underneath his suicide blanket, a tear-proof garment that doubles as a smock. “Ah hell nah, you can’t sit here, man!” he shouts at me. Other than the blanket, he is naked, his bare feet on the concrete. There is nothing else allowed in his cell other than some toilet paper. No books. Nothing to occupy his mind.
The sparse conditions are intended to be “a deterrent as well as protection,” Miss Carter said. Some inmates claim to be suicidal because, for one reason or another, they want out of their dorms and don’t want to go to protective custody, where they would be labeled as snitches. Inmates on suicide watch don’t get a mattress; they have to sleep on a steel bunk. They also get worse food. The official ration is one “mystery meat” sandwich, one peanut butter sandwich, six carrot sticks, six celery sticks, and six apple slices per meal. Assuming this meal contains no nutritional supplements, I calculate that eating it three times a day provides at least 250 calories less than the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s daily recommendation for sedentary adult men younger than forty-one years old. (CCA says suicide-watch meals are of “equivalent nutritional value” to general-population meals. It also says suicide watch “is designed for the safety of the inmate and nothing else.”)
Nowhere else does a single guard oversee one or two inmates. If more than two inmates are on constant watch for more than forty-eight hours, the prison has to ask the regional corporate office for permission to continue, Miss Carter tells us. (CCA says this is inaccurate.) Sometimes the regional office says no, she says, and the prisoners are put back on the tiers or in seg.
“Come on, man, get the fuck out of here,” shouts Coestly. “You know what I’m about to do is, get up on top of this bed and jump straight onto my motherfucking neck if y’all don’t get the fuck out from the front of my cell.”
I look over to the cell to the right and see Skeen sitting on his metal bed, staring at me and masturbating under his suicide blanket.
I tell him to stop.
“Move your chair, then. I’m just doing my thing.” He keeps going.
I get up and grab a pink slip to write him up, my first disciplinary report.
“You making a mistake,” he says. “You fuck with me like that, I’m gonna go all night.”
“All right,” I say.
“Write that bitch. I don’t give a fuck. I’m on extended lockdown.” He tells me he’s been in Cypress for three years. He starts singing and dancing in his cell. “All night, all niiiiiight.” Prisoners down the tier laugh. “I’ll add that to my collection. I have about a hundred write-ups. I don’t give a fuck!”
Someone down the tier calls for me. He’s not on suicide watch, just regular segregation. “I’m having some mental-health issues, man,” he says. He has a wild look in his eyes and he speaks intensely, but quietly. “I’m not suicidal or homicidal necessarily, but it’s hard for me to be around people.” There is another man in his cell with him, sitting on the top bunk, shaving his face. “And, and, and the voices, demons, whatever you want to call them, want me to wait till y’all come down here and throw defecation or urine or something. I don’t want to do that, okay?” He says he wants to go on suicide watch as a preventive measure. “Until I figure out what’s going on here”—he taps the sides of his head with his index fingers—“then that’s where I need to be.” His request is denied by the unit manager. With four inmates on suicide watch, we are already over capacity.
“We are gonna have a Mexican standoff,” Coestly says. “Ever seen one of those? I get off the bed, jump off that mothafucker headfirst.” He says he’s having a mental-health emergency, which I am required to report. When I tell the key officer, she rolls her eyes. In class, Miss Carter told us that “unless he’s psychotic and needs a shot to keep him from doing the behavior, then I just let them get it out of their system.” It takes six hours for a psychiatrist to show up.
One of the other inmates on suicide watch, who’s been silent until now, starts yelling through his food slot. “World war!” he shouts. “I got some niggas who need to tell the CIA something, since they already got their eye in the sky, the satellite orbiting in space processing global information.” His voice has a demonic quality to it and he occasionally hits the plexigla
ss to punctuate his sentences. The CO sitting directly across from him twiddles his thumbs and gazes ahead blankly.
In the neighboring cell, Skeen is staring at me, completely naked, masturbating vigorously. I tell him to stop. He gets up, comes to the bars, and strokes himself five feet in front of me. I leave and come back with the pink sheet and he shouts, “Stop looking like that ’cuz you making my dick hard!” I don’t respond. “Stop looking like that ’cuz you making my dick hard! Stop looking like that ’cuz you making my dick hard!” The seemingly schizophrenic man next to him hits the plexiglass over and over. “That’s what the devil’s doing to you, in the invisible world—sticking his invisible dick in your white or black ass and fucking you with it.” My heart is pounding. For an hour, I stare at a cup on the floor and study the blotches in the concrete.
A few hours later, a SORT officer walks a cuffed man onto the tier. The man’s eyes are tightly closed and snot is dripping off his upper lip. He was pepper-sprayed after punching my old instructor Kenny in the face as Kenny sat in his office doing paperwork. Kenny’s in the hospital now—after he confiscated another inmate’s cell phone, the prisoner put a paid hit out on him.
Building Rapport
Kenny is gone for days, recovering from his busted nose. The message his assailant sent was clear: Keep your hands off our phones. Meanwhile, the fact that I took the phone in Ash showed Miss Price that I’m a strong officer who plays by the rules, so she asked the warden if I could be posted there permanently. Now I work there, on the floor, almost every day. I immediately try to smooth over the phone thing with the inmates. I tell a few of them that I took it because I didn’t have a choice and suggest they should try to hide their contraband better. “You ain’t no police?” one asks me. “Nah. I ain’t here to be police,” I reply. “If people ain’t fucking with me, I ain’t got a problem with them.”