by Sid Holt
Don’t be like your partner Bacle, they tell me. In some units and on some shifts, the pairing of floor officers changes day to day, but for whatever reason Bacle and I become a regular pair. (He has allowed me to use his real name.) I tell the inmates I’ll never be like him, all that shouting and hollering.
The truth is, Bacle’s temper tantrums make us laugh. One inmate asks him for his Social Security number every day just to set him off. If he were not a squat, hobbling sixty-three-year-old, Bacle’s occasional fantasies about putting shock collars on inmates or shoving his keys down their throats might not seem so harmless. But he hates the company too. “All you are is a fucking body to ’em. That’s the way I feel,” he says. He counts the days until his Social Security kicks in and he no longer needs to work here to supplement his retirement checks from the Coast Guard.
Every day, I come to know him more and more. He is a reader of old westerns and an aficionado of Civil War reenactments. He uses words like “gadzooks” and phrases like “useful as tits on a boar hog.” Back before the hobby shops closed, he liked to buy his wife gifts made by prisoners. Once, he bought her a handmade saddle for her toy unicorns. “When she seen it, she was tickled pink. We are still fat, dumb, and happy over it!” His breath smells perpetually of menthol chewing tobacco, a fleck of which is always stuck in the corner of his mouth.
Bacle becomes a teacher of sorts. “You got to have what I call a rapport with some of the inmates,” he says. Mostly, he is referring to the orderlies, the prisoners selected for special roles inside each unit. When an orderly passes out toothpaste, Bacle tells me to follow the inmate’s lead. “I just kind of modify it from when I was in the service. I might have rank over someone, but I don’t want to step on their toes.”
Without the orderlies, the prison would not function. Each unit has a key orderly, whose job is to keep the key clean and pack up the property of any prisoner sent to seg. Count-room orderlies deliver the tallies from each unit to the room where they’re tabulated. Tier orderlies, floor orderlies, yard orderlies, walk orderlies, and gym orderlies keep the prison clean. Orderlies typically maintain a friendly relationship with the guards but take every opportunity to make it clear to other inmates they are not snitches. And they rarely are. It is much more likely for them to be movers of contraband. They cozy up to guards who will bring it in, and their freedom of movement allows them to distribute the goods. I will see some of the most trusted orderlies get busted while I’m here.
Bacle regularly gives his lunch to the muscular key orderly. We are not allowed to do this, so he does it discreetly. “It’s a habit I got into when I started,” he says. Bacle isn’t afraid to bend the rules to keep things under control. When one inmate starts marching around angrily, saying “fuck white people” and we’re too afraid to try to get him into his tier, Bacle buys cigarettes from another inmate, gives them to the agitated prisoner, and says, “Why don’t you go have a smoke on your bed to calm your nerves?” And it works. When Miss Price isn’t watching, Bacle lets a guy called Corner Store off his tier so he can run deodorant and chewing tobacco and sugar and coffee between inmates on different tiers. They aren’t allowed to trade commissary items, but they do anyway, so when we let Corner Store handle it, they stop pestering us with ploys to get off the tier, like faking medical emergencies.
Corner Store is a thirty-seven-year-old black man who looks fifty-five. His hair is scraggly, his uniform tattered, his face puffy. He walks with the clipped gait of a stiff-legged old man who is late for a meeting he doesn’t really want to attend. He’s been in prison for half his life, though I don’t know what for. I rarely know what anyone is in for. I do know that he used to sell crack, that he saw his friend get shot to death when he was eight, and that he once had a firefight with some white men in Mississippi who called him a “nigger.” At least that’s what he tells me. Fourteen of his eighteen years behind bars have been at Winn.
Corner Store does not inspire fear, yet he is confident. He tells COs to open the tier door for him; he does not ask. On his pluckier days, he flaunts his status by sitting in the guards’ chairs and smoking. He talks to us as if we are office colleagues from different departments. And unlike the floor orderly who protects his reputation by loudly proclaiming that rats deserve to get stabbed, Corner Store doesn’t need to make a show of his loyalty to inmates, yet it is unwavering. When I ask him to teach me some prison lingo, he refuses gently.
The first time I meet Corner Store, he walks through the metal detector at the entrance of the unit. It beeps, but neither Bacle nor I do anything; its sound is one of the many we tune out. The device was installed not long before I started working here, in an effort to cut down on the number of inmates carrying shanks, but functionally it is a piece of furniture. We never use it since it takes at least two officers to get inmates to line up, walk through it, and get patted down whenever they enter or exit the unit, which leaves no one to let inmates into their tiers. When Corner Store makes it beep, he calls over to me: “Hey, watch this here! I’m going to go back through this thing and it won’t go off.” He jumps through it sideways, and it doesn’t make a sound. I laugh. “This is something my granddaddy taught me years ago,” he says. “Anything that a man makes can always be altered. Always.”
He had to learn to hustle because he has no money and no support from his family. For his courier services, inmates kick him cigarettes, coffee, and soup. He doesn’t take charity; he learned early that little comes without strings in prison. Sexual predators prey on needy inmates, giving them commissary or drugs, seemingly as gifts, but eventually recalling the debt. If you don’t have money, the only way to pay is with your body. “When I first come to prison, I had to fight about five times for my ass,” Corner Store says. “This is how it starts: You’re scared of being in prison because of the violence or whatever. You go to people for protection. But this is the No. 1 thing you don’t do. You have to be a man on your own.” He tries to discourage vulnerable inmates from seeking help and says he’s gotten into fights to stop new prisoners from being sexually assaulted. “It just hurts me to see it happen. A kid who really don’t even understand life yet, you turn and fuck his life up even more?”
He says there have been periods when he’s had to pack a shank. “Sometimes it’s best, because you got some bullheaded people in prison who don’t understand nothin’ but violence. When you show them you can get on the same level they gettin’ on, they leave you the fuck alone.”
“They always talking about how prison rehabilitates you,” he says. “Prison don’t rehabilitate you. You have to rehabilitate yourself.” When Miss Price is around, Bacle and I are careful not to make it obvious we are letting Corner Store out, and he makes sure to stay out of her sight.
Instructors like Kenny preached against giving concessions to inmates, but in reality most guards think you have to cooperate with them. Frankly, there just aren’t enough staff members to do otherwise. Bacle and I don’t have time, for example, to keep watch over the corrections counselor when she is in her office, where there are no security cameras, so she uses two inmates as her bodyguards. (CCA says this went against its policy.) COs are always under pressure to impress on the supervisors that everything is under control. We rely on inmates for this, too, letting some stand out in front of the unit to warn us when a ranking officer is coming so we can make sure everything is in order.
It can be a slippery slope. In 2007, a Tennessee inmate, Gary Thompson, sued CCA, claiming that guards, including a captain, periodically ordered him to beat up other inmates to punish them, giving him the best jobs and privileges as a reward. On one occasion, he claimed, guards called him the “largest nigger,” put him with a mentally ill inmate who’d cut a swastika into his arm, and ordered Thompson to “rough [him] up.” When Thompson filed a complaint, he was put in the hole. CCA denied his allegations but settled the case.
In Idaho, CCA was accused of ceding control to prison gangs to save money on wages. A lawsuit file
d in 2012 by eight inmates at the Idaho Correctional Center alleged there was effectively “a partnership between CCA and certain prison gangs,” in which gang members were used to discipline inmates. A subsequent FBI investigation found that employees had falsified records and understaffed mandatory positions. A confidential Idaho Department of Correction memo shared with CCA that was disclosed in the case showed that by August 2008, inmate-on-inmate assaults and other incidents of violence had “steadily increased to the point that there are four incidents for every one that occurs in the rest of the Idaho state operated facilities combined.” (CCA points to a later analysis by an independent monitor that concluded that the rate of violence at ICC over the entire first eight months of 2008 was not disproportionate to that of other facilities.) No charges were brought against CCA, nor were any sanctions levied against it. But the state ended automatic renewal of its contract, and reopened it to bidders. CCA did not bid. “It was a lot better than this place,” an out-of-state guard who worked in Idaho at the time told me.
There are no gangs at Winn, but that has more to do with Louisiana prison culture than the management of the prison. In most prisons around the country, the racial divide is stark and internal politics are determined by racialized prison gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia. But Louisiana is an anomaly. Here, there are no prison gangs. In a prison that is 75 percent black and less than 25 percent white, people of different races sit together in the chow hall, hang out on the yard, and sleep in the same dorms.
Throughout my time at Winn, I meet guards from CCA prisons around the country who talk up the benefits of gangs. Two SORT members filling in from Oklahoma speak to each other in Sureño sign language that they learned from prisoners transferred from California. The influx of gang members is a “good thing,” one of the SORT guys tells me, because gang culture is highly disciplined. “With their politics, they have to clean their cells. They have to maintain cleanliness. If they don’t, they get stabbed. If they acted the way these guys act, they’d get stabbed.”
• • •
I quickly learn it’s no longer possible to be the silent observer I was in training, so I try to find the middle ground between appearing soft and being draconian. When I write up one inmate after he runs off the tier against my orders, I think about it all weekend, wondering if he will get sent to Cypress. I feel guilty and decide I will only write up inmates for two things: threatening me and refusing to get on their tier after they enter the unit. The floor is where most assaults happen, and if a lot of inmates are out there, things can get out of hand. That’s not why I choose to write them up for it, though. I write them up because my main job is to keep inmates off the floor, and if I don’t establish authority, I end up having to negotiate with each prisoner over how long he can wander the unit, which is exhausting.
I spend free moments leaning up against the bars, making chitchat with prisoners about their lives. I tell one, Brick, that I am from Minnesota. He says he has friends there. “We got to hook up!” he says. I cultivate these relationships; having gray-haired, charming inmates like him in my good graces helps me because younger, harder prisoners follow their lead. I do favors for others—I let a cop killer outside when it’s not yard time because he seems to have influence over some of the inmates. Guys like him and Corner Store teach me how to win inmates’ respect. They teach me how to make it in here.
I try to address every request and respond to every inmate who yells “Minnesota,” my new nickname. The microwaves on some tiers are broken, so I help out by carrying cups of water for soup or coffee to Brick’s tier, where he heats them up. When Corner Store isn’t working and people ask if I can let them off the tier for a minute so they can run and exchange a honey bun for a few cigarettes, I unlock the door. “You’re cool,” one inmate says to me. “Real laid-back.” I let people out to see the corrections counselor when they need a mattress or need to call their lawyers, even when she tells me she doesn’t want to field these requests, which is most of the time.
Brick can see that I get tired striking across the unit from one place to the next for twelve hours a day. He sees that by the end of the day my feet and back hurt and I start to ignore the inmates. He knows that two people aren’t enough to run this floor. “This shit don’t work,” he says to me. We bump fists.
Chapter 4: “You Got to Survive”
There is a looming sense of crisis at Winn. Shortly after Cortez escaped, the warden decreed that the security staff should meet at the start of every shift. So at six a.m. each day, everyone is shepherded into a conference room, where they brood over coffee and Monster Energy drinks. “I apologize if it seems as though we’re coming down on y’all all the time,” says Assistant Warden Parker, who introduced himself to me in Cypress four weeks ago. He’s sitting on a table, the picture of a guy-next-door, we’re-in-this-together type of boss. “Unfortunately, due to a series of events that took place over 2014, culminating with that escape, there is a high, high level of scrutiny on how you do your job.”
He doesn’t get into specifics, but guards tell me there was a rash of stabbings over the summer that CCA didn’t report to the Louisiana DOC. (The company’s spokesman says it reported all assaults.) “Someone said this place has slid downhill for a long time,” the assistant warden says to us. “Here’s what we have before us: We have to climb up that hill extremely fast.”
The DOC, which has ultimate authority over all prisons in the state, has been taking a closer look at Winn’s day-to-day operations. (According to DOC documents I later obtained, the department had just written to CCA about “contract compliance” and areas where Winn’s “basic correctional practices” needed improvement.) Wardens from publicly run state prisons have appeared out of nowhere, watching over COs as they work, asking them questions. The newer guards fret about losing their jobs. Old-timers shrug it off—they say they’ve seen Winn weather tough times before.
At each morning meeting, we are given a new “game plan”: keep inmates off the bars of the tiers, move them quicker out to chow, keep them off the floor, finish count faster. We never discuss the problem that both guards and inmates complain about most: There aren’t enough employees. Corporate has tried to mitigate the problem by bringing officers in from out of state. The economics of this are never clear to me—it seems far more expensive to pay for their transportation and lodging than to hire more locals or raise wages. In addition to the SORT members, there are an average of five guards filling in for a month or so at a time from places like Arizona and Tennessee.
According to CCA’s contract with Louisiana, thirty-six guards are expected to show up for work at six a.m. every day. Twenty-nine of them fill mandatory twelve-hour positions that require a body in them at all times—these include unit floor officers, front-gate officers, perimeter patrol, supervisors, and infirmary officers. I make a habit of counting the number of security staff at the meetings. Some days there are twenty-eight, some days twenty-four, but there are almost always fewer than twenty-nine.
It’s possible that employees working overtime from the night shift aren’t there or that others trickle in late. But it still appears there are often fewer people on the shift than contractually required to keep the prison open, let alone running smoothly. CCA’s spokesman later tells me I was too low on the totem pole to have an accurate understanding of staffing at Winn. (He adds that “security is everyone’s job” and a “team effort” involving even employees who are not guards.) Correspondence between CCA and the DOC shows that in early 2015 Winn had forty-two vacancies for regular guards and nine vacancies for ranking officers. Miss Lawson, the assistant chief of security, says that when officials from the DOC were scheduled to visit, “we would be tripping over each other, but it was just because we were paying people overtime to come in and work extra.”
Often, the only guards in a 352-inmate unit are the two floor officers and the key officer. There is supposed to be an officer controlling the gate that connects each u
nit walk to the main walk, but often there isn’t. From nine a.m. to five p.m. on weekdays, every unit should have two case managers, who manage rehabilitation and reentry programs, two corrections counselors, who are in charge of resolving inmates’ daily issues, and a unit manager, who supervises everything. Not once do I see all these positions filled in a unit.
During my time at Winn, I witness corners cut daily. Key officers, who are charged with documenting activities in the units, routinely record security checks that do not occur. I hear that these logbooks are audited by the state and are the only evidence of whether guards walk up and down the tiers every half-hour. I almost never see anyone do such a security check unless DOC officials are around. Collinsworth tells me that when he worked in the key he was told repeatedly to record security checks every fifteen to thirty minutes, even though they weren’t being done. Miss Lawson later says she was once reprimanded by a warden for refusing to log checks that did not occur. “I’m just going to write down that you are doing your security checks every thirty minutes,” a ranking officer once told me. “That’s just how it’s been done, so until someone up top tells me different, that’s how we’ll do it.” (CCA’s spokesman says the company had no knowledge of security checks being skipped or logbooks being falsified.)
Even with the guards filling in from out of state, we are required to work extra days, which means that for up to five days in a row, I have just enough time to drive home, eat, sleep, and come back to the prison. Sometimes I have to stay longer than twelve hours because there is no one to take over for me. A guard I relieve one morning is ending a four-day stretch; in a forty-eight-hour period he worked forty-two hours at the warden’s insistence, he says. He didn’t sleep the whole time. (CCA says no such incident occurred.)
