by Sid Holt
Parker says the DOC wardens have been pestering him. “Are they scared, Mr. Parker?” he mimics. “Are you not providing the adequate training that your staff members need, Mr. Parker, to be strong enough to take clothing away from an inmate? Are they that scared, Mr. Parker?”
His tone softens. “I don’t know when it last dawned on me in the last couple weeks—I actually care about this institution and I care about all of you. I’m tired of people telling me that people at Winn aren’t doing their jobs. A term that was used a couple of weeks ago that was very embarrassing to me was: They don’t even understand basic prison management at Winn.” Some of the guards shake their heads. “Anybody feel good about that one? I know I sure as hell don’t.”
After the meeting, everyone moves slowly down the walk. Edison, a big white CO with a bull neck, says he’s tired of this “ ‘Kumbaya’ bullshit.” He was removed from his post in Cypress when the SORT team took it over. Suggesting he can’t handle his own is about the worst insult you could give him. “I’m sick and tired of doin’ this shit,” he says. “The security in this place is pathetic. They need to tighten up on the tier doors, re-man the towers, and reinstitute the inmate work out in the field and the inmate programs, and give these fools something to do besides sit in their beds, eat, watch TV, and figure out how to fuck with us.” He blames the “ivory tower” in Nashville—CCA’s corporate headquarters—for Winn’s problems. “Those fools ain’t got nothing in their mind but the bottom line.”
Today, the supervisor tells Edison to join Bacle and me in Ash. Having a new guard come to Ash is like having a visitor to our twisted household. This morning, standing around, waiting for the day to begin, Bacle complains about the most mundane of issues: Some inmates don’t sit on their bunks during count like they are supposed to.
“How’s your fighting skills, Bauer?” Edison asks. The question makes me nervous. This is the opposite of the approach I’m trying to take in here.
“All right,” I say.
“You’re with me,” he says. “We’re going to give these motherfuckers an eye-opener today. I don’t play that bullshit. You get your ass on the bunk.”
“You’re not into this playing shit,” Bacle says sympathetically.
“That’s right,” Edison says.
“You’re a grade A1 asshole when it needs to be,” Bacle says.
“I’m a grade A1 drill instructor when I have to be.”
“That’s what this place needs!”
“I know it does,” Edison says. “It needs to go back to about 1960. Give a goddamn PR-24”—a police baton—“and hand a can of gas to everybody. You get stupid, you get beat down. You get big and stupid, you get gassed and beat down. Either way, you learn your fucking place.”
Edison has been here for a year and a half. “With my skill set, and with where I moved to, it was the only fuckin’ thing open,” he says. He is an Army Rangers veteran and was once a small-town police chief. He says he retired when “the city council got afraid of me.” “When I was a cop, I knew damn well that I would shoot your ass. I didn’t carry two extra clips, I carried four. When I went to work, I went to war. When I got off, I still went to war. I carried two clips on me regardless of what I was wearing. I carried at least my Glock 40 underneath my arm, and usually I had a Glock .45 on my ankle. Go ahead, play with me.”
We walk the floor. He stops. We stop. “You know what is stupid?” he says. “I see murderers. I see rapists. I see robbers. And then I see, the vast majority is in here for bein’ stupid enough to smoke a joint too close to a school. Twenty-five years, federal mandatory. Then you got somebody that slaughtered a whole fucking family gets twenty-five to life and he’s out in six to eight.” (About one-fifth of Winn inmates are in for drug-related crimes. Getting busted with a joint near a school will typically land you about six years, not twenty-five.) Edison’s indignation about drug criminalization surprises me. “Now, where’s the fucking justice in that? And we’re paying how much per inmate per day?”
“Count time!” the woman in the key yells. I unlock the door of B1 tier and Edison walks in. An inmate is standing at the sink, brushing his teeth. “Get on your bunk,” Edison barks. The inmate keeps his back turned to Edison. “Or would you like to do it in Cypress?” Edison steps in toward him. “Step out!” Edison shouts, pointing to the door. He’s seriously sending a prisoner to seg for this?
The inmate walks out, still brushing his teeth. “This man is going on about some bullshit,” he says, waving his toothbrush around. A spot of toothpaste lands on Edison’s jacket, which is hanging on a nearby chair.
“Go ahead! Be dumb! Let’s go!” Edison yells, turning his hat backward. “Please be stupid enough to touch me. I’m already taking your ass to Cypress.” The inmate continues to brush his teeth.
I walk down the tier and do count. “That Crip boy go’ to tear his ass up,” one inmate says as I pass. “Your work partner going to get stabbed.”
I can’t keep count straight in my head. I just want to get off the tier.
When we leave the tier everyone comes up to the bars and yells at Edison. “You want to go next?” he shouts. “Behind the wall!” They don’t budge. “Every one of y’all is going to Cypress.”
“Suck my dick!”
The captain and a sergeant enter the unit. The captain tells Edison to step aside so he can talk to the inmates and try to ease the tension. “This pacification bullshit,” Edison mutters to me. “Yeah, we knew how to pacify ’em in Vietnam. We dropped a fuckin’ 500-pounder on ’em. That pacifies.” The captain tells Edison to come with him. “It’s not warm and fuzzy enough,” Edison says to me as he leaves.
The sergeant, whose name is King, pulls me aside. “I’m here for you, bro,” he says. In the past, I’ve heard him complain that the supervisors don’t back the line officers enough. “Don’t ever think I’m against you. ’Cuz I’m gonna knock one of ’em out if I have to. And we go’ to write that report like he was trying to kill me and it was self-defense. Hahahaha!”
King has only been working at Winn for five months, but he’s been in corrections for eight years. As a kid, he spent time in juvenile hall. Like Edison, he is an army vet, and he credits the military for correcting his delinquent ways. After twenty-two years in the service, he got a job in a juvenile-correctional facility in Texas. One day, he told a boy to get off the basketball court and the kid grabbed his throat and tried to strangle him. “I damn near beat the piss out of him. Sixteen years old, six-foot-three. As soon as you put your hands on me, you’re not a teenager, you’re a man. I put that uppercut on his ass and the superintendent said, ‘I strongly suggest that you resign, sarge.’ I fucked him up pretty good.”
“Oh well!” Bacle says.
“All of this I shattered,” he says, pointing to his jaw and mouth.
“Oh well!”
Pink Shades
During count, I tally bodies, not faces. If I look at faces, it means I have to keep the numbers straight while constantly calibrating sternness and friendliness in my eyes for each individual. When I go down the tier, I make a point to walk in a fast, long stride with a slight pop in my left step, trying to look tough. I practiced this in the mirror because inmates comment every day on a twist in my walk that I never knew existed. Sometimes prisoners whistle at me as I pass. In my normal life, I try to diffuse any macho tendencies. Now, I try to annihilate anything remotely feminine about me. As I walk and count, I tighten my core to keep my hips from moving.
I steel myself for A1 tier. For some reason, inmates on this tier are always testing me, and as I walk down one side, someone makes a comment about my “panties” as I pass. “You like that dick. You like that dick,” someone sings as I go by. I ignore it. Another comments that I look like a model. I pretend I don’t hear him. On my way back toward the front, I hear again, “You like that dick. You like that dick.”
This has been going on for weeks, but this time something snaps. I stop count and march back to the
guy calling out to me, a thirty-something black man with pink sunglasses and tattoos crawling up his neck. “What did you say to me?” I shout.
“I ain’t said nothin’.”
“Why are you always saying shit like that? You are always focusing so much on me, maybe you like the dick! Bitch ass!”
“Say that again?”
“Maybe you like the dick!” I shout. I am completely livid.
“He doesn’t know how big a mistake he just made,” another inmate says as I storm out.
When we finish count, I go back to Pink Shades’s tier. “Give me your ID,” I say to him. He refuses. “Give me your ID! Now!” I shout at the top of my lungs. He doesn’t. I get his name from another officer and write him up for making sexual comments. He says he’s going to file a PREA grievance on me.
I try to cool down. My heart is still hammering ten minutes later. “Are you all right, sarge?” a prisoner asks me. Slowly, my rage turns to shame and I go into the bathroom and sit on the floor. Where did those words come from? I rarely ever shout. I am not homophobic. Or am I? I feel utterly defeated. I go back to A1 and call Pink Shades to the bars.
“Look, I just want you to understand I don’t have a problem with any of y’all,” I tell him. “I think a lot of you are in here for sentences that are too long. I’m not like these other guys, all right?”
“All right,” he says.
“But, you know, when people disrespect me like that for no reason, I can’t just take that—you know what I mean?”
He tries to deny taunting me, but I won’t back down. “Look, you going to have inmates talkin’ crazy,” he says.
“But you don’t want me talking crazy to you, right?” There are inmates staring at us in astonishment.
“I feel you,” he says. “You came here and talked to me like a man. And I apologize. I ain’t got nothing against any of y’all officers. You feel me? I understand that you gotta live. You got to survive. Those words hurt you. I feel you. I mean I was singing a song, but you probably took it the wrong way. It triggered something in you.” He’s right. Something about being here reminds me of being in junior high, getting picked on for my size and the fact that I read books, getting called a faggot.
I tear up his disciplinary report and throw it in the trash. When I walk back down the tier for the next count, no one pays any attention to me.
Man Down
One day in Ash, a few inmates shout, “Man down! Man down!” A large man, Mason, is lying on his bed in C2, his right hand over his bare chest. His eyes are closed and his left leg is moving back and forth slowly.
“We just put him on his bed. He had fell off this side of his fucking bed just now, bro,” an inmate says to me. “He’s fucked up.” I radio for a stretcher.
Mason starts to cry. His left hand is a fist. His back arches. “I’m scared,” he mouths. Someone puts a hand on his arm for the briefest moment: “I know, son. They finna come see you now.”
A stretcher finally arrives. The nurses and their orderlies move slowly. “They weren’t supposed to send that man back down here,” an inmate says to me. Earlier today Mason was playing basketball and fell to the ground in pain, he explains. He went to the infirmary, where they told him that he had fluid in his lungs.
Three inmates pick up Mason in his sheet and put him on the stretcher. His hands are crossed over his chest like a mummy as two prisoners wheel him away.
Within a few hours he is sent back to the tier.
Days later, I see Mason dragging his feet, his arms around his chest. I tell him to take my chair. He sits and hunches over, putting his head in his lap. It feels like a “throbbing pain in my chest,” he says. We call for a wheelchair. “They told me I got fluid on my lungs and they won’t send me to the hospital,” he says. “That shit crazy.”
A nurse happens to be in the unit, passing out pills. I tell her they keep sending Mason to the infirmary but won’t take him to the hospital. She insists “nothing serious” is wrong with him.
“When I saw him last week, he was almost passed out,” I say. “He was in a lot of pain.”
She looks at me sidelong. “But the doctor still ain’t going to send him to the hospital just ’cause of that.”
If he were sent to the hospital, CCA would be contractually obligated to pay for his stay. For a for-profit company, this presents a dilemma. Even a short hospital stay is a major expense for an inmate who brings the company about thirty-four dollars per day. And that’s aside from the cost of having two guards keep watch over him. Medical care within the prison is expensive, too. CCA does not disclose its medical expenses, but in a typical prison, health-care costs are the second-biggest expense after staff. On average, a Louisiana prison puts 9 percent of its budget toward health care. In some states it can be much higher; health care is 31 percent of a California prison’s budget. Nearly 40 percent of Winn inmates have a chronic disease such as diabetes, heart disease, or asthma, according to Louisiana’s budget office. About 6 percent have a communicable disease such as HIV or hepatitis C.
One day, I meet a man with no legs in a wheelchair. His name is Robert Scott. (He consented to having his real name used.) He’s been at Winn twelve years. “I was walking when I got here,” he tells me. “I was walking, had all my fingers.” I notice he is wearing fingerless gloves with nothing poking out of them. “They took my legs off in January and my fingers in June. Gangrene don’t play. I kept going to the infirmary, saying, ‘My feet hurt. My feet hurt.’ They said, ‘Ain’t nothin’ wrong wicha. I don’t see nothin’ wrong wicha.’ They didn’t believe me, or they talk bad to me—‘I can’t believe you comin’ up here!’ ”
His medical records show that in the space of four months he made at least nine requests to see a doctor. He complained of sore spots on his feet, swelling, oozing pus, and pain so severe he couldn’t sleep. When he visited the infirmary, medical staff offered him sole pads, corn removal strips, and Motrin. He says he once showed his swollen foot, dripping with pus, to the warden. On one of these occasions, Scott alleges in a federal lawsuit against CCA, a nurse told him, “Ain’t nothing wrong with you. If you make another medical emergency you will receive a disciplinary write-up for malingering.” He filed a written request to be taken to a hospital for a second opinion, but it was denied.
Eventually, numbness spread to his hands, but the infirmary refused to treat him. His fingertips and toes turned black and wept pus. Inmates began to fear his condition was contagious. When Scott’s sleeplessness kept another inmate awake, the inmate threatened to kill him if he was not moved to another tier. A resulting altercation drew the attention of staff, who finally sent him to the local hospital.
“But when I got my legs cut off they didn’t come back and say, ‘Robert, I’m sorry.’ I done taked my lickin’. Part of being locked up.” He is now suing CCA for neglect, claiming that inmates are denied medical care because the company operates the prison “on a ‘skeleton crew’ for profitable gain.”
“Where do you think is one of the number-one areas that we get hit on as a confinement business?” Assistant Warden Parker asks us at a staff meeting. “Medical! Inmates have this thing that if they have a sniffle they are supposed to be flown to a specialist somewhere and be treated immediately for that sniffle.” His tone becomes incredulous. “Believe it or not, we are required by law to take care of them.”
It’s true: Under Supreme Court rulings citing the Eighth Amendment, prisons are required to provide inmates with adequate health care. Yet CCA has found ways to minimize its obligations. At the out-of-state prisons where California ships some of its inmates, CCA will not accept prisoners who are over sixty-five years old, have mental-health issues, or have serious conditions like HIV. The company’s Idaho prison contract specified that the “primary criteria” for screening incoming offenders was “no chronic mental health or health care issues.” The contracts of some CCA prisons in Tennessee and Hawaii stipulate that the states will bear the cost of HIV treatment.
Such exemptions allow CCA to tout its cost-efficiency while taxpayers assume the medical expenses for the inmates the company won’t take or treat.
In 2010, the company and Immigration and Customs Enforcement settled a federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU that asserted immigration detainees at a CCA-run facility in California were routinely denied prescribed medical treatment. (CCA admitted no wrongdoing.) In a rare case that made its way to trial in 2001, the company was found to have violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments and ordered to pay $235,000 to an inmate whose broken jaw was left wired shut for ten weeks. (He removed the wires himself with nail clippers while guards watched.) The jury wrote they hoped the message sent by the ruling would “echo throughout the halls of your corporate offices as well as your corporate housing facilities.” (CCA appealed and settled for an undisclosed amount.)
CCA has also been the subject of medical malpractice cases involving pregnant inmates. In 2014, it settled a case for $690,000 over the death of a prisoner’s baby at a county jail in Chattanooga, Tennessee. When the inmate went into labor, she was put in a cell with no mattress and left there for three hours as she bled heavily onto the floor. CCA employees did not call an ambulance until approximately five hours after the prisoner asked for help. Her newborn baby died shortly thereafter. In court proceedings, the warden testified that surveillance footage showed no signs of an emergency. But before the footage could be reviewed, CCA claimed it had been accidentally erased. The court sanctioned the company for destroying evidence.
CCA settled another case for $250,000 after a pregnant woman being held in a jail in Nashville complained of vaginal bleeding and severe abdominal pain. She said medical staff demanded “proof,” so they put her in solitary and turned off the water so her blood loss could be “monitored.” She claimed they did nothing to alleviate her pain as she endured contractions, filling the toilet with blood. The next morning, the inmate was shackled and taken to a hospital, where doctors found that she was already dilated. While prison guards watched, she gave birth and was immediately sedated. When she woke up, medical staff brought her the dead baby. She said she was not allowed to call her family and was given no information about the disposal of her son’s body.