by Sid Holt
At least fifteen doctors at Winn have been sued for delivering poor medical care. The prison hired several of them even after the state had disciplined them for misconduct. One, Aris Cox, was hired in the nineties, after his license was temporarily suspended for writing prescriptions to support his tranquilizer addiction. While Mark Singleton was at Winn, the Louisiana board of medical examiners discovered that he had failed “to meet the standard of care” at his previous position in New Mexico. He was put on probation, but CCA kept him on. Winn hired Stephen Kuplesky after his license had been temporarily suspended for prescribing painkillers to a family member with no medical condition. Robert Cleveland was working at Winn when he was put on medical probation for his involvement in a kickback scheme with a wheelchair company. He was later disciplined for prescribing narcotics from his home and vehicle. (It’s not clear if he was working at Winn at the time. CCA says all doctors at Winn had “appropriate credentials.”)
Data collected by Prison Legal News on more than 1,200 state and federal suits against CCA shows that 15 percent of them were related to medical care. (This sample is not a complete list of complaints against the company; in 2010 alone, CCA faced more than 600 pending cases. Between 1998 and 2008, the company settled another 600 cases.) Since most inmates can’t afford legal counsel, it’s nearly impossible for them to prevail in court. When I made public-records requests in a couple of states for a more recent accounting of lawsuits settled by CCA, the company intervened, arguing that a list of settlements involving claims of medical malpractice, wrongful deaths, assaults, and the use of force “constitutes trade secrets.”
• • •
My reconciliation with Pink Shades encouraged me. Every time I have a problem with a prisoner, I try the same approach and eventually we tap knuckles to show each other respect. Still, these breakthroughs are fleeting. In the moment, they feel like a glimmer of a possibility that we can appreciate each other’s humanity, but I come to understand that our positions make this virtually impossible. We can chat and laugh through the bars, but inevitably I need to flex my authority. My job will always be to deny them the most basic of human impulses—to push for more freedom. Day by day, the number of inmates who are friendly with me grows smaller.
There are exceptions, like Corner Store, but were I to take away the privileges Bacle and I have granted him, I know that he, too, would become an enemy.
My priorities change. Striving to treat everyone as human takes too much energy. More and more, I focus on proving I won’t back down. I am vigilant; I come to work ready for people to catcall me or run up on me and threaten to punch me in the face. I show neither fear nor compunction. Sometimes prisoners call me racist, and it stings, but I try as hard as I can not to flinch because to do so would be to show a pressure point, a button that can be pressed when they want to make me bend.
Nearly every day the unit reaches a crescendo of frustration because inmates are supposed to be going somewhere like the law library, GED classes, vocational training, or a substance-abuse group, but their programs are canceled or they are let out of the unit late. Inmates tell me that at other prisons, the schedule is firm. “That door would be opening up and everybody would be on the move,” an inmate who’s been incarcerated throughout the state says. Here, there is no schedule. We wait for the call over the radio; then we let the inmates go. They could eat at eleven-thirty a.m. They could eat at three p.m. School might happen, or maybe not. It’s been years since Winn has had the staff to run the big yard. Sometimes we let the inmates onto the small yard attached to the unit. Often we don’t. Canteen and law-library hours are canceled regularly. There just aren’t enough officers to keep everything going.
Guards bond with prisoners over their frustrations. Prisoners tell us they understand we are powerless to change these high-level management problems. Yet the two groups remain locked in battle like soldiers in a war they don’t believe in.
Whenever I open a tier door, I demand that everyone shows me his pass, and I use my body to stop the flood of people from pouring out. Some just push through.
I catch one. “Get back in!” I shout. “I’m writing you up right now if you don’t get back in there right now. You hear me?”
He walks back in, staring me down. “White dude all on a nigga’s trail, man,” he says. I shut the door, ignoring him. “You better get the fuck from down here before I end up hurtin’ one of y’all,” he shouts at me. “You green as a motherfucker!”
I’m tired.
An inmate comes around the key. Bacle is following him and calls for me to stop him. I stand in the inmate’s path. I know him, the one with the mini-dreads. I feel threatened, frankly, whenever I see him. “This way,” I say, pointing back to where he came from. He tries to walk past me. I lock eyes with him. “This way!” I command. He turns back and walks slowly away. I walk behind him. He stops, spins around, throws his hands in the air, and shouts, “Get the fuck off my trail, dog!” I know he’s testing me. I open his tier door. He walks in, stands just inside, and stares me down hard. I grab the door and slam it shut—bang!—in his face.
I turn and step back into the throng of inmates milling around the floor. “Motherfucker’s going to end up dead!” he shouts after me. I stop and turn around. He just stares. I grab the radio on my shoulder, then pause. Was I ever taught what to do when something like this happens? I know how to press the button and speak into the radio, but whom do I call? I think of King, the officer who smashed the kid’s jaw. “Sergeant King, could you come down to Ash?” I say into my shoulder.
“En route.”
When he arrives, I take him into B1 tier. I find Mini-Dreads.
“He needs to get locked up,” I say, looking him in the eyes.
King cuffs him. I tell King he threatened my life. He needs to go to seg.
“What happened?! I ain’t said nuttin’!” the inmate shouts. I walk away.
I go back to chasing the others into their tiers. “What you lock that dude up for?” an inmate asks me. “Dude was ’bout to go home,” another says. “He ain’t go’ go home now.” I walk away, unyielding. In the back of my mind, however, there is a voice: Did you see him say anything? Wasn’t your back turned? Are you sure what you heard? It doesn’t matter, really. He wanted to intimidate me and it was about time I threw someone in the hole. They need to know I am not weak.
• • •
One morning, Ash smells like feces. On D2, liquid shit is oozing out of the shower drain and running down the tier. “It’s been here over twelve hours,” one inmate says.
“Man, you got worms and everything on the floor. Real talk.”
“This is a health and safety violation!”
“Man, this is cruel and unusual punishment!”
We let inmates out to go to the small yard. As they flow out of the tiers, I see a large group run to A1 tier. Bacle pushes the tier door shut and calls a Code Blue over the radio. Inside the tier, two prisoners are grappling, their bodies pressed up against the bars. Each is gripping a shank in one hand while holding the other’s arm to keep him from swinging. Drops of blood spatter the floor. The surrounding scene is oddly calm. Inmates stand around and watch, not saying anything.
“Break it up,” Bacle says indifferently. “Break it up.”
The two combatants are speaking to each other quietly, almost at a whisper.
“Come on,” one says. “Come on with it, big dog.”
“I’ma do you like you did me.”
They grapple some more.
“Break it up!” Bacle yells.
“Come on!” I shout, feeling utterly impotent.
Bacle, Miss Price, a CCA employee from out of state, and I stand just two feet from them, separated by the bars, and watch the two try to press their knives into each other.
One man breaks his hand free, swings it up, and jams his shank into the side of the other man’s neck. My breath stops for a moment, and I utter a gagging sound. “It ain’t sharp enough, big dog,�
� says the guy who was just stabbed. “Let me show you where the sharp one is.”
Bacle reaches through the bars and grabs the stabber by his hood as the other inmate struggles to break loose. For the first time, the other prisoners make noise. “Hey, man, you’re gonna get him killed like that!” one shouts at Bacle. Bacle lets go, and the two men tumble across the floor, landing in a heap by the toilet, blocked from our view by a short wall. They keep scuffling. An arm swings up and jabs down. One prisoner walks over to the urinal two feet from them and pees as they keep stabbing.
The fight lasts nearly four minutes, until a SORT member comes in with a can of pepper spray. “Don’t fucking move,” he barks. “Everybody lay the fuck down.” He sprays the men as they try to stab each other. One, who’s had a bit of his ear sliced off, is taken to the hospital. The other goes to seg.
The smell of pepper spray fades, but the smell of shit does not. It’s not until the afternoon that someone comes in to fix the toilets and finds a shank stuck in the plumbing.
Later, I recount to a sergeant how one of the inmates was poking the knife into the other guy’s neck. “Did you learn something from that?” he asks me.
“Not really.”
The inmate could have slit the other guy’s throat if he wanted to, he says. But he didn’t. “Both of ’em scared. That’s the reason for havin’ them shanks in the first place, ’cuz they are scared.”
The Audit
At the end of my shift, I stride briskly down the dark walk. I am relieved to be going home, but after two weeks on the job as a full-time CO, I’m afraid in a way I wasn’t at first. The longer I work here, the more people have grudges against me. As I head down the walk, inmates are coming and going from various parts of the prison and I can’t see any other guards around. I don’t have a radio—I am required to give it to the officer who relieves me. I’ve seen the surveillance footage, and I doubt it would be clear enough to identify anyone who might jump me in this darkness.
The gate before the exit is locked and I am routed through the visitation area. There, twenty or so officers from my shift are sitting at the tables, frowning. Two inmates are serving pizza. We’ve been trapped in a company meeting. Assistant Warden Parker is there. The chief of security. HR. I grab some pizza and sit down, frustrated.
“How many people here got less than a year in?” Parker asks. I raise my hand. “You’ve probably seen a lot of bad days, okay? We’re gonna change that. And it takes all of us working together. It really, really does. As long as we stay as a decent team and we remember that the bad guys are the guys who stay here twenty-four/seven and don’t get to leave.”
On the wall is a painting of a black kid and a white kid lying on their bellies on a grassy hillside, looking at a rainbow. Next to it is another mural of a lion and a tiger tearing through an American flag with a bald eagle flying overhead. “The CCA Way” is written above it.
“The company took a look at things and they realized that we need to do a little bit better for the staff here at Winn. I’m not going to say that we’ve waved a magic wand and everybody’s walking out of here, gonna go buy new cars, but the hourly wage for a correctional officer is going to go up to ten dollars an hour. So congratulations to everybody sitting inside this room.” He starts clapping and a few people join unenthusiastically. “This is going to be one of those proud moments,” he says.
“Does anybody know what the ACA is?” Parker asks. “Have you been hearing about ‘We got ACA coming up. Ooooh! ACA’s coming. We gotta panic! Hit the panic button!’”
“The American Correctional Association,” someone volunteers.
“Okay, why do we care about ACA?” Parker asks.
“We need our jobs. We need to pass.”
“That’s a theme that goes with it. Years and years and years ago, I think it was 1870, there was a governor upset with what he thought was cruel and unusual punishment,” he lectures. “So he started drafting up a little group of people that would go around and they would check on prisons and prison conditions to ensure that the people who were confined were not being treated cruelly. After time they started developing a sophisticated auditing process. So, a third-party person who has no dog in the fight, so to speak, comes in and they take a look at how are we treating our inmates. And they give us a stamp of, ‘You’re treating them with proper care.’
“That way when we go to court and the inmate says, ‘Oh, they made me eat Pizza Hut pizza! That’s cruel and unusual punishment! It should have been Domino’s!’—when it goes to court, we pull up our ACA files and say, ‘Hey, look, here’s how we prepare our food in the kitchen. We prepare the food in our kitchen under these standards.’ ”
The ACA is a trade association, but it’s also the closest thing we have to a national regulatory body for prisons. More than 900 public and private correctional facilities and detention centers are accredited under its standards. Winn was the first prison to be accredited in Louisiana. Shortly after T. Don Hutto cofounded CCA, he became the president of ACA.
Over the next few weeks, inmates repaint every unit in preparation for the ACA audit. The maintenance man is run ragged as he tries to fix busted vents, plumbing, and cell and tier doors. (“We didn’t own the facility,” CCA’s spokesman told me, noting that major maintenance issues at Winn were the DOC’s responsibility. CCA’s contract states that it was responsible for routine and preventive maintenance.)
In anticipation of the audit, I read the ACA standards. How will the auditors deal with the fact that the cells in segregation are at least twenty square feet smaller than required? Or that inmates only get ten minutes to eat, not the mandated twenty? There are many other ACA standards and recommendations Winn does not appear to meet: We rarely have the required number of positions staffed; guards’ pay is not comparable to the pay of state corrections officers; guards rarely ever use the metal detectors at the entrances to the housing units; prisoners often don’t get one hour of daily access to exercise space; suicide-watch meals are below caloric requirements; there aren’t enough toilets in the dorms. (The ACA did not respond to a request for comment.)
Then again, Winn passed its last ACA audit, in 2012, with a near-perfect score of 99 percent, the same score it received in its previous audit three years earlier. In fact, CCA’s average score across all its accredited prisons is also 99 percent.
On the morning of the audit, we wake everyone up and tell them to make their beds and take any pictures of women off their lockers. Two well-dressed white men enter Ash unit and do a slow lap around the floor. The only questions they ask Bacle and me are what our names are and how we’re doing. They do not examine our logbook, nor do they check our entries against the camera footage. If they did, they would find that some of the cameras don’t work. They do not check the doors. If they did, they would see they need to be yanked open by hand because most of the switches don’t work. They don’t check the fire alarm, which automatically closes smoke doors over the tiers, some of which must be jimmied back open by two guards. They do not ask to go on a tier. They do not interview any inmates. They do a single loop and they leave.
• • •
After nearly two decades, Corner Store is about to be free. He has just six weeks to go before he qualifies for early release with the “good time” he’s earned. How does someone reenter the world after two decades behind bars, with no friends on the outside and no money to his name? His first step, he says, will be to stay in a shelter until he can get on his feet. He doesn’t know where he will go yet. He tells me he doesn’t want to count the days. “It stresses me out. Anxiety sets in. Your mind goes, working and thinking about stuff. How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that? It causes a panic attack. When I walk, I walk.”
But fantasies creep into his mind. “I’ma get me a big bottle of Kaopectate, a big German chocolate cake, five-gallon thing of milk,” he says. “Just get out the way, that’s all I’ma tell you.” We are outside, talking through the fence; he’s o
n the small yard and I’m on the Ash walk. “After that, I want me a seafood platter, a real seafood platter about the size of the kitchen table, just for me and Mom. It’s all about Mom when I go home.”
He puts his hand on the fence and leans in. “What I’m sayin’ is this here, man: I just wanna go have fun, boy. And fun does not mean me-gettin’-in-trouble fun. Fun means just enjoying life. I wanna be able to take my mothafuckin’ shoes off and socks off and walk in the sand. I wanna be able to just go outside in my shorts and just my house slippers and stand in the rain and just—” he spreads his arms, points his face to the sky, and opens his mouth. “Them thangs I miss. You can’t do that in here. Alls I’m sayin’ is this here: When I get out, I don’t want to have to poke my chest out any longer. It hurts to poke my chest out. It’s a weight on my shoulders I’ve been toting for the last twenty-somethin’ years, and I’m ready to drop that weight because the load is heavy.”
Chapter 5: Lockdown
On my fifth week on the job, I’m asked to train a new cadet. He is a short white man in his forties with peppered black hair. He says he worked as a security contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan for Triple Canopy and Blackwater. He is hoping to go back to Afghanistan soon. “I had terrorists who blew up schools and shit that I had to take care of. It wasn’t all PC like it is here.” Prisoners here, he says, get treated with kid gloves. “They got rights and all this crap. Fuck that.”
I show him how to open the doors and do callouts, and I tell him we are going to start letting people out for chow soon. “What do you mean?” he says, suddenly looking frightened. “You are just going to open the doors and let them out? I can’t believe that!”
