by Sid Holt
He doesn’t think they should go out at all. “Fuck ’em. Not unless you have absolutely an emergency. Or you’re on a work plan or some shit like that. I’d make prison so bad that you would never want to come back. When I was growing up, my mom used to live in Mississippi. They had all the work gangs and they were all in orange and all chained up. Chain gangs and shit like that. That’s how it should be. Make it so bad, you’d never want to come back.”
“It’s pretty bad in here,” I tell him. “People get stabbed here all the time.” At least seven inmates have been stabbed in the last six weeks. As people come in from chow, I hear on the radio, “Code Blue in Elm! Code Blue in Elm!” A CO is frantically calling for a stretcher. Several inmates are stabbing each other; they can’t count how many.
“Everyone on the tier!” Bacle shouts to the prisoners milling about. “Fuck all that,” one says. “We’ll have another Code motherfucking Blue.” Bacle blows his whistle. We get everyone in and I head out onto the Ash walk to see what is happening.
A minute later, a bleeding man is wheeled by on a work cart and I return inside. Several people were injured, and I hear one was stabbed about thirty times. Miraculously, no one dies.
Three days later, I see two inmates stab each other in Ash.
A week after that, another inmate is stabbed and beaten by multiple people in Elm. People say he was cut more than forty times. During this time, Miss Price quits after nearly twenty-five years of service. She says she’s tired of this work. (We will go without a unit manager in Ash for weeks.) Not long after she leaves, someone is beaten unconscious and stabbed through the cheek in Birch and another inmate is stabbed in Cypress.
It is difficult to imagine how someone gets stabbed in segregation. How do shanks get in? How do inmates get to each other? The morning after the stabbing in Cypress, I hear Assistant Warden Parker call over the radio for maintenance to come and fix the cell doors there. A month ago, he told us that inmates in the unit could pull some cell doors off their tracks. A month before that, Mr. Tucker, the SORT commander, told us something similar. Apparently this problem still hasn’t been fixed.
Miss Calahan (her real name), the Ash key officer, tells me they had the same problem in the unit before I started. She points at D1 tier and says that for two months, she and Bacle told the higher-ups to fix the door. At least one inmate filed a grievance about it. “I popped it several times using my foot,” Bacle says. He even showed the warden how it was done. Then, one evening, two inmates shook the tier door open from the outside, apparently unnoticed by the floor officers. One was carrying an eight-inch knife, the other an ice pick. According to a legal complaint, the two inmates found another inmate who lived on the tier and stabbed him twelve times in the head, mouth, eye, and body. One of the attackers warned that he would kill anyone who alerted the guards, so the victim lay bleeding, waiting for a CO to come through for the mandatory half-hour security check. Unsurprisingly, no one did. He bled for an hour and a half until a guard came by for count. He spent nine days in the infirmary.
“Child, next day they was out here fixing that door!” Miss Calahan says.
Bacle says he wishes an investigative reporter would come and look into this place. He complains about how, in other prisons, inmates get new charges for stabbing someone. Here, they are put in seg, but they rarely get shipped to another prison with tighter security. “CCA wants that fucking dollar!” Bacle says through clenched teeth. “That’s the reason why we play hell on getting a damn raise, because all they want is that dollar in their pocket.”
High levels of violence have been documented at several CCA prisons. At Ohio’s Lake Erie Correctional Institution, which CCA bought in 2011, inmate-on-inmate assaults increased 188 percent and inmate-on-staff assaults went up more than 300 percent between 2010 and 2012, according to a state report. (A 2015 report by the state prison inspector, provided by CCA, noted that Lake Erie had “drastically improved” and said the facility was “outperforming some of the state institutions.”) In 2009, Kentucky declined to raise CCA’s per diem rate at one facility because the company’s prison was twice as violent as its state-run counterpart and because a suicidal employee smuggled in a gun and shot herself in the warden’s office. There is no current data on how violence in public prisons compares with violence in private ones. The last study released by the Department of Justice was in 2001, and it found that the rate of inmate-on-inmate assaults was 38 percent higher at private prisons than at public prisons.
But are any of these numbers accurate? If I were not working at Winn and were reporting on the prison through more traditional means, I would never know how violent it is. While I work here, I keep track of every stabbing that I see or hear about from supervisors or eyewitnesses. During the first two months of 2015, at least twelve people are shanked. The company is required to report all serious assaults to the DOC. But DOC records show that for the first ten months of 2015, CCA reported only five stabbings. (CCA says it reports all assaults and that the DOC may have classified incidents differently.)
Reported or not, by my seventh week as a guard the violence is getting out of control. The stabbings start to happen so frequently that, on February 16, the prison goes on indefinite lockdown. No inmates leave their tiers. The walk is empty. Crows gather and puddles of water form on the rec yards. More men in black are sent in by corporate. They march around the prison in military formation. Some wear face masks.
• • •
The new SORT team, composed of officers from around the country, shakes down the prison bit by bit. The wardens from the DOC continue to wander around, and CCA also sends in wardens of its own from out of state. Tension is high. No inmates except kitchen workers can leave the tiers. Passing out food trays becomes a daily battle. Prisoners rush the food cart and take everything.
“CCA is not qualified to run this place,” an inmate shouts to me a day into the lockdown. “You always got to shut the place down. You can’t function. You can’t run school or nothing because you got everybody on lockdown.”
Another inmate cuts in. “Since I been here, there’s been nothing but stabbings,” he says. “It don’t happen like this at other prisons because they got power. They got control. Ain’t no control here, so it’s gonna always be something happening. You got to start from the top to the bottom, you feel me? If [the warden] really want to control this prison—goddamn!—why ain’t you go’ call and get some workers? But you know what it’s all about? It’s about the money. ‘Let them kill theyselves.’ They don’t give a fuck.”
One day, a former public-jail warden visits Ash. “I don’t know what’s going on down here, but it’s not good,” he says to me. “There’s something fucked up, I can tell you that.”
I ask if Winn seems different from publicly operated prisons. “Oh, hell yeah,” he says. “Too lax.” If this were his prison, he says, there would be four officers on the floor, not two. At his public facility, officers start at $12.50 an hour. When they go to police academy, they get another $500 a month. Every time they pass a quarterly fitness test, they get $300. The initial training is ninety days. I tell him it was thirty days here. “This is a joke,” he says. “I been doing this for sixteen years. This is a free jail to me. Too much shit going on down here. Not no consequences.” He says CCA could lose its contract.
One day, the visiting SORT team comes to Ash. One masked officer keeps watch over everyone with a pepper-ball gun. Other SORT members stand around, eating Twinkies and Oatmeal Creme Pies and drinking Mountain Dew. They tear up the tiers, throwing things out, slicing up mattresses. They find drugs and cell phones. Bacle tries to stop them from taking inmates’ coffee or destroying their matchstick crafts. Their overzealousness riles him. “Some people here think just because they’re locked up they’re a bunch of shitheads. I look at it, they fucked up and they’re doing their damn time.”
As soon as SORT leaves, inmates scream over each other to tell me what was taken, cursing me for not standing up
for them.
• • •
During the lockdown, Corner Store asks me to let him out of his tier. With the canteen closed, his services are badly needed. Everyone’s commissary is getting low; many inmates are in search of cigarettes. They ask me to ferry things from one tier to the next, but I refuse, mostly because I know that once I do, the requests will never stop. I don’t let Corner Store out. I tell him it’s too risky with all these eyes around. For days, he just lies on his bed, staring at the ceiling.
His release date is five days away, but he still doesn’t know where he’s going when he gets out.
“Isn’t it Tuesday you are getting out?”
“Supposedly,” he says. Louisiana law doesn’t allow early release unless the inmate has an address to go to. New parolees have to stay in the state, and his mother doesn’t live in Louisiana. With no one outside to assist him, he has to rely on CCA to make arrangements with a shelter. The prison’s coach was trying to help, but Corner Store says he got “roadblocked” by the administration.
“So they just keep you here?” I say, incredulous.
“Yeah, basically. I’m not even angry, man. I just know my day is coming. I’ve waited years for this. I’m not mad.”
I ask Corner Store’s case manager what is happening with him. “He might be supposed to be getting out,” he says, but “as long as he don’t have that [address], his feet will not hit outside that gate. It ain’t nothin’ I can do for him.”
“They don’t want nobody to leave,” Corner Store tells me. “The longer they keep you, the more money they make. You understand that?”
• • •
One of the SORT members tells me they’ll be at Winn for months. Yesterday, they found fifty-one shanks in Elm, roughly one for every seven men. DOC records show that during the first four months of 2015, CCA reported finding nearly 200 weapons at Winn. That made it the state’s most heavily armed prison, with more than five times more confiscated weapons per inmate than GEO’s similarly sized Allen Correctional Center, and twenty-three times more than Angola. “They getting ready to start a war,” one officer says in a morning meeting.
Sergeant King stops by Ash. As he makes to leave, people start shouting from their tiers. “What’s up with the fuckin’ store?” It’s been three weeks since anyone here went to canteen. Inmates are up at the bars, looking angry. “You ’bout to start a whole riot,” one says to King.
Bacle seems nervous. “If they start throwing shit, you step right up here where they can’t gitcha,” he tells me, pointing toward the entrance. Less than a week ago, inmates rioted in a privately operated immigrant detention center in Texas. I saw prisoners here watching it on the news.
I walk over to one of the tiers.
“There ain’t go’ be no count or no nothing!” one shouts at me.
“Ain’t no COs coming in this bitch until we go to canteen.”
“That’s what’s up. We all standing behind that.”
“We gonna put this bitch on the channel eight news.”
“Y’all risking your fucking life around here playing these fucking games!”
“Fuck the count! Bring the warden down here.”
King comes over to one of the tiers. “Y’all gotta give me an opportunity. Before y’all start bucking. Before y’all start refusing. Because here’s what’s going to happen: They’re gonna bring the SORT force down here.”
“We don’t give a fuck!”
“I ain’t got no fucking soap! No nothing! No deodorant! No fucking cigarettes! This place is shit!”
I don’t want to give the impression we are afraid, so I walk the floor. Everyone, everywhere, is pissed. I feel an explosion coming and I want to flee. “I’m surprised ain’t nobody got you yet,” a white inmate with a shaved head says to me, his eyes cold and focused. “They go’ get you.”
A few years ago, a riot erupted in a low-security CCA prison in Mississippi over what inmates saw as inadequate health care and poor food. A guard was beaten to death. When Alex Friedmann, a former CCA inmate and a company shareholder, asked for a moment of silence for the guard at a corporate meeting in 2013, the board chair refused to honor the request. (At the time, CCA said it had “honored his memory a number of ways.”)
King calls Bacle and me to the door. “Listen, it’s a lot of tension down here,” he says.
“No shit,” Bacle says.
“They found seventy-five shanks in two days. These sonsabitches is dangerous, y’all. I don’t want y’all goin’ in them tiers. I don’t want y’all lettin’ nobody out. As of right now, if this shit don’t get handled, y’all going to have a fuckin’ riot on y’all hands. All the black suits ain’t going to do nothin’ but pepper-ball and gas all of they asses.” He leaves.
A while later, a CCA warden from Tennessee comes and talks to the inmates. “Y’all saying that y’all are being mistreated. I got plenty of people here. If we want to act like refugees and animals, then we can do it that way.” The prisoners don’t back down.
A couple of hours later, SORT comes and escorts the inmates to the canteen.
A Drastic Change
The lockdown lasts a total of eleven days. When it ends, Corner Store stands at the bars, waiting for me to let him out to work the floor. I ignore him. He pleads, but I am unbending. I have become convinced that he thinks he has influence over me, though I can’t articulate why. I become suspicious of his friendliness and wonder if he is manipulating me. I start to talk to him like every other inmate and he looks at me with confusion. When he lingers too long as I hold the gate open for chow, I slam it shut and let him stew. He calls my name as I walk away. I feel a twinge of guilt, but it lasts only momentarily.
His release date comes and goes. When I do count, I see him lying on his bunk. Eventually, he stops making eye contact as I pass.
An inmate orderly corners me. “Listen, what’s the problem?” he says, leaning against his broom.
“What problem?” I say curtly.
“Listen, be cool. Be cool. We talking. Relax. Why you so aggressive when I talk to you? You’re too snappy.”
“I’m not aggressive, man!”
“No, no, no. There’s been a drastic change in you. What the fuck went wrong?”
I tell him we are under pressure from management to tighten up. This is true, but there is more. I see conspiracies brewing. Things I used to view as harmless transgressions I now view as personal attacks. When a physically disabled man doesn’t leave the shower in time for count, I am certain he is testing me, trying to break me down, to dominate me. The same is true when I see prisoners lying under their blankets during the daytime or standing at the bars. I don’t care about the rules, per se; many of them seem arbitrary. But I become obsessed with the notion that people are breaking them in front of me to whittle away at my will. I write inmates up all day long. One paper after another, I stack them, sometimes more than twenty-five disciplinaries in a day. Some inmates are clever; they know how to get under my skin without breaking the rules. So I shake down their beds and look for a reason to punish them.
I carry all this with me. Some days, when I stop for gas on the way home from work I notice myself, for a split second, casing the black men who enter the gas station. When I shoot pool at the local bar, I imagine—I hope—that the white man in hunting camouflage who’s playing against me will do something to spark a fight.
One day, the key officer tells me to go to the captain’s office. I am nervous; this has never happened before. He is sitting alone at his desk. “I think you are a very strong officer,” he says. I relax—it’s my employee evaluation. “I think you are a very detailed officer. You got a knack for this. You got a ‘it’ factor for this. It’s just who you are as a person. So, like you went down there to Ash and you just took the bull by the horns and just ran with it. It seems like them guys are starting to understand now—this is how this unit is go’ run. This is how CO Bauer go’ run it.”
The computer screen in front of
him reads, “He is an outstanding officer. He has a take-charge attitude. He is dependable and stern. He would be an excellent candidate for promotion.”
“That’s how we feel about you. I just think that you need to stay consistent with what you are doing. Don’t break.” Despite myself, I crack a smile.
• • •
Even after the lockdown ends, SORT does not leave. They patrol the walk, frisking random inmates, and shake down tiers relentlessly. One morning, I spot white buses parked outside the prison as I pull in for work. At the morning meeting, there are about fifteen wardens and COs from public prisons across the state. The Winn warden steps up to the podium. “Our friends here from the Louisiana Department of Corrections have come to help us out,” he says. This is the moment everyone has feared. Are they taking over? Will we lose our jobs?
A warden and a couple of officers from Angola follow Bacle and me to Ash. One tells us they are taking inmates who are too friendly with staff and shipping them to other prisons. He also says they’ve been administering lie detector tests to officers. Several have already refused to take one and walked off the job. When he says this, I get nervous. I go into the bathroom and flip through my notebook. I rip out my notes. I throw them in the toilet and hold the handle down for a good ten seconds.
When it’s count time, the COs from Angola blow a whistle and bark for everyone to sit up straight on their bunks. We’ve never done this. They tell us that if we get used to counting people sleeping under their blankets, we might eventually count someone who is dead. All the inmates sit up without hesitation. As long as the DOC officers are here, everything is quiet and smooth. They make inmates walk through the metal detector as they enter the unit, and Bacle and I put them in their tiers. I feel less worried about getting attacked, and some inmates tell me things are better for them, too. But others say that as soon as the DOC is gone, things will go back to the way they were. “It’s like Mommy and Daddy back home,” one prisoner says. “But when they go back on vacation, the kids is back out.”
