by Sid Holt
The Winn COs are deferential to the DOC officers, but in private they describe them as elitist pricks. It feels like incompetence has been replaced with overzealousness. The DOC officers chide us for letting inmates smoke inside, and when they spot someone smoking on camera, they find him and strip-search him in front of everyone. When I sit on a chair to take a break, a DOC officer, staring at the monitor inside the key, tells me to go into the TV room in one of the tiers. There is an inmate in there whose pants are sagging. He orders me to tell the man to pull them up.
“It gets in your blood”
Three days later, the DOC officers leave, and the order they imposed vanishes with them. COs slide back into their old routines and prisoners resist more than usual. Assistant Warden Parker, however, is jubilant: CCA has hung onto the prison. “The great state of Louisiana came in with both guns a-blazing,” he tells us during a morning meeting. “They were ready to tear Winn apart.” In interviews with staff, the DOC learned that staff members had been “bringing in mountains and mountains of mojo”—synthetic marijuana—and having sex with inmates. “One person actually said that they trusted the inmates more than they trusted me, the warden. One staff member said, ‘The inmate made me feel pretty. Why wouldn’t I love him? Why wouldn’t I bring him things he needs because you all won’t let him have it?’ ”
Later that morning, I clench up when my old instructor Kenny enters the unit and approaches me. “The warden told me to find somebody that’s knowledgeable and ready for leadership,” he says, smiling slightly. “Out of all y’all’s crew down here, I’m gonna handpick you. If you are interested in moving on up, I’m go’ make it happen. I’m going to train you for the next level.” I’ve been on the job for two months.
In the following days, I walk up and down the tiers at count time, barking at inmates to sit up on their bunks. If they are asleep, I kick their beds. Some refuse to obey, so I write them up.
At the end of a long day, I head down the walk. On my way out, I meet Miss Carter, the mental-health director.
“How do you like it so far?” she asks.
“It’s okay. It can be exciting,” I say.
“It gets in your blood, doesn’t it? Someone asked me if we were pretty picky about who we hire,” Miss Carter continues as we pass through the front gate. “I said, ‘Well, I’d love to tell you yes, but we take ’em six-legged and lazy.’ We take whatever we can get!” she says with a laugh. “When you get down like this, you’ll take whatever. But then we come across a few good people like yourself. That’s not the norm.”
Outside, there is a chorus of frogs and crickets. The air is sweet and balmy. Like I do every night when I get off work, I take a breath and try to remember who I am. Miss Carter is right. It is getting in my blood. The boundary between pleasure and anger is blurring. To shout makes me feel alive. I take pleasure in saying “no” to prisoners. I like to hear them complain about my write-ups. I like to ignore them when they ask me to cut them a break. When they hang their clothes to dry in the TV room, an unauthorized area, I confiscate the laundry and get a thrill when they shout from down the tier as I take it away. During the lockdown, when Ash threatened to riot, I hoped the SORT team would come in and gas the whole unit. Everyone would be coughing and gasping, including me, and it would be good because it would be action. All that matters anymore is action.
Until I leave. When I drive home, I wonder who I am becoming. I feel ashamed of my lack of self-control, my growing thirst for punishment and vengeance. I’m getting afraid of the expanding distance between the person I am at home and the one behind the wire. My glass of wine with dinner regularly becomes three. I hear the sounds of Ash unit as I fall asleep. I dream of monsters and men behind bars.
• • •
Late one night in the middle of March, my wife wakes me. James West, my Mother Jones colleague who’s recently come to Louisiana to shoot video for my story, has not returned from trying to get a nighttime shot of the outside of Winn. Something is wrong. The sheriff of Winn Parish answers James’s phone. James, he says, will be in jail for a while. I feel the blood drain from my face. Then I wonder, “Will they come for me?” We scramble to pack up everything that has anything to do with my reporting and check into a hotel at two a.m. A few hours later, I call in sick.
The same morning, James tells the sheriff he needs to make a call. “You can tell them we didn’t shoot you at dawn!” the sheriff says. James is later taken in leg irons into a room for questioning. “We don’t care if you are doing an exposé on CCA,” a deputy tells him. “We have nothing to do with them. They have given us trouble in the past.” A state trooper adds, “I don’t care if that guy works in the prison.” James assumes he is referring to me but says nothing.
James is charged with trespassing. By evening, a $10,000 bond is posted and he is released. “Send me a copy of the article when it’s done,” one of the cops tells him.
We pick up James at a gas station at the edge of Winnfield and drive out of town. The next morning, as I get coffee in the hotel lobby, I see a SORT officer standing outside in a black uniform, flex-cuffs hanging from his belt. Are they looking for me? We exit through a side door, and as I pull my truck out I see another man I recognize from the prison. We go back to the apartment, hurriedly throw everything in plastic bags, and leave. We drive across the border to Texas. I feel, oddly, sad.
A couple of days later, I call HR at Winn. “This is CO Bauer. I’m calling because I’ve decided to resign.”
“Oh! Mr. Bauer, I hate to hear that!” the HR woman says. “I hate to lose you. Your evaluation looked good and it looked like you were willing to hang in there and hopefully promote. Well, I hate it, Mr. Bauer. I truly do. In the future, if you decide to change your mind, you know the process.”
Epilogue
When Bacle pulled into Winn’s front gate after I left town, the guard told him the assistant warden wanted to see him. “What the hell did I do?” he thought. In his office, Assistant Warden Parker asked Bacle what he knew about me. “He was a good partner,” Bacle told him. “I enjoyed working with the dude. He has no problem writing ’em up.” He asked what was wrong, but Parker wouldn’t say. On his way out, Bacle asked the officer at the front gate, “What’s going on with Bauer?”
“You ain’t heard?” the officer said. “He was an undercover reporter!”
Bacle recounted this to me on the phone ten months later. “Oh, I laughed,” he said. “I don’t know if you remember, but I told you once that it would be nice to have an investigative reporter out there.”
Word about me got out quick. The day after I quit, the Winnfield newspaper reported that I had been working at the prison. National media picked up the story and CCA issued a statement saying my approach “raises serious questions about his journalistic standards.” A couple of guards I worked with reached out to me right away. Miss Calahan, who’d quit before me because she thought the job was getting too dangerous, wrote to me on Facebook: “Hey boy you got they ass lol.” Another sent me an e-mail: “Wow, Bauer! I’m honored. I don’t even know what to say.”
I attempted to contact everyone who’s mentioned in this story to ask them about their experiences at Winn. Some refused outright. Others didn’t respond to my phone calls and letters, and a few I could not track down. A surprising number, however, were eager to talk. Corner Store insisted he and other inmates knew something was up all along. “I just don’t know no CO to pull out his pad every five minutes,” he told me. “Everybody’s like, ‘Oh man, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.’ ” Collinsworth said that when he found out I was a reporter, he “thought it was cool.” Christian thought “pretty much what most people thought: Can’t wait to read the story!”
Some people whom I would never have expected spoke to me. One was Miss Lawson, who’d been the assistant chief of security. “They were scared to death of who you were,” she told me. “After they found out you were a reporter, it was like, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ ” The DOC q
uickly required the staff to undergo fresh background checks. CCA’s corporate office sent people to Winn to open what she described as an “extensive” investigation on me. They gathered “everything that had your name on it,” Miss Lawson said. Ironically, the investigation narrowed in on the item that, in my mind, had symbolized my transformation from an observer into a real prison guard: the cell phone I had confiscated in Ash. “I got called like four or five times for that one phone from corporate,” Miss Lawson said. “It was like they were insinuating that you brought the phone in or there was some information in the phone. I’m like, ‘No, he found it in a water fountain.’ ”
After I’d filled out the paperwork about the phone and handed it off to Miss Price, it had disappeared somewhere in the chain of command. The mystery of the missing cell phone grew into a broader probe in which Christian and Miss Lawson were fired for allegedly selling phones to inmates. Both deny it, and CCA did not pursue legal action against them.
Miss Lawson also told me that Assistant Warden Parker texted her a photo of me, asking if she knew who I was. After she identified me, Miss Lawson says, Parker told her to delete the photo and “forget I sent it to you.” She kept it, however, and e-mailed it to me. The image was a shot of a laptop screen on which a video of me was playing. I recognized the footage immediately: James had filmed it on the afternoon before he was arrested.
When James was detained, he was careful to protect his camera and the footage on it, even as he was surrounded by SORT officers from the prison and Winn Parish deputies. Police body-cam footage that I later obtained shows one deputy grabbing James’s camera as James struggles to hang on to it, telling the officer that searching his camera and memory cards would be illegal. After James was cuffed and put in a police cruiser, two officers left their body cameras on. The video shows a SORT member scrolling through the images on James’s camera. The sheriff never obtained a search warrant for my colleague’s belongings, but someone apparently searched them anyway. Geolocation data on the photo Miss Lawson sent me points to the sheriff’s office. (The Winn Parish sheriff says he was “not aware” of anyone searching James’s things.)
In April 2015, about two weeks after I left Winn, CCA notified the DOC that it planned to void its contract for the prison, which had been set to expire in 2020. According to documents that the DOC later sent me, in late 2014 the department had reviewed CCA’s compliance with its contract and asked it to make immediate changes at Winn. Several security issues were identified, including broken doors and cameras, and unused metal detectors. The DOC also asked CCA to increase inmate recreation and activities, improve training, hire more guards, hire more medical and mental-health employees, and address a “total lack of maintenance.” Another concern raised by the DOC, CCA’s chief corrections officer acknowledged, was a bonus paid to Winn’s warden that “causes neglect of basic needs.” The DOC also noted that CCA had charged inmates for state-supplied toilet paper and toothpaste and made them pay to clip their nails. In a message to its shareholders, the company gave no hint of any problems at Winn; it only said the prison wasn’t making enough money. LaSalle Corrections, a Louisiana-based company, took over in September.
Some guards stayed on with the new company, but many left. Bacle got a job at a lumber mill. Miss Calahan became a CO at a local jail. One went on to army basic training. Another took a security-guard job in Texas. Some are still unemployed. Assistant Warden Parker took a similar position at another CCA prison. Some Winn prisoners have been transferred across the state and some have been released. Robert Scott is still suing over his amputated legs. I still don’t know what most of them were in for, but I was shocked to find out that Corner Store was in for armed robbery and forcible rape.
One inmate’s mother read about me in the news and asked an attorney to connect us. When the lawyer told me her son’s name—Damien Coestly—it took me back to my first day on the job, when I was working suicide watch. It had been a year since I’d pulled my chair across from him as he sat on the toilet, his entire body hidden under his suicide blanket. He had told me to “get the fuck out of here” and threatened that if I didn’t he would “get up on top of this bed and jump straight onto [his] motherfucking neck.” He had gone on hunger strike repeatedly to protest the limited dietary options and inadequate mental-health services. In June 2015, he hanged himself. His autopsy said he weighed seventy-one pounds.
• • •
Five months after I left Winn, Mother Jones received a letter from a law firm representing CCA. The letter dropped hints that the company had been monitoring my recent communications with inmates and was keeping an eye on my social-media presence. CCA’s counsel claimed I was bound by the company’s code of conduct, which states, “All employees must safeguard the company’s trade secrets and confidential information.” Since guards are not privy to confidential business information, the implication is that what I experienced and observed inside Winn should remain secret.
CCA insisted on receiving a “meaningful opportunity to respond” to this story prior to its publication. Yet when I asked for an in-person interview, the company refused. CCA did eventually reply to the more than 150 questions I sent; its responses are included throughout this article. In one letter to me, CCA’s spokesman scolded me thirteen times for my “fundamental misunderstanding” of the company’s business and “corrections in general.” He also suggested that my reporting methods were “better suited for celebrity and entertainment reporting.”
• • •
In March 2016, Corner Store walked free. He stayed in prison a full year while CCA was supposed to help him find a place to go. A lawyer eventually tracked down his father’s address and arranged for him to stay there. He rode a Greyhound bus to Baton Rouge. His mother drove from Texas to see him. He got his seafood platter. He walked in the rain. He got a job detailing cars. Sometimes he would hop on a bus, any bus, and ride the entire route just to see the city.
Two weeks after he gets out, James and I visit him at his house on a quiet street near the airport. His father invites us in.
“You all taking [him] somewhere?” his father asks us as we sit on the couch waiting for Corner Store to get ready.
“Yeah, we were going to see if he wants to go anywhere,” I say.
“You all ain’t come here to arrest him?”
Corner Store comes out of his room and walks directly outside. He tells us to get straight in the car—no talking in the street. He’s tense.
“Hey, this no names involved, huh?”
“What are you worried about?” I ask.
“Let’s just say something happens and I go back.”
“Who would you be worried about?”
“The free people.” He means the guards.
“Do you think you might go back?”
“Anything is possible,” he says. The smallest parole violation could land him back in prison. “If they were ever to see me again, they wouldn’t have too much of a liking for me. They feel like you shouldn’t even be talking about this.”
When we pick up Corner Store the next day, he tells me he hasn’t seen the Mississippi yet. He used to fish in it, growing up. We head to the river. After we sit and talk awhile, he stops scoping out everyone who passes by, and he stares out at the glistening surface. A tugboat chugs past. He walks down to the bank, scoops up some water, brings it to his nose, and breathes in deep.
Harper’s Magazine
WINNER—COLUMNS AND COMMENTARY
The first woman to write “The Easy Chair” since the column was introduced in Harper’s Magazine in 1851, Rebecca Solnit was first nominated for the Ellie for Columns and Commentary in 2016. The three pieces that won the Ellie this year included a meditation on the film Giant, an examination of the link between isolation and modern conservatism, and a portrait of an African American writer living on death row. “Because her touch with reported material is humble and light and her writing so able, it can appear that Solnit arrives at her insights w
ith little effort,” said the Ellie judges, “yet there is nothing ‘easy’ about her work. Each of these pieces tells an important story with curiosity and care.”
Rebecca Solnit
Bird in a Cage and The Ideology of Isolation and Giantess
Bird in a Cage
There are two things I think about nearly every time I row out into San Francisco Bay. One is a passage from Shankar Vedantam’s The Hidden Brain, in which he talks about a swim he once took. A decent swimmer in his own estimate, Vedantam went out into the sea one day and discovered that he had become superb and powerful; he was instantly proud of his new abilities. Far from shore, he realized he had been riding a current and was going to have to fight it all the way back to shore. “Unconscious bias influences our lives in exactly the same manner as that undercurrent,” Vedantam writes. “Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers; those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.”
Most mornings I row out against the current, and the moment when I turn around is exhilarating. Strokes that felt choppy and ineffectual are suddenly graceful and powerful. I feel very good at what I do, even though I know that the tide is going my way.
Rowing is the closest I will ever come to flying. On calm, flat days my battered old oars make twin circles of ripples that spread out until they intersect behind the stern of the boat. I’m forever retreating from that gentle disturbance, the water smoothing itself into glass again as I go. On the calmest days, when the bay is a mirror, these oars pull me and my scull through reflected clouds in long glides, the two nine-foot oars moving together like wings in that untrammeled space.
