Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  Prodded by media coverage, the State of Florida eventually reopened an investigation into Darren Rainey’s death to determine whether the security officers who had subjected him to the “shower treatment” should be prosecuted. On March 17, 2017, Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the state attorney for Miami-Dade County, announced that the investigation had concluded and that no criminal charges would be filed against any of the guards involved. According to a report issued by Rundle’s office, formally titled “In Custody Death Investigation Close-Out Memo,” Rainey’s death was caused by schizophrenia, heart disease, and “confinement inside a shower room,” not by mistreatment or criminal negligence. “The evidence does not show that Rainey’s well-being was grossly disregarded by the correctional staff,” it stated.

  To reach this conclusion, the Rundle report dutifully ignored the voluminous evidence that gross disregard was pervasive at Dade. Nowhere did the report discuss the climate of abuse and intimidation that Harriet Krzykowski and other mental health counselors witnessed. Nowhere did it mention that prisoners were beaten, tortured, and starved. State investigators did collect testimony from some critical sources, including Harold Hempstead. But Hempstead was portrayed as an unreliable witness whose statements contained inconsistencies and whose allegations “tainted” the views of other prisoners (several of whom corroborated his account). Far less skepticism was applied to the testimony of the guards, who, investigators concluded, took Rainey to the shower out of concern for his hygiene, “allowing him to wash himself” after they had spotted feces smeared on his body and on the walls of his cell.

  Investigators were equally unquestioning of Dr. Emma Lew, a medical examiner who told them that Rainey “did not sustain any obvious external injuries and, particularly, that there were no thermal injuries (burns) of any kind on his body.” This conclusion was at odds with an interim report that the Miami-Dade medical examiner filed immediately after Rainey’s death, in which an autopsy technician had observed, “Visible trauma was noticed throughout the decedent’s body.” (The interim report was not mentioned in the “Close-Out Memo.”) Dr. Lew’s conclusion was also at odds with a series of autopsy photos of Rainey’s body that were soon leaked to the press. One of the photos showed Rainey’s chest, a grisly patchwork of raw white tissue and exposed blood vessels. Another showed his back, which was flayed from the nape of the neck down to the shoulder blades. Rainey had visible wounds on his arms, legs, face, and stomach. Two forensic pathologists who examined the pictures told the Miami Herald they believed his death was a homicide and that the injuries he sustained were burns.

  The Rundle report was a whitewash, illustrating the culture of impunity that prevailed in Florida when it came to crimes committed by guards. “We are appalled that the state attorney did not look deeper into this case and see the criminality of the people who were involved,” Milton Grimes, an attorney for the Rainey family, told the Herald. Harriet Krzykowski was equally appalled. Yet as dismayed as she was, Harriet did not seem to blame the guards at Dade for the cruelty and degradation she witnessed. Many of the officers she met were decent people who treated the prisoners with respect, she told me. And the ones who were abusive, she maintained, acted in ways that were to be expected in a society that had resumed warehousing mentally ill people in prisons, as if they were beyond hope.

  The more brutal guards were doing society’s dirty work, in other words, which, as it happens, is exactly what Everett Hughes suggested in his 1962 essay. “From time to time, we get wind of cruelty practiced upon prisoners in penitentiaries or jails,” Hughes observed at one point in the essay. The impulse to blame such conduct on the custodians in charge was natural. But the people who ran prisons were “our agents,” Hughes argued, dispensing punishment to an “out-group”—convicts—that much of the public felt “deserve something, because of some dissociation of them from the in-group of good people.” If the punishment in question was “worse than what we like to think about, it is a little bit too bad. It is a point on which we are ambivalent.”

  Hughes proceeded to consider the matter from the perspective of a “minor prison guard” who had engaged in some “questionable practices” and boastfully justified his conduct afterward, sneering at the hypocrisy of the “higher-ups” and “good people” who held him in contempt. The guard had good reason to see them as hypocrites, Hughes averred. “He knows quite well that the wishes of his employers, the public, are by no means unmixed. They are quite as likely to put upon him for being too nice as for being too harsh. And if, as sometimes happens, he is a man disposed to cruelty, there may be some justice in his feeling that he is only doing what others would like to do, if they but dared; and what they would do, if they were in his place.”

  “KEEPERS”

  That prison guards received mixed messages from society was not news to Bill Curtis. In 2004, Curtis bought a black leather belt at Walmart, put a spit shine on a pair of 1969 military-issue boots—the pair he brought back with him from Vietnam, where he served for two years in the Twentieth Engineer Brigade (the same unit as a future vice president named Albert Gore)—and began working as a guard at the Charlotte Correctional Institution in Punta Gorda, Florida. Within a week, Curtis traded in his heavy army boots for a pair of lightweight nylon ones—being quick on your feet was essential in his new job, he’d discovered—but the memory of serving in the military was rarely far from his mind in the years to come. Working at a prison, he came to realize, was not unlike stepping onto the battlefield in a combat zone.

  Originally from southern Illinois, Curtis had moved to Florida with his wife in 1989. For the next fifteen years, he worked in retail, at a furniture store, making decent money until a dispute with his boss led him to quit. A short while later, he spotted a newspaper ad soliciting applications for corrections officers and decided to respond. Most of the would-be officers in Curtis’s training cohort were young men in their twenties or thirties. Curtis was older, with tousled brown hair that had started to go gray, but he was lean and athletic, an amateur boxer with a spry manner who sometimes sparred with younger guys at the gym and held his own.

  It did not take long for Curtis to have his sparring skills tested at his new job, or to internalize the “us against them” mentality that pervaded the profession he’d entered: corrections officers on one side, prisoners on the other. The officers had “the power and the keys,” the prisoners “the numbers and time,” Curtis told me over lunch one day. Neither had much sympathy for the other. When it came to some incarcerated people, little sympathy was warranted, Curtis came to feel. Part of his initiation into life as a guard was learning that if he turned his back to the wrong person at the wrong moment, he could wind up in an ambulance or a coffin. “I’ve picked up a guy with a slashed throat,” he said. “I’ve fought for my own life a few times.” Once, a particularly menacing prisoner who was running contraband into CCI and threatening the staff told him that he needed to “take a long vacation” after Curtis stood up to him. The prisoner ended up taking another officer hostage and pressing a nine-inch knife to his neck. (The officer survived after the assailant was persuaded to hand over the knife and release his captive and then, to Curtis’s relief, was transferred to another facility.) To work as a corrections officer was to live in a state of “constant apprehension,” Curtis told me, particularly at a place like CCI, which at the time was a “close management” lockdown facility, housing some of the most violent criminals in the state.

  Like most of his peers, Curtis came to believe that the system was stacked against corrections officers, not prisoners. “They’ve got so many rules protecting inmates, and you have to give them so many rights,” he groused. Yet he did not deny that corrections officers sometimes bent the rules to their advantage. At our lunch, Curtis pulled out a journal that he’d kept while working at CCI and handed it to me. In 2005, when Curtis was a year into the job, the journal contained an entry in which he described feeling “somewhat astounded” after reading the regulations on t
he use of chemical agents, which were sprayed at prisoners seemingly all the time. “The regulations state that chemical agents are not to be used as punishment but merely as a final resort in the control of disorderly conduct,” Curtis wrote. “The uses of agents I have observed have in large [part] been premeditated and planned punishments.” In another entry Curtis noted, “Abuses of power and undesirable behavior are more the norm than the exception among some correctional officers … Baiting, teasing, threatening, tricking, and at times physical abuse are common.” Later in the journal, he described the case of an officer who had been “caught spraying a mixture of bleach water into the face of an inmate who was known to be allergic or reactive to chemicals.” It was not the first time the officer in question had amused himself in this manner.

  “I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff in life—ugly things,” Curtis told me over lunch. “But I’ve never seen real cruel things like what you see in a prison—real cruelty, just intentional cruelty. It’s like husbands who beat their wives. That’s how some of these guys beat their inmates.” Curtis did not hide his disgust for such officers, whom he called “serial bullies.” He also made it clear that blowing the whistle on them would have been unthinkable. If a corrections officer ratted out a peer, “you’ll be out of work, they’ll find a way to fire you, slash your tires, put the blackball on you, nobody will talk to you, or they’ll leave you hanging somewhere and tell an inmate to get you,” he said.

  Curtis wanted to live, and he wanted to keep his job until the age of sixty-two, when he could retire. But there was something else that kept him from getting too vocal or self-righteous about the “serial bullies” who entered his profession. The citizens of Florida got what they paid for, he became convinced, filling their prisons to capacity, running them on the cheap, and then expressing shock and disapproval when presented with the unpalatable consequences. “The real problem here is that our rank and file citizens do not want to pay what it takes to care for their prisoners,” Curtis observed in his journal. “We talk a good game about how humane and decent our society is but when it comes down to it the bucks are not there.”

  Over lunch, Curtis elaborated, pointing out that in 2016 the starting salary for a corrections officer in Florida was twenty-eight thousand dollars. Despite the efforts of Teamsters Local 2011, which represented thousands of Florida COs,* the last raise they’d received had been in 2005. Meanwhile, line staff had been pared to the bone in one facility after another, thanks in part to the Florida governor Rick Scott, who, in 2010, ran for office promising to cut the DOC’s budget by 40 percent. After his election, Scott set about privatizing services, slashing jobs, and transitioning COs from eight- to twelve-hour shifts, changes that vastly increased staff turnover and led to a sharp rise in use-of-force incidents. Curtis admitted he hadn’t always used force judiciously himself. One time, he “got physical” with a prisoner, body-slamming him hard into the ground, a slab of bare concrete that could easily have fractured his skull. Curtis lowered his eyes as he told me the story. “It was totally illegal,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done it.” But he relayed the story for a reason, in order to drive home the point that even decent officers did bad things in a system that skimped on training, salaries, staffing, rehabilitative programs. It didn’t help that so many of the people inundating Florida’s prisons belonged in psychiatric hospitals, Curtis added. At one point in his journal, he made note of the number of prisoners at CCI who were “not in their proper mind,” thanks to “the drastic reduction in the state run mental health facilities.” Curtis had received no training on how to interact with mentally ill people.

  A boxer, a military veteran: in these respects, Curtis fit the popular image of the prison guard as a hard-boiled type, a muscle-bound enforcer given to dispensing bruising punishment. Yet as his journal showed, he was not incapable of registering shock at punishment that was unduly harsh, even when the person meting it out was a fellow officer. One of Curtis’s hobbies was stargazing. Another was reading (he particularly loved the crime novels of the Florida native Carl Hiaasen). He’d even taken a stab at writing a novel himself, a copy of which he later shared with me. The story was set in a prison teetering on the brink of collapse from budget cuts: the cells overheating because the air-conditioning was busted; the meals larded with cheap protein substitutes in place of beef and chicken; the switch panel constantly shorting out. The main character in the book, Sergeant Bernie Petrovsky, is a veteran of the Iraq War with a fondness for chewing tobacco. Petrovsky hasn’t had a raise in six years or a moment to relax because of chronic staff shortages. In one scene, he likens his experience in Iraq to his experience behind the walls. “In the desert war we were being blown up in our Humvees until they decided to spend the money to armor the vehicles better … Here the management just keeps cutting the budget, which means less personnel and equipment to maintain and perform to an increasingly higher level of expectations.”

  As Curtis acknowledged, the novel was a thinly disguised account of his experience. Cheaply run prisons were a lot like cheaply run wars, he had concluded, lowering morale, heightening tension, and leading frontline officers to rely increasingly on the one tool at their disposal: brute force. “If you don’t have a lot of money, the only way you can control the unit in prison is through brutality, threats, and fear,” Curtis told me. “And in order to do that, every once in a while, you gotta kick a little butt. You gotta get brutal, and your officers learn to do that, just like I learned to do that.”

  * * *

  Nobody told Curtis and his fellow guards to get brutal. But no one really needed to tell them this. It was enough to pay them modest salaries to enforce order in overcrowded, understaffed prisons that were neither equipped nor expected to do much else. When Curtis was in Vietnam, most of the officials in charge of America’s criminal justice system still subscribed to the rehabilitative ideal—the notion that in addition to maintaining public safety, criminal sanctions should be designed to improve the life chances of convicts, who deserved an opportunity to become productive members of society after completing their sentences. For much of the twentieth century, this was the dominant view among, policy makers and corrections officials, shaping everything from sentencing laws to probation systems to the therapeutic programs offered to prisoners. But by the time Curtis had moved to Florida in the late 1980s, the rehabilitative ideal had given way to a more punitive approach, emphasizing the imperative to punish and incapacitate both violent criminals and nonviolent offenders.

  As the rehabilitative ideal crumbled, America’s prisons experienced a spectacular boom, thanks to draconian policies—mandatory minimum sentences, three strikes laws—that, for several decades, were popular. The elected officials who enacted these policies spanned the political spectrum, from Ronald Reagan, who vastly expanded the scope and severity of the drug war, to Bill Clinton, whose 1994 crime bill gave states incentives to put even more people behind bars. These laws were not foisted on the public against the wishes of ordinary citizens. They reflected and embodied popular sentiment. In the decades when the rehabilitative ideal held sway, convicts had often been depicted as disadvantaged individuals who’d been unjustly deprived of education and opportunity. Now they were labeled “thugs” and “superpredators,” dehumanizing, racially coded terms that implied they were beyond redemption and deserved to suffer. If politicians during this era feared anything, it was not being overly punitive but being perceived as “soft on crime.” The shift in rhetoric sent the custodians of jails and prisons a clear message that society expected them to treat prisoners harshly, even if “good people” preferred to be spared the unsavory details and to avoid being reminded that a vastly disproportionate share of those getting locked up were Black men, who were incarcerated at a higher rate in America than in apartheid South Africa. By the time some lawmakers began to question whether this was sensible or just, more than two million Americans languished behind bars.

  Another message the custodians of jails and pri
sons had long been sent was that their jobs were lowly and disreputable. The wages of “turnkeys” and “keepers,” as prison guards in America were once popularly known, had always been paltry, their hours long, their penchant for cruelty notorious, a perception as old as the job itself. In 1823, an account of a prison in New York portrayed the guards working there as “small-minded, intoxicated with their power, vulgar.” A century later, during the Progressive Era, penal reformers drew up ambitious plans to refashion prisons into more humane institutions. The stark, regimented penitentiaries of the nineteenth century—places like the Auburn State Prison in New York, where convicts were forced to eat their meals in silence and routinely flogged—would give way to enlightened sanctuaries replete with baseball diamonds, workshops, and theaters. But as the historian David Rothman has shown, few prisons were provided with the resources to fulfill this vision, which is one reason that most correctional institutions remained “places of pervasive brutality,” staffed by undertrained, overworked guards plying a trade that was “a last resort for the unskilled and uneducated.” In his 1922 book, Wall Shadows, the criminologist Frank Tannenbaum identified “the exercise of authority and the resulting enjoyment of brutality” as “the keynote to an understanding of the psychology of the keeper.” Drawing partly on his own experience serving time on Blackwell’s Island, where he was incarcerated for “unlawful assembly” after participating in protests for the unemployed, Tannenbaum attributed this psychology not to character flaws but to structural conditions, in particular the desire that guards felt to affirm that they were different from—and superior to—the people under their watch, with whom they shared the same harsh, oppressive environment. “For his own clear conscience’s sake the keeper must, and does instinctively, make a sharp distinction between himself and the man whom he guards,” Tannenbaum wrote, “and the gap is filled by contempt.” In his classic study The Society of Captives, published in 1958, Gresham M. Sykes contested the view that most guards were “brutal tyrants,” arguing that to maintain order, many learned to negotiate and compromise with prisoners. But Sykes did not make the life of the typical “keeper” sound any less dreary. “The job of the guard is often depressing, dangerous, and possesses relatively low prestige,” he wrote.