Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  Sykes’s study appeared in the Eisenhower era, when the overwhelming majority of “keepers” in America, like police officers and other law enforcement agents, were white. In the early 1970s, this began to change, thanks in part to the political ferment of the 1960s and to events such as the 1971 rebellion at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York, which drew attention to the racism that pervaded the nation’s prisons and led reformers to call for hiring more people of color to help quell the unrest. One of the demands of the prisoners at Attica was “a program for the recruitment and employment of a significant number of black and Spanish-speaking officers.” In 1973, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals urged commissioners to recruit minority officers with more sympathetic attitudes to prisoners. “Black inmates want black staff with whom they can identify,” the commission argued. To test the hypothesis that hiring Black staff would improve relations with incarcerated people, the sociologists James Jacobs and Lawrence Kraft surveyed guards at two maximum-security prisons in Illinois that had begun to diversify. The Black guards in the survey tended to believe that “fewer prisoners belong in prison” and to have more liberal political views, they found. But they were also more likely to agree that punishment was the primary purpose of confinement and to be “more active disciplinarians” than their white peers. One potential reason for this was that administrators screened out Black candidates who were sympathetic to prisoners, Jacobs and Kraft speculated. Another was that, like their counterparts in the police, Blacks who were hired felt added pressure to prove that they belonged by suppressing their sympathies. Whatever the case, Jacobs and Kraft questioned the assumption that hiring minorities would lead incarcerated people to be treated with greater respect, concluding that the attitudes and behavior of guards were “built into the organization of the maximum-security prison.” Notably, although they adapted to the strictures of the job, the Black guards in their study were twice as likely to say that they were “embarrassed” to tell people what they did for a living. Also striking was one finding that transcended racial lines. “A majority of guards of both races would not like to see their sons follow their occupation,” Jacobs and Kraft found.

  Between 1960 and 2015, the percentage of Black prison guards increased more than fourfold, paralleling the growth in the number of Americans—in particular African Americans—behind bars. As the prison population ballooned during the age of mass incarceration, Blacks were increasingly given the “opportunity” to run the penal institutions where more and more people of color were caged. In many urban areas, the makeup of the guards came to mirror the makeup of the men and women in custody—places like New York City, where, by 2017, Blacks and Latinos made up nearly 90 percent of the correctional staff. The ranks of female officers also surged. These were “good jobs,” some economists argued, and it is true that the growth of America’s prisons lent prison guards—newly christened “corrections officers”—a degree of newfound legitimacy. In states like New York and California, COs earned decent salaries and joined unions that came to wield substantial political clout. In some rural areas, working at a prison soon became the best employment prospect around, offering benefits unavailable at fast-food restaurants or in the mills and factories that had long ago left town.

  But the jobs in question tended to be reserved for people with limited options who lived in struggling backwaters. A few days after meeting Bill Curtis, I drove to one such place—Florida City, the last stop on Florida’s Turnpike before Key West and, along with neighboring Homestead, the area that furnished Dade with most of its rank-and-file guards. Other than to fill up on gas before racing off to the Keys, more affluent Floridians rarely frequented places like Florida City. When I visited one Friday morning, the town looked sun beaten and deserted. The dingy storefronts and random businesses lining the main commercial thoroughfare were empty or shuttered. A mile or so down the road, I pulled in to a plaza that was unusually busy. It was situated across the street from a church with a tattered sign out front—PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD—and was home to at least one thriving local establishment, a yellow building with paint-chipped walls that turned out to be a welfare agency. Near the entrance was a poster of a Latina girl in pigtails holding the halves of two oranges to her ears and smiling, beneath the words WIC: GOOD NUTRITION FOR WOMEN, INFANTS & CHILDREN.* Inside, several women with toddlers were waiting in line. None of them were smiling. In Florida City, 40 percent of families fell below the poverty line. Many of the entry-level guards at Dade were Black and Latina women, Bill Curtis told me, in part because so many young men of color from Homestead and Florida City had police records (which disqualified them from working for the DOC). “They need jobs, they’ve got kids,” Curtis said of the female guards at Dade, “and it’s the best job they can get.”

  The area surrounding Dade was an example of what the sociologist John Eason has called a “rural ghetto”—small towns in depressed rural areas that were home to many of the prisons built in America since the 1970s, when the number of correctional facilities tripled. Until this time, rural areas tended to oppose allowing prisons to be constructed on local land for the same reason that wealthy suburbs did: to avoid association with institutions that were seen as disreputable and potentially dangerous. But as factories closed and family farms went bankrupt, the civic leaders in many rural areas began lobbying to have prisons built in their counties. Whether any lasting economic benefits resulted from this strategy is unclear (one study concluded that, to the contrary, prisons impeded growth in the areas where they were located). What is clear is that luring these “stigmatized institutions” to town further cemented the lowly status of the communities in question, places of concentrated disadvantage where poverty and racial segregation were deeply entrenched. “Stigmatized places are more likely to ‘demand’ stigmatized institutions, particularly if the stigma of the community is equal to or greater than the stigma associated with the institution in question,” Eason observed. “Rural towns most likely to receive a prison suffer the quadruple stigma of rurality, race, region, and poverty.”*

  After leaving the plaza in Florida City, I drove around town, stopping to talk to a man named Jimmy who was sitting in a plastic lawn chair by the side of the road, next to an empty shopping cart. An African American man with a Phillies cap on, Jimmy was selling fruits—mangoes and bags of lychees that he’d arranged on a rickety table. How were things? I asked. “Hard,” he said. Jimmy had lived in Florida City for twenty-five years. He appreciated the sunshine and warm weather but was less fond of the business climate, which he told me was moribund (I was his only customer). When he was young, Jimmy said, he picked okra and tomatoes in the fields. The migrant workers now were “mostly Mexicans and Haitians ’cause it’s hard work,” he told me. A little girl in dreadlocks soon came out to join us. She was Jimmy’s granddaughter and lived in the dilapidated housing complex behind his makeshift fruit stand. Next to the housing complex was an abandoned lot strewn with broken glass and garbage.

  I bought some mangoes from Jimmy and drove on, past a Laundromat and a dollar store, past a strip of row houses, past some squash and bean fields, which looked parched and wilted in the scorching sun. I turned left at a fruit stand called Robert Is Here and, after a few more miles, saw the soaring gray floodlights surrounding Dade CI. The prison squatted in the distance, a cluster of dun-colored buildings set behind a maze of fences topped with concertina wire. In front of the outermost fence, I spotted a sign:

  FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS

  correctional employment opportunities

  now hiring, apply online

  It was the only notice for jobs that I came across in Florida City.

  COPING MECHANISMS

  In her 1973 book, Kind and Usual Punishment, the muckraking journalist Jessica Mitford wrote, “For after all, if we were to ask a small boy, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and he were to answer, ‘A prison guard,’ should we not find that a trifle wor
rying—cause, perhaps, to take him off to a child guidance clinic for observation and therapy?”

  Mitford’s question betrayed a common preconception, which is that anyone who yearned to become a prison guard was a bit morally suspect. It also betrayed a dubious assumption, which is that becoming a guard was something people aspired to do, as opposed to something they stumbled into or got stuck doing for lack of better options. In 2010, a team of scholars conducted a survey that compared why police officers and prison guards chose their careers. While the police officers emphasized “service as a primary factor,” the corrections officers “placed greater importance on financial motivators,” including “a lack of other job alternatives.” None of the guards interviewed by the sociologist Dana Britton in her book At Work in the Iron Cage “grew up dreaming of working in prisons or even planning to do so.” Most entered the profession after a period of “occupational drift,” with few positive aspirations and little idea of what they were getting into.

  It’s no wonder, considering what the occupational health literature suggested lay in store for prison guards: alarming rates of hypertension, divorce, depression, substance abuse, suicide. One study in New Jersey found that the average life expectancy of a corrections officer was fifty-eight. Another, drawing on data from twenty-one states, found that the suicide risk among corrections workers was 39 percent higher than for the rest of the working-age population.

  I’d met corrections officers whose stories bore out these dispiriting facts. There was a CO from New England I’ll call Johnny Nevins (he did not want his real name used) who went home one day, drank an entire bottle of whiskey, posted a video on Facebook saying goodbye to his family, and then pointed a loaded gun at his head. The cartridge jammed when he pulled the trigger, and Nevins had since launched a support group to help troubled COs avoid going down a similar path. He’d also begun seeing a therapist, who diagnosed him with acute PTSD caused by repeated exposure to extreme violence.

  There was Tom Beneze, a guard from Cañon City, Colorado, a town of sixteen thousand that was home to a Walmart, some fast-food chains, and more than a dozen jails and prisons. When I met Beneze one morning on the back porch of his modest ranch house, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a box of pills that he kept with him at all times to ward off the anxiety that periodically rippled over him. “If I start buzzing real bad, I’ll take one of those,” he said, pointing to the small white tablets in one of the compartments, which helped ward off panic attacks. Next to the white tablets were some blue capsules he took for depression. A third slot was filled with painkillers for his various injuries, including nerve damage sustained when a prisoner wielding a shank gashed his leg. Beneze, who had a thinning patch of reddish-brown hair and an anxious, watchful air, told me he’d seen “more hand-to-hand combat” than his son, a navy veteran who’d done two tours of duty in Iraq. He never sat in a restaurant with his back to the door, a habit ingrained in all of the COs he knew. Some of Beneze’s coworkers relied on drugs and alcohol to mitigate the stress of the job, he said. Others had exhausted these coping mechanisms. Not long before we met, his friend Leonard, another CO, “blew his brains out,” he told me. “I don’t know the stats, but I’ve had a lot of friends that killed themselves,” he said.

  The person who’d introduced me to Beneze was Caterina Spinaris, a therapist from Florence, Colorado, which, like Cañon City, sits at the foothills of the Rockies, in a rugged canyon of steep cliffs and red-rock gorges that straddle the banks of the Arkansas River. Originally from Denver, where she ran a practice that focused on treating the victims of trauma and sexual assault, Spinaris moved to Florence in 2000 to hike, plant a garden, and enjoy the breathtaking scenery. It took her a while to notice the brown and gray detention facilities dotting the landscape, many of them tucked behind fences off unmarked roads that twisted into the hills. Spinaris became aware of their existence when she started fielding an unusual volume of calls requesting referrals from the wives and girlfriends of corrections officers.

  The callers were seeking help for their partners. Having never set foot in a prison, Spinaris searched about for a local agency to which she could refer them. When she discovered there was no such agency, she decided to open one herself. Desert Waters Correctional Outreach began with a hotline and an email address that was soon flooded with messages from prison guards who unburdened themselves of their bitterness and anger, which was spilling into their relationships and seeping into their family lives. “I can’t seem to get along with anyone anymore,” one guard wrote to Spinaris. “I wish I could get out of this rut. That is what prison work is—a big, deep rut.” Another wrote, “After a while and numerous incidents, you have so many Band-Aids on you that inmates can’t penetrate them and get to you or your ‘old’ heart. The only problem is the Band-Aids don’t come off after work. They stay on. So you live your life and miss all the beauty.”

  Spinaris heard from guards who were alcoholics, from guards whose marriages were imploding, from guards who seethed at performing a public service that no one ever thanked you for doing and that plenty of people looked down on. The outpouring of unfiltered anguish reminded her of her sessions with trauma victims. In 2012, Spinaris distributed a questionnaire to more than three thousand correctional workers across the country that was designed to measure the prevalence of PTSD. Thirty-four percent of the COs who responded to the survey reported symptoms, a rate comparable to that in the military. In Spinaris’s view, many prison guards struggled with something else—feelings of alienation and shame that churned beneath their gruff exteriors.

  Spinaris described corrections officers as “an invisible population.” This was certainly true of the scholarly literature on prisons, a body of work that focused overwhelmingly on the plight of incarcerated people, perhaps because its authors viewed guards less sympathetically. One exception was a book titled Prison Officers and Their World, by Kelsey Kauffman, a sociologist who, after working at a women’s prison in Connecticut, spent several years interviewing corrections officers in Massachusetts. As her study showed, violent prison systems inevitably dehumanized not only the prisoners but also the guards. “You can’t be a positive person in a place like this,” one CO told her. “I used to have a lot of compassion for people and now I don’t have as much,” said another. “It just doesn’t bother me the way it used to, and it bothers me that it doesn’t bother me.”

  In Kauffman’s view, the callousness of COs was often preceded by a period of adjustment as guards struggled to negotiate “discrepancies between their own ethical standards and the behavior expected of them as officers.” For those who relished violence, the adjustment was easy enough. But this was not typical, Kauffman found. “Initially, many attempted to avoid engaging in behavior injurious to inmates by refusing (openly or surreptitiously) to carry out certain duties and by displacing their aggressions onto others outside the prison or themselves,” she wrote.

  As their involvement in the prison world grew, and their ability to abstain from morally questionable actions within the prison declined, they attempted to neutralize their own feelings of guilt by regarding prisons as separate moral realms or by viewing inmates as individuals outside the protection of moral laws … Regardless of whether officers became active participants in the worst abuses of the prisons or were merely passive observers of it, the moral compromises involved exacted a substantial toll.

  Kaufmann called guards “the other prisoners.”

  For Black prison guards, an added moral tension existed—the discomfort of working in a system that disproportionately harmed their own communities. This fact was not lost on Black prisoners, who sometimes heckled them for betraying their brothers or working for the Man. In recent years, some Black police officers have heard similar accusations at protests organized by the Black Lives Matter movement where demonstrators have labeled them “sellouts” and “Uncle Toms,” insults that carry a particular sting for those who sympathize with some of the movement’s aims. A Black
CO from Florida whom I’ll call James (he did not want his real name used) told me he’d heard his share of such accusations from prisoners through the years. He insisted they didn’t bother him, telling me that whenever it happened, he would remind them that he came from a similar background and that they were behind bars because they’d violated the law. “I tell them, that’s why you’re on that side,” he said. Every so often, though, James would be reminded how unevenly the law was applied. One time when he was driving, an officer pulled him over, placed him in handcuffs, shoved him into the back of a police car, and called headquarters to run a background check on the “asshole” he’d picked up. To prepare for such encounters, which happened frequently, James made sure his badge was readily accessible, but flashing it didn’t always help, a problem he attributed to the fact that many cops “feel corrections officers are not real officers” as well as to his race. “A lot of times they won’t recognize me as a law enforcement officer; they just look at me as being Black,” he said. In fact, this was a struggle not only with cops but also with his peers in the DOC. “I don’t like you, ’cause you’re Black,” some of his fellow COs told him. “I’m Klan,” he’d heard others say. A sixteen-year veteran, James saw his career nearly end when a couple of white guards tried to forge his signature onto a disciplinary report that contained spurious allegations about a prisoner (officers who wrote up false DRs could lose their certification). The officers were acting at the behest of a rabidly racist colonel who had it in for him, James was convinced. Every Black prison guard in Florida had such stories, he told me, compounding the stress of what was already a taxing job.