by Eyal Press
“THE LOWEST-RANKING MAN”
Perhaps because he’d entered the profession late, Bill Curtis, who had retired three months before we met, emerged from his experience relatively unscathed. Clad in shorts and flip-flops, he’d just returned from a cycling trip to Monument Valley, sporting a newly grown-out beard and a weathered suntan. We had lunch in the outdoor section of a Mexican restaurant on a scorching day in June, drinking pints of Fat Tire to temper the sultry weather and the Cajun burgers we’d ordered. Curtis seemed in good spirits, showing me pictures of the catamaran on which he took his grandkids whenever they came to visit (sailing was another of his hobbies). At no point did he peer nervously over his shoulder or appear to be watching his back. But there was one occupational hazard he told me he hadn’t managed to escape, a shift in values and outlook that he believed all corrections officers underwent.
“Your morals change,” he said. “It’s a coarsening and a lessening of concern for people. It’s a slide. When a man—a good man, or woman—goes into prison, a little bit of your goodness wears off. You become jaded. You become more callous. Your language and your interpretation of things changes.”
Among the things that led Curtis to feel jaded was his understanding of who took the blame—and who did not—when egregious abuses took place. When he started out at CCI, Curtis assumed that guards who engaged in misconduct would be weeded out. “The ‘bad actors’ are known and their days as correctional officers are numbered,” he wrote in his journal. As he grew more experienced, he began to realize that brutality was routinely excused and not infrequently rewarded. The officer who doused a prisoner in the face with bleach, for example, was not disciplined. He was promoted to sergeant. “Cover-ups, false statements, coercion, and outright lying seem to be the order of the day in this business,” Curtis noted with dismay in his journal.
Curtis’s cynicism on this score only deepened when, in 2012, after he’d been working for eight years as a CO, the Teamsters hired him to represent officers at different prisons who stood accused of engaging in disciplinary infractions. On occasion, the guards in question had behaved improperly. More often, they were scapegoats who had been singled out to deflect blame from their superiors—the “good old boys” who ran the system and protected the people who displayed loyalty to them. The officer disciplined or demoted was “always the lowest-ranking man,” Curtis told me, and often the least corrupt worker on duty. A case in point was the death of Richard Mair, a prisoner in the Transitional Care Unit at Dade CI who hung himself in September 2013, one year after Darren Rainey died. A note found in Mair’s boxers, titled “FUCK THE WORLD,” detailed the abuse that precipitated his suicide, including an incident when a guard ordered Mair, a rape victim, to “strip out” and then, promising cigarettes in return, commanded, “Stick a finger in your hole.” In his suicide note, Mair indicated that he tried to file a grievance but that a lieutenant intercepted it, slamming him against a wall and warning him “to keep my mouth shut or else.” Two low-ranking guards were subsequently faulted, purportedly for failing to conduct timely checks of Mair’s cell before he hung himself. According to Curtis, the real reason they were blamed was for collecting written documentation about what happened that another prisoner, Damien Foster, had compiled and bringing it to the attention of an assistant warden. By the time an investigation was launched, the documentation had conveniently disappeared, Curtis told me, and Damien Foster had been transferred to another prison, preventing him from talking to investigators. “It was a cover-up,” Curtis said. At some prisons, another CO told me, corrupt captains and colonels would groom low-ranking guards to do their “dirty work”—roughing people up, writing up bogus DRs—and then pretend to know nothing about it when the conduct was exposed and someone needed to take the fall.
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In prisons as elsewhere, dirty workers performed another essential function, shouldering the blame for inhumane systems within which they ultimately had little power and thus deflecting attention from other social actors with far more sway. These other actors included not only their superiors but also judges, prosecutors, and elected officials operating with broad consent from the public. The corrections officers at places like Dade were the agents of a society that was home to the world’s largest prison system, a system that grew even faster in Florida than in the United States as a whole, under Democrats and Republicans alike. In 1993, the year before Bill Clinton signed a punitive new crime bill, a series of headline-making murders took place in Florida. The victims were European tourists, which threatened to tarnish the state’s image as a family-friendly travel destination. Against this backdrop, Lawton Chiles, Florida’s Democratic governor, unveiled the “Safe Streets” program, which called for building twenty-one thousand new prison beds. “It’s time to stop talking tough about the problem and start acting tough,” Chiles declared. Five years later, Jeb Bush, Chiles’s Republican successor, signed the “10-20-Life” law, which mandated a minimum ten-year sentence for anyone armed with a gun during certain felonies, irrespective of the circumstances. Florida’s legislature later extended the law to apply to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. Between 1970 and 2010, Florida’s prison population grew by more than 1,000 percent. It grew when the crime rate was rising and when it flattened out—year after year, legislative session after legislative session. Someone needed to do the dirty work of running this system on a day-to-day basis, and someone needed to foot the blame when its brutal inner workings spilled into the headlines on occasion, prompting “good people” to express dismay and shock.
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The fact that the blame fell on low-ranking workers, and not on the respectable people who relied on and benefited from what they did, was nothing new. In antebellum America, a similar logic shaped popular attitudes toward another band of dirty workers: the auctioneers and traffickers who presided over the interstate slave trade, here parading their “merchandise” in the showrooms of cities like New Orleans, there dragging chained caravans of slaves through the streets of Washington, D.C. These traders played a crucial role in enabling slavery to spread and thrive, particularly after 1808, when the ban on importing slaves from Africa led southern planters to turn to domestic sources to replenish their supply of “field hands.” Soon enough, slave traders were subjected to withering scorn, not only in the pages of abolitionist journals but also, tellingly, in much of the South. In his popular 1860 book, Social Relations in Our Southern States, Daniel Hundley, the son of a plantation owner from Alabama, denounced slave traders as “soul drivers” who plied a “detestable” trade. “The miserly Negro trader … is not troubled evidently with a conscience, for, although he habitually separates parent from child, brother from sister, and husband from wife, he is yet one of the jolliest dogs alive,” wrote Hundley, whose book nonetheless offered a robust defense of slavery. On the floor of Congress, the first person to denounce the interstate slave trade was Virginia’s John Randolph. Like Hundley, Randolph was a defender of slavery who felt moved to say something after a high-ranking foreign visitor told him that he was “horrorstruck and disgusted” by the sight of coffles of slaves passing through the streets in broad daylight.
Denouncing slave traders enabled southerners like Randolph to shame the culprits responsible for the horror while leaving the institution of slavery unquestioned and absolving themselves. Whereas traders were greedy opportunists driven by profit, slave owners were men of honor. Whereas traders destroyed slave families, masters took pains to protect them. Although these distinctions were spurious, drawing them was not an empty rhetorical exercise. It was “therapeutic,” notes the historian Robert Gudmestad, enabling southerners to distance themselves from what Gudmestad calls “a troublesome commerce.” Troublesome not because of the torment it inflicted on Blacks, but because of the uncomfortable truth it threatened to bring home to whites: that slavery itself was detestable; that it routinely tore families apart. Troublesome, too, because the trade’s most repugnant features were embarras
singly public.
The disreputable “soul drivers” who trafficked in slaves served as convenient scapegoats for slavery’s champions and apologists. And yet, as some shrewd observers noted at the time, not all of them were seen as disreputable. As the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld pointed out, the stigma of the slave trade fell mainly on the shoulders of “men from low families” who carried out the “vulgar drudgery” that earned their vocation its notoriety. The largest, most successful slave traders were spared such opprobrium. “There was apparently little stigma attached to the trade for those who were successful at it,” observes the historian Walter Johnson in his magisterial study of a slave market in New Orleans, Soul by Soul. Not coincidentally, the wealthy men who ran the largest trading firms tended to outsource much of the actual work to roving bands of lower-class laborers, from whom they made sure to distance themselves in more polite company. “See those gentlemen, I have nothing to do with that,” remarked one successful trader when asked about a slave sold in his name, neglecting to mention that the “soul drivers” in question were working for him.
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In the spring of 2020, prison guards in America received a new designation, joining the ranks of “essential workers”—truck drivers, warehouse handlers, grocery clerks—who were instructed to continue showing up at their jobs even as the coronavirus pandemic led mayors and governors to order lockdowns. Some of the frontline workers who did these jobs—most notably, physicians and first responders—were soon accorded hero status for the risks they braved and the sacrifices they made. In New York, where the first wave of the pandemic took a particularly devastating toll, citizens stood on their stoops and balconies every evening to salute the medical professionals scrambling to accommodate the influx of COVID-19 patients pouring into the city’s hospitals. In the course of trying to provide ventilators and some measure of comfort to these patients, many medical workers themselves fell ill, which only increased the public’s gratitude to them.
Nobody clapped for corrections officers, whose risk of infection was equally grave. The crowded, unsanitary conditions in America’s prisons was one reason for this. The lack of regard for the health and welfare of the people in them—both the prisoners doing time and the staff watching over them—was another. In New York City alone, more than twelve hundred guards tested positive for the coronavirus, and thirteen prison staff died during the pandemic’s initial wave. Some COs later complained that they were pressured to return to their jobs while they were still symptomatic. Others alleged that they were actively discouraged from wearing masks by their supervisors, a problem not confined to New York. In Florida, the Orlando Sentinel interviewed guards at four different prisons who came to work with their own masks, only to be reprimanded by their superiors. A report on the federal prison system published by the Marshall Project uncovered multiple instances in which staff alleged that they lacked protective gear and were pressured to continue working even after exposure to the virus.
Over the course of 2020, nearly 100,000 corrections workers tested positive for the virus and 170 died. The COs losing their lives looked a lot like the casualties in other frontline jobs—people like Quinsey Simpson, an African American man from Queens who developed a cough after doing a shift in a security booth at Rikers, unaware that the guard he’d replaced was symptomatic. Simpson, who had not been supplied with gloves or a mask, soon developed respiratory problems. He died shortly thereafter, leaving behind a six-year-old son.
If prison guards were not showered with applause for continuing to do their jobs, it’s perhaps because, by the time the pandemic began, public attitudes about the crowded, violent facilities in which they worked had shifted. After decades of backing punitive laws and harsh sentencing policies, Americans in many parts of the country had begun to embrace reforming the criminal justice system. In 2019, the New York City Council approved a plan to close Rikers Island by 2026, an idea that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. But if treating prisoners more humanely was a public priority, you wouldn’t have known it from the way prosecutors and elected officials carried on during the pandemic. By June 2020, all five of the nation’s largest COVID-19 outbreaks were in correctional institutions. At a prison in Ohio where dormitories were filled to double their capacity, nearly three-fourths of the people in custody were infected. In the face of these alarming figures, some advocates and public defenders urged elected officials to discharge low-level offenders and older prisoners. Governors in a few states responded by releasing thousands of incarcerated people who were nearing the end of their terms. But in many other states, little was done. “Despite all of the information, voices calling for action, and the obvious need, state responses ranged from disorganized or ineffective, at best, to callously nonexistent at worst,” a survey conducted by the Prison Policy Initiative and the ACLU found.
By early 2021, the jail population in many states had returned to pre-pandemic levels, even as the number of infections continued to rise. In states like North Carolina and Wisconsin, the virus’s toll on correctional workers prompted officials not to rethink the logic of mass incarceration and put fewer people behind bars, but to shut down understaffed facilities and transfer prisoners elsewhere. The closures exacerbated overcrowding in the penitentiaries that remained open—and, in turn, the fear of infection among both prisoners and staff. “They’re terrified,” an official with the union representing prison guards in North Carolina told The New York Times. “They feel like, as usual, they’re forgotten and left behind.”
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Feeling forgotten was a familiar sensation to a CO I’ll call Bobby who worked at CCI, the same prison where Bill Curtis had cut his teeth as a guard. Like Dade, CCI attracted some media attention after a prisoner there died. The death occurred late one night, when guards conducting a “spot” compliance check roused a man named Matthew Walker from his sleep and ordered him to put away an item that they claimed was out of place. The misplaced item was a plastic cup. “This is crazy … you are waking me up about a cup!” Walker fumed, prompting a confrontation that soon erupted into a bloody melee. By the time it was over, two officers had been injured, and Walker had sustained “blunt trauma” injuries in eleven places, including to his neck and head. At 1:20 a.m., he was pronounced dead, a death that was “tragic, senseless and avoidable,” a grand jury report subsequently concluded.
The grand jury report presented conflicting evidence about what had caused the skirmish to escalate. But it was clear on one point, which was that conducting late-night cell-compliance checks, a policy devised by a captain at the prison, was a “bad idea” that numerous guards feared would spark violence. Afterward, nine COs at CCI were dismissed, a move that Bill Curtis had described to me as a public relations exercise: Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, was running for reelection and, in the wake of the Herald story about Darren Rainey, wanted to show “how tough he is on inmate mistreatment.” The toughness had limits, Curtis pointed out. While the guards were punished, the warden at CCI was promoted to regional director. An assistant warden became full warden. The captain who initiated the compliance checks asked to be transferred to another facility, a request that was obliged.
One of the guards who was disciplined was Bobby. A compactly built man with a steely gaze and a Home Depot hat pulled low over his brow, Bobby described the cell-compliance policy at CCI as “a ticking time bomb” that was bound to provoke a violent reaction. “Everyone said someone’s gonna get hurt,” he told me. Yet no subordinate could apparently say this without fearing retaliation. “Do it or I’ll replace you” was the message sent to line staff, Bobby said. Bobby wasn’t present when the skirmish with Walker began—he rushed over afterward to provide backup—or at the end, when evidence he believed should have been preserved was removed or mishandled (a point the grand jury report also raised). This didn’t prevent him from losing his job.
I wanted to know what had led Bobby to become a corrections officer in the first place. He needed
a job, he said, and although the salary was lousy, it came with benefits. Better wages typically meant no benefits, and Bobby had a family to support. “You either have the benefits and no pay, or you have pay but no benefits” was how Bobby summarized his employment options. In the decades after World War II, workers in America’s mills and factories often managed to secure both of these things—decent pay and benefits—but that era was long gone, and Bobby knew it, so he swallowed his pride and took what he could get, a dangerous, low-prestige job that ended in dishonor and disgrace.
Or rather, that would have ended there, if not for the fact that later, after Governor Scott was reelected and attention shifted elsewhere, all of the guards at CCI who were dismissed were reinstated. The move prompted some newspapers in Florida to express outrage at the lack of accountability within the DOC. The outrage was justified. According to the grand jury report, after Matthew Walker was beaten, a lieutenant involved in the melee stood over him and yelled, “Do you know who I am? I will kill you, motherfucker!” By the time medical help finally arrived, Walker was no longer breathing. As with the murder of Darren Rainey, the fact that nobody paid a lasting price for Walker’s death showed how little value was placed on incarcerated people’s lives. Still, one could hardly blame Bobby for wondering why the media’s outrage wasn’t directed at the senior officers who had instituted the policy that precipitated the incident rather than at the low-ranking guards. If the public really cared about abuse, he added, Florida would “increase the pay of officers to where people would actually want a career out of it” rather than making them the fall guys for a corrupt system that made good officers feel devalued.
