Post Eight

Hard Times: Part Two

"I guess you don't find horror movies very frightening anymore...".  I spoke those exact words to my future supervisor.  It was my second week on the job.  The first week was spent in orientation classes.  The only thing I remember about that turgid experience was that the Warden introduced himself, and told us about spiders.  In prison, inmates have pets; not cats and dogs, but bugs and spiders.  The Warden told us to never kill spiders, not because the inmates had adopted them as pets, but because they created webs.  The creation of webs gave the inmates something to clean up.  It provided work and a distraction from unpleasant thoughts like killing their cellmate, killing staff members, stealing, rape, or escape.  Such was the the way of things. 

Anway, back to that statement I made.  We were in C-Dorm, affectionately know as the "Nuthut".  C-Dorm housed the mentally ill inmates.  Some were fakers who simply wanted their own cell and air conditioning (due to the psychotropic medications housed and dispensed in this dorm the State had to air-condition the whole unit; it was the only dorm that had this luxury at the prison).  Their kind lasted only a couple of days before the doctors could declare them sain, and boot them back to general population. Others were somewhat troubled by their circumstances (after all, prison is by it's very nature a stressful enivornment), and were simply depressed (who wasn't?).  However, about half were legit; paranoid schizophrenics, bipolars (massive and sometimes violent mood shifts), multiple personalities, and just plain homicidal sociopaths.  Charlotte had every kind of horror imaginable.

My future supervisor was doing DR Court that day.  I was simply an observer, but was new meat, and, therefore, a curiosity.  I was 23 years old, tall, thin, and very white.  Inmate predators loved that.  As one particularly vile inmate was brought out for court he pratically drooled when he saw me.  "Who's this, your boyfriend?" was the polite way of putting what I remember this creature saying.  What he really said I don't want to put in print.  My comrade in arms jokingly told him to settle down and behave as I was new, and he didn't want the inmate scaring me off the first time in the unit.

A this point I should explain the prison heirarchy.  On one side you have civilians; teachers, medical personnel, librarians, chaplains, etc.  On the other side you had security.  Classification Officers were in the middle; we neither were civilians (being certified law enforcement officers) or civilians.  Security treated us like civilians, though.  If you weren't wearing brown (the color of their uniform), you weren't one of them. 

Security is structured like the military.  On the bottom you have the line officers who make up the majority of security.  Above them you have sergeants who run dorms during a shift, work details, and the like.  Above them are the "white shirts"; lieutenants and above.  They are called "white shirts" because their tunic is white, and not brown like officers and sergeants.  Lieutenants were our counterparts in Classification.  Theoretically, we had the same rank, but the lieutenants had much more pull being they were part of Security. 

Lieutenants were in charge of entire dorms over all three shifts (prisons have three shifts: days, afternoons, and midnights).  Above them were Captains who were in charge of entire shifts.  Then, you had the Colonel who was the head of Security.  Beyond Colonel you had two Assistant Wardens.  One ran Programs (where Classification fell), and the other ran Operations (Security and all services at the prison like Laundry, Maintenance, etc).  While in theory they were of equal rank the Assistant Warden-Operations was much more powerful because he ran security.  And, finally, you had the Warden who was in charge of everything.  Wardens are dictators in everything but name whose say is final.

The inmate who made that awful comment to me was brought out from his cell to the DR hearing.  He was a pathetic, but frightful, site.  He was black (not being racist, but most of Florida prisons are comprised of black males, it's just a fact), and probably in his late 30's.  He had rotten teeth; a few missing.  You could smell him from 10 feet away, a sort of rotten smell like food that has gone bad.  He was a big man, but not tall.  His buggy eyes and and drooping jaw were his most prominent features.  Mentally, he was a violent paranoid schizophrenic who had assaulted many inmates and security staff.  The inmate was serving a life sentence for murder. 

Security brought him out of his cell in chains.  Handcuffs in front, but attached to other chains which wrapped around his legs, his hands secured against his body by a belt.  He waddled to his seat, instead of walked, and was plopped down by two big security officers onto a metal bench that had been imbedded by concrete into the concrete floor.  Nothing in common areas was ever allowed to be anything but bolted down in some way lest it be used as a weapon.

The Sergeant, more than a little nuts himself, began and ended the hearing.

"Now, we're going to find you guilty, but you can appeal.  Any questions?"

The inmate responded, "Sarge, I don't think you can do that."

The Sergeant smiled and laughed.  "This is prison.  We CAN do that."

And so it was over.  The inmate was sentenced to something, and I don't even remember the charge.  It wasn't important.  This inmate wasn't going anywhere, and he wasn't getting out of confinement for years.  For the Sergeant the whole thing was a waste of time, and he ended the hearing in the most efficient way possible for him.  Safety and security of the public and facility were the guiding words of every security officer of rank.  I always remember the words of Sean Connery in the Untouchables, "You have just fulfilled the first rule of police work...when you finish your shift go home alive." 

Technically, the inmate should have been given a fair hearing with rules of evidence, witnesses, etc.  Realistically, with inmates like this one that rarely happened.  Many times security wouldn't even have the inmate come to the hearing claiming that the inmate refused to appear.  Many times this was true; some inmates just gave up.  Other times, well, it was assumed they didn't want to appear.  Whatever works.  It wasn't justice, it was just us.

"Over here", my future boss said to me on the way out of dorm.  "Look at this." 

I was standing in front of a cell that had police tape over it.  The cell door was open, and it was dark inside.  On the floor, though, you could clearly make out stains.  A whole lot of stains.  I assumed correctly that those stains were indeed dried blood.

A couple of weeks before I started at Charlotte something terrible had happened in that cell.  Disclaimer: What follows is what I know to be true, but cannot prove.  It is hearsay, but it is what I believe to be true.

An inmate at another facility had bitten an officer.  This inmate had full blown AIDS, and was known to want to take as many with him to death as possible.  This inmate was transferred in the middle of the night to Charlotte.  He was escorted to C-Dorm.  The next morning, the inmate was found in his cell naked, and "four pointed" (all limbs tied to each end of the bed) to his rack.  Blood was everywhere.  He appeared to have been beaten to death. 

The officers involved were tried for murder, and acquitted a few months later.  I remember everyone being on edge on the day of the verdict as it was feared the inmates might retaliate or riot.  Luckily, that didn't happen.  The officers did lose their jobs, though. 

After seeing that cell, I pondered my situation.  How could I work in a place that almost required one to break the law, or at least turn a blind eye, to survive?  I prayed and cried more than once about the matter, but decided to make it work.  God would have to get me through it.  If Jews in concentration camps had survived so could I.  I would just have to tread carefully, and be smart.  If it were only that easy.  The worst was yet to come.