Paul Rucker’s project, “Proliferation” dramatically illustrates the growth of the US prisons through the course of US history. It “connects the dots” between the development of our nation state and the US prison system. Additionally, I believe it is yet another example of the power of music/art/media to illuminate our understanding of the US prison system.
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A follow-up to our discussion of Louisiana prison writing–
Here’s an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Walter Rideau, a former Angola inmate who was imprisoned from age 19-31 and who reported from prison while incarcerated. He was released in 2000 and has just released his memoir, In the Place of Justice:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126217412
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We discussed Thomas’s memoir, Down These Mean Streets, in class. Here’s an innovative PBS doc on Thomas, his life, and his ongoing work as a poet-activist:
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The following is an interview UNO student Lydia Bradley conducted with former correctional officer Jason Hayes. It is a striking view of the effects of prison labor on those workers and their families.
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Mr. Jason Hayes Served for 2 years at the Bill Clements Psychiatric Prison and Hospital, a state-run facility in Amarillo, TX. It is a step down for violent and maximum security inmates trying to work their way into the population.
What hours did you work as a correctional officer?
Mr. Hayes: As a correctional officer, we had 12 and a half hour shifts, 4 days on and 4 off. However, because of lifestyle choice and personal preference, I would work 6 days on and 2 off.
Why did you decide to become a correctional officer?
Mr. Hayes: I became a correctional officer because my mother-in-law required that I get a good job before marrying her daughter. So I went to the state board to find good job. I found correctional officer. You have to go through several background check s for this job: federal background, and state driving background, have to have good credit, have to have no criminal history, and no outstanding driving tickets or they won’t hire you. At the time I was only 20 years old, and I had none of these holdings, so I was hired on the spot. The job only paid $1200 a month. When I left I was getting $1450 a month.
Why take the job if it paid so little?
Mr. Hayes: Job security. It was really hard to get fired from this job.
On the internet, an ad for a correctional officer says that they receive many injuries throughout the year. Did you receive many injuries?
Mr. Hayes: Yes. During my two years of working there, I received broken ribs, was stabbed, and had my nose broken nose broken six or eight times. Often, if an inmate felt he would be harmed by another inmate, he would try to get put in a cell on level one which housed the more mentally unstable offenders, who had to stay in their cell longer throughout the day. The easiest way to do that was to hit an officer. Many of my Injuries had long term effects. Due to the multiple broken noses I developed sleep apnea (where one stops breathing several times at night), and rapid weight gain – due to the sleep apnea. I almost died from hypoxia until I had surgery (hypoxia – is when the tissue of your body significantly lacks oxygen, making you turn blue, such as when babies are born blue). In addition, due to the fast weight gain, I also developed diabetes. the sleep apnea will never go away even if I loose all the weight, but the weight does add to it. The multiple broken noses started everything. The sleep apnea started just a few months after I got the job.
Another offer there had his entire face crushed by an inmate.
Did you receive training for this job?
Mr. Hayes: Yes. We received 6 weeks of training in new boot camp, called that because the new officers always had the newest, cleanest, most polished boots. We did all our training at the unit. If you were late once during training, you got fired. We trained for 12 hours a day for 6 weeks sitting in a classroom; we got a break every hour for 15 minutes. It was very monotonous. They trained us in the proper use of weapons and how to make sure both the inmate and the officer are kept safe. Though a lot of things were very political. You actually have to learn to be a certain kind of person to do this. You can’t get angry because prisoners often use this to manipulate you. As far as physical training, we only learned hand to hand defense. We were taught this by a master in jujitsu. We were never taught how to fight. They were afraid that if we were taught how to fight going in, we would just go in and start fighting. You also have to be gassed with pepper spray during the training.
How did this job affect your family life?
Mr. Hayes: Well, on the first day we received a warning from the sergeant training us. He said that “When I first started the job, I had a brand new car, was getting married, and had the job. Now , 12 years later, I still have the job.” He had to trade out his car and his marriage fell apart. The divorce rate for correctional is officers 78% of marriages end in divorce. My wife and eye got divorced during my time as a correctional officer. Half to split your personality to do the job; you have to be the person the prison needs, firm and fair, and say no to everything up front, and then try to work it out so that they inmate can have privileges. (if you say yes to things, you have to keep saying it.) You can’t be the same person at home as at the prison. I would get angry. Inmates hurl verbal abuse at officers every day for 12 hours a day. You half to learn to block it out, have thick skin.
Anyway, job split us up a few weeks before marriage. We got back together a few months later and got married after my fiancé was pregnant. She lost the baby. We stayed married. She said I had changed dramatically, that I wasn’t the same person. In my eyes I was a better person. Before the job, I was a docile weak person; the job really did give me a better ability to stand up to people in general.
Mrs. Hayes: After we were married, I became pregnant again.
Mr. Hayes: I was up at 3am and out the door. She was not up at 3am, of course. I didn’t home until 7pm and I had to be in bed by 9 to get up for 3 again. We never talked to each other.
Mrs. Hayes: The doctor said the situation was too stressful and that I needed to get away from it. I moved 250 miles away from my husband to live with my father. The job comes home. He was so physically tired, he couldn’t get out of his uniform before he fell asleep. I couldn’t even say hi. This separation ended his career.
Mr. Hayes: The stress of doing the job and keeping the family together made me a more aggressive officer. I took more chances with my job and with my life. I quit after being reprimanded. They were going to bring me back after so many weeks. I told them I wasn’t coming back and turned in my badge.
Mrs. Hayes: I was pregnant most of the time he had the job. He would come home covered in pepper spray or in blood. After one of his first few days of work, I ran up to him to give him a big bear hug and I suddenly felt as if I had caught on fire. It was the pepper spray but we didn’t realize it yet. I ran and got into the shower. However, sweat or anything wet activates the pepper spray even more. My husband had to pull me out, dry me with a towel, which felt like he was rubbing glass into my skin, and cover me in talcum powder.
Mr. Hayes: I started wearing shorts under my uniform because my wife from then on made him strip on the front porch.
Mrs. Hayes: I couldn’t touch him or his clothes, specifically for the safety of the baby. I wanted to support him but I couldn’t even wash his laundry. We couldn’t even touch each other 4 or 5 days out of the week. We only saw each other in passing.
I had a lot of fear and would worry about minor things. If he came home 5 minutes late, I thought he was dead. I had no way to pay the bills without him and no car to get around because he had to take it to work. I felt like I was in prison, like the whole rapunzel story. I understood that the job was his responsibility. However, I would be jealous of inmates because they had more physical, emotional, and mental experience with my husband than I did. In addition, when you are pregnant, you hormones and emotional are heightened. I would cook great meals, but he would be too tired to eat anything and would just go to sleep. I would go in my room and cry for hours on end. Even though he had 4 days off, he really only had 3 days off because 1 whole day is spent sleeping. The other days, you have to do grocery shopping and other necessities. He Just wanted to drink and watch tv.
Mr. Hayes: The 4th day was spent getting psyched to go back to work.
Mrs. Hayes: The guards going in would look fresh. The ones going out were literally gray; that’s how draining it was. He came home one day, and said he had a mixed blessing; he had gotten suspended. It was the best news I had heard. He was on probation for six weeks. He could decide to return. He decided not to.
So why did you become a correctional officer again?
Mr. Hayes: Job stability and awesome medical insurance. It was top notch, paid for everything. But you used it all the time. You didn’t just get hurt, but got sick a lot. I got chronic bronchitis for 2 years. I had it even after I left. The bronchitis went away when I moved to humid New Orleans, Louisiana.
What type of misconduct occurred by the correctional officers at the prison?
Mr. Hayes: Correctional officers would get used by the inmates, especially the new ones. Some went to jail because helped an inmate do something. Inmates were often hiding drugs in their cell. Drugs were a big problem, officers (mules) brought it in. Some officers were selling drugs for inmates on the inside. An officer could buy a can of tobacco for $15 and get $200 for it from an inmate. This was very tempting for many officers with the extremely low pay. Inmates would sometimes blackmail officers for money. You didn’t want your friends to get in trouble, but you couldn’t allow it to continue; it could get you hurt. Only about 5% of the officers participated in this. Officers doing this were often caught within months of when they started.
There was also a prostitution ring uncovered and stopped. 78 women had to walk out of the unit because they were prostitutes from across the state. They looked just like officers. The pimps set them up in a way that they had no backgrounds and got them to go to the prison. They were paid by inmates who had the money. The officers cold tell which ones were prostitutes because they stayed aloof from the other officers.
I found several hundred dollars on inmates while there. People could stick the money in singing cards. Inmates could fold a hundred dollar bill to fit in the crease of a book. They could also take out the binding or the cardboard out of the book and put money and drugs in the middle. They would sometimes put stickers laced with drug in the book.
Every inmate got a small Bible. The bible was used most frequently as the mule, because officers were not allowed to thoroughly search a religious artifact it. The more worn the Bible, the easier it was to sneak stuff in. Family members could send this stuff into the prison. Officers also were not allowed to go through legal documents. Therefore, notes between gang members went through legal papers. They paid lawyers to facilitate this.
As an officer, state law says the inmates have to have access to the officer’s full name, address and phone number. Some of the inmates would tell you, “see you when I get out.” This made it more tempting for officers to do illegal things for fear of the inmate or someone the inmate knows on the outside finding and harming them. The system was set up to fail, maybe even purposefully.
This place did not really rehabilitate anyone. It only schooled them in crime. Many would get out and end up coming back. A small percentage did better themselves. All the prisoners had access to a library and some used this to learn useful things for when they got out.
Only a small percentage of guards treated inmates bad, because they would have to leave fast. They would get threatened and beat up by the inmates. These were mostly young kids with a superiority complex. In addition, in a prison for the mentally unstable, most of the guards did what they could to help the inmates. The best officers would say, “I want my paycheck. I will do what I can for you, but I will not get myself in trouble to get it.”
What did you do after you quit the job?
Mr. Hayes: I applied for a sheriffs job in Mississippi after I quit. They couldn’t hire me because I had more experience in 2 years than the sheriff of 12 years. I was overqualified. They couldn’t put him in such a high ranking position at the age of 23. I later got a job in the same field as a private security guard, staking out a cable antenna at night. I then had to be at my day job at 8 in the morning. I got off at 7pm, and then went to my night job. The security job actually paid less than the prison job.
Mr. Hayes: We lived in Canyon TX. The prison in Amarillo, TX. It was a very little town, makes Chalmette looks huge. You could literally walk from one end of the town to the other in like 20 minutes
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In March, I came across an article from 2006 about how the US prison population is represented in the US Census (which is upon us once again). The article outlined the impact that this population has on prison districts and the cities from which these prisoners come. I was unable to find the particular article again, but I did find the main source that was cited. The Prison Policy Initiative is a group that focuses on lobbying for state and federal legislation for prisoners’ civil rights, in particular for a prisoner’s right to be counted as a member of his home, not the prison district. The site features a report that was sent to the Census Bureau back in 2006 arguing that prisons should supply the addresses and hometowns of its prisoners rather than simply counting them as residents. Prisons are very careful about that census count, and prefer it to be as high as possible, as it results in the prison’s district receiving more local, state, or federal funding particularly during redistricting. Even with the lobbying done by this and other organizations, few states have any progressing legislation concerning prisoners and the census, and most are not in effect for this year’s census. According to the PPI, a realistic goal for changing these policies is for the 2020 Census.
Prison Policy Initiative (full report – long)
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/homeaddresses/report.html
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April is National Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and this June regulations will go into effect that will aim to curb sexual assault in US prisons. In 2003, Congress unanimously passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act. It outlined recommendations for prisons to help eliminate the sexual assault of prisoners and it founded the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission (NPREC) to study rape in US prisons. The commission was mandated to publish a report on its findings in 2009, and it held hearings in several cities, including New Orleans, in the years leading up to their report. An article posted April 17th in the Huffington Post outlines the aims of the original act and the current state of these reforms. “By law, Attorney General Eric Holder has until June to review the standards and codify them as federal regulations, making them binding on detention facilities nationwide.” The Attorney General opened a 60-day time frame for public comment on these regulations that ends on May 10, 2010. The article urges readers to make use of this public dialogue and sign a petition started by Just Detention, a group that was behind the passing of the original act in 2003.
Also linked below is an article from 2008 about the NPREC and their hearings, particularly the one held in New Orleans. It mentions the irony holding the hearings so close to Angola, where 2 of the Angola Three are still being held for their activism for prison rape reform. I also included a link to the archived site of the NPREC, which shows their overview, executive summary, and the entire 260-page report.
April 17, 2010 article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lovisa-stannow/time-to-end-prisoner-rape_b_540599.html
March 17, 2008 article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-farrell/ending-the-hidden-savage-_b_91867.html
NPREC report site (now archived): http://www.cybercemetery.unt.edu/archive/nprec/20090820154816/http://nprec.us/publication/
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Below is a link to a presentation entitled, “Dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline,” written by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. It speaks out against the school-to-prison system where students are constantly policed in schools, sentenced to jail time without committing crimes, and racial segregation that leads students to criminality. The NAACP along with other organizations are combating this system with their own defenses. They challenge disciplinary actions, advocate for increasing school resources, and encourage a better prison system functions to take prisoners and reform them into good students.
http://www.naacpldf.org/content/pdf/pipeline/Dismantling_the_School_to_Prison_Pipeline.pdf
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