Since my last post, I left Bizarro World, effectively ending my blog. After I made that decision, it turned out that my new accommodations were impossible to continue given my current circumstances and prior obligations. To my great shock, I was asked to return to Bizarro World. For reasons I can’t explain and still don’t understand (either I’m a glutton for punishment or needed the entertainment) I accepted. Ben Franklin’s definition of insanity comes to mind.

Things have changed in ways I couldn’t see coming. I don’t think anyone else could have either. Who would have thought that an overcrowded minimum security building with little supervision or inmate accountability could have become… *gasp* dangerous??? I have now passed the 5 year mark as a CO, and this past summer have seen more blood than the rest of my years combined. I have watched the management completely screw up every part of every incident. I didn’t think I could be more shocked than before, and yet here I am. I have lost some good coworkers and gained new allies, but The Professor and I find ourselves in a steep uphill battle. Where in the past we only left the battlefield to return to supply and get bigger guns, we are actually considering watching the unit destroy itself.

It has occurred to us recently that perhaps we are part of the problem with Bizarro World. Our attempts to keep it together may have enabled it to remain as broken as it is. Maybe instead of fixing what is broken, we should be allowing it to receive the gift of consequence that the laws of nature provide (I expect fire and brimstone at any moment). However, one nagging thought tears at our brains: if we allow it to fail, will it be recognized as the failure it is? Our experience tells us a resounding “No.” After all, that would require someone else to show forethought. There has been some hope in the form of massive searches and discipline, but the follow through has been predictably weak, and in some cases non-existent.

A Correctional Law term has been stuck in my head lately which I cannot seem to shake: “DELIBERATE INDIFFERENCE.” It is a term used to describe security staff who are aware of danger but show apathy. In some cases it can be considered criminal. I guess the trick is that it has to be noticed. I would think that in this case that would require eyeballs and an IQ one point above celery, but that might be an unrealistic expectation.

Moving on, about 3 weeks ago I decided to start testing some of the broader theories on inmates, mostly because I’m really bored, but also because, believe it or not, they tend to lie to me.

After doing this for about a week with some success, I discovered an inmate who was almost impossible to read; a natural liar.  The funniest thing about it was that he was so well hidden; everyone considers him a liar, but the truth is that he looks like he is lying all the time, even when he’s being honest. Had I not started reading this book I never would have noticed. This causes a problem since most people show high anxiety when they lie. Sometimes you detect it, sometimes you have a feeling the person lied but can’t put your finger on it. This guy could tell you his real name and birth date and you wouldn’t believe him, which is just as much a deception as lying about it.  I vowed to crack him; I call him Kent.

In observing Kent, it is difficult to establish a baseline for truth. His mannerisms constantly show classic signs of deception, especially his body language and facial expression. He has almost no “detection apprehension” (fear of being caught) because of his self confidence in his ability to lie, and lack of confidence on others’ skill as lie catchers due to his past experience. Kent is very intelligent in a “street smart” sort of way, and can be highly manipulative. In accordance with his own moral views, he typically does not show poor judgement (before you jump up and shout “But he got arrested!” He believes that there was no better alternative at the time. According to him, this was the best possible outcome due to the circumstances). But his moral code being so different from mine makes it that much harder to detect his lies. Because our social values are so different, he shows no sign of guilt when he lies to me.

So that is Kent. When speaking, he looks the same 100% of the time – left hand shaking up and down for emphasis, face almost unmoving except for an occasional smirk, but head moving from side to side and consistently breaking eye contact. He has done this without fail in every conversation. Some of them I knew for a fact he was lying, some of them I knew he was telling the truth, but if not for the fact that I knew the information before I spoke to him, I would have had no idea whether or not he was lying.

The following entry in my personal diary comes after two weeks of patience.

Date: XXXX09

Kent has been speaking to me voluntarily in increasing increments of up to 30 minutes almost every night over the past two weeks. He used nearly all of this time to talk about his past and mostly to boast about never being interrogated succesfully (how he is cool under pressure, how he understands the system and can’t be fooled, etc.). Tonight he lingered for about 45 minutes. As the conversation came to a close, I finally saw in Kent a moment where his guard was down, almost relaxed. I said “You know why I would hate to be your probation officer? Because since you’ve started talking to me, you have told me truths, half truths, and flat out lies. But I can never tell the difference.”

As soon as I finished saying that, Kent did several things I have never seen him do. He turned sideways, and played with his hands, looking at them for a moment and trying to not show his face, then he leaned on the counter with his arms crossed and tilted forward. The smile on his face was so big it looked like it hurt, forcing his cheeks up so high I could barely see his eyes – the first time I’ve seen him smile with both corners of his mouth. Then I said “You enjoy knowing that, don’t you.” He did not change his stance, but attempted to mask his emotion by frowning. The corners of his mouth moved downward, but his cheeks still betrayed him, leaking signs of his true emotion, as he said “No, no I don’t.”

“Now that, Kent, was a lie.”  His face turned beet-red.

This emotion that I illicited from Kent was something Paul Ekman calls “Duping Delight,” when a liar receives some sort of excitement from lying, and in this case, a strong sense of acheivement. What I did was gratify Kent’s emotion by complimenting him, which made him happier than I have ever seen him. Because of his inability to control himself in that moment, he felt his weakness and lost confidence in his ability to lie, which was self-fulfilling. I suspect that with time and patience, I could eventually instill “detection apprehension” in Kent. He now knows that I can catch him lying, so I will have to wait another few weeks before doing it again, which should give him enough time to drop his guard (this situation caused a window of about 4 minutes where he could not conceal his emotions and showed genuine embarassment). My goal is to put him in such a state of mind that when he talks to me, I will be able to differenciate between the truth and a lie a majority of the time, or at least in situations where the stakes are high, whereas in this case the stakes were low. This will require several successful attempts at catching him in lies, while at the same time keeping him comfortable enough to continue to talk to me.

The management in Bizarro World tends to prescribe to this same type of logic. The guy I brought to the desk was an absolute ass, which was completely unnecessary. Nine out of ten inmates would have said “Sorry CO” and that would have been the end of it. The punishment for sincerely apologetic inmates sometimes turns out to be one of those “where would you be if I hadn’t called you to the desk” kind of situations. Instead he was an ass and walked off on me in conversation. So I wrote the dude up. I quoted policy in the write up just so there wouldn’t be any confusion (you know, because the management is incompetent). As it turns out, they are so incompetent with policy that they are misinterpreting it and now say that because the inmate went to his room, and I told him to stay there, he can’t be written up for anything else he did.

I could go on and on about how ignorant that is, but the bottom line is, if you are a complete f***in jerk to me, I’m not going to let you run around and play pool and watch TV. That also does not mean that since someone did something they deserve 30 days in segregation for and I told them to go to their room that he has already been punished. That’s not double jeopardy (which is not even applicable to the corrections system. Happens all the time: inmate smokes a joint and gets 30 days seg time plus outside charges to boot. It’s perfectly legal to do, but my management says it’s not lawful for me to do… even though it is… and that’s not what I did in the first place).

So they’re complete idiots, not that there is any surprise there. What good is policy when the management can’t read or form complete thoughts? I will say this: the unit manager called me at home on my day off about this. I almost had to sit down. I’ve begged him to do this in the past rather than stab me in the back, and he doesn’t. He just stabs me in the back. He says he doesn’t want to bother us at home (even though I sign off the reports with “please call me at home if you have any questions” with my phone number right next to my signature). But he did call in this instance and ask me about it, and he says I will get a meeting with the man in charge of disipline, who will forward the results to the DOC lawyer, because either I’m right, or they wrote the policy wrong.

Either way, I win, which is the CO’s way. We always win, even when we lose. I say this wearing my shirt from correctionstees.com . Now I see they have a couple new ones that I now want, like “Corrections – We Have More Bars Than Any Other Network” and “My Daddy Fed Your Daddy Chow Last Night On 3rd Watch.” It’s important to keep laughing, otherwise you’ll just cut yourself. Which reminds me, I didn’t update for almost a month because I went on vacation and then nothing happened noteworthy, but a girl tried to kill herself. Well, not kill herself, but she tried to “kill herself” by cutting a part of her body which could not possibly bleed enough to kill you unless you cut it off, but it did make red stuff come out and she got the attention she thought she needed. To some people that might have been noteworthy. It didn’t make a blip on my entertainment radar.

This has caused the climate of the unit CO’s to change in a way I didn’t expect. I would think that a batch of new, unexperienced “yes sir” CO’s would grab at the chance to have a regular post (as I did when I started) and The Snake would once again have control over the staff, but instead, no one wants to work in his unit. The Shift Captain just fills the slot, and no one really cares about what The Snake or SGT Inventory have to say, because there is no possible penalty for telling them to stuff it.

I experienced this point last week. I am getting really tired of Bizarro World and, in a moment of weakness, asked my Shift Captain if I could be reassigned. Turns out the only other open post is also in Bizarro World. This at first seemed like a bad thing , but if you can’t change something, you just have to change the way you feel about it. If they can’t move me then…well, they can’t move me. Therefore if I’m told to do something that I think is stupid, I can just say “no.” What are they going to do about it? Nothing. I could be removed from the Unit Management Team, but I would simply be replaced with…me. And not only that, but the new me would be free of any Unit Management ties. The dog would be off the leash.

“If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you could ever imagine”     -Obi Wan Kenobie

In other news, I just bought a Tshirt from www.correctionstees.com “Corrections: We Can’t Make This S*** Up” – priceless. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

The site is connected with www.thesallyport.com, which is a ning.com-based web community for law enforcement professionals, so if you wear a badge and deal with criminals, check out the site (there is a law enforcement verification process to become a member). They have an offer where if you send in a tshirt idea and they use it, you get a tshirt. As you could imagine, I’m spending my time thinking of tshirt names instead of working.

It also introduces two new and exciting characters (or caricatures), an inmate and a CO. The inmate is The Browbeater: a “Youth Center graduate” who has aimlessly bounced around the penal system, eventually landing him a prized spot in Bizarro World. The CO, Captain America, makes brief appearances in Bizarro World, typically resulting in welcomed entertainment. He has an impressive physical stature, but his trademark is his “low and slow” verbal style. He could clobber an inmate with little or no effort, but instead chooses to question them in a friendly tone, causing them to invariably humiliate and incriminate themselves until they give up and resign the battle.

On this day, Captain America entered Bizarro World and immediately noticed an oddity in one inmate. He called the inmate to the desk by announcing his late name.  Since there were several inmates who shared that last name, they asked him which one he was referring to.  He replied over the loudspeaker, “the one with no eyebrows.” The inmate reported to the desk, looking surprised to be there (then again, how could he NOT look surprised…).

Captain America questioned him about his strange brow-cut. The inmate (now referred to as The Browbeater) explained that he was pressured into shaving his eyebrows off. Further digging by Captain America revealed that he had partially shaved his eyebrows for “style” and was made fun of for it. I got the back story from one of his roommates. The results are as follows:

The Browbeater had shaved a vertical line down the center of each of his eyebrows, creating a “quadribrow,” if you will. Kind of like a procession of hairy caterpillars walking across his forehead. Just a few days later, a T.V. special on prisons aired, featuring a homosexual gang-banging inmate who had styled his eyebrows in the same manner. The inmates apparently have a nickname for this type of homosexual gang-banger: the Gay Boy Gangster (or GBG for short). The inmates started calling The Browbeater “GBG” until he gave in to pressure and shaved his eyebrows completely off, deciding that this fate was better than the name calling he was receiving.

It should be noted that relieving himself of his hairy vertiblinds has not stopped the name calling or ridicule. Frankly, I’m not surprised…

I did some research online and found that a prominent, mainly west coast Mexican gang, MS-13, sometimes shave a line on one eyebrow and three on the other to signify the number thirteen. I now fear that I have discovered a new gang: MS-11. I’m not sure what the purpose of MS-11 is, but I am currently working on some theories involving binary code, and a supernatural group centered around the number “eleven-eleven.”

Anyone with information on MS-11 is encouraged to come forward and share it with the rest of the world.

correctionsblog@yahoo.com

I will edit it if needed, but please remember not to include the names of the people involved or the facility you work in.

The truth is, an inmate is not the same as every other inmate, though professionally COs must view them that way in many aspects to ensure that certain segments of the inmate population aren’t discriminated against. After all, even inmates have a pecking order. “Lifers” prey on lesser criminals, who prey on younger criminals, who prey on sexual predators (kind of ironic). Each class of inmate also comes with their own typical set of behaviors. It’s quite possible to predict an inmate’s crime based on some of these behaviors – thieves have a tendency to covet that which they don’t have, which can translate to more than just physical property. Drug dealers continue to be businessmen, who are likely to run an “inmate store,” the gambling rings betting on sports, or any other money making activity. Sexual predators tend to be personable; a skill honed on luring innocent victims into feeling comfortable and safe, and are less likely to be confrontational. There are others than indicate broader boundary problems – vehicle crimes such as operating under the influence or operating after suspension. This group tends to grasp the understanding of why they are in prison, but feel that they are less of a criminal than the rest, as their crime is based more on potential victims than victims themselves.

That being said, every person brings with them their own personalities and habits. That’s what makes us human, and that’s what all inmates are. That’s what we all are. So why is law enforcement, not just corrections officers, held at times to such an inhuman standard? When an offender spits on an officer or throws feces at them, they are not allowed to act out in anger. Most people who spit on someone else on the street get their teeth knocked out. We must, however, robotically ask the inmate to back down, and then write a detailed but emotionless report on his behavior. Any emotional response could be seen as an indication that the principle based steps taken for safety were actually retaliatory. Great COs can make most situations with inmates transactional. Finding enough people with that ability to staff a prison, let alone all the prisons in the U.S., is damn near impossible. Anyone can be provoked to anger while staying well within reason.

Yet the critics are everywhere, and every time an officer acts out in anger, we all suffer. True, prisoners are people under lock and key, without the same liberties that we have for their specified time, and officers are in a position of authority, but that doesn’t make prisoners completely helpless. After all, they still have the most important freedom we all share.

For those of you who are confused, see Man’s Search for Meaning, a book by Victor Frankl. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, imprisoned in a Nazi death camp during the holocaust (notes on this are easily searchable on wikipedia.org ). He observed that no matter what stresses you are put under or how confined and oppressed you may be, you will always retain a fundamental freedom that no one on earth can take away from you – the freedom to choose your own response. Even God allows us to choose, good or evil, and whether you are religious or not, that doesn’t change the fact that everyone (save for perhaps the severely mentally disabled) has the ability to choose their own response to a given situation. It should be noted that that does NOT mean that our decisions come without consequences, but we have the freedom to make that decision nonetheless. Criminals understood that when they committed their crime, no matter what their intent, that good or bad consequences were possible, yet they chose to continue the activity that brought them into the criminal justice system.

Corrections officers have that same choice, and I have observed and experienced that they (we) usually make the morally correct choice in challenging circumstances. That seems to be what sets us apart, perhaps, from inmates. That’s not to say we are perfect, because we’re not; we’re human. We do show a capacity to make better choices, and more often than not we exercise that ability properly.  Those that don’t roll the dice on losing their job, and making the rest of us look like knuckle-dragging fools who were probably picked on as a kid, and take it out on the helpless inmates under our care; fodder for the political activists and conspiracy theorists.

I suppose the same goes for uninformed bystanders who comment on a system which they have not experienced, and do so with such enthusiasm.

Inmates have been known to hang themselves with rope made from toilet paper. I’ve wondered if logbook paper will do the trick. (That’s a joke)

Other days aren’t so bad. Despite consistently handing out discipline, I appear to have a pretty good reputation with the inmates in my unit, even (and sometimes especially) with inmates that I frequently discipline. Maybe discipline is what they were looking for.

Meanwhile, running Bizarro World still seems to be like running through knee-high mud.  Understanding and compassion are key – I get that.  But so is accountability. These two forces should be balanced evenly, but instead they are used independently of each other and not necessarily to good benefit (depending on your perspective, although mine is correct).

I hear we are going to be getting tazers soon. What could possibly go wrong…

I first encountered this inmate soon after his arrival. It was linen exchange day, but due to it being a holiday, linen exchange was put off to later on in the week. He came to the desk, proclaiming his entitlement to have his linens cleaned in a timely manner, and that it was against his constitutional rights to spend but one more day in his used linens. When told it wasn’t our fault, and not our problem, he deferred himself to the grievance process in disgust.  The following week, linen exchange was performed on the normally scheduled day. Again, Outgoing Dave came to the desk, this time stating that his linens were cleaned less than a week ago, and that he should not be forced to have his linens cleaned repeatedly (prompting the mocking battle cry “What IS this, MEDIUM??” as if to say “…and you call this steak WELL DONE??”). We then reminded him of his complaint the previous week. I watched the gears slowly turn in his head, and he withdrew his complaint.

He would later play a more useful and more complicated role in a performance with SGT Inventory and an inmate I call Devious Dan, but that will be left for another day.

Dave was one of the few inmates who acted generally interested in self-help, and we obliged him as best we could. He was a classic example of someone who could read the information and regurgitate it with relative ease, and yet constantly proved that he had absorbed little of the information. Nonetheless he tried, and for that we gave him the kind of attention that we simply don’t have time to have with every inmate. He hasn’t come back yet, so maybe it did some good after all.

What came with that attention was something that happens to nearly every other inmate who receives copious amounts of positive attention: an overfed sense of entitlement. It’s a very frustrating phenomenon that I have yet to fully understand, but it seems that when you give an inmate positive attention that is not equal to the rest over a period of time, they feel that they have become better than the population.  If not caught early, this leads to more complaining, wanting more attention, and feeling as if they deserve to be treated even better. Some even try to take on the role of Junior Corrections Officer. Try as I might, I have rarely been able to foster the positive professional relationship I have described with an inmate over a sustained length of time without this result, and from what I have observed, my peers haven’t either.

This finding has led me to change from Bizarro World’s norm in several ways. First, I do not give extra meals to inmates in exchange for extra work, resulting in more food and less work. I also do not often take on the task of helping to rehabilitate inmates beyond what the programs of the facility provide, resulting in more time to do room searches, and less rehabilitation (and possibly, more discipline as a result of room searches). As usual, I welcome any thoughts on this topic, and as always, more research, I think, is needed.

My partner and I once, in one night, unraveled a contraband network, exposing how prisoners were getting contraband through the fence and distributing it to inmates whose job was to deliver it to other inmates who then doled it out. This generated a 20 page document of evidence. Included were separate reports on how the discovery was made and any other information we had that might be useful to people with more resources. It was a major victory. We spent all night working on it, not knowing if it could one day be used in court. It took at least 20 man hours to complete. We briefed the day Captain on it, making copies for the facility investigator and any management that needed to know. Upon reviewing his copy of the document, SGT Inventory said verbatim, “It looks like you guys did a thorough report, but you did forget one thing… (dramatic pause) you forgot to do your tool inventory last night.” The Captain rolled his eyes.

On another occasion, an inmate was found during the day shift to have two black eyes and a broken nose. Another inmate was found in the same day to have broken his hand. I came in at night, assuming that we were going to get down to business on this security issue. SGT Inventory took a rare moment to come out of his office and pull me aside. Eager to get the scoop, I listened in as he said that he had something he needed to discuss with me. He then said “<an auditor> came through the unit and was rather upset when he noticed (brace yourself) that there were cobwebs in the corner of the CO’s station (about 8 feet up).” Pictures had been taken by said auditor, and I was told that I needed to rectify the situation. I was stunned, “You mean to tell me that inmates are getting knocked the f*** out, and you’re worried about COBWEBS???” I got no answer, and he strolled back to his office. Some amazing work, by a truly amazing man. The baffling conundrum of how an inmate broke his own hand, and another inmate coincidentally broke his own face on the same day, remains unsolved. Anyone with information is urged to come forward.

The cobwebs are probably still there.