by Mateo Hoke
My attitude and actions got me into situations with people that could’ve gone bad in a lot of ways a lot of times. I was never really drawn to crime per se or to be mean to people. But you hear about adrenaline junkies coming out of Vietnam, and I could be like that. Maybe 90 percent of the time I was running heads-up doing everything right, but the other 10 percent I was kind of unrecognizable.
After I was discharged, I just traveled around. I’d go to Houston and LA and Seattle and Chicago. I’d go set up, get a job and an apartment and get established, and then get bored and leave. There one day and gone the next. I would hitchhike to the next city and go do the same thing.
I met Pam in 1974. I was working at a boardinghouse in Seattle where she was living finishing her last year of nursing school at the University of Washington. She was this cute little guitar-playing hippie girl. I was taken by the fact that a nice girl would look at me, and she was kind of intrigued by this freewheeling renegade. We connected. It was very much an “opposites attract” thing. I was twenty-three and she was twenty-two. We were married in 1976.
Pam and I went down to Houston and got an apartment. I did construction down there. We wanted to get back up to Washington, so in 1978 we moved to Port Angeles in Washington.24 I continued in construction for about ten years, and we had three kids during that time. I tried to make it work in construction, but the economy there was tough. During that time some other things happened as well that pushed me toward the work I’m in now. Sometime around 1986, I got a DWI. I was running around with a lot of bikers and crazies. At one point after a relatively bad night, a friend of mine pointed out that I was “typical PTSD.” I didn’t even know what he meant, but he gave me the number of a therapist to talk to.
So I did PTSD counseling. I’d go to this counseling for Vietnam vets and the counselor would drag it all out and have us roll around in it. You know—“What did it taste like, what did it smell like”—and then when it was all out in the open, it would be, “Okay, time’s up.” Then I’d have to shove it all back inside and go out with my buddies, and we’d cry in our beers.
After a while it became obvious to me that man didn’t have the answers I was looking for. I called out to the God of the Bible. There, I found peace and purpose and real direction for life. This really opened a new chapter in my life. Sometime in ’87 or ’88, I went with one of my Christian mentors to volunteer out at Clallam Bay Corrections Center, which had just been opened up a couple of years before.25
I don’t remember that first visit clearly except that I was overwhelmed a little by the sensory details. The sounds of the steel slider doors opening and closing. I remember being struck by the cleanliness of it, the orderliness. I was surprised, and it wasn’t the sort of impression I’d got about prisons from the movies.
Construction was just not supporting my family the way I wanted, so I’d gone back to school at Peninsula College, studying sociology under the GI Bill. I was thinking about corrections a little when I went to Clallam Bay. After visiting there a couple times I really had a sense of calling. So I pursued that path.
IT COULD’VE HAPPENED TO ME
In 1987, I went to work for the county sheriff’s department and county corrections. The county system is ordinarily for people who are incarcerated for under a year or in pretrial detention. If you’re doing time over a year, most people transition to a state prison. I found I had pretty good instincts for communication with the inmates. You know, not being their buddy or anything, but just being able to communicate during stress. And not taking their verbal assaults personally, not becoming preoccupied with my personal pride.
The people who were coming to the jail, I felt like I knew them. I didn’t know their names, but I knew what was in their heads. This is one of the reasons that I was good at it, I think, is I was able to connect with them. While I didn’t spend time incarcerated or get into serious trouble, I was always on the edge of it. It could’ve happened to me.
Sometimes it felt like the whole place was a little on edge, and a confrontation with an inmate, like a murderer, could go really bad really fast. But being on edge was comfortable for me. Sometimes it almost felt like I was back home. Those things that I’d learned in confrontations in the bars and in Vietnam and those types of settings just kind of came back and became functional tools. A lot of times when everyone else was stressed and not thinking, I was able to think through things.
My work at county was a part-time, temporary position. Then to get more hours they started putting me in a juvenile detention center. Working with kids was weird. You start to have a sense of where these guys in the adult system came from. You have these kids come in to juvenile and they liked it better there than they did at home. They’d spend two or three weeks there and you get to know them a little bit, and then they’d get picked up by their drunk dads.
The County Sheriff’s Office wanted me to stay there at juvenile and county jail, and get the hours in to full time, but I really felt a call to the state system and went to work for the Department of Corrections out in Clallam Bay.
“US AGAINST THEM”
I started at Clallam Bay in 1989 when I was thirty-seven. I was a little older, and a lot of the difficulties that young people have exercising authority over others had passed me a bit, so I think that helped me fit in quickly. When I got there, it had been open for a couple years and virtually every inmate there was pretty new, except for some people who’d transferred in.
Attitudes in corrections were changing as well at that time when I was just starting. In the late eighties, the attitude between corrections and offenders was very “us against them.” Corrections in Washington, like other places, had gone through a cycle in the fifties and the sixties with a very punitive emphasis. For corrections staff, that meant not a lot of accountability and probably a lot of abuses.
Then in response to that the pendulum swung toward more of a psychology-based approach in the seventies. The emphasis was on “if you’re nice to people, then they’ll be nice”—that kind of mind-set. Psychologists were becoming superintendents and kind of setting the tone and climate for the facilities. They followed that strategy to the point where in the seventies, prisons might have a lifers club—an official committee of people with life sentences who interacted with prison management—who were allowed to speak to policies and procedures at prisons.
They had places in the prison called “free spaces” where corrections officers weren’t supposed to go. People could volunteer to check lifers out of prison and take them to dinner. You know, the old adage of the inmates running the asylum really started to become more of a reality than a cliché.
Then in the late seventies, early eighties, there was a sense among corrections that things had gotten out of hand. When the department tightened up they had huge riots in Monroe, Shelton, and Walla Walla Prisons, and the corrections staff started undoing some of the psychology approaches of the seventies for more of a control-based approach again.
When I started at Clallam, we were swinging back to being definitively in control by virtue of force. It wasn’t extreme in terms of emphasis on force, but it was moving that way. I think I got six days of training before my first day on the job. Then, “Here’s the keys,” and I got started.
It was an interesting first couple of months. At that time the laundry in the prison had been compromised, and there were drugs and weapons coming in through the laundry and being distributed to the prisoners in their laundry bags. We came to find out that all the workers there had been compromised and were bringing this stuff in, and the prison had to fire everybody in the laundry.
My first position was to step into this area where all the staff had been compromised and fired, and a lot of the inmates involved in the plan hadn’t been removed. Those who were overtly involved, of course, had been moved out of there, but to a large extent, a lot of the issues around the problem were still intact.
I actually thought it was a great opportunity. I had a couple drug busts and found several shanks and had been in two or three one-on-one uses of force, where it was just me and the inmate. I had no backup. It was a good way to prove I could handle the job. At one point the sergeants and the lieutenant called me in. They told me they had gotten word that some inmates were planning to kill me that day. I didn’t have a radio to check in with other guards or anything yet. I said, “Well, can I get a radio?” And they said, “No, don’t have any extras.”
So I asked for an extra staff member to help when the inmates came back to the work area, and I patted them all down and made sure nobody had anything coming into it, and apart from that there was nothing much I did. I was still in training, really. I hadn’t even been to the Correctional Officer Academy at that point. I think I was good at defusing stressful situations, but that’s not what my bosses noticed. I mean, it’s hard to get accolades for what doesn’t happen.
GLADIATOR SCHOOL
After a year they finally sent me over to the academy, and when I graduated I was top of my academy class. When I came back to Clallam, I started working the close-custody units.
It was during this period that Clallam Bay got a reputation statewide as being a gladiator school. In the general population units, we were fighting several times a week. That was just the way it was done. It was all physical combat. I was not always above the fray. I was as quick as anybody to use force. The rule of thumb was, you told ’em twice when they weren’t complying. One of the standard phrases was, “Are you refusing a direct order?” And if the answer was yes or there was anything less than direct compliance, then that was justification for hands on.
The perspective of COs at that time was it was a slippery slope, and once inmates started disobeying anything, no matter how minor, it would spiral out of control. That is more or less the exact opposite way you should manage behavior, but that’s the way it was done at the time.
Other than the general population units, we also had intensive management units, or IMUs. Those were the maximum-security segregation units in the state system. Inmates who were demoted to max custody were placed on an Intensive Management Status program.
On IMS an offender would have three primary expectations before going back into general population: Get no infractions, promote through the behavior levels, and complete an “Offender Change Program.” So for example, an inmate might be assigned a program in an IMU for six months. He would have to have no behavioral infractions during that period. If he did have an infraction, he’d go back to the first stage of the process including starting the assigned time frame over again. Inmates could get stuck in IMUs for years if they didn’t complete the program.
I remember my first time I had to escort a guy over to the segregation units. At the time it was single officer escort. I don’t remember the circumstances for why. I put the cuffs up to the door window, and the prisoner steps back and gets cuffed up. The cells were single man, concrete, six feet by sixteen feet. They had a little partition wall between the bunk and the toilet, one window to see outside and one in the door looking inside. The windows were vertical, maybe four or five inches by twenty inches.
What really struck me about the units is that they seemed like a combat zone more than anything else. I did not really absorb the isolation and the numbness of the routine of solitary until much later, because there was always so much going on. At that time in the early and mid-nineties, the intensive management unit was very volatile. There was continual flooding of the cells, feces smearing, staff assaults, very definitively an “us against them” mentality. It was very noisy, and because of the feces smearing and stuff it really stank all the time.
Of course that makes for bad attitudes on both sides of the door. I’d hear stories from other officers about stuff they’d done like not feeding inmates. There was some instigation on both sides that kind of perpetuated conflict. It was assumed that when you had a use of force on one inmate that the other inmates were obligated to get in line for a cell extraction. The culture on both sides was to provoke each other.
This meant that inmates would cover their windows, soap the floors, tie the doors, block the cuff ports, prepare weapons, et cetera. You know, if you did one extraction, you did twelve. There was a lot of flooding. Sometimes the tiers looked like Niagara Falls. Sometimes I had to evacuate IMU over people setting their mattresses on fire by arcing their electrical systems. Now I look back at some of those things that inmates did at the time just to disrupt, and I go, Damn. At the time, that’s just what I thought seg units were.
I was a corrections officer for three years before becoming a sergeant. From ’90 to ’94 I was involved in over fifty-one uses of force. What got you kudos as an officer was doing cell extractions, and there were corrections officers who liked doing it as well, liked the ongoing drama. I think nowadays an officer who had five years in might have twenty cell extractions on average. Then I was a sergeant from ’92 to ’96 and became an emergency response team leader in 1994, so I was the one called in to quell a lot of this stuff.
Back then, if a person refused to cuff up when he needed to be taken out of his cell, we’d come in and get him. Of course all of the other inmates would become involved with that process. Pretty soon they’d cover their windows and start making preparations for a cell entry, either by soaking their floor or blocking the door and setting up for flooding, or grabbing anything they can use for a weapon. We’d put a team together outside the door and we’d open the door and go in and get them.
It was a knock-down, drag-out fight and we’d haul ’em down and put ’em butt naked in an observation cell and have them eating Nutraloaf. Nutraloaf we haven’t used in a long time. It was—how did they describe it—a “nutritionally balanced meat vegetable product.” Yeah, it wasn’t appetizing and was definitely meant to be punitive.
We went through a cycle, like all correctional systems, where there was a gross overuse of segregation. An individual could go to segregation without real cause. I think we had a program at one point where we could put an inmate in segregation for seventy-two days before we even had a disposition.
LIFT PEOPLE UP INSTEAD OF HOLDING THEM DOWN
In January 1996, Steve was made acting lieutenant and shift supervisor. That June he was selected to join a think tank attached to Peninsula College. Staff Training, Education, and Performance (“STEP”) was a forward-thinking group of correctional professionals led by Dr. Cheryl Young. Starting in the mid-nineties, major riots were common in Washington’s intensive management units, drawing media attention. Statewide legislation cut programs and resources for prisons and instituted further punitive measures, especially for those in IMUs, which led to more frequent protests. Even as the state legislature enacted these punitive, tough-on-crime measures, the state DOC was looking to develop standards that would lead to reduced conflict between incarcerated people and corrections officers. Over four years, from 1996 to 2000, Steve helped develop and implement new Emergency Response Team procedures that incorporated de-escalation techniques and innovative on-the-job training standards that incorporated nonphysical conflict-resolution training. In 2000, after a person escaped from CBCC, Steve returned to serve as training manager for implementation of the new procedures, and in 2003 he became supervisor of CBCC’s intensive management unit.
I got back to Clallam Bay in 2000. It wasn’t easy to get back at first. After four years of helping implement these training programs I’d become kind of politically a persona non grata. Some of the officers at Clallam had seen me as being part of this imposition of new ideas from academia that really butted up against the longtime culture of corrections.
In 2000, they had a few openings for lieutenants, and I wanted to come back as one. I’d left Clallam Bay as a lieutenant, but at first they didn’t select me, even though I was highly qualified. Then after an escape that year, they realized correctional officer t
raining needed to be redone, so they brought me back as a training manager.
Then after three years, I wanted to get back into the custody line of things, and I ended up becoming IMU supervisor while the IMU was in huge uproar. They’d been having hunger strikes and a lot of protests. There was some resistance to me taking over among the officers because I was seen as the “administration’s boy,” but it was a chance to put into practice some of these ideas on how to lift people up instead of holding them down.
I was immediately overwhelmed. The conflicts, the grievances. . . . You know, I just put one foot in front of the other every day. At first the staff would hardly talk to me. But I had a couple key people in there. Several of the instigators bid out.26 Some good sergeants and classification counselors eventually came in. These were staff members who were just not interested in starting fights all the time.
My relationship on the tiers was that I knew the inmates and they knew me. They knew my goal was not to hurt them. But they also recognized that there were things that had to be done, like moving them out of their cells to talk to a counselor, for instance. I tried to set an example for the officers I was supervising. I always tried to be fair, patient, listen to the inmates. Listening was not just important to the person you’re listening to—other inmates and officers see it too.
One of the things that happened early on in the unit was a lot of cussing at inmates, and at each other, and just a lot of expletives happening throughout the unit. And then I’d see inmates getting infractions for abusive language. I told the officers I didn’t want to see any more of those sorts of infractions or demotions until the staff learned how to talk without swearing. That’s the kind of thing that wasn’t received well at first. It was really kind of funny—when I’d be in the unit I’d hear some cussing being yelled down the corridor and next thing you know a head’d pop around the corner and say, “Oops, sorry, boss.” They started to catch on.