by Sid Holt
“Mr. Trahan is found guilty.” The entire “trial” lasts less than two minutes.
The next defendant is called.
He is being considered for release from segregation. “Do you know your Bible?” Miss Lawson asks.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you remember in the Gospel of John when the adulteress was brought before Jesus? What did he say?”
“I don’t remember that, ma’am.”
“He says, ‘Sin no more.’ ” She points for him to leave the room.
The next inmate, an orderly in Cypress, enters. He is charged with being in an unauthorized area because he took a broom to sweep the tier during rec time, which is not the authorized time to sweep the tier. He starts to explain that a CO gave him permission. Miss Lawson cuts him off. “How would you like to plead?”
“Guilty, I guess.”
“You are found guilty and sentenced to thirty days’ loss of good time.”
“Man! Y’all—this is fucked up, man. Y’all gonna take my good time!?” He runs out of the room. “They done took my good time!” he screams in the hall. “They took my good time! Fuck them!” For removing a broom from a closet at the wrong time, this inmate will stay in prison an extra thirty days, for which CCA will be paid more than $1,000.
True Colors
One day in class we take a personality test called True Colors that’s supposed to help CCA decide how to place us. Impulsive “orange” people can be useful in hostage negotiations because they don’t waste time deliberating. Rule-oriented “gold” people are chosen for the daily management of inmates. The majority of the staff, Miss Blanchard says, are gold—dutiful, punctual people who value rules. My results show that green is my dominant color (analytical, curious) and orange is my secondary (free and spontaneous). Green is a rare personality type at Winn. Miss Blanchard doesn’t offer any examples of how greens can be useful in a prison.
The company that markets the test claims that people who retake it get the same results 94 percent of the time. But Miss Blanchard says that after working here awhile, people often find their colors have shifted. Gold traits tend to become more dominant.
Studies have shown that personalities can change dramatically when people find themselves in prison environments. In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted the now-famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which he randomly assigned college students to the roles of prisoners and guards in a makeshift basement “prison.” The experiment was intended to study how people respond to authority, but it quickly became clear that some of the most profound changes were happening to the guards. Some became sadistic, forcing the prisoners to sleep on concrete, sing and dance, defecate into buckets, and strip naked. The situation became so extreme that the two-week study was cut short after just six days. When it was over, many “guards” were ashamed at what they had done and some “prisoners” were traumatized for years. “We all want to believe in our inner power, our sense of personal agency, to resist external situational forces of the kinds operating in this Stanford Prison Experiment,” Zimbardo reflected. “For many, that belief of personal power to resist powerful situational and systemic forces is little more than a reassuring illusion of invulnerability.”
The question the study posed still lingers: Are the soldiers of Abu Ghraib, or even Auschwitz guards and ISIS hostage takers, inherently different from you and me? We take comfort in the notion of an unbridgeable gulf between good and evil, but maybe we should understand, as Zimbardo’s work suggested, that evil is incremental—something we are all capable of, given the right circumstances.
• • •
One day during our third week of training I am assigned to work in the chow hall. My job is to tell the inmates where to sit, filling up one row of tables at a time. I don’t understand why we do this. “When you fill up this side, start clearing them out,” the captain tells me. “They get ten minutes to eat.” CCA policy is twenty minutes. We just learned that in class.
Inmates file through the chow line and I point them to their tables. One man sits at the table next to the one I directed him to. “Right here,” I say, pointing to the table again. He doesn’t move. The supervisor is watching. Hundreds of inmates can see me.
“Hey. Move back to this table.”
“Hell nah,” he says. “I ain’t movin’.”
“Yes, you are,” I say. “Move.” He doesn’t.
I get the muscle-bound captain, who comes and tells the inmate to do what I say. The inmate gets up and sits at a third table. He’s playing with me. “I told you to move to that table,” I say sternly.
“Man, the fuck is this?” he says, sitting at the table I point to. I’m shaky with fear. Project confidence. Project power. I stand tall, broaden my shoulders, and stride up and down the floor, making enough eye contact with people to show I’m not intimidated, but not holding it long enough to threaten them. I tell inmates to take off their hats as they enter. They listen to me, and a part of me likes that.
For the first time, for just a moment, I forget that I am a journalist. I watch for guys sitting with their friends rather than where they are told to. I scan the room for people sneaking back in line for more food. I tell inmates to get up and leave while they are still eating. I look closely to make sure no one has an extra cup of Kool-Aid.
“Hey, man, why you gotta be a cop like that?” asks the inmate whom I moved. “They don’t pay you enough to be no cop.”
“Hey Bauer, go tell that guy to take his hat off,” Collinsworth says, pointing to another inmate. “I told him and he didn’t listen to me.”
“You tell him,” I say. “If you’re going to start something, you got to finish it.” A CO looks at me approvingly.
The Dog Team
Out in the back of the prison, not far from where Chase Cortez hopped the fence, there is a barn. Miss Blanchard, another cadet, and I step inside the barn office. Country music is playing on the radio. Halters, leashes, and horseshoes hang on the walls. Three heavyset white COs are inside. They do not like surprise visits. One spits into a garbage can.
The men and their inmate trusties take care of a small herd of horses and three packs of bloodhounds. The horses don’t do much these days. The COs used to mount them with shotguns and oversee hundreds of inmates who left the compound every day to tend the grounds. The shotguns had to be put to use when, occasionally, an inmate tried to run for it. “You don’t actually shoot to kill; you shoot to stop,” a longtime staff member told me one day. “Oops! I killed him,” she said sarcastically. “I told him to stop! We can always get another inmate, though.”
Prisoners and officers alike talk nostalgically about the time when the men spent their days working outside, coming back to their dorms drained of restless energy and aggression. CCA’s contract requires that Winn inmates are assigned to “productive full time activity” five days a week, but few are. The work program was dropped around the same time that guards were taken out of the towers. Many vocational programs at Winn have been axed. The hobby shops have become storage units; access to the law library is limited. The big recreation yard sits empty most of the time: There aren’t enough guards to watch over it. (Asked about the lack of classes, recreation, and other activities at Winn, CCA insisted “these resources and programs were largely available to inmates.” It said the work program was cut during contract negotiations with the DOC, and it acknowledged some gaps in programming due to “brief periods of staffing vacancies.”)
“Things ain’t like they used to be,” Chris, the officer who runs the dog team, tells us. “It’s a frickin’ mess.”
“Can’t whup people’s ass like we used to,” another officer named Gary says.
“Yeah you can! We did!” Chris says. He then sulks a little: “You got to know how to do it, I guess.”
“You got to know where to do it also,” Miss Blanchard says, referring, I assume, to the areas of the prison the cameras don’t see.
“We got one in the infirmary,” Chris says. �
�Haha! Gary gassed him.”
“You always using the gas, man,” the third officer says.
“If one causes me to do three or four hours of paperwork, I’m go’ put somethin’ on his ass,” Gary says. “He’s go’ get some gas. He’s go’ get the full load. I ain’t go’ do just a light use of force on him; I’m go’ handle my business with him. Of course, y’all the new class. I’m sitting here telling y’all wrong. Do it the right way. But sometimes, you just can’t do it the right way.”
With no work program to oversee, the men’s main job is to take the horses and the packs of bloodhounds anywhere across thirteen nearby parishes to help the police chase down suspects or prison escapees. They’ve apprehended armed robbers and murder suspects.
When we step inside the kennel, the bloodhounds bay and howl. Gary kicks the door of one cage and a dog lunges at his foot. “If they can get to him, they go’ to bite him,” he says. “They deal with ’em pretty bad.”
Back in the barn office, Gary pulls a binder off the shelf and shows us a photo of a man’s face. There is a red hole under his chin and a gash down his throat. “I turn inmates loose every day and go catch ’em,” Chris says, rubbing the stubble on his neck. “And that was the result to one of ’em.”
“A dog, when he got too close to him, bit him in the throat,” Gary says.
“That’s an inmate?” I ask.
“Yeah. What we’ll do is we’ll take a trusty and we’ll put him in them woods right out there.” He points out the window. The trusty wears a “bite suit” to protect him from the dogs. “We’ll tell him where to go. He might walk back here two miles. We’ll tell him what tree to go up, and he goes up a tree.” Then, after some time passes, they “turn the dogs loose.”
He holds up the picture of the guy with the throat bite. “This guy here, he got too close to ’em.” Christian walks in the door.
“That looks nasty,” I say.
“Eh, it wasn’t that bad,” Christian cuts in. “I took him to the hospital. It wasn’t that bad.” (CCA says the inmate’s injuries were “minor.”)
Gary, still holding out the picture, says, “He was a character.”
“He was a piece of crap,” Christian says. “Instigator.”
“I gave him his gear and he didn’t put it on correctly. That’s on him,” Chris says with a shrug.
“Part of the bid’ness”
“I would kill an inmate if I had to,” Collinsworth says to me during a break one day. We are standing around outside; most cadets are smoking cigarettes. “I wouldn’t feel bad about it, not if they were attacking me.”
“You got to feel some kinda remorse if you a human being,” Willis says.
“I can’t see why you’d need to kill anyone,” Miss Stirling says.
“You might have to,” says Collinsworth.
“I do what needs to get done,” says a forty-something, chubby-faced white officer. He wears a baseball cap low over his eyes. “I just had a use of force on an inmate who just got out of open-heart surgery. It’s all part a the bid’ness.” (CCA says it cannot confirm this incident.)
The officer’s name is Kenny. He’s been working here for twelve years, and he views inmates as “customers.” While teaching class, he lectures us on CCA’s principle of “cost-effectiveness,” which requires us to “provide honest and fair, competitive pricing to our partner and deliver value to our shareholders.” A part of being cost-effective is not getting sued too often. “One thing the Department of Corrections does is they give us a certain amount of money to manage this facility,” Kenny explains. “They set a portion of money back for lawsuits, but if we go over budget, it’s kind of like any other job. We got sixty-something-plus facilities. If they not making no money at Winn Correctional Center, guess what? We not go’ be employed.”
Kenny is detached and cool. He says he used to have a temper but he’s learned to control it. He doesn’t sit in bed at night writing up disciplinary reports while his wife sleeps, like he did years ago. Now, if an inmate gives him a smart mouth or doesn’t keep a tidy bed, he’ll throw him in seg to set an example. There are rules, and they are meant to be followed. This goes both ways: When he has any say, he makes sure inmates get what they are entitled to. He prides himself on his fairness. “All them inmates ain’t bad,” he reminds us. Everyone deserves a chance at redemption.
Still, we must never let inmates forget their place. “When you a inmate and you talk too much and you think you free, it’s time for you to go,” he says. “You got some of these guys, they smart. They real educated. I know one and I be talkin’ to him and he smarter than me. Now he might have more book sense, but he ain’t got more common sense. He go’ talk to me at a inmate level, not at no staff level. You got to put ’em in check sometimes.”
Kenny makes me nervous. He notices that I am the only one in class who takes notes. One day, he tells us that he sits on the hiring committee. “We don’t know what you here for,” he says to the class. He then glances at me. “There might be somebody in this room here hooked up wit’ a inmate.” Throughout the day, he asks my name on several occasions. “My job is to monitor inmates; it’s also to monitor staff. I’m a sneaky junker.” He turns and looks me directly in the eyes. “I come up here and tell you I don’t know what your name is? I know what your name is. That’s just a game I’m playing with you.” I feel my face flush. I chuckle nervously. He has to know. “I play games just like they play games. I test my staff to test their loyalty. I report to the warden about what I see. It’s a game, but it’s also a part of the bid’ness.”
Mail Call
Over Christmas week, I am stationed in the mail room with a couple of other cadets to process the deluge of holiday letters. The woman in charge, Miss Roberts, demonstrates our task: Slice the top of each envelope, cut the back off and throw it in the trash, cut the postage off the front, staple what remains to the letter, and stamp it: Inspected.
Miss Roberts opens a letter with several pages of colorful child’s drawings. “Now, see like this one, it’s not allowed because they’re not allowed to get anything that’s crayon,” she says. I presume this is for the same reason we remove stamps; crayon could be a vehicle for drugs. There are so many letters from children—little hands outlined, little stockings glued to the inside of cards—that we rip out and throw in the trash.
One reads:
I love you and miss you so much daddy, but we are doing good. Rick Jr. is bad now. He gets into everything. I have not forgot you daddy. I love you.
Around the mail room, there are bulletins posted of things to look out for: an anti-imperialist newsletter called Under Lock and Key, an issue of Forbes that comes with a miniature wireless internet router, a CD from a Chicano gangster rapper with a track titled “Death on a CO.” I find a list of books and periodicals that aren’t allowed inside Louisiana prisons. It includes Fifty Shades of Grey; Lady Gaga Extreme Style; Surrealism and the Occult; Tai Chi Fa Jin: Advanced Techniques for Discharging Chi Energy; The Complete Book of Zen; Socialism vs Anarchism: A Debate; and Native American Crafts & Skills. On Miss Roberts’s desk is a confiscated book: Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, a self-help book favored by 50 Cent and Donald Trump. Other than holy books, this is the most common text I see in inmates’ lockers, usually tattered and hidden under piles of clothes. She says this book is banned because it’s considered “mind-bending material,” though she did enjoy it herself. There are also titles on the list about black history and culture, like Huey: Spirit of the Panther; Faces of Africa; Message to the Blackman in America, by Elijah Muhammad; and an anthology of news articles called 100 Years of Lynchings.
“That’s the craziest girl I ever seen,” Miss Roberts says of the woman who wrote the letter she holds in her hand. She is familiar with many of the correspondents from reading about the intimate details of their lives. “She’s got his whole name tattooed across her back, all the way down to her hip bone. When his ass gets out—whenever he gets out, ’cuz he’s got
30 or 40 years—if he ever gets out, he ain’t going to her.”
I feel like a voyeur, but the letters draw me in. I am surprised at how many are from former inmates with lovers still at Winn. I read one from a man currently incarcerated in Angola, Louisiana’s infamous maximum-security prison:
Our anniversary is in 13 more days on Christmas and we could have been married for 2 years why can’t you see that I want this to work between us? … Bae, [remember] the tattoo on my left tittie close to my heart that won’t never get covered up as long as I have a breath in my body and I’m about to get your name again on my ass cheek.
Another is from a recently released inmate to his lover:
Hope everything is going well with you. Very deeply in love with you …
I won’t be able to spend x-mass with my family either. Baby my heart is broken and I am so unhappy. I always had a great fear of being homeless … And even if I did find a job and had to work nights or work the evening shift, then I wouldn’t have anywhere to sleep because the shelter won’t let you in to sleep after hours. In order to get my bed every night I have to check in before 4pm. After that you lose your bed so the program is designed to keep you homeless. It don’t make sense …
I bet that this is a sad letter. I wish that I had good news. This will be a short letter because I don’t have a lot of paper left.
Merry Christmas baby. Very deeply in love with you.
The front of one card reads, “Although your situation may seem impossible … ” and continues on the inside, “through Christ, all things are Him-possible!” It contains a letter from the wife of an inmate:
Here I am once again w/ thoughts of you. I hate it here everything reminds me of you. I miss u dammit! It’s weird this connection we have its as if I carry you in my soul. It terrifies me the thought of ever losing you. I pray you haven’t replaced me. I know I haven’t been the most supporting but baby seriously you don’t know the hell I’ve been through since we got torn apart And I guess my family got fed up w/ seeing me kill myself slowly I attempted twice 90 phenobarb 2 roxy 3 subs. I lived. 2nd after I hung up w/ you 60 Doxepin 90 propananol i lived WTF? God has a sense of humor i don’t have anyone but u, u see no one cares whether I live die hurt am hungry, well, or safe … So I’ve been alone left to struggle to survive on my income in and out mental wards and running from the pain of you bein there …