One of the most sought-after jobs for inmates in the DOC is Laundry Porter. At most facilities laundry is processed by unit laundry porters. Prison laundries are located either in the housing unit, a facility laundry or in a few rare instances at an off-site facility. With the doubling of the number of prisoners housed in each housing unit, like most ancillary infrastructure the laundry facilities did not increase. The result is a real need for 24/7 laundry operations in order to keep up with the demand. The washers and dryers are generally commercial/industrial grade in nature and most are decades old. The result is that there are frequent breakdowns with repairs conducted by in-house maintenance staff as long as there are parts available. Laundry detergent and bleach are delivered in 5-gallon pails which are hooked up by tubing to the washing machine and are automatically measured out and added to the wash, depending on the cycle chosen.
Laundry Porters are considered unskilled labor and are paid less than $1 per day but make a fortune in coffee and Raman noodles by providing special service. If you wanted your laundry to come back clean you contracted for about $3 per month with a laundryman to personally see to the washing of your clothes, especially items like sweats. If you didn’t pay to have your laundry done then it would likely be crammed into the washer with too many others’ bags. Laundry is placed into mesh bags with your prison ID and housing unit bunk number (called a lock). So, if you didn’t pay to have it washed separately it be washed in the bag and tended not to come clean due to the lack of agitation.
The standing joke was that laundry came back dirtier than when it was turned in. I proved this once by turning in a brand new white tee shirt and it came back gray. Leaving one to wonder if the laundry had been washed with the rag mop heads. Also, the odds of your laundry not coming back due to theft increased significantly if you didn’t pay. In one housing unit where I locked the laundry porter would put wet laundry bags on the heat register to finish drying where anyone had access, so laundry frequently turned up missing, especially items like sweats or new uniform blues.
Paying for a free service was the only way to get your clothes cleaned and returned each time. It wasn’t without risk but there isn’t any coin operated self-service alternative. At a different facility the laundry was a facility laundry so there were fewer problems with laundry theft, but the washing was really poor. I had to resort to hand washing my tee shirts in the bathroom sink and hang them over the end rail of my bunk to dry. Theoretically this is against the rules but a lot of guys who were concerned about their appearance did it all the time. Considering that you only got 3 tee shirts that meant sink washing 2-3 times a week.
Doing laundry was necessary since you have such a limited wardrobe, at least it should be. Not everyone was hygienically inclined and would wear their uniforms for days on end. Some of these were people with mental disorders and it would take a direct order from the CO to get them to shower and change clothes. In cases like this the laundry man would treat the dirty laundry like it was a biohazard and wash it separately. Laundry Porters had to trained to handle blood borne pathogens, since blood, urine, and fecal material are biohazardous. Since the washing process does not sterilize and the colored load doesn’t use bleach these could contaminate other people’s clothes and spread disease.
I knew one guy who had bowel troubles and he paid several laundry men to handle his biohazardous laundry so any time he had an accident he could get his soiled laundry cleaned. If he didn’t pay they wouldn’t touch his stuff. For someone who was disabled and unable to work this represented a financial hardship, but he didn’t have an option. The laundry porters treat their jobs like a business and aren’t into charity.
Corrections Officers (COs) are trained professionals, some with previous military or law enforcement experience, and a minimum of an associate degree from an accredited university. At each prison there is a command structure for custody staff similar to that found in most police departments: Captains, Lieutenants, Sergeants, Officers, and Inspectors. The custody staff reports in a silo to the Warden and Deputy Warden to carry out day-to-day custody operations. Where ever there are inmates there will be COs watching over them, often times directly, at other times by surveillance camera. At least that is the theory, however the reality of the situation is not so straight forward.
Officers conduct periodic rounds of their assigned areas to visually monitor inmate activity. Routine searches are conducted to look for contraband such as weapons, stolen property, alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs, tattoo paraphernalia, and everything else forbidden to inmates by policy. Innates are subject to pat downs in any place at any time at the discretion of the officers. There is even a quota of random searches intended to make inmates think twice about participating in illegal activity.
Corrections Officers are all part of a union that advertises that theirs is the most dangerous job in Michigan. They lobby the legislature and administration continuously regarding staffing levels, compensation, prison closures, use of Tasers, prisoner personal clothing, and an endless list of wrongful termination cases to protect their fellow officers. From my personal observation the majority are overweight, out of shape and aging, especially in Level I. They sit around in offices, especially second and third shift, doing nothing but talking or surfing the internet. They don’t enforce the rules consistently and turn a blind eye to theft, illegal activity and bullying. They show favoritism and will single out inmates, often based on their crime for harassment or worse.
There used to be a position called Regular Unit Officer (RUO) and for each shift there would always be the same officers working in the housing units. They knew everyone’s names and faces. They knew who caused trouble, who was troubled, and those who stayed out of trouble. They received higher compensation for the position than COs that worked in other areas. The position was eliminated a few years back as a cost savings measure. The COs and their union were not happy about this. The COs that worked in the housing units tended to have higher seniority and resented the loss of income and position. Officers can now be assigned to other positions on their shift at will. The result has been a work slowdown, a form of silent protest. I watched it happen first hand.
Officers in the housing units still tend to be routinely assigned to the same unit, but they tend to do the bare minimum for their required duties. It is the younger officers that don’t routinely work in the housing units that are making the big busts, actively shaking bunks and inmates down. The older officers are too predictable in the timing of their rounds, lax in their searches, and even turn a blind eye to illegal activity. They spend their time in the office on the internet or phone. Loss of Privilege (LOP) is the restriction of an inmate to his cell or cube as a punishment for some ticketed behavior or activity is not enforced very strictly, to the point that inmates are on the phone or on the yard instead of on their bunks.
Unless you front-off a CO you can get away with almost anything. Rules enforcement is inconsistent at best. In an incident in a housing unit where I lived the CO put the following warning message on the board:
”Unless the spud juice stops tickets will be written no questions asked for the following:
Use of the bathroom during count time.
Going down the hall beyond your cube.
Use of the back bathroom, if you lock in the front hall.”
In other words, unless the drinking is brought under control we’ll actually have to do our jobs. Too bad they didn’t want to enforce the other rules like not cutting hair and no tattooing, since the bathroom is a barber shop/tattoo parlor, in addition to being a brewery. The CO actually thought that by making these threats that the inmates might either exercise self-control or positive peer pressure to bring the situation under control. During Emergency Count, two 5-gallon buckets of spud juice were placed in the toilet stalls on the toilet seats, since the COs would never check there. There are so many issues like this I don’t know where to start.
Sugar is the major ingredient in spud juice so they took it off the commissary, so instead it is stolen out of the kitchen in bulk. Officers fail to adequately monitor food service worker activity and the inmates are able to walk out with it hidden on their person or pass it off to others during chow. The 5-gallon plastic buckets are what the laundry soap, bleach, floor wax, and cleaning chemicals come in. The empties are not secured or rendered unusable and are easily procured by the inmates right in the housing unit. During fermentation the 5-gallon buckets are even vented out the window using plastic tubing to keep the smell down that might give the location away. Unit officers should be able to smell spud juice if it is in the cubicles since everyone else can. Brewing debris left in trash bags should also be a giveaway that there is spud juice in the unit.
One time an officer tried to write a ticket for the spud juice she found, the lieutenant made her tear up the ticket and just dump the spud juice down the drain. It is clear they know what’s going on and intentionally turn a blind eye to it.
The officer station is near the front entrance to the housing unit in the lobby. This allows them to keep an eye on who is coming and going from the unit. Only resident inmates are allowed in to unit (except for maintenance workers.) But with irregulars working in the units who don’t know names and faces the inmates will take advantage of this situation and slip in for various reasons, usually up to no good. Even with the regular officers there may be times when the front desk is unmanned and people can slip in and out. One time a group of gang members raided a unit by turning their orange knit caps into ski masks so they wouldn’t be recognized on camera. They went into a cube and beat a guy up who had done something they didn’t like. Like a smash and grab, in and out in 60 seconds, and they got away with it.
Televisions are a big-ticket item that cost nearly $200 new for a 13″ model you wouldn’t consider buying on the street. Nobody takes them home when they parole. They are sold on the black market. The prisoner’s ID is engraved by the Property Room before it goes to the owner. If you are caught with a that has someone else’s number you could get a theft ticket, even if you actually paid the owner for it since there is no legal way to transfer ownership. So, there is a hustle for guys that can sand off the old number and put a new one on. While it may pass a casual visual inspection under the low light conditions in the housing unit, the property records are available on the COs computer so they can easily determine whether or not an inmate legally possess that TV.
The officers know that the majority of the TVs in the unit are contraband but unless there is an incident that really pisses them off they will let sleeping dogs lie. More than a few times I’ve witnessed massive unit wide shake downs during Emergency Count where dozens of TVs are swept up as contraband. If someone in the unit is tipped off in advance, the TVs will vanish off the shelves to be hidden in lockers or footlockers until the all clear is sounded.
When TVs are confiscated it generally leads to a rash of thefts, as guys who lost theirs will secure another one. Sometimes the CO will make an announcement warning that the stolen needs to be returned, no questions asked and threaten additional retaliatory measures if not. The funny thing is, usually the stolen TVs to replace one confiscated ones come from another housing unit and have been transported across the front yard in plain view. The result is that the COs retaliatory round of contraband confiscation won’t turn up the stolen and only further propagates the problem. The amazing thing is this happened before flat screen were introduced into prisons. The old color CRT TVs were about 18-inch cubes. So how is it that something larger than a breadbox could be carried out of a cube, out of a unit, across the yard, into another unit, and into another cube when all of these are under video surveillance and the supervision of COs?
I would hope that I am not the only one who is sick and tired of COs undermining, thwarting, confounding, ignoring, or otherwise circumventing the purpose of discipline in prison as the primary means of correction through their willful negligence, lax rules enforcement, dysfunctional internal security, and poor job performance. No wonder prisons are so unsafe, the COs like it that way- job security.
Update to this essay- In the March 16, 2019 Detroit News there was an article regarding the lawsuite brought by the officers regarding the elimination of the Resident Unit Officer (RUO) positions in 2012. The state Supreme Court declinded to revisit the decision by the Court of Appeals ruling that affirmed the Michigan Civil Service Commission decision authorizing the state to reclassify nearly 2,500 correction works to lower paid jobs. If it takes nearly 7 years to resolve this dispute imagine how long it takes for those appealing their convictions.
Duane Waters Health Center (DHW) is a 112 inpatient bed medical facility operated by the MDOC. It provides acute medical, outpatient, and long-term care. It is adjacent to the Charles Egeler Reception and Guidance Center and is located at the site of the old walled prison in Jackson. Opened in 1986 DWH was named after Dr. Duane Leonard Waters who worked with the Michigan Corrections Commission for 25 years to modernize health care for Michigan prisoners. This information comes from the MDOC website and sounds well and good but like so much else doesn’t tell the whole story.
In the 1980’s a number of inmate lawsuits filed in federal court regarding prison conditions and medical care were combined into a class action. The state negotiated a settlement known as the Hadix consent decree which outlined specific goals for improvement of prisoner care. Despite repeated attempts by the MDOC to convince the court to end the consent decree it is still in force, providing oversight and monitoring progress made to improve conditions.
Over the course of the first 5 years I was in prison I made annual trips to DWH for eye exams, so I have some firsthand experience. There were a lot of stories about DWH circulating and from talking with the old timers it was clear that you didn’t want to end up there. I don’t know the statistics but a lot of inmates have died there over the years. One time when I was being processed into the facility and was standing across from the elevators waiting to have my leg irons removed I watched them wheel out a body bag on a stretcher. When that happened the dozen or so inmates I was with grew very quiet and still in respect for the dead.
While prison is a dangerous place and several inmates are killed by other inmates on an annual basis, for the 95% of inmates which will likely receive parole, the fear of dying in prison is more likely related to a medical issue such as a heart attack or cancer.
DWH lost its certification to perform surgery years ago. I heard horror stories of wrong limbs being amputated, post-operative infections, patient neglect, misdiagnosis, and excessive pain and suffering. The doctors and nurses no longer work for the MDOC but for a subcontracted medical service provider, a for profit company. But that hasn’t done anything to improve medical care. doctors that work in prisons have a reputation for being poor physicians that can no longer work with the general public. Not long after I arrived at my first prison the state police showed up to arrest the doctor. They found that he had been stealing prescription medications that were supposed to be distributed to inmates.
Decisions regarding treatment are made by case managers working for the medical service provider and will routinely deny requests for testing and treatments recommended by the physicians. The medical service provider has a national reputation for providing substandard care and has faced numerous lawsuits both by innates and the states that it contracts for.
Their philosophy seems to be to delay and if possible avoid making a diagnosis and when that doesn’t work delay treatment or seek to least costly treatment option regardless of success rate. Major medical procedures required by inmates including surgery and cancer treatments are now performed at public hospitals. In Jackson and Lansing there are enough inmates in the hospital that the MDOC maintains a prison ward. In addition, inmates are transported off site for doctor’s appointments and outpatient treatments. Inmate medical expenses are one of the highest cost centers due to the aging prison population. Yet getting medical treatment can be a major ordeal with delay, denial, and a very one-sided grievance process that puts the inmate at a significant disadvantage to fight the decisions made. Inmates pay a $5 copay for medical service appointments and are charged this even when no services are provided. For those without financial resources this is just another debt added to their bill that will follow them after they get out.
My level II bunkie was a lifer that had been down since the 1970’s. He had COPD due to emphysema from smoking his whole life. It was well managed using a national brand inhaler. The health care company decided to change his medication to a cheaper alternative over the objections of his doctor. The result was an almost immediate deterioration of his condition from fit enough to work in the chow hall wiping tables for $90 per month to wheel chair bound, oxygen dependent, and indigent. Quality of life is a major concern in prison since it doesn’t take much to destroy what little you have when a major change in health status occurs. The result of going cheap on his medication is that the overall cost of his health care increased significantly.
From talking with an inmate who was suing the doctors and nurses for pain and suffering in regards to a misdiagnosis for cancer, I learned that the ability to successfully prove malpractice is not easy. The lawyers provided for the doctor were so used to dealing with prison malpractice claims that when they asked the judge to dismiss the claim during a pretrial hearing they were caught off guard when the judge informed them that the doctor was being sued under different statutes and the case was going forward. Every now and then an inmate will win, but the cost to the doctors, the medical service provider and the state aren’t great enough to cause them to change their ways and improve inmate medica1 services.
I myself had personal experience with prison medical services. Due to a preexisting medical condition I was at a high risk for heart attack or stroke and classified as chronic care for additional monitoring. This meant I got a medica1 exam every six months instead of the annual checkup that was part of routine medical care. But when I developed an unrelated non-life-threatening condition, I did not receive the same level of care.
Due to poor food quality I developed hemorrhoids as a result of hard stool and difficult bowel movements. The hemorrhoid ointment for sale in the commissary wasn’t Preparation H and did nothing to treat the painful condition I was suffering from. I was literally reduced to tears from the fiery pain I experienced from bloody swollen hemorrhoids. My first trip to medical I received a small supply of Tuck’s pads that actually worked to provide temporary relief in treating my condition, but no further supplies were provided when those were used up. Medical wouldn’t address the underlying cause and I ended up having to purchase fiber laxative powder for $5 every two weeks for the next 7 years, along with hydrocortisone cream to reduce the swelling. If I hadn’t had the financial resources available to afford this I have been in a world of hurt.
My prison safe coffee cup. I kept it as a reminder of what I left behind and never want to return to.
One of the notable aspects of jail/prison is the removal of common items that could potentially be used as a weapon. Everyday items, creature comforts, or even basic hygiene supplies when they end up in the wrong hands can become dangerous. The higher the level of security the more items are restricted. For example, in quarantine which is in some ways like a level V, standard writing utensils have been replaced with less dangerous alternatives. Golf pencils instead of full size. Short stubby pens made from soft flexible material instead of hard plastic or metal. The idea being that they are too short to be fully griped in the hand and still penetrate deeply enough into flesh to cause significant injury.
The same approach was taken with tooth brushes. Full size tooth brushes made from plastic can be sharpened into a point. More over this has been across all levels. There does tend to be some inconsistencies. At one point while I was in prison travel tooth brushes were added to the commissary. The type where the handle doubles as a storage case. Less than a year later they were removed without explanation. If I had to guess one was used as a weapon. In an unusual move that was probably an oversight, an innate returning from county jail where he spent time while attending court was able to bring in as personal property a dozen long handled tooth brushes. He was able to sell them in the housing unit for two bags of coffee each, worth about $8 per tooth brush. For the guys that had the foresight to buy extra travel tooth brushes, these were going for a bag of coffee each. This just shows the value that some guys put on their teeth.
Razor blades have to be the all-time hair-raising security nightmare. The plain old disposable single blade type with a plastic handle that cut skin better than facial hair. In the county jail the razors were kept at the officer station and given out for use. The same technique was used in prison segregation. While I was in prison the MDOC removed razors from the population because of the number of incidents involving razor blades used as weapons. Instead inmates had to purchase battery powered electric shavers. As a concession the PBF bought razors for the indigent. A $1.50 razor was replaced with a $16 device that required AA batteries for an additional $3 per 4 pack. This is just another case were a few have ruined it for everyone.
When they took away the razor blades they also took away the pencil sharpeners for hobby craft that had a blade held in a plastic housing. Only the wall mounted rotary style was available in the housing unit. The classrooms had either those or electric pencil sharpeners. The unit sharpeners were generally so bad that they would eat an art pencil before ever giving a point sharp enough to draw with.
Scissors could only be children’s safety scissors. The type that you couldn’t hurt yourself with if you disregarded your mother’s admonition not to run with them. They could barely cut a sheet of paper, skin would be out of the question. Rulers could only be plastic; no wood or metal styles were permitted and no more than a foot long. Knitting needles were not allowed but crochet hooks were permitted. Paint brushes had to be short handled and thin bodied. Sewing needles were only sold as part of a small sewing repair kit and would break going through fabric let alone anything tougher like leather. Leather working as a hobby craft was eliminated with its stronger needles.
Wrist watches were allowed to only have basic day, date, time and stop watch functions. Count down timers were not allowed. The MDOC must have been afraid that MacGyver inspired inmates would make a bomb out of it or something. My first watch was a basic digital Casio with an Indiglow face. When that watch died I tried to order another but was denied. I had to settle for the same watch without the Indiglow face. The reason was that the catalog description for the two watches differed slightly, even though the only actual difference was the night light on the approved watch verses the Indiglow on the unapproved watch.
Legal pads and loose-leaf paper for writing but spiral bound notebooks or three ring binders were not allowed to be purchased because anything metal was contraband. I once purchased a foot-long florescent light so I could have adequate light to read in bed. A month after I purchased it a memo was issued requiring that the lamp be sent home or turned in. The catalog vendor had switched from the approved plastic body to a metal case. I still have it at home and use it in my garage workshop. Odds are after I moved to level I it would have been stolen.
Vaseline used to be sold in large containers with an easy opening lid. But when Vaseline and water are heated in a microwave it becomes a weapon when splashed in someone’s face. It is worse than plain boiling water because it sticks and causes greater damage.
Large mugs were removed from the commissary before I got there. Only 8 oz. coffee cups and 20 oz. plastic tumblers were available. The larger double walled mugs came with a plastic handle and a lid which kept the coffee warm longer. By limiting the volume of cups, it would thereby reduce the number and severity of incidents involving throwing liquids. The old mugs became a valuable commodity that would be resold over and over. Guys would have them painted in order to give them a unique appearance to reduce theft by making them one of a kind works of art. Floor wax sealer applied regularly would keep the paint protected.
Cleaning chemicals like bleach were supplied in a diluted form and even then, metering pumps were installed to dilute them further prior to use. It reduced waste when guys used chemicals for cleaning with the philosophy “if a little is good, more is better” in a vain attempt to kill more germs and kept chemicals that could cause harm if ingested or splashed in eyes from being readily available.
Tools from maintenance or vocational education must be accounted for at the end of every shift or class period. Contractors working in the facility must manifest in and out every tool. Many years ago, I worked as a contractor doing repairs in the ceiling above Cell block 7, the intake unit at the old walled prison and scalpels were part of my took kit. The COs had a cow about me needing to take them into the prison but there was no way to do my job without them. I had to account for them or I wasn’t going home.
Mirrors in the bathroom are made of either plastic or polished metal. No glass that could be smashed and the shards turned into weapons. Small plastic mirrors were available in the commissary and necessity since the bathroom mirrors were either oxidized or scratched so badly that they were practically unusable to use to see yourself shaving. Just before I came home one of the pole barns I lived in was being renovated and they put new mirrors in the bathrooms. I got to see myself clearly for the first time in years instead of the funhouse image I had to put up with previously.
Lawn mowers at the multi-level facility were the old fashion manual push mower because the higher levels weren’t allowed to have access to power mowers which could be used as a weapon apparently. At the level I only facility the yard crew had gas powered push mowers but maintenance had put a lock on the gas cap so the inmates could not steal the gas.
Except for the school the only calculators available have basic add, subtract, multiply, divide functions. The school has to supply a specific calculator for the GED program or they wouldn’t have them, again the MacGyver thing.
Typewriters that were available for purchase in the catalog came without memory because the legal beagles would use them to mass produce grievances. There were a few old ones around when I was in level II that had memory, so I’ve seen their power. I guess the MDOC believes that words can hurt.
In level II there were a lot of items that I saw that could no longer be purchased. Large ghetto blasters, TVs with internal speakers, black plastic headphones, and other items that were either held onto by the lifers or resold over and over again because they weren’t on people’s property cards and therefor would be confiscated if they tried to take it with them to another facility.
In the units with cells the MDOC had to install a fan as part of a settlement over the lack of air conditioning and heat related illness during the summer months. To keep from having to pay for replacement fans when those wore out the MDOC allowed inmates to purchase small personal fans from the catalog. The big ones did a good job moving air. I had one in my level IV and II cells. I had to purchase a personal fan when I got to level I. The problem was they were small and really didn’t move very much air to cool you off. Attempts to get a larger fan approved were denied because they said it posed a security threat. As if a bunch of hot and grumpy guys with short tempers wasn’t already a threat. It is amazing the devious uses guys with too much time on their hands, a temper, and who see little value in human life can come up with. Somebody once said to me that prison wouldn’t be such a bad place if it wasn’t for the people there.
One of the first things I noticed when I first went to jail and then prison was the odor. Not hospital antiseptic but of unwashed bodies and filth. In jail the water in the shower was ice cold and the lack of clean clothes to change in to meant that body odor stayed with you. In the higher security levels of prison, showers were only offered every other day while you could exercise every day. In the lower levels showers were accessible every day. This is where hygiene becomes the distinguishing characteristic and could make or break your relationship with your bunkie or cubemates.
Poor hygiene goes beyond access to showers. In a place where no one feels at home, many will make messes and simply walk away leaving them for others to take care of. Plugged toilets, hair trimmings in the sink, clogged shower drains, malfunctioning chemical urinals all contribute to making the bathrooms foul, disgusting, smelly places that don’t get cleaned nearly often enough.
An underlying issue is aging infrastructure. Many jails and prisons are more than 25 years old and some are more than 50 and in need of significant repairs and renovations. Coupled with prison populations that are double the original design specification there is significant pressure on sewage pipes. In one case these issues made the newspaper. Inmate maintenance crews were used to clean up raw sewage that had overflowed and one of the inmates on the cleanup crew contracted hepatitis due the lack of personal protective equipment.
At one of the prisons I was at there were problems with the drain pipes in the Level II chow hall backing up. Grease had plugged the pipes and overflowed all over the kitchen floor. The kitchen was closed for a day while the sewage pipes were snaked out and the kitchen cleaned thoroughly before food preparation could begin again.
Another time raw sewage was bubbling up out of the ground from a broken pipe coming from the Level IV housing unit. They had sewer problems there on a regular basis. To reduce pressure on the sewage system they installed controls on the toilets that prevented multiple flushes. In a unit where the toilet is in the two-man cells they used to do what was called a courtesy flush so that the smell of your waste would not be inflicted on your cell mate. With the controls in place limiting the number of flushes in a 5-minute period this practice could no longer be performed. In Level I the flush urinals were replaced with chemical urinals. These created a whole different set of headaches and after a couple of years they were removed, and low volume flush urinals were reinstalled.
In a place where the residence will purposely break or sabotage the facility, anything and everything will get flushed down the toilet. In the kitchenette there isn’t a garbage disposal so lots of food waste is poured down the drain. The result is a constant struggle by maintenance to keep the drains flowing, a losing proposition.
Example of front and back yards. The small white squares spaced around the track represent exercise stations.
At Level I and II general population facilities the great outdoors that is accessible to inmates is divided into the front and back yards. The front yard is the area in front of each housing unit and while the rules at each facility vary, the front yard is usually restricted to the residents of that unit. Like a front porch it contains benches and maybe picnic tables and phones. There may also be a basketball court. At times this area may be open while the backyard is closed.
The backyard is more like a park or playground. There will be baseball diamonds, soccer fields, horseshoe pits, a weight pit, benches, tables and exercise equipment. There will also be a walking path. The backyards vary greatly in size from facility to facility. Some were referred to as “the back 40” with plenty of room to spread out. Others were only a couple of acres, and there was no way to find space for a little peace and quiet.
The Prisoner Benefit Fund (PBF) at each facility pays from recreational facilities and equipment. The weight pits that I saw were unheated roofed pavilions with chain link fence walls, which could be wrapped in plastic during the winter months to keep out the elements. It was not your typical health club, just a limited number and variety of benches and racks of dumb bells and barbells. The weight pit is a very popular exercise destination. So much so that it must be signed up for through the Athletic Director’s office at many facilities. Further since it is a privilege it is often tied to a requirement that the inmate be ticket free for some period of time to be eligible for the weight pit call out.
Rain or shine, hot or cold, guys will be out there lifting iron. Inmates can purchase weight pit gloves through a catalog vendor. Some facilities will have weight lifting belts available, but that is about it. Guys take the weight pit seriously with workout routines and partners to push them and spot for them. Also, you need to have someone to watch your back, since some of the worst incidents of assault that I heard about occurred in the weight pit.
Team sports like softball, basketball, soccer, and volley ball will have organized leagues where competition will have a season and a playoff. At some facilities the champions may even receive some type of prize to go along with the bragging rights. Given the nature of inmates, the games could sometimes get a little rough and arguments could be fierce. The inmates would sometimes have to self-police in order to prevent a situation from getting out of hand and having the administration cancel to rest of the season.
The walking/running track generally circles the perimeter of the yard and along the track will be various workout stations. At some facilities this may only be a simple chin-up bar, at others there be more elaborate setup including spots for chin-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, stationary bikes, rowing, and other workout contraptions.
At the last facility I was at the workout equipment was really nice stuff like you would find at a city’s community center fitness trail. Made up of tubular steel set into concrete pads. The variety of equipment really provided for a full body isometric workout circuit as you went from station to station around the track. But I can guarantee that the designers of the equipment never thought about how inmates would find creative alternative ways of using the equipment to either work alternate muscle groups or increase the resistance to increase the workout intensity. This unfortunately had the side effect of increased breakage of equipment that should have otherwise been nearly indestructible.
Examples of the type of exercise equipment installed at the last Level I that I served time at. A different machine was located at each workout station around the track.
The work to install and repair this equipment is performed by the facility maintenance crew. This work is not considered critical and is performed by inmates working under the supervision of a maintenance staff member, who generally only performs work for the PBF on overtime. Again, another opportunity to take advantage of prisoners by charging the PBF overtime rates for the maintenance staff member while the inmates only receive their standard rate.
In good weather the yard looks and sounds a lot like a school playground. Groups congregate together to plot & scheme, shoot the breeze, brag about the past and dream about the future. The yard is where you go to catch up your acquaintances or accomplices from other housing units to exchange information and gossip. It is the one place where you can truly choose the mates you want to hang out with.
Cameras watch and COs circulate to keep an eye on activities, bust up overly large groups and conduct random body searches looking for weapons and contraband. The yard is a place where you need to keep your head on swivel. I’ve seen more than one guy get hit by a foul ball or a homerun that he didn’t see coming. It is not a good idea to accidentally walk up on somebody from behind when they stop abruptly while walking. The yard is where deals are made, goods trade hands, and favors exchanged. I’ve seen guys smoking marijuana, engaging in sex, fights, and stabbings. The yard is safest in the morning and nothing good happens after dark.
For the 8 years I was in prison I never saw the stars. The facilities are lit up like Times Square. All around the perimeter to illuminate the fences and the no-man’s land, both inside and out. The yards are so well lit that you can read a book outdoors after the sun sets. Too bad the night is the only darkness banished in prison.
When writing about prison and what life is like in prison it is difficult to convey in words to someone who has not experienced it what prison is really like. It is like trying to retell a funny story that happened and the person you are telling it to just gives you a blank stare and doesn’t laugh, so you finish by saying, “I guess you just had to be there.”
Richard Wurmbrand, founder of ‘Voice of the Martyrs’ was imprisoned by the Nazis and then the Communists in Romania. In his book “If Prison Walls Could Speak” he described the struggle to explain what prison is like to those who have never been there.
“I do not publish my experiences in prison, but the words in which these experiences are expressed. There is a big difference. On one hand there is your experience, and on the other hand a very poor attempt to put it into words developed by men whose experiences have been totally unlike yours.”
Prison is an experience like no other and for the vast majority of those unfortunate enough to have spent time there they do not possess the communication skills to even make the attempt. There is a very strong correlation between education and prison. Those who fail to graduate from high school are far more likely than someone who has a college degree to end up in prison. I unfortunately defied those odds and came to prison with both an undergraduate and graduate level college education plus twenty years of work experience as a technical professional including work as an auditor.
After spending a total of ten years in prison and on parole I can speak from experience with insight about what life was like serving time in the Michigan Department of Corrections. My earnest desire is to convey a sense of the scope and magnitude of the issues faced by those hidden from sight behind walls and fences. Those forgotten men and women who are often thought of as both a menace to and a burden on society, who endure hardship and abuse at the hands of those in authority over them and from their own fellow inmates.
As referred to by Richard Wurmbrand, the key issue is language itself. Not only the language used to relate prison experiences, but also the language used by those who are experiencing it. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I’m not sure this applies to the reality TV shows that try to depict what life is like behind bars is like by taking a camera crew into prisons or jails. As the narrator speaks the camera shows a bleak land scape of cinderblock walls, iron bars and reinforced glass, which is true. Prisons are very utilitarian structures meant to be both fire proof and escape proof, unfortunately they are not fool proof. And it is the foolish nature of the inmates and staff that is on display when the cameras are present.
The first thing the viewer notices is that the language used by everyone on camera is full of profanity that must be bleeped out. Cursing, swearing, vulgarity, obscenity or profanity, whatever you want to call it, it is the use of base, demeaning, degrading language that substitutes for civil discourse in prisons.
The punishment for using this type of language in an earlier era, when we were young children, was for our mothers to wash our mouths out with soap for using such filthy words. Now it is so commonplace that the animated TV series ‘South Park’ on Comedy Central, about a group of fourth grade boys, did a whole episode about the socially acceptable and unacceptable usage of the word S#*T. The acceptable usages involved swearing while the unacceptable usage involved its scatological meaning.
The explicative most commonly used in Michigan prisons is F#*k, the ‘F’ bomb. It is a word that is used as a noun, pronoun, adjective, verb and adverb, yet has no meaning of its own in the context in which it is used. It is simply a substitution for words that have actual meaning. The result is a conversation that is devoid of meaning unless the context is known.
According to Webster’s Dictionary the word ‘Ineffable’ (pronounced in-ef-a-ble) is an adjective that means- beyond expression, indescribable or unutterable. This would be something like trying to describe the glory of God in heaven, sitting on his throne. It is the frustrations and limitations of human language that the Apostle John experienced when he wrote the Book of Revelations.
In contrast to this is the common, base, vulgar cursing of man: “F’ing this” or “F’ing that.” Where we profane God and his creation in a way that is beyond belief, inarticulate, and unprintable. What I call “F’able” language is the lingua franca of prison.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian executed by the Nazis for his role in the failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, in his personal writings published in his ‘Letters and Papers from Prison’ commented on the coarseness of the language used in every day conversation between inmates and inmates and inmates and guards. Since his time, I can only imagine that the degradation of the language has only gotten worse. However, I shall attempt to translate for the reader so that the meaning is clear while still conveying the underlying tenor and veracity of the reality experienced by those I represent.
The language used to describe prison and the prison experience is what hinders understanding. In Genesis 11 in the account of the Tower of Babel the Lord says in verse 6, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing they propose to do will be impossible for them. Come let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” The result was the project to build the tower ended and the people where scattered. Language became the barrier to unity of purpose because of misunderstanding. Now even though the English language is the national language we can’t understand each other because we aren’t one people. We are separated by more than experience and barbed wire, we are separated by attitudes, opinions, ignorance, and fear. Communication is the only way to overcome this situation and this blog is my humble attempt to contribute to better understanding in the hope that positive lasting change can be achieved to address a shameful aspect of our society.
In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy faces a series of challenges he must solve in order to find the Holy Grail and save his friend’s life. The clue to overcoming one of the deadly obstacles was the “penitent man”. Looking around he saw a number of decapitated bodies and quickly surmised that he needed to humble himself in a hurry or share their fate. The same happens to people who come to prison.
Another synonym for prison is penitentiary. In 1787 the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons developed a prison system where they believed some criminals could be reformed through hard work and meditation. Many members of the society were Quakers, who considered the moral/religious aspect of meditation a key to reformation. They knew that the repentance that comes from the realization of the wrong one has done will lead to lasting change.
People who commit crimes by and large are selfish people who have placed their wants and desires above the needs of others. Many are proud and unashamed of what they have done. When you fill up a prison full of these people, sparks will fly. When two proud people clash there can be only one winner. Like the decapitated bodies in Indiana Jones, heads will roll, unless one of these proud men will humble them self.
Humility comes as the result of awareness regarding one’s selfish, prideful condition and the willingness to admit that this form of behavior is what brought the person to prison. However, some in prison will double down and try to make themselves into the biggest, baddest, toughest, meanest, orneriest, foulest, strongest, most ruthless SOB in the Big House. They lift weights compulsively to strengthen their bodies, they harden their hearts until all empathy for others is gone, and they live only to satisfy their lusts for food, sex, and drugs. They think the way to live is to die to what separates us from the animals, and in the process become animals.
When a person in prison learns to humble them self, they become more sensitive to those around them, which allows them to react quickly, like Indy, to duck out of the way when the violence starts. A humble person has a quiet spirit which allows them to put others before themselves even when they know of the other’s selfish intentions, thereby avoiding the wrath of the proud. We are talking about meekness here, which some confuse for weakness. Meekness is the combination of the character traits of patience and humility. Not exactly something that one would expect from inmates.
So how does one learn humility in prison? The Quakers coming from a Judeo-Christian world view would not have seen meditation as an Eastern Zen Buddhist self-contemplation practice, but rather as a Biblical contemplation practice. They would not expect a person to change on their own, but by the conviction of the Holy Spirit, not by self-revelation, but by illumination of the moral standard revealed in God’s Holy Scriptures. Humility is both the inward and outward manifestation of the change in a person’s world view when they acknowledge God the Father and Jesus Christ His Son for who they are.
James 4:6-10 says, “But He gives more grace. Therefore, He says; God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Therefore, submit to God. Resist the Devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double minded. Lament and mourn and weep! Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord; and He will lift you up.”
Prison is a place of stark contrasts and nothing exemplifies this concept better than the contrast between the proud and the humble. The proud are arrogant and unteachable. They will not learn the lessons of correction and if they ever get out of prison will keep coming back, doing life on the installment plan. Those who are humbled are teachable, they will learn the lessons of correction, and when they get out of prison will never come back.
While the original model of a penitentiary failed for a number of reasons, the concept of active participation by faith-based ministries remains a vital and necessary part of the correction system. Rehabilitation cannot be accomplished by a person in isolation, but rather only in the context of Christian community, both in prison and out.
Organizations such as the Salvation Army and Prison Fellowship are well known by the general public for providing social and moral training for those incarcerated. But there are in the U.S. literally hundreds of faith-based ministries dedicated to bringing the gospel into prison. On any given day of the week there are thousands of paid and volunteer workers in prisons and jails across the country, meeting with hundreds of thousands of men and women. From full church services to Bible studies to social/moral education these groups work with prison/jail chaplains to provide resources, programming and counseling that makes rehabilitation possible. No other religion provides this much capital and man power to assist the state in reforming the lives of so many that society has already written off.
Studies have shown that without programming recidivism rates can exceed 75%. With programming provided by the state such as educational, vocational, or psychological, recidivism rates drop to 50%. Faith-based programs reduce recidivism to less than 35%. When combined with additional programs and resources on the outside for when an individual is released from incarceration recidivism rates drop even further. One study even suggested that the first 72 hours out of prison are the key to success. If there is a person/organization there to provide mentoring and assistance and get the individual involved in a church, the recidivism rate falls to less than 10% in some studies.
Over the last two hundred years there have been numerous attempts at prison reform. In each case there was an acknowledgment that the current system was broken and that changes needed to be made. However, each one failed to live up to the expectations and did not result in accomplishment of the stated goals.
In each case the failures could be directly related to three causes: inadequate funding, over-crowding, and poor staff training. Prisons are expensive to operate and since they generate little revenue are a continuing drag on government budgets. Human societies for all of recorded history have failed due to the inability to pay the full cost of maintaining the society, whether it be defense, infrastructure, or social programs. At some point the costs exceed the economic strength of that society.
In the U.S., political parties and their candidates campaign on the ideas of lower taxes and being tough on crime. The two concepts are mutually exclusive, you can’t do both. Being tough on crime means more police, more prosecutors, and longer sentences which translates into significant cost increases. Lowering taxes means that the revenue to pay for government programs becomes scarce, which leads to reductions in services since the elimination of programs can be political suicide.
In corrections this means that every year prisons must do more with less. Costs for food, clothing, services, facilities, and staffing increase. And yet as incarceration rates increase, budgets have been held constant or even reduced. Even the best, most successful rehabilitation programs will be affected by this and will ultimately fail. The result is that prisons and jails become nothing more than warehouses or cattle pens where humans are contained until they must be released to once again wreak havoc on society. The worst possible outcome with the lowest return on investment.
Since the evidence of rehabilitation is incontrovertible and human lives matter, what are we as a society willing to pay to see our sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, and wives returned to us in a condition where they no longer pose a threat to society or themselves? What are we willing to spend to end the cycle of poverty, violence, and broken homes that results from locking people up? What does it say about a society that claims to be a beacon of freedom and hope, yet incarcerates more people than any other country on earth? When is enough, enough?
There must be more to corrections than retribution. An eye for an eye was Old Covenant philosophy. At least some portion of the church understands that we are now under the New Covenant and that forgiveness and redemption are the philosophy to live by. There should always be repercussions for violating the laws that hold our society together but hate the sin not the sinner. We have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
Faith-based prison ministries get this and that is why we need more of them participating in the correction system. These organizations raise their own money from their supporters to fund their prison ministries. This is like free money to the fiscally strapped prisons. In the day and age where outsourcing services is seen as cost effective, what could be more cost effective than free? Sure, there needs to be coordination and oversight and that is where the chaplain comes in. But why turn down programs that have a positive effect on the prison environment and can significantly reduce recidivism?
Moreover, since it is that critical time immediately upon release from prison that is the major decider on whether or not a person will go straight or fall back into a life of crime, the MDOC should be actively recruiting organizations to provide after care, housing, employment/job placement services in addition to mentoring and counseling services. The vast majority of people coming out of prison have lost everything while they’ve been away and most have nowhere to come home to. The state needs to take more responsibility to help these people that they were so zealous to lock up in the first place.
There was a program called the Michigan Prisoner Reentry Initiative (MPRI) whose original goal was to partner with non-profit organizations to help fund and coordinate these types of programs. Yet after only two years the external portion of the MPRI program was cancelled and the funding redirected back into the MDOC, due to claims of misappropriation of funds and mismanagement by these outside groups. Given the history of the MDOC there is more than a little irony in that allegation. There should be considerations made to revisit this decision and encourage more faith-based organizations to come to the aide of these returning citizens.
Given human nature, not everyone can or even wants to be rehabilitated, but that is a minority of the people in prison. A sad but true fact is that those serving life sentences, after a period of adjustment are the best-behaved inmates. Those doing short determinate sentences, such as two years for a gun are almost completely unmanageable. Which takes us right back to my original point about the Penitent Man: those who are willing to humble themselves can be rehabilitated. It is up to the people in society to demand more from their representatives in the legislature and the legislature to demand more from the MDOC and the MDOC to demand more of its staff, contractors and inmates.
The term used for new inmates is “fish.” The length of time one is considered a fish varies. It depends on the individual and how quickly they integrate into prison culture. It also depends to a great extent on who is passing judgement. An old timer doing life might judge another’s level of integration harsher than someone doing two or five years.
It used to be really easy to pick out the fish because of the number on the back of their uniform. A few years ago, the Quartermaster stopped painting numbers on the backs of shirts and pant legs as a cost saving move. Uniform pants, shirts, coats, and athletic shorts are reissued over and over. By not painting numbers they also don’t have to cover them up.
In the eight years I was in prison the ID number count went up 200,000 numbers and was about to exceed 1,000,000. Each number represents a new felon being enrolled in the MDOC system, even those who don’t actually serve time in prison. My lifer level II bunkie had a 200,000 number from the late 1970s and a friend who came to prison around the year 2000 had a mid-600,000 number. Clearly the number assignment is accelerating. Lots of fish.
A saying about those who hadn’t served a year in prison yet is that “they’re still sh*#ing Burger King.” A reference to the amount of time it takes to completely flush meat from the colon. Not a pleasant thought but I heard it over and over. Another case of the philosophy, “If you say something often enough it must be true.”
Now there is a steep learning curve for those coming to prison for the first time. Prison isn’t like the free world and it takes longer for some to figure that out. The basic principle of prison is that someone else makes all the major decisions for you. This concept if very difficult for control freaks to grasp. The rules of the MDOC are printed in black and white in the form of a Prisoner Handbook. While this establishes the expectations of the administration there isn’t a guide for how to interact with other inmates in reality.
When a person first comes to prison they literally arrive with just the clothes on their back and then those are taken away. They gave me a tooth brush and a tiny tube of toothpaste that wouldn’t last a week. I had to write a kite to the Chaplin to get a Bible. If I hadn’t arrived with a check from the county jail for deposit into my inmate trust account I would have been unable to go to the commissary for weeks. Fish have nothing, no personal clothing like sweats or athletic shoes, no radio, MP3 player or TV, no food or coffee. The Protestant church in prisons that I was incarcerated in had a “love box” where inmates could donate hygiene items like toothpaste, deodorant, or soap specifically to help the new arrivals and the indigent.
Besides having nothing, fish don’t know the rhyme or rhythm of prison. Where and when to go for callouts. What time is count. They have a lot of work to do to establish a daily routine. Routine is the key to making your time in prison both productive and pass quicker. It takes time to get a job or school assignment. Depending on your classification and the waiting list it could be weeks to months or even years before you are called.
I was a tutor and it took about a year both times I was on the waiting list. To be a unit porter I started work in less than a month. The lower qualification jobs have a higher turnover rate. Both because of the transient nature of prison and guys being terminated for various reasons.
Fish make mistakes. Either they are too zealous to make a name for themselves by resisting authority or they are too eager to please. There is a lot to learn trying to fit in. There is an uneasy path between cooperation, capitulation and defiance to either the jailers or the inmates
Determining who you can trust and who you need to keep an eye on is an important lesson. It can be very expensive when you chose poorly. Personal agendas, gang affiliation and debts can affect a person and make them act in unpredictable ways. I had several bunkies steal from me to pay their debts. They were fairly normal and we got along fine but under pressure their behavior changed and they did something I could not anticipate.
You need to have a healthy paranoia, develop a sixth sense of danger to keep you out of trouble. Fish are thrown into a sink or swim situation and find themselves in over their heads, which is ironic. They need to learn to feel the energy in the room and sense the mood of the crowd. Being new they haven’t had the chance to tap into the gossip network to find out who’s who and what’s what.
What a fish needs is a mentor. Someone who is willing to take the time to educate them. I was fortunate to have a couple of bunkies that helped me through the process. They introduced me to others that I could hang out with. Being able to surround yourself with people you can get along with is very important. There is safety in numbers and it really helps with the loneliness and isolation of being in prison.
Prison is the one place where the question, “What is wrong with you?” should be asked sincerely and with the intent of receiving an answer rather than an exclamation of exasperation. From my experience, prison is short on introspection and long on intransigence.
Prisoners are crowded together so tightly that the background noise of daily living is loud enough that you can’t hear yourself think. Low expectations of how you serve your time result in high recidivism rates. I read that the goal of the MDOC is to reduce free time to 5%, which is a far cry from the current reality of 95%. A porter detail to clean in the housing unit may be listed for 8 hours, but only 15 minutes of work may be performed and that only by a conscientious worker. GED students may be expected to attend class for 1½ hours, 5 days a week, but except for a very few, don’t count on any textbooks being opened or any learning occurring.
For the vast majority of inmates, prison is like school recess all day instead of classroom instruction. Gym callouts, weight pit, yard time for softball, basketball, volleyball, horseshoes, handball, floor hockey and soccer; television and poker tables in the housing units. Few are those who can read and even fewer still practice the art.
Programs that once lasted six months are now completed in six weeks, because the graduation rates were too low. Lowered expectations have resulted in lower achievement. Inmates are smart, they will keep doing anything they can get away with and avoid doing anything they are told they have to do for as long as they can, and then only do a halfhearted job. If they put as much effort into their work as they put into trying to get out of working, they might actually accomplish something.
For many in the GED program it is simply a matter of outlasting the government’s law that they go to school in prison. They may spend years or even decades in school and not make any progress in getting an education, because they know that getting a parole is not contingent upon getting their GED. I’d bet that they would find the motivation to study and earn their GED if their parole depended upon it.
Many people in prison are “happy” with the way they are. They don’t see the need to change and so they don’t. As a result, they leave prison much the same as when they came in. Prison should be about providing alternatives and creating the conditions under which constructive change can occur. Maintaining the status quo is neither cost effective or socially responsible. Somethings got to change. Coming back to prison should be considered a failure of the system, not just the individual, and certainly not the norm.
Christ, Crime and Punishment 