Prodded by media coverage, the State of Florida eventually reopened an investigation into Darren Rainey’s death to determine whether the security officers who had subjected him to the “shower treatment” should be prosecuted. On March 17, 2017, Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the state attorney for Miami-Dade County, announced that the investigation had concluded and that no criminal charges would be filed against any of the guards involved. According to a report issued by Rundle’s office, formally titled “In Custody Death Investigation Close-Out Memo,” Rainey’s death was caused by schizophrenia, heart disease, and “confinement inside a shower room,” not by mistreatment or criminal negligence. “The evidence does not show that Rainey’s well-being was grossly disregarded by the correctional staff,” it stated.
To reach this conclusion, the Rundle report dutifully ignored the voluminous evidence that gross disregard was pervasive at Dade. Nowhere did the report discuss the climate of abuse and intimidation that Harriet Krzykowski and other mental health counselors witnessed. Nowhere did it mention that prisoners were beaten, tortured, and starved. State investigators did collect testimony from some critical sources, including Harold Hempstead. But Hempstead was portrayed as an unreliable witness whose statements contained inconsistencies and whose allegations “tainted” the views of other prisoners (several of whom corroborated his account). Far less skepticism was applied to the testimony of the guards, who, investigators concluded, took Rainey to the shower out of concern for his hygiene, “allowing him to wash himself” after they had spotted feces smeared on his body and on the walls of his cell.
Investigators were equally unquestioning of Dr. Emma Lew, a medical examiner who told them that Rainey “did not sustain any obvious external injuries and, particularly, that there were no thermal injuries (burns) of any kind on his body.” This conclusion was at odds with an interim report that the Miami-Dade medical examiner filed immediately after Rainey’s death, in which an autopsy technician had observed, “Visible trauma was noticed throughout the decedent’s body.” (The interim report was not mentioned in the “Close-Out Memo.”) Dr. Lew’s conclusion was also at odds with a series of autopsy photos of Rainey’s body that were soon leaked to the press. One of the photos showed Rainey’s chest, a grisly patchwork of raw white tissue and exposed blood vessels. Another showed his back, which was flayed from the nape of the neck down to the shoulder blades. Rainey had visible wounds on his arms, legs, face, and stomach. Two forensic pathologists who examined the pictures told the Miami Herald they believed his death was a homicide and that the injuries he sustained were burns.
The Rundle report was a whitewash, illustrating the culture of impunity that prevailed in Florida when it came to crimes committed by guards. “We are appalled that the state attorney did not look deeper into this case and see the criminality of the people who were involved,” Milton Grimes, an attorney for the Rainey family, told the Herald. Harriet Krzykowski was equally appalled. Yet as dismayed as she was, Harriet did not seem to blame the guards at Dade for the cruelty and degradation she witnessed. Many of the officers she met were decent people who treated the prisoners with respect, she told me. And the ones who were abusive, she maintained, acted in ways that were to be expected in a society that had resumed warehousing mentally ill people in prisons, as if they were beyond hope.
The more brutal guards were doing society’s dirty work, in other words, which, as it happens, is exactly what Everett Hughes suggested in his 1962 essay. “From time to time, we get wind of cruelty practiced upon prisoners in penitentiaries or jails,” Hughes observed at one point in the essay. The impulse to blame such conduct on the custodians in charge was natural. But the people who ran prisons were “our agents,” Hughes argued, dispensing punishment to an “out-group”—convicts—that much of the public felt “deserve something, because of some dissociation of them from the in-group of good people.” If the punishment in question was “worse than what we like to think about, it is a little bit too bad. It is a point on which we are ambivalent.”
Hughes proceeded to consider the matter from the perspective of a “minor prison guard” who had engaged in some “questionable practices” and boastfully justified his conduct afterward, sneering at the hypocrisy of the “higher-ups” and “good people” who held him in contempt. The guard had good reason to see them as hypocrites, Hughes averred. “He knows quite well that the wishes of his employers, the public, are by no means unmixed. They are quite as likely to put upon him for being too nice as for being too harsh. And if, as sometimes happens, he is a man disposed to cruelty, there may be some justice in his feeling that he is only doing what others would like to do, if they but dared; and what they would do, if they were in his place.”
That prison guards received mixed messages from society was not news to Bill Curtis. In 2004, Curtis bought a black leather belt at Walmart, put a spit shine on a pair of 1969 military-issue boots—the pair he brought back with him from Vietnam, where he served for two years in the Twentieth Engineer Brigade (the same unit as a future vice president named Albert Gore)—and began working as a guard at the Charlotte Correctional Institution in Punta Gorda, Florida. Within a week, Curtis traded in his heavy army boots for a pair of lightweight nylon ones—being quick on your feet was essential in his new job, he’d discovered—but the memory of serving in the military was rarely far from his mind in the years to come. Working at a prison, he came to realize, was not unlike stepping onto the battlefield in a combat zone.
Originally from southern Illinois, Curtis had moved to Florida with his wife in 1989. For the next fifteen years, he worked in retail, at a furniture store, making decent money until a dispute with his boss led him to quit. A short while later, he spotted a newspaper ad soliciting applications for corrections officers and decided to respond. Most of the would-be officers in Curtis’s training cohort were young men in their twenties or thirties. Curtis was older, with tousled brown hair that had started to go gray, but he was lean and athletic, an amateur boxer with a spry manner who sometimes sparred with younger guys at the gym and held his own.
It did not take long for Curtis to have his sparring skills tested at his new job, or to internalize the “us against them” mentality that pervaded the profession he’d entered: corrections officers on one side, prisoners on the other. The officers had “the power and the keys,” the prisoners “the numbers and time,” Curtis told me over lunch one day. Neither had much sympathy for the other. When it came to some incarcerated people, little sympathy was warranted, Curtis came to feel. Part of his initiation into life as a guard was learning that if he turned his back to the wrong person at the wrong moment, he could wind up in an ambulance or a coffin. “I’ve picked up a guy with a slashed throat,” he said. “I’ve fought for my own life a few times.” Once, a particularly menacing prisoner who was running contraband into CCI and threatening the staff told him that he needed to “take a long vacation” after Curtis stood up to him. The prisoner ended up taking another officer hostage and pressing a nine-inch knife to his neck. (The officer survived after the assailant was persuaded to hand over the knife and release his captive and then, to Curtis’s relief, was transferred to another facility.) To work as a corrections officer was to live in a state of “constant apprehension,” Curtis told me, particularly at a place like CCI, which at the time was a “close management” lockdown facility, housing some of the most violent criminals in the state.
Like most of his peers, Curtis came to believe that the system was stacked against corrections officers, not prisoners. “They’ve got so many rules protecting inmates, and you have to give them so many rights,” he groused. Yet he did not deny that corrections officers sometimes bent the rules to their advantage. At our lunch, Curtis pulled out a journal that he’d kept while working at CCI and handed it to me. In 2005, when Curtis was a year into the job, the journal contained an entry in which he described feeling “somewhat astounded” after reading the regulations on the use of chemical agents, which were sprayed at prisoners seemingly all the time. “The regulations state that chemical agents are not to be used as punishment but merely as a final resort in the control of disorderly conduct,” Curtis wrote. “The uses of agents I have observed have in large [part] been premeditated and planned punishments.” In another entry Curtis noted, “Abuses of power and undesirable behavior are more the norm than the exception among some correctional officers … Baiting, teasing, threatening, tricking, and at times physical abuse are common.” Later in the journal, he described the case of an officer who had been “caught spraying a mixture of bleach water into the face of an inmate who was known to be allergic or reactive to chemicals.” It was not the first time the officer in question had amused himself in this manner.
“I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff in life—ugly things,” Curtis told me over lunch. “But I’ve never seen real cruel things like what you see in a prison—real cruelty, just intentional cruelty. It’s like husbands who beat their wives. That’s how some of these guys beat their inmates.” Curtis did not hide his disgust for such officers, whom he called “serial bullies.” He also made it clear that blowing the whistle on them would have been unthinkable. If a corrections officer ratted out a peer, “you’ll be out of work, they’ll find a way to fire you, slash your tires, put the blackball on you, nobody will talk to you, or they’ll leave you hanging somewhere and tell an inmate to get you,” he said.
Curtis wanted to live, and he wanted to keep his job until the age of sixty-two, when he could retire. But there was something else that kept him from getting too vocal or self-righteous about the “serial bullies” who entered his profession. The citizens of Florida got what they paid for, he became convinced, filling their prisons to capacity, running them on the cheap, and then expressing shock and disapproval when presented with the unpalatable consequences. “The real problem here is that our rank and file citizens do not want to pay what it takes to care for their prisoners,” Curtis observed in his journal. “We talk a good game about how humane and decent our society is but when it comes down to it the bucks are not there.”
Over lunch, Curtis elaborated, pointing out that in 2016 the starting salary for a corrections officer in Florida was twenty-eight thousand dollars. Despite the efforts of Teamsters Local 2011, which represented thousands of Florida COs,* the last raise they’d received had been in 2005. Meanwhile, line staff had been pared to the bone in one facility after another, thanks in part to the Florida governor Rick Scott, who, in 2010, ran for office promising to cut the DOC’s budget by 40 percent. After his election, Scott set about privatizing services, slashing jobs, and transitioning COs from eight- to twelve-hour shifts, changes that vastly increased staff turnover and led to a sharp rise in use-of-force incidents. Curtis admitted he hadn’t always used force judiciously himself. One time, he “got physical” with a prisoner, body-slamming him hard into the ground, a slab of bare concrete that could easily have fractured his skull. Curtis lowered his eyes as he told me the story. “It was totally illegal,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done it.” But he relayed the story for a reason, in order to drive home the point that even decent officers did bad things in a system that skimped on training, salaries, staffing, rehabilitative programs. It didn’t help that so many of the people inundating Florida’s prisons belonged in psychiatric hospitals, Curtis added. At one point in his journal, he made note of the number of prisoners at CCI who were “not in their proper mind,” thanks to “the drastic reduction in the state run mental health facilities.” Curtis had received no training on how to interact with mentally ill people.
A boxer, a military veteran: in these respects, Curtis fit the popular image of the prison guard as a hard-boiled type, a muscle-bound enforcer given to dispensing bruising punishment. Yet as his journal showed, he was not incapable of registering shock at punishment that was unduly harsh, even when the person meting it out was a fellow officer. One of Curtis’s hobbies was stargazing. Another was reading (he particularly loved the crime novels of the Florida native Carl Hiaasen). He’d even taken a stab at writing a novel himself, a copy of which he later shared with me. The story was set in a prison teetering on the brink of collapse from budget cuts: the cells overheating because the air-conditioning was busted; the meals larded with cheap protein substitutes in place of beef and chicken; the switch panel constantly shorting out. The main character in the book, Sergeant Bernie Petrovsky, is a veteran of the Iraq War with a fondness for chewing tobacco. Petrovsky hasn’t had a raise in six years or a moment to relax because of chronic staff shortages. In one scene, he likens his experience in Iraq to his experience behind the walls. “In the desert war we were being blown up in our Humvees until they decided to spend the money to armor the vehicles better … Here the management just keeps cutting the budget, which means less personnel and equipment to maintain and perform to an increasingly higher level of expectations.”
As Curtis acknowledged, the novel was a thinly disguised account of his experience. Cheaply run prisons were a lot like cheaply run wars, he had concluded, lowering morale, heightening tension, and leading frontline officers to rely increasingly on the one tool at their disposal: brute force. “If you don’t have a lot of money, the only way you can control the unit in prison is through brutality, threats, and fear,” Curtis told me. “And in order to do that, every once in a while, you gotta kick a little butt. You gotta get brutal, and your officers learn to do that, just like I learned to do that.”
Nobody told Curtis and his fellow guards to get brutal. But no one really needed to tell them this. It was enough to pay them modest salaries to enforce order in overcrowded, understaffed prisons that were neither equipped nor expected to do much else. When Curtis was in Vietnam, most of the officials in charge of America’s criminal justice system still subscribed to the rehabilitative ideal—the notion that in addition to maintaining public safety, criminal sanctions should be designed to improve the life chances of convicts, who deserved an opportunity to become productive members of society after completing their sentences. For much of the twentieth century, this was the dominant view among, policy makers and corrections officials, shaping everything from sentencing laws to probation systems to the therapeutic programs offered to prisoners. But by the time Curtis had moved to Florida in the late 1980s, the rehabilitative ideal had given way to a more punitive approach, emphasizing the imperative to punish and incapacitate both violent criminals and nonviolent offenders.
As the rehabilitative ideal crumbled, America’s prisons experienced a spectacular boom, thanks to draconian policies—mandatory minimum sentences, three strikes laws—that, for several decades, were popular. The elected officials who enacted these policies spanned the political spectrum, from Ronald Reagan, who vastly expanded the scope and severity of the drug war, to Bill Clinton, whose 1994 crime bill gave states incentives to put even more people behind bars. These laws were not foisted on the public against the wishes of ordinary citizens. They reflected and embodied popular sentiment. In the decades when the rehabilitative ideal held sway, convicts had often been depicted as disadvantaged individuals who’d been unjustly deprived of education and opportunity. Now they were labeled “thugs” and “superpredators,” dehumanizing, racially coded terms that implied they were beyond redemption and deserved to suffer. If politicians during this era feared anything, it was not being overly punitive but being perceived as “soft on crime.” The shift in rhetoric sent the custodians of jails and prisons a clear message that society expected them to treat prisoners harshly, even if “good people” preferred to be spared the unsavory details and to avoid being reminded that a vastly disproportionate share of those getting locked up were Black men, who were incarcerated at a higher rate in America than in apartheid South Africa. By the time some lawmakers began to question whether this was sensible or just, more than two million Americans languished behind bars.
Another message the custodians of jails and prisons had long been sent was that their jobs were lowly and disreputable. The wages of “turnkeys” and “keepers,” as prison guards in America were once popularly known, had always been paltry, their hours long, their penchant for cruelty notorious, a perception as old as the job itself. In 1823, an account of a prison in New York portrayed the guards working there as “small-minded, intoxicated with their power, vulgar.” A century later, during the Progressive Era, penal reformers drew up ambitious plans to refashion prisons into more humane institutions. The stark, regimented penitentiaries of the nineteenth century—places like the Auburn State Prison in New York, where convicts were forced to eat their meals in silence and routinely flogged—would give way to enlightened sanctuaries replete with baseball diamonds, workshops, and theaters. But as the historian David Rothman has shown, few prisons were provided with the resources to fulfill this vision, which is one reason that most correctional institutions remained “places of pervasive brutality,” staffed by undertrained, overworked guards plying a trade that was “a last resort for the unskilled and uneducated.” In his 1922 book, Wall Shadows, the criminologist Frank Tannenbaum identified “the exercise of authority and the resulting enjoyment of brutality” as “the keynote to an understanding of the psychology of the keeper.” Drawing partly on his own experience serving time on Blackwell’s Island, where he was incarcerated for “unlawful assembly” after participating in protests for the unemployed, Tannenbaum attributed this psychology not to character flaws but to structural conditions, in particular the desire that guards felt to affirm that they were different from—and superior to—the people under their watch, with whom they shared the same harsh, oppressive environment. “For his own clear conscience’s sake the keeper must, and does instinctively, make a sharp distinction between himself and the man whom he guards,” Tannenbaum wrote, “and the gap is filled by contempt.” In his classic study The Society of Captives, published in 1958, Gresham M. Sykes contested the view that most guards were “brutal tyrants,” arguing that to maintain order, many learned to negotiate and compromise with prisoners. But Sykes did not make the life of the typical “keeper” sound any less dreary. “The job of the guard is often depressing, dangerous, and possesses relatively low prestige,” he wrote.
Sykes’s study appeared in the Eisenhower era, when the overwhelming majority of “keepers” in America, like police officers and other law enforcement agents, were white. In the early 1970s, this began to change, thanks in part to the political ferment of the 1960s and to events such as the 1971 rebellion at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York, which drew attention to the racism that pervaded the nation’s prisons and led reformers to call for hiring more people of color to help quell the unrest. One of the demands of the prisoners at Attica was “a program for the recruitment and employment of a significant number of black and Spanish-speaking officers.” In 1973, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals urged commissioners to recruit minority officers with more sympathetic attitudes to prisoners. “Black inmates want black staff with whom they can identify,” the commission argued. To test the hypothesis that hiring Black staff would improve relations with incarcerated people, the sociologists James Jacobs and Lawrence Kraft surveyed guards at two maximum-security prisons in Illinois that had begun to diversify. The Black guards in the survey tended to believe that “fewer prisoners belong in prison” and to have more liberal political views, they found. But they were also more likely to agree that punishment was the primary purpose of confinement and to be “more active disciplinarians” than their white peers. One potential reason for this was that administrators screened out Black candidates who were sympathetic to prisoners, Jacobs and Kraft speculated. Another was that, like their counterparts in the police, Blacks who were hired felt added pressure to prove that they belonged by suppressing their sympathies. Whatever the case, Jacobs and Kraft questioned the assumption that hiring minorities would lead incarcerated people to be treated with greater respect, concluding that the attitudes and behavior of guards were “built into the organization of the maximum-security prison.” Notably, although they adapted to the strictures of the job, the Black guards in their study were twice as likely to say that they were “embarrassed” to tell people what they did for a living. Also striking was one finding that transcended racial lines. “A majority of guards of both races would not like to see their sons follow their occupation,” Jacobs and Kraft found.
Between 1960 and 2015, the percentage of Black prison guards increased more than fourfold, paralleling the growth in the number of Americans—in particular African Americans—behind bars. As the prison population ballooned during the age of mass incarceration, Blacks were increasingly given the “opportunity” to run the penal institutions where more and more people of color were caged. In many urban areas, the makeup of the guards came to mirror the makeup of the men and women in custody—places like New York City, where, by 2017, Blacks and Latinos made up nearly 90 percent of the correctional staff. The ranks of female officers also surged. These were “good jobs,” some economists argued, and it is true that the growth of America’s prisons lent prison guards—newly christened “corrections officers”—a degree of newfound legitimacy. In states like New York and California, COs earned decent salaries and joined unions that came to wield substantial political clout. In some rural areas, working at a prison soon became the best employment prospect around, offering benefits unavailable at fast-food restaurants or in the mills and factories that had long ago left town.
But the jobs in question tended to be reserved for people with limited options who lived in struggling backwaters. A few days after meeting Bill Curtis, I drove to one such place—Florida City, the last stop on Florida’s Turnpike before Key West and, along with neighboring Homestead, the area that furnished Dade with most of its rank-and-file guards. Other than to fill up on gas before racing off to the Keys, more affluent Floridians rarely frequented places like Florida City. When I visited one Friday morning, the town looked sun beaten and deserted. The dingy storefronts and random businesses lining the main commercial thoroughfare were empty or shuttered. A mile or so down the road, I pulled in to a plaza that was unusually busy. It was situated across the street from a church with a tattered sign out front—PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD—and was home to at least one thriving local establishment, a yellow building with paint-chipped walls that turned out to be a welfare agency. Near the entrance was a poster of a Latina girl in pigtails holding the halves of two oranges to her ears and smiling, beneath the words WIC: GOOD NUTRITION FOR WOMEN, INFANTS & CHILDREN.* Inside, several women with toddlers were waiting in line. None of them were smiling. In Florida City, 40 percent of families fell below the poverty line. Many of the entry-level guards at Dade were Black and Latina women, Bill Curtis told me, in part because so many young men of color from Homestead and Florida City had police records (which disqualified them from working for the DOC). “They need jobs, they’ve got kids,” Curtis said of the female guards at Dade, “and it’s the best job they can get.”
The area surrounding Dade was an example of what the sociologist John Eason has called a “rural ghetto”—small towns in depressed rural areas that were home to many of the prisons built in America since the 1970s, when the number of correctional facilities tripled. Until this time, rural areas tended to oppose allowing prisons to be constructed on local land for the same reason that wealthy suburbs did: to avoid association with institutions that were seen as disreputable and potentially dangerous. But as factories closed and family farms went bankrupt, the civic leaders in many rural areas began lobbying to have prisons built in their counties. Whether any lasting economic benefits resulted from this strategy is unclear (one study concluded that, to the contrary, prisons impeded growth in the areas where they were located). What is clear is that luring these “stigmatized institutions” to town further cemented the lowly status of the communities in question, places of concentrated disadvantage where poverty and racial segregation were deeply entrenched. “Stigmatized places are more likely to ‘demand’ stigmatized institutions, particularly if the stigma of the community is equal to or greater than the stigma associated with the institution in question,” Eason observed. “Rural towns most likely to receive a prison suffer the quadruple stigma of rurality, race, region, and poverty.”*
After leaving the plaza in Florida City, I drove around town, stopping to talk to a man named Jimmy who was sitting in a plastic lawn chair by the side of the road, next to an empty shopping cart. An African American man with a Phillies cap on, Jimmy was selling fruits—mangoes and bags of lychees that he’d arranged on a rickety table. How were things? I asked. “Hard,” he said. Jimmy had lived in Florida City for twenty-five years. He appreciated the sunshine and warm weather but was less fond of the business climate, which he told me was moribund (I was his only customer). When he was young, Jimmy said, he picked okra and tomatoes in the fields. The migrant workers now were “mostly Mexicans and Haitians ’cause it’s hard work,” he told me. A little girl in dreadlocks soon came out to join us. She was Jimmy’s granddaughter and lived in the dilapidated housing complex behind his makeshift fruit stand. Next to the housing complex was an abandoned lot strewn with broken glass and garbage.
I bought some mangoes from Jimmy and drove on, past a Laundromat and a dollar store, past a strip of row houses, past some squash and bean fields, which looked parched and wilted in the scorching sun. I turned left at a fruit stand called Robert Is Here and, after a few more miles, saw the soaring gray floodlights surrounding Dade CI. The prison squatted in the distance, a cluster of dun-colored buildings set behind a maze of fences topped with concertina wire. In front of the outermost fence, I spotted a sign:
FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
correctional employment opportunities
now hiring, apply online
It was the only notice for jobs that I came across in Florida City.
In her 1973 book, Kind and Usual Punishment, the muckraking journalist Jessica Mitford wrote, “For after all, if we were to ask a small boy, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and he were to answer, ‘A prison guard,’ should we not find that a trifle worrying—cause, perhaps, to take him off to a child guidance clinic for observation and therapy?”
Mitford’s question betrayed a common preconception, which is that anyone who yearned to become a prison guard was a bit morally suspect. It also betrayed a dubious assumption, which is that becoming a guard was something people aspired to do, as opposed to something they stumbled into or got stuck doing for lack of better options. In 2010, a team of scholars conducted a survey that compared why police officers and prison guards chose their careers. While the police officers emphasized “service as a primary factor,” the corrections officers “placed greater importance on financial motivators,” including “a lack of other job alternatives.” None of the guards interviewed by the sociologist Dana Britton in her book At Work in the Iron Cage “grew up dreaming of working in prisons or even planning to do so.” Most entered the profession after a period of “occupational drift,” with few positive aspirations and little idea of what they were getting into.
It’s no wonder, considering what the occupational health literature suggested lay in store for prison guards: alarming rates of hypertension, divorce, depression, substance abuse, suicide. One study in New Jersey found that the average life expectancy of a corrections officer was fifty-eight. Another, drawing on data from twenty-one states, found that the suicide risk among corrections workers was 39 percent higher than for the rest of the working-age population.
I’d met corrections officers whose stories bore out these dispiriting facts. There was a CO from New England I’ll call Johnny Nevins (he did not want his real name used) who went home one day, drank an entire bottle of whiskey, posted a video on Facebook saying goodbye to his family, and then pointed a loaded gun at his head. The cartridge jammed when he pulled the trigger, and Nevins had since launched a support group to help troubled COs avoid going down a similar path. He’d also begun seeing a therapist, who diagnosed him with acute PTSD caused by repeated exposure to extreme violence.
There was Tom Beneze, a guard from Cañon City, Colorado, a town of sixteen thousand that was home to a Walmart, some fast-food chains, and more than a dozen jails and prisons. When I met Beneze one morning on the back porch of his modest ranch house, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a box of pills that he kept with him at all times to ward off the anxiety that periodically rippled over him. “If I start buzzing real bad, I’ll take one of those,” he said, pointing to the small white tablets in one of the compartments, which helped ward off panic attacks. Next to the white tablets were some blue capsules he took for depression. A third slot was filled with painkillers for his various injuries, including nerve damage sustained when a prisoner wielding a shank gashed his leg. Beneze, who had a thinning patch of reddish-brown hair and an anxious, watchful air, told me he’d seen “more hand-to-hand combat” than his son, a navy veteran who’d done two tours of duty in Iraq. He never sat in a restaurant with his back to the door, a habit ingrained in all of the COs he knew. Some of Beneze’s coworkers relied on drugs and alcohol to mitigate the stress of the job, he said. Others had exhausted these coping mechanisms. Not long before we met, his friend Leonard, another CO, “blew his brains out,” he told me. “I don’t know the stats, but I’ve had a lot of friends that killed themselves,” he said.
The person who’d introduced me to Beneze was Caterina Spinaris, a therapist from Florence, Colorado, which, like Cañon City, sits at the foothills of the Rockies, in a rugged canyon of steep cliffs and red-rock gorges that straddle the banks of the Arkansas River. Originally from Denver, where she ran a practice that focused on treating the victims of trauma and sexual assault, Spinaris moved to Florence in 2000 to hike, plant a garden, and enjoy the breathtaking scenery. It took her a while to notice the brown and gray detention facilities dotting the landscape, many of them tucked behind fences off unmarked roads that twisted into the hills. Spinaris became aware of their existence when she started fielding an unusual volume of calls requesting referrals from the wives and girlfriends of corrections officers.
The callers were seeking help for their partners. Having never set foot in a prison, Spinaris searched about for a local agency to which she could refer them. When she discovered there was no such agency, she decided to open one herself. Desert Waters Correctional Outreach began with a hotline and an email address that was soon flooded with messages from prison guards who unburdened themselves of their bitterness and anger, which was spilling into their relationships and seeping into their family lives. “I can’t seem to get along with anyone anymore,” one guard wrote to Spinaris. “I wish I could get out of this rut. That is what prison work is—a big, deep rut.” Another wrote, “After a while and numerous incidents, you have so many Band-Aids on you that inmates can’t penetrate them and get to you or your ‘old’ heart. The only problem is the Band-Aids don’t come off after work. They stay on. So you live your life and miss all the beauty.”
Spinaris heard from guards who were alcoholics, from guards whose marriages were imploding, from guards who seethed at performing a public service that no one ever thanked you for doing and that plenty of people looked down on. The outpouring of unfiltered anguish reminded her of her sessions with trauma victims. In 2012, Spinaris distributed a questionnaire to more than three thousand correctional workers across the country that was designed to measure the prevalence of PTSD. Thirty-four percent of the COs who responded to the survey reported symptoms, a rate comparable to that in the military. In Spinaris’s view, many prison guards struggled with something else—feelings of alienation and shame that churned beneath their gruff exteriors.
Spinaris described corrections officers as “an invisible population.” This was certainly true of the scholarly literature on prisons, a body of work that focused overwhelmingly on the plight of incarcerated people, perhaps because its authors viewed guards less sympathetically. One exception was a book titled Prison Officers and Their World, by Kelsey Kauffman, a sociologist who, after working at a women’s prison in Connecticut, spent several years interviewing corrections officers in Massachusetts. As her study showed, violent prison systems inevitably dehumanized not only the prisoners but also the guards. “You can’t be a positive person in a place like this,” one CO told her. “I used to have a lot of compassion for people and now I don’t have as much,” said another. “It just doesn’t bother me the way it used to, and it bothers me that it doesn’t bother me.”
In Kauffman’s view, the callousness of COs was often preceded by a period of adjustment as guards struggled to negotiate “discrepancies between their own ethical standards and the behavior expected of them as officers.” For those who relished violence, the adjustment was easy enough. But this was not typical, Kauffman found. “Initially, many attempted to avoid engaging in behavior injurious to inmates by refusing (openly or surreptitiously) to carry out certain duties and by displacing their aggressions onto others outside the prison or themselves,” she wrote.
As their involvement in the prison world grew, and their ability to abstain from morally questionable actions within the prison declined, they attempted to neutralize their own feelings of guilt by regarding prisons as separate moral realms or by viewing inmates as individuals outside the protection of moral laws … Regardless of whether officers became active participants in the worst abuses of the prisons or were merely passive observers of it, the moral compromises involved exacted a substantial toll.
Kaufmann called guards “the other prisoners.”
For Black prison guards, an added moral tension existed—the discomfort of working in a system that disproportionately harmed their own communities. This fact was not lost on Black prisoners, who sometimes heckled them for betraying their brothers or working for the Man. In recent years, some Black police officers have heard similar accusations at protests organized by the Black Lives Matter movement where demonstrators have labeled them “sellouts” and “Uncle Toms,” insults that carry a particular sting for those who sympathize with some of the movement’s aims. A Black CO from Florida whom I’ll call James (he did not want his real name used) told me he’d heard his share of such accusations from prisoners through the years. He insisted they didn’t bother him, telling me that whenever it happened, he would remind them that he came from a similar background and that they were behind bars because they’d violated the law. “I tell them, that’s why you’re on that side,” he said. Every so often, though, James would be reminded how unevenly the law was applied. One time when he was driving, an officer pulled him over, placed him in handcuffs, shoved him into the back of a police car, and called headquarters to run a background check on the “asshole” he’d picked up. To prepare for such encounters, which happened frequently, James made sure his badge was readily accessible, but flashing it didn’t always help, a problem he attributed to the fact that many cops “feel corrections officers are not real officers” as well as to his race. “A lot of times they won’t recognize me as a law enforcement officer; they just look at me as being Black,” he said. In fact, this was a struggle not only with cops but also with his peers in the DOC. “I don’t like you, ’cause you’re Black,” some of his fellow COs told him. “I’m Klan,” he’d heard others say. A sixteen-year veteran, James saw his career nearly end when a couple of white guards tried to forge his signature onto a disciplinary report that contained spurious allegations about a prisoner (officers who wrote up false DRs could lose their certification). The officers were acting at the behest of a rabidly racist colonel who had it in for him, James was convinced. Every Black prison guard in Florida had such stories, he told me, compounding the stress of what was already a taxing job.
Perhaps because he’d entered the profession late, Bill Curtis, who had retired three months before we met, emerged from his experience relatively unscathed. Clad in shorts and flip-flops, he’d just returned from a cycling trip to Monument Valley, sporting a newly grown-out beard and a weathered suntan. We had lunch in the outdoor section of a Mexican restaurant on a scorching day in June, drinking pints of Fat Tire to temper the sultry weather and the Cajun burgers we’d ordered. Curtis seemed in good spirits, showing me pictures of the catamaran on which he took his grandkids whenever they came to visit (sailing was another of his hobbies). At no point did he peer nervously over his shoulder or appear to be watching his back. But there was one occupational hazard he told me he hadn’t managed to escape, a shift in values and outlook that he believed all corrections officers underwent.
“Your morals change,” he said. “It’s a coarsening and a lessening of concern for people. It’s a slide. When a man—a good man, or woman—goes into prison, a little bit of your goodness wears off. You become jaded. You become more callous. Your language and your interpretation of things changes.”
Among the things that led Curtis to feel jaded was his understanding of who took the blame—and who did not—when egregious abuses took place. When he started out at CCI, Curtis assumed that guards who engaged in misconduct would be weeded out. “The ‘bad actors’ are known and their days as correctional officers are numbered,” he wrote in his journal. As he grew more experienced, he began to realize that brutality was routinely excused and not infrequently rewarded. The officer who doused a prisoner in the face with bleach, for example, was not disciplined. He was promoted to sergeant. “Cover-ups, false statements, coercion, and outright lying seem to be the order of the day in this business,” Curtis noted with dismay in his journal.
Curtis’s cynicism on this score only deepened when, in 2012, after he’d been working for eight years as a CO, the Teamsters hired him to represent officers at different prisons who stood accused of engaging in disciplinary infractions. On occasion, the guards in question had behaved improperly. More often, they were scapegoats who had been singled out to deflect blame from their superiors—the “good old boys” who ran the system and protected the people who displayed loyalty to them. The officer disciplined or demoted was “always the lowest-ranking man,” Curtis told me, and often the least corrupt worker on duty. A case in point was the death of Richard Mair, a prisoner in the Transitional Care Unit at Dade CI who hung himself in September 2013, one year after Darren Rainey died. A note found in Mair’s boxers, titled “FUCK THE WORLD,” detailed the abuse that precipitated his suicide, including an incident when a guard ordered Mair, a rape victim, to “strip out” and then, promising cigarettes in return, commanded, “Stick a finger in your hole.” In his suicide note, Mair indicated that he tried to file a grievance but that a lieutenant intercepted it, slamming him against a wall and warning him “to keep my mouth shut or else.” Two low-ranking guards were subsequently faulted, purportedly for failing to conduct timely checks of Mair’s cell before he hung himself. According to Curtis, the real reason they were blamed was for collecting written documentation about what happened that another prisoner, Damien Foster, had compiled and bringing it to the attention of an assistant warden. By the time an investigation was launched, the documentation had conveniently disappeared, Curtis told me, and Damien Foster had been transferred to another prison, preventing him from talking to investigators. “It was a cover-up,” Curtis said. At some prisons, another CO told me, corrupt captains and colonels would groom low-ranking guards to do their “dirty work”—roughing people up, writing up bogus DRs—and then pretend to know nothing about it when the conduct was exposed and someone needed to take the fall.
In prisons as elsewhere, dirty workers performed another essential function, shouldering the blame for inhumane systems within which they ultimately had little power and thus deflecting attention from other social actors with far more sway. These other actors included not only their superiors but also judges, prosecutors, and elected officials operating with broad consent from the public. The corrections officers at places like Dade were the agents of a society that was home to the world’s largest prison system, a system that grew even faster in Florida than in the United States as a whole, under Democrats and Republicans alike. In 1993, the year before Bill Clinton signed a punitive new crime bill, a series of headline-making murders took place in Florida. The victims were European tourists, which threatened to tarnish the state’s image as a family-friendly travel destination. Against this backdrop, Lawton Chiles, Florida’s Democratic governor, unveiled the “Safe Streets” program, which called for building twenty-one thousand new prison beds. “It’s time to stop talking tough about the problem and start acting tough,” Chiles declared. Five years later, Jeb Bush, Chiles’s Republican successor, signed the “10-20-Life” law, which mandated a minimum ten-year sentence for anyone armed with a gun during certain felonies, irrespective of the circumstances. Florida’s legislature later extended the law to apply to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. Between 1970 and 2010, Florida’s prison population grew by more than 1,000 percent. It grew when the crime rate was rising and when it flattened out—year after year, legislative session after legislative session. Someone needed to do the dirty work of running this system on a day-to-day basis, and someone needed to foot the blame when its brutal inner workings spilled into the headlines on occasion, prompting “good people” to express dismay and shock.
The fact that the blame fell on low-ranking workers, and not on the respectable people who relied on and benefited from what they did, was nothing new. In antebellum America, a similar logic shaped popular attitudes toward another band of dirty workers: the auctioneers and traffickers who presided over the interstate slave trade, here parading their “merchandise” in the showrooms of cities like New Orleans, there dragging chained caravans of slaves through the streets of Washington, D.C. These traders played a crucial role in enabling slavery to spread and thrive, particularly after 1808, when the ban on importing slaves from Africa led southern planters to turn to domestic sources to replenish their supply of “field hands.” Soon enough, slave traders were subjected to withering scorn, not only in the pages of abolitionist journals but also, tellingly, in much of the South. In his popular 1860 book, Social Relations in Our Southern States, Daniel Hundley, the son of a plantation owner from Alabama, denounced slave traders as “soul drivers” who plied a “detestable” trade. “The miserly Negro trader … is not troubled evidently with a conscience, for, although he habitually separates parent from child, brother from sister, and husband from wife, he is yet one of the jolliest dogs alive,” wrote Hundley, whose book nonetheless offered a robust defense of slavery. On the floor of Congress, the first person to denounce the interstate slave trade was Virginia’s John Randolph. Like Hundley, Randolph was a defender of slavery who felt moved to say something after a high-ranking foreign visitor told him that he was “horrorstruck and disgusted” by the sight of coffles of slaves passing through the streets in broad daylight.
Denouncing slave traders enabled southerners like Randolph to shame the culprits responsible for the horror while leaving the institution of slavery unquestioned and absolving themselves. Whereas traders were greedy opportunists driven by profit, slave owners were men of honor. Whereas traders destroyed slave families, masters took pains to protect them. Although these distinctions were spurious, drawing them was not an empty rhetorical exercise. It was “therapeutic,” notes the historian Robert Gudmestad, enabling southerners to distance themselves from what Gudmestad calls “a troublesome commerce.” Troublesome not because of the torment it inflicted on Blacks, but because of the uncomfortable truth it threatened to bring home to whites: that slavery itself was detestable; that it routinely tore families apart. Troublesome, too, because the trade’s most repugnant features were embarrassingly public.
The disreputable “soul drivers” who trafficked in slaves served as convenient scapegoats for slavery’s champions and apologists. And yet, as some shrewd observers noted at the time, not all of them were seen as disreputable. As the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld pointed out, the stigma of the slave trade fell mainly on the shoulders of “men from low families” who carried out the “vulgar drudgery” that earned their vocation its notoriety. The largest, most successful slave traders were spared such opprobrium. “There was apparently little stigma attached to the trade for those who were successful at it,” observes the historian Walter Johnson in his magisterial study of a slave market in New Orleans, Soul by Soul. Not coincidentally, the wealthy men who ran the largest trading firms tended to outsource much of the actual work to roving bands of lower-class laborers, from whom they made sure to distance themselves in more polite company. “See those gentlemen, I have nothing to do with that,” remarked one successful trader when asked about a slave sold in his name, neglecting to mention that the “soul drivers” in question were working for him.
In the spring of 2020, prison guards in America received a new designation, joining the ranks of “essential workers”—truck drivers, warehouse handlers, grocery clerks—who were instructed to continue showing up at their jobs even as the coronavirus pandemic led mayors and governors to order lockdowns. Some of the frontline workers who did these jobs—most notably, physicians and first responders—were soon accorded hero status for the risks they braved and the sacrifices they made. In New York, where the first wave of the pandemic took a particularly devastating toll, citizens stood on their stoops and balconies every evening to salute the medical professionals scrambling to accommodate the influx of COVID-19 patients pouring into the city’s hospitals. In the course of trying to provide ventilators and some measure of comfort to these patients, many medical workers themselves fell ill, which only increased the public’s gratitude to them.
Nobody clapped for corrections officers, whose risk of infection was equally grave. The crowded, unsanitary conditions in America’s prisons was one reason for this. The lack of regard for the health and welfare of the people in them—both the prisoners doing time and the staff watching over them—was another. In New York City alone, more than twelve hundred guards tested positive for the coronavirus, and thirteen prison staff died during the pandemic’s initial wave. Some COs later complained that they were pressured to return to their jobs while they were still symptomatic. Others alleged that they were actively discouraged from wearing masks by their supervisors, a problem not confined to New York. In Florida, the Orlando Sentinel interviewed guards at four different prisons who came to work with their own masks, only to be reprimanded by their superiors. A report on the federal prison system published by the Marshall Project uncovered multiple instances in which staff alleged that they lacked protective gear and were pressured to continue working even after exposure to the virus.
Over the course of 2020, nearly 100,000 corrections workers tested positive for the virus and 170 died. The COs losing their lives looked a lot like the casualties in other frontline jobs—people like Quinsey Simpson, an African American man from Queens who developed a cough after doing a shift in a security booth at Rikers, unaware that the guard he’d replaced was symptomatic. Simpson, who had not been supplied with gloves or a mask, soon developed respiratory problems. He died shortly thereafter, leaving behind a six-year-old son.
If prison guards were not showered with applause for continuing to do their jobs, it’s perhaps because, by the time the pandemic began, public attitudes about the crowded, violent facilities in which they worked had shifted. After decades of backing punitive laws and harsh sentencing policies, Americans in many parts of the country had begun to embrace reforming the criminal justice system. In 2019, the New York City Council approved a plan to close Rikers Island by 2026, an idea that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. But if treating prisoners more humanely was a public priority, you wouldn’t have known it from the way prosecutors and elected officials carried on during the pandemic. By June 2020, all five of the nation’s largest COVID-19 outbreaks were in correctional institutions. At a prison in Ohio where dormitories were filled to double their capacity, nearly three-fourths of the people in custody were infected. In the face of these alarming figures, some advocates and public defenders urged elected officials to discharge low-level offenders and older prisoners. Governors in a few states responded by releasing thousands of incarcerated people who were nearing the end of their terms. But in many other states, little was done. “Despite all of the information, voices calling for action, and the obvious need, state responses ranged from disorganized or ineffective, at best, to callously nonexistent at worst,” a survey conducted by the Prison Policy Initiative and the ACLU found.
By early 2021, the jail population in many states had returned to pre-pandemic levels, even as the number of infections continued to rise. In states like North Carolina and Wisconsin, the virus’s toll on correctional workers prompted officials not to rethink the logic of mass incarceration and put fewer people behind bars, but to shut down understaffed facilities and transfer prisoners elsewhere. The closures exacerbated overcrowding in the penitentiaries that remained open—and, in turn, the fear of infection among both prisoners and staff. “They’re terrified,” an official with the union representing prison guards in North Carolina told The New York Times. “They feel like, as usual, they’re forgotten and left behind.”
Feeling forgotten was a familiar sensation to a CO I’ll call Bobby who worked at CCI, the same prison where Bill Curtis had cut his teeth as a guard. Like Dade, CCI attracted some media attention after a prisoner there died. The death occurred late one night, when guards conducting a “spot” compliance check roused a man named Matthew Walker from his sleep and ordered him to put away an item that they claimed was out of place. The misplaced item was a plastic cup. “This is crazy … you are waking me up about a cup!” Walker fumed, prompting a confrontation that soon erupted into a bloody melee. By the time it was over, two officers had been injured, and Walker had sustained “blunt trauma” injuries in eleven places, including to his neck and head. At 1:20 a.m., he was pronounced dead, a death that was “tragic, senseless and avoidable,” a grand jury report subsequently concluded.
The grand jury report presented conflicting evidence about what had caused the skirmish to escalate. But it was clear on one point, which was that conducting late-night cell-compliance checks, a policy devised by a captain at the prison, was a “bad idea” that numerous guards feared would spark violence. Afterward, nine COs at CCI were dismissed, a move that Bill Curtis had described to me as a public relations exercise: Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, was running for reelection and, in the wake of the Herald story about Darren Rainey, wanted to show “how tough he is on inmate mistreatment.” The toughness had limits, Curtis pointed out. While the guards were punished, the warden at CCI was promoted to regional director. An assistant warden became full warden. The captain who initiated the compliance checks asked to be transferred to another facility, a request that was obliged.
One of the guards who was disciplined was Bobby. A compactly built man with a steely gaze and a Home Depot hat pulled low over his brow, Bobby described the cell-compliance policy at CCI as “a ticking time bomb” that was bound to provoke a violent reaction. “Everyone said someone’s gonna get hurt,” he told me. Yet no subordinate could apparently say this without fearing retaliation. “Do it or I’ll replace you” was the message sent to line staff, Bobby said. Bobby wasn’t present when the skirmish with Walker began—he rushed over afterward to provide backup—or at the end, when evidence he believed should have been preserved was removed or mishandled (a point the grand jury report also raised). This didn’t prevent him from losing his job.
I wanted to know what had led Bobby to become a corrections officer in the first place. He needed a job, he said, and although the salary was lousy, it came with benefits. Better wages typically meant no benefits, and Bobby had a family to support. “You either have the benefits and no pay, or you have pay but no benefits” was how Bobby summarized his employment options. In the decades after World War II, workers in America’s mills and factories often managed to secure both of these things—decent pay and benefits—but that era was long gone, and Bobby knew it, so he swallowed his pride and took what he could get, a dangerous, low-prestige job that ended in dishonor and disgrace.
Or rather, that would have ended there, if not for the fact that later, after Governor Scott was reelected and attention shifted elsewhere, all of the guards at CCI who were dismissed were reinstated. The move prompted some newspapers in Florida to express outrage at the lack of accountability within the DOC. The outrage was justified. According to the grand jury report, after Matthew Walker was beaten, a lieutenant involved in the melee stood over him and yelled, “Do you know who I am? I will kill you, motherfucker!” By the time medical help finally arrived, Walker was no longer breathing. As with the murder of Darren Rainey, the fact that nobody paid a lasting price for Walker’s death showed how little value was placed on incarcerated people’s lives. Still, one could hardly blame Bobby for wondering why the media’s outrage wasn’t directed at the senior officers who had instituted the policy that precipitated the incident rather than at the low-ranking guards. If the public really cared about abuse, he added, Florida would “increase the pay of officers to where people would actually want a career out of it” rather than making them the fall guys for a corrupt system that made good officers feel devalued.
Were there places where prison guards didn’t feel devalued? In Prison Worlds, an ethnographic study of the prison system in France, the anthropologist Didier Fassin found that many guards were so embarrassed about what they did for a living that they avoided talking about it. “I never tell anyone what I do … it’s too shaming,” one guard said. “I don’t tell my friends,” another confessed. Most of the guards in Fassin’s study hailed from small provincial towns and working-class families. Many compared themselves unfavorably to police officers, sensing that the latter regarded them as “sub-professionals.” Far from taking pride in the uniforms they wore, the guards felt “contaminated by the conditions in which they carry out their work,” Fassin found. In other words, like their counterparts in places like Florida and Colorado, they felt like dirty workers who performed a demeaning and morally discredited job, notwithstanding the fact that the conditions they worked under reflected the public’s wishes and priorities. (Another study of prison guards in France asked “why the image of the correctional officer is so negative, when all he does is carry out the task society sets him,” suggesting that the answer could be traced to “the process of displacement,” whereby society’s “bad conscience” about the deplorable conditions in France’s prisons were projected onto the figure of the guard.)
But while such feelings were pervasive, they were not inevitable. In 2015, the journalist Jessica Benko toured the grounds of Halden Fengsel, a maximum-security prison in Norway. Located in a bucolic landscape of pine trees and blueberry bushes, the prison housed 251 people, more than half of whom had been convicted of violent crimes. This did not prevent Halden’s proprietors from allowing them to live in furnished rooms with no bars on the doors. The prisoners at Halden were encouraged to attend classes and permitted to circulate unmonitored by surveillance cameras, a philosophy known as “dynamic security,” which sought to reduce violence through trust and social interactions rather than coercion and control. Halden had only one isolation cell reserved for unruly individuals, equipped with a restraining chair that had never been used. A skeptic might note that such a prison would probably cost more to run than a maximum-security prison in the United States, which was true, and that the data on whether more humane prisons succeeded in reducing the recidivism rate was inconclusive. But reducing the recidivism rate was not the only goal. Equally important was creating an institution in which Norwegians could take pride, a sentiment the staff at Halden appeared to share. “I have the best job in the world,” the warden of the prison told Benko, mentioning that his officers liked their jobs and hoped to finish their careers there. As the comment suggested, it wasn’t only the dignity of incarcerated people that was at stake in changing the brutal conditions in America’s prisons. It was also the dignity of the staff, who didn’t use fear and threats to enforce their authority and didn’t seem to feel contaminated by the conditions in which they worked.
At the very beginning, Bobby actually did take pride in his job. He wanted to make a career of it, he told me. The low pay and rampant corruption made this impossible, he’d concluded, conditions he wasn’t holding his breath for “good people” in Florida to change. The same critics who rushed to blame the guards at CCI for killing Matthew Walker after hearing about it on the local news would just as quickly forget that the prison even existed, he predicted, likening the level of awareness about the conditions in Florida’s prisons to the level of awareness of the landfills where the public’s trash was dumped. “You put your trash out, the trash gets taken away—you don’t care about the landfill,” he said. “The only time you care is when it’s full and you gotta pay for a new landfill.” For most Floridians, it was the same with the DOC, he told me at the restaurant where we met, which had begun to fill up for happy hour, the customers trickling in for beers and margaritas served at a bar flanked by TVs tuned to golf and baseball. “Nobody cares about the DOC until something hits the newspaper,” Bobby said, tugging on the brim of his Home Depot cap as he glanced over at the scrum of patrons by the bar, “and then the media’s gonna blow it up to make it sound like, you know, we’re a terrible group of people.”