After being somewhere for a while, you’d expect that a person would have a reputation. Whether it’s at school, work, the gym, or the library, there’s a likelihood that others there who have been watching know who that person is, what they’re like, and how they act.

The same goes for prison.  As he started moving around the system, Craig’s reputation with the officers quickly preceded him. Which was surprising to him because at times, he had had no personal interaction with the officers who actually acted like they already knew him.

One example: One day at camp, the officers were coming through, putting on a typical shake down. They rolled in, hitting the whole Central Unit. At any given time, an inmate in a single-man cell could expect 2-3 officers to open the door and strip it out. Everything turned upside down with very little, if any, care given to personal artifacts. No time to get things in order, no chance to create your own space. Your space was their space. Physically, there were always two officers inside the cell and one outside, just “stripping the shit out of it,” as Craig said.

“And this one time, a guy comes up and I turn around and a sergeant grabs my wrists with his hands. He shakes my arms, so I’m kind of just standing there like that for a minute. I’m standing like I’m wearing handcuffs because he’s looking at me like ‘I don’t want to handcuff you and we have to make sure my superiors don’t see it.’ I’m whistling while whey they do their thing. It’s just a song and dance. They get done, the sergeant comes over and acts like he’s taking the handcuffs off. I act like, ‘Cool, that’ll work.’”

Craig was sure the officer did that with others too. He wasn’t saying it as if to presuppose that he had special privileges of any sort or that he deserved special conveniences. Pretty opposite of that. His intent was to show that there were times the officers, the ones who are there to enforce the rules and push forward the legal structure, because they knew of him in a certain way, they were willing to skip a lot of the procedural necessity. That wasn’t always the case with every prisoner, and wasn’t every time with Craig. The thought just was that, because he felt officers generally tried to do their job, some may have just understood better the underlying scorecard that went something like: dance with us and we’ll dance with you.

And he played the game with them.

Sometimes, it was drawn out when there was a “random” search. Random as in they’d do two or three “random” cells out of 20 on a single run. It was obvious they were targeting specific people in the run but it was random that they were hit that night. His inference to the fact that the officers would somehow skirt the actual regulation – or even a law – at times wasn’t without merit. Many cases can be made, he said, where even the best officers would let loose of the written way they were supposed to handle situations and go with the way that worked the easiest for the officers. Other times, it was the way that made everyone’s life – the officer’s and felon’s – a little easier. Sometimes, that’s what made them the best.

Back to this one time at camp when they were specifically “randomly” targeting one of Craig’s neighbors. As he remembered, they came into his cell and interrupted him watching his television, specifically barging in on “That ‘70s Show” which pissed Craig off more than the search itself. They get him out and start going through his cell. It was a new officer though. He had no idea what he was doing according to Craig, who by this time had gone through dozens if not hundreds of “random” searches and knew how it was supposed to run.

As the newbie floundered, Craig and the other officer were standing there talking, shooting the shit until the veteran officer finally got tired of the poor job the new guy was doing and said, “Here, do it like this.” He dumped Craig’s footlocker on the bed, thumbed through a couple of books, riffled through a few miscellaneous items. As he recalled it, “It was your typical Shawshank situation. There was a little contraband but nothing to get his shorts up about, so he piled the stuff on my bed inside my door and said, ‘Make sure to throw that way.’

“They purposely came to me because they knew they wouldn’t find anything. That was kind of neat.”

The better the reputation Craig had, the more often those things would happen. From the standpoint of the officers, he was someone calm in the neighborhood full of unrest. And he was just fine with that.

“I didn’t want to piss them off and give them a reason not to be calm. Piss them off and they’ll make my job hard the next three weeks.”

That, however, is a two-way street.

The prisoners also had a card to play at times when the administration misplayed its hand. In a nutshell, the inmates don’t want to be pressured, don’t want to have to get out of their routine. While they hate being there, they love their routine because it helped them, or at least helped Craig, cope with being locked up. If the administration tried to force something on them – say, by bringing in a search crew from another yard to do a more formal search and hold every prisoner accountable – that act would stir the pot. The result? If you tweaked the prisoners, they’d show up pointedly the next time there was an opportunity to put pressure back on you. And the officers, the good ones anyway, knew what to expect.

“The officers on our yard would be like, ‘Oh, don’t do that to him,’ or ‘Don’t piss HIM off.’ They knew, ‘Oh we have to fix this.’ Those sort of things happen, push everyone into an ‘Us and them’ mentality. Then, when an issue happens with an inmate, they’re thinking, ‘Someone dressed in brown fucked with my shit, so I’m going to take it out on someone in brown.’”

‘Taking it out on someone in brown’ is likely a place you don’t want to be if you’re on the side of correctional control. Some have found out the hard way, like the officer in one Central Unit tale that Craig relayed and seemed to believe as truthful.

Let’s take a quick step back here before digging into the meat of the story. At this point in the chapter, I’m going to give you a situation recounted by Craig. Here’s the catch: it’s not one that he was a part of or witnessed personally. In fact, it happened when he wasn’t in Central Unit, but yet, he believes it to be true. Why? Because he said he knew the people who told it to him well enough, making it, to him, a trusted story and not just hearsay.

As I began thinking about it, that reasoning was kind of a tough sell. Wouldn’t the people in Central Unit have every reason to raise their own status in the eyes of newcomers? If the newbies thought, “Damn, these convicts are fucking hardcore?” right when they came in, wouldn’t it help get them to fall in line a little quicker? Or at least make that possibility a little more viable? And how better to gain that control than by convincing those who have not been indoctrinated that this side is the side in control of everything you’re going to do from now on because of the way they ‘run’ the place? I’m not saying by any means that I don’t believe it, just that it brings up an interesting question in my mind whether there really is honor among thieves. If there is, then it’s likely you can believe that what Craig believes to be true is just that. But if there’s one thing you can know about thieves – and cheats and killers and rapists and embezzlers and drug dealers and carjackers and everyone else in prison – is that you can only trust them as far as you can see them doing what they are telling you they did.

Ok, so back to the story in Central Unit. It was years, even decades ago. Probably in the 1940s or ‘50s. One notorious officer – and here, notorious is not used in a good way – had a particular shift that he regularly worked. It was nearly clockwork that he’d be there at that time. It was also almost nearly clockwork that he’d be shitty to the prisoners. He was regarded overwhelmingly as a horrible, detestable human being, not just a bad corrections officer. He went out of his way to always make everyone suffer. And at this point, I’ll let Craig take over for himself:

“He always made everyone’s life miserable. So it was decided that he needed to die. What happened was a hit was set up, choreographed. The situation (to carry out a hit) came about once a week within the recreation schedule depending on who was available, and this particular officer typically worked the schedule. It was decided he needed to be killed, and what happened the day that the hit went down, that particular officer was not at work for whatever reason, so another officer filled the post. But (the hit) was all set in motion already. It didn’t matter. It happened to the officer who was there and they did kill him. Unfortunately, it was one of the more decent officers.”

What happened to the original officer who the hit was put on? The administration knew what went down, as it knows everything, but it also only has so many officers to work with. So, in the end, the officer was reassigned to some other facility. There are only so many bodies to fill so many spots.

One area Craig did have a first-hand account of was kind of strange and came during his time working maintenance in Central Unit. He said that that original officer’s ghost is still in that building.

Yes, you read that correctly. And if you have some skepticism, you can sit on my side of the room. But, Craig knew there was a catwalk and that the cells are situated back-to-back, made of cinderblock walls with the plumbing going through the wall from the center. The catwalk is between runs, on the east-west side. With the catwalk between the back of the cells, along with the plumbing and electrical, the officers could move around the building isolated from the inmates, which is a nice advantage to have so that sometimes you don’t have to go through the Lion’s Den. The space isn’t big, not really even two-feet wide, and when two people meet, one has to turn sideways to continue to walk down the catwalk.

One day when Craig was working his maintenance shift, he saw an officer coming toward him. “The officer was going in the other direction, so he’d turn aside, squeeze past me, and keep walking, but when I looked, he’s not wearing a regular uniform but a bus driver hat and uniform. It didn’t register right away. I turned to look, and he was not there. It was the ghost of the officer who was killed.”

Weird shit, right?

Whether you believe the stories that don’t have first-hand accounts, it should be possible for you to believe in karma, and its ability to be a swift bitch. Just ask the officer who had a run-in in the parking lot after work one night. This happened when Craig was there. The officer was an instigator with the inmates, and the other officers told him to knock it off because they were worried one of them would get hurt because of his actions. They didn’t care about him; it was more a stance that if he pissed an inmate off and they want to get their hands on brown, the correctional officers, then they didn’t want this asshole’s actions to rub off on them.

The things he would do were likely what we’d consider minor annoyances. For instance, all officers carried a radio, but his was set at the highest volume. The radio then broadcast anywhere he was walking, and on the swing shift, or even graveyard, Craig said, “that’s just annoying, trying listen to your TV or take a nap or whatever. The idiot would come by walking with all that radio noise. Well, what happens is they caught him in the parking lot and beat his ass. Shortly thereafter he transferred somewhere else.”

The ‘they’ in that sentence was the other guards, not the inmates. His peers, his co-workers saw what he was doing as possibly being the precursor to an inmate reaction that could be put down on them. And since they didn’t act like that, they weren’t all too pleased with the precarious situation the perpetrating officer was putting them in. For the most part though, Craig said things tend to work out smoothly at camp, but if you stir the pot, “You need to knock it off or you’ll be hurt bad” no matter your status or which side you’re on.

There were other examples. Take the officer who was not allowed to work the gun tower in maximum security. This was a guy who co-workers would call in to the chief and say, “If that motherfucker is in the gun tower tonight, I’m not coming to work.” They meant it.

In the administration, there was the usual spectrum with a few people who want to make it a career and make the environment better, do some real good, and yet there are others using the position only to advance their own career. For this one Craig mentioned a female sergeant who showed up at the end of her tenure at maximum security and took it as a numbers game. According to Craig, she’d write up anybody, for anything, because the more write-ups she made, it made it look like she was doing her job better, leading to a quicker step up the promotion line. And it didn’t matter whether it was inmates or officers. She’d write up anyone.

“A couple officers I knew wouldn’t work the same shift as her because of that reason. She enforced any and every rule present. Others took the tact of, ‘I need a job and you have to be here. What do we need to do to make this go smoothly? Because who wants a hard day at work?’ You make my job easy, I’ll make your life easy.”

It came down to fudging the rules where needed to keep everyone calm, so everyone goes home alive. That’s good. Later on, a problem Craig saw with the prison system was that older career officers would get toward retirement and new, young people would come in. They were the ones who wanted to make a difference, but because of the low pay, being overwork and understaffed, the bad officers would have to stay because they can’t get any other job while many times, good young officers come in, find out what is really going on, and then move on. They’d see it’s bad enough they have to deal with the inmates, but they also have to work with this asshole coworker too.

“It’s a vicious circle because the bad ones are the only ones to stay because they can’t get a better job. Their coworkers leave because they can make more, so you end up with just the bad left.

“I’m in prison AS punishment, not FOR punishment. I was amazed at how many officers make it a personal job to punish, even though that’s not why I’m there.

“Unfortunately, I think a lot prisons are heading in that direction and anyone decent will not put up with it and go work somewhere else. The ones that can’t get any other job and because they know they are stuck, become miserable human beings, hate life and everything around. They’re the ones who stay, and that’s not a good situation.”

That’s not a reputation anyone should want.