Employees: Supervisor (unnamed); Romaine (Counselor A); Tom (Counselor B) (working there less than a year); Nicole (Counselor B) (working there less than six months and on maternity leave); Kay (Counselor B) (a new employee who started work on the same night I did); Nancy (the clerk that became a Counselor B and replaced Kay later). And, oh yeah, Me (Counselor B). All names are aliases. Pre Trial, second shift 1:30PM to 10:00PM, 1 hour daily lunch.
I started at Pre Trial at the end of a blistering summer. My first day to work in the jail was Sunday, August 6, 1995.
I reported to work at 1:30PM and found that my new co-worker, Kay, was also just starting and I would spend the evening interviewing defendants in the misdemeanor office. Although I was pretty aware of the job, having talked with my husband (who had worked there before) at length about his experiences there, I struggled with all of the details after our supervisor skimmed over the instructions.
I got home around 10:50PM overwhelmed by the schedule, the need to learn my way around the jail, the responsibilities of the job, and the demands on me generally. I was determined to make a go of it and I proceeded to do what I had done so many other times in my life: put my head down and charge ahead., utilizing sheer will- power and determination to get me through.
I finished my first week of work, which was Sunday through Thursday. The Counselor A, Romain, had taken a six week leave to go to Germany with her boyfriend. So we suffered through training by our supervisor. During the week, I met my other co-worker, Tom, who had been working in the jail less than a year. The other Counselor B, Nicole, who had also been there a short time, was on maternity leave and wouldn’t be back for two or three weeks. So our shift had only one Counselor B (Tom) with two new recruits (Kay and me, also Counselor Bs) and a worthless supervisor who disappeared a lot.
Tom pitched in and helped train Kay and me, but I wished with all my heart that Romain, who would have been the one to train us, would hurry back.
The next Tuesday, Kay failed to show up at work. I knew that she was both very nice and very responsible. I also knew that she was an alternate for a PhD slot at Vanderbilt and if called, she would be gone. They must have called her because she FAXED her resignation which was the talk of the department for awhile. I never saw her or heard from her again. Now, another new Counselor B would come and within a week, a Counselor C, Nancy, got a promotion from upstairs to join us in the lovely hell-hole of a jail.
On Saturday, August 18, Romain returned to work. Although I really liked her, I found through talking to her that she had had a very difficult upbringing and her family had many problems. She was very driven, a perfectionist, and demanding of her counselor Bs because she was ultimately responsible for our work and mistakes. But it seemed no matter what I did, it was never right the first time.
If I got two good references on an interview, she wanted three, whether the defendant could give me another one or not. If I verified the information a defendant had given me through two sources and one said he had lived at his current address 18 months and one said 12 months (both of which were good enough for several points toward his ROR or felony verification), she would demand that I call another verification and corroborate his information even further. She would nitpick me to death, even when it didn’t matter.
I got smart like everyone else already had and stopped asking questions and requesting that she check my work, hoping she would give everything a cursory going-over and let the small stuff ride. It worked most of the time. Despite this, however, she was an interesting person and we went out to lunch as much as we could.
On September 6, I had my first illness of the period and went to bed in the afternoon and threw up over and over in the evening. The next two days were my days off. On Friday, I dragged myself to work and felt some better as the evening progressed. Already my attitude was bad and I felt bad.
Life was beginning to be bad in general. It was the beginning of the second sickest period of my life (the first being my pregnancy, where I lost so much weight, I gained almost no weight with the baby). I ended up using more sick days than I had accrued. At one point while working there, I went to the doctor and was given five prescriptions for a raging sinus infection.
Another time, I had influenza (diagnosed by a doctor). I hadn’t had the flu since I was in 5th grade. I had only been on the job for four weeks and things were beginning to go south. The entire thing was more than I could handle and I knew it. We needed the money and I needed the job on my resume and the experience in order to not let my already ailing career die from neglect.
The atmosphere in the jail was always variable. Either we were hot or cold most days. I worked some days where the workload was unbearable and I would run around the office making copies and getting things ready to set bonds. It would be so hot the sweat would roll down my chest and back and into my waist band. By the time the shift was over, I was totally exhausted and dehydrated from stress and sweating.
Other times, it was damp and chilly and I would try to wear my coat or heavy sweater. On hot days, we would use the little fan in the felony office that was so filthy, it had gray dust that resembled moss hanging from it. I was hesitant to use it because I knew it would blow the dust and dirt from the office onto me and I was afraid it would cause a migraine, which I had with some regularity while working there. The atmosphere there was dirty, noisy, and hellish.
I imagined that there had to be a giant trap door on the Lower Level that you could raise and peer right into the fires of hell. Sometimes things were so bad that I was surprised that the structure of the building could hold that much human misery and pain.
I had not been working in the jail long before a Saturday night when Romain and Tom were working felonies and I was doing misdemeanors alone. It was, mercifully, a rather slow night on my side. Romain had been in and out of the office checking on me and it was not lunch time yet. I heard a commotion down the hall and looked up to see an ambulance crew running up the hall at full speed with a rolling gurney. Earlier the medic had left his office and run toward lower level housing. I knew it wouldn’t be long before the news reached our end of the hall.
The guards were pretty good about keeping us informed. One of the passing guards said that a defendant had hanged himself in his cell and that they were working to save his life. I had no one to interview so I was getting paperwork caught up. In half an hour, our medic from next door came into my office. Our medics were a tough breed, both men and women. Many of them were civilians for the local naval base. This particular medic was very friendly and nice. He was a big, jolly guy with long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail and a slight beard. We all liked him.
He came in totally worn out and woefully told me that the defendant had been successful in his attempt to kill himself. He was really upset. He said the dead man had just come around the corner a few minutes ago from Pre Trial. I asked the dead man’s name and the medic told me. I realized that I had only interviewed the man a few short minutes ago and now he had taken his own life. Recognizing his name and remembering him, I broke down and cried and reached out to take the medic’s arm for support. He broke down at this point and we stood in my office and cried together. He was concerned about me.
I went over to the Felony Office, where Tom was setti ng bonds with the judge over the telephone. I closed the door and Romain could see that I had been crying. I quietly told her that we had a felony defendant who had hung himself. I had already verified the defendant’s information over the phone through his family. I began to cry again and Romain asked me if I wanted to get out awhile and take lunch. I said yes and got my things and went down the hall in shock.
The lower level was unusually quiet, whereas it was usually incredibly loud, especially as dinner time approached on a Saturday night. It was obvious that something had happened and the other defendants were affected by it.
The next day, there was news that I as the Counselor B, had called the family and told them that their son had killed himself. The Duty Sergeant asked me if I had called them back with the n ews. Of course, I would never have done that. Later the story came to light that one of the other inmates admitted that he had called the family. I don’t now if that was ever verified as true or not. But everyone was satisfied that the family had been confused because it was indeed me who had called to verify his interview information minutes before he hung himself, probably as he was doing it.
Parking at the jail was a difficult proposition. On Saturdays and Sundays, “casual” days at the jail for us (we could wear blue jeans, although our supervisor always insisted that “the powers that be” never officially approved of it), the parking lots were empty and we on the second shift parked wherever we wanted.
However, on Fridays and especially on Mondays and Tuesdays (my weekend was Wednesdays and Thursdays), parking was a nightmare and I drove a land-barge (1975 Chevrolet Monte Carlo) that I would have to slide very carefully into one of the too-small-anyway parking spaces. I would then go pay the box $1.00, the accepted rate for employees for the “privilege” of parking in order to work for the Great County Government. I had a rule that I would NEVER fight for a parking place or drive around the block more than once searching for one.
I usually drove up Union Avenue and turned north on Third Street. I would then turn into the small parking lot just before the street that our building sat on and park in a tiny lot at the corner. But the longer I parked there, the fewer spaces there seemed to be until finally, there were none there at all.
Many times, there were no spaces in any of the lots; and many people were waiting for one to come open. People circled through the tiny driveways and alleys and were frustrated in general. Civilians and lawyers were also battling for spaces, as well as jail personnel at shift change.
I would go down to the next block where I could cut back south and find a space in a lot through the alley, just across from a historic landmark. Then I would scoot through the alley to work. This worked well until the time came for me to move my car at dinner time: either 5:30PM or 6:30PM.
I have skipped down the alley in the rain or, in the winter, in total darkness, run outright through the alley to get my car and park it closer to our building. My husband was always afraid that someone would steal it because after everyone left court and the office buildings, it sat alone in the giant lot. No one ever bothered my precious Chevy, though. I always feared I would be murdered going to fetch it. It always amazed me that we had to pay to park in order to work. I had never done that before.
We never could figure out where to eat at the jail, either Sometimes, Tom would go out and get dinner for everyone on the shift. Sometimes, I went. We all worked together well. I tried my best to pack my lunch, even if it was only a can of soup to take upstairs to the office and break room on the 8th floor. We had an hour for lunch but it took a good seven minutes to get through all of the locked doors and gates that the guards in the control rooms had to let us through to get out and the same going back in.
Many nights I enjoyed my lunch on the 8th floor and read in the conference room with the wall of windows and the amazing southwestern view of downtown. I watched the sunset and dreamed of better and easier times to come. I read Shirley Jackson novels and escaped the demands of my life for a precious few minutes. I read a lot of Smithsonian Magazines there, too, in awe of the people in them that were reaching and broadening horizons by expanding scientific knowledge or improving the world in some way. For the time, however, I was stuck allowing people to walk out of the jail on their own recognizance.
The jail had a cafeteria. Many of the jailers ate there and usually were a loud and jovial group. The catch was that the food in the jail, although free, was prepared and served by inmates. I didn’t allow myself to think of what they might have done to it during the preparation. In later months, a sergeant warned me not to eat there. There was a big hepatitis scare in the general population in my city these days and it had become bad enough for the Health Department to begin inoculating children and old people against the disease (the source of which was private kitchens and restaurants alike).
So when anyone ate outside of their own house, they were very aware of who had prepared the food and how. There was a lot of media attention. As the weeks went on and I ate in the jail cafeteria once in a while, that same sergeant stopped me again and talked to me about the dangers of eating there. He was a white employee (one of the very, very few in the jail in any capacity). Finally, I decided to heed his stern warning and stop eating there. None of the other counselors on my shift would have even considered eating there.
The food served to the inmates was the most horrible stuff you ever saw or smelled. Everything smelled like cabbage. Many of the white defendants on the lower level wouldn’t touch it. They would go hungry instead. While I ate in the cafeteria, I admit there were times when I couldn’t begin to identify what the entree was. Lots of times, I simply made a salad from the salad bar. It was just a part of the generally deplorable working conditions there.
One night, Saturday, March 5, 1996, Tom and I were working alone (since our supervisor was following his reputation and had disappeared). After hearing guards run up the hallway and knowing something bad was going down, I saw the guards bring another guard down to intake. His head was bleeding and the news was that he and another guard had been attacked by an inmate. We didn’t know the entire story yet. It was a particularly quiet night and it was about 8:00PM, almost an hour before time for me to stop interviewing in the misdemeanor office and finish up for the night. The next thing I heard was that there had been a jail break and two inmates had escaped. I busied myself finishing up in case the Duty Sergeant evacuated us for our safety.
Tom, too, was rushing to finish up what he could in the felony office. Then I heard the words over the always-blaring intercom, “LOCKDOWN, LOCKDOWN, LOCKDOWN!” I knew who the Commander was upstairs giving the order from the first floor duty desk. My heart started to beat faster and my knees got weak. I had always thought about and talked with others about what would happen if the jail was taken over or if there was a riot. But on this night, not knowing what had happened or where the escapees might be, it all became way too real that the jail was a dangerous place to work.
Soon, our “wandering” supervisor came into our office sweating profusely and shaking and told us his story. The two inmates had been in first floor visitation with their lawyers (1st floor visitation is for the bad, bad boys). The two inmates had attacked a guard just as they were being taken back to housing and had gained access to the command center, where they pushed the button to click open the lock to the outside door (to the actual outside of the jail).
They had then run into the visitation waiting room and gone into the outer hall by the elevators. Once they reached the last set of doors to the outside world, our supervisor had been coming in from a “smoke break” outside. One of the inmates poked a gun into my supervisor’s chest (God only knows where this inmate had obtained a gun) and told him to get out of the way, which he immediately did. The inmates then ran north past a bail bond office and into the projects.
That was all the work that we did in Pre Trial that night. The jail was locked down tight. Tom walked me to my car when we got out but there were police cars, SWAT officers, sheriff’s deputies, journalists, and a police helicopter flying around. It was a strange feeling. There was never any telling what or who might be out around the jail (especially when we were the ones who had advocated for their Release On their own Recognizance) at 10:30 at night. The parking lots were very poorly lit and were very dark.
At Pre Trial, policies and procedures seemed to change drastically week by week. It was hard enough to be trained in the details without having to have a staff meeting weekly where radical changes came down regularly. I always tried to be positive because we had to do the work, no matter what was dumped on us. Pre Trial was the whipping-boy of the criminal justice complex in my town because we had the most critical contact immediately after a defendant was booked. We could glean loads of information for defendants’ initial court appearance.
Since no one obviously knew how to say “NO” to any request from the prosecutor’s office to the public defender or the judges themselves and since it didn’t affect the workload of the managers upstairs in Pre Trial release, we got to do tons of things that we knew others could have done, but we became obliged to copy it, fill it out, write it up, or send it anyway. So along with doing office work for many other departments, we were ultimately responsible to the managers and the outside world by having the awesome power to release defendants with our personal signatures.
One of the drastic changes came from the world of Domestic Violence, to which we were introduced in the winter of 1995. The Tennessee Legislature had passed a law that made Domestic Violence (DV) very serious and not the joke it had long been for some law enforcement personnel. Many times, people had called the police to spot-mediate an argument or an assault but then dropped any charges before the case went to court.
Police tired of this and many DV cases escalated, some resulting in the death of a victim after the police left the scene. The new law stated that if the police made the scene of a DV, someone went to jail (if not both parties). It was called “Mandatory Arrest”. It was up to the police officers to determine who the “primary aggressor” was and arrest them. Many times, they arrested both parties involved.
So we at Pre Trial had to prepare entire cases for DVs to go to court. This included a long questionnaire where whomever of us worked DVs that particular evening had to call the victim and ask them if they were injured, if this had happened before, how long they and the defendant had been together, did they have children together, was a weapon used, and the final most explosive one: could the perpetrator return home? If the victim said the perpetrator couldn’t return, the judge who set the bond (and ALL DV bonds had to be set by a judge) could immediately issue an order of protection to be “served” on the defendant (by us at Pre Trial) before their release if they were able to make a bond.
Most defendants, especially males who had been arrested, didn’t appreciate being told that they could not return home. They usually claimed that it was “their house” and that they paid the bills. It didn’t matter, though. It was up to the victim. Actually, sometimes it was a little bit fun to tell an especially cocksure defendant that if he returned to the house and was caught, he would serve time in jail.
This was part of our duty at Pre Trial. We were usually the bearers of bad news. After awhile, I could get in the face of the defendants with the best of them. Men didn’t intimidate me much. All I had to do was raise my voice and they usually backed down pretty quickly. Most of them realized that they were in a bad situation and it would be better for them if they were helpful. They were so right, especially when we were the ones who went to the judge for a bond for them.
I learned to enjoy working with the DV victims and telling them what to expect in court, etc. This always drove my supervisor crazy – that I spent so much time on the phone with victims (an assigned duty, no less), even though we were supposed to do a thorough job and my co-workers spent a lot of time on the phone with personal calls. My supervisor complained and railed at me whenever he could, telling me that I believed everything everyone told me and calling me naive. I kept my interview rate way up, which made him even more unhappy because he couldn’t prove his allegations against me.
By the time I left, Pre Trial was swimming in paperwork with the DV stuff, the felony preparations, the extra copies we had to make for the “powers” upstairs, as well as the extra work for the prosecutor’s office and anyone else in administration who wanted anything at anytime.
One afternoon in March, 1996, I was working with Nicole and we were in the misdemeanor office interviewing together. I had interviewed a DV defendant and I was calling the victim to ask her the 10,000 questions. The other counselor was interviewing a defendant and I had my next interviewee sitting at the end of my desk waiting for me to finish on the phone.
Our desks faced each other and the defendants sat on my right, her left – close enough for us to reach out and touch. Suddenly, the lights throughout the jail went out and everything went black. It was so dark for a minute, my brain just blanked out. Then I recovered and told my victim on the phone what had happened and that I was sitting in total pitch-black darkness. We paused and waited to see if the emergency lights would blink on. Finally, after a very long minute, they did.
I had memorized the DV questionnaire by now, we all had, so I was able to continue to ask what I knew the next few questions would be. After a couple of minutes, my computer came back on and I could see a little bit by the light from my green screen.
It was scary to think about what all the inmates who were unlocked and being processed were doing or what they might do. The Deputy Jailers were busy rounding everyone up and locking them back into the holding tanks. It was a confusing, scary mess.
I finished my interview on the phone with my DV victim and we received the word that we were being evacuated immediately. I just had time to grab my purse before we were whisked up the hall and out of the jail. We were only out about an hour, then everything was back to normal. It turned out to be a mysterious power failure, believed to be associated with the filming of a major motion picture that was taking place in the courthouse just a block away. But the first thing on my mind was that it had been engineered and the inmates were all going to take over.
It was nice to be outside with my friend, Nicole, in the warm spring weather that day after escaping from a dark jail where only emergency lights were burning. That was the thing about working there. When you were in the lower level, you never knew what was going on in the outside world. I knew that if the weather was bad, anything could have happened at home and I would never have known about it until I walked out the outside door after my shift.
In the winter, I went to work in the daylight but by dinner, I knew the sun would be down. There was just something about walking out that last locked door into the visitation area and around the corner into the long, brown hall and seeing the night lights outside the building and knowing that it was night (and looked like midnight). I never got used to it. It was always a shock to discover whether it was raining, snowing, or what. Twice during the winter, we had known the forecast called for sleet and walked out from our shift onto a solid sheet of ice. We were separated from the outside world and it was creepy.
The power outage came during the trial of Tony Carruthers.
While I was at Pre Trial, we had one of the most notorious trials in the history of Memphis. A couple of years earlier, a woman, her 18-year old son, and one of his friends had been abducted from their vehicle, a Jeep Cherokee, and had simply disappeared. Some weeks went by and a worker at a small cemetery in town had gone to authorities and confessed that he had helped re-dig a grave and dig a deeper one under it and had helped bury the three missing people. He and the other perpetrators had then replaced the original coffin and filled in the grave.
It was so bizarre that the police had trouble keeping up with the story and the details. Sure enough, the authorities went to the grave site, dug it up, and there were three bodies under the coffin. After an autopsy, it was determined that two of the victims had been buried alive.
The main perpetrators arrested were gang members Tony Carruthers and his sidekick, James Montgomery. I had only heard the story on the local news and didn’t think much about it until I worked in the jail.
One day, I was returning from setting bonds in the courtroom and was on my way through the lower level men’s dressing area, as usual. There was a SWAT officer at the door who would not let me through, routing me instead through men’s housing. I looked into the dressing area quickly and saw a black male surrounded by SWAT team members. When I arrived at the Pre Trial office, I asked Terry who the man was.
All the clerks as well as my supervisor gave me wide-eyed looks and told me about Tony Carruthers. Apparently, he was so powerful, he had all sorts of amenities in his jail cell and many lackies in the jail to do his bidding including both inmates and deputy jailers. He was truly a ruthless, dangerous, powerful man.
He was also remarkably handsome. I knew immediately he was not purely African-American. It was obvious that he had a measure of Native American blood in his veins. He looked important; and I suppose in his way, he certainly was. He had decided to become The Godfather of drugs in South Memphis and had robbed and beat many other competing drug dealers (including the son who was a passenger in the Jeep Cherokee). That murder was done to send a very specific message to those who would compete with Carruthers. The dead youth’s mother and friend just happened to be along with him when Carruthers struck.
Tony Carruthers was found guilty (after making the monumentally egregious decision to defend his sociopathic self after firing or “running off” each of his defense attorneys by threatening them and their families). His co-defendant, James Montgomery, who was tried separately, was found guilty, also. The jail administration deemed his so dangerous they sent him to Nashville in the middle of the night immediately after his conviction.
During the time of this trial, when there was already a pall of foreboding in the jail, a Deputy Jailer returned home from his shift one Friday night, was ambushed, shot, and killed in his own driveway. His wife and children were inside his house and heard the shots and ran outside, finding him dead. The next day was Saturday and I will never forget how upset everyone was. The Deputy Jailers walked around in a daze.
The murdered jailer, Sgt. Deadrick Taylor, had been working there many years and was well known and loved. He had worked in lower level frequently and I recognized his picture, but really didn’t know him. It was a terrible time, truly awful, with jailers grieving and scared to go home after their shifts because no one knew who had killed him or why.
My co-worker, Nancy, was dating a jailer and she was nervous. Everyone assumed that Tony Carruthers had had something to do with the murder, since he had such influence. Well, it wasn’t two weeks before someone ratted on the culprit and he was arrested. Actually, several gang members had gone to the jailer’s house avenging some punishment that the jailer had meted out to the shooter’s brother while he was an inmate.
The 21-year old gang member who shot him was brought into the jail by a couple of SWAT team members, as well as the Duty Commander and two Memphis Police officers, in order to protect him from the immediate wrath of the deputy jailers. The defendant was being processed through the jail by himself with everyone else locked down and when they brought him to Pre Trial, no one else would interview him. So I volunteered to interview him and got it over with as soon as I could. He seemed co-operative enough, like most other black male defendants. I experienced no fall-out over my having interviewed him – someone had to. Everyone was relieved just to have him processed and sent on his way to wherever he ended up.
One of the Deputy Jailers was an older white man (Sgt. Callis). He had worked at the jail for years and while not everyone liked him, they paid him a certain amount of respect. He just didn’t take any crap off the defendants, black or white. But while he acted tough, he seemed sort of old and bumbling. He had given Kay and me our jail tour when we started there. He was friendly and nice and helpful, although a little strange.
While there, he had begun working a second job as a courier for a delivery service. I had talked to him about how much I hated the job and was looking for something else – especially part-time. He said to wait until he had worked with the company awhile to see if it was an OK job, then he would help me get on there. Well, after a month, he advised me not to work there because the work was so physically demanding. It was May and it was HOT and he was running around delivering 100 pound boxes in the mornings and being a jailer in the evenings.
He had told all of us he had a bad heart condition and was continually under the care of a doctor. On a Sunday night later in May, while at home on his day off, Sgt. Callis dropped dead of a massive heart attack. I was really sad because I had eaten dinner with him in the jail cafeteria at times and he was always showing me the pictures of his daughter and his granddaughter, whom he adored.
While all of this was going on, back in April, all hell broke loose and I decided to quit. On Friday, April 12, a new computer system came on-line in the Criminal Justice Complex. We had been training for weeks and had to learn it because they were planing to totally shut the old system down within two weeks of implementing the new one. It was radically different and we would have to learn how to read the screens and print different screens to send to court.
Believe it or not, that weekend, the Sheriff’s Department decided to implement a new program called “Zero Tolerance”, a political move if there ever was one, where they arrested people for any minor infraction. They were supposedly attempting to “clean up” the bad neighborhoods. Jail Administration begged them to postpone the program, but the same Sheriffs’s Department that ran the jail refused.
So the same day that a completely new computer system was brought to life, affecting jail intake, Pre Trial, and all the other departments, the arrest rate tripled. It was the wildest thing you can imagine. When I got to work on that Friday (my Monday) there were so many inmates already in lower level holding waiting to be processed that my supervisor placed me and another Nicole at a table in the middle of the holding area to try and interview defendants. Counselors from the 8th floor came down to help us and botched things even further. It was like working in an insane asylum, just too crazy for words.
Of course, the following night, being a Saturday night, was worse. Defendants slept on the floors and the jailers were placed at the opening to each position in lower level housing. The holding tanks were absolutely bursting, which was very dangerous because crowded, frustrated, and drunk defendants tend to fight one another and prey on the weaker of them.
During these next few days, we had defendants who were in the holding tanks when I left work on Saturday and were still in the same holding tanks when I returned in Sunday. When we interviewed defendants, they asked us what day it was. Of course, it was our job to clean out as many defendants as we could but we couldn’t just open the doors and let them go (although I would have gladly done that). We had to justify everything we did by computer printout (as we always had but now it was exponentially harder).
Suffice it to say, my husband and I decided that I would quit on my 1st work anniversary (August 1st), although I didn’t make it that long. We were running around like crazy people at Pre Trial trying to learn the system, decode what was on the computer screens (and hope the information was accurate), interview a million people, process felonies, etc. The process moved on, people were arrested by the hundreds – and the jail came to a stop.
Weeks later, we found that in the system software design, there was no way to print a defendant’s criminal history without going to each court disposition screen and printing a page for each. Needless to say, many defendants had been arrested and disposed 15 times or more. The man thing Pre Trial used for processing cases and a vital life-or-death tool for the entire criminal justice system (multiple dispositions per page) had not been included. My job, which had been difficult, became impossible. The last thing I heard months after I quit, the jail was still using the old system, which included an easy way to print lots of useful stuff quickly. Go figure.
Through it all, I cannot say that my days at Pre Trial were wasted. I learned a lot about criminal justice on a first hand basis. I met bail bondsmen and “accidentally” let them check out my bond list after the bonds had been set (something strictly forbidden). But they were friendly enough and gave me candy bars and I wondered if I would wind up working for one of them some day. I didn’t worry about it.
I sat with judges and read criminal histories and learned which judges were cool and which were hard and detailed. I looked into the faces of defendants who had murdered people. I talked with rapists and child molesters. I interviewed women who had not bathed, had clean clothes, or eaten in days because they were continuously high on crack cocaine. As they sat next to my desk, some would talk to me and some could not while they rocked violently back and forth – coming down off those awful drugs.
We interviewed many homeless folks and drunks who had no place to go. They would shoplift a little something from a grocery store and get arrested. I knew one old man whom I dealt with five or so times. He was a grizzled white man who would have sat and talked with my for my entire shift. I would let him visit awhile , then I would have to physically abandon my desk in order to get him to “go up the hall and make a right” to get to men’s housing. I hope my attention made a little difference in his life.
One Sunday during my employment at Pre Trial, I read in the newspaper that someone had killed him on the street by setting him on fire while he slept. He lived a few hours and died. I recognized his name in the article as the same name he had given us. I grieved for his poor old soul.
I confess that it was neat to read about notorious crimes that happened in my city and know that I had interviewed the people involved and sometimes even prepared the felony paperwork and had the bond set (so I had a copy of the arrest ticket and knew the gory details about what happened). I also learned a lot about crime from the defendants themselves who would gladly share their secrets about things. When you work in the jail, you know about everyone and everything nefarious that’s going on around town.
One of the things about the jail that was the most difficult to get accustomed to was the constant extreme noise. The booming intercom was bad enough but mixed with the clanging of the cell doors and the yelling of the defendants and the jailers, it would drive me crazy some nights. Once in a while an angry defendant would cause trouble and the jailers would put him in one of the cells by himself for holding until he could calm down enough to be processed. These cells had little windows in them. The inside of these cells was so dimly lit you could not see the defendants in them unless you looked really closely. The jailers would have to open the cell door if you were looking to fetch someone specific.
The troublemaking defendants would kick those heavy metal doors and scream and yell through the little grill window. I have heard a defendant kick and scream for hours. Finally, you got used to the yelling or they mercifully tired out. When they kicked the door it would make a deep, booming metallic noise that would roll down the concrete-block hallway. Sometimes, we would slam our office door just to get a minutes worth of peace if we were only finishing paperwork and there was no one waiting to be interviewed.
On one Sunday night, we had an especially mad defendant, a black male, who screamed and kicked the door incessantly. He kept crying abut wanting to see his brother. There was also another defendant who was boisterous. I witnessed something that night that I only saw once in my ten months down there. The jail SWAT team came.
The minute the SWAT team came down the hall, marching in lockstep, a hush fell over the holding area and our bad boy, who must have been looking out of his little door window, knew he was about finished and fell quiet. My supervisor and the medic next door and deputies from Classification across the hall came to our doors and watched the SWAT team open the holding cell door and rush in to subdue the defendant. One member of the team was dedicated to catching the incident on videotape.
Once they got the defendant out of the cell, they held him on the floor until he stopped struggling. Then they put him in a special restraint chair and tied him to it. They covered his head with a black hood. He looked for all the world like a man about to be executed. He started his cry about his brother again and called for Jesus to help him. The second defendant was easier to subdue and the team walked him to wherever they took guys like him. After witnessing all of this, the defendants left in the holding tanks were very well behaved, co-operative and quiet for the rest of the evening.
Another strange thing about the jail was how dark the cells were, both holding and housing, especially on the women’s side. On the occasion that I went to fetch a female defendant to sign papers, I would walk down the brightly lit hall on the pod and have to peer into the cell. There were bunk beds in female (and male) cells and my eyes would have to adjust to the dim lights in the cells to find my defendant.
If the female was in the top bunk, she would be five feet off the floor (at least. I believe the bunk beds were over my head, which would have made them six feet tall). The female in the top bunk would have to step way out through the air onto her toilet seat in order to reach the floor. There is no way she could have jumped from the bed to the concrete floor – she would have been injured. Over in the female holding tanks (before processing) there was so little light, I could not look into the large window and tell how many females were in the tank. I would look in and see four or five pair of eyes looking at me and I would have to have the female jailer open the door if I were looking for a specific defendant.
Tuesday, June 4 was my last day in the jail. In the following three months, six other people quit at Pre Trial, some long-time employees. The work load was so heavy and so much was expected of everyone including all the changes – and the stress never seemed to get better. It got to people in the jail as well as the Pre Trial employees upstairs. In the year following, Pre Trial also lost three supervisors. I quit at a good time.
Pre Trial affected me in ways that I’m still dealing with. It made me “rougher” and made me consider whether I should have taken more risks in my life regarding outrageous behavior. After ten months in the jail, I figured I should have “kicked more butt and raised more hell”. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I might have lost. What would the authorities have done to me? Probably not much.
Originally written September, 1997 *all names changed*
Tears and Catharsis 