The doors were electronically controlled by a middle-aged woman wearing a blue security uniform seated at controls located to the right of the glass enclosure. It was into this glass enclosure that an inmate suddenly appeared holding up his right hand for inspection by the woman behind the glass.

He was a young man, perhaps twenty years old, and one finger was crooked, bending in a way fingers aren't supposed to bend. A trickle of blood flowed from the bent finger and coursed down his hand and wrist. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other in agitation, and the pained look on his face matched the mangled appearance of his finger.

"I need to see Medical," he said.

"Get out of Turnkey," the woman replied.

"No, you don't understand," said the man. "I dropped a weight on my finger out on the weight pile. It's broken. I need to see a doctor."

"Get out of Turnkey, or I'll have you dragged out by a guard," she replied.

The inmate stared at the woman for a long moment in disbelief, but he offered no further protest. He turned and left Turnkey and returned to the prison yard from which he had come.

I was stunned. What kind of place was this? I looked from one person to another. There were uniformed officers present who had witnessed the exchange, yet no one seemed concerned. No one spoke to the woman at the controls. No one tried to help the inmate.

I sat uncomfortably as the minutes ticked away. I grieved for the inmate, and I wondered what he would do with his broken finger without the help of a doctor. I also wondered what he was thinking as he stepped back into the sunshine of the prison yard with the pain throbbing through his hand and into his arm.

This was a personal encounter with cruelty for him. What would it mean for him? Would his heart harden? Would he be more likely to pass on the cruelty he had experienced to others? Would he become one of the dangerous, evil men of our nightmares delivered into our society by our own institutional cruelty?

I grieved for the inmate, but I also thought about myself. What was I doing here? How had I come to this place? Did I really belong here?

The answer to this question had begun to unfold for me a couple of weeks earlier when my wife and I found ourselves in the comfortable living room of Al and Lois Hansen. It was a warm Sunday afternoon in May, and we had all been in church that morning. Al was the Training Director for the Nebraska Department of Corrections and a fellow parishioner. I was thirty years old, married, with a three-year-old child, a mortgage, and a job in a nearby school system. It was my first year in this school district, and I'd recently learned that my contract for the following year had not been renewed, so when the end of the school year arrived, I would need to find a new job. I'd been a middle-school counselor for six years. It was my life, but that would soon end, and it was unlikely that I would find another school counseling job without moving again. I did not want to move. Al had invited us to his home after church when he learned that I was looking for work locally. He wanted to tell me about the new caseworker position that was being created in the Nebraska Department of Corrections. For me, prison was a place I drove past whenever I went downtown. It was right there on 14th Street, and it had a name, the State Penitentiary. It had twenty-foot gray concrete walls with guard towers arrayed along the top. Guards in these towers were armed with rifles, and they kept watch on the dangerous criminals inside.

As I sat and listened to Al talk about corrections in Nebraska while seated next to my wife with our little son playing on the floor with a toy car, it gave me a little shudder to think that I might actually go inside a prison every day and work with dangerous criminals all around me.

Al described an official review of the Nebraska Department of Corrections that had been carried out in recent years. The report from this review had called for major changes its authors felt were needed, so the state legislature had directed the Department to make those changes, and they had appropriated money to do so.

Al described two of the changes that were currently being carried out. First, the state was building two new prisons, and second, they were implementing a new system of correctional management called Unit Management.

The first new prison to be built would be named the Lincoln Correctional Center (LCC), and it would be located next to an existing prison, the Men's Reformatory. A second new facility named the Diagnostic and Evaluation Center would stand next to it. Both buildings were nearly complete and would be occupied during the coming summer.

The design of the new prison was unusual, and this design enabled the second change to be implemented, the adoption of a Unit Management System of corrections. The Unit Management System was new in Nebraska, but it wasn't invented here. One change elevated inmates into a more important role in managing their own programs. They would become voting members of committees established to make decisions that concerned them. With the meetings of this committee, they hoped to elicit the enthusiastic participation of the inmate in completing self-help programs and implementing the decisions the committee had made.

The other feature of Unit Management he wanted to describe was the creation of the unit caseworker position. Caseworkers would be college educated professional employees who would combine three separate roles which inmates typically encountered: security (guards), emotional support and guidance (counselors), and programing direction (case managers). Prison guards would be pulled back from daily contact with inmates. Caseworkers would take their places. Interactions between inmates and these new caseworkers were expected to be more professional. Al believed I was perfect for the unit caseworker position, and he urged me to apply. Part of his pitch contained the crucial phrase "They're hiring right now."

Al gave me the necessary contact information, and we left his home that Sunday afternoon with something entirely new to consider. By the next morning, I'd decided to cast a wide net and to include corrections in that net. I hoped something more familiar would open up over the summer, but it wasn't likely. I was constrained in my job search to the Lincoln area, and I would be grateful for any job. I applied, and before the week had ended, I had found myself driving west toward the city limits and turning right onto a dusty gravel road which led to the Men's Reformatory.

The gravel road was lined with pine trees on both sides. Straight ahead, at the end of the road, I could see a tall chain link gate, a short guard tower to the right of the gate, and a small shack to the left. A rutted gravel parking lot emerged on my left, and as I parked, I could see across the corn field to the west the gleaming new prison Al Hansen had described standing out in the bright sunlight on top of the hill. It was still under construction, and this was the first time I'd seen it. I stood for a moment next to my car admiring it, and then I turned away from the new prison and walked toward the guard shack at the entrance of the old Men's Reformatory. As I approached, my heart was racing.

I explained my arrival to a guard who emerged from the shack, and he motioned to another guard sitting above us in the tower. A motor whirred to life, and the gate began to slowly slide open and then stop. I stepped through the gate as the guard had directed me and listened as the motor came to life once more. The gate slowly rolled to a stop, closing me inside. When it stopped, there was silence. I'd never before been inside a prison, and I'd never thought I would be, but here I was. "Go to the building straight ahead of you and through the center doors," the guard said as he turned away to attend to other duties.

With the gate now quiet and closed behind me, my wild imagination commanded a full stop for me to assess my situation, and as I stood just inside the gate, it prodded my fears with violent images. "This is a prison. A real prison," it said. "This is where the bad guys live. The men who kill and rob and rape. These men laugh as they make you beg for your life. These are the monsters from under the bed who will pull out your fingernails with pliers and the bogeymen hiding in the bushes who will creep up behind you in the darkness, daggers poised high over their heads, eager to slash downward to stab you in the back." My palms began to sweat. My fears were provoked. The fence, which was now behind me, protected us from these people. It separated these bad people from society. It prevented them from harming us, but now, this barrier was behind me, and now, there was nothing between them and me, and I was alone.

I looked ahead. Two men in khaki clothing were picking up litter in a grassy area in front of the building I was to enter. They didn't seem threatening or dangerous, and they didn't notice me. I listened, but I only heard sparrows chirping as they searched for insects and seeds in the grass. Everything seemed peaceful, and it contradicted the violent images swirling through my mind.

"You're perfect for this job," my friend had said. Was I? Coming into a prison every day to work with prison inmates, I was perfect for this job!? I hadn't even known this job existed a week earlier, and I certainly didn't know if I wanted it now, but I needed a job, and I didn't have one. I began to gain some confidence. My fears ebbed. "I can do this," I thought.

Standing just inside the gate with my mind swirling, I next reflected on my life. Of the many futures I could live, one of them began through the middle door of the building in front of me. There was a man in an office inside who was expecting me, and he would interview me for a job. Many people in my situation would turn to the guard, ask to be let out, and go home. Their fears would prevail, but I needed a job. My family was depending on me. I thought about bravery, and I decided that it wasn't something you chose to have. It was something you discovered inside yourself when it was needed, and I needed it now. I lifted my right foot and set it down in front of me. My left foot followed. I was on my way to the building right in front of me, and I was on my way to a possible future. It was just inside that door. I swallowed hard, and I kept walking. "I can do this" repeated in my mind.

I entered the building, spoke to a receptionist, walked into the lobby, settled myself uncomfortably in a straight-backed chair, and I took in my surroundings. The floor was tile, and there was no air conditioning. Warm, moist, early summer air poured into the room through open, east-facing windows to my right. Bright sunlight warmed the tile floor in front of me, and the room filled with the odor of the moist earth from the newly planted cornfield nearby. The furniture was very old, and the walls were painted green just like the outside of the building. The lighting was dim. I felt as though I'd stepped through a time portal into a typical government building in Havana while Fidel Castro was in charge.

I was called in for my interview soon after the injured young man had left Turnkey, but the image of his broken finger and the response of the woman operating the controls for the doors and of the other officers who had failed to act when they observed the incident followed me as I walked down a hall and into an office where I met Bob Houston, the Unit Manager, who would interview me for a position in his unit.

Mr. Houston had been appointed to manage a special programming unit at the new prison, he explained. This unit was funded by money earmarked to provide care for inmates with chemical dependency. He described the new unit and asked a few questions. He had my application and my work history laid out in front of him on the desk, and his questions invited me to elaborate on the bare details of my application. I did my best to present myself as a willing and competent professional, but my mind kept pulling me back into the lobby and the image of casual cruelty that I had just witnessed. Troubling questions hounded me. Did I really want a job in this prison? What was this place where such incidents occurred and passed by with no one offering any objection? What else happens here?

As I was thinking about prisons, and Mr. Houston was thinking about me, he paused, leaned back in his chair, and he asked this question.

"Do you think inmates are sent to prison as punishment, or are they sent to prison for punishment?" I heard the question, but I didn't understand it. Aren't they the same thing?

I was searching for an answer when my mind returned to the scene I'd just witnessed in the lobby, and I wondered how the woman operating the door controls in Turnkey would answer this question. She would probably agree that inmates were sent to prison for punishment. That's what I just watched her do.

Suddenly, I understood why he asked this question. He was talking about cruelty in the prison, and he wanted something different in his unit. I had the sensation of fog lifting and revealing features of the landscape that had previously been hidden. There was tension in the prison among staff concerning inmates and punishment. Some employees felt inmates were sent to prison as punishment, and not for punishment. They would feel compassion for the difficult circumstances of being incarcerated, and they would not be likely to add to inmates' misery by inflicting additional unnecessary punishments.

However, other staff members in the prison believed inmates were sent to prison for punishment. These staff could be expected to embrace the role of the punisher and willingly deliver these punishments. "It's my job," they might say. These staff could easily become cruel, cruel enough to casually deny care to an inmate who had broken his finger on the weight pile and wanted medical treatment. Inmates would experience these people as sadistic and view them as a threat. These people would not fit into a special programming unit committed to helping inmates with chemical dependency problems, and this was the special unit Bob Houston had been hired to create. Bob was intending to screen out such people and create a living unit free of the cruelty I'd just witnessed in the lobby.

It was all suddenly very clear to me, and I wondered if the authors of the report Al Hansen had described that demanded reform had also sensed this tension. Had they also witnessed examples of casual cruelty in the prison as I had seen in the lobby? Was this the root of the desire to reform corrections in Nebraska?

I was encouraged, and I wondered if well-meaning people like Bob Houston could really change this environment. It got me thinking, and I wondered if I could help. (Bob Houston eventually rose through the ranks and became the Director of the Nebraska Department of Corrections).

As I drove home from the interview, my mind swirled. Conflicting emotions pulled me first in one direction and then another, and my wife anxiously listened when I got home as I described the prison and my interview.

I didn't have to wait long for the uncertainty in my life to be resolved. Bob called the next morning and offered me a job, and I accepted it. There was much to think about. I was opening an entirely new chapter in my life in a setting with many new challenges.

I became a new correctional employee, and I posed for my first employee picture for my ID card (right). My first assignment placed me in a classroom as the most recent addition to the next new-hire training class at the Department of Corrections Training Academy, which Al Hansen oversaw.

The Training Academy was far away from the Men's Reformatory. Far away from the cruel lady operating the door controls, and far away from inmates with crushed, bloody, broken fingers.

Discussion

1. What would you have done if you had been the woman operating the door controls?
2. The author did nothing when he watched the guard refuse to allow the prisoner to receive care for his broken finger. What would you have done if you were him?
3. What do you think actually happened to the man with a broken finger?
4. Do you think criminals are sent to prison as punishment or to receive additional punishment?

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