The caseworkers in our class did not go to the Range to shoot guns. We had been directed to report to our facilities for on-the-job training. There were six of us assigned to LCC, and we met in the lobby of the Administration Building at the old Men’s Reformatory at 8 o’clock in the morning. After a brief tour of the Building, we crossed the yard and met a guard standing outside a heavy steel door that allowed entry into the old Cell House. He pulled out a gigantic set of keys, unlocked the door, and directed us to climb a narrow steel staircase to the second floor and go to a meeting room we would find there.

The Cell House was loud and smelled of warm bodies, and it was filled with steel. There were iron bars everywhere, and behind them were the faces and bodies of young men languishing in their cells with arms and folded hands hanging out through the bars.

We found the second-floor meeting room crowded with a couple dozen people all dressed in casual business attire. There was a sprinkling of women and people of color, but most were young white men. When we entered, we were greeted by welcoming faces, and as we spoke our names, people emerged from the group to take responsibility for us. It was Benjamin and Richard who stepped forward to take responsibility for me.

Benjamin and Richard were veterans of corrections, and they occupied a higher rank than caseworker. Both were in a position of authority over me, but their warmth and concern about me allayed any misgivings I might have had about their rank.

Everything I knew about corrections as I stood before them was what I had learned in four days of new-hire training. I had many questions, and Benjamin and Richard welcomed them all. Indeed, exploring the deep questions and controversial issues involving corrections became a feature of our lunch-break conversations which we would enjoy together for many years to come. But on this day, it was necessary for me to get out of our meeting room and interact with prisoners, and that’s what we did.

Once an hour, an amplified, droll voice came to life from speakers throughout the prison and announced the running of “gates and doors.” An inmate had been assigned this task, and he made the most of this opportunity to insult his fellow prisoners and offer commentary for their edification.

“Alright you miserable bunch of rejects, it’s ten o’clock doors. You’ve got ten minutes to get your butts out of bed to get your ice and get to your assignments.”

The inmate clearly relished this role, and I could hardly contain my mirth as I listened to this performance once every hour. He always thought of something new.

The prison sprang to life at the announcement of gates and doors as all the doors opened at the same time and inmates flooded out of their cells and moved quickly up and down the stairs and hallways to complete tasks before the deadline arrived when all the doors would be closed and locked for another hour. Those who missed the deadline waited outside in the yard, and for some, this was exactly what they intended.

Benjamin and Richard anticipated the running of doors, and when they were called, we were stationed next to an ice machine on the ground floor of the old Cell House. Inmates swarmed around, and many carried cups to the ice machine and bent over and packed them tight with ice. A warning on the machine clearly stated that inmates were to pack ice only into cups and tumblers. Benjamin and Richard explained that inmates often tried to pack wastebaskets and other large containers full of ice which then deprived other inmates of ice. It also occasionally occurred that inmates coming for ice would find the ice spoiled because someone had urinated into the machine. Our presence at the ice machine deterred inmates from such mischief.

The inmates moved quickly around us, and as they did, I tried to notice the fingers on the hands of the men hurrying past. I remembered the young man with the broken finger, and I wondered if he had received medical care. I did not see him.

When gates and doors had been closed, the frantic movements of prisoners ceased, and I asked Benjamin and Richard if they were ever afraid. I pointed out that the inmates had swarmed around us on all sides and had greatly outnumbered us. They could have done whatever they had wanted to do with us.

Benjamin spoke up right away and insisted that he was not afraid. Although inmates have an advantage in greater numbers, staff have the advantage of greater power. “We can mess with their time,” he said, explaining that we write reports, and what we write often affects the length of time inmates spend in prison.

Richard and I listened, but when Benjamin turned to speak to someone walking by, Richard caught my eye and quickly said that he was sometimes afraid.

“It’s a scary place,” he said.

“And then there’s pain,” said Benjamin, turning abruptly and rejoining our conversation. He picked up right where he had left off.

“You’ve been practicing stuns and takedowns in self defense training. That shit hurts. And if you think it hurts to have your face hit a tumbling mat in a takedown at the Training Academy, imagine how much more it hurts when you hit a bare concrete floor with your face.” Benjamin motioned to the floor as he finished. “And there’ll be four or five guys who will come to help, and they’ll all pile on top. You can’t move anything. You can hardly breathe, and you feel like a squashed bug. If you see that happen to someone who starts trouble, you learn to stay out of trouble yourself.”

“I try to talk my way out of dangerous situations myself,” said Richard. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

I smiled in recognition. Richard would have fit in nicely at the middle schools where I’d worked. Benjamin and Richard had a long-standing practice of eating lunch together, and when noon arrived, they invited me to join them. Over our sandwiches, I asked them why they had stuck it out with corrections.

“It’s a job,” said Benjamin. “It’s steady employment. There are no layoffs.”

“The benefits are good even if the pay isn’t,” added Richard.

“You’ll never get rich here, but it is a growth industry. You’ll never run out of criminals, and they’ll always need some place to put them,” said Richard. Then Richard became more thoughtful. “It’s the right thing to do. Prisoners are people, too. We put them in prison and take away their freedom. When we do that, we force them to depend upon us. They have no choice, and that puts the responsibility on us. We can embrace that responsibility and do the right thing, or we can neglect it. I choose to accept it and try to do the right thing. Someone has to do it.”

Benjamin was listening closely and nodded slightly in agreement.

“We’re the crazy ones who haven’t been able to find a better job,” he said with a chuckle.

After lunch, Benjamin and Richard introduced me to two major responsibilities I would have as a caseworker. First, they showed me a list of names. This was my caseload, they said. A dozen names were written on a piece of paper that Richard placed in my hands. Second, I would conduct official inmate counts of areas assigned to me.

The first responsibility required me to learn about the inmates on my caseload and to be able to make recommendations concerning their lives in our prison. Recommendations would be made as part of regular reports that we caseworkers were assigned to produce, and we did so with the assistance of the inmate. This involvement of the inmate was actually a new feature of the Unit Management system we were introducing to Nebraska corrections. It was new, and it required a delicate balance between knowing the inmate, a familiarity with the options available to the inmate, and providing counseling to guide and encourage inmates to make the best choices. As they explained this responsibility, I could understand why Al Hansen believed I was perfect for this job.

The second responsibility was extremely easy but very important. Several times every day in every prison in America, all activity stops, all the inmates return to their rooms, and staff go door-to-door counting the inmates. As a new unit caseworker, counting the inmates would become one of my routine tasks, so I listened carefully when this duty was explained to me, and since we conducted frequent counts, I had a chance to practice conducting a count by myself later in the afternoon. It was a memorable experience.

At the Men’s Reformatory, count sheets prepared for each of the areas of the prison list every room with an inmate’s name and institutional number next to the room number. A check mark in a small box next to the room number records that a staff member has observed this inmate in this room at this time on the date and time listed at the top. Count sheets are then collected and tabulated, and when the totals match the number of inmates assigned to our prison, count clears, doors open, and routine activities resume. We are certain no one has escaped since the last formal count, and we have proof that we have fulfilled our primary responsibility, which is to confine the inmates assigned to us so that they are not free to commit more crimes in the community. The signatures at the bottom of the count sheets are the proof. Simple, but crucial.

I conducted my first formal count in the Cell House, the building where the second-floor meeting room was located. The Cell House was a red brick building with a three-story stack of iron cages inside. The cages had thick steel bars that formed the front of the cells. Sliding iron-bar doors on these walls opened and closed by operating a huge mechanical lever at the end of each tier of cells. There were no electric motors to help move the heavy iron-bar doors. Narrow steel steps in a steep staircase led upward from the ground level to the second and third levels, and steel catwalks led down each tier of cells to gain entry into individual cells.

When I conducted my first count, I counted inmates in a section of the old Cell House that consisted of small, single-person cells. There were eight cells in a row, and they shared a common back wall with an identical eight cells on the same level, facing the opposite direction, one row facing east and the other facing west. These double rows were stacked on top of one another, three stories high.

When I counted in this area, I moved silently and purposefully down each gallery looking into each cell just long enough to be sure that the inmate in the cell was the one whose name appeared on the count sheet. Benjamin and Richard directed me to examine a picture board of mug shots for each tier of cells before beginning my count, so I could recognize the faces.

When I stepped out onto the narrow steel walkway to look into the individual cells, the air was heavy with the heat and humidity of a July day and the pungent odor of sweat from dozens of bodies trying to cool themselves inside their shaded but stifling cells.

As I went cell-to-cell up and down the catwalks, there wasn’t time to stop and chat. The entire prison was on pause waiting for everyone to complete their counts, so the totals could be tabulated, and routine operations could resume. However, once I had completed and submitted my count sheet, I had a down period while we waited for count to clear for the entire prison. It was a break that could last ten minutes or half an hour.

While I waited for count to clear, I remembered my personal caseload and noticed that I had a fast-approaching deadline for one of my inmates. To complete the report, I needed to speak to him. We had time to chat right then, and I knew where he was. I had just finished counting his row of cells. I knew he wouldn’t be busy, and I had a good reason to return to his cell after finishing my count to chat with him. And so, on a warm July day, shortly before leaving for the day, I walked down the second story east-facing gallery to speak to one of my assigned inmates, Thomas Jones.

I’d counted this section ten minutes earlier, and my appearance on the outside of his cell was not expected. The walls between the cells were solid steel, so he did not see me coming. As I stepped into his view, I greeted him.

“‘Evening, Mister Jones,” I said. “I have some questions for your upcoming review. I’m writing a report . . . “

My voice trailed off to a stop. There was a strange sight in Thomas’s room. One that hadn’t been there ten minutes earlier. Thomas was standing and leaning back against a small steel sink in his room. At first, I thought he was holding a mop handle between his legs as a child would do if he were pretending to be riding a toy horse made of a broomstick. But Thomas’s hands were lathered up with soap suds, and so was the broom handle. It suddenly dawned on me that this was no ordinary broom handle. I didn’t know penises could get that long, but it was a penis. No doubt about it. And a long one, too! I was flummoxed. I didn’t know what to do, but Thomas did.

“What questions do you have, Mister Larsen?” he asked without stopping what he was doing.

I turned slightly to the side, looked down at my clipboard, and I picked out two or three questions that I thought were most crucial, and I asked them.

Our conversation was business-like and brief. We did not make eye contact. I kept my eyes down and made a few notations on the paper on my clipboard. I thanked him, and I excused myself. Presumably, Thomas finished his personal business shortly after I left.

There wasn’t time to tell Benjamin and Richard about what I had seen. I would soon be leaving to go home for my weekend. I'm not sure exactly how I would have described the situation, but boy did I have a story to tell my wife!

Two weekends and another week of training at the Academy would pass before I next saw Benjamin and Richard. When I returned, I did not think to mention my brief interview with Thomas. However, I did see Thomas, but there was no conversation between us about the activity I’d interrupted. He was friendly and asked if I had any more questions. Thinking it over, it did occur to me that I might give a little warning in the future as I approached a room. Perhaps I should tie a small bell to one of my shoes, but I never did.

Discussion

1. What advantages and disadvantages do you recognize in a career in corrections?
2. Do you think conjugal visits should be allowed in prisons? What problems would they solve? What problems would they cause?

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