Scenes of Prison
9. Criminal Case Histories
I t was early on a bright, warm July morning in 1979, a week after completing my second week of new-hire training, when I arrived at the old Men’s Reformatory to report to work. I parked in the dusty parking lot, walked through the sliding entrance gate, crossed the lobby of the administration building, and nodded to the woman who operated the controls at Turnkey. I crossed the yard to the old Cell House, climbed the stairs to the second floor meeting room, and I found the room arranged with stacks of files piled high on the tables. Benjamin and Richard stood next to one of the stacks and motioned for me to join them.
“You remember you’re supposed to get to know the inmates on your caseload,” said Benjamin. “We gave you a list. Well, here’s your caseload.”
As he said this, Benjamin rested his hand on the top of one of two stacks of files lying side-by-side on the table in front of him. It was the tall pile. A shorter stack of files was positioned next to it. Benjamin addressed the two stacks.
“The tall pile contains the institutional files for the men on your caseload. The short pile contains the unit files for these same men. The records department maintains the institutional files. Your responsibility is to maintain the unit files,” he said.
He opened the top file from the pile of institutional files, and he laid it open on the table. Multiple pages of documents were neatly arranged and secured tightly to each side of the folder. Richard motioned to the left side.
“This side tells us who an inmate was when he arrived. You’ll find his Presentence Investigation, his “rap sheet,” and his Inmate Classification Study. Everything on this side was true of the inmate when we received him. If he comes to us, he has been assigned a maximum custody level because we are a maximum custody prison,” he went on.
Next, he motioned to the right side of the folder.
“The right side contains documents that tell us who an inmate is becoming during his incarceration,” added Benjamin. “Here you’ll find work reports from his work supervisor, incident reports, misconduct reports, and Parole Progress reports. Going through these reports should tell us if an inmate is improving or getting more dangerous.”
“The unit folders are supposed to look a lot like the institutional folders,” said Richard. “They don’t because you haven’t yet prepared them. In the coming weeks, you’ll spend a lot of time getting these files ready. These we keep on the Unit.”
Richard opened one of the slender unit files. “I got started with one of the unit files to show you how it’s supposed to look,” he said. “You’ll notice one major difference between these unit files and the Institutional file. The right side of the unit files has Inmate Contact Notes on top on the right side. You will be writing a new contact note every week for everyone on your caseload, and if we want to know what is going on with an inmate, we will open his unit file and read what you’ve written.”
“You will be the expert on these men,” Benjamin added. “We will be forming perceptions and making decisions based on what you have written here.
“Get started, and ask questions as you think of them,” said Benjamin.
I stepped up to the files and rested my palms on the tall stack. This would occupy a great deal of my time. I took a breath and a seat, and I opened the top institutional file, and I started to read.
Over the coming days and weeks, I learned a great deal about the men on my caseload and a great deal about corrections.
When an offender stands convicted before a Nebraska judge, he is led out of the courtroom and loaded into a van. His next stop will be the Diagnostic and Evaluation Center in Lincoln. He will not leave this facility until he is assigned a custody level and a housing location in one of our prisons, but before that can happen, they must study this inmate to learn as much as they can about him, so their decision will be an informed decision. Lives depend upon it, so they are careful, and they collect, assemble, and consider as much information about a person as they can before they make important decisions.
The first step is to complete an Inmate Classification Study. We have expert staff who complete this report. They gather all the information that is available from the sentencing court, including the Presentence Investigation. Our staff also administers tests and inventories to fill in the blanks, including psychological tests which reveal evidence of mental illness. The Classification Study reports the results of this investigation, and by the time it’s complete, we know a great deal about this inmate.
When the Inmate Classification Study is complete, its findings inform the first decision to be made about an inmate: assigning a custody status. We have several choices. They include Community Custody, Minimum Custody, Medium Custody, and Maximum Custody. Staff make this decision by considering everything learned from the Inmate Classification Study, and they pay special attention to the length of the inmate’s sentence and the violence of the crime for which an inmate has been convicted. We also make a prediction of the likelihood that an inmate will try to escape and the likelihood that an inmate will become violent and harm others. A maximum custody status is the most restrictive. A community custody status is the least restrictive. A maximum custody status reflects our conclusion that this inmate is dangerous. A community custody status reflects our belief that this inmate is not dangerous. We expect maximum custody inmates to take opportunities to victimize innocent people if they can. We are wary of maximum custody inmates.
The next decision to be made about newly arriving inmates involves placement: we assign them to a housing location within a specific prison. Once again, this decision is made very carefully, but the range of choices is constrained by the inmate’s custody level. All of our prison settings limit the custody levels of those who live there. A community corrections center with most inmates leaving the facility to work at jobs in the community would not house anyone with a maximum custody status. A maximum custody prison, providing the most restrictive living setting, would not house anyone with a community custody status.
The Lincoln Correctional Center was a maximum custody prison, so all our inmates had been assigned a maximum custody status. I also noticed that our prison received the younger, more violent offenders. They were more volatile and explosive in confrontations. Older maximum custody inmates went to the Nebraska State Penitentiary.
Custody assignments for most inmates are temporary. We expect they will change as an inmate completes self-help programs and controls or fails to control his actions while he is incarcerated. Downward moving custody assignments, from maximum through medium and minimum custody down to community levels, allows inmates to live in less restrictive housing settings. It eventually leads to them being released for periods of the day to be employed at a job in the community. When an inmate on my caseload was promoted to a custody level that allowed more freedom, he moved out of the Lincoln Correctional Center, and I lost track of him.
The first step in my work with a prisoner was to read the Inmate Classification Study, and I found one section to be very helpful: the history of past contacts a person has had with the criminal justice system, the “rap sheet.” How many times has this person been arrested? How many times has he been convicted? How many times have charges against him been dismissed? What prior sentences of incarceration have been imposed upon him? What kinds of offenses has he committed? Do these offenses involve violence? Drugs? Weapons? Gang involvement? Dishonesty? Assault? Is there a history of increasing severity of the crimes committed? At what age do the arrests begin? Who are his victims: women, children, peers, the elderly?
One question of great interest to me was how many second chances this person had squandered. It was all listed in the rap sheet, and always, for maximum custody inmates on my caseload, I found these lists of prior offenses and contacts with law enforcement to be long and discouraging. As I read through these entries, it was easy to imagine a sentencing judge looking through the same list and thinking “People are suffering. I’ve got to do something to stop this. I must put this person somewhere where everyone can be safe.”
Bill Foster, the Superintendent you’ll meet in the next chapter, spent long hours in the records department reading Inmate Classification Studies of inmates assigned to LCC. He intended to know who lived in his prison, and when he chatted with inmates, he would be able to inquire about members of the inmate’s family. He could do this because he had read their Classification Study, and he remembered the names of family members it had mentioned.
The history of arrests and other contacts a prisoner has had with the criminal justice system is an inventory of the unnecessary suffering of others. The list includes the victims of the crimes this person has committed, but it also includes the inmate’s family. They have suffered, too. They are the ones who had been grateful to earlier judges who had given the young men standing before them a second chance and dismissed charges or sentenced probation. The gratitude of these family members for a second chance is very often disappointed. The mothers and fathers, wives and children of these inmates whose hopes for a better future had been raised by the second chance were then dashed when it was squandered. These inmates, whose histories I read sitting quietly in the second floor meeting room that July, have left a trail of sorrows, sorrows of those they have harmed and sorrows of those they have disappointed.
This trail of sorrows follows them and leads inside the prison and up to these very men on my caseload. It becomes a subject we discuss as they sit across the table from me as we talk about who they have been, who they are now, and who they will become. As a caseworker, we confronted the present and planned for the future with our inmates, and I wondered and hoped that this trail of sorrows and disappointments would end here, and a new, purposeful, and positive future could unfold for them and for their families. As a caseworker, I hoped to be a part of this transformation.
Discussion
- Do you know anyone who has been incarcerated?
- Did the experience help them or make them more dangerous?
- Can you think of ways to introduce experiences that will help rehabilitate criminals?
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