Scenes of Prison
59. My Last Day
I retired on the first of July shortly after turning sixty-six. I had worked at LCC for thirty-five years and seventeen days. The day before I retired, a Friday, a reception had been held in my honor. People said nice things about me and wished me well in retirement. We ate cake. My wife was there.
The next day, a Saturday, would be my last day.
The day passed, routine and uneventful, and as the time drew near for me to leave for the last time, I had some time for my thoughts. All of the work was done, and everyone was busy and occupied. I sat down with a cup of coffee, and I thought of all the people I’d known at the prison. I thought about the inmates: Aamadu, David, Dan, Terry, Larry, Darnell, Stanton, Graham, Gerald, Henry, and many more. Some of them I’d known for many years. Some I’d watched grow from their teens into middle age, and I wasn’t going to be able to say “goodbye” to any of them. I would disappear from their lives, and they would never see me again, at least not inside this prison. I wondered if they would miss me. I wondered if I would miss them.
I also thought about my co-workers, Richard, Benjamin, Bonnie the Brave, Denne, Lucy, Don, Dave, Sally and her son, Steve, Bob, Hie, Diane, Darleen, Dick, Max, Mike, Daniel, and many more. We’d passed the years together, and we’d all gotten considerably older. Tragedy had visited some, and good fortune had visited others. I might see some of them occasionally in chance meetings in the community if they were still around. I would want to question them about the prison, and I wondered what they would say.
I thought about those who had been hurt and those who had died. I thought about moments of fear and moments of hilarity. I thought about the relief I’d felt when the ERT officers arrived to get control of inmates who were clearly out of control. I thought of all the stories that could be told rattling around inside these prison walls and of all the people who could tell those stories. So many stories, so many memories.
My departure on this last day would have to be routine. If the inmates knew that I was leaving for the last time, some of them might decide that I should leave with an unpleasant experience to remember them by, perhaps an injury. I didn’t want to take a chance.
Inmates in our kitchen were once asked to prepare a special cake which would be served at a celebration for a departing upper level manager of the Security force. They made the cake, but they added piss to the batter and spit to the frosting as they iced the cake. Fortunately, their misdeeds were exposed, and the cake was thrown away before anyone was served a piece. My cake, the cake we had eaten the previous day at my retirement party, had been prepared at a local grocery store.
My thoughts turned next toward the future. I’d been thinking about retirement for years, and now, it was here. The last third of my life was upon me. I would become a retired person. When I’d transitioned from student to adult, the important accomplishments of being a student drastically diminished. One’s grade point average as a student is not very important when that same person is a 40-year-old and employed in a business. I was pretty sure the same changes would occur now.
The important accomplishments and milestones of employed adult life would diminish in importance for me in retired adult life. I wondered if those changes would pass as painlessly as they did when I transitioned from child/student to employed adult. I know for many who face retirement this is not a painless process, and they drag along unfulfilled aspirations from their time as employed adults into their lives as retired adults. When such desires tempted me, I resisted them by picturing very elderly family members and imagining the unwelcome and futile efforts they might make to reach some achievement that had eluded them during their employed lives. I did not want to step into a similar doomed effort and waste the enjoyment that I hoped would come with a good retirement. I would aspire for a good retirement, and I would now begin the task of defining what that would be for me. I also remembered the humorous quote from the wife of a retired fellow who once remarked “I married him for better or for worse, but not for lunch.”
With all these weighty thoughts upon me, a light knock on the entrance door interrupted them. It was the caseworker who would relieve me. I let him in and gave him my large key ring and my two-way radio. He exchanged the fresh battery he had brought for the depleted one in the radio I had handed him, so he would have a fresh charge for his shift, and I passed on information about the events of the day. It was an exchange we carried out every day, and this was the last time I would do it. Then, it was time to go.
The caseworker let me out of the entrance door, and he stepped back inside the Unit. The door closed behind him, and I was alone in the hall. It was time to walk out for the last time.
I paused for a few moments in the hallway. The entrance door closed behind me and locked securely, and I looked up the hallway leading out of the prison. I was certain that I would make that walk, but I was uncertain what the future at the end of the hallway would bring. I had done exactly the same thing thirty-five years earlier when I paused inside the gate at the old Men’s Reformatory, looked ahead at the two-story, green Administration Building, and knew that one possible future for me lay inside the center door of that building. I didn’t know then what lay ahead, and I didn’t know now. On that early summer day so long ago, I had extended my right foot toward that possible future and my left foot had followed. I did the same thing now: right foot, left foot, and I was on my way to a new future.
I walked slowly down the hall, and when I met a turn in the hall or a door that would close behind me and lock tightly, I paused and looked back.
“I’ll never do this again,” I mused to myself. “Will I miss it?”
“No, I don’t think so,” came the answer. My spirits were beginning to rise. Could it have been excitement?
Finally, it was time to go through the heavy, sliding glass and steel doors of Turnkey, a double set of doors that controlled all movement into and out of the prison.
“KaChunk!” “KaChunk!”
It was done. I was out.
I paused in the lobby. No one was nearby, and I thought about walking into the prison thirty-five years earlier. I thought of all that had changed. The comfortable day areas with indoor-outdoor carpeting and real furniture were now tile-floored spaces bare of any furniture. If inmates wanted to sit in these areas, they had to bring stacking plastic chairs from their own rooms.
But mostly, standing alone in the lobby, I thought of the visionary experiment we had begun thirty-five years earlier to reform the way we treated inmates in Nebraska. It was our hopeful plan to remove people from cages and treat them well. Al Hansen had described it to me thirty-five long years ago on that May afternoon in his living room. Al had long ago retired and had since passed away. Bob Houston had interviewed me for a job, and he was the one who phoned to offer me a position. He had risen through the ranks all the way to the top, and he had been our Director for six years, but even he was now gone. He had moved on to another job. Had our vision of corrections left with them, or did they leave it behind? Were we still pursuing its vision? Our recidivism rate in Nebraska was one of the lowest in the country, and it had been for many years. That’s certainly a mark of success, an indication that the new approach had borne fruit.
What other ways had we made a positive difference? As I stood in the lobby, I couldn’t remember anyone asking this question, and I wondered if it could be answered. We had tried, and I had been a part of that effort. I was leaving now, but the effort was ongoing. The changes we had made had now taken root. It was the normal way we did things. We did not have a problem with staff cruelty. Yes, I thought. We had made a change for the better. It was real, and it was enduring.
Someone would now take my place. Hopefully, this person would share my desire to help and would offer their energies to contribute to this ongoing effort to care for and care about prison inmates in Nebraska.
As I drove away for the last time, a weight seemed to lift from my shoulders. It was July, and my garden was waiting for me. It needed tending. It was the weekend, but this weekend would never end. There would be no returning to this work next week.
During my years of working in the prison, I’d grown accustomed to having nightly fight-for-your-life nightmares. I’d faced shipwrecks, plane crashes, attacks by individuals and groups with and without weapons, falls, drowning, and every other life-threatening emergency a wild imagination could conjure up. Waking in the middle of the night with a racing heart desperately trying to figure out how to save my life filled many hours in the darkness of my bedroom.
During the day, terrible images would occasionally pop into my mind, paying an uninvited call that commanded my full attention. My wife would occasionally notice me sitting quietly. I appeared to be very busy doing nothing at all, and she would ask what was on my mind. I had no desire to share this experience with her. It was a burden I would have to bear alone. I told her merely that I was having “dark thoughts,” and I knew she wanted no part of them. She never questioned me further.
Experts would say these unwelcome intrusions were symptomatic of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When I retired, the dreams gradually stopped, and I could sleep soundly again without interruption. It would take longer for the dark thoughts to abandon their occasional visits, but they eventually stopped, too. Perhaps, I was done with it.
A retirement for James. A rescue from unwelcome experiences. I expected to enjoy retirement, and I might have lived out the rest of my life with the prison merely a distant fading memory. Eight years would pass, and then Scott Samuelson’s frequent visits to the meeting room at the Iowa Medical and Classification Center (Oakdale Prison) which he describes in his book Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering awakened a sleeping monster. You and I have now finished our exploration of this awakening.
Perhaps now I am finally done with it.
Discussion
- Everyone has last days scattered throughout their life - last day as a student, last day in a job. Describe some of the last day experiences that you have had.
The end
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