March 10, 2011 | 9:34 AM | By

Drinking whiskey with a sergeant at California’s securest prison

FILED UNDER: Community, Luke Whyte, Pelican Bay State Prison, Voices of Justice

Luke Whyte

A street in Crescent City, CA, home of Pelican Bay State Prison

by Luke Whyte, Voices of Justice

We met at a bar in the back of a Mexican restaurant at the edge of town.

I wanted to know about assaults, about verbal abuse, about what it feels like to kiss your kids goodbye every day knowing there’s a very real chance an inmate will rip your throat open with a chunk of cafeteria tray before nightfall.

He told me about accepting death beneath 18 fists and 18 feet, about feeding the man that stabbed your partner, about making love to your wife with a condom for three months because someone with hepatitis shoved feces in your mouth.

Luke Whyte

It was raining outside.

In coastal Crescent City, it always seems to be raining this time of year. Sun-smothering clouds drizzle in their sleep. Wet winds slap flesh from white to red then back to white. The soul swallows salt water.

He smoked Seneca Lights — Tax-free cigarettes sold by the Native Americans who worked the land here before the prison folks, the loggers and even the gold hunters.

Most of all, I wanted to know, why. Why spent your days with rapists and murderers at what’s been called “the largest maximum security lock-up in the free world”? Why be a correctional officer at Pelican Bay State Prison?

We drank whiskey. And he told me.

“You don’t grow up wanting to be a correctional officer,” he said.

But life has a way of happening.

I was going to go into the highway patrol and then my wife got pregnant.”

The highway patrol academy took six months to complete. The correctional department academy took six weeks. The pay was the same.

Today he is a sergeant.

“Every guy I meet is a killer, a murderer or a rapist.”

Pelican Bay State Prison is the end of the line; designed to contain and isolate California’s most dangerous inmates. In the event of an earthquake, its walls are designed to collapse inward.

“The job is more clear-cut (than at lower security prisons). You know who you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with the most evil people on the face of the planet.”

I asked him what the worst part of the job is.

He said, “seeing one of my partners lying dead on the tier.”

“She ended up surviving,” he added, “but probably in my life that has been the most intense thing I’ve ever had to deal with. It has made me hate more than anything else. It has made me love more. It has made me scream. It has made me angry. It’s made me everything.

“That’s the worst part, watching your partners bleeding.”

We ordered two more glasses of Red Label.

I asked him about “gassing”.

Gassing is a form of assault where inmates ball up their feces, vomit, blood, urine and/or semen and throw it at officers.

They aim for the face, for the eyes, for the mouth.

“We’ve probably had more officers lose their mental well being because of a gassing than anything else.”

“There’s nothing like having someone else’s turd in your mouth knowing they have hepatitis or AIDS.”

Mariachi music blared from behind the bar; someone’s heart had been stolen.

“So how do you deal with that?” I said.

“You become pretty cynical. The trick is keeping that inside. And that’s been the challenge for a lot of us… Eventually almost everybody breaks down and realizes they need to handle this a little better than they have been.”

The suicide rate for correctional officers is six times the national average.

He told me about being jumped by nine inmates, about going to ground beneath their punches and kicks, about thinking, “This is it.”

It wasn’t.

Dinner was cooking when we arrived.

I asked him what the best part of the job is.

He said, “There’s a joke out there, ‘I go home today knowing I saved that child molester from that serial killer.’ And that pretty much describes the job satisfaction we get.”

But then he said, “A lot of officers tell you, ‘I’m just here for the money.’ But 99 percent of the time, that’s bullshit. You can make good money doing other things. People are here because they love their work. We’re here to keep inmates out of the community.”

The food was delicious.

As we ate, I caught one of the children stealing glances with his father. Clearly, the kid was shied by the presence of an unknown, ravenous hobo.

Dad smiled knowingly. The boy giggled. The process repeated.

Peek-a-boo.

I realized, this is why.

The table was cleared. We headed to the porch for a cigarette.

It was still raining.

I told myself more tobacco would make me feel sick.

But life has a way of happening.

We smoked Seneca Lights.

Then I realized, so is this.

Luke Whyte was recently the editor of the online magazine for correctional professionals, CorrectionsOne.com. He quit to focus on a new project called Voices of Justice, in which Whyte is hitchhiking around California, telling stories of those involved with the criminal justice system. He’ll be contributing stories regularly to the Informant. You can reach Luke at luke.whyte(at)voicesofjustice.com or (207) 266-9006.

  • Anonymous

    The pay’s the same… six months of training or six weeks of training… then spend the rest of your life bored to death watching people behind a cage… there’s no stimulation in “saving the community” when they’re already locked up. Get real. You spend the rest of your life working with “losers”… not only the convicted ones, but the colleagues who chose six weeks of training and haven’t got much on the ball either.

  • JC

    troll – or ex-felon. Either way I think we know who the loser is. CDCR is hiring if you need the job, but I suspect you would pee your pants the first week and quit… I can smell it on you… and the coward odor is unmistakable.

    I applaud the article. The only part of society that hates on C/O’s are those that are guests of the state. No one else gives a #%^%&

    Ever been “wrongly” stopped and ticketed by a C/O who is hiding in a speed trap in a nice neighborhood? I thought not.

    If you hate what you are told to hate you are a SHEEP! Isn’t that scary?

    If you think it’s easy and the C/O’s are overpaid, Come on in, and join. Or, I forget, you would rather earn $7.00 hr for the principal (even though I suspect you contribute nothing and expect everything). Or, let me guess, you make $75,000 a year, and you are just appalled by the treatment of the 170,000 poor wrongly convicted men.

    Please……………

  • MemphisBlue77379

    You really have no idea of what you are talking about. You are a complete idiot. I know what he is going through. I am one in Texas. My ex-husband is a stupid police officer that thought he could do a correctional officer job. He left after just 3 years because he could not handle the “stress” of it. He is fat-frickin-happy in his Roscoe P. Coltrane job, writing tickets to idiots like you.

    Correctional officers should be paid much more than they are. These are the men and women who do not get to go home at the end of the shift, if there isn’t anyone to come relieve them. We work 365 days a year. When the state cuts the budget, we are the first affected. When pay raises are handed out, we are the last in line.

    No, there isn’t 6 months of training to get our badge, we are in training every day. We work tirelessly and without complaint, knowing that we are the ones that keep these “wonderful members of society” away from the public. We are the ones that know that the offenders are smarter than you are. Many have advanced college degrees and can make a weapon out of things that you could never believe.

    Next time you have the urge to open your stupid mouth and reveal your intellegence level, don’t. People like you make me want to vomit.

  • Wrath-man

    Wow! Good article, but I don’t know how well I like stories like this. I can see what the writer is trying to convey, but at the same time it feels like he’s trying to draw sympathy, and I just don’t like that.

    We as C/O’s have a lot that we have to deal with on a daily basis. Not just assaults or having to walk into an environment that most people fear just to earn a living, but other stressors. I think other issues are bigger factors to most of us…having to deal with incompetent management…being unfairly potrayed to the public by the media, just so they can stay in business…having those in power manipulate your paycheck just because they can. Those are the things that are more than likely causing me to die within a year or 2 after my retirement, like I’ve seen so many of my partners do over the past 15 years.

    After reading the reply from “more_questions”, there is no doubt that he or she is CHP, and should know that the pay is NOT the same. You guys were obviously picked by our past Governor to be the golden children and didn’t have to suffer what we’ve had to over these past 6 years, especially the past 2. What gets me is how you would feel the need to come on to an article like this and look down your nose at us.

    I won’t deny that we have some employee’s that have somehow manage to slip through the cracks and make it into our profession. It’s going to happen. We’re the 2nd largest law enforcement agency in the country, 2nd only to NYPD. Those are the employee’s that tend to make it into the news papers and make us as a whole look bad. For whatever reasons, the media never chooses to print anything positive about the good things that many of our employee’s do.

    For you to say that my colleagues are “losers” is one of the biggest slaps in the face that I’ve ever experienced. I have some amazing partners and have had over the years. The real truth, they ARE the reason that I go to work. So take your smug attitude elsewhere. My partners and I would probably run circles around you and your fat colleagues. We don’t train to sit in a car for 8 hours. We train to run/respond into fights between people intent on killing….each other, us, or whoever they can get their hands on sometimes…We even have to “save” them from themselves most of the time when they decide to try to take their own life and expose us to financial liability when the department, or the inmates family, wants to go on a “cop” hunt, to find out what it is that we didn’t do to stop them.

    So don’t look down your nose at us or discredit our profession. Most of us are proud of what we do, whether you or the community want to see what really do.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=689913316 B Cayenne Bird

    As you two macho swashbucklers were doing your tall story tellin’, why didn’t you question why there is but a small percentage of “violent” inmates in prison? What about the time the United Nations had to come into Pelican Bay because the guards decide to put a mentally ill man in boiling hot water. He was acting out after extreme psychological torture in the inhumane Supermax prison. The episode ended up costing Calif taxpayers $400 mil and the entire prison went into federal receivership because torture is a worse crime than most of the inmates are incarcerated for committing. What about the time there was a Tsunami alert and the lovely (not) guards boarded up all the inmates in their cells and left them at the prison to die? In spite of solid research that proves Supermax prisons drives men mad and they serve no penological purpose, public safety is endangered with these bloodhouses. I am not surprised that it takes a little whiskey to tell stories of being a participant in torture. Maybe as a journalist, you need to a sober person to talk with, huh?

  • Hurricaneterm

    Just another c/o.

    I’m sick of hearing people open their mouth and spew out lame, uneducated comments regarding a professon they have never experienced, I can’t really say it better than the above comments but just to add it is a 16 week academy and we make much less money than CHP. I don’t have a problem with the CHP personally however I have a problem with people talking on subjects they have no expertise in, especially inmate lovers in the public who have no clue of the real world. If they or their loved ones were the victim then I’m sure they would have a different attitude regarding prisons and prisoners. Inmates have too many rights. If they think they have it bad here they need to go to Korea or China and serve their time there……EVERY DEPARTMENT HAS IT’S BAD SEEDS, NONE ARE EXEMPT……

  • Wrath-man

    Ha! Dr. Cayenne Bird…We meet again. You and I have crossed swords before…

    Dr. Bird is a very vocal inmate activist with some very special interests in CDCR. It seems that she has a son that’s doing time in one of our institutions and apparently he likes to cry to momma about poor living conditions and alleged abuses. How is little Johnny doing now, and what was his crime again?

    Dr. Bird also has problems with telling the whole truth about things and likes to paint these pictures of horrid conditions and torture, but likes to leave out a lot of the facts. It’s funny how inmate activists like to do that!

    Here’s some facts that the good doctor forgot to mention.

    In the case of the “boiled” inmate.

    1) The man was on trial for another crime and was attempting to sway the judge into believing that he was insane. So he covered himself in feces prior to showing up in court. The judge ordered the Department to bathe him prior to his next court appearance.

    2) The inmate was obviousely un-willing, and of course resisted.

    3) After the bath, the inmate’s body was covered with redness and blistering. It’s funny how feces will do that to the human skin. It’s something that most of us that have ever raised children have seen numerous times in the form of “diaper rash”.

    Why don’t you try being honest about things instead of trying to make the public feel bad and hate us because of your own failures as a parent.

    I think it’s pretty obvious to not bite into this kind of stuff and believe everything that you read. The State and court system is overwhelmed with frivilous allegations by inmates and their families that have nothing but time on their hands to create these tall tales. They have nothing to lose. I’ve had numerous inmates tell me ” All I’ve got to do is wait, the State will get tired of this and settle.” They refer to this as their “hustle”, and there is so little that we can do as “C/O’s” to stop it!

    I’m just hoping that one of these days the California public is going to see the frivality of this kind of stuff and get tired of watching their tax dollars being wasted and demand that the State take away the ability of these CONVICTED FELONS to do this. At the very least, hire some better qualified attorneys! The State needs to realize that it would be a whole lot cheaper to put forth a quality defense than to just roll over to these un-justified “Agreements” that become quick sand and costing the State billions.

    Have a good day Doc!

  • 161 Signer

    The misinformed about our work is prevelent in your statement. The inmates may be locked in cages, but we are locked in the cages with them. People have this misconception that inmates are safely kept inside cells. This is so untrue. Most of the day they spend outside of those cells of protection that you incorrectly assume isolate them from the prison staff.

  • Amazed

    “Seeing one of my partners lying dead on the tier”…..”“She ended up surviving,” he added, ……………..“but probably in my life that has been the most intense thing I’ve ever had to deal with. It has made me hate more than anything else. It has made me love more. It has made me scream. It has made me angry. It’s made me everything.

    Is this guy for REAL? Obviously not too familiar with what “dead” means………..or not too familiar with reality or honesty. Seems like he lies to himself for effect, but even more bizzare…..it seems he probably expects others to believe him.
    This psudo “death” is the most intense thing he’s ever had to deal with? He REALLY doesn’t sound too stable, nor does he sound like he’s experienced much of life…REAL LIFE. And it’s ma

  • Wrath-man

    Oh! and here’s just one more little fact to dispell another of Dr. Bird’s lies. Anyone who’s ever worked at Pelican Bay will tell you that the prison itself sits about 5 miles inland from the coast. Even the sunami’s from yesterday’s quake in Japan didn’t go that far inland…right at the epi-center. The C/O’s there didn’t board up the inmates cells and leave them to die, they just went about work as usual.

    This small percentage of violent inmates that you speak of, is that at the level 4 facilities too, because that’s all I’ve ever worked. They all seem to be there for some reason or another, but it’s usually because of violence…either in their crime of commitment or since they’ve been in prison.

    Now watch as this venomous liar disappears into the the darkness like a cockroach in the light when you shine truth and fact upon her…

  • Joe

    Shame on you for telling us lies. Tell me why your son is in prison and how much you have won from law suit you have file ? You tell it but from one side. Shame on you your son is burden to us tax payers . I see it you don’t talk about how you fail make productive person for society just how we have to deal with him now because you could not.’

  • Pelon

    B C Bird,,,, I have 26 years in the system,, at PBSP and a prison in central Calif,,,, first off the water was not boiling,,, the inmate covered himself with feces, the inmate won 1 million dollars I understand, PBSP is not on the beach, it is inland by at least 4 to 5 miles,,, your Tsunami story is a fantasy, you work your way up to PBSP by being out of control and violence,,,

    your husband is no doubt a inmate….

  • Rflo

    more/questions, is that your scared name ? because you sound like someone who use to wear blue pants and shirt that say’s “CDC PRISONER”. Your probably on parole and mad at C/O’s who put you in your place! right?

  • Anonymous

    The court settled for $1 million in the inmate’s favor and the United Nations ordered $400 million in changes, plus a federal receiver was appointed. I hardly think that this was over skimpy evidence.

  • Anonymous

    The prison was built in a hole and there have been 17 tsunamis in Crescent City. It wouldn’t be hard for that hole to fill up and mass murder would be committed. In 1964 the town was wiped out. This was before the prison was built. Be careful how you justify the danger there. Truth has a way of full circling.