In this excerpt from Rob Reilly’s upcoming book “The Cooler,” he finds out that no inmate is easy to read.
Skinners and rats: prison slang for sex offenders and informants. Good inmates: an oxymoron.
While working protective custody one night I struck up a conversation with a trustee. The inmate was about five foot six, and probably weighed a little over a hundred pounds. His hair was long dark and greasy. His complexion was that of a spotty teenager who had just had his first shave and was a little embarrassed about the results. The kid was only nineteen years old, scared of everything and reminded me of an injured bird. As the young fear-filled inmate mopped around my desk and emptied the trash can at my feet, we started to talk. All the other inmates were on lock-down and secured in their cells. The only other person present was a middle-aged, exhausted looking prison psychologist who was at a table in the middle of the day room processing paperwork. Every now and then he asked me to let out a prisoner so he could get them to sign something then, after the paperwork was taken care of, I would lock them back in. I quietly asked the young trustee to stop working and, if he wouldn’t mind, to sit down and talk with me for a moment.
“Why, what do you want to know?” he asked rather defensively.
I turned my chair around to face him and told him to sit in one of the riot proof arm chairs he was mopping around. I remember telling him I thought he didn’t fit in and something about that bothered me.
“Why don’t you think I fit in here?” He looked down at his feet when he talked and picked constantly at a large cold sore at the corner of his mouth. When he did look up, he only glanced at me nervously, his eyes hardly ever meeting mine.
“This unit is full of sex offenders and prison informants and I don’t know why I feel this way but for some reason I don’t think you’re in the right place.”
The young inmate put the mop in the bucket, leaned the handle against the wall and sat down in the chair he had just been cleaning around. The old psychologist looked up to see what was going on. He recognized a break in the usual routine and an unusual interaction between guard and prisoner. I glanced up at the psychologist and he looked back down at the paperwork in front of him.
Out of the blue, the inmate asked me, “Do you have kids Mr. Reilly?” Normally, I would say I’d rather not talk about my family but that night I answered, yes I do, I have three young children. Then the inmate said something that completely threw me.
“I bet you’re a really good dad. You wanna know something? I never met my dad.” He kept talking. “Once, when I was about eight or nine, my mom told me my dad was going to take me out to the Philadelphia zoo the following day. She took me shopping and bought me new sneakers, jeans and a sweatshirt.
That next morning I got up really early. My mom was already awake and had made me my lunch and put it in a brown paper grocery bag. She told me my dad was going to come and pick me up after breakfast. Each time a car passed the outside of our trailer I jumped up, kneeled on the couch and whipped open the curtains. I wasn’t sure who I was looking for because my mom didn’t have any pictures of him but I was sure he would be driving a pickup truck and I was pretty sure he would want to hold my hand when we were walking around the zoo. The morning dragged by and slowly turned into lunchtime. I got hungry and ate half my sandwich. I saved the rest for later to eat with my dad. Sometime in the afternoon it started to rain. I remember my mom started to clean the trailer like crazy; I was pretty positive she was getting it looking really nice for my dad. I thought mom was doing such a good job because if the trailer looked great maybe my dad might want to come and live with us. At dinnertime mom ordered pizza and Pepsi. The rain was really coming down hard as it got dark but I didn’t care. I was convinced the zoo would be open at night because that was where the animals lived.
My mom let me eat as much pizza and drink as much Pepsi as I wanted. My belly became swollen up like a balloon and I remember making my mom laugh each time I burped. I watched cartoons until really late, and then I remember my mom’s face being all red and swollen. I kept asking her over and over again, ‘Is my dad going to be here soon?’ That’s when she started to cry, and then she told me she didn’t think he was coming”
A deep silence filled the air after the young inmate finished talking. I kept looking at him until he looked up and his eyes met mine.
“So you’ve never met your dad?”
The young inmate shook his head and then stared blankly down at the floor. I sensed a movement and looked up. The old psychologist was watching and listening. Again, I looked at him and he quickly looked down, returning to his paperwork.
“So tell me, how did you end up in here?”
The inmate raised his head and looked right at me. “I got my girlfriend pregnant and her mother went crazy and called the cops. I’m nineteen and she’s fifteen. I got a year for statutory rape.”
“You were worried about general population weren’t you?” There was another long pause.
“Yeah, I can’t fight and I’m not even a good talker, if those guys found out about my charges I know I couldn’t handle it. I’m not a rapist, Mr. Reilly. Honestly I’m not.”
“So you took Protective Custody right?”
“Yeah, I just felt like it would be safer up here, but I’m not sure it is. My cellie’s crazy.”
“So what are you going to do when you get out?”
“I’m going to try and get a job and be with my girlfriend and the baby. We love each other…”
There was nothing to say, nothing that wouldn’t sound patronizing or out of place. I fumbled around for the right words. “I hope it works out for you. Thanks for sharing your story with me; you can head back to your cell.”
“Thanks Mr. Reilly.”
After the inmate put the mop and bucket away and locked in, the tired looking psychologist collected up his papers, put them in his case and walked toward me and the cell block door. I picked up the radio, keyed the mic and asked the housing control officer to open Charlie Two. The door clicked open, but instead of leaving the psychologist put his old leather brief case on my desk and said to me, “I’ve been doing this job for over twenty years and in all that time I’ve never heard a guard talk to an inmate the way you talked to that young man tonight.” Before I could answer, the psychologist sighed through a tired, defeated smile, shook his head slowly, picked up his case and left. The door slammed heavily behind him.
♦◊♦
A few months later I was in the video store and a thin, boyish voice behind me said, “Hello Mr. Reilly.”
It was the young inmate from protective custody. He looked exactly the same; malnourished, skinny and scared. A very young girl with a baby stood next to him; she looked about sixteen and not yet old enough to drive…
The young man had kept his word and seeing him with his family moved me. I was hopeful that their baby would grow up to know his dad and the cycle would be broken.
♦◊♦
My intuition and sense of the inmates was a developing skill I was learning to lean on. I was starting to feel pretty confident about reading my charges and getting to know them for who they really were. My run-in with the newly released young man at the video store confirmed that he was a good kid; a good kid – not a rapist – posing no threat to society, wanting nothing more than to be a good dad.
During my next rotation, in a medium security, general population housing unit, Inmate Michael was always there when I needed him. He was a good inmate and always willing to lend an extra hand during clean-up, be a stand-in worker on the food line, or scrub down the showers when the regular workers couldn’t get the job done properly. He gave me a heads-up if something troublesome was percolating and, in short, he was a hard worker and an informant no one suspected of being a rat. Whatever it was I needed, he was there to oblige. After the initial period of suspicion wore off and I got to see some consistency in his actions, I actually got to like Michael. He was so helpful and straightforward I was kind of impressed by him and wondered why he wasn’t having success in life outside of prison. He wasn’t necessarily the kind of guy I’d have house sit, but I felt like he could be trusted enough to mow my grass or detail my car for a few bucks.
He told me he grew up in a poor neighborhood without a father (a theme that was starting to sound all too common), got in trouble after high school and caught a couple of small prison bids for steeling. After going straight for a few years he bought a bag of weed from an undercover cop and ended up getting locked down again. I honestly felt sorry for him.
There were a couple of occasions when Michael actually helped me out. An argument between several African American and Hispanic inmates was about to erupt into a full blown fist fight. There was a lot of cursing, pointing and pre-brawl posturing. I stepped into the middle of things but it was like I wasn’t there. Whatever was the cause of the trouble was beyond my resolve. I yelled out for the inmates to “settle down and back off!” but no one was listening. Realizing things were escalating out of control; I pulled out my radio, raised it to my mouth and was about call for “assistance” when the burly figure of Michael walked boldly into the middle of the fray and yelled out, “C’mon cut it out!”
For whatever reason, the group of five or six men stopped yelling at each other and walked away in opposite directions. I was so impressed. Michael was able to do something I wasn’t and seemingly didn’t think it was a big deal. I spoke with him later and told him how much I appreciated what he did but he shrugged it off and wouldn’t accept my thanks.
On another occasion, a group of inmates was watching the Miss Universe contest. It was very interesting overhearing the respectful tone and content of the conversations regarding the contestants. The inmates were commenting on the outfits, singing and dancing abilities of the women. One of young women interviewed said she’d just been accepted into medical school. This really got the viewers excited. One of the inmates said something foul and unfunny about the pre-med beauty queen giving him a physical. Michael took exception to this, reprimanded the foul-mouthed viewer and, in front of the other inmates, sent him away from the TV for being disrespectful to women. Again, I was impressed.
When Michael eventually left prison, I wished him the best and hoped he continued to act on the outside the same way I’d witnessed him acting on the inside. I remember telling him, if he continued to conduct himself the way he had been, he’d be on the right track and surely find success.
It turned out that I couldn’t have been more wrong about Michael. I was as wrong as wrong could be. Several weeks later, he was back in prison – not for buying weed or stealing. No, he was incarcerated this time for raping and murdering a sixty-nine year old Sunday school teacher.
I felt sick. So much for my ability to read people.
—Photo SNappa2006/Flickr