The Backstory to ‘Into The Abyss’
Editor’s Note: We recently ran a book excerpt—a chapter called “The Abyss”, from a not yet published book by RJ Reilly, a former prison guard. (The book is tentatively titled The Cooler, and Reilly is represented by Tristram C. Coburn Literary Management.)
A reader saw the post on Reddit and commented over there: “Wow that preview hooked me. Is this the author who took the job at the prison because the staff wouldn’t let him do interviews for the book, or was that someone else?”
As a matter of fact, no, it was not that author. RJ Reilly never set out to be an author — nor a prison guard. He wanted to be a musician. Here is his story.
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“Children never tell their parents: when I grow up I want to be a prison guard.”
I was born in Manchester, England, on May, 30th, 1967. My school life was a catalog of academic and team-sport disasters. I taught myself to play guitar and piano, learned to rock climb and ski, raced motorcycles and boxed as an amateur. My parents allowed me to do anything dangerous, insisted I went to church every Sunday, and always told me that absolutely anything was possible.
At the age of sixteen I left school to travel and work. I labored in factories, forests and on farms. I taught rock climbing, wrote songs and dreamt about having hit records. In 1988 I made the jump to playing music full time and moved to London. Miraculously, I scored a recording and publishing deal and other small deals followed. I got married to my girlfriend, Sarah, in 1990.
In 1992 an opportunity to play and tour in the US took me to Nashville. After a year in Tennessee, I decided to stay in America. I played gigs from New York to Los Angeles, and in every toilet in-between. The promise of success came and went and as it did, Sarah suffered silently while I worked on “the big hit” and a long list of lousy part-time jobs. After almost fifteen years of struggling, and despite scoring several small recording and publishing deals in the UK, Australia and the US, I found myself completely broke and on the edge of despair. The specter of success in the music business had become a monster threatening to ruin my marriage and turn me into the sort of father who never saw his children. Either something was going to change, or something was going to break beyond repair.
A chance conversation with a neighbor led me to apply for a job as a guard at a large county prison. It was a “real job” and in comparison to the hit and miss wages I’d made as a musician, the teamsters’ benefits, paid time off and forty grand a year seemed like a small fortune. So in an effort to put my family first, I left the madness of the music business and entered the insanity of the US prison system. What I found there was disturbing, amazing and on occasion, hilarious.
Over the next six years I lived in a world within a world where things were quite often not what they appeared. I learned to walk the wire between guards and inmates, good guys and bad guys while trying constantly to work out who was who and what was what. Through numerous close calls, extremely dangerous situations and crazy personal interactions I became known as THE COOLER (a prison nickname for guards who are an even-keeled voice of calm and reason within a vicious and violent arena constantly on edge). The daily business of prison life with all its drama, fascinating characters and Machiavellian staff politics was a wild education. The funny thing was, as time passed and my visions of fame and fortune faded, what I wanted for my family finally seemed to be emerging; being a reliable husband, the best father possible, and holding down a steady job became the principal focus of my life.
After a tragic and untimely death in my family, my wife and I started to look more closely than ever at our children, where we lived, and out toward a new horizon. Our cookie cutter suburban life in strip mall Hades, and the suffocating over-development closing in all around, kept telling us the same thing over and over: it was time to move out to the country.
The criteria were simple; relocate to the mountains or the ocean, get away from the city with all its problems and distractions and somehow make a simpler life. But before we could move, I had to find a new job.
The surest way for me to acquire stable employment was to find work using my developing people skills, even if they were incarcerated people skills. So we set our sights on beautiful mid-coast Maine, with its rugged mountains, quaint small towns, pristine harbors, and critically understaffed state maximum security prison with all the overtime a man with a mortgage and family could want.
Once at my new job, the unformed thoughts I’d had about the prison I’d just left solidified and led me to realize I was and had been nothing but a tiny cog in an enormous machine. I was part of the problem, not the solution. During this six year journey, I became an American citizen, a dad for the third time, lost my wonderful father-in-law to cancer while inmates I supervised had their cancer cured by our tax dollars, and discovered the true importance of love and family values.
Becoming a prison guard in most state or federal run prisons is akin to becoming a police officer. Background checks and physicals, as well as psychological exams, are common. It’s somewhat easier to become a prison guard because the nature of the work doesn’t attract as many applicants as police work does and it’s easier to find a job.
The prison culture is a sub-culture of military life. Prisoners are treated as recruits in boot camp; guards are treated as inferiors who have not yet been toughened against caring. Firmly in place is the “Kid System” of prison hierarchy – standing by your designee long after human decency would dictate otherwise.