CRIME BEAT
by Richard Korn, Ph.D.,
Retired Professor of Criminal Justice
"Turnkeys" and "Hacks"
In 1974 an inmate on the main line of a Georgia prison was transferred to
a Special Housing Unit-a solitary confine-ment block-for writing too many
writs. The Warden requesting the transfer was quite explicit about his reasons:
"He has written so many writs that it has taken an extra, separate
file to hold his legal papers. He has continuously complained about mistreatment.
Hardwick has chosen an antisocial path. Therefore it is recommended that
he be transferred to the GDCC (Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center)
to participate in their behavior modification program in the hope that this
will change his devious trend."
Hardwick used his augmented spare time to study law books, redoubled his
litigious behavior, became the representative of all the other lost souls
in the unit, and filed a class action suit that won the admiration and help
of the Georgia Bar and the state ACLU. A fairly conservative federal judge
would later rule that the program at GDCC was merely an old-style "hole"
redesignated as a "treatment facility."
Many years before, I had helped design and administer a prototype SHU in
the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton. After coming to my moral senses
I became an expert witness in the effect of these places on the human mind
and personality. The hole at Jackson, Georgia was one of the worst I had
seen-and it was driving every one confined in it to the brink of madness.
Eventually, I planned a new kind of criminal justice college, a graduate
school for non-offenders. Prisoners and staff would be invited to participate
as "mentors" and "facilitators" during the intramural
phase of this program. Then it occurred to me that I should include officers
and prisoners as "students." Why not invite them to become not
only scholars but gentle-persons as well?
But who would stand still for this? Even if higher administration agreed-which
is always problematic-how would the idea fare among the custodians? Three
possibilities offered a ghost of hope: Suppose the correctional officers
were invited to participate as full partners from the very outset? Suppose
that the same educational opportunity was offered to them? Suppose that
inmate continuation in the program was contingent on good behavior (not
just as scholars, but as gentlemen)?
In 1981, Scott Cristianson and I published a highly charged article in The
Washington Post entitled, "The Other Prison Problem: Regaining Control
of the Guards." The data adduced in the article were inflammatory;
so, we believed, were the realities on which we based them. Our thesis could
be reduced to two propositions and one policy recommendation:
1. Led by their unions, correctional officers, as an occupational group,
have gotten out of control and are increasingly taking the law into their
own hands.
2. Administrative capitulation to guards is as insidious and dangerous as
surrender to inmates had always been; nevertheless, the same guards who
traditionally denounce negotiation with prisoners as a "shameful surrender
to criminals" are now demanding unilateral control of penal policy.
3. Prison officials (we mostly meant correctional officers) can't expect
prisoners to correct themselves unless they clean up their own act. They
can begin by conforming to the same standards of law and decency they enforce
on their clients.
Our indictment was appropriate as far as it went, and we still stand by
it. No group should take the law into its own hands, or enforce on others
the same rules which it ignores or violates. But our article failed to ask
the obvious question: Why do correctional officers themselves sometimes
behave in ways indistinguishable from the prisoners they guard? Had we asked
that question we might have come up with an hypothesis equally ironic: Maybe
they misbehave for the same reason that most other offenders do: because
they feel deprived of any legitimate power to affect the forces which affect
them.
The parallel seems appropriate. Following what they construed to be the
military model of command, prison administrators, until the recent past,
have demanded unilateral control over the activities of prison officers-treating
them, in effect, like inmates at one remove. Nothing is more human than
to resent and resist those who hold the levers of one's fate in their exclusive
hands and who refuse to negotiate how that power can be better shaped by
sharing.
In a country which has pioneered the rights of the labor, nothing should
have been more predictable than the consequences of that refusal to negotiate.
Correctional workers have merely done what other misused groups have done:
they have turned the tables on those who unilaterally dominated them and
seized control with their own hands. Unfortunately, in liberating themselves,
they have merely exchanged roles with their former bosses. Ask any Commissioner
and Warden who must face the correctional workers' union over the negotiating
table. The principle of unilateral control remains intact, but now it is
the union which dictates most of the work rules.
I came into the prison business in 1952. That was before the labor movement
had rescued prison guards from what used to be a "calling" and
given them in return a "job." In those old days, the hours were
long, the pay was rotten, and the public image of the "turnkey"
was an unceasing insult. But every one of us in the joint knew who The Man
was and knew we had to rely on him for whatever order, dignity and decency
could be had in those places.
The one principle which the best of them held as a matter of faith was told
to me by an elderly sergeant who had ended his education before high school.
He said: "There's only one thing you have to do to make it with cons.
When they are right, you stand up FOR them. When they're wrong, you stand
up TO them. And you never, never, never let them (pointing his finger upward,
where the bosses lived) take that job away from you. Because if they do,
they'll screw it up and then it's us and the cons who do the dying."
When I served in the army, like all line officers who had been overseas,
I knew that it wasn't the generals who controlled the fighting on the ground.
Nor was it the colonels, the majors, the captains, nor even the second lieutenants;
it was the sergeants and the corporals. And the reason they could run it
was because they knew that it wasn't them either. It was the G.I. and his
buddies who ran it-and they ran it not for the colonels and generals, or
even for the Cause, noble as that was in World War II. They ran it and ran
it well for one another and for their parents and sweethearts back home-because
the worst thing they feared was having to write home on behalf of some dead
buddy they felt that they had let down.
The "Military Model"? In the field there was only one model: the
friendship, the respect, of one man for another. True, that could extend
to individual Brass if they had earned it. (Bradley was loved, Ike was liked,
and Patton was respected.) The reason that Bradley was loved was that he
cared about his soldiers and listened to them. In a word, he commanded because
he knew how to negotiate. And the reason he negotiated was that only people
who could negotiate their fate cared enough to fight for it, to die for
it, and to do the same for you.
Nothing I have seen in prisons since 1952 has persuaded me that these operational
imperatives have changed. What has changed is our observation of them. In
the old days, the cell-block officer didn't have a "tac squad"
to call on to keep things from getting out of control. Typically, he didn't
need the goon squad because he knew how to prevent problems from requiring
violent resolutions. When the inmate was right, that inmate would be supported.
When the inmate was wrong, that inmate would be escorted out of the cell-block
by him, not by a gung-ho gang of faceless strangers with weird headgear
and bizarre weapons.
The most inspiring interaction between an old-style C.O. and a goon squad
I have ever seen took place in Walla-Walla prison. A senile, physically
broken-down convict had taken an extra ice-cream cone from the mess hall
and fled back to his "home" with the mess-hall officer in hot
pursuit. Appearing at the closed gate of the block with his club in his
hand, the mess-hall officer demanded entrance. His intent was plain: he
was going to teach that convict a lesson with his club. When he furiously
demanded to be let in, the cell block officer said, softly but distinctly,
"Over my dead body." When the Tac Squad arrived, he said the same
thing to them. That was how little he cared for the "peer loyalty among
correctional officers" that is so powerful these days.
Peer loyalty wasn't talked about because it was taken for granted. But it
did not legitimately excuse the sacrifice of inmates. The line officer's
duty was to guard his inmates-not only from one another but from any one
who might wrongfully harm them. And that included other officers, the Captain,
the Warden, the Commissioner, and the welfare worker who neglected a convict's
family. Caring had not yet been professionalized in prisons. It had not
yet been made the exclusive province of special professions called Social
Work and Counseling; it was something that every one was supposed to do.
Whatever I learned of value about prison work I did not learn from my teachers
or my professional supervisors or from books. I learned it from the same
correctional officers that I and too many of my colleagues would later stereotype
as "hacks," "turnkeys" or--in the more insulting because
more dehumanizing jargon of the trade--"the custodial mentality."
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