The Four Stages of Cruelty
OF CRUELTY
“In memory of two good fathers,
Graham Hollihan and Fred Williams.”
Die, dear, that I may love you;
Live, and be my foe.
—N
IKOS
K
AZANTZAKIS
God has undertaken a plan: it is a daring and risky plan, involving God in so much ambiguity—one might almost say subterfuge—that he begins to look like a double agent, becoming compromised at many points in order to pull off the solution.
—N. T. W
RIGHT
Let’s say your name is Joshua. You’re eighteen years old, a quiet student who likes to draw and an otherwise normal person, but you’re going out of your mind because your ex-girlfriend won’t talk to you anymore and has been hooking up with another guy. You know her parents are out of town and you know she’s with him in her living room right now, lying on the couch, shirt off, jeans unzipped, because that’s exactly what you would have been doing with her on a Friday night a month or so before. You take your father’s gun because you want her to know how painful it feels and how far you’d go to get her back. But when you’re finally there, standing in the middle of the living room, nothing works out the way you’d planned. Not that you had any plans. The girlfriend, you realize, is no longer your girlfriend. She’s screaming at you to get out, and there’s a look in her eyes that doesn’t fit with the way you feel. Meanwhile, her new boyfriend has decided to go all Rambo. It gets crazy. You’re both fighting over the gun like it’s a live snake, and it’s pointing this way and that. You just want to get a firm hold on it, put it away, and go home. But Rambo won’t let go.
And then he does, and you’re both out of breath, and all the emotions have drained away, and you just leave. You drive home, numb and shaky, praying no one calls the cops or your parents. You’re terrified for a month and ashamed for about a year. You bounce back a little in your second year of college and switch majors, dropping pre-medicine to work on a degree in psychology with as many fine art classes as you can squeeze in. Once in a while you think about that Friday night. You even gain some perspective on it. In one of your classes, you read some statistics about violent crimes and young males. It’s practically an epidemic, except no one acknowledges it. At seventeen to twenty, the human brain isn’t developed enough to fully distinguish right from wrong, reality from fantasy, but the young male has all this emotion and power and little ability to express it except through physical violence or acts of self- destruction. That’s how soldiers and suicide bombers get recruited. Sitting there in the library, drawing pictures of her along the margins of your notebook, you think about that gun and what it felt like holding it, and how it slipped around in your hands when you were fighting, and how goddamn scary those few seconds of un certainty were. And you put down your pen, cover up the drawing, and thank God that nothing bad really happened.
Now, let’s say the gun went off.
I can think of no gentle way to begin.
I need to explain why the biggest mystery for me was not how an inmate could go missing inside a maximum security penitentiary, nor what the drawings meant, or even who was involved in the murders. The thing that stays with me, like the memory of a limb now gone, is the mystery of human compassion. The twisted variations of it, the love and the hurt, the obsession and the neglect, the abuse and the need, all commingled and bound. Although I am as cynical and skeptical as can be expected, given my experience, I am not one to deny that genuine relationships can form between inmates and corrections officers. I do know, however, that those relationships are almost universally based on some form of trade, a commerce of getting by. You need them as much as they
need you, and I will admit that debts accumulate and sometimes must be paid off in ways that compromise what you think is right. This can happen to any of us.
My name is Kali Williams. I doubt that my parents, when they changed a few letters in the more conventionally spelled Kaylee, knew they were naming me after the many-armed Hindu goddess of darkness and destruction. But out of that dull midwestern instinct to be safe but slightly different, I sprang: a personality of sharp edges and bruising elbows.
If this were just a story about Ditmarsh Penitentiary and my work within it, I would probably start by discussing the routine and even the incidentally interesting aspect of being a thirty-nine-year-old female—one of only 26 women on a corrections staff of 312—providing daily operational security over 950 (plus or minus) hard-core assholes, sex offenders, addicts, liars, serial felons, white-collar dick suckers, gang-bangers, and relatively honest murderers. I enjoyed my job. I liked the bang and clang of the cellblocks, the armored ease you needed to show in getting by, the acute attention to psychology and mood. For the most part, the bullshit bounced off me, the rat-a-tat routine of jokes and looks, the subtle grind of male criticism disguised half-assedly as helpfulness. I never questioned the right and wrong of the work—it was pretty goddamn clear to me, and still is—but there were times when I got stuck wondering how I’d become this person who wore the belt and jangled the keys and relied on the way the quick decisions got backed up by the remorseless rules. Nothing good came of those moods, however, and I avoided them as much as possible. I have an irritable impatience for the
overly steeped, self-pitying emotions of anyone with too much time on their hands, including, and perhaps especially, myself.
This is not about my job, though, or about me; it’s about what happened, and all those mysteries I mentioned, and the mystery of compassion most of all. Even when I found the body dangling from a door in the abandoned cells beneath the prison, so terribly abused, it was the absence of compassion, the lack of pity in the place, that hit me hardest. Though surrounded by the dark output of violent lives, I had never before seen the ravages of such unrestrained brutality. I forced myself to edge past, pressing up against the cold wall where the scrawled drawings were most tangled, in order to see the face. In that dead gaze, was I the delayed rescuer or another tormenter? I’m not sure I can answer without sorting through the events that led up to it. As I said, I can think of no gentle way to begin.
I liked the in-between times, too. It was the illusion of control, the condensed privacy. The post-dinner lull was a favorite of mine, a period in which inmate frustrations seemed to ebb and alpha energy got transferred into focused tasks. Even in
the winter I often crossed the yard when I moved from building to building, avoiding the tunnels just to take it in. The cell lights showed narrow slashes in the granite, like countless white crosses in a military cemetery. In the mess hall, you knew the born-agains were with group. In the gym, the squeak and snap of basketball. In the library, the amateur lawyers searched for precedents like paleontologists dusting off dirt-covered rocks. In their cells, the book readers flipped pages of dog-eared mysteries, hoping the endings hadn’t been ripped out. At key-up, when we sealed the cells and locked the blocks, the inmates got restless and edgy again, but after midnight, those who weren’t asleep wanted to be alone, and that suited us fine. All the innocence held until an hour before breakfast, when a sizable minority woke and did whatever exercises, prayers, or self-abuse rituals their OCD fixes demanded. By that time their brains were stirring and they had plans or worries or irritations to ponder, and for those of us who watched them, that was the beginning of another shit day.
Joshua Riff was an in-between kind of inmate. The first time I met him, I came in three hours prior to shift change, just after four in the morning, to wake him up in his cell. Most inmates jump long before you key, but Josh was still a puppy, a pale-skinned nineteen-year-old with wispy chin whiskers and sleepy eyes, sporting bed wood and mussed-up hair, a delinquent little brother late for school.
His cell was a dump. The typical inmate keeps a tight drum, even if it’s overflowing with stuff, but Josh had scattered his belongings everywhere without organization—wet towel, dirty socks, one shoe flopped over, the other climbing
the wall. He didn’t have much, and he lacked the electronic amenities, visual distractions, and cardboard shelving units of a resourceful inmate, but if this were general population, someone would have rapped his head against the wall hard and forced him to tidy up his moldy shit.
Josh was not housed in a normal range, however, but in the Ditmarsh infirmary, or what we called the howler ward. It was a storage house for misfits—the injured, seriously ill, and not-all-there. I’d probably passed his cell a hundred times and never looked in. Like most COs, I didn’t give the howlers and cripples and AIDS carriers much thought; it wasn’t contempt so much as indifference to anyone who was too vulnerable to pose a threat or too weak to command attention. When Keeper Wallace told me where Riff was located, I made the quick assumption that my new friend was bugged up or self-injurious. He seemed utterly normal to me now, and that put another irritant into my brain, making me wonder why he wasn’t shelved in gen pop like the other inmates. He was young and soft, but that shouldn’t have made a difference—the cubs got tossed in with the wolves. So why the special treatment? Nothing pisses me off more sharply than unearned privilege, and I was already confused about the strange and unusual task I had been given.
It was not a good day for Josh either.
“Why?” he asked in a low, sleepy voice.
“Why do you think?” I answered just as quietly, and told him to suit up.
I could see the memory pass over him in the grim, stilted way he got dressed. His father’s funeral, and me his reluctant
escort. I’d delivered inmates to court or the hospital before, and once to a school, but never in the middle of the night without paperwork, assistance, or formal permission, and never with the strongly worded advice to remain discreet about what was going on. I should have asked why. I should have mentioned that a pile of rules were being violated and a stack of lies were being told. But I kept thinking, what good would that do me against Keeper Wallace? Whistle-blowers never won out, they just got the hurt.
Josh avoided glancing at me as we walked. I figured he was probably rattled by the whole father funeral thing, and the less we said to each other over the course of the day, the better we’d both bear up. I brought him down the darkened stairwell of the infirmary and through the tunnel into the main hub. He looked up and around like a nervous tourist passing through. The hub was the focal point of the entire prison, the center space from which the four cellblocks, the education wing, and Keeper’s Hall stretched out. When empty, it had a vacant stadium feel. At ground level, squatting in the exact middle was the bubble—the caged, bulletproof-glass central control space for guards, equipped with closed-circuit television monitors scanning every cellblock and most of the hallways and access points. Below the bubble was the armaments room—where wistful COs went to fondle the weapons they could not carry—and deeper still the old isolation range we called the City, our medieval dungeon, our prison within a prison, welded shut these past five years in accordance with the kinder, gentler approach of the current administration.
Six stories above, a full two stories beyond the four levels
of cellblocks, was the glass dome. At night it reflected a muted glow that turned the entire hub into a dimly lit cathedral, while in the day, it was the world’s strangest greenhouse, the sun grinding through hundreds of years of dirt. It must have cost a fortune when it was built, and it must have seen a hundred thousand inmates and COs wasting their lives below. And for what? Once upon a time, the architects and builders had believed that inspiration for reform would come from the contemplation of God, visible no doubt through that far aperture. The hub-and-spoke system, with its stacked tiers of narrow cells lit by high windows, was made purposely cramped and austere in order to restrict activity and encourage spiritual reflection, a miscalculation regarding the true nature of human psychology that only got more ridiculous as the years went on. Reform was a hopeless dream, I believed. You could restrict what inmates did, but you could never restrict what they thought—and what they thought about practically all the time was doing bad. Instead of dreams about the higher power, most people inside—COs and inmates alike—spent their mental energy calculating the power at hand, mixing it with thoughts about survival, making money, or getting some kind of sexual gratification or substance abuse in before the day was done. The rest was filler, the measly stuff of thwarted lives.
I avoided Keeper’s Hall, where night shift COs might be doing paperwork, and we crossed the second yard outside. The cold air bit our skin. The ground was barren and snow free, but it crunched, the kind of early December morning that makes you long like a pagan for the summer sun to rise.
Inside the front gate, Keeper Wallace stood behind the admittance counter all alone, waiting for us. He was flipping paper when we arrived, checking through old admittance reports, never a wasted moment for those thick, short-fingered hands. When he looked up, a tweak of guilt hit me, despite the righteousness that stiffened my spine.
I had admired him once, and that was the problem. There were four other keepers on staff—that’s what we called our supervising COs—and all were of equal rank and similar seniority, but it was clear by the flow of decisions and the command he imposed that Wallace had the most authority at the field level. From the beginning I was drawn to his detailed knowledge and his understated character and above all his severe and never-wavering competence, a professional code surprisingly rare in an institution of vigilant discipline. In my way, without being obvious about it, I’d modeled my own conduct as a CO on his, disdaining the slackness and the easy corruption I saw around me on a routine basis. I’d assumed that a supervisor like Wallace would notice such adherence. But my first two years on the job warranted no special attention or approval apparently, and the respect I felt for him drained away when my application for URF duty got turned down with his signature.
The Urgent Response Force was a kind of SWAT team of elite COs called to task during prolonged or particularly dangerous emergency situations. I had wanted in for a number of reasons. The money appealed—an extra fifteen to twenty thousand a year. The toughness appealed—even the name sounded hard, the exhale made when baton met belly. And
the bullet point on the résumé was the kicker. Maybe, just maybe, I could impress some federal law enforcement agency with a few years doing serious tactical work as a corrections officer. This late bloomer wanted to go places.
Despite my solid test scores, Wallace denied my application without any adequate explanation. Maybe I hadn’t paid my dues. Maybe I wasn’t connected to the right people. But I’d followed the rules and been turned down, so I filed a successful grievance, using gender to force my way into a club that didn’t want me. To my paranoid eye, the assignment with Josh smacked of revenge, a trick to catch me out. Wallace had asked me to do it as a favor. He’d told me that because I’d lost my own father a few months before, I’d be suitable for the role, more sensitive in my handling of a social situation. But I did not believe him. We did not think of inmates in such terms. When an incident of violence occurred somewhere inside the walls, one of the first questions we asked was, “Any humans involved?”—meaning any COs, even any civilians. The emotional well-being of an inmate was not our first, second, or third priority, and Wallace was no different in that regard from anyone else.
We exchanged good-mornings. Wallace didn’t thank me or indicate through any shared glance or hurried movement that what we were doing was out of the ordinary. I’d been curious about who would be on shift at the gate, because I figured that would allow me to meet one of his cronies, someone else who did his bidding when the work was off-the-record. I wanted to see whether my fellow CO was sheepish or brazen about it and to get a little more insight into the way
Wallace operated and what it cost and what it provided. Seeing the Keeper alone made my stomach twist a little bit more. Either this outing was so wrong he didn’t want to involve anyone else, or no one else had been willing to attach themselves to the deed.
Instead, ever efficient and grim, Wallace told Josh to shackle up, and Josh held out his hands for his three-piece suit—the metal bracelets and taut chain looping his ankles, waist, and wrists.
When Wallace stood straight again, he grimaced, as though the bending over had bothered an already tight back. Then he spoke.
“You’ve got a day pass,” he told Josh. “You’ve got a medical condition requiring a CT scan. You’re getting the scan done at the veterans hospital. Officer Williams is your escort. There was another CO along for the ride, but you don’t remember his name. I hope you’ll remember that story without embellishments. It’s for your own well-being as much as anything else.”
I was rattled to hear the lie so openly blueprinted. Josh gave an inarticulate teenager nod, the kind you never quite trust, and Wallace turned to me and said thank you. This time I detected a flimsy gratitude in the sagging lines of his face. I gave my own inarticulate nod in return.