Guarded Dehumanization
~ by Taj Mahon-Haft ~
*Please note, names have been changed for the protection and consideration of all involved.*
Every day we get counted repeatedly in prison. Four of those times are officially considered “standing counts,” where the guards blow shrill whistles and bellow, “Count time! Feet on the floor! Lights On!!” The whole point of it is explicitly to be a wellness and presence check, just to make sure we’re there and alive.
However, to do this, they insist we spend half an hour to an hour on either side locked down in our cells. Given these huge interruptions on our day and the cramped confines, many people end up napping through these counts. Thus, the count itself must rouse us quickly and unpleasantly.
Imagine someone blowing a basketball referee’s whistle outside your bedroom door every morning at 545am. Hell of a way to wake up!
Also disorienting, so getting down from a five foot high bunk rapidly in a steel and concrete box can be dangerous. I have two facial scars and one on my shin where I saw the bone after slipping while descending my first year. I tell everyone it was a knife fight, of course. Falling out of bed is too embarrassing. Also, I fear my modeling career may be over as a result.
Anyway, there is enough discomfort in this whole experience as it is. Yet yesterday I overheard a conversation between two guards–the count requires multiple people to confirm counting to two repeatedly apparently–as they did this round. The perspective C/O Festerson demonstrated speaks to a common attitude by those running our lives.
I caught it midway, but Reynolds and Festerson had clearly been discussing the ways to regulate resident behavior. Reynolds said, “For minor things, I feel like I should just talk to them first to avoid making a big deal.”
Festerson responded, “Nah, man, we should enforce all the small things. Write them up every chance we can get. That’s how these fools learn…punishment… write every charge possible.”
Keep in mind, even a single institutional infraction here in Virginia has an immediate penalty, usually a fine around ten bucks. That is twenty two hours of work here. More importantly, it is likely to change our good time earning level, keeping us imprisoned weeks or months extra for just one charge. A single infraction has been known to alter security level, getting people sent to the max security spots with only an hour a day out of the cell. Here it is almost always produces a month’s suspension from work, which means not even those meager wages, and has seen many guys fired on the first offense.
Those are pretty severe consequences for being in the wrong cell, cussing when angry, or pooping with a semi transparent screen in part of the window for a modicum of privacy.
Typically more humane than most, Reynolds retorted, “But for things like this, not standing up all the way for count, it seems pointless. All that will happen is they’ll lose their rec time, and that would have to be the whole pod.”
To that, Festerson replied, “Exactly! We should do that more. If the others inmates missed rec, they’d do what they have to do to make sure that guy would stand up the next count! We can’t touch them, but they will.”
With that, he literally promoted the opposite of his job description. He wanted to excessively punish everyone for one person failing to stand all the way up during a safety check, probably while napping.
The official role of the guards is to maintain safety here, yet he wanted to instigate violence between us to enforce petty rules. Most of all, he sought to punish us while here, not just monitor our time here–the punishment we are already serving.
In describing his position, he made it abundantly clear that he considered us, inherently one-dimensional “criminals” without any context.
All of this was said openly, walking past our cells, as if we did not exist.