at the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Training Academy. The academy’s an old brick children’s hospital with cherub statues on the roof and a pepper-spray chamber out back.
I walked under the cherubs with my gym bag. The duty sergeant working the desk, a young guy, about six foot five and 240 pounds of muscle, said, “S’up.”
My room came with a camouflage bedspread. The window was painted shut. Other cadets walked from the parking lot carrying duffle bags and rolling suitcases. Old oaks and green grass surrounded the building.
~
THE top Man at the academy, Lieutenant Rice, yelled into his microphone, “Welcome, Class 615!” We sat on folding chairs in the gym. Word was inmates beat him badly in a riot fifteen years earlier. Cadets whispered about razor-wire scars. He said, “The food here is better than anywhere else in the DOC. Period.”
Rice introduced the seven sergeants on the stage. There was the redneck, the rugged lady, the one with a bad haircut, the fat one, the gnarly one-eared one, the intimidating one, and the muscly one who signed me in. They stood, arms crossed, and labeled us the same, no doubt. We had the fat cadets, the redneck cadets, the tough-looking cadets, and the one cadet dressed all in black with spikes on his boots. Most of us ex-military. There were only two black guys. The few women, maybe fifteen, were almost all nurses, counselors, or kitchen staff. I put the goatee percentage at 95 percent.
I decided, right then, to grow my own.
Lieutenant Rice told us a cadet had already been asked to leave. He had showed up drunk. “Come talk to me anytime,” Rice said. “But chances are, if I have to find you, you’re done. Kicked out.”
Rice told us to yell, “DOC proud!” So we yelled. Then he said, “Return the chairs to the back of the gym and hit your racks.” So we returned the chairs and hit our racks.
~
CLASS 615 was 180 goatees strong, but they split us into three smaller groups. We wouldn’t get our uniforms until week five, so it was civvies for everyone: polo shirts and jeans seemed to be the unspoken dress code. I bought two polos after the first day.
The Man assigned to my class was the fat sergeant from the stage, a bald man with one squinty eye. He had three rolls of flesh on the back of his neck. The cadets called him the Vanilla Gorilla.
He said that our classroom was originally the ER, then announced, “This is what we are going to do in the next five weeks: get through this.” When he talked, only half of his mouth moved. It looked like he was recovering from a stroke. But he walked fine.
We introduced ourselves by giving our names and favorite movies.
In the class we had a lot of Rockys and Full Metal Jackets. A guy with a flattop said, “I’m a big movie buff. So it’s hard to decide . . . but it has to be Die Hard. The first one.”
“Yes!” another guy with a flattop said.
A guy at my table said that the ladies in high school called him Chocolate Thunder. Vanilla Gorilla loved this. He half-smiled.
I said my movie was Seven Samurai. Nobody seemed to recognize it. There was an actual pause.
Seven Samurai is about seven samurai warriors with different skills coming together to save a farming village from bandits. They take the job for rice and honor only. Working for rice, I felt, everyone would at least relate to.
At a podium, Gorilla gave us our first lesson: how to talk to inmates. He read a chapter from what he called The Book of the Man—which was a jail-policy book.
He read that when speaking to an escalated inmate (jail speak for an inmate yelling something like “I got nobody left. Nobody. Know what that’s like?”) you should appeal to him as an equal by repeating phrases like “I understand where you’re coming from” and “That must be hard.”
Then Gorilla said, “But this is how it really works. Don’t say, ‘Calm down.’ Don’t say, ‘Relax.’ They won’t calm down or relax. Any questions?”
A cadet asked, “It’s okay to shake an inmate’s hand?”
“Well, yes,” Gorilla said, which was a surprise. “But that doesn’t mean you let any dickheads grit on you” (jail speak for mean-mug you).
~
THEY bused in inmates from a local jail to cook our food. I stared at them in the dining hall.
I was not going to let them grit on me.
An obese inmate who wore an all-white uniform and hairnet pushed a plate with meatballs and a brick of garlic bread at me. I did not say thank you. Just gave him a nod to see what he would do. He nodded back. I sat, back to the wall, watching him.
~
SUBJECTS from “use of force” to “use of restraints” changed hourly. Gorilla read from The Book of the Man and taught to the tests while I daydreamed about paydays.
Ultimately, the academy’s mission wasn’t to turn people into perfect guards. It was to get people used to the idea of being the Man over other men. It’s a process. It costs money to hire guards and get them uniformed, and the state wanted to keep them in that uniform for more than a week.
The process was mostly successful. Of the five Rockview cadets, I was the first to leave after three years. But a cadet who graduated six months after me resigned after only one day at Rockview. I heard him say, “Some shit’s going to kick off in here,” after being surrounded in the crush of inmates headed to breakfast.
Gorilla told us, “Today, you can’t just throw a guy in jail with a key and tell him to run the place. But that’s how we used to do it.”
That first Friday, five days in, he stopped me and said, “Your goatee looks like butt. Shave.”
So I shaved.
~
AT home that weekend, my fiancée asked, “What did you learn?”
How to escalate a killer.
“How’s that?”
Calm down, honey. Calm down.
She gave a look and went back to writing. She was halfway through her PhD program.
The joke is, I had so much promise. There I was, a veteran working my way through college to be an engineer. My technical drawings were the best in my intro-to-engineering class. I was president of the Penn State Martial Arts Group. A leader. Until she walked into my karate class one night. And that was it. I dropped out of school and retreated to a factory.
But that’s just the joke. Really, I was tired of orders. Call it an overload. In the army, walking to the chow hall risked having one of the thirty thousand soldiers who outranked me let me know he outranked me by having me pick up cigarette butts or straighten my beret or tuck in the one inch of exposed bootlace that came loose while picking up cigarette butts. I didn’t even smoke. College felt the same. One of my professors told us we couldn’t use blue pens, only black. Never-ending authority. If this was life, I might as well get paid for it.
My fiancée just happened to come along at a moment when, if I were more self-aware and resourceful, I should have gone backpacking across Europe instead of dropping out.
I left her alone and read a well-respected book written by a journalist who had worked as a prison guard for a year. He wrote seventy-three pages on the academy.
I wasn’t convinced it deserved eight.
~
I TOOK every meal in the dining hall and got used to the obese inmate. We nodded to each other on every exchange. I didn’t stare him down anymore.
There was a good weight room at the academy. At night it was empty except for Sergeant Gnarly-One-Ear, who rode the bike or benched. He always came over and talked and held the heavy bag for me. He said that he was taking a lieutenant slot in