in order to make it interesting. You also need characters. This place was overflowing with conflict and characters. When asked if I liked my job, I would flat out tell them, "No, but it's always interesting." A lot of the conflicts I'll be relaying to you involve bad, lazy, egomaniac officers and bosses making unintelligent, uniformed, downright stupid or self serving decisions. If someone did something to save the taxpayers a million dollars, that would be good, interesting and worth telling you about, but those things rarely happen in a place like this. Even though there are many good officers here, most of our time is spent dealing with all of the crap that rolls downhill from those above us.
RELATIONSHIPS
These books are about a convicted mass murderer being the man I learned the most from, whether it was by him correctly informing me of institution policies, unwritten codes and inmate perspectives or if it was by lying to me, lying to officers about me, lying to inmates about me or lying to superiors about me to try to get what he wanted. These are all things he had to do in order to make his life as a lifer as good as possible.
The relationships in a place like this can get complicated. When they start to get complicated, there are questions I would ask myself in order to do the right thing. What is my job responsibility? What is right or wrong? What is just? Unfortunately and strangely, the answer to the first question frequently conflicted with the answers to the other questions. Just as odd, the correct thing to do at times is not the answer to any of these questions.
UNDERSTANDING
There are stories I will tell you about that would be more believable if told by someone other than who it happened to. But seeing as how they happened to me, I am the only one with the accurate information involving situations that were one on one between me and someone else. And believe me when I say some of these things seemed unbelievable to me at the time too.
You will realize that I am not a clone of anyone. You will see run on sentences and sentence fragments, but that's who I am. Not a run on sentence or a sentence fragment, but different and really not liking a lot of the rules that force us to do what we don't want to do; someone with a different kind of a mind; someone with the correct dysfunctions to be able to survive a job like being a corrections officer; someone who is stepping into a different world every day that is extremely dysfunctional.
Making you aware of why and how I am different will require me to gradually inform you of things from my past that have made me who I am today. I had hoped to not give up so much of myself, but it is the only way that you will be able to understand my approach to this job and why I did things the way I did them. Normally, I would be extremely guarded about letting anyone so far into my mind, but these books, will probably never get published anyway. If they do get published, by that time, I'll probably be dead or close to it, so it won't matter much.
A friend of mine thought it was cool when I was doing standup comedy. We'd meet people and he'd say, "This is Dave Basham. He's a standup comedian." Once I started working in the prison, comedy wasn't the coolest thing about me anymore. His introduction of me changed to, "This is Dave Basham. He's a prison guard in Stillwater Prison."
People think they want to hear stories of what happens inside those prison walls. The problem is how you tell them about what happened. Even some of my hard core buddies would cringe and say, "Why did you tell me that?" "Hey, you asked!" I found out that most people don't really want to know the details of what happens. Most can handle a sanitized version, but not the graphic details. When I tell you of these incidents, I will make them as palatable as possible, but some things could turn your gut no matter how much creative phrasing I inject.
DOUBLE DUTY
There will be some minor repetition in this book. Some is intentional as I felt some things needed reinforcing. Some things crossed over into other situations. Some is because I wrote this over a period of several years; felt it was interesting or important and wasn't sure if I had written about it before. Some is just because I am an old man trying to get this finished before I croak.
Writing these books really sucked. I had to relive all of the frustrations and dysfunctional crap that I was elated to leave behind when I retired. There is a reason books like these don't get written. We just want to leave all of the bullshit behind.
REASONS TO WRITE THESE BOOKS
In order to be qualified to be a corrections officer, the Department of Corrections started us off with a six week training course. When I finished that course, I had filled three loose leaf binders with notes and handouts. This seemed hilarious to the other cadets, especially those that finished the course with nothing.
During my time working in the prison, I took extensive notes on my experiences. I documented the conflicts I encountered, the bizarre goings on and the way this place functioned.
I felt our training could've been a heck of a lot better, so I combined these notebooks with the other notes that I had accumulated. I figured that this would be invaluable to anyone deciding on how to approach this job. With the huge amount that there is to know about handling this job, if the DOC would be interested in using my books to fill some of the gaps in our training, I would just give it to them. Any new officer reading these books and then going to work behind those walls would be far more prepared than any of the rest of us ever was.
However, I knew that the reality was that this was most likely something that would be tossed in the trash when I croaked.
When I told friends of some of my experiences, they wanted to read about them. This resulted in formulating these notes into books that the general public would find interesting. By doing this, these books became even better training devices for corrections officers.
This was an immense task; especially considering that I had never written a book before. I had to condense thousands of pages of notes. It was necessary to add my commentary and to phrase things to make them more understandable and palatable to those that have never been behind those walls. Trying to eliminate redundancy from a project so huge was time consuming and frustrating. It was necessary to rewrite and reorganize this sucker several times; nothing enjoyable about that.
Over the years many people had asked me what went on in Stillwater Prison. It was a loaded question. It can't be answered quickly. There are so many pieces to this puzzling little world that no matter how much I wrote, there would still be pieces missing. I wanted to write about as many pieces as possible without getting sued and tossed into this place as an inmate. I wrote it for those people that wanted to know what went on behind those walls and how it all worked.
I searched the internet to find out about things I was told that didn't seem to make sense and to try to find out more about things I was interested in. I hate inaccurate information. It is difficult to sort out fact from fiction a lot of the time. I wanted this to be as accurate as possible; knowing that total accuracy was impossible. From research and my experiences, I feel that I was able to determine the most likely probability of how certain events transpired and phrased it as such. Some instances will be left up to you to draw a conclusion. If I experienced it, I took good notes and you can be assured of its accuracy. I wrote it for those people that are as anal as me.
This facility is historic. Most people do not know much about this place other than it is a prison. The fact that Stillwater Prison is in Bayport raised questions in my mind. I am interested in history and appreciated working in a place that actually had an interesting history. I wanted to know of the history and thought others might find it interesting too, such as the Younger Brothers connection to the prison.
There is corruption in the Department of Corrections in Minnesota, as there probably is most everywhere. I wanted people to know it existed, however I don't have a legal background to be able to protect myself if I printed the word of mouth things that I found out. By letting people know that this existed, and tossing out a few starting points, maybe someone would dig in and uncover enough facts to be able to end or at least decrease the amount of corruption. I wrote this for them. They must be careful because there is a powerful system out there that