The Beat

The unlikely victims of the American prison system.

Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor from Stanford University, conducted the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971. In an attempt to explore the effects of a prison’s power dynamics on peoples’ behavior, he recruited twenty-four male college students, and instructed them to act out a prison environment in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department. The subjects, randomly assigned the roles of either prisoner or prison guard, were asked to live in this basement for the entire duration of the study. It was supposed to last for two weeks, but that’s not what happened. After only six days, the experiment had to end because of the extreme behaviors of both prisoners and guards. The guards began acting cruelly—some might say sadistically—toward the prisoners, and as a result, the prisoners became depressed and hopeless.

So why am I talking about this? I was fourteen when The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted, living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, at that time a working class neighborhood with factory areas scattered throughout. My friends were the children of factory workers, police officers, sanitation workers, truck drivers, Brooklyn Union gas men (as National Grid was called in the 70s), bookies, and loan sharks. We were a group of about thirty boys and girls who played together, drank together, held seances, played Johnny on the Pony, Red Rover, Cocalario, stick ball, stoop ball, and any other game we could think of. We sang together, got chased from stoops, explored vacant factories, did anything outside our houses with our peers. We only went home when we had to.

Every one of us had a different home life. Some of us lived in apartments in houses owned by our parents, and some of us rented the apartments we lived in. Most of our mothers were stay-at-home housewives. The only mothers who worked were those whose fathers were no longer alive, deadbeat drunks no longer living in the home, or deadbeat drunks still at home. Summer evenings found families and neighbors on their stoops trying to cool off from the heat of the long, hot summer days. Everyone knew everyone else. No one’s business was their own. My family was Italian. We didn’t talk about our problems, and anything that happened at home was a secret. I wasn’t allowed to bring friends home to my house to play. In fact, I wasn’t even allowed to talk about anything that happened at home. And I didn’t, because I knew it would get back to my mother.

My friend Teresa was different. She talked about her home life, and we spent many days playing at her house. Teresa lived in a large brick corner house, which sounds very nice, but actually she and her family lived in four rooms situated above garages that were rented to friends and family from the neighborhood. Her Grandma and Grandpa lived in a three-room apartment on the same floor, at the end of a seven-foot-long hallway. The apartment doors were never locked. She had a “nice” family who went to church every Sunday. Teresa and her six brothers and sisters went to Catholic School, were well dressed and well fed. Although her father was rarely home (he was the sole breadwinner of the family and held two to three jobs), when we did see him, he was always friendly and seemed good natured and well adjusted.

One evening Teresa and her family had just finished supper, as they called it, when the bell rang. Being twelve years old, she loved to buzz people in. She was instructed to always look carefully at who was at the door before hitting the buzzer, but you have to understand that the door’s windows were at the top of the door and not very large. I don’t know what her parents thought, but unless the person out there was planting their face against the first small pane, identification really was just an illusion. Still, Teresa had hit that buzzer many times before and there never was a problem. The person ringing the bell had always been a neighbor, friend, family member, parish priest—but not that night. She hit the buzzer and let in a drunk salesman who was trying to sell her family something for her sister’s wedding. He yelled up the stairs and was slurring and reeling from side to side. She ran to get the one person who she knew could save her and everyone else in the house: her dad.

6:10 I was cowering on the daybed in my brothers’ small room we called the ‘porch.’ (When my father’s parents lived in the house, it was a one-family and this room really was a screened in porch.) I knew I was in trouble. I had done the unthinkable. I had buzzed in a drunken salesman and I’m terrified for my whole family, but mostly for myself because even if the drunk did not get me, my father would. I heard my mother screaming and there were bumping noises and yells coming from the hallway. Finally the noise stopped, but there was still yelling and it was getting closer to me. I looked up and saw that murderous look on my father’s face. One I’d seen before and knew it meant something awful was about to occur. Although my dad appeared personable to friends and neighbors, at home, he was an intimidating man—a captain in the NYC Department of Correction. He was stern and never talked or yelled, but he kept a belt (called the “strap”) hanging next to our white, wall telephone (with a 5 foot long cord), and my whole family knew the “look”. We never knew what would transpire when we saw the look, but whatever it was would not be good.

Daddy didn’t have the strap in his hand. He came at me with his fists—hit my face several times. I had never seen my father in such a rage and had never seen him beat one of my siblings the way he beat me that day. My mother dragged him off of me. Now I heard more screams. They were mine.

5:45 that same day. Ah… what a long, horrible day I had. Finally I can relax. I hope the incident at work blows over, but I doubt it. A man died today. I don’t know how this happened. The men on my staff usually can control their anger. It doesn’t really matter how it happened. I have to be sure that the reports match the events, and that I don’t lose my job. How will I support my family if I do? I know my men were doing a cell check. The prisoners were told to come out of their cells, which they did. There were 50 naked prisoners, 2 captains, and 25 correction officers standing on the cell block. I had my back to cell block 8. All of a sudden I saw 5 officers on top of the prisoner who had just vacated cell block 8. The noise was cacophonous, and I needed to get the rest of the prisoners back into their cells before a riot broke out. I radioed for emergency help. By the time I was able to pull all the officers off of the man, he wasn’t moving. The emergency team arrived and took the inmate into the elevator. I spoke with the correction officers who told me that the man had a shiv and had threatened one of them with it. I wrote the incident report, but I’m worried. This is not going to be good for me. A man died on my watch.

“Daddy, Daddy, help me there’s a man in the hallway.”

6:15 that same evening. “You shouldn’t have buzzed that man in. Your father had to forcibly throw him out of the hallway. He wouldn’t leave. He was drunk.”

“But Ma, I didn’t know. I’m sorry. Daddy hurt me. He hates me. He always calls me stupid and that’s what he was yelling at me while he was hitting me. I didn’t mean for it to happen. It was an accident.”

“Daddy loves you Teresa. Stop crying. Don’t let him hear you. Shh. It will be okay. He lost his temper. He’s a good father. It’s okay”

We didn’t see Teresa that night, but she came to school the day after. Her mother put makeup under her eyes to hide the bruising. It didn’t matter, though. We could still see the bruises. She told us a bunch of things about how her father didn’t mean it. He was upset and nervous because he had to throw the drunk out of the house. She reassured us that he loved her. We all just looked at each other. We knew she was just covering for him. We asked her if he said he was sorry about what happened. She just put down her head and shook it from side to side. The beating had left its mark on her, and not just on her face.

As I contemplate this event as an adult, I wonder how a child could provoke such behavior from someone who is supposed to love her. Aren’t children supposed to be innocent? Aren’t parents supposed to have an instinct to protect them? How could a good man act so evil? Professor Zimbardo once said, “The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.” Perhaps my friend’s father wasn’t a bad man, but merely one who had been pushed over this edge.

The day we saw Teresa’s beaten face, we didn’t know about the incident in the jail. Later that summer, it was in all the papers. There was a long trial, but Teresa’s father was not found guilty of anything. Several officers lost their jobs, but none were convicted of murder.

I was reminded of this event recently, and did some research to try and understand Teresa’s father and the “situational forces” that influenced him. I read about ‘reactive’ and ‘proactive’ aggression (‘reactive’ being the type of aggression that occurs impulsively, emotionally, and ‘proactive’ being the premeditated type). I came to the conclusion that Teresa’s father acted ‘reactively.’ He had an impulsive response to a perceived threat which triggered anxiety and anger. I understood the reactive aggression, but why didn’t he apologize to her? Didn’t he think what he did was wrong? This led me to consider empathy. Did Teresa’s father not have any empathy? Does experiencing an overload of negative people and/or negative behaviors affect a person’s ability to have empathy?

So I did some research about correction officers. Much to my surprise there are numerous studies about the negative effect such a job has on a person. I was surprised. You never really hear about this. There has been so much hype in the press and the internet about how badly prisoners are treated and how correction officers use brutality to control inmates. But while Hollywood, politicians, newscasters, and bloggers spout a myriad of empathetic feelings for the abused, there never seems to be much attention or empathy for the alleged abusers, the people who work day after day with them. The popular story is that correction officers are the bad guys and the incarcerated are the victims. It is rare to see the issue explored further than this.¹

I know it’s hard to have empathy for the abuser (in this case, Teresa's father). I certainly didn't until I started reading about the way jobs in correction can change people.² From my research, I learned that correction officers are regularly exposed to death. They break up fights between inmates who try and kill each other using smuggled weapons, homemade weapons, or just their hands. They try to stop suicide attempts, or, after a successful suicide attempt, clean up the remains. They might go home with blood or human excrement on their uniform. They are in a constant state of vigilance; anything could happen at any time, and they must always be prepared. Even when the violence subsides, the verbal abuse they experience is constant. They are outnumbered in prisons and are exposed to traumatic experiences, whether it be directly, when they themselves are involved, or indirectly, when they are called to aid or clean up an incident that has happened to someone else. There's even a term for the effect that this job has on people: correction fatigue.

“The violence in prisons haunts guards’ private lives. They begin to treat their family and friends like they treat convicts, lose their trust in people, and feel threatened on a daily basis. This behavior often leads to domestic violence, drug abuse, and feelings of guilt.”

“Physical assaults, mental assaults, assaults with weapons, assaults with bodily fluids, and threats to loved ones and families are all part of the psychological trauma officers endure on a regular basis.”³

Although Teresa’s father seemed to evade this risk, drug abuse seems to be a common problem. And not only drug abuse—officers struggle with PTSD, depression, suicide, divorce, nightmares, early death, hypertension, and alcoholism.⁴

“The combination of mental health struggles and substance abuse takes its toll on the family; a Radford University study found that officers serving in correctional facilities have higher rates of divorce than the general population (which, in its own way, contributes to negative wellbeing and stress). The Journal of Family Violence writes of high rates of domestic violence carried out by COs, and The Atlantic says that violence directed toward wives or girlfriends by COs often goes unreported.”

I doubt that, when Teresa’s father violently attacked her, any of these studies existed. Regardless, I don’t know if learning about ‘correction fatigue’ would have helped Teresa (or any of us) understand and forgive her father. I don’t know if identifying and naming the problem really changes anything, anyway. In Greenpoint in the 1970s, ‘family violence’ was not really thought about. Violence was a way of life. We saw many Catholic nuns and brothers use corporal punishment in the classroom and on the church and school property. It was not really talked about—the mentality was if you got in trouble in school, you deserved it. The few parents who did complain rarely got any satisfaction; corporal punishment was still practiced. We heard about gangs beating on one another in the parks and on the streets, so we traveled in groups and had our own gang. We heard about the “Mafia” who we knew beat up or even killed the people who did something they didn’t like, so we tried to stay away from anyone “connected.”

It’s decades later and nothing has really changed in New York City. Crime is on the rise. There are daily reports of violence on our subways, highways, parks, streets, and schools. Many people have decided to leave the city for the suburbs, where they feel they will be safe. The prevailing wisdom is to get rid of jails, blame the police, blame the racists, blame everyone except the people who are committing the violence. According to popular theory aggression seems to be excusable, as long as the cause of it is something Hollywood and the media think is justifiable. However, is there something about the system that victimizes the abused and abusers alike? Have we forgotten that good and evil exist in everyone?

Of course, there is no definitive answer to the problem of crime and violence, even though politicians and the media would have you believe differently. We’re told that there should be no more jails, that only when someone commits a heinous, violent crime should they be incarcerated. Before that, we’d been taught ‘broken windows theory’: be tough on the small crimes, and the big ones won’t be committed. They’re all just guesses, but still we’re told that the police can’t be trusted to arrest people, and correction officers can’t be trusted to do their jobs, and teachers can’t be trusted with students and priests can’t be trusted with our children. Perhaps it’s true, to an extent. If good and evil exist in everyone, then is anyone capable of being judge and jury? And, if no one is deemed capable, should we conduct our lives like we are in the jungle, where the strongest prevail (the lions) and their lackeys (the hyenas) prey upon their spoils and the weakest cower in fear in their hiding places?

“Try to recall the last time there was a movie or television show that portrayed correctional officers in a positive light. From the 1950s Jimmy Cagney gangster movies to The Shawshank Redemption, Orange Is the New Black, and Prison Break, it’s hard to find a positive portrayal of correctional officers. The same is true in daily media and news.”

1. From “I Am Not Okay,” a ‘white paper’ regarding the mental health problems facing correction officers.

2. I encourage you to visit onevoiceunited.org where there is a link to download “I Am Not Okay”: sixty-four pages analyzing various statistics concerning correction officers: rates of PTSD, depression, divorce, heart disease, suicide, mortality, assaults (reported and unreported). The paper elucidates the mental health crisis facing correction officers and frontline staff.

3. Both excerpts from “I Am Not Okay.”

4. Taken from the American Addiction Centers website.