Violence

"They've got someone for you out here," the officer at the desk in medical rang into the pharmacy to tell me. When the other nurse and I came out onto the floor I thought perhaps a chest pain, maybe an asthma attack, but he young black man sitting in the brown molded plastic chair at the nurse's station had just gotten the shit beat out of him. His right eye was swollen shut and a laceration in the swollen pocket underneath the eye oozed blood. The other nurse began cleaning and steri-stripping the wound while I got scissors and an eye pad to secure the eye shut till the nurse practitioner could look at it in the morning. we documented his other wounds, welts on his arms and legs.

"How long will it take you to do six guys?" the Sergeant asked us after we were finished. We looked at each other and laughed. "Get your filthy minds out of the gutter," he said, blushing up to his baseball cap with the embroidered badge. "Not too long," I replied, raising my left eyebrow. I wished I could wink. Six other inmates were involved in the incident, making it officially a disturbance in my book. Nobody in corrections really wants to say the word "riot." A riot must involve some sort of destruction to the physical structure of the jail.

One by one they brought the inmates up the medical, the Sergeants interviewed them in one of the empty cells and while we got them to strip down to their underwear one by one and documented any injuries on a body sheet, two outlines of a man's body printed on a sheet of paper, one dorsal and one ventral. We marked any injuries on the printed drawing. "Pay special attention to the hands," the other nurse coached me. Most of the other six had few injuries. I wondered what the first guy did to get everyone so pissed off. Meanwhile officers came from all over the jail to shake down the block on the west side of the old jail. When I finally went down at eleven PM to do some meds on the west side the block was still rocking.

The physical violence of corrections is real, not just something you see on Lockup Raw. Something will happen requiring a body sheet about every third time I work at the jail. Maybe the officers had to put their hands on an inmate, maybe there was a fight. Any time the officers put their hands on an inmate medical assess the inmate and fills out a body sheet. At the women's prison where I worked physical violence was less frequent, but extremely brutal when it did occur, one inmate beat the hell out of another inmate with the padlock from her footlocker. Another inmate pressed the blades of a fan into another's face while she was sleeping. Girlfriend and roommate stuff.

Despite the atmosphere of violence, I rarely feel threatened. Most inmates only want to hurt each other for a love-triangle, to settle a debt, or assert authority on the block. Attacking staff is a waste of time because all it gets in time in the hole. The inmates will often complain to us, but they know they need us. If you are pulled over for a speeding ticket you might be annoyed, but you know that you need to police to keep you safe. A seasoned training Lieutenant once told me that every institution runs with the consent of the inmates for this reason, they know we are there to keep them safe from each other. At a the women's prison out of a population of 1,200 we only had 2 or 3 at a time who really liked to attack staff and only one in the ten-year history of institution who had done any serious harm to an officer. At my jail there is only really one who comes in from time to time with a significant history of staff violence. At any institutions these inmates are well-known and precautions are taken.