Other Challenges Working in SHU (Security Housing Unit)

As I mentioned in a previous article it can be very challenging to always do the right thing all the time. One thing that I am proud to say is that even though I have lost my cool a few times, as mentioned with one of my supervisors and maybe a few times with an inmate or two, I never did curse or use any bad language.

One time I came close to losing it to the point of throwing an inmate over the 2^nd tier, while I was working in the SHU unit. I was escorting an inmate in handcuffs up the stairs to the 2^nd tier when this inmate for some reason got on my last nerve. I don't remember what she said or what happened exactly but all of sudden she started to try to pull away from me. I said to her, "Hold on! Where are you going?" I was holding on to the small piece of chain going between the two restraints and she tried to break away from my grip. I twisted on the chain so that she would feel the pressure of the restraints go on to her wrists.

"Let go of me!" followed by several expletives, expressing a disliking of prison guards in general. As she continued to call me several names, I almost totally snapped and was just about ready to throw her over the railing of the 2^nd tier, when something told me, "No, don't do it, or there goes your job!" So I caught myself before I threw her over and just held on long enough before another C/O (Correctional Officer) came and helped take control of her, escorting her back into her cell.

There were a couple of other experiences I turned out to be the helper, in a way, like the C/O mentioned above. Both of these experiences I was involved in were with my sergeant, Sergeant Handleton. You would think that I would have held a grudge against him from the time before when we had a disagreement. But no, I guess one of my gifts is to have a very forgiving heart and I wasn't going to let that stand in my way. I knew he was trying his hardest to be the best supervisor he could be even though he made a lot of mistakes.

There was a time where he could have almost lost his job but Officer Money (name changed) and I intervened before he even had a chance to attempt to kill this inmate.

The inmate, Mary Less, who I had dealings with before and who had spit on me, was acting like a fool again. At the time, Sergeant Handleton had put her in this empty cell that never was used. The plumbing was bad. The toilet didn't flush and there was water all over the floor making it uninhabitable. The Sergeant had a habit of putting inmates in there that acted up, like Mary Less.

On this particular occasion Inmate Less was yelling at Sergeant Handleton and saying the right things or maybe or I should say the wrong things to get him perturbed. I'm not sure what threw him over the edge but whatever it was he couldn't deal with her anymore. He ordered the tower officer to open the door. She did and he ran in to the cell without her being handcuffed. He grabbed her around the neck and started choking her. Officer Money, a female officer, who was almost my height and almost twice my size, went in with me. We both had to literally grab Sergeant Handleton and pull him off of her so that he wouldn't choke her to death.

Another time where I helped save him from his job was around the time when my first tour of duty was up in SHU. At the time I believe we were taking the inmates out of their cells and taking them to their showers. They had six showers through out the SHU unit. Each time, before an inmate could come out of her cell, she had to be handcuffed. Then she would be escorted to an enclosed shower, with a metal door and a wicket. After being locked in, we would take the cuffs off through the wicket.

We would just do the opposite procedure taking them back to their cells. Well, one of the inmates, when she got back to her cell, stuck her arm out of the wicket so the officer couldn't close it back up. She was yelling for Sergeant Handleton and wanted his attention. He went up there and asked her to put her arms back in but refused to so. I didn't really see everything that happened but the inmate claimed that the sergeant grabbed her by the arms and pushed them back in partially and slammed the wicket port or door on her arms. She filed a complaint form called a 602 that went all the way up to the investigative unit. Because of that I was called up front to testify in his behalf and they asked me all kinds of questions about the incident. I told them what I saw was from a distance. From what I could tell from the position I was located, it didn't look like he slammed the wicket port on her.

Sergeant Handleton got off from that as well and of course the first incident never made it out of the building. Even though Mary Less was a big talker, she was too chicken to tell on Sergeant Handleton and she never said a word to anyone about it.

Six months later Sergeant Handleton promoted to a Lieutenant in another prison. But in the meantime, along the way he got cancer. It wasn't but maybe two or three years later he succumbed to the illness.

Even though we had our differences, he was a good man and he did his best he knew how to do. He never challenged me again after we had our run-in and he respected me from that day on. In fact, I think he gave me a very good performance evaluation after that. God bless his soul and may he have joy in Heaven if it be the Lord's will!