Life behind Bars

By Femi Olawole

The American prison system is a big, booming business with a cluster of parasitic cottage industries. The bakeries, the dairy producers, the juice makers, and several other businesses are feeding on the system.
And in terms of equity, if only the inmates knew there was just a thin line between them and the officers watching over them, they would stay out of jails. Sadly, they keep recycling themselves as the human raw materials needed to lubricate the wicked engine of oppression that a typical prison represents.
The author should know all these issues. He retired as a lieutenant from the Delaware Department of Corrections after a 15-year tour of duty with the state’s largest law enforcement agency.
Prior to his stint in the Department of Corrections, Femi Olawole was a certified accountant with a passion for freelance journalism. He once contributed a weekly column of social commentaries to The News Journal (Delaware’s top-most newspaper). This was in his capacity as a member of the newspaper's Community Advisory Board. In 1993, Olawole received The Nigerian Media Merit Award in the Business Reporting category for his work, Sailing on Dark Waters. He is also the author of The Temptation of Fate and The Tower of Mammon. Olawole is in Delaware, United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Femi Olawole
• Release date: Jul 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215926666

Femi Olawole

A certified accountant with a passion for writing and freelance journalism, Femi Olawole once contributed a weekly column of social commentaries to The News Journal (Delaware’s top-most newspaper). And he did this in his capacity as a member of the newspaper's Community Advisory Board. In 1993, he received The Nigerian Media Merit Award in the Business Reporting category for his work, Sailing on Dark Waters. It was a special report on the travails of Nigerian entrepreneurs in their search for seed capital. Olawole is also the author of The Temptation of Fate and The Tower of Mammon. He lives in Delaware, United States. He is in Delaware, United States.

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PREFACE

Life Behind Bars is the outcome of a 15-year adventure into the American prison system, using the Delaware Department of Corrections as a specimen. It is a story of society’s great determination to balance itself between the devil and the dark, blue sea. On the one hand, convicted criminals must be made to pay society for their crimes. On the other hand, the offenders have rights that are protected by the United States constitution. And for the state to achieve and maintain a balance between these two critical objectives, both the offenders and their keepers, the correctional officers, must be kept Behind Bars for life. The only difference between the two groups is that the officers, who work on shifts, get to go home at the end of their arduous tasks.

Don’t take the job home is the constant but unrealistic advice given to correctional officers right from the academy, and all through their careers. It is meant to discourage officers from taking the hazardous stress of the job home to their families. The reality though is that no officer desires to take the job home. Rather, it is the job, along with its stress, exhaustion, and the constantly looming dangers, that clings to them like a dreadful, nauseating magnet.

Daily, job-related stress follows every officer about like a shadow. The difference here is that while a shadow fades in the presence of light, the prison’s stress sticks on an officer on 24-7 basis. Therefore, it is neither a cliché nor a form of platitude when officers counsel each other always to STAY SAFE.

In a prison’s environment, correctional officers are regularly susceptible to hazards such as injuries, awful manipulations, assaults by inmates, hostile work environments and the job-related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It is no wonder therefore that when correctional officers finally retire, they soon turn into statistics in the post-retirement high mortality rate that plagues the profession.

– Femi Olawole.

PROLOGUE

THE HOSTAGE CRISIS OF 2004.

It was a bright, sunny afternoon on that fateful summer day of July 12, 2004. One of those days when the job at hand and everything else flowed in sync with my mood.

At lunch time, I was among a group of staff that gathered to chat over lunch inside the large corporate cafeteria of my then employers, a financial institution in Wilmington, DE. Shortly afterwards, Breaking News flashed across the TV in the cafeteria. As was usual for any piece of local news that affected the community close to home or workplace, we all, at various tables, quickly got our faces focused and glued to the large TV screen that hung on a wall inside the cafeteria.

According to the pretty ABC News anchor, a tragic incident had occurred earlier on that day at the Delaware Correctional Center which was in the small southern Delaware town of Smyrna. In the correctional center was one inmate, Scott A. Miller, 45, who was reportedly serving 699 years since 1997 for a series of rapes during which nine women were assaulted.

On July 12, 2004, the same Miller was allegedly armed with a home-made knife when he abducted a female correctional counselor. The location of the incident was the maximum-security section of the Delaware Correctional Center, the state’s largest prison, which was said to have held about 2,400 inmates at that time. In a hostage scenario that would last several hours, the inmate went on to rape the counselor repeatedly. That was until a member of the CERT (Correctional Emergency Response Team) fatally shot the inmate when it appeared that the abducted counselor was in imminent danger.

As the news shifted in focus to a different piece of event on the TV, the colleagues with whom I sat in the cafeteria exchanged a moment of stares. I could still remember a guy sharing the same dining table with me, as he opened his mouth wide as if in a bid to speak but without any word coming out of his mouth. He was too dazed to utter a word, just like everyone else.

What kind of a job is that? I finally asked even as I looked around the table for someone to answer.

Are you serious? another guy volunteered to answer with a different question. "Did you just call that crap, a job?"

For another moment, we all stared silently at each other all over again.

Oh my God... this time, it was a female colleague, also at the dining table. She added her voice in a stuttered consternation. The poor woman was raped by...by...an inmate?

Yes... someone else stated in confirmation. And the said inmate was shot to death...

And so? the woman gaped and snapped furiously at the guy as though he had committed some verbal sacrilege. "Uh...and so frigging what? The poor woman will have to live with that physical invasion of her body for the rest of her life."

No one said anything else as we all stared at the angry, female colleague with as much empathy as we could muster.

A few seconds later, one guy cast a glance at his wristwatch, stood up quietly and excused himself from the dining table. Soon, another guy stood up and, as if on cue, the rest of us got up to leave the area without another word.

XXX

In the next few weeks and months following the rape incident inside the Delaware Correctional Center in Smyrna, every day was filled with assorted news report. There was one such report that credited the state governor, Ruth Ann Minner, as saying that This isn’t something that is unique to Delaware. In prisons, you almost expect this to happen.

This statement sent a lot of people, especially those in the state of Delaware, into rage. They wondered how the governor, especially, being a woman herself, could say such a thing, that was deemed devoid of empathy or basic human feeling.

In a quick but ineffective rebuttal, governor Minner denied that her earlier statement had anything to do with the rape victim. On the contrary, the governor attributed the core of her statement, ...you almost expect this to happen to the shoddy way and manner that the correctional officers handled the over seven-hour crisis when it should have been tackled by a state police unit.

Unfortunately for the governor, her position was made worse when the victim of the crisis, in a press interview in which she described her ordeal, considered the governor’s comment as being insulting. This was made more complicated because the governor was seen by the generality of the public as saying that she would have wanted the state police or a SWAT team to handle the crisis. The governor also made it clear that no policies of the Department of Corrections were violated in the handling of the crisis. This gave the impression that the governor was on the side of the prison facility’s warden who had refused to allow the state police to enter the prison with their weapons. Incidentally though, it was disclosed to the public that a major policy of the Delaware Department of Corrections was to never allow firearms inside any of its facilities except when ordered by the warden or their designee.

In her very first press interview since her abduction and rape during the hostage crisis, the rape victim said there were three correctional officers at the spot where the offender, serial rapist Scott Miller, got hold of her. None of these officers tried to prevent the offender from launching his attack at her all through the time he barricaded himself in her office.

The poor woman was reported to have gone further to blame her eventual rape on Thomas Carroll, the then warden of the Delaware Correctional Center for refusing repeated requests made by the serial rapist to talk with him. One of the requests the assailant had wanted to make of the prison warden was to be transferred to another prison. Here also, the reason coming out of the department was that it would have been a huge breach of procedures if the warden had granted any of the stated requests of the serial rapist. It was also reported though that in response to the offender’s request, the prison warden sent a one-sentence note informing the inmate that he would have the opportunity to talk only upon the release of the hostage. Therefore, this reaction by the prison warden allegedly created a stalemate. Instead of a resolution, the crisis extended into several hours.

He (the offender) asked to talk to the warden the whole time, and it never happened, and I was raped, the rape victim stated as she wept. I felt abandoned, like no one cared at all.

XXX

The following day, I got a copy of The News Journal, Delaware’s largest news publication. I knew there would be a follow-up to the previous day’s news report regarding the hostage crisis in the Delaware Correctional Center in Smyrna. And I was not disappointed.

The situation report was continuously followed by the newspaper for the next couple of weeks.

About a week after the ugly incident at Delaware Correctional Center, members of the correctional officers’ union embarked on a work-to-rule action. It was in protesting the department’s long-standing staffing problem which they attributed to the incompetence of the management. The sexual assault on the female counselor was merely a catalyst in the action of the correctional officers’ union.

The consequences of the DOC officers’ work-to-rule action soon began to manifest. According to subsequent news reports in the news media across the region for instance, many of the inmates in the Delaware prisons were unable to keep their court appointments. In a swift, desperate reaction, the department of corrections took the correctional officers’ union to court.

Incidentally however, the case against the Correctional Officers’ Association by the Delaware Department of Corrections was decided in favor of the union members in August 2004.

From that moment, the war of attrition between the Delaware Department of Corrections and the Correctional Officers’ Association shifted to the media.

Interestingly though, while the correctional officers won their case against the state of Delaware in the court of law, it was a different kettle of fish entirely in the ensuing media war. Almost every day, the department of corrections and the Delaware state government would unleash one damaging blow after the other against the correctional officers.

As a form of coup de grâce, the state of Delaware, along with the department of corrections provided some local publications with a list of officers and their annual incomes. The headlines in almost all these newspapers were the same; Correctional Officers Earning more than the State Governor...

In those publications, correctional officers were portrayed as great income earners in the state of Delaware. The officers’ incomes, as published in the newspapers, ranged from $100,000 to $150,000 per year.

The reactions of members of the public varied but unanimous in their lack of empathy for the correctional officers. The officers were seen as spoilt brats who had no moral rights to embark on strike action of any kind.

In my private moments, I kept wondering whether the correctional officers’ union reps knew the implications of their silence in the face of these media onslaughts against its members. One would have expected the union reps to educate the public about the pay. Specifically, they needed to state that the regular pay of a correctional officer was $26,000 per year and that anything above that amount must have been earned through overtime.

At various public discussions at work though, many of my colleagues were aghast by the disclosures that correctional officers were earning so much money from a mere chore of baby-sitting inmates.

Except for a few Letters to the Editors written by a handful of correctional officers and published by The News Journal, there was practically no tangible reaction by the correctional officers’ union reps to the antics of the state government and the department of correction.

Personally, I was stunned.

CHAPTER ONE

MY DECISION TO JOIN THE DOC.

As of the time the imbroglio between the Delaware State government and the correctional officers’ union was raging, I was writing a weekly column in The News Journal. This was in my privileged capacity as a member of the newspaper’s community advisory board. In view of my interest in the whole situation therefore, I felt like writing about it in my column.

However, it soon dawned on me that a mere column could not do justice to the unfolding drama between the state and the officers. I had a feeling that the hostage crisis was just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, I soon realized that there was more to the issue at the Delaware Correctional Center in Smyrna than met the eye.

Randomly, I located and picked out some correctional officers for interviews at different locations in the state. While I met with some of them at gas stations along the state route 13, a few others were approached at St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington where they were said to be on outside hospital duties. There were no personal relationships whatsoever between me and those officers. Prior to my meetings with each of those officers, I never knew nor met them in the past.

But while I met with each one of them separately, their opinions on the department of corrections were unanimous. To my amazement, I came to realize that there was a deep layer of operational rot in the Delaware Department of Corrections. And from my discussions with those correctional officers, I could smell the stink in the public institution even at a long distance.

The officers I came across and, especially those with whom I discussed, were a bunch of terribly disgruntled lots altogether. I considered them a cross-section of the entire correctional officers in the state of Delaware. Each one had tales of a prevailing large-scale complacency, laziness, nepotism, favoritism, autocratic management, and a very abusive, hostile environment to tell.

Yet, in legal parlance, He that comes to equity must come with clean hands. Many of the officers themselves did not come squeaky clean. At almost every occasion of our meeting, there was nothing professional in the official appearance of a whole lot of the officers.

To be very sure of my immediate impressions of the correctional officers, I paid separate visits to some of the correctional institutions in the state. As I could not walk into any of those establishments, I had to hang around the reception rooms, the parking lots, or some other areas. It was from such a safe distance that I observed the correctional officers as they pulled in or out of their parking lots and walked in or out of their job locations.

At every institution I visited, the individual official appearance of many correctional officers was anything but professionally sharp. A whole lot of them had uniform shirts flagged out of their pants. Several of the men were spotting big, shaggy beards. And while some of the black male officers had their hairs braided like some sundry thugs, a bunch of the white male officers had long hairs and tattoos all over their arms as if they belonged to some bikers’ gangs.

The only exceptions here were the correctional officers of the various community correction centers in the state. For professionalism in appearance, those were the individuals to see or meet in their khaki pants and blue or black polo shirts.

The worst aspect of it all, in terms of my direct observation, was the emotional state of most of the Delaware State correctional officers. Misery and frustrations were regular features, written all over their faces. Too many of them cast an overall image of a pack of broken souls. Already, the incarcerated offenders under the watch of the correctional officers were damaged individuals. Therefore, one could only wonder how one set of emotionally damaged human beings could effectively be warehoused and supervised by another set of emotionally broken souls.

From that moment, my curious mind began to get jittery. For example, I wondered how some of the correctional officers could earn six figures in annual incomes from the state even though officially, these same individuals were officially on annual incomes that hovered between $26,000 and $29,000.

Several sources among the officers informed me that the usual trick was for a typical officer to work their regular eight-hour shift and then wait behind to do some overtime. In the performance of their duty during the overtime period though, the officer would take it as a matter of rights to be indolent, complacent, and practically doing nothing. To such an officer, the first original eight-hour shift was the legitimate period of work, and it was more important than the next eight hours of overtime. In most cases, the sergeant or lead worker that was supposed to supervise such an officer would very more likely be a fellow victim of wear and tear, having been on overtime themselves.

On the other hand, there were those correctional staff members that were on freeze. This happened when the relieving colleague of a correctional staff member failed to show up for one reason or the other. These correctional officers, so frozen on their duty posts, would naturally be too physically exhausted and demoralized to contribute any meaningful job productivity for the additional eight hours that they were expected to work. Therefore, under the circumstance, the facility would be saddled with a mere array of window-dressing staff members that were parading themselves as officers on duty. Sadly, everyone, from the lowest-ranked officer to the warden was aware of the situation but felt helpless to do anything about it.

This was the kind of top command or management they had in the Delaware Correctional Center in Smyrna that permitted so much gross indiscipline, laziness, and complacency to reign supreme in the institution. And this was allegedly a major factor that contributed to the criminal negligence that led to the breach of procedure and paved the way for the hostage crisis of 2004.

I could vividly recollect that the hostage and rape victim in Smyrna mentioned something to the effect that she chose to speak out publicly to draw attention to the problems in the Delaware prison system. It was reportedly in a bid to protect other DOC employees that made the young woman say, the way the system works needs to be stopped and changed...people need to get rid of inadequate and incompetent staff and put in managers who hold people accountable, who train people properly, who are intelligent and who have respect for each other...

Speaking further, the young woman reportedly criticized the competency of the top management staff of the Department of Corrections while sympathizing with members of the Correctional Officers Association of Delaware (COAD) over consistent staffing shortages and low wages.

As an individual looking into the department from outside, I was touched by the rape victim’s personal appraisal of the top management staff of the Delaware Department of Corrections. I wondered what could make the young woman come to such a very sensitive conclusion about the management of an institution that was charged with public safety.

After a while, I arrived at the personal conclusion that there was no way I, as an individual, could get concrete answers to these and many other nagging questions unless I became an insider. This was precisely the first reason behind my decision to join the Delaware Department of Corrections. Secondly, it was easier for me to take the plunge because I was already, at that time, contemplating an early retirement from corporate life. Subsequently, I considered going into another job industry. My first port of call was the military, but I was politely informed that I was too old to be a soldier. Then, the Department of Corrections, being the state largest employer of law enforcement officers, appeared to be another avenue for me to serve my adopted state and nation.

The author, above, in his corporate days.

CHAPTER TWO

AT THE ACADEMY.

My journey toward becoming a Delaware correctional officer could not begin immediately due to some circumstances beyond my control. I could not proceed with the planned adventure until the beginning of 2007. The journey therefore began the day I paid an online visit to the Delaware State employment website. There, I completed the prescribed form for the position of correctional officer. A few days afterward, I got an invitation to attend and participate in an examination that was aimed at testing candidates in certain skills such as proficiency in English grammar, Observations and Awareness in a prison environment.

I passed the entire segments of the examination at the first sitting. I was to later learn that it took some candidates two or three sittings to pass the same examinations in their efforts toward becoming correctional officers. Ironically, some of those guys that barely passed the basic entrance tests would end up getting promotions to, as high as, the rank of a correctional captain and above.

Shortly after the test, I got another letter from Delaware Department of Corrections, directing me to report for interview, drug test, police background checks and the completion of some necessary documents. I reported as directed and realized that we were about thirty candidates in the large room. With all the paperwork completed, every successful candidate was given the date to resume training at the academy which was located inside the Employee Development Center in Dover, the capital city of Delaware.

On the first day at the academy, I discovered along with other cadets that a section of the parking lot had been allotted for our exclusive benefits. Standing at the door to meet and welcome the fresh cadets participating in the Correctional Employee Initial Training (CEIT) on March 22, 2007, was a team of instructors. There was Correctional Lieutenant Alex Lapinski, a man in