Category: Female Offenders

California Department of Corrections, Female Offenders, Training Academy, Wisdom

What I Learned in Prison: Women in Front and Behind Bars #5

Mona Alvarado Frazier
photo via Colorado Int’ School

When you want to learn a new language, experts say that ‘immersion’ programs work faster and better than taking semi-regular classes. This applies to working in the law enforcement field. A couple of weeks ago I talked about the initial training I received when I began my career in corrections. Much of the training was OJT-on the job, not only training from other staff members but also the female offenders or wards, as we called them back in the ’80’s.


                                             The full immersion program is known as the Academy. 


It’s the same concept as a military boot camp or a police academy. You are there to learn discipline, the language, customs, and rules of the Department. Notice I capitalized ” Academy” and “Department.” That’s how certain things are referred to in quasi-military training academies. In this regimented world, you can bet that it wasn’t welcoming to women. Most of the women who worked in the prisons were nurses, teachers, social workers, or  MTA’s (Medical Technical Assistant).


It was a man’s world. And I don’t say this in a negative, judgmental sense. It is what it is (or was in those days). In my class, there were five women out of sixty men.  An outcome of having few women in the Academy was that we were tested more often than men, to see ‘what we were made of.’ Consequently, we tried harder, sometimes acted more masculine than needed, and often times tried to outdo our male classmates. 


The Academy stressed that the trainers objective was to get a person ready to work in a high-stress environment as safely as possible. It was drilled into us that order and safety were the priorities. 


                                               How can you supervise inmates if you’re dead, 


one of the instructors said. Made sense to me. After the first week, one of the women dropped out. 


The classroom lectures were reinforced by the dozens of ‘war stories’ one hears during breaks and from the veteran training staff teaching said, classes. The field trips to the closest correctional facility: Duel Vocational Institute-DVI, frighteningly referred to as “gladiator school,” further reinforced why one needed to pay attention in class, learn the self-defense techniques, proper handcuffing, and so on. 


Again, all this made sense to me as a twenty-one-year-old, that is until we were told about the tear gas shack. Say what? 


An older guy, in his thirties, told me that the trainers were going to herd us into a shack and then shoot tear gas through the open windows. His buddy, an earlier cadet, told him about the scenario. 


                                           Don’t worry, I went through this in Nam. Piece of cake.


He told me to cover my face with a handkerchief, close my eyes and run. “You’re going to be disoriented, but run in a straight line.” My first reaction was “Hell No.” 


My second thought was the idea of me sobbing from the stinging chemical, laying in the middle of the tear gas shack and all the men standing outside shaking their heads, saying “That’s why women shouldn’t be allowed to work for the Department.”


 “Oh, hell no.”   I swiped a hand towel from the women’s bathroom and stuffed it in my pocket. 

 The scenario played out exactly like my Viet Nam friend said. Twenty of us were herded into a 16×16 wooden building and told to line up against the wall-I was the first and only woman in the group. Two open windows were on opposing walls. 
  
                                         Two tear gas canisters will be shot into the windows,


our instructor said and pointed to each window. “Your objective? Make it out the door over there.”
“Where are our gas masks, sir?” a male cadet asked. The trainer smirked in response. My VN friend elbowed me and whispered “cover yourself as soon as you hear the shotgun sound. When you get outside, kneel down and take in some air.” I listened for the sound and ran like a bat out of hell. 


The tear gas stung like a swarm of bees. Immediately, the eyes and nose gushed with tears and mucus. I felt like dropping to the ground. My friend and I crashed through that front door first and fell forward on our knees, gasping for breath. 


A few guys didn’t make it out and the trainers, in their gas masks, went into the building to haul them out. One of the cadets asked the trainers, “why did we have to do this without gas masks?”


                                    So you know how it feels to use this on a human being. It’s not a toy.


That was the best moral lesson I learned in the Academy. Treat others as human beings regardless of the circumstances. Sometimes you learn wisdom in the most roundabout ways, like in a tear gas shack. It’s a lesson I carried with me and hope I never forget. 


For former post in this Wednesday series click on:
First post  in “What I Learned in Prison…”
Second post
Third post
Fourth post


If you have any questions about life inside please share in the comment section. 

Female Offenders, Women in Prison

What I Learned in Prison: Women in Front and Behind Cell Bars #4

Mona Alvarado Frazier

These stories are from one employee’s perspective during 1980-2008 with the California Youth Authority (CYA).Training, classifications, and agency have significantly changed in the last 10-15 years. There is no longer a CYA, it merged with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Any names are fictional. This is the first post.

After a couple of days of shadowing my co-workers, I met other staff members who worked on and off the living unit. There was the unit cook, the night dwellers (staff who worked the graveyard shift), the Senior Youth Counselor, Youth Correctional Officers, Institutional Parole Agents, Supervising Parole Agents, Social Workers, Teachers, Lieutenants, Treatment Team Supervisors, and more.

 
I soon learned that a correctional facility had a hierarchy of staff titles and roles. In the very early ’80’s the facility I worked at had more of a ‘rehabilitative’ environment so the result was two ‘branches’ working together (most of the time): the custody part and the treatment part. During one week, I heard several euphemisms for these two sections: the goon squad and the bleeding hearts, the guards and the social workers, security and the hippies. The advice was most often given by all:
 
                                                                                            Don’t Act Scared
 
Three days later, I met the seven girls (wards) assigned to my caseload. There we sat, in a loose rectangle of chairs in the dayroom of the unit, with the noisy washing machine and dryer running in the room behind us and twelve feet from the staff desk with the incessant ringing of phones and door buzzers. The Senior advised me that after I had a few groups in the dayroom I could move to the kitchen.


Before I sat down I caught some of the girls staring at me, others turned their bodies away from me and began chatting to the other girls, and another sat with her head down, biting her fingernails. (None of them looked as interested in small group as the women in the photo above).


This could not be more difficult than being in the small group with the adult felons from Lompoc Federal Penitentiary so I took a deep breath. Not only were the girls watching me but the staff at the desk waited to see how I’d respond. 
 
I stood up. “Everyone up, pull your chairs into a circle, and then we’ll begin,” I said in the firmest but polite, non-shaky voice I could muster. The eyes that had looked elsewhere focused in on me heads raised, and the girl stopped biting her nails. They stood up, not quickly, not cooperatively but eventually they all stood up. 
 
                            The first rule of supervision  is to establish who you are and your expectations.
 

The introductions took several minutes and reminders that we had to use their proper names, not their nicknames. The girls ranged in age from fifteen to eighteen and their crimes varied from a drive-by shooting, robbery, sales of narcotics, theft, prostitution, assault with a deadly weapon, and accessory to murder. 


Like most teenagers the girls wanted to know who I was, what I was about and why was I working in a ‘place like this,’ instead of being married and raising kids. The small group could have been any social gathering at a high school except these were girls who had histories of drug use, abuse, bad decision-making, and…wait, doesn’t that sound like a few high school teens you may know?  


The difference was these girls committed crimes and serious ones that called for more than the one-year maximum term is given at their local Juvenile Hall. The average sentence, in the early ’80’s, was fifteen months with the maximum of seven years. 


I survived my first small group, eventually made it into the kitchen for a quieter environment, and established a rapport with the girls and staff. Two months later and right when I was getting acclimated to the place I received a letter to report to the Correctional Academy in Northern California, two weeks after my marriage date. 

from CDCR website

After I showed my letter to my supervisor she said, “Now get ready to unlearn everything we just taught you.”