124: If We Don’t Tell Our Story, Someone Else Will

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Behind the Wall is Live! https://www.patreon.com/ThePrisonOfficer

Silence doesn’t stay empty for long. When correctional agencies refuse to talk about what happens behind the wall, someone else will gladly explain it for us, and they’ll usually pick the most extreme version. From the ILEETA conference, I take one simple line, “nature abhors a vacuum,” and apply it to one of the biggest challenges in corrections: who controls the narrative of prison life, jail incidents, and use of force.

We get specific about what the public rarely sees. A 30-second YouTube clip won’t show the hours of de-escalation that happened before a cell extraction. A headline counting jail deaths may skip the cause, the medical response, and the reality that correctional officers perform CPR, cut people down, and intervene in violence far more than outsiders assume. In a world of doom scrolling and sensationalism, partial facts become “truth” fast, especially when movies, scripted TV, and even inmate podcasts fill in the blanks.

We also push back on the idea that this is just a PR issue. Our goal is light, not spin. That means sharing real context, owning mistakes when they happen, and inviting the people who shape policy to see the real environment: legislators, judges, and community leaders taking honest tours, not staged walkthroughs. If we want smarter conversations about public safety, accountability, and prison reform, we have to start with accurate information.

Subscribe to the Prison Officer Podcast, share this with someone who thinks they already know what prison is like, and leave a review with the biggest myth you want corrected.

Transcript

Pepperball As A Safer Option

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In more than 28 years of corrections, I have used or supervised Pepperball hundreds of times. Now, as a master instructor for Pepperball, I teach others about the versatility and effectiveness of this pepperball system. From cell extractions to disturbances on the wreckyard, Pepperball is the first option in my correctional toolbox. One of the most dangerous types for officers is during cell extractions. Pepperball allows officers to respond with the lowest level of force and still be effective and ready if the situation escalates. The responding officer controls where the projectiles are aimed, how many projectiles are launched, and how rapidly they're deployed. This allows the response to be tailored to the moment. To learn more about Pepperball, go to www.pepperball.com or click the link below in the show's information guide. Pepperball is the safer option first. Hey guys, welcome back to the Prison Officer Podcast. As you probably know, I've mentioned it on a couple of posts. Uh I'm at the ILEDA Conference, the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Conference. So I'm I'm presenting up here, but along with that, I get to spend most of this week going to other people's classes. So I was in a class yesterday, and it really has nothing to do with corrections, but something was said that really made me think, and I wanted to get on here and talk about it. And it was that nature abhors a vacuum. And you guys have probably heard this before. It's that's not a uh, I mean, it's a quote that's been around for a long time. And um but what it got me to thinking about, because they were talking about public information officers. And if your agency in an incident doesn't get out there and give it a narrative, um, and you can even control some of that narrative from doing it internally, right? Um, then you can get the public some information. You know, uh, and I'm gonna go here, I've got some notes that I took from the class. You know, it matters who tells the story, does it not? Who do you want telling the story of what goes on inside your prison, your jail, right? And for years we have we have held back from that. We have always hidden from the cameras, we've hidden from uh the media, we've hidden from uh even the public. Uh so that's not new. What's what's new kind of in my mind is this years and decades of perception of movies, of TV, of bad journalism, of um letting someone else write our narrative has caught up not only to us, but I believe it's caught up to law enforcement in general. I think that's a lot of what our our brothers on the street are dealing with, also. Um but we've got to get better. We've got to make sure that we get some of you know what what we know is the truth. Uh, we've got to get that out there. Correctional agencies have a habit of staying quiet. We don't show the public what really happens inside. Uh maybe the closest, you know, in the last few years, we've had some of these lockup TV shows, but those things are a lot of those are scripted, you know. Um not everything you see on there is is true to life, uh, true to what you and I say, see on the inside. Um and when we don't let them see the real videos, right? Uh when we don't put the information out there, the only thing that ends up on YouTube, and you're welcome to get on YouTube and look around, look up uh uh prison officer fight, look up uh inmate fight. And what it's going to show you is these 30-second clips that don't show everything that led up to it or anything that happened afterwards. Um you know as well as I do that you know I have I have talked down more inmates than I ever fought. Um we de-escalate stuff on a daily basis. We do it, we do it all the time. Um I've saved inmates' lives. I've performed CPR, I've cut inmates down who were hanging. Um and they lived because of the actions of myself and others. But that's not on the news, is it? I just saw a news article and it was listing the number of deaths in jail this year. It didn't talk about how they died. It didn't talk about um, you know, whether or not these were suicides, self-inflicted, other inmates. They just made it sound like agencies had failed, that these 54 deaths happened because agencies had failed. You know, and agencies we we can. We can control a lot of what goes on inside our prisons, but we didn't build prisons. The public is the one that built prisons. They're the ones that decided a couple of hundred years ago that we should take people who can't live in public and put them together in prison. And somewhere along the way, um, the public perception has become that those guys will get better, right? That if we've got them in this secure place with people watching them, that they can't hurt each other and they can't hurt the people watching them, and that's simply not true. Um, but the the fault comes to the agencies. We're the ones that aren't putting that information out. They aren't showing, you know, the two hours of de-escalation that failed before we had to send a use of force team into a cell. Um, they're not showing um the officers who who stood there and held up, you know, a 200-pound body until somebody could get a knife there to cut them down. They just show the picture of the dead inmate laying on the floor. Um so we've got to get control of our narrative. When there are no facts, and this is this is true for everybody, it's not just prisons, but when people wonder about something, and there are no facts, they will make up stuff. They will make up stuff in their mind, what's right, what's wrong. Um and that's where we mess up. Everybody wonders what goes on behind the wall, behind the fence, behind the bars. And since there's this vacuum where we won't say what goes on there, we won't show what goes on there, we don't talk about what goes on back there, then we leave it open for other people to do that interpretation. We leave it open for media to cover us with bad stories that always show the officers doing the wrong thing, that only show the few bad apples in the barrel. We leave it open to inmates who have no problem. There's if look on the internet and see how many inmate podcasts there are. They're everywhere. And they have no problem lying. They have no problem, and some of it, I will grant you, is their perception from a different view, but a lot of it is boldface lies. You know, they're talking about how poorly they're fed. I've been in several prisons. You're fed as good as anybody is at a nursing home or a school. It's institutional cooking. You're right. You don't get Taco Bell, but you're getting fed well. You get a full meal. So, but they're not going to tell you that. They're going to tell you that they get fed poorly. They're going to call up on the phone and they're going to tell their family, you know, it's cold, they won't give me a coat. I can't get an extra sheet. I can't get some shoes. And so that family will send them money. And this is the narrative they want to push because it benefits them. If the if their parents, if the you know, family, if the public feel sorry for them, what do they get out of that? They get quite a bit of stuff out of that. They get money put on their books, they get sympathy, they get treated better. They're allowed to manipulate people because they have this sympathy-empathy thing going on. So, how do we get in front of that? We're the people that tell the truth. So get out there and tell the truth. And if we have something bad happen, then get out there and tell the truth about what happened that was bad. Because if if we don't do it, people are just gonna make it up in their minds. Think about some time in your life, and I know this has probably happened to everybody. One of your family members maybe goes to the store or goes on a trip, and you know that they were supposed to be back at 3 30. Well, it's 4 o'clock now. Oh no, it's 4 30, and I haven't heard from them, and nobody's called me. Oh my gosh, it's five o'clock. Where are they at? What's going on? What goes through your mind when you don't have those facts? Well, what goes through most people's minds is usually the worst case scenario. That's what goes on in people's minds when they think about prison. If we don't tell them what the truth is, if we don't help them understand what goes on in your jail, in your prisons, then they're gonna take the worst case scenario and they're gonna run with it. And that's where we come in. That's where we bring the truth, that's where we shine the light. You know, we live in a social media, and you guys know this as well as I do, some people call it doom scrolling. As you flip through there, there's no way to explain what goes on in prison in 30-second bites. You can't do it. And I don't even think they're trying. I think it's sensationalism. If I can show blood, if I can show violence, if I can show sex, then somebody's gonna click. Then somebody's gonna stop for a second because it's shocking. And so prison is getting drawn into this, as well as law enforcement on the streets and and many other things, but it's getting drawn into this simply for the sensationalism of it. Crime fascinates people, it always has. You know, uh, there's I I've authored a couple of books, so I I I've read up and and been part of some writers' groups, and up to 60 or 70 percent of crime junkies identify themselves as as women. That blows my mind. Um, I don't know why people are so fascinated with crime. Um and I doubt, I really think that faced with true crime, that people aren't as fascinated with it. This whole culture of crime junkies, um, this is what they see on TV, this is what they see on the movies. This is what's portrayed in a neat little package. But that's not crime, that's not criminals. That's not the violence that you and I see every day. That's not the the inmates taking advantage of other inmates. That's not the meth head who doesn't know where they're at. That's not the mental health inmate now trapped in prison and off his meds and going to probably get in worse trouble and stay in prison longer. That's crime. That's what goes on in our world. It's not a neat little book or movie with a with a good with a good ending. Right? That's just, I don't know. That's my view on it. You know what we've got isn't um, I don't want you to think that this is a PR problem. I'm not talking about public relations. I'm talking about shining light. We need to shine light on this profession. We need to get out there and bring people in and let them view what the truth is. I mentioned several podcasts back. You know, I sat and listened to a lady who who talked about what she knew about prison. And it came from her relative who was in a prison camp. And he told her all kinds of stories. And then she came to came to this group and and she told them all kinds of stories like it was fact. And it made me really sad. It it because I watched people nod and take that in as truth. And that's not what it was. I've walked through these places, real prisons, not a camp, not a camp where he's playing Xbox, not a camp with a basketball court, not a camp with no fence, but real prisons where real stuff happens. And it made me sad to sit see everybody sit there and nod and take in this information, even though it wasn't true. It's not a PR problem, it's a it's a light problem. Prisons, you know, and they always depict us as shadowy places, right? And these dark corridors. Well, we need to remove the shadow from what we do. We need to invite people in. We need to invite community leaders in. I think every politician who makes laws should have to tour a prison every year or two. A real prison, not a camp, not a dog and pony show. Because I've been through dozens of those, where we have some high-level uh senator come through, so we lock everything down, we bring out six inmates that are model inmates, and he talks to them, doesn't go any farther than just inside and then leaves and does a press release in the parking lot. I've watched that. No, we need them to come in. We need them to come in and see how their laws affect people. That's what we take care of, is people. See how the laws affect people. I'd like to see judges. Judges should have to come through a prison on a tour every year. They should have to go see what goes on behind the walls, behind the fences, in the jails, in booking. These nice cleaned-up inmates that show up in their courtroom aren't the same people who came into your booking, are they? Judges need to see some of that. Our community leaders, our mayors, our committee members. Um, they need to go on some tours. We need to open it up. And I'm not talking about donuts with the warden. I've seen a lot of that over my career. No, they need to come into the prison. They need to see what life is like. They need to see what the food looks like, right? They need to see that every inmate's got a bed and sheets and blankets. They need to go walk through a prison commissary and see how it's stacked to the ceiling with ramen and ho-hos and wham whams and zoozus and everything else. They need to go see in these inmates' cells who have who have given them this stark view of this empty cell that's dark and dingy, and let them see it stacked high to the ceiling sometimes with property. And that's on you guys, too. If they've got that much, it's too much. But that's beside the point. But these people need to come through, and the public needs to come through. You know, it's interesting if you'll go back and and I don't think they did it after it opened, but in uh 1938, when they built the Federal Medical Center for Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, um, when they built that prison, they brought buses out and they let the community come out for a weekend. And they rode buses at that time outside of town and went on tours of this new prison to see all the new stuff that was being done and the better way of building prisons. We need to do a little more of that. We need to let people see what their money buys and what it doesn't. So people fear crime, people fear prison, and so they give us this darkness that they put upon us. And prison isn't all darkness, and the darkness that is there needs light shined on it. And the inmates, the violent inmates, the problem inmates, those repetitive inmates that we deal with, because we're a lot like police officers. Police officers deal with the same small percentage of the population weekend after weekend after weekend. They've been 34 times to so-and-so's house on a domestic violence call. They do it all the time. We do the same thing. A lot of the inmates want to do their time and get out. But we need to pull the mask off of those violent, manipulative inmates that have the community and the public fooled, and our legislators fooled. Even our directors these days. So many of our directors are so far removed from the crime that they're supervising, from the criminals that they are charged to house. Let's shine a light, take the mask off of what people perceive prison to be. If we, and by we, I mean the administrators and the agencies, if we build the narrative, if we put out the truth, but I'm not talking about these fake film clips that show everybody sitting around a table with iron pressed inmate uniforms, looking like everything's going perfect. Go get some film and release it and show the world what we do inside. The good, the bad, and the ugly. It's not perfect. It's never gonna be. It is what it is. But when we don't tell them what it is, they're gonna make it up. And that's what's going on now. Nature abhors a vacuum. Hope you guys have a good day. Be safe out there.