CONFINEMENT STAFF

Our Correctional Officers and Correctional Officers in Training hold complete authority and wear it where you can see it: leather over uniform, keys on belt, boots arriving before they do. Steel bars, cold cuffs and stone corridors that carry the sound of them coming. The sound of their boots will bring you to position. If not, their correction will ensure it’s a mistake you dare not repeat. Nothing about your comfort is their concern. Your conduct is. You will be answerable to every staff member, from the youngest trainee to the Warden herself, and none of them will make it easy on you. You will become a trapped toy for these dominant women to bat at as a cat does a toy – to use and abuse as they want. Each one holds mastery over several specialties: enhanced interrogation, corporal punishment, stress positions, psychological torture. You will be used as a tool. Trainees will drill their techniques on you under the eyes of the tenured COs: counts, cuffs, searches, posture, tone.

Your release is theirs alone to grant: no countdown, no expected hour, nobody to tell you how much longer. You will wait on their word the way you’ve waited on everything else, and it comes only when they decide it does.