AFTER THE REFORMS - HARDENED GUARDS

State Finds Fewer Who Are Willing,Able To Watch Inmates

DAY AFTER day for the past 13 years, Shawn Blackhurst has faced each
morning knowing what lies ahead for him on the job as a prison guard.

It's eight hours on his feet trying to tune out the screams, taunts
and curses of inmates. Eight hours of fending off boredom while trying
to stay alert to the nuances that may signal a fight or a riot. And
eight hours of exposure to contagious diseases like hepatitis and AIDS.

If he's lucky today, he won't be doused with human waste, slashed with
a razor blade, head-butted, punched in the face, spat on or pelted in
the back with a roll of toilet paper soaked in water or worse. It has
happened to him before.

"Believe it or not, I enjoy my job," said Blackhurst, a 38-year-old
state prisons correctional officer at the Clemens Unit in Brazoria.
"This is what I want to do."

There's no doubt, however, that not everyone is cut out for the job.
Good correctional officers, he said, must have "a lot of patience and
... take a lot of abuse."

Increasingly, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is finding that
seasoned correctional officers like Blackhurst are becoming a rarer
commodity.

More than 40 percent of TDCJ's correctional staff has been on the job
less than three years, said agency spokesman Glen Castlebury. Turnover
is so high that last year alone about one in every six guards quit.

Officials attribute staffing difficulties to TDCJ's rapid expansion
and a good economy. The state built so many prisons so fast in the
early part of this decade that the agency has struggled to find large
numbers of employees.

And many who might have relied on prison work in leaner times have
found work elsewhere because of Texas' booming economy, officials
contend. Although starting pay is relatively good, prison guards top
out at $25,524 after about 20 months on the job, and raises are rare
- -- available only when the Legislature gives them. (In 1997,
legislators approved a $100-a-month pay hike. Prison officials say it
was the first in at least four years.)

Staff shortages in recent years have been so critical -- currently
1,000 guard jobs remain vacant -- that a few years ago TDCJ lowered
its employment standards. While a high school diploma once was
required, a general equivalency diploma is now acceptable; the minimum
score applicants must post on a pre-employment aptitude test has been
lowered; and, many veteran guards complain, training has been shortened.

The upshot: A large number of inexperienced officers, some as young as
18, are watching over hardened criminals.

The security force is so young that the warden at one unit recently
discovered a number of its correctional officers had grown up on the
streets with those on the other side of the bars.

"It's not unusual that you have a correctional officer that knows an
offender" given the number of guards TDCJ hires, said Gary Johnson,
director of of the institutional division. When he went to work as a
guard at the Eastham Unit in Lovelady in 1977, Johnson said, he ran
into an inmate who had gone to high school with him.

Today, though, when a warden learns that an offender and a guard had a
particular relationship outside of prison, the inmate often is
transferred, Johnson said.

That's not to say that those who hire on at 18 can't survive the
rigors of the job. Tim Simmons, an assistant warden at the Estelle
Unit outside Huntsville, and William De la Rosa, a guard-supervisor at
the Estelle High Security Unit, both started right after graduating
from high school.

"I was going to work one year," said Simmons, who had initially
planned to join the Houston police force. "You had to be 19 to join
HPD. I got up here and I liked it. I enjoyed the job and just decided
to stick it out." He's stuck it out 14 years so far.

De la Rosa also decided to stay on the job. His older brother works
for TDCJ and is assigned to the Darrington Unit in Rosharon. "I found
out it was great (work) and I could handle it," he said. He's been on
the staff 11 years.

The location of some prisons presents another problem, added Jim Bush,
TDCJ personnel director. Some are in locations a lot of people don't
care to move to. That's particularly true for units in the East Texas
community of Tennessee Colony, just outside Palestine, and in the
Panhandle town of Dalhart, Bush said.

Indeed, TDCJ's biggest competitor for employees in Palestine is the
Wal-Mart Distribution Center, according to Bush. "It pays about $2,000
less for entry-level positions, but the environment is better," he
said.

Administrators from TDCJ Executive Director Wayne Scott on down admit
that the work environment is a crucial factor in staff turnover.

So does "Bob," another veteran guard who asked that his full identity
not be revealed for fear of reprisal from his supervisors. He comes
from a family of Texas prison guards. His brother and wife are guards
and his father used to be.

"The job stress begins when you wake up," he said. "You lie in bed
when the alarm goes off and think: `I'm working for society and they
treat me like the inmate.' "

For nearly a decade he has been working in the administrative
segregation wing of one of Texas' toughest prisons. Only once in all
that time, he said, has the stress really gotten to him. "I lost my
cool one day and sprayed an inmate with a water-based fire
extinguisher." He was demoted in rank and pay.

Although his career goal was to become a warden, now Bob is seriously
considering quitting -- if he doesn't get fired first.

He has been accused of aiding a gang-related stabbing of an inmate --
two weeks after unit administrators notified him that he had been
recommended for a citation for having saved the victim's life by
breaking up the fight.

He insists he became the patsy for supervisors who are trying to cover
up their own culpability. The supervisors, he said, ignored warnings
about the planned attack. They had been alerted by two other guards
who had intercepted an inmate note with details of the attack.

"I put my life on the line and then they go and accuse me of aiding
and abetting" the Texas Syndicate gang, he said.

The stress is particularly acute for correction officers assigned to
administrative segregation wings at maximum-security prisons because
of the type of inmate they must watch, administrators said.

Scott said TDCJ unofficially tries to rotate guards off duty at the
Estelle High Security Unit, an entire ad-seg facility outside
Huntsville, after six months because of the stress.

In addition to the tensions created by constantly high noise levels,
Scott said, ad-seg officers face other stress involved with moving
dangerous criminals.

"The staff is responsible for going in and moving the individuals out
and they have to handcuff ... the individuals," Scott said. "And they
have to do it under extreme circumstances, because they can't make a
mistake. You've got to stay extra vigilant your whole shift." One
mistake in securing the handcuffs or a cell door can mean another
assault or murder.

Some officers, though, like working ad seg. "It's an unpredictable
environment," said Bob Chance, assistant warden over the High Security
Unit. "The key to the job is never walking in here without learning
something."

Given the work environment inside a prison, says David Ward, an expert
on the effects of long-term isolation, "it takes a tremendous amount
of self control" on a guard's part not to lose his cool.

"It is very easy to cross over the line," says Ward, a sociology
professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied federal prisoners.

While prison administrators like Chance tend to see their jobs as
challenging and never boring, rank-and-file guards tend to focus on
the routine.

Some describe the monotonous and constant whining of inmates as having
an anesthetizing effect on them. "You kind of walk around
half-conscious," said Blackhurst, the Clemens guard. "But you try to
keep yourself prepared.

"The verbal abuse goes on all day long," he said. "It's, `I need this.
My toilet's broke or this is broke. I want this. Will you get me ...
?' Whenever you don't give (inmates) what they want, you're Mr. SOB."

A native of Illinois, he moved to Texas because guard work here was
paying more than any job he could find in his home state, especially
for someone without a college degree.

His biggest fear these days, though, stems from the youth and
inexperience of his co-workers. Very few officers today have the
experience to know what to do in emergencies, Blackhurst said. Even
his supervisors have less experience than he does.

And Blackhurst knows that when he heads home at the end of his shift,
if he stops to buy groceries or fuel his car, his blue-and-gray TDCJ
uniform most likely will not earn him any respect or admiration from
the public.

"I don't think they think we're very upstanding because of all the bad
stuff they hear (in the media)," he said.

Nevertheless, in 1994, 30 officers at four prisons were under
investigation for possible organized criminal conduct in which some
inmates were targeted and beaten. Johnson said most of those officers
were fired. That same year, guards at the Terrell Unit near Livingston
were under fire for failing to stop inmates from viciously killing
23-year-old inmate Randy Payne, who was beaten over a two-hour period
because he wouldn't submit to sex or pay for protection.

At the same prison, Michael McCoy, a 30-year-old convicted car thief,
was beaten to death in his cell because he had spit on a guard. Guards
Joel Lambright and Alex Torres were convicted of manslaughter in the
case, but each served less than six months in prison before being
released on probation.

TDCJ also has had sporadic instances, even today, in which guards are
discovered to be gang members, Johnson said. Such was the case in 1994
when officials suspected some guards at the McConnell Unit in Beeville
had formed a gang that beat prisoners. They called themselves the
"Blue Bandanas" for the color of handkerchiefs they carried as a sign
of unity. At least two of those officers were fired after they were
indicted on charges of aggravated assault.

The reputation of Texas prison guards took another battering earlier
this month from U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice.

In his March 1 court order retaining control over the prison system,
the judge acknowledged the remarkable changes in the system since he
began mandating reforms nearly three decades ago, citing the agency's
"complex web of policies and procedures," its additional capacity to
house inmates, and gleaming, state-of-the-art health-care facilities
now available to prisoners.

But in holding that Texas prisons are still unconstitutional, he
blamed TDCJ employees, citing everything from "staff indifference" to
some guards' use of "malicious and sadistic" punishment. He reserved
his harshest criticisms for employees who, he said, ignored inmate
complaints of rape.

"The inability of TDCJ to compile and report data on such assaults,"
he wrote, "evidences disregard by prison officials for a crime that
rips at the dignity and humanity of its victims. ... Prison officials
at all levels play a game of willing disbelief, one that appears
adequate on paper and fails dismally in practice."

That is the kind of criticism, Blackhurst and other employees said,
that sets them off.

"Every last one of these (excessive use of force complaints) is
instigated by the inmates," Blackhurst insisted. "We don't go around
throwing them on the floor. Some (inmates) will actually attack us
while they're handcuffed. They'll try to break away from us.

"I'm tired of being slandered by Judge Justice and his friends,"
Blackhurst added. "I've worked for TDCJ over 13 years and I've been
abused every day of it by inmates. You name it, from verbal to
physical. Now I have to wonder what's going to happen if I enforce the
rules, which are written to comply with the stipulation. Will they
believe me or the inmate?

"I challenge Judge Justice to lock thousands of criminals in prison,
give them all the amenities we have to and keep them from hurting each
other. Can he find his heaven behind bars so that we may emulate it?"

For many prison employees, Justice's criticism seems to condemn them
all for the acts of a few.

"We have a dedicated and professional staff," Scott said. "We've got
27,000 correctional officers, and by and large the majority of those
people every day go out and do a heck of a job for the state of Texas
with very little recognition. You only read about us when an incident
occurs ... It's really unfair that any time an incident occurs the
entire system gets branded."