What Happens During a Lockdown?

Join Sabrina and learn what makes a prison "lockdown," and be surprised by some of the difficulties that arise out of lockdown...in particular, for correctional officers.

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Intro/Outro MUSIC CREDIT:
The Fool, original recording music and lyrics by J. Bloom © 2022.

For the full song, visit the PrisonCare, Inc. YouTube Channel:

https://youtu.be/cG8zHpQZDug

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This is THE PRISONCARE PODCAST! I’m Sabrina Justison, your host, the founder and Executive Director of PrisonCare, Inc. where we are committed to equipping compassionate people to support positive prison culture from the outside, because everyone on the inside matters!

“I want to be as relevant to you as you are to me…

…am I the fool who’s dreaming? I’ll wait.”

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http://prisoncare.org/community.html

Intro/Outro MUSIC CREDIT:
The Fool, original recording music and lyrics by J. Bloom © 2022.

For the full song, visit the PrisonCare, Inc. YouTube Channel:

https://youtu.be/cG8zHpQZDug

“I’ll wait. I'll wait until I break.”

{ 0:40 }

Well, hello there. This is Sabrina. And today's episode on Lockdowns is one that was recorded a number of weeks ago before the in-real-time episodes that we did for four in a row. So, if you notice a difference in tone, that's because this was a little while ago and a whole lot has gone down since then.

The information in there is still accurate, and educational, and informative, and hopefully entertaining in the way that it's presented. But it is based on the facility where J lived for five years and not the one where he is in real time at the end of July 2023, where he's living now.

So, this is the last of some episodes that I had recorded before all of the changes that led to J being transferred to a new facility. And I thought the information in this one is really good, and I didn't want to just lose it, or have to re-record it, either. So here you go. Today's episode on lockdowns. I hope that you learn some cool stuff and that this gives you things to think about, and more reasons to care about the people inside prison neighborhoods.

{ 2:00 }

Hello friends. So, what happens when a prison goes on lockdown? That's our big question for the day, and I didn't actually know what a lockdown was until just a few years ago. So, maybe you don't even know what that means! And even if you know what it means, maybe you don't know the more specifics about all the different ways that it impacts, the residents of a prison neighborhood. No matter which uniform they're wearing, lockdown is a huge thing, and it doesn't matter if you are an incarcerated person in a prison or if you are a correctional officer in a prison. So, let's talk lockdowns today.

So, in simplest terms, a lockdown is when everyone has to go into their cells. All the cell doors are locked. There is no movement allowed around the prison by anyone who is incarcerated, and it can happen for any number of reasons.

{ 2:58 }

It happens a couple times a day for Count, where they do an accounting of everyone to make sure that no one has escaped and that no one has died. So, there are those brief lockdowns for Count, but when the facility goes on lockdown, it is usually in response to violence or some sort of danger.

So, there have been times when facilities have gone on lockdown because of, like, weather problems…you know, like a tornado watch, or you know, like, it can be something that has nothing to do with activity in the facility.

Lockdown also happens when something goes missing that has the potential to be a serous contraband problem. Definitely, if something like keys get stolen, you know, but sometimes even if something like a big spoon from the kitchen, if something that is prison property, that would be potentially dangerous in the hands of the wrong resident who is using it for nefarious purposes, then the facility goes on lockdown.

{ 4:08 }

So, what happens in a lockdown is much more complicated than I would have thought before in my mind, before I knew anyone who was incarcerated, before I knew people who worked in corrections. I had this picture of it getting so much easier! I mean, if you lock down the facility, hello! All the bad guys are locked in their cells, right? So nobody's causing problems. And the staff could probably, like, breathe deeply, get a cup of coffee, put their feet up for a couple of minutes. Like, it would be much easier once the facility is on lockdown.

So, it wouldn't be great if you were one of the incarcerated individuals, of course, because you would be stuck in your cell for however, long the facility is locked down.

{ 4:58 }

If it's a lockdown that only lasts a day or two, you'd probably be in there the whole time. If it is a lockdown that goes on longer than that, well then at some point around two to three days, they would have to begin bringing people out and allowing them to get showers and to make a quick phone call, and they would be doing this in small groups, and it would be rotating through.

So, if you are a prison resident, and the facility goes on lockdown, it is boring. It means you're stuck with your cellie, who you may or may not get along with very well. Time just crawls while you're locked down. There’s no programs. There's no classes. You’re not doing your job, if you have a job in the facility. You’re not able to talk on the phone. If you don't have a TV of your own, you're not able to watch TV, all of that. Lockdown is not fun.

But if you’re staff, there are ways in which it's even worse for you. This is the part that I did not realize at all. And I'm really, like, trying to emphasize the fact that I just did not realize this, because I think a lot of you listening may have never realized it. And when I describe it a little bit, you're probably going to feel like I did, where I went, “Duh.! Why did I never think about this? Oh my, that’s…that’s, that’s awful.”

So, here's the deal. Prisons are not small, you know? We're not talking about the, the TV shows where we got the wild west, and here's the little sheriff in the jail with the two cells in it and you know…

It’s…they're huge. They’re huge! It is not at all unusual for a facility to have 1500 to 2000 inmates in it.

{ 6:59 }

That's a big facility. Even in smaller ones, you're talking five to six hundred. There's not really anything much smaller than that. I don't think so. When a facility with that many residents has to be locked down, first of all, you’ve got to get it locked down, which is a hassle.

You have to get everybody to get where they're supposed to be, to get into their cells, to get everything locked. Okay? So you get them all in. You get everything locked down, and now it's quiet. Phew.

But then there's this big problem, and it's called feeding people, because you can't just starve everyone in their cells during the lockdown. I mean, that would be cruel and unusual punishment. A violation of their, what is it? Eighth Amendment rights, or whatever, constitutionally. You can't just starve them. So they have to be fed.

Well, they usually get fed by going to the chow hall. But they can't go to the chow hall because they're locked down. So you're going to have to deliver

{ 7:59 }

all those meals to all of those residents. Let's say there's 1,500 of them, and your staff is now delivering meals to them. Maybe it's in a brown paper bag. Maybe it's in a little styrofoam container.

If it's hot food, you're delivering food that should have been hot. And by the time it gets to them, it's cold. So you've got a lot of grumpy people who were very hungry before you got there, because this process takes a long time to deliver 1,500 meals. They were probably hangry before you ever got to them, and now you're serving them something that should have been served hot, and it's cold and disgusting, and they're mad. So you've got a lot of really miserable people you're coming in contact with while you try to get this whole facility fed.

And oh, wait! How are you going to feed them if there's nobody working in the kitchen to prepare the food?

{ 8:59 }

Now, it varies some from one facility to the next, but what a lot of prisons have is some sort of outside company that runs the prison kitchen. So these are civilians who come in from the outside, who are trained to run a prison kitchen. And there's a team, however big, but they are just in charge of the kitchen, and then it's typically incarcerated people who work in the kitchen and who follow orders from them and actually prepare the food.

So in a lockdown, before the staff can even begin trying to deliver those 1,500 meals to all those hangry people, they have to make the food.

Like, just let that sink in, guys. 1,500 meals, and the people who usually cook them and prepare them, they don't show up for work. So you have to try to, let's see…

{ 9:59 }

“We'll make something really simple. We’ll make sandwiches, and so that'll be easier than trying to do hot food. And we’ll…golly, 1500 people is a lot of people to feed and we don't have our kitchen staff!”

All right? So on a lockdown, you have not once a day, but minimum twice a day, you have staff, who have to get food made and delivered to everyone in the facility. You've also got people on special diets who normally would just pick up one of the special diet labeled trays, or whatever. Because, you know, once you've been cleared that you have to be on a special diet, or that you've chosen to be on, like, a Kosher diet, or whatever, that is approved, and then there's, you know, that many of the Special meals are available in the chow hall, and when you show that you're entitled to one of them, it's given to you.

{ 10:59 }

But if you're locked down in your cell, you've now got staff showing up with the food on the cart, and you're already angry because it's taking them so long to get there because they had to make all this food and deliver it. And now you have people who are on special diets who are saying, “Wait, I can't eat that. I'm on the such-and-such diet.”

There's this whole other layer of complication, right? Additionally, if a lockdown continues, it's because something is still very wrong, and that's the part that we've left out up to this point.

The facility didn't go on Lockdown randomly, just for fun. It went on lockdown, because something happened. In most cases it’s because something happened on the inside, something went missing. Someone tried to escape, someone was assaulted. Some staff member was found in a compromising position. Something bad has happened on the inside, and so something has to be done to correct,

{ 11:59 }

whatever the problem was that put the facility on lockdown. So, a lot of your staffers should be, you would think, solving whatever that problem was, right? That's where their time and energy should be going: trying to fix the problem so that the facility can come back off of lockdown.

But while you need staffers solving the problem, you also need staffers keeping people from starving to death while you solve the problem. If you start with a facility that is understaffed anyway, which (by the way) almost all prisons are significantly understaffed, then you've got a real problem here. You've got way too much work to be done by too few people, and you're trying to get it done as quickly as possible, so that things can return to normal.

It's tough on staff when they lock down. Nobody goes home when they were supposed to go home. Mandatory overtime,

{ 12:58 }

You stay while the problems get solved. And so, if you had stuff going on in the real world like, I don't know, families! If you had kids with sporting events, with musical performances, with whatever…if you have aging parents, if you have a spouse that you have not been getting along with and you would plan to spend some really good time together and try to improve things, if you have doctor's appointments for yourself, all that just doesn't matter.

Because if a facility is on lockdown, everybody has to stay over and everybody works really long hours until the problem is solved, and things can be opened back up again. If the lockdown goes on long enough that now you do have to deal with this whole showering thing, and contact with the outside, now you're talking about a rotation of small groups of people at a time being let out in each pod.

{ 13:59 }

And you're watching the clock and you're warning everybody, you know, “Quick you got 20 minutes total,” or, “you got 30 minutes total. So go, get your shower, make a quick phone call. Let your loved ones know that. You're okay, that the facility's just on lockdown. They're not going to hear from you again for probably three days.”

And that's over and over and over and over again. If you've got 100 cells in each pod and you're letting 20 guys out at a time, and they got a half an hour, that’s like, that's like a whole day of just trying to get people out and showered and able to talk to their loved ones and reassure them that, you know, they haven't died or something. So that's one more thing that a staffer has to oversee, instead of working in the kitchen preparing food. Instead of pushing the cart around, delivering the food.

{ 14:56 }

Instead of working with the investigative team to solve whatever the problem was that caused the facility to go on lockdown in the first place. And all the while, you have residents who are getting more and more frustrated, and discouraged, and stir crazy.

Lockdown is a really tough situation for everyone involved. Now, one of the things that is a hopeful ray of light in a lot of prisons, and it's a step toward what I'm hoping will be an increase in dynamic security models within prisons, but that's what happens in the incentive units in a prison.

So, if the prison has a housing area, a single pod, or maybe a unit with multiple pods in it, but what is called incentive housing is an area of cells within the prison. And the only people who can live there are people who have earned the right to live there by having no behavioral write-ups, by staying out of trouble, for, in most cases, at least a year.

And so, if you've gone a long-enough time without any write-ups, and you apply and a bed becomes available, then you can move into incentive housing. And incentive pods, or units, have different kinds of perks available to them. And that varies a lot from one facility to another. But, you know, maybe it's that there's a couple of pieces of upholstered furniture, you know, a couple of couches, or whatever, in the common area rather than only the hard plastic or the metal. Maybe it means that there's, you know, a microwave, or an air fryer, or something more than you would have in the other day rooms. Maybe there's a better TV. Maybe there's access to a particular type of activity.

{ 16:56 }

So, some incentive pods, like, have a theme, and we've talked in the past about J, my son who is incarcerated, that he lives in a music incentive pot, and so there's access to musical instruments and recording equipment. So, there can be all different kinds of things that an incentive pod is thematically based on, or whatever.

But in addition to having those perks — because, when the facility is on lockdown, the incentive pods are locked down, too; that’s facility-wide. It has to be for security and safety, right? But As time goes on, and you have this problem of all these people have to be fed, we have to make the food, and deliver the food, and get it to them, and we don't have enough staff to do that… What will often happen is a fairly high level staffer will come into an incentive pod and ask for volunteers to work in the kitchen.

{ 17:56 }

And because the residents living in that housing area, have not had any behavioral write-ups for an extended period of time, there is a degree of trust that they have earned. It's a really minimal degree of trust. We're not talking about, like, staffers really trusting these people, it's just that they figure they are less likely to have a problem with them than they are with anybody else in the building. And let's face it, they've got to have hands to prepare all the food.

So, it's a desperate enough situation that they ask for volunteers, and residents from an incentive unit or pod will help prepare the food.

And that's what a lockdown looks like and feels like. And it's really hard.

There have been times when J’s facility has been on lockdown, and when he has volunteered to work in the kitchen, where he's worked, a 12 or 15-hour day

{ 18:58 }

in the kitchen for no pay. Just because it was better than sitting in his cell for all those hours, and because he knew people gotta eat, somebody's got to make the food. “I can do it and I've even like worked in restaurants before. So, okay, I'm a good fit for this, and people need it.”

So they jump in there and do it. But it can be a really long day, could be really hard work and you're not getting paid for it. You're also not getting promoted for it. You know, your manager is not going to notice. It’s not going to move you closer to your release date. You don't get good time taken off of your sentence for volunteering in the kitchen, right? It's purely just volunteering because it needs to be done. So, that's one of those things that you'll learn about people who are incarcerated, is that some of them are actually doing things like that, just because they need to be done and because it's a part of taking care of the people in their neighborhood.

{ 20:02 }

And that's a beautiful thing. If you're serving a prison sentence, if you have messed up your life enough that this is where you've ended up, but if you have grown and changed enough beyond that point that you now genuinely care about whether or not the rest of the people in the facility get fed, and get fed something that is actually nutritious, and kind of provides what they need, you know, that’s hopeful That's hopeful even in the midst of a lockdown.

So there you go. Lockdowns.

Once upon a time, I thought of them as being really, really hard on the residents, and kind of a nice break for the staff, but a little increased proximity to the prison neighborhood thing has taught me what I was able to share with you today: that it's hard on the residents, and it's really hard on the staff. Lockdowns, not fun for anyone.

So, thank you for being willing to learn a little bit today. I hope that there was something new there for you, that you didn't just already know all of that, and were yawning and waiting for me to get to something brand new!

But it's new for a lot of us, I think. And if you have connection to Corrections, if you have worked through lockdowns, and there's things that I have gotten wrong in how I've described them, or things that were, at least, not that way in the facility where you worked — because a lot of my knowledge comes from my connection to J's facility. I do have numerous people connected to other prisons, you know, that I talked with as well, but I'm not going to lie, my closest connection is through my son —

{ 21:59 }

So, if there are things that were different in the facility that you worked in, or if there are other things that I left out and that you think it would be good if people knew about…Oh! Meds!

I never even mentioned medicine! But yeah, typically people go to Meds to get their…there's like a spot, I don't know, whatever! A place where you pick up your medicine, if you're on maintenance medicines every day for anything, whether it's high blood pressure or diabetes, or antipsychotics, and you go, and you pick up your medicine every day. But when the facility goes on lockdown, all the meds have to be brought to each cell and distributed.

Think about the nightmare, that that is, and the chances of delivering the wrong medicine, to the wrong person because you've got the wrong stuff on the cart when you get to their cell. Just another whole layer.

And then there are medicines that have to be taken at certain times of the day, right? Or at least within a certain window. But when you're having to take all the medicines to the residents rather than them coming to you at a set time,

{ 23:00 }

that guarantees that a lot of people are taking their medicine at the wrong time. Another whole layer of mess; another whole layer of mess.

Anyway, I should have looked at my notes, shouldn't I? Because I had, “meds,” written in my notes, and I overlooked that.

But if you have worked in a facility, and there's something that I have forgotten, and you want to share it with us, please do comment on our social media, send me an e-mail. Sabrina@prisoncare.org.

However, you would like to interact with us. We're on Facebook, we're on Instagram, or on Twitter, or on LinkedIn. We're on YouTube, and we're here on whatever podcast listening platform you prefer.

And I'm glad that you are here with us. I'm glad that you're listening. I hope that you will continue to tune in for future episodes, and I hope that you will visit prisoncare.org and become involved in more and more ways. We really can support positive prison culture from the outside and we can do it because everybody on the inside matters…when the facility is running normally, and when it's on lockdown.

Thanks for caring, friends.

The PrisonCare Podcast

What Happens During a Lockdown?

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