Corruption Officer (27 page)

I had a different pep in my step when I was escorted back to
the holding pens.
 
The thought of me
getting out of there in six months lifted my spirits a little under the
circumstances.
 
I was escorted down a
corridor that had holding pens on each side.
 
I was put in the last pen by myself to wait for my ride back to Nassau County
Jail.
 
I noticed that the pen next to
mine had four people in it, one person was gay and he was on the bars talking
to another gay person right across from him.
 
The C.O. that escorted me yelled for them to
keep it down as he locked me in.
 
I took
a deep breath because I am never going to get used to that.
 
I knew that I was in for a long day of bull
pen therapy.
 
That’s when they have you
sitting in the pens all day and all night spitefully making you wait until
you’re the last one left before they send you on your way.

I was in my own thoughts when I heard a voice say, “He’s
back there, last pen.”
 
Then I heard the
footsteps of more than one person.
 
I
looked up to see Officer Jackson, who I had worked with, and another Officer
who I did not know.
 
Jackson had a look
of confusion like, ‘Hell naw, not my dawg!’ as if he could not believe that it
was me sitting there.
 
He asked me with
great pain, “What happened to you?”
 
I
couldn’t face him.
 
I put my head down.
 
He wouldn’t let it go.
 
He said, “This ain’t the Heyward I remember
before I left that jail.
 
You was the fly
uptown
negro
from Harlem cracking all the jokes,
getting the chicks, playing basketball and all that, so what happened?”

I tried to answer.
 
I
made it short when I spoke.
 
My voice
cracked.

“The child support,” I said.

I figured he’d understand since damn near every Officer was
getting hit up for it.
 
He went in on me
saying, “You know what you’ve done to yourself!?
 
Yo’, check it, people are busting their asses
out there trying to be where we’re at doing a job like this.
 
This job has a lot of opportunities for people
especially people from the hood.
 
You
know they don’t want us to come up like this.
 
Look at the things we get with this job.
 
We get benefits.
 
Our family members get benefits too.
 
Can you imagine a motherfucker running around
here with no benefits?
 
Look at our job,
Hey?
 
We sit around all day babysitting
just in case something happens.
 
That’s
all we do.
 
And you fucked that up.
 
Now that they done raised the bar as far as
qualifications to get this job with that college or military shit you got all
kinds of people trying to work on the Island, crackers included.
 
You have Officers really doing it.
 
I mean going to school, getting degrees,
owning businesses and all of that!
 
Not
to mention buying houses and really getting their families up out the hood.
 
Now that’s what this job is about!
 
That’s what you were supposed to use this
opportunity for!
 
Now look at you!?”
 
He said with anger this time.
 
He said in a low tone, “Do you know how you’re
making us look as Black people right now?
 
All in the paper, all on the news they’re
thinking, ‘I told you that you can’t give them
nothing
- look at this.’”
 

When he finished saying all that, he stood there, out of
breath, with a look of anger but most of all disgust.
 
Then the C.O., who I didn’t know, began to
talk, “Six. I have six kids and I love my babies to death that’s why I couldn’t
do what you did.
 
I’ve been through it
all.
 
I have child support right now.
 
I have a restraining order against me that
stops me from seeing my kids right now.
 
I have not seen them in months and when I did
get to see them it was at a Police Station with a cop standing there
supervising.
 
All of
this because she said that I threatened her and them with my gun.
 
Even though this incident that she claims
happened in a building lobby and the video shows that she’s lying, they still
will not let up off me because of my outburst when the judge still denied me
visitation.
 
Even though the evidence
says she made it all up!
 
Brother, my
check right now is $63 dollars every two weeks.
 
I survive off a second gig off the books.
 
I see her all the time with her new man around
my kids and it just hits me in my gut.”
 
He
pauses and I could tell that he was getting emotional just talking about this
then he continues, “As an Officer right now my weapon has been taken away from
me and even though the Fire Arms Review Board knows that I didn’t threaten her
with it, I still may not get it back for years.
 
I am saying all of this to say that Child Support
should never be an excuse.
 
We took an
oath to be an Officer.
 
We swore that we
would do this job.
 
All that stuff that
Officer Jackson said you lost as far as the perks of this job is true, but in time
you can get that back.
 
The one thing
that these inmates took from you that you may never get back is your integrity.”
 

They stood there for a moment to see if they had did the
damage that they came to do, to see if I absorbed what they were saying.
 
Truthfully, the way that I was feeling, I
would have rather they just beat me.
 
Then
he said, “You’re a big dude so I know Corrections used you in the past to whip
ass and I hope you realize that it’s a small world up north and that you will
run into some of the inmates that you beat down so I hope you know how to
fight.
 
There’s a difference when you
don’t have one of us with you jumping one of them.”
 

They left after I didn’t say anything.
 
I felt like a carcass that a pack of wolves
had left after a feeding.
 
I sat back and
thought about everything they had said while I waited for my ride back.

A few hours had passed and I must have dozed off and now I
am awakened to a scuffle going on in the pen next to me.
 
It had something to do with the gay guy.
 
I could not see it but I could hear it and I
could slightly see the expression on the face of the gay guy across from the
cell that the scuffle was taking place in.
 
Everyone was silent.
 
No one screaming for the C.O.
or nothing.
 
Then I heard the gay
guy say, “Nooo, stoop it,” in a low voice not wanting to alert any C.O.
 
Then I heard another dude say, “Come on maaan,
you got to do that right here, right now!?”
 
Then I heard another voice say, “Shut the fuck up or gay or not your
next!”
 
Then I heard a slap and a thud as
if someone hit the floor.
 
Then the gay
guy in the pens across from them said, “Don’t fight him.
 
Girl, he’s gonna’ take it anyway.”
 
The next thing I heard was a flopping sound
and the gay guy moaning!
 
I couldn’t
believe that this shit was happening right here in the pens!
 
I looked across to the other pen and the gay
guy that he was talking to backed away from the bars and out of my view.
 
The rape went on for about ten or fifteen
minutes then ended with the assailant taking a shit in front of everybody and
the gay guy whimpering.

Moments passed then I heard footsteps and my name being
called for my ride.
 
As I was shackled
and taken out of my pen, I looked in the cell where the rape happened.
 
I saw the gay guy sitting with his head down
very close to another inmate with the other two sitting away from them on the
other side of the pen.
 
No one said a
word.
 

As I sat there on my way to Nassau County, I thought about
everything.

When I arrived at Downstate Correctional Facility, I was
removed from a van the handcuffs and shackles.
 
The City Corrections Officer escorts me inside then turns me over to the
State Corrections Officer and at that moment my sentence begins.
 

A short Corrections Officer grabs me by my arm after my handcuffs
are removed and leads me toward a wall then yells, “Put your fucking head in
that wall and don’t move!”
 
My thoughts
were, ‘Here we go.’
 
I did what I was
told.
 
Then the City C.O. that brought me
up from Nassau pulled him over to the side and said, “He’s one of ours.”
 
Then the State C.O. came over to me, looked
me in my face as if he was saying I know what you’re going through then he
patted me on my back and told me to hold my head in there.
 
Then I was placed in a cell by myself for
hours and in that time I hear ass whippings being handed out left to right.
 
This made me start to reflect on when I was
on the giving end of those situations.
 
I
was in the middle of going down memory lane when I heard a C.O. say, “Put him
in the cell with the big Black guy with the big dick!”
 
Then my cell opened and a stocky White guy
walked in.
 
I recognized him right away
because his face, like mine, was all in the papers and now I understood the C.O.’s
statement.
 
This individual was
incarcerated for a hate crime against Black people.
 
Now he was going to get picked on wherever
he’s going because of it, another form of jail justice.
 

The holding pen that we were in was very small and the bench
I sat on barely was big enough for me.
 
I
could see that he also knew why they put him in here with me.
 
I was Black and twice his size.
 
He stood against the wall on edge as if he was
waiting for something to happen.
 
I thought
to myself, ‘This is some bullshit.
 
I
don’t need this and I hope this fool don’t pop and try to fight me thinking
that I want to do something to him.
 
I’ve
seen this happen a million times, an inmate will start a fight with a stranger
just to be moved to a different area.’
 
I
decided to defuse the situation before it even began.
 
I said to him, “Check this out, I know who you
are but you don’t know who I am.
 
I am
the Corrections Officer that got in trouble for hustling
drugs
inside the jail.”
 
He
raised his eyebrow and said, “I heard about you.”
 
I continued to ease the situation by telling
him that I don’t want any problems.
 
I am
here to do my time and that’s it.
 
He
nodded and I moved over as much as I could so that he could sit down.
 
He said his name was Rick, which I already
knew from the news.
 
Nothing else was
said after that.
 
A few more hours passed
then we were taken out of the cell and processed.
 

They had us go through the whole thing together.
 
We were issued our State green clothing, which
all inmates wore, and issued everything that we were supposed to have.
 
Then a Sergeant came over to me and asked me
to sign a paper saying that I wanted to be placed into protective custody.
 
I refused.
 
Then he sat me on a bench for a few minutes while some more inmates came
in for processing and when it got good and packed, he yelled out to me
innocently and loud so that everyone could hear him, especially the inmates,
“Hey, Heyward, how long where you a Corrections Officer on Rikers Island?”
 
Everyone looked at me as if I was E.F.
Hutton.
 
I stood up and glared at
everyone that was looking at me and said, “For nearly ten years.”
 
All you heard after that was mumbling and
pointing from the inmates.
 
I knew then
that my road was going to be rough.
 
Then
the Sergeant came over to me and said that because now the inmates know who I am
that I was a safety hazard for the facility and that they were placing me
involuntarily into protective custody, so that they could better protect me.
 
I kind of knew that this was going to happen
because of my status but I really didn’t want it because I knew that P.C.
inmates are locked down a large portion of the day in some places for a whole
22 hours.
 

We went through some more processing with the guy accused of
a hate crime getting harassed some more.
 
When we were being instructed to do things, they would tell him to put
his feet on the ‘Black’ line on the floor or put your fingers on the ‘Black”
ink pad to get fingerprinted.
 
Everything
that we did they emphasized the word black to him.
 
Then we went to the part of the process that
had us being checked out medically.
 
We
were escorted by six Corrections Officers to a large room about the size of a
gymnasium and what happened next was crazy.
 
We were seated on one side of the room alone
and on the other side were about a hundred Black inmates getting processed as
well.
 
The looks and stares were crazy
and with the amount of C.O.s escorting us, they knew that we were high
profile.
 
They recognized Rick right away
and they began to talk to one another.
 
The
C.O. barks out an order for them to stop talking.
 
As the inmates settle down the C.O.s start
talking shop amongst
themselves
, taking their
attention away from the stares that me and Rick were receiving.
 
I looked into the crowd across from us and began
to get facial communication and hand gestures.
 
I recognized a few inmates that had worked for
me.
 
They bumped their fists together
then mouthed to me, “Hold your head.”

Then there where the inmates who did not know me but felt
that I was the closest person to get to Rick and that Rick should be getting
pounded on right now for what he did to those Blacks.
 
They looked at me like, ‘
You
know who that is!?’
 
Then they would put
their fists to their jaw indicating that they wanted me to pop on him and beat
him down right there!
 
I looked at them,
then
looked at the barrage of C.O.s that stood around me and
Rick, then looked back at them as if to say, ‘How can I?’
 
In my mind I wasn’t even entertaining the
thought of doing anything to anybody.
 
I
just wanted to get processed so that I could see when I would be going to the Shock
Program and getting the hell up out of there.
 
That went on for a couple of seconds then we were put in front of the
other inmates to get processed.
 
I guess
the C.O.s felt the tension in the room.
 
After
we finished being processed, we were taken to our cells and locked in.
 
Then one by one they let us out to use the
telephone to call home and let our people know where we were.
 
I called my moms and got yelled at, “Where are
you?”
 
I tell her and she is happy
because she knows this meant that we could finally get some answers as to how
long I would be in here.
 
I told her that
they told me the counselor would be by this week to see me so that meant that
he did not come every day.
 
She tells me
that she will be up there later this week.
 
I said, “Okay.”
 
Then she said, “I love you.”
 
I said, “I love you too.”
 
Then as the phone went dead, a recording came
on saying, “You are talking to and inmate incarcerated at Downstate Correctional
Facility.”