Elizabeth Berrios: On Working in Prisons

Elizabeth Berrios, 28, is from Hartford, Connecticut. She’s been working at various prisons in Hartford, and in maximum-security prisons in rural areas north of the city for a year as a Correctional Commissary Officer. She works the first shift, 6:30 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. Her day begins at 4:45 a.m. and her second shift begins at 3 p.m. when she picks up her 3-year-old daughter from daycare.
Correctional Commissary Officers supervise inmates who work in the prison in an assembly-like line packaging products [TVs, CDs, envelopes, etc.] that inmates of the prison legitimately buy from the prison. These boxes are later checked and approved by the Correctional Commissary Officer to ensure nothing extra is packed into the boxes. These boxes are then hand-delivered to the inmates by the Correctional Commissary Officer with the help of a Correctional Officer (CO) [prison guard].
I spoke with Elizabeth on May 24, 2006, two days after she found out a CO at one of the prisons she works at was beaten by one of the inmates with the phone that was on her desk. Here’s Elizabeth….

Before you start the interview, I probably should tell you a CO was beaten by a prisoner at one of the prisons that I work at on Monday. He tried to beat her to death with the telephone. She’s in the hospital. She got 49 stitches in her head. She’s in critical condition and they’re saying she might lose her eye. Her eye is folding up under pressure from the brain.
There are 52 inmates that work in the commissary, but 24 of our workers, half of them, were yelling, “Kill the bitch!� They all got fired today. The whole place is on lockdown, there’s no movement or nothing. Everything is being brought to their cells, lunch and everything.

Did your supervisor talk with you all afterwards?
No.
Your day just kept going?
Yeah. But I wasn’t at MacDougall on Monday [where it happened]. I was at Northern. But when I went in on Tuesday at 6:30 in the morning, the first CO I saw—my uniform says Berrios—he was like, “Are you related to the Berrios that got attacked at MacDougall?” And I had seen it on the news the night before. And I was like no, there’s two Berrios at MacDougall that I know. But it ended up not being “Berrios,â€? it was “Beros.â€?
And the CO kept talking to me about it, “What happened to her? That’s really fucked up. She’s got stitches in her?â€? Right in front of the inmates! And the inmates were listening to him! I’m looking at him like I’m not paying attention to him and wanting him to shut up because you’re not supposed to talk about stuff like that in front of the inmates. The inmates were listening and they started yelling, “Word! She got her ass kicked! That’s one for us! That’s one for us!â€? It’s like a game to them! It’s like, dag, if they think that way about all of us? They don’t even know the lady and they’re saying, “It’s one for us”!
Are you OK?
Yeah, I’m OK. It’s just crazy.
What’s your average day like?
All I do is supervise them [the inmates], and make sure they don’t steal. Sometimes you see people bend down and they come up chewing. Chewing because they’re opening stuff up and eating the food! [Laughs] They automatically get fired because they’re not supposed to be eating anything. They’re there to work, not to eat! But some of them think they can get away with shit, so they try to test you.
Then we dump the whole bag out and check the whole bag to make sure nothing extra went in. And if anything is missing, they get credited back for it. I opened up a bag one time and found some staplers and a highlighter. They’re not supposed to have anything like that, they’re murderers! [Laughs] I’m like, holy shit! They’re only supposed to have what the commissary sells them. Those are the only things they can have. And like some jails, they’re not allowed baby powder or ponytail elastics because when baby powder gets thrown on the floor, the boots that we wear to work, they slip. Like if someone didn’t want to go back to their cell, they would spill baby powder all over the place, and the COs would slide all over the place, and they [the inmate] would run. But I don’t know why they don’t sell ponytail elastics.
But that’s an average day at MacDougall [not maximum security]. The toughest place is Northern [maximum security] and passing their commissary through a trap door. Sometimes they’re jerking off, and something flies out through the door. They yell sexually explicit things at you all day. You can hear them yelling, but you don’t know what cell it’s coming from because they’re all locked in their cell. So you can’t give that person a ticket because you don’t know who it is. So it’s hard.

Can you see the inmates?
Yeah, they have a little window at the side of their door. And they stare at you. Monday I was there, I was giving this guy his stuff and I was by myself with the CO. And he said, “Look at you, lookin’ all sexy.� And I was like, “Excuse me. Slow your roll. Don’t do it.� And he said, “You can’t be comin’ up to my cell lookin’ like that.� Then I took his shit, and put it back in the bag and kept walking. [Laughs] He knows he’s not supposed to be talking to me like that. But they try you and they do all this stuff trying to play you.
So they can get in trouble?
Yeah. They get written up tickets and everything. The way that facility is, the units are 1, 2, and 3. And 3 is OK—it’s for people who don’t really give too much trouble. 2 is a little bit worse. And 1 is the worst—that’s death row—and where all the people are really fighting and everything. So the people in the 1 unit are the people who really give me trouble—like yelling and all that stuff.

Are there other women who work in your position, too?
Yeah, there’s another lady. There’s two women in my district that I’ve worked with. One works at MacDougall. She doesn’t do anything but scan the bubble sheet that they fill in when they go the commissary. She refuses to go next to inmates. She doesn’t like being near them so she stays on one side.
There’s another lady who works with me at Northern and another facility. She’s older. She used to work at medical for 16 years and she got laid off. So now she’s almost done three years in commissary. She basically took the job to finish off her 20 years so she can collect her retirement [Retirement or pension is the average of the worker’s three highest earning years out of the 20]. She’s making like half of what she used to make! When she worked at medical, she got paid almost $70,000. Now she’s making like 33!
And the new girl, who’s still training in the academy, she came today to the facility. She’s like my age.

Do you get paid OK?
I have a daughter now, so I have to pay for daycare. If I didn’t have her, I’d have more money.

Do the male commissary workers get treated the same way by the inmates as the female commissary workers?
No, because you’re female in a male facility. And 75 percent of them are there for murder at MacDougall alone. They look at you, and they talk to you differently. They try to talk to you like they’re trying to pick you up at the club. Being a female, you have to show them you’re about business and you’re not going to take any shit. Once they see you’re constantly like that, they stop fuckin’ with you and show you respect. They’re actually more polite to me because they don’t like taking orders from other men. Men don’t like taking orders from other men. They act up more with men.
With women, well with me at least, they’re very polite. But then again, you have the CO that I told you, who got beat up. Who knows how she could have acted, you know? Or the reason why she got beat up. The guy who beat her up was in a gang in New Haven, the Elm City Boys, and he had six Gameboys in his cell. You’re only allowed to have one. Nobody else knew why he had six, so why did he have six? So the lady took all of them away. He said he wanted his back but she said no because it was under investigation. And she wrote him a ticket, a Class B ticket, which means either his phone or his mail gets stopped for 30 days. So he was upset about that. And who knows what she could have told him, she could have told him, “Fuck you! I don’t give a shit about you. You’re an inmate.� They already hate you. When you say stuff like that, they hate you even more.
I mean I feel the same way. I know you’re an inmate, and I’m staff, and you’re supposed to stay away from me. But I don’t treat them like shit because I don’t want to burn my bridges. Who knows what they can do, you know? They have nothing to lose if they try anything on you. Like that guy [who beat the CO] was doing 75 years, and he was like 40 years old. He’s going to die in there and he knows it. So he really didn’t give a shit about taking her out or what. So that’s the thing, you really have to think about it like that. There’s this other guy in the commissary, he’s doing 999 years.
What?
Yup, that was his sentence. 999 years.

And that sentence was for murder?
Yup.

Do you think you get good support from your male co-workers and your supervisors?
Yes. They encourage me not to take shit from anybody. That you should speak up and say how you feel, and treat everybody the same. That’s what they say mostly, make sure you treat everybody the same. Cuz if you favor one person over the other, who knows what they can do, or what they’ll try to do. But with me, they’re OK.
Did somebody tell you about the job or you were thinking about doing it?
I had applied before. I was going to school for my Associate’s in criminal justice. When I was going to school, I had applied for it, but I hadn’t finished school yet. I didn’t get it. And then I applied for it again when I finished my Associate’s. This fall I’m going to start going to Springfield College and I’m going to do my Bachelor’s in human services because I want to be a counselor in the jail.

So, what is your view of prisons and inmates now after working in prisons?
I grew up in Hartford, and I wasn’t around the best crowd in the world growing up. [Laughs] So I definitely had people around me who sold drugs, or drank, or thieved, or did this or that. But now working there changed my mind about a lot of things because when they’re locked up, I see how they act and how they do. And I been knowing it was wrong, and whatever I did. But you can’t trust them. They lie to your face all the time. They’ll swear on their mother’s grave and on their father’s grave that this is true and then you find out it’s a lie. They constantly try to play you. They constantly try to find out information about you. “Are you married?� “Where do you live?� “What’s your first name?� Cuz inmates are not supposed to know your first name. They’re only supposed to call you by your last name, that’s why your last name is on the uniform. Like that’s a big thing. Nobody wants an inmate to know where you live.
And like I said, growing up, I was around the same people—did this and that—and I was like whatever. But now, they either lie to you straight…I mean, they’re not good people. They’re criminals! [Laughs]

So, why do you want to counsel them?
[Laughs] They’re all crazy! [Laughs] They’re on medical drugs that you wouldn’t believe! So many of them.
Like what kind of drugs?
I don’t know, medical won’t tell you that kind of stuff. It’s confidential. [Laughs] But you can tell. Like on their ID, they have another white card that is attached to their ID that says when they’re allowed to go to medical. Some of them go four times a day!
Honestly, I don’t know if they’re really crazy, or if being in prison so long has made them crazy. Because you’re in a cell, confined all day. And you’re out for a few hours a day: 45 minutes to go eat breakfast, 45 minutes to go eat lunch, and 45 minutes to go eat dinner. And then you go outside for an hour and a half. That’s about it. I would go crazy if that was me! If I was stuck in a little room with another guy, smelling his shit if he’s taking a shit on the toilet. So I don’t know if they’re really crazy. But then you look at what they did.

And so you want to counsel them? Why?
[Laughs] You know, being a counselor is not really counseling them as far as the Department of Corrections. What a counselor does is help them get a job at the facility and help them get things like toothpaste, boxers, envelopes. Help them if they don’t have any money, or any family sending them money. Give them legal calls to their lawyer. Help make appointments with their lawyer for them. Or if they’re put on probation, or in another facility, or in a halfway house, you hook that up and help all that stuff out. Just like little things like that.
As a counselor, you don’t really sit there and help them out with their problems. They all have problems. Nobody really wants to talk to them that much. [Laughs]

So, basically helping them manage their lives there?
Yeah, that’s basically what a counselor does. Help them find out programs. Like one guy who was in the commissary, he got 12 years for robbery. He’s probably going to do 9 out of the 12. He’s done seven already. So he only has two years left, and then after he’s probably going to go to a halfway house or something like supervised living with a curfew and you have to find a job. And then you live out there—they don’t put a bracelet on you or anything.
Some of them get to go home. And so you have to work the proof out with their family, as long as they check in with a parole officer. But some of them don’t have a family to go to so they go to a halfway house.
Have you met any guys that you knew in Hartford that are in one of your prisons now?
Yeah, these two guys at Northern I know from Hartford that I used to hang out with. They’re in there for hustling and selling drugs. And one of them saw me and he was like “Don’t I know you?� And I was like, “I don’t know. Do I know you? I don’t think so.� And he said, “Yeah, you used to be chillin’ over here. How long you been workin’ here?� And I don’t tell them that I’ve been working there a year. My attitude is different now, I’m more confident. And I said, “I’ve been working here for five years.� He was like, “For real?� And I was like, “Yeah.� And he was like, “Dang, look at you, CO Berrios. Oh, you a sell out! You a sell out!� And I said, “I’m a sell out? No, I’m not a sell out. I can pay my bills and take care of my family. Look at you. You’re locked up for 23 and a half hours a day and in one little room by yourself. How fun is that?�
You said that to him?
I said that to him because I knew him. And the other dude that I saw at Northern, he didn’t say anything. He just said, “How you doin?� And I said, “I can’t complain.� And he said, “Oh, what do you mean you can’t complain?� And I said, “I can’t complain. I’m alright.�
There was somebody else that I saw. He was in there for driving with a suspended license. I knew him when I was like 7 years old. And he saw me and asked me how I was doing. I told him alright. I asked him why he was there. Then he said, “Oh, I’m just here for a motor vehicle case. It’s only 12 months.� And I’m like, “What do you mean it’s only 12 months? That’s 12 months of your life!� And he said, “Oh, just a little bit. It’s alright. It’s alright.� I just kept saying to myself, how did someone that I grew up with—he was close to my family, his sister was best friends with my aunt—how could somebody that I know who came from a really good family, end up talking that 12 months out of his life is nothing? That living in a jail for a year be nothing. How does your mentality get to this?
Do you think it’s the environment of prisons? Many of them do come back.
Yeah, many of them come back because they don’t know anything different about life than jail. Some of them, they leave today, they go get high, and then they come right back. When they get high they do something stupid, and they come right back. How many faces I’ve seen come back, come back, come back? They just don’t learn.
When I was in the academy, I was training [for the commissary job]. They told us, “What can an inmate learn in jail? The only thing really that they learn is to try to be better criminals. Because they talk to all the other criminals and think about how they did stuff, and then they take those ideas with their own ideas. And when they leave, they try those ideas, and then they come right back.�

Do they have classes they can go to?
Yeah, they have classes. They have religious stuff for every single religion you can think of. They have a library they can go to check out books. Like a normal library with a guy behind the counter. There’s a lady there, but the inmate runs it. They have GED programs. They have classes to learn English. They have rec time for the older guys. The older guys hang together—“Over 40� it’s called. Guys over 40 get to chill out and hang together. And they have a law library and they all go in there to try to research their case, and prove them innocent.
Then there’s some people—there’s this one guy. He’s in there for murder. He’s in there for 20 years. He’s been in jail for three years. Some guy came to his house and wanted to kill him and stabbed him three times, I think. And he pulled the knife out of himself and he killed the guy and they charged him with murder. I mean, if it’s just him and the guy there, the guy can’t talk cuz he’s dead. But now he got granted a retrial. It’s in August, I think. I mean who knows, that’s his story. You don’t know what to believe. It sounds good because you’ve got three stab wounds in you. But who knows?
What about your views on prison guards or COs? Have you seen good COs? Bad COs?
A lot of them are good. And they do good. They treat everybody the same, and they don’t switch up. Some of them will give the inmates whatever they want so that they don’t bitch and complain, and don’t threaten their lives. Some of them are real abusers and real assholes. And they’ll pick and choose who they want to be like that with.
But I can say at MacDougall, I like all the COs I’ve met so far. I don’t know all of them because I don’t work in the third shift.
Some of them are really miserable. Some of them hate their jobs because they’re there doing double shifts, and then they go home and sleep, and wake up to go do their regular shift. It’s a hard job to do. It’s a lot of hours.
I mean it’s the best job if you have a family to support. That’s the job for you. It pays good. And it has good benefits. In 20 years you’re out. But some of them let it get to them. They bring their problems home from the jail. You have to let that stay behind you.
How do you feel about working in prisons?
It is hard. Because I remember the first time [I started working], a guy stalked me. Like an inmate stalked me inside the prison. I would bring his commissary, and I was inside a little room—there was glass there. And the doorway was where I put a table in front of to give them things from the table. He would literally stand at the window and stare at me. Like right in my face, stare! He was in there for molesting a little girl. He would stare at me and it would make me uncomfortable, and I would tell him, “Go back to your cell.� And he would say, “No, it’s break time.� And I would tell the CO, “Would you go have him locked up?� And the CO would be like, “For what? He’s not doing nothin’. What you can’t take it?� And I would be like, “No.� And the CO said, “What, you can’t take an inmate looking at you? Well, you better get used to it.� And I was like, “Yo, I just asked you to lock him up. What is this? Agreeing with the inmate, or is staff supposed to agree with staff? OK fine, whatever.�
And then when I would be in the commissary, I don’t know how he would get past everything and come and ask personal questions. And I would be like, “You need to go back, nobody called you down here.� And he would be like, “OH, but how’s your day going?� And I would be like, “It’s none of your concern. Good bye.� And literally, every time he would try to get near me and talk to me. Finally, I transferred up here [North district]. [Laughs]
But at first, I was real nervous. And I was like, oh shit, I don’t know if I can do this. Can I do 20 years with these people like this? It’s intimidating. And at first I started in a women’s facility. They’re disgusting. To do strip searches was disgusting! Some of them would have their periods with tampons and pads, and they had to take all that shit out in front of you. It’s disgusting. And I had gloves on, and I had to pat check them and everything. They would hide shit under their breast, everything. But eventually, I was like OK. I built more confidence, and more confidence, and more confidence. And now I’m OK, I can say, “Fuck you! Get away from me!� But it’s hard being a woman. It’s different working with the guys. And I think that’s the main thing, they just stare. It makes me uncomfortable.

Is that what you would pretty much say to a woman who was thinking about working in a prison?
Yeah. If you have tough skin you can do it. Make sure it’s really what you want because the way I found out that I could do corrections was I did an internship at a Hartford facility. I worked with counselors there, and sometimes with the COs just to see how the environment was like. And over there, every day there was a code. Inmates fighting or an inmate attacking a staff member. Every day there was something. But I was like, who cares. It’s really not bad. I can do it. But then when I really had to do it, I was like, “Oh shit!� Now I’m OK with it.
I’ll tell you there’s never a boring day at work. There’s always something going on in prison.
How much of what we see in movies and on TV shows regarding prisons and inmates is realistic to what you see every day?
You ever seen that show on HBO called “OZ�? That show is so fake! Now that I’ve been to a jail and I work there, I know the show is so fake. Because on that show, men are all raping each other in the kitchen; there are no supervisors around anywhere; there are no COs around anywhere; they’re all just by themselves. There’s a guy getting high in his cell, and having parties in his cell with the gay guys on the block! It’s so not even real.
And like when you watch “Prison Break,� that’s fake. They dig a tunnel underneath the ground without anybody knowing anything! [Laughs] And nobody supervises them, they’re out by themselves. It doesn’t happen like that. What you see on TV is just something exciting for them to make up. It’s not what real prison is.
Prison is a totally different experience. It’s different from any experience you could have imagined it to be. It’s just something that you have to go and experience.
Even people I used to hang out with before, and hustle and everything on the street, they don’t know I have this job. If they did know, they probably wouldn’t want to talk to me. They’ve all been to jail. Just like that guy who called me a sell out. They would all call me a sell out. I really don’t care.

What does your family think about you working in prisons?
My mom hated it. She told me no, go find another job. “Why are you studying criminal justice? Why do you want to work in a jail?�
Al, my boyfriend, he was like, “OK, if that’s what you want.� Anything I want, he’s OK with. “Oh, you want to go to school for that, OK.� He didn’t really care. But then I told him about the thing that happened on Monday. He was like, “Oh shit, you better be careful.�
That’s a real wakeup call for everybody in this facility. Cuz sometimes you get too comfortable. You talk to them. Like when they’re in the commissary, I talk to them. I joke with them, laugh with them. Sometimes I rank on them, and they might rank back. Like we’re friends or something. But I know when to draw the line. And they know when to draw the line. But they never got rude with me, none of them. But it’s a wakeup call. That lady almost got killed! And it’s like dang, everybody is yelling, “Kill the bitch!� The inmates that work with me are yelling, “Kill the bitch!� And they all knew about it, that it was going to happen. They were nice to her face and everything. It’s like, dag, they could do that shit to me in a second. Somebody could be nice to my face and then someone could come and attack me. And then they’re all yelling at me, “Kill the bitch!� You never know with them.
So you really want to go the 20?
Yeah, but not in the commissary. No, no. [Laughs] I took the commissary job just to get into the department. I want to become a counselor.

Do they pay counselors good?
Between $45K and $60K. It’s more than what I’m making now. [Laughs]

Why did you want to get into criminal justice?
I don’t know. I started with nursing for one semester. And then I took a biology class and said fuck this! [Laughs] I was like I can’t take all these classes like this. My counselor was laughing at me. She told me why don’t you try a law class or human services. So I said, well let me try a law class. I called my mom and she said oh, you can be a lawyer. I was like I don’t want to be lawyer. But I took it and I liked it. And then I took a corrections class. And my mom was like you’re wasting your time taking corrections. Now every time she calls me she’s like, “Oh, how’s your job doing?�
So, she’s OK with it now?
Yeah, she’s OK with it now. But I didn’t tell her about that lady. [Laughs] She would have a heart attack! [Laughs]