This is an excerpt from my memoir, Officer Banfield — the honest story of my years as a corrections and police officer, hitting bottom in alcoholism, and the long road to recovery.
What I ended up doing was moving with my friend who put my bed on top of his car and I moved the stuff in my car. I spent all day with my friends and my girlfriend moving all my stuff into my new apartment, and then I
only got like three hours of sleep before work.
We didn't finish moving until about 7 p.m. and I missed all the time I normally slept during the day.
I went to bed late, then I came in on three hours of sleep just having moved, but I came in feeling good about life.
I had spent the day with my friends and my girlfriend. I felt pretty comfortable in the unit and my coworkers.
Almost every coworker I ever worked with slept, and some of the coworkers scheduled and planned on sleeping like they just lived their normal day-to-day life during the day.
They would be home raising their kids. They would then schedule like 11
p.m. as soon as they got into the unit until the kids woke up at 6 a.m. They essentially would sleep all night and that was their plan.
Their plan was to come to work and sleep from eleven to six and the kids knew that too. Many of the coworkers I worked with would either take naps during some of the night or they would sleep the entire night, and they would do the same thing every night.
So, if you worked with a certain person, you knew they were going to sleep from midnight till five in the morning and you were completely on your own if anything happened, walking the hall and paying attention.
Some of them did an amazing job too. They would wake up every couple of hours to walk down the hall and immediately go back to sleep.
I swore I would never sleep, that I wouldn't be like that, that it was against my ethics, until that day I moved. I was sober, I had gotten back from sick leave and I said, "You know what? I didn't mean to fall asleep."
You didn't get a bed to lay down on or anything. People would sleep in the chairs at night and you were right on camera. They could look at you and see you sleeping on camera, and not often, but sometimes you would hear they would just call your unit if they saw you were probably sleeping.
So, I sat in the chair and I just fell asleep the day I moved, probably like three in the morning. I fell asleep for a little while accidentally, and then after that, I was a changed man.
I said, "Well, I guess it's okay to take a nap here from time to time."
So then, that became my vice. I would often fall asleep for a little while or take a nap here and there while I was on night shift, and you got to be pretty relaxed about it because when you are in an open dorm where you could wake up with anything happening, to be able to fall asleep you got to be pretty peaceful in that situation.
That was kind of the downside, you could say, of being relaxed and peaceful. It was like so peaceful that I thought, "I can knock out for a nap for a little while if I'm a little tired. It is no big deal," and thankfully I made it through that safely.
Now ironically, the more comfortable I came into being as an officer, the more they started sticking me with the newer officers, which was a huge compliment because the sergeants were pretty smart up at the Department of Juvenile Justice Corrections.
At the time, I didn't understand what they were doing, but I could see now they were very smart about using their personnel wisely, because obviously, if they put the wrong two people in a unit together they were looking at having a big problem for themselves.
So, they did really well most of the time putting the right people together.
They consistently, for the first several months I was at DJJ, they put me most of the time with more seasoned officers.
Officers that had been there longer and they put me with officers that were pretty reliable.
That way, I didn't really have to do anything except not mess things up and the other officers that were there could pretty much run the unit without me.
By the time I had been there for several months and I had stopped coming in after drinking, I had stayed sober, I had a better attitude, they started putting the newer and less reliable officers with me, which was an incredible compliment, especially given I wasn't doing anything like bringing cigarettes in to get a relationship with the kids.
I was purely just starting to see them as a human being and with some of the kids, if you just saw them as a human being and talked with them, that made a huge difference for them and they would stand up for you to the other kids.
I remember one of the kids was talking shit about me and another kid stood up for me, during the second part at DJJ.
There was the beginning part of DJJ where I was really sick, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Then, there was a second part where there was this regression to the mean, where I had gone so far down that I kind of went back up, and let some of my better sides to show.
During this time one of the kids was saying, "Oh, this racist motherfucker," and all that, and another of the kids stood up for me.
He said, "No, man. Banfield's cool. Banfield's nice to us. He's not mean.
He doesn't say shit. Banfield's cool."
I always took that as a huge compliment because I will tell you the first few months none of the kids were standing up or saying anything nice about me because I wasn't that nice.
I guess I wasn't as bad as some other officers.
I'm amazed by the time I was there, a lot of the kids I had actually had decent relationships with just from one human being to another, and by the end of the time I was there, I even was able to double overtime shifts.
I worked a double shift one day, an entire second overtime shift doing a time I had never done before.
I worked from 11 p.m. to 4 p.m. the next day and it went smoothly. I'm amazed at how smooth those last two months at corrections were.
I have people who ask me, "Jerry, you know, I'm in this job I don't like right now. I see you doing what you love. What do you think I should do right now?"
I say, "For me it is mandatory, love what you do and do what you love."
I was just sharing on my live stream yesterday, which probably inspired me to get this narrated today, that I managed to love doing my job as a corrections officer the last two months.
At the same time, I couldn't wait to get out of there. The whole time I was plotting and planning my escape. I was applying to police officer jobs.
At this point now, it was getting to be 2007. It was getting to be almost two years since I had smoked marijuana in college. That was starting to get past the time for some departments and close to the time for other
departments where they would let bygones be bygones.
They would figure that if you hadn't done it in two years, you probably had a good shot of not doing it again.
So I was back out. I was sending applications off to lots of police departments and that's when the Department of Mental Health, where I had applied, gave me a job pretty quickly, which was really nice.
I remember feeling so good when I finally came in and gave them my two weeks’ notice at DJJ. I thought, "I made it through this and I left on my own terms," because leaving on your own terms was not guaranteed.
In fact, most people left either just quitting or getting fired. I had two coworkers who went into a dorm one night. One of them had run to be class president against me and I really liked him. He was a dad, he was in his 40s and he got put in the same dorm I worked in plenty of nights.
One night, they jumped his partner and beat him so badly he ended up with a permanent disability, something like brain damage, I don't know. They sent his partner to the emergency room. Then, I guess either the next day or so, my classmate beat one of the kids who had done the beating the day before.
Here's what had happened from what I heard. The kids jumped and beat his partner just into a mess. The next day, he was at work in the dorm with the same kids that had beaten the shit out of his partner the night before.
They didn't have enough spaces in solitary confinement to even put all the kids in there that had participated in.
As I explained before, the kids did it in a way that they would try to
arrange so that only one or two kids would take the fall for something like that.
So even if 6, 8 or 10 kids jumped and beat up an officer, they would arrange and they would all snitch on one or two kids and say, "Oh, yeah. He did it."
All the rest of the kids would just gang up on the one or two kids and say, "Well, he did it. He did it."
They would all agree.
"Yep. Yep. Those two kids. We were just watching. We were trying to stop them. We were trying to help him. We were trying to get in there."
Sure, maybe that was true, maybe it wasn't.
Long story short, my partner was in the unit the next night with the same kids that had beaten up his partner the night before and sent him to the emergency room. It was the same kids that he had watched beat his partner so bad that he had to then go to the hospital.
I guess he snapped and went off, and just beat the hell out of one of the kids who had beaten the hell out of the partner, and then they took him out in a police car.
They came in and arrested him. He was going out on felony child abuse charges, and last I heard, he was on his way to prison for beating that kid up.
That's the kind of place we worked in where you might not go out on your own terms. You might either get beaten out like the one guy's partner did, or you might snap one day and get taken out in handcuffs yourself, or you might get fired.
If you even put a bruise on the kids and they manage to say, or get you on camera having hit them, you could easily be going out and getting charges pressed for something like that too.
I was so grateful for the chance to leave DJJ on my own terms because it was a place where lots of people did not leave on their own terms, and it was a place where some real scary shit could go down real quick.
Looking back, it's not even a product of the kids or the stuff they did. It's the whole system. Everyone and everything, even people who passively participate just by not doing anything, just by letting things be, just by not speaking up. There is no one person, there is no one politician, there is no one organization to blame. It is the whole system. It's everyone not just looking around and realizing that these are fellow human beings that are just like us.
One of the hardest things working at DJJ was facing those kids and realizing, "I'm not that much different from these kids. But for the grace of God, I'd be in here for murder or for rape or for drug dealing or for gang banging. But for the grace of God, I'd be in here. That just by some miracle and my dumb drunken nights, I didn't end up physically hurting anyone."
Now, sure, I mentally and emotionally abused a lot of people with the things I said, and I did a lot of damage to myself with my self-destruction.
That's mental and emotional abuse.
Sure, I punched a couple of people, but by the grace of God, I didn't do anything worse than that.
I understand the drunken state of mind I was in. I understand exactly how it feels to get into a state where you are capable of murder or rape,
and of the very worst things you can imagine in life. I understand what your mind looks like prior to something like that happening physically, and I'm just glad by the grace of God that this was not my story.
At the same time, how can I possibly love every human being if I can't love and understand another person that it is their story?
And see, you wind up in front of those kids and that is their story. They did murder someone.
They did rape someone.
They did deal a whole bunch of drugs. They did run someone over in a car.
They did nearly beat someone to death.
They did permanently disfigure or disable someone. They did do those things that I thought of doing.
They did do those things that I almost did, but for the grace of God, there was some nice person who intervened or some kind and loving thought that intervened.
I had several nights drunk, and even a night sober as a police officer, where my mind went to a violent, frightening place. That was how sick I had become in active addiction.
I had been in that mind state drunk plenty of times, and even sober a few times, and I realized, but for the grace of an intervening person or
some kind of God, or a thought in my mind, I would have been there.
It was really hard to face the kids and to see that they were people just like me. They were not that different from me, and in fact, they reacted a lot like I did.
When their mom didn't come to visit them in prison, they flipped shit.
When I didn't get to go home and see my family for Christmas, I flipped shit just like them.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.