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.
A gauntlet is a piece of medieval armor like a glove you put on or it can also be referred to as something you run for physical punishment. That's the scenario we are going to use the word gauntlet in this chapter.
My first three months at DJJ were like running the gauntlet, some of the most challenging times in my entire life. Although I would say the dispatcher story is on par with it, that one felt like a little more fun, with a lot more darkness and despair mixed into it, whereas this DJJ was just a trip through hell.
Let's take a trip through hell together.
When I got into the unit, I had come in with this massive hope and excitement that I could do some good. When I sat down in the unit, I was assigned to night shift, which was the third shift. I was to arrive at work at about 11:30, go into the…
It's not 11:30, but 10:30.
I appreciate you going through a live listen and read of this because I think that gives me the ability to be more honest. If I was going to edit this, I would edit 90% of this book probably.
I was to come into work at about 10:30 and go into my unit a little bit before 11:00. I would then stay until 7:00, which lots of times turned into 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning just after breakfast.
The first unit I got assigned to, was a total lockdown unit for the very worst in the entire facility. These were the kids who had beaten up officers.
These were the kids that were not trusted to be in an open unit without doors. These were the very most dangerous kids having the very hardest of times. They were in the solo lockdown unit.
In this unit each kid had a door and their own cell similar to what you might imagine the adult corrections having. Except, I realize adult corrections had a lot of dorms in it as well, but anyway we are just going to stick to my little illusion here.
Each of these kids was in their own solitary confinement room and this was actually a pretty easy place to work most of the time unless there was a kid up in the corner of one of the rooms waiting to jump you as soon as you open the door.
Things usually went pretty smoothly. Lots of times these kids had just committed some kind of violence in the facility either hurting another inmate or hurting an officer. They were stuck in here to be in solo, in solitary confinement as a punishment, and a lot of them were just resting or hoping to get out and trying to behave pretty good. It actually was a pretty easy unit most of the time.
My job consisted of walking around the unit at night, making sure nothing funny was going on, listening for any weird things happening and then reading a book.
I got a lot of great books in.
I was big into Harry Turtledove, Alternate History where aliens invade during World War II, an amazing series of books. Or where the South ends up negotiating a truce during the Civil War, and then World War One and Two both happen in the US between North and South, as well as in Europe, where the North ends up allying with Germany and the South ends
up making an alliance with Britain and France.
That was an awesome series of books, and tons of reading material.
Most of my job in this first unit was just sitting in a desk and reading books. It was actually pretty nice. I was getting comfortable there. They put me there for my first few weeks just to get the basics because they realized most of the white boys, especially the young white guys had almost a total attrition rate.
I remember the one other young white guy who came in during my several months at the Department of Juvenile Justice as a corrections officer, he lasted one night. He quit in the morning. He had some kid up against the wall and was going to start beating him before the other officers managed to intervene.
He quit his very first night and I was determined I wasn't going to be like that, even though up to that point I hadn't seen what happened. I did notice in the first couple of weeks while I was in this kind of protected environment, although with a very high risk of having something bad happen at any point in it, I noticed several others of my coworkers quit.
One of the younger college girls that was in there quit almost immediately on her first night and a couple of my other coworkers quietly disappeared and we never saw them again.
They just didn't come back to work or they called in and gave their notice and said, "That's it. I can't take this anymore."
Meanwhile, I was thinking, "This isn't too bad. I mostly read books, watch out for a kid trying to jump me first thing in the morning and with just having access to one kid at a time, not too bad, right?"
Most of these kids were as big or bigger than me, and therefore, usually
stronger than me as well, sitting in their cells, doing pushups and jumping jacks all day. Most of the kids were physically as strong or stronger than me, I respected those kids' ability to hurt me, and I was pretty safe in that little lockdown unit.
Then, after a few weeks of training me in there on the basics, they figured to see if I really could be of use in the rest of the units, and they started rotating me around to more of the dorms, and that's when things got tough because that lockdown unit had been a vacation compared to the dorms.
Each dorm had about anywhere from 10 kids at the low side up to 25 or close to 30 at the high side. There were no doors. You couldn't even close any doors on any of the rooms. The kids were two, three or four maybe to one room, and they had bunk beds with state-issued sheets that looking back on it didn't seem very comfortable, and they had pretty minimal number of personal items as well.
Those kids did not have much to do all day either and they were ready to get into some trouble. On night shift, you would think it wasn't too bad and it turned out a lot of the sketchy stuff happened at night and first thing in the morning, especially if someone had a bad visitation the day earlier or their mom didn't show up.
They would go to bed, you would come in, the dorm would be all up in uproar already, and then the next morning for breakfast, there would be a fight or something. It got pretty crazy.
One of my first nights in a dorm, I think it was right around Christmas. They put me in a dorm with a bunch of kids. I think the dorm's name was John G, or something like that, and the most memorable part is that all of the kids piled up into the bathroom.
Something like 15 or 20 of the kids, all got in the bathroom at the same time. These were all boys I was in with. There was a girls’ dorm and obviously they were only female correction officers that were in there with the girls' dorm.
I was in the boys’ dorm, of course, so there were 15 to 20 boys all in the bathroom. They had turned the light off and a boy got behind me and they tried to get me to go in the bathroom.
Thankfully, I could sense that wasn't a good idea and apparently that was the standard operational procedure where they would try to get an officer into the bathroom, and then a whole bunch of the boys would jump the officer, beat the officer to hell in the bathroom, and then all suddenly come scattering out of the bathroom.
There would be no way to pinpoint one specific kid that did anything unless one was ratted out and that's often what would happen too. The boys would just gang up and say, "Well, this kid did most of the beating."
One person would take the fall for it, but really, they would all get in and get their punches in.
Thankfully, I did not get in that bathroom. That did scare the shit out of me though. I nearly got jumped and probably beaten into. I don't even know what I would have gotten beaten into, but I imagine between all those kids they could have really done a number on me.
As we had heard, officers in training had been beaten to the point of severe brain damage and permanent disability.
I also found it very difficult to get anything to go on successfully. I was scared to death although I wouldn't admit it. I tried to act tough.
You would tell the kids to turn their light on and start getting dressed,
they would say, "Fuck you, shove it up your ass, you white piece of shit," and they would go on doing whatever they wanted to do like jacking off, beating up other kids, and somehow we were supposed to get these kids to walk to breakfast in an orderly fashion, sit down to eat, and then bring them back to the dorm.
Somehow it worked, but it was ugly.
I remember the one day that really pissed me off, the major came by and gave me an ass chewing about, was I really cut out for this?
He didn't know if I could handle this and all that kind of stuff. He was trying to encourage me to quit basically, that I wasn't a good enough officer and couldn't handle it.
I remember going home from that feeling just utterly miserable. I also missed Christmas with my family. It was the very first time I had ever missed Christmas, and I was at a real emotional low point.
I had just gotten off work at about 8:30 in the morning or so, after that ass chewing right around Christmas, missing my family. I felt absolutely and utterly lonely and miserable, even though I had a girlfriend that loved me, who was coming over to see me in a couple of days.
I had a couple of days off after Christmas and that's when I got into a night off. I got into the liquor really heavy, even though I was saying I wasn't going to buy liquor. I just bought some beer.
I bought a 12 pack of Bud Select. Then my roommate had this huge bottle of Cruzan Rum, which was disgusting, but after 12 Bud Selects, I thought, "Fuck it. We will have his rum too."
I had had a bad online gambling addiction in college and it was so bad that I would literally tell my friends at lunch, "I'm never ever gambling
again," and then literally hours later I would be playing poker again.
At lunch, I had meant it when I told my friends "never again" and two hours later I would have rationalized, "Well, I don't have shit to do today. I might as well go do this wire transfer and I'll put a deposit on."
I then would be playing poker and drinking all night, and my friends wouldn't even say anything. Eventually, they would just think, "Well, I guess he's playing poker again."
I had sworn I'd never play poker again online in May 2006 after graduating from college and having yet another night where I lost a bunch of money. I ended up in December 2006, I got back on to an online gambling website. Even though I had almost no money, I managed to put
$100 on to that website immediately out of my bank account, even in 2006, and I started gambling online that night and that was the most memorable game.
Now keep in mind that I've had a bunch to drink and I made these poor decisions sober. I made the decision, even though I knew all the trouble I had had with alcohol before to just buy a 12 pack and see if it would be different, and I thought I changed my mind at some point as to the online gambling like, "Well, why not have some fun tonight?"
Getting in the liquor and online gambling, I then got into this one heads-up game where I had lost all of the initial hundred dollars.
So, I put on another hundred dollars, which almost cleaned my bank account out. I played $100 one-on-one game, which means you put down
$100, and then the house takes like $5 or $10 each, and you are playing heads-up Texas Hold'em 1v1 with one other person.
I got into this game and I realized that I could win back that hundred dollars I lost and put the money back in the bank and it would be like nothing ever happened. I was in such a dark, desperate, sick place that night that I had way more than money riding on that hand in my own head. I ended up winning the game back. I was drinking heavily and acting recklessly the whole night, and I was living in one of the higher-crime parts of Columbia, South Carolina at the time.
I'm very grateful I made it through that night. I puked and I filled my roommate’s liquor up with water from the sink because then I figured he
wouldn't know that I drank it. He told me not to drink it and just because he told me not to drink it, that's probably why I ended up wanting to drink it.
Thank God my girlfriend came over because when you wake up the next day having relapsed on an online gambling addiction, drank your roommate's liquor and fired your gun off, I was feeling pretty low.
I was at this miserable corrections job I hated, I was at a really low, desperate point after that night, I was missing my family, and thank God my girlfriend came over.
We watched one of those dark shoot 'em up movies and I was really happy she was there. She really might have saved my life right there from feeling so down and depressed, and I went back into work after that and things did not get better immediately from there.
Things started to get even worse.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.