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.
I tried to act really hard and tough especially with my flashlight and I was willing to beat the shit out of someone too, and kids recognized that I was as crazy as they were. I was willing to go as far as needed, but I preferred not to go there.
I remember walking in one day, there were about five kids that had pinned down the biggest kid in the unit. They had all jumped him. They had him pinned on the floor. They weren't beating him too bad, but they were kicking him, punching him, slapping him, pulling him and all kinds of stuff.
Usually they would wrap things up pretty quickly. They would jump someone, hit him a few times, and it would be done with.
So, there was no point in me even getting my fat ass out of my chair and stopping reading my book to go down and see what they were doing.
But in this case, they were in there for a while. It had probably been five minutes. I had heard it going on so I walked in and I watched for a moment.
I said, "Alright, guys. Don't you think this has been enough? Hasn't he got the point by now?"
They let off him and he went back into his room, and then the next time he would be one of the people jumping a different kid.
There was not much you could do about it because if you immediately ran in there and tried to intervene, they would just do it again five minutes later in a different room.
You couldn't just call someone down there to try to bring them down to lock up. I remember several times I called them down to come take a kid
out of the unit.
One time, a kid had spit on me. I had walked by his room and he had spit on me, and I got mad as a motherfucker. I got pissed and said, "This motherfucker spit on me. That's nasty."
I got pissed, I called them up and said, "This kid spit on me. That's assault and battery. I want to press charges."
They laughed at me and they said, "We're not taking that kid down to lock down because he spit on you. People get spit on all the time around here. Maybe you need to develop a better relationship with the kid and start being nicer to him or something."
They added, "We're not taking him down to lock up and you're not going to press charges over that."
I was pissed.
I called another time when I first got in there. If any of the kids did shit to each other, I tried to call, "Hey, this kid punched that kid."
I called them down to lock up. Officer: "Did you hit him?" Kid: "No."
Officer: "Did he hit you?"
Kid: "No."
I would feel like, "What the fuck? I saw this kid punch this other kid and he's not going to do shit."
I called them down and tried to get them taken out to lock up, but the
kids would deny everything because they didn't want to be a snitch.
You might get jumped for being a snitch. If you did get a kid sent off to solitary for punching you, the rest of the kids might jump you because you were a bitch, a snitch, and that's lots of times how those jumping things happened.
There were all these rules there that the kids made up and they enforced the rules on each other.
So, as an officer, you were just a minor roadblock to the rules being enforced and if you tried to enforce the rules strictly on your shift, someone on another shift would end up catching it anyway.
My thought was, you might as well let them do what they are going to do and just make sure there is nothing life-threatening going on.
Let them know that, "Hey, you know what? You guys are going to do what you're going to do. I respect that. I want everyone to stay safe in here. Don't hurt anyone in here or I'm going to be really pissed and we are going to make sure to press charges on that."
At first, I used to call down several times. The sergeant would come down. I tried to have some incident report started. I tried to report things, but the kids wouldn't cooperate at all, and then I got into this "fuck them" attitude.
I said, "If they want to beat the shit out of each other, as long as they beat the shit out of each other to the point where I'm not going to get in trouble, I don't care."
"The only time I'm going to intervene is if I might potentially get in trouble. Therefore, if any of them is permanently injured, or severely disabled, or disfigured I might get in trouble. So, I'm going to intervene if
that's happening. But if they're just punching and kicking and slapping each other a little bit, I'm not going to get in the way of that."
Most days there were some kind of hitting and punching. There was some kind of dumb shit going on almost every day, and the kids would test you every day too.
You would walk up and down the hall just to see what rooms they were in and those kids were sneaky as hell. You would check and every kid would be in their bed. I would go back and sit there, not even be reading or anything, and all of a sudden you would hear like this flash, like the wind blew for just a brief second.
You would go down there and there would be five kids in one room, leaving you thinking, "How the hell did that happen?"
Another memorable night, around Christmas, I witnessed some of the kids doing disturbing sexual things with each other in the unit, which I am not going to describe. It was one of many moments at DJJ that showed me how broken the whole environment was, and how much pain those kids were carrying and acting out. There was nothing I could really do about it in the moment, and it left me shaken.
Love and tolerance is our code. My purpose in sharing this is to promote love and tolerance and understanding. That's what I hope is the purpose of this. Maybe it is just to share the truth with you. Sometimes the truth is nasty. If you don't judge, it is not nasty.
So you can see why I was so messed up for Christmas.
There are so many of these stories at DJJ, like there was one morning they would line all the kids up outside for breakfast to count them, and there was this one kid. What they would try to do is run off and get into fights with the kids from other dorms because most of the day the kids were locked up in their own dorm.
So, if they had beef with other kids, the main strategy they used was to just move kids into a different dorm, like if one kid had beaten the shit out of another kid, they would just split the kids up into different dorms figuring they would keep them separated and there wouldn't be any problem.
Some of these kids were rival gang members. Some of these kids had huge beef with each other and the only time they would get a good shot at each other was lined up out in the morning at 6:30 a.m., when it was dark and there were no cameras, and the kids were lined up in different dorm unit standing outside the dorm waiting to either go in or out.
And, of course, you would look bad as a correction officer if your kids from your unit ran out, and then just started getting into something else.
There was a huge amount of posturing involved with this between you as the officer and the kids because the kids believed to some degree you could control or intervene, especially in situations like this.
One morning, one of the biggest kids there put a sign. You had to look for real small signs too because the kids would not say shit. They would not let you know they were about to do something. You had to look and watch what they were doing.
I noticed this kid was tying his shoes up.
Now, most of the kids most of the time rolled with their shoes untied. I
guess it was laid back or cool.
This kid bent down and started to tie his shoes.
I looked over at him and said, "Where are you going? You go run over there on one of the other lines?"
That's what he was planning to do. He actually was getting set. He got down like he was about to run.
I warned him, "If you go running over there I'm going to tackle the shit out of you in front of all these other kids. And they're going to be laughing their ass off at both of us. So, it's up to you. You can run if you want to, but I'm just letting you know. I'm going to tackle this shit out of you. You go run over to this other kid. Because I know you're going to run over and try and jump his ass. You don't have any other reason to try and run out of line and risk getting yourself in trouble except you want to jump him."
You would listen to them talk and get to know them a little bit, hear the gossip, like this kid was going to do this, and then you would see him looking at that other kid.
I'm grateful the kid stayed in line that day because I was ready to tackle his ass and he was a big old boy and that probably would have not gone very well for me.
That was an ordinary day in the life of a correction officer. Posturing, putting your ass on the line like that and trying to keep it together, especially when you were out of the dorm desperately hoping your kids wouldn't go off.
The kids knew that the dorm was kind of the safe place to act up a little bit and let it out because you just had the correction officers in the dorm with you and you were not out anywhere. But when there was a bunch of
kids and a bunch of correction officers then, stuff could really go off and you could get into some craziness, and that was a big discomfort there.
Going to breakfast was the worst part of the day being a correction officer because you would need to wake the kids up at 5:30 in the morning.
Now, who wants to wake anyone up at 5:30 in the morning, let alone a 16-year-old kid who is in prison for murdering or raping or whatever the hell the kid is in prison for?
In the unit I was in, it was mostly murder or rape, or rape and murder, or molesting or something like that.
Who the hell wants to wake anyone up at 5:30 in the morning, let alone someone who has got that kind of a history, and then tell them they got to get dressed and get ready and be in the room?
My God, every morning was an adventure, and I will tell you what, parenting my daughter today is just the easiest thing in the world compared to getting those kids up for breakfast.
My God!
My daughter loves me. She wants to do what I want her to do, and sure, sometimes I break down crying because I want to go to the store and she just wants to play in the car, or I want to go to bed and she just wants to play. But my daughter is so sweet and easy with me, and I'm pretty sweet and easy with her.
But man, those kids were tough.
I remember the one kid, the same kid I was thinking about tackling, the same kid who was getting jumped one day that I walked in and said, "All right, it has been enough time. You guys have done enough on him. Let
him out of there."
This kid was probably 6'2, 230 and strong. I still remember his name too.
He could have easily murdered the shit out of me with his bare hands. I walked into his room one day and I just flipped a light on. I just flipped the light on because it was time to wake up and we were going to be late to breakfast.
God forbid, if you were late to breakfast, you would catch some shift for being late for breakfast, and then everything would be all out of order if your dorm was not there in time.
I turned his light on because it was time to get up and that was standard operating procedure. You walked down the hall and turned all the kids' light on. Some of the kids were really compliant. You would turn the light on, they would wake right up, they would put their clothes on, they would make their bed.
They wouldn't give you any shit, especially if you were a little white boy in there. That was a really good idea to be like that. There was one little white boy that was in there and he was really nice.
The only thing, if his mom didn't come to visit though or whoever came to visit him, he would get bent out of shape and pretty damn crazy then.
So, unless I say he was a white boy, everyone else was black or maybe occasionally Mexican.
I turned this kid's light on, the first thing he said, "Motherfucker." He turned the light off and I turned the light back on. So we played that little game like three times. There were a couple of kids you would have to turn the light on and off several times before they would wake up.
You would have to ask them to get dressed several times and usually I
wasn't pleased. I wasn't very nice, "Let's go. Come on. We're going to be late. You need to get dressed."
I turned this kid's light on probably the second or third time that day and he said, "Motherfucker. You turn that fucking light back on again…"
And what did he say?
"You're going to regret it."
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.