Writings chronicle life in Nevada 'Prisneyland'

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LAS VEGAS -- The inmates run this place. Not the staff. That's the reality of it.That's the graduation speech Dahn Shaulis says he got at Nevada's prison guard academy. Manage the unmanageable, his trainers said. Learn to provoke power, to play with the "politics of the fist," to control inmates by pitting them against one another, to perfect benign neglect.This is how Shaulis sucked up "40 hours of purgatory and a paycheck" every week for seven years. He worked for Nevada's overcrowded, understaffed prison system, the expensive thorn in the side of state lawmakers who have been arguing about whether to close some prisons to absorb the blow of a budget shortfall.Shaulis walked into the job with a Ph.D. in sociology and left last July with a binder of bitter stories. While working as a corrections officer and a caseworker, Shaulis carried a notebook everywhere, and not for writing infractions.He worked Death Row, maximum security, minimum security, gang units, administrative segregation, and as he spent more time inside, his stories changed. At first, they were the restrained observations of a book-bred sociologist. Then they started to sound as if someone who had bought into the program wrote them. In the end, however, they came out as the cries of an angry critic -- a man with an eye so jaundiced the world was yellow.When Shaulis slept, he dreamed of beating up the warden.Stories from Shaulis' final phase were published in the current issue of Justice Policy Journal, edited by Randall Sheldon, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.The stories paint a bleak picture. At times, the view peering into the prisons seems almost as bad as it must be from behind the bars -- and Shaulis isn't shy. He calls Nevada's prison administration "morally corrupt." He calls America's prison system "Pri$neyland."Shaulis, 47, who quit the Nevada Corrections Department to teach criminal justice at the College of Southern Nevada, says it was no secret he was writing about his work. The prison administration saw his notebook, knew he had poems published, and never said a word to make him stop. He became a corrections officer only because he couldn't make ends meet, after all. He was working as a substitute teacher for the Clark County School District, and when the jobs didn't come fast enough, he decided to sign on with the state prison system. Once he left, he published poetry in newspapers and magazines about the job, and started a blog, Vegas Quixote, where he does more of the same: tell stories about prison.Excerpts from these stories, as they appear in Justice Policy Journal, appear below. Privately, some prison employees have accused Shaulis of making it all up. Or at least taking liberal creative license.He says the stories are true, though some names are changed and some characters are composites, based on what Shaulis saw and still can't shake.On applying to be a corrections officer:"There was a physical agility test, an interview, a physical, and a urinalysis, but it seems that almost everybody was hired, even if they didn't quite pass. There was no psychological testing. There was a background check, but apparently it wasn't thorough enough for some of the criminals and sadists that were hired."On learning how to manage inmates:"It seemed like we were being given two messages. The formal message was don't use excessive force, be 'firm, fair and consistent.' The second message, the informal message from several staff, was that inmates are bad people, 'scum,' and we needed to 'keep them in line.' "On violence:"There are the planned gang assaults, hits, we rarely see, except for the aftermath. And there are acts of extortion, drug deals, assaults on staff, excessive use of force by staff, rape, mail scams, inmate demonstrations, cell-mate murders and escape attempts. Seems like I'm always somewhere else when things happen."On staff relations:"Collins (a corrections officer) tells us that there are cell phones on the yard, and lots of drugs, sex and gang activity. . . He jokes about putting inmates in the hole and getting sued for doing his job. He smiles as he talks about accidentally injuring an inmate while he was restraining him."On punishment:"An inmate may get four-pointed: systematically gang-rushed by five officers in riot gear, placed in one of the two seclusion cells, stripped naked and held face-down in soft restraints. Some inmates appear to enjoy the drama as if it were a form of entertainment."On overcrowding:"The only way to make it work, at all, is to circulate inmates. There is no choice other than to let some inmates out of lockup, even if it may cause another assault. Not surprisingly, we also have had more assaults for the last few months, about one a week."(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)