This is a picture of the B side of a cellblock in the House of Detention for Men on Rikers Island. Each side had 120 cells holding 240 inmates. Nothing separated the one officer working this side from the inmates.When we arrived on the 2-B tier, I could see a body lying on the floor, halfway down the tier, the torso outside the open cell gate. When we got to the cell, we saw the dead inmate in a pool of blood with a shiv sticking out of his neck.
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Just because this was a civil service job didn’t mean we had no personality differences with our bosses to contend with. Some of them could be just as treacherous or vindictive as in a non-union business-world job.
As I stated earlier, if I thought a boss was really wrong about something and it affected the job, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut; I had to tell him. After I told one deputy warden at HDM his latest written order would cause a number of problems in the institution, he got so incensed with me that he picked up a chair in his office and threw it across the room, straight at me. Thank God I was still young enough to be agile on my feet.
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We got around to talking about some of the many experiences we both had while working the housing areas. I remembered that John had worked a steady tour in the administrative segregation area before coming to personnel. I asked how he dealt with a particularly nasty inmate that gave almost everyone problems. John laughed. He also had many problems with this inmate for a while, until he made the inmate an offer the inmate found difficult to refuse.
John worked the midnight to eight a.m. tour steady in admin seg. Late one night, very quietly, he woke the inmate. Whispering for the inmate to come closer, he made him this offer: “If you ever break my chops again, I’ll come in one night with a can of lighter fluid and set your ass on fire. By the time I unlock your cell, you’ll be like a toasted marshmallow.”
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