The Prison Officer

00:07
Brent Hinson
We all have a story to tell. Welcome to another edition of between the Lines with Virtual Academy. We are a podcast going beyond the bad to allow members of law enforcement public safety and first response place to tell their stories and also talk about the cases that have impacted their lives.

00:23
Michael Warren
How you doing?

00:23
Brent Hinson
I’m your co host Brent Henson, and our guest today is going to take us inside the walls of our nation’s prisons in order to share what it’s like to survive one of the toughest careers out there, being a correctional officer. It’s something he’s been doing on his own for over three years now, too, talking about this kind of thing on his own podcast, aptly titled The Prison Officer Podcast. And oddly enough, the first time we broached the topic of corrections was back in episode 19 with Robert Greenwood, who incidentally, was just featured on the Prison Officer podcast a few weeks back. So we’ll talk to him a little bit about that. But before we bring him in, allow me to bring in our host Mike Warren. To those of us, like me, not in law enforcement, we may have a limited view of what a job in corrections really encompasses on a daily basis.

01:17
Brent Hinson
I know I got a glimpse of that with Robert Greenwood, and I think we’re going to get a little bit more information about that today, at least someone who’s not involved in that world.

01:27
Michael Warren
It’s interesting as somebody with a law enforcement background like mine, my interactions with that side of the law enforcement community was limited to dropping off prisoners at the county jail, which is different than prisons sometimes, having to go to prisons to interview suspects in crimes. But it was one of those things, to be very honest with you. You get there, you do your job, and then you get the hell out of there. Prison is a scary place even when you’re going through and you’re one of the good guys. So I’m looking forward to this conversation.

02:02
Brent Hinson
Today, and I’m always wondering how it’s portrayed in movies and TV and juxtapose that with what it’s in real life, that kind of thing. And if my view is slanted or skewed. So it’ll be interesting to hear directly from our guests today.

02:18
Michael Warren
When you find somebody that truly is a subject matter expert in an area that you’re not familiar with, that’s the type thing that really gets me excited. So I’ve been looking forward to this conversation we’re going to have today because I want to learn more and I think that you want to learn more just like me. So why don’t you tell us a little bit more about him and let’s bring him on.

02:36
Brent Hinson
Well, our guest today retired with more than 29 years of experience working in the field of corrections, both on the state and federal level. During his career, he led special Response Disturbance Control and canine teams. Not only is he a correctional consultant specializing in the use of force and physical security, but he’s also an author. And as I mentioned earlier, for the past three and a half years, he is the host of the Prison Officer podcast. I’m going to make sure I say his last name right. He told me that I could say it any way I wanted, but welcome on Michael cantrell. Cantrell either. I said it both ways, so I’m just going to make sure that I get it right. Thank you for reaching out to us. You reached out to us on Facebook and were able to get our schedules coordinated and get you on the podcast.

03:23
Brent Hinson
And it’s got to be nice to be sitting on the other side of things because you’re in the podcasting world, so it’s got to be nice to just sit back and have somebody ask you the questions.

03:31
Michael Cantrell
Yeah, a little nerve wracking. You don’t have your own control of it. But no, I’ve listened to your guys’podcast several times. I really enjoy what you do. And you can pronounce my name either way. I worked in prison, so I’ve been called a lot worse than either way you pronounced it.

03:47
Michael Warren
I was trying to think what words might rhyme with your last name to get more the creative ones, but I’m not very good at that.

03:54
Michael Cantrell
I don’t even think they tried to rhyme.

03:56
Michael Warren
It doesn’t matter, right? Right. So I want to start off, as I was doing my research, finding out more about you. One of the things that I think I found is that you are a military veteran.

04:08
Michael Cantrell
For a short time I was in the military, went in there for a little bit, had to come out of there early when training, and then I got into some government jobs and just kept going down that road. But I worked around the military and worked on some military bases as a civilian, but I was only in the military for a few months.

04:27
Michael Warren
What branch were you in? This is a test right here.

04:30
Michael Cantrell
I was in the army.

04:31
Michael Warren
There you go. Now, see, that’s a sign of intelligence. So you and I can continue the conversation right there. Now, I did hear something interesting. When you were a guest on another podcast, you were doing some work on an island.

04:46
Michael Cantrell
Yes.

04:46
Michael Warren
And I wonder if you could just tell me what that was about, because to me, again, everybody, our listeners know I’m really heavy on the dork side. So what was that all about?

04:57
Michael Cantrell
Well, I had an uncle who worked at Tonopah test range and at Area 51. So he was working private contract with the government and told me about a job that had come open. I was in the middle of jobs and he said if you go over there and work hard, you can probably move up. So I went over there as a dishwasher and the island was Johnston Atoll. It was a mile and a half long and a half mile wide, and there were about 1100 people on there. 84 cars, 1300 bicycles. It’s basically an airstrip in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I got to spend every day after work face down in the ocean on some of the most beautiful coral reefs you’ve ever seen in your life. Untouched out there. But our mission was destroying all the chemical weapons from World War II.

05:46
Michael Cantrell
So the reason they picked Johnston Atoll is because the trade winds blow one way, 360 days of the year. And the people that worked there lived one end of the island, and the other end of the island was bunkers full of mustard gas and nerve guests and that kind of stuff. So they worked on that. I think they did it for, like, 20 years. I worked for Raytheon and Holmes and Narver.

06:09
Michael Warren
No kidding.

06:10
Michael Cantrell
So that’s actually part of what got me into corrections, because I worked there as a dishwasher was there a couple of months, and they promoted me to cook. I worked my way on up to a second cook, a line cook, with them. And when I was back on leave, fell in love, decided I needed to stay home now. So I saw an ad in the paper at Missouri State Pen, and it said, Cooks wanted. So I called them up and know, fill out an application for a cook. And the lady called me back a couple of weeks later. She said, we don’t need cooks. We need cos. And I said, what’s a co? I had no idea. So, yeah, it kind of all worked in a pattern there.

06:53
Michael Warren
But isn’t it amazing how many career choices have been influenced by falling in love? Seriously?

07:00
Michael Cantrell
Absolutely.

07:01
Michael Warren
You want to talk about something that changes careers and changes geographic location? That’s probably the number one thing right there, isn’t it?

07:07
Michael Cantrell
Oh, I guarantee it. Yeah. We all do that at some point. We decide that’s where we need to be at that moment in life. We invest ourselves. It worked out.

07:15
Michael Warren
It turned out pretty good for you, especially since you didn’t even know what a co was going in to this interview. So when this recruiter, when this HR person said, hey, we don’t need cooks, we need cos, and after you found out what a co was, what was it that made you say, okay, I’ll give that a shot?

07:35
Michael Cantrell
Like I said, I was looking, and I stayed with this woman that I fell in love with. We’ve been married 31 plus years now, so it was worth it. I don’t know. I was looking for stability at that point. I was looking for health insurance, retirement, all that kinds of stuff. So that seemed like a good place to start. And I did see that there was places to go from there. It didn’t seem like I was just going to stop there was options, right?

08:02
Brent Hinson
Did she sugarcoat what the job entailed, or was she fully honest with you?

08:09
Michael Cantrell
I talk a little bit about it in one of my books. I say she told me that a co enforces rules. And that was all she said. A co does so much more than that. I’ve held the hands of inmates as they died because nobody else was in that room. I’ve ran to fights. I’ve pulled inmates down from suicides. I’ve been out in the middle of the night with a flashlight and a 38 revolver chasing escapees. So for somebody to put a one sentence on what a co does was just crazy.

08:38
Michael Warren
She almost makes it sound like you’re a hall monitor.

08:40
Michael Cantrell
Yes.

08:41
Michael Warren
And that’s part of the job. It certainly is, right?

08:44
Michael Cantrell
Yeah.

08:44
Michael Warren
But I want to just bring something up here because you mentioned it, because one of the things that we’ve talked about on our podcast several times is the problem with hiring retention in the law enforcement community right now. And it’s not just on the roadside. It’s not just in the dispatch side, but it’s also on the correctional side. Money is not the overall motivator for most of the people that come into this job. But a lot of people that come into this job are seeking that stability that comes or used to come with this type of job, a regular pay with health benefits. Because you’re not making a bunch of money, you need health benefits. And that long term security of a retirement, it’s not the only factor. But you see a lot of places removing those things. And we wonder why, as a profession, we can’t get qualified people to apply.

09:39
Michael Cantrell
Absolutely. And they say that it doesn’t matter as much to this generation, but I don’t know that’s true. I know my son is putting into a 401, is my daughter. They’re looking at retirement at some point. So I don’t think that’s true. I will say I’ve had this discussion a lot lately. And the other thing that we’re removing because of staffing and because we perceive that we don’t have time for it is the training. I will tell you, when you put an officer inside a prison that first day, they’re scared. They don’t know what they’re doing. It is an unnatural place for a human to be. And if you don’t put in the time and the effort to make them feel knowledgeable, to make them feel like they have people around them and that they’re secure, that they understand the way the system works, you will have officers who start looking to inmates to answer these questions.

10:33
Michael Cantrell
We’ve got to bring the training back. We’re saving money by not sending people out there to training. And that’s part of our retention right there, in my opinion.

10:42
Brent Hinson
I think I could go work at McDonald’s on my first day and make my way through without being trained properly. But if I’m going to be a correctional officer. I want to make sure that I am properly trained and I know the ins and outs of everything that’s just me. But I would hope that’s the goal.

11:01
Michael Cantrell
Absolutely. You’ve got to have that self confidence to be able to because I remember the first time I looked at a 50 year old Tatted Aryan Brotherhood leader and said, no, go back to your cell. I’m 21 years old. That’s not normal. And I was scared to death. But I stood there and said it till he did it. And I never did know whether he listened to me or the two officers behind me, but it didn’t matter. We accomplished the mission. But you have to have self confidence. You have to be able to walk with your shoulders back and your head high in a prison in order to do that job.

11:37
Michael Warren
It’s been my experience during my career that the better prepared the professional is, the safer it is for the people that they’re dealing with. It’s not just safer for the officer, but it also increases the safety of, in your case, the inmates that you’re charged with keeping in place but also protecting.

11:57
Michael Cantrell
Absolutely. You talked about the media that’s the part they never show in the media is the fact how many inmates we protect and how many of those inmates want to do their time without drama, without killings, without suicides, without drugs, without any of that. They just want to do their time, and they want to go home. And it’s our job to provide a prison where most of them can do that and keep them safe from the part that doesn’t. It’s just like society. You have a part in society that doesn’t want to follow the rules. They don’t want to do the right thing. But that’s not everybody. Most of us want to mow our yard on Sunday and have a beer. So I think that doesn’t get portrayed a lot in our media.

12:37
Michael Warren
Well, I think you’re probably somewhat like me, which is a phrase that most people don’t want to hear, is that they’re like me, but I am pretty capable of handling myself. But that doesn’t mean I want to have to handle myself, especially at home. I would imagine that there are people that in the prison system that they are probably more terrified of what is going on than you are, and those are the ones that are preyed upon in these systems. And your job is to help protect them.

13:09
Michael Cantrell
Absolutely. They live there 24 hours a day. I only lived there 16 when I was working. We just do a lot of overtime. That’s why I say that. No, absolutely. They don’t want weapons around them, because when that comes out and this fight happens, they could be the one not going home. Like it or not, a lot of them have a reason to go home. They have family. They have kids. They have mothers, fathers, the same as everybody else a lot of times, and they call it snitching, but you’ll have inmates come up to you and go, hey, there’s some stuff hid over here. And that’s why they’re doing that. Unless they’re the competition and they want you to take out the other person selling whatever. But most of the time I don’t want that in my housing unit. I want to go to sleep tonight without one eye open.

13:54
Michael Warren
It would seem that those that have something to look forward to, as you described it a reason to go home, that those are the ones that can be managed. It is those that without hope. That’s their domain from here on out. Those would seem to be the ones that would typically be most dangerous for you.

14:17
Michael Cantrell
Sure. And the ones that we talk about, the reasonable ones with hope, a lot of times what they need is that’s where we need the rehabilitation and the retraining, because they don’t make good decisions. They have a long history of not making good decisions, but it doesn’t mean that they’re the violent ones like were talking about, who have no hope. And when we talk about it, ends up in the news quite a bit. Segregation and 24 hours lockdown. And they talk about how bad these things are. There are humans in this world who you can’t manage outside of a cell, and the public doesn’t see that because they’re hidden. They’re behind the walls. Matter of fact, they’re behind a couple of walls. But I still have to walk in there every day. I still have to feed this guy three times a day, get him out three times a week for shower, recreate him five times a week.

15:08
Michael Cantrell
I have to handle him. I have to put cuffs on him and bring him outside of that cell. That’s another place where the hiddenness of what we doesn’t get out to the public. And they don’t understand that there’s just people out there. We take care of the boogeyman that you don’t want in your house, and we keep them from going back out there.

15:27
Brent Hinson
But as you said, there are people that just want to go in. There are people that want to go in, do their time, and go home, but they’re serving along. People that, like you said, have no cares in the world, and they just want to do their thing, and we’re putting them together. And that seems like that’s counterproductive, wouldn’t you say?

15:45
Michael Cantrell
It is. I will say it’s better now than any other time in the history of prisons. I mean, literally, there were times where everybody from the bottom to the top got lumped into same prison with the Federal Bureau of Prisons. We have four different levels of prisons, so we are segregating them, and the ones with the lower problems or with the lower charges are at camps and stuff, and then you can go up to an administrative maximum security where we’re handling basically the Hannibal Lecters of the world. And there really are some evil inmates out there that you can’t imagine what they do. It hasn’t been that long ago since we had one kill, one in their cell. And I don’t know how graphic you get on here, but he actually ate part of the other inmate. That doesn’t get much news time. What gets news time is when one escapes or when one dies in custody and then they go after the correctional officers, rightly?

16:41
Michael Cantrell
So sometimes, but not always, maybe that’s.

16:43
Brent Hinson
Because we don’t want to hear it. The public doesn’t want to hear that. Well, that’s over there, we won’t deal with it.

16:50
Michael Cantrell
Absolutely. There was a deal made 100 plus years ago and the deal was more than 200 years ago. You’re looking at basically capital or corporal punishment when something happened. Either you got held up in those stocks in front of the community or you got killed and hung or something like that. That was the only punishments we had. Prisons didn’t exist longer than that. And at some point society said, here, I’m going to give you some of my treasure and I’m going to give the government some of my freedom and you’re going to take this stuff away from me where I don’t have to see it, deal with it, or be part of it. I want to go over here and as long as I’m good, you’re going to handle that for me. And so that’s where we’re at. The public is comfortable with that deal that they made.

17:39
Michael Cantrell
Don’t get me wrong. I think they’re happy that they don’t see it, hear it, or have anything to do with it. But that does leave those people who walk inside the walls and who walk inside those prisons, and we call them the forgotten cops. We’re doing a hard job. We’re busting our asses every day keeping those people inside the wall. But nobody gets to see us drive by and play basketball with the kids in the neighborhood or stop at a lemonade stand or they don’t see us. We’re hidden.

18:03
Michael Warren
It’s one of those things where when corrections make the news, it’s almost always for something bad. It’s either for misbehavior on the part of the correctional officers or there was a failure in security and someone has escaped. And neither one of those are good press for the CEOs out there doing the job.

18:23
Michael Cantrell
Yeah. I can keep 3000 inmates in a jail today. Nobody cares. One gets out, it’s news for three, four days until we get them. It’s kind of a lopsided expectations.

18:38
Michael Warren
And when I was doing the research, I think I saw that your dad was a firefighter. Is that correct?

18:44
Michael Cantrell
Yes, my dad was a firefighter.

18:46
Michael Warren
And one of the things I’ve mentioned, it often here we tend to see families that have a legacy of public service. But what I want to ask you is, did your dad have any reservations or did he offer you any advice? Because he works in a dangerous job, and now you’re talking about going and doing this dangerous job. That had to have been concerning to him and other members of your family.

19:11
Michael Cantrell
I really don’t think it was, but I don’t think they knew anything about my job. Now, I grew up in a household. My dad was a firefighter. We knew every police officer, firefighter, city manager. I mean, we hung out. That was the circle of friends that my parents had. Cops would stop by on their lunch break when my mom fixed chicken and dumplings because she was really good at that, so she’d have two or three bowls laid out there for them to take a break. So I grew up like that in public service and went into corrections with a little thought in the back of my head that was public service. I still think it is, but I don’t think it’s looked at that way. My dad, I don’t really think that he ever considered that it was any more dangerous than what he did.

19:55
Michael Cantrell
But I don’t think dad knew what went on in there either. He fell through a roof one time. He’s been on so many. He was on emergency Unit rescue for 19 of those 20 years. So he saw a lot of stuff. I don’t think he ever thought about the danger that I was in. If he did, he never expressed it.

20:13
Michael Warren
You’re one of those people that, if I remember correctly, you started off in state prisons, but then you transferred over to the federal side of things. Britt and I, were talking. This is something that interests both of us at their basic level, what is the biggest difference, or difference says, between the state side versus the federal side.

20:36
Michael Cantrell
The prison side of it? I think the biggest difference is the gangs. In state prison, you’re going to see fewer gangs controlling more. And in the federal system, I think we’re up to tracking I know it’s well over 40 different gangs inside the system, but they tend to be smaller. So that was one of the first things I noticed. Now, of course, on a personal side, it’s the retirement, it’s the benefits, that kind of stuff. The job is the same state or federal. We’re a little more cleaned up. Maybe in federal, they have more money to spend. They get to be more choosy about who they prosecute and take into their jails. At a federal level, the states don’t get to be as picky about that. They get whatever’s left over, and then even counties probably have to deal with less than that. Yeah, it’s the money, which is great for the officers, access to training, access to that type of stuff that I didn’t get at the state.

21:31
Michael Cantrell
The camaraderie was much the same, because when I walked into Missouri State Pen, in 1992 that was still being called the Bloodiest, 47 acres in America. That prison was built in 1838. I think it had 3200 inmates while I was there in this 47 acre prison.

21:48
Brent Hinson
Left that out of the conversation.

21:51
Michael Cantrell
Well, you have to walk through a pretty big old block wall, so if you didn’t notice, it might kind of be on you there. Yeah, it was off the hook. I mean, staff assaults and inmate assaults and killings like I didn’t see in my career past that it was a very violent place at the time. Aryan Brotherhood, the Muslims pretty much split 50 that yard. You didn’t see much else than that. But, like, you guys know, when you go through stuff like that, you build this camaraderie with those people that you’re standing next to like nothing else. They were literally watching my back, and I was watching theirs the whole time were inside. So that was a little bit different. Even though I went to work at Penitentiaries and stuff for the Feds, it still was never that violent as it was at Missouri State.

22:44
Michael Warren
Penn I think that’s one of the things that is hidden most from society as a whole, is the violent nature in prisons. In many prisons, it’s not everyone, because especially at the federal level, they’ve got some very low security type events at some of these places. I mean, it is incredibly dangerous for staff and also for the inmates themselves, because I wrote in my notes here, death is a reality in prison, and sometimes it’s caused by suicide, and sometimes it’s caused by homicide. Explain for our listeners, if you would, what that reality does to the correctional officer. What does that do to you mentally? What does it do as far as your dealings with the inmates?

23:36
Michael Cantrell
You don’t notice a lot of what happens to you. And I’m a changed person from what I was when I walked in. There’s no way you could say you’re not. But I remember I think the first thing that really grabbed my attention was an inmate who had laid down and cut his femoral arteries to commit suicide on a bunk. He was successful by the time the inmates on the either side didn’t say anything. You do 30 minutes rounds. Well, he’d probably planned it right, but when I walked in that cell, the blood went up over the edge of my boots. I did not know that the human body had that much blood in it. And I grew up on a farm. I’ve slaughtered cattle and deer and hogs, and that was not unusual to see blood. But the fact that was human blood and that there was that much of it threw me back.

24:26
Michael Cantrell
And so that was the first time I remember this change that started to come over me, because after that didn’t bother you as much. You forgot about it. And I can’t name the number of times I saw stuff like that or suicides or killings. I saw a guy sit on top of another guy and take a shank that was a foot long and drive it through him several times before we could knock him off of him. Stuff like that. It affects you, but you’re in an emergency, and you guys police officer, you understand this. You don’t think about it. Then it doesn’t show up usually till much later. I’ve got a job to finish. I’ve got rounds to do. I’ve got to get this cleaned up so we can feed the rest of the inmates. That’s always happening in prison. When a killing or a suicide or staff assault or anything like that happens, people don’t realize the rush is to get everything cleaned back up and get prison back to normal, because when prison is not normal, more problems happen.

25:24
Brent Hinson
Well, I think I’ve asked this to several guests before that have worked in law enforcement. It’s an abnormal situation. Surely a conversation has to be had that you need to talk that out, mental health wise, therapy wise, and I have to assume that’s not happening or didn’t happen for you in that instance.

25:46
Michael Cantrell
There’s multiple facets to that. One is we did talk it out. We talked it out amongst us. It usually lasted a few minutes, but it wasn’t, hey, how are you feeling about that? It was usually probably some jokes that I can’t repeat on here, because that’s how we dealt with that. Was that dark humor at that moment.

26:06
Brent Hinson
But like a professional setting, that didn’t happen.

26:09
Michael Cantrell
No, but that camaraderie that you get, your buddy comes by and slaps you on the back. I remember one time, this is going to be gross, but we had an inmate that had killed another one, and of course, we’re trying to get everything back together. And I have tried all day long on this unit to eat my lunch, and I have not got there. It’s been this horrible day, and I finished it with this at 03:00. And I get the orderlies out. They’re getting mops. They’re spreading blood everywhere, trying to mop it up. And I reach in the office, grab my bologna sandwich, and I’m sitting there eating it while I’m watching the orderlies do all this cleanup. And one of my buddies walks up, and he pats me on the back, kind of gives me this little shoulder hug, and he goes, Are you okay?

26:53
Michael Cantrell
I was like, Why? Yeah, what’s wrong? He goes, you’re eating a sandwich, standing in the middle of this blood pool. And I was like, I was hungry. It wasn’t abnormal at that point.

27:05
Brent Hinson
We laugh about it, but we laugh in order to get through the intenseness of what you just experienced, right?

27:12
Michael Cantrell
So it affects your whole family. My daughter, she got a master’s degree. She’s a professor now, but during her dissertation, she interviewed a bunch of correctional staff and asked them questions. About how they deal with mental health and wellness and all this stuff. And one of the biggest things that I took from what she found out was correctional staff equate mental health with mental health problems. Talking about mental health, when you say, hey, how’s your mental health? Well, my mental health is fine. I don’t have any problems. And almost everybody to the T talked to her about that. Well, have you been to the employee wellness deal? I don’t need that. I don’t have any mental health problems. It’s perceived throughout corrections that mental health is something that we deal with the inmates. Mental health isn’t something that we deal with ourselves, and we become very clickish.

28:08
Michael Cantrell
My wife will tell you that she almost hates going out in the Christmas party and stuff like that because she gets pushed off to the side. And even though I’ve seen these people 320 days this year, 16 hours a day, that’s who I go talk to. And then she’s left standing over here, and we’re all talking about work, and so there is this conversation, and that’s kind of how we deal with it. But I’m not saying that’s how we deal with it. Well, there is a lot of suicide, Officer. Suicide and corrections.

28:37
Michael Warren
It’s one of those things the gallow humor often comes about, not because people are demented, but because the need for emotional release. In this case, it’s emotional release through laughter. I can remember a suicide that I was called in on, and this guy actually climbed into his bathtub, closed the drain, and then he slid his wrist and he sat there in this bathtub. And as he’s bleeding out, he’s got shampoo bottles in both hands and he’s pumping. It kind of like you do at the doctor’s office when you go to have your blood taken. The amount of blood, if you stop it up, it ain’t going nowhere. I mean, it’s deep in this thing. It was a surreal scene. And I can remember one of the officers that was there with us say, hey, I think I found out why this guy did this. And we’re all thinking, hey, he found a suicide note.

29:28
Michael Warren
Well, what he actually had found was a city calendar that had a picture of another officer one of the months, and he was ed. This has got to be what caused this thing right here. It was how ugly our guy was, and everybody laughed, but it was that release of tension, and you could actually feel things go down. And so I want to ask you, it had to be a very unique experience because I’ve processed a lot of crime scenes. But processing a crime scene inside of a prison when you truly have to be situationally ready to handle other threats, that had to be a challenge for folks on the correctional side.

30:07
Michael Cantrell
It is an absolute challenge. And only in the last few years have they started bringing some of our own people in, teaching them ERT so they can do the crime scene on the spot when it happens. Before, if it was a crime scene that was going to get prosecuted, we had to stop it and wait for people to come in. Now we’ll process it ourself, but the prison doesn’t stop. There is no stopping it. And they don’t care that guy died. They don’t care that inmate’s laying there in a pool of blood. They care that it’s 415. And every day I eat supper at 415. So now I’ve got inmates who are getting rowdy over in this unit because I haven’t gotten the ability to feed them yet. You see what I’m saying? And I don’t think they understand that part of it.

30:51
Michael Warren
So it starts to become a compounding problem. Then you’ve got this initial problem, but it starts to cause other ones down the line.

30:57
Michael Cantrell
And is somebody taking advantage of this chaos to sell more drugs, to stab the person on the other end of the prison? Are they trying to make an escape during all this? I mean, we can’t stop any of those other jobs and now we’ve got all this to deal with. I just don’t think people understand how involved we are in those crime scenes. One quarter, I worked in a medical unit. I got a special recognition for bagging 21 inmates very well. Now, officers, most of the time when they roll up on a crime scene, they may have to secure the crime scene, the basic officer, until everybody else gets there and cleans it up. We clean up our own stuff. I’m the one that has to secure the cell or secure the evidence. Get this inmate bagged up, get the orderlies over there and clean up the blood and make sure it doesn’t look like a problem when everybody else can return to work, so we don’t ever get to see it and then walk away from it until it’s finished.

31:55
Michael Cantrell
It’s finished, which I think is something people don’t know about us.

31:58
Michael Warren
You brought up, hey, you have to be concerned about, are they doing this here to hide an escape attempt somewhere else in the prison? And we actually had my mom on here a few episodes ago and my granddaddy was a Georgia State Patrolman, and so she was talking about when she was growing up, how they lived near a prison and he would have to go out at night on occasion for escapes. And what that did to her was that she and her two brothers, they slept with hammers and stuff like that because they were scared. But when we look at that as a society, the bad people are all bottled up in these prisons. When a little bit of escapes, it causes this. I don’t want to say irrational, but perhaps overstated fear a lot of times in society, because this thing that I have ignored and denied the existence of for so long has now become much more real to me.

32:53
Michael Warren
But that is a reality for you guys every single day.

32:58
Michael Cantrell
Yes. And it affects our personal lives. And my kids will tell you to work with 2030 4100 child molesters and watch the way they act and what they do, and then come home and your kid wants to go spend the night somewhere, or you’re not going anywhere. So my kids, they’ll tell you that I was very controlling as we talk as adults. It wasn’t that I was doing that to be mean. I was doing that to protect them. Because I know the boogeyman exists. You see so many people out there that get to walk around and don’t know the Boogeyman exists. They’ve never seen him eye to eye. I’ve fed him. I’ve looked in his eyes. I’ve had him threaten me. And most people don’t go through that. And then I have to walk home and try to be a normal parent, try to be a normal husband.

33:45
Michael Cantrell
And that was the tough part of my job. I think I handled a lot of the internal stuff pretty well because I had the ability to detach and look at myself from a distance and say, Are you doing okay? Not going to say I’m perfect, but I think the hard part of my job was not letting that part of the job go outside with me. And it affecting my family. And they’ll tell you, I mean, they’re very open about it. She’s done dissertations on it and a couple of podcasts with some other people about it. I look back at it now, and it’s kind of crazy that I was that worried about it, but I had seen it. How do you walk away from that?

34:24
Michael Warren
In another interview that I heard you do, one of the things that you had said you did that you think helped with your health was you actually wrote poetry, and you read some of the poetry. Part that really got to me was where you got to talk about washing your hands and trying to get the dirt off. I don’t think that people outside the profession understand the psychological part of taking a shower. And it’s like this cleansing time, you know what I’m saying? For example, when I worked the road, one of the first things I would do was I would go and get my car washed. And I wanted the car to be clean because it sets a good example. It shows that you’re squared away all that stuff. But it was also this mindset that, hey, okay, games on, right? Taking that shower and washing your hands at the end of work is an attempt to say, okay, the game’s over now I need to transition over to my dad role or to my parent role.

35:25
Michael Warren
But sometimes you see things that you just can’t turn off in your head.

35:30
Michael Cantrell
It’s those days when you walk into the garage and kick your boots off and you drop all your clothes directly into the washer because you don’t want that going in your house. Prisons are dirty. I mean, they’re clean. We work very hard to make them sanitary. I’m not going to say they’re not sanitary, but anytime you put the handrails at the mall aren’t clean. You got 1000 people in there. The blood and the cussing and the dirtiness. You just feel dirty when you walk out of there. And it feels like after a while that it becomes part of you and you fight that. I don’t want to be dirty. I don’t want to be like everybody else. But it does get inside you and you feel it. And that’s kind of what that poem was talking about. Do I ever get clean of this? I won’t ever forget it.

36:17
Michael Cantrell
I’m retired three years and I love what I do. I still get to help people with this. But those memories are still there. I’ve seen things that most humans haven’t and I don’t want them to.

36:28
Brent Hinson
Do. You find that writing through the poetry or the things that you do on your website because you are an author, you’ve written books and also you’re hosting the podcast. You find that has been a good source of therapy for you.

36:41
Michael Cantrell
Definitely the poetry. I did that at work a lot of times and a line here and a line there. Just trying to make that work. And what it did was give me a focus. And that’s part of probably what saved me in my mental health was I always had a focus outside of work. I always knew I was going to write something or do something like that. Didn’t know what it was. My original job in the army was a journalist. Part of the reason why that didn’t go well for me, I’ve always known that I didn’t want that to be my entire identity. Okay. And so the writing absolutely did. I competed in Scottish Highland games for many years, strength events. And so that’s what we did on the weekends. We’d go to those and have fun and get away from prison. Because that has nothing to do with prison, throwing a telephone pole.

37:31
Michael Cantrell
So I think that’s part of what saved me now. What I do now isn’t as much about me as it is about giving back. I do this podcast because I want to give back. I want to open that conversation. I want to say thank you to all the people that helped me over the years. More than any other job, I think you realize I did not make it through 29 years of prison without help. There was always somebody watching my back. There was always somebody helping me make that next step. There was people I’ll never know were watching a camera to make sure that I was safe that day. So for me, what I’m doing now is more about trying to give back to that community. And part of what I’ve learned is how global this community is counted up. The other day, I’m up to 81 different countries that have listened to the Prison Officer podcast.

38:23
Michael Cantrell
And when you think about it, everywhere in the world there’s a co, whatever they call them, but there’s a co sitting in a broken chair watching a jail somewhere. Every country does that. And so it’s been really interesting to learn that part of it, because I thought I was just doing it, know the people I knew, and it’s grown so much bigger than that.

38:46
Michael Warren
It really is one of the most under recognized parts of the criminal justice system. And I’ve mentioned this before on our podcast. John Douglas, who was one of the original members of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. In his book Mindhunter, he talks about how when he came into law enforcement, he was idealistic and how he thought that with enough input and enough work and enough therapy, we could turn bad people into good people. And in many cases we can, because in a lot of cases these are people that made a bad decision and like you said, they just want to go home. But there is that segment. There is that segment, and he puts it eloquently. He says, we as a society have to decide what we’re going to do with those people who can’t be fixed. And what we as a society have decided is by and large, we’re going to put them in prisons.

39:42
Michael Warren
But in order for them to stay there and not be a danger to society at large, we need people like you and the people that you work with to provide that service. But that service comes at a cost. It comes at a monetary cost. It costs a lot of money to incarcerate people for a long period of time. Yes, it costs a lot psychologically for the people who have to do it day in and day out. Going back to it, I worry as a society what the decrease in the number of qualified applicants is going to do to our ability to keep those people that need to be locked up?

40:24
Michael Cantrell
Absolutely. I just had a conversation a few weeks ago and I hear this a lot now. I think somebody mentioned on that last program that you had, you get a lot of these older staff members who are like, well, I told them what to do, but they’re not listening to me, so I’m done with them. And there’s this thought out there and I had a conversation with somebody and I said, you do realize there’s nobody else. You don’t get to pick from another group here. These are the people who are coming up and these are the people somebody’s got to protect society. And it’s your job before you walk out that door to teach them if you have to stop them and shake them and say, hey, this is what we do. We’ve got to do that. We can’t just throw our hands up in the air and say, oh, well, it’ll work out.

41:10
Michael Cantrell
It won’t work out. There is things behind those walls that we don’t want in society. Yes, I want society to know how hard correctional officers work. I want them to know that it’s not a nice job and that we deal with a lot of stuff. But I don’t want society dealing with the boogeyman in their front yard. And we have no other choice. We have to bring up this next generation.

41:33
Michael Warren
I want them to be aware of what’s behind those walls, but I don’t want them affected by what’s behind those walls. And it’s only by doing our job correctly that we can make that happen as a profession. But there’s a flip side to this, though. And this is the part I’m going to raise my hand, because this is the part I struggle with, okay? Most of the folks that are behind those prison walls will eventually make it back into society legally, not the escape way. Legally, they will be returned to society. And this is a much bigger problem than we can solve on this podcast. But we have to do something to make that transition stick so that they become productive members of society, that they don’t take what has happened to them and what was learned in prison and use that to prey upon the people who are in society.

42:27
Michael Warren
Again, as a correctional officer, your job primarily is about safety, the safety of your fellow correctional officers and the safety of the inmates. But there are these programs in place, and I just don’t know if we’re doing enough, if we’re investing enough on that side of things so that we don’t get those people back and become a problem for you.

42:49
Michael Cantrell
Again, the Federal Bureau of Prison’s budget for last year was $8.3 billion. We’re investing enough. The resources are there. The people are there. Where we spend some of that money is a huge part of the problem. This is all my opinion. Drug treatment is a very lucrative business to get into. Now, I’ve seen rehabilitation work, and I want to tell people, probably part of the change that happened in me is I’m not really into the rehabilitation part. I’m into the correctional officer part and how to keep them safe. But throughout my career, I have seen some programs. One of them was at a state level facility. And those inmates up to I think we had up to 1.150 inmates who went out every day, and they went to work in the community at a factory. One of the factories at the time was Tyson Foods or something like that, they made turkeys.

43:47
Michael Cantrell
A lot of people don’t want that job. It was a tough job, okay? But these inmates got paid the same as everybody else in there did. Those inmates could even be promoted while they were working there. And don’t quote me specifically, but something like a quarter of their money went to the victim’s fund. A quarter of it went to their commissary account, quarter went to savings, and a quarter went to paying the state back for the busing and the officer and all that stuff. Why I say all that is the thing I saw with that program was and this is minimum security at this level the last couple of years of their incarceration, they could do that. And when they’d walk out the door, they had 1015. I think I saw a couple of them had $20,000 saved up. Now, here’s the key. $20,000 will let you buy a used car.

44:37
Michael Cantrell
It’ll let you get insurance for it. It’ll let you pay first and last month’s rent. It’ll let you pay the $50 water because you’ve got bad credit from being in prison. It’ll let you do all this stuff and start anew. Most of the time. And yes, there’s programs, but most of the time, when we kick them out, we kick them back to the same area they fell out of, and we don’t give them the resources that they need to start that life without asking somebody else. So they’re going to go back to what they knew. Hey, I need some money this week. I got to get rent. I’ll sell some drugs for you. And so we repeat this process. Another good one I saw was they bring them into prison, and the last couple of years, they can oh, it’s on computer screens with a wheel, and they learn how to get their CDL from the computer.

45:24
Michael Cantrell
And then the last few months, they’re in. They get to go out, get their real CDL, they get to go to an interview with trucking companies. And these trucking companies come in and hire them based on their skills and scores and stuff that they’ve shown. And trucking companies are hurting for people to work for them. And then you’ve got this inmate who not only has a great job that will buy rent, that’ll buy all the stuff he needs in life, you’re putting him on the biggest GPS tracker you’ve ever seen in your life, and you’re getting him out of his neighborhood. There’s been some successes with that, but that’s not where we’re putting most of our money. Those are here and there. I don’t think we look at what it is that those people need when they come out. They need what I need. They need what you need.

46:11
Michael Cantrell
They need a start where they don’t owe anybody. Because if you owe somebody in those neighborhoods, it’s always coming back.

46:18
Michael Warren
When we look at drug and alcohol treatment programs, one of the things that they say in order to be successful is that you need to remove yourself from the people that you were with when you developed these issues, and you need to remove yourself from the context of where it was developed.

46:35
Brent Hinson
People, places, things. Those things. Those three things.

46:38
Michael Warren
Yes, absolutely. I am by no means a bleeding heart, okay? But I am practical and I am a realist. These folks are coming back into society and I would have to think that when they’re involved in programs like that, they are much less a threat to correctional officers on the inside and to their fellow inmates because they have those programs that they’re working towards every day.

47:07
Michael Cantrell
They have something to lose, they have something to look forward to. They have goals, they have dreams. They have the same thing all the rest of us. You take away my family, my income, my life, my dreams, my goals, there’s no telling what kind of guy you’re going to end up with. And it works the same for them. Some people are going to call me crazy, but as far as the drug treatment and stuff, most of the time when I see an inmate come into prison, I can tell you whether or not they’re coming back because they’re humbled. They have decided, I’m not doing this anymore. And that person doesn’t mean they can’t get caught up in something. But that person is going to work their ass off to get back out there. And you don’t have to bring the program to them. They’re going to find it.

47:51
Michael Cantrell
They want it. And so that’s something I’ve seen over the years. I’ve seen so many inmates that have just been pushed through some of these programs, like ten times. No change.

48:00
Michael Warren
Yes.

48:01
Michael Cantrell
Well, then you’re doing something wrong. Let’s do something different.

48:06
Michael Warren
But at some point, we have to say, okay, this person has no desire to change.

48:10
Michael Cantrell
Absolutely.

48:11
Michael Warren
We have to be selective. We’re going to start wrapping things up, but I have to bring this one to you because this one has kind of been in the news recently. Susan Smith was the young lady, and I use the term lady very loosely when I’m talking about her back in the 90s that drove her car into the lake with her two young sons still strapped into the car seats. And then she had blamed it on a blackmail, had kidnapped them. Well, she’s coming up for parole next year, and one of the things that she has been looking for, she has been writing and reaching out to family members to write letters on her behalf so that she can show the parole board that she has family support, a support system in place outside so that she’s less likely to reoffend. And I would have to imagine that for long term prisoners, that support system erodes away.

49:05
Michael Warren
I mean, people die, people move away, they lose that connection. And to me, those type people would be the ones that I would be really worried about from both an officer safety perspective, but also a suicide perspective. Because like you said, that lack of hope makes it dangerous for everybody around?

49:28
Michael Cantrell
Absolutely. There is a lot provided for them if they want it. You do see the difference in the inmates who have families that are involved and the ones that don’t. Probably more so than ever before because a lot of our jails and it’s coming into the state systems with the tablets where they can actually do some video visiting. If you’ve got a poor family and you fell out in St. Louis and your family lives in Tucson, they can’t drive up there and see you on the weekends, but you’re going to do prison where you fell. But now you can get on a tablet and you can have that interaction with the family. Phone calls and used to it was just letters. I mean, that’s all it was. So they’re also doing a lot more things at the lower custody levels about involving the families. I’ve been around some of the camps where we had family days and for a kid to get to come in there on a weekend and spend an hour playing basketball with his dad is huge.

50:20
Michael Cantrell
Now, the flip side of that is you moms out there who have a husband in prison don’t take the kids every Christmas because they shouldn’t be spending Christmas in prison, which is what I always hated seeing. For them to have that interaction I think is great. And it does build those bonds and it does give probably a sense of identity to those kids that they may not have because there’s a hole in their life and they don’t know where it’s at and they don’t understand it, and they shouldn’t understand it, but they don’t. So I think there’s some stuff out there that we do and we’re getting better at it. But it all comes down to choices. That inmate either chooses that he’s going to get better and take advantage of it, or he chooses he’s going to go down the other path and continue to be a criminal.

51:06
Michael Warren
I have to ask one last question here. There was a new story that came out the past couple of weeks about a sheriff’s office in the state of Georgia. This sheriff’s office has had over 30 of their deputies, almost all of them correctional officers, arrested over the past two or three years. And almost all of them were arrested for bringing contraband into the corrections environment. First of all, why is it so important, I mean, outside the fact that it’s illegal to possess drugs and that type thing, why it’s so important in the correctional setting to stop that contraband from being introduced? And secondly, how is it inmates, prisoners are able to talk law enforcement professionals into doing something illegal?

51:58
Michael Cantrell
Right. This all starts with training. And when that person walks through the door, you’ve got to be honest with them and you’ve got to talk about manipulation. Manipulation happens in all forms throughout the prison. You have brought some of the best manipulators in the world and put them in one spot. That’s how they’ve spent their life, is manipulating people. And so you can’t expect that these officers are going to walk in there and just be able to stand up against that because they’ve probably never been around it. That’s not something you experience in high school and in your family and stuff is this level of manipulation. So we’ve got to have that training. We’ve got to talk more about that, and we’ve got to talk openly about how it starts, because everybody thinks it starts with, hey, come here, officer. I’ll give you $500 if you bring in a pack of cigarettes.

52:47
Michael Cantrell
And it doesn’t. And I’ve told this story before. I was sitting at my desk. I had brought in some Chinese food, sitting there eating it. I got done. I threw the deal in the trash can. There was two soy sauce packets there. And the inmate walks by. He’s doing my orderly, he’s cleaning the floor. He goes, hey, can I have those? I was like, yeah, I don’t care. I’m going to throw them away. So he takes them and goes off. No big deal, right? So the next day, he comes walking through. He’s brushing, he’s doing the mopping and stuff, and he says, hey, next time you go get some Chinese food, can you bring a couple more of them in? That was the beginning of manipulation, and that’s what we’ve got to teach them, because at that point, hey, he hooked me with that. Now, next time, hey, can you bring me a slice of pizza in?

53:28
Michael Cantrell
Then it’s going to be a pack of cigarettes. And I’m going to say, well, that’s illegal. I can’t bring in cigarettes. Well, you brought me in pizza, and that’s against the rules, so do it or I’ll tell. So we end up with this where it just works up to some things that you can’t even imagine what people bring in cartons and drugs and sex and all this stuff. And I guess if there are correctional officers or police officers listening, the number one thing and I was in a supervisory position the number one thing you can do when you think you’re being manipulated is walk over to your supervisor and say, hey, I think I’m being manipulated. Let me handle it at that level and we’ll take care of it. You won’t get in trouble. And if you do, if it’s went so far that you do get in trouble, you’re still in a public trust position, and there are consequences to what we do.

54:16
Michael Cantrell
So you may rightfully get in some trouble, but you’re not going to end up with having that on your conscience for the rest of your life. That you brought this stuff in, that this stuff may have caused a killing, because that’s what happens with drugs. That’s what happens with cigarettes. That’s what happens with tupperware bowls that get left in prison. You. Probably don’t know this, but if there’s one of something in prison, it’s valuable. I have seen a stabbing over a rubber made cup because one football team had won that year and that’s what color that was and one guy wanted it and the other one had it. So anything that gets brought in there becomes a huge problem for us. But with your question, it starts with the manipulation and the training and getting people to understand and expect they’re going to try to manipulate you.

55:09
Michael Cantrell
And the only way you can take care of it is to be honest and open about it when it happens and we’ll put a stop to it.

55:16
Michael Warren
Then the officer only has to trip up once.

55:20
Michael Cantrell
Yes.

55:20
Michael Warren
And it starts to become an issue. The prisoner can fail day after day. They only have to get lucky once in order to be successful. And it’s unfortunate because I do believe the people that come into this profession, by and large, overwhelmingly want to do good. They want to protect society. They want to do what’s right for those in the profession. Not only do we want to say thanks, but we also want to say, hey, keep your guard up.

55:44
Michael Cantrell
Yes, you have value.

55:46
Michael Warren
What you’re doing has value. It’s not worth sacrificing for being popular or being whatever the case may be. Just keep your guard up. Man mike, we really appreciate you being here today. Fascinating. You made me rethink some of my favorite movies like The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption because there may be a kernel of truth in there that’s not a reality necessarily of what’s going on. But thanks for sharing your story with us. Thanks for what you do. Real quickly. Before we do sign off, what’s the name of your podcast again?

56:18
Michael Cantrell
The prison officer Podcast. WW theprizesonofficer.com and if you want to reach out to me, it’s Mike@theprizesonoffsr.com. We’d love for you to stop by and take a listen.

56:29
Michael Warren
We’ll make sure we include that in our show notes because I do think it’s important that society has an understanding of what you do to keep them safe because if they do, then I think there’s greater support and there’s value in that. So thanks again for being here, man. I find this stuff fascinating, man.

56:49
Brent Hinson
Everything that he’s talking about is very enlightening. But just the fact that manipulation can start with two packs of soy sauce, that is eye opening to me. And you’re going to get more of those types of things by listening to Mike’s podcast, the Prison Officer podcast. Again, we’ll put all those links in the show notes and you’ll be able to find that on our website between the Lines with virtualacademy.com. Mike, thank you so much for taking some time to just recount and give some insight into what your life was like inside those prison walls and what life is like for you now. So thank you so much for being open and honest with us today. We certainly appreciate it.

57:26
Michael Cantrell
Absolutely. Thank you guys for having me on here. And keep up the good work on your podcast. I love listening to you guys too, so I appreciate getting to be part of this.