COVER STORY: Courage Under Fire - Part 2

by Ian Pickett, C.O., California Correctional Institution, Tehachapi

Courage Under Fire

The following year, on Dec. 19, 2006, I found myself on an upper tier telling an inmate to stop so I could perform a clothed body search, as I suspected he had something in his pocket. The inmate refused my instructions to stop and take his hands out of his pocket. Instead, he charged me, swinging wildly, eventually stabbing me in the neck with an inmate-manufactured knife. As my partner came to my aid, he was attacked by another inmate.

After that assault, I had the first real argument with my fiancé. She was livid that I had tried to return to work the day after being assaulted. In the end, I was told I could not return until the stitches and staples were taken out of my neck. The day they were removed I returned to work on full duty.

Also in 2006, my friend and partner, Officer Malcomb, was nearly killed when an inmate walked up behind him and slashed his throat with a razor. Officer Malcomb was able to fend off his attacker and survived by only millimeters, as the weapon just missed vital arteries. I stood by at the staff entrance that very night and witnessed Officer Malcomb trying to return to work only hours later, with more than 20 stitches in his throat and neck. Like me, he, too, was turned away due to the rules. He is now back at work.

The inmates in both the 2005 and 2006 incidents I've described here were acting on their own prison codes. Specifically, if you are caught with a weapon you must try and use it on the staff member who catches you with it. And, if one of their fellow inmates or homies gets involved in a physical altercation with a staff member, it is the duty of all the affiliated inmates to also attack.

In 2004, yard officers on B Facility were simultaneously attacked by Crips inmates in front of Housing Unit B4. One staff member lost consciousness and was nearly choked to death, while another officer trying to help him was hit over the head with a baton an inmate had taken from a fallen officer. Both officers are at work today.

In 2001, another of my partners-an officer I have learned a great deal from-was faced with a split-second decision. During the search of the yard after an inmate-on-inmate stabbing, the staff on the yard found an inmate with a weapon. Almost immediately, the entire Hispanic population on the yard at that time, upwards of 90 inmates, began to attack all staff.

During the fight, my friend witnessed a female officer about to be hit by an inmate who had armed himself with a baton taken from a fallen officer. My friend made the decision to jump in between the attacking inmate and the female officer. He was hit across the head and face. To this day, he continues to suffer from headaches so bad that at one point he suffered such a loss of balance that he fell and broke his wrist. Today, he is also back at work.

All of the assaults I've detailed here occurred at Calipatria State Prison, a 270-designed, Level IV, maximum-security prison. Yet, these are only a few of the many violent assaults and incidents that have occurred there. You would simply get tired of reading if I listed them all.

Unfortunately, I do not have the gruesome details readily available in front of me to show the numbers and severity of staff assaults that occur at all prisons, across the state, every day. I do know there is an average of nine inmate assaults on officers every day in California prisons. All staff members I have referred to here-and many more- have been viciously assaulted during attempts on their lives and bear scars to this day. Every officer I mentioned has returned to work and continues to work at this writing. The sad fact is that they continue to do their jobs without any fair contract offered to them by the state of California.

These brave people offer up their lives every day, not knowing if they will make it home to see their families at the end of their shifts. These officers-my partners, brothers and sisters-give their best every day, yet the state can only offer what they call its Last, Best, and Final offer. We all know that we are not being offered the state's best in return for ours.

The California Highway Patrol has received a fair contract, as they should. Currently, their salary is about that of a correctional lieutenant. I recognize the high danger CHP officers place themselves in every day, and they are one part of a very honorable profession. I cannot imagine the anxiety and fear that officers on the streets face every time they walk up to a car on a traffic stop, not knowing if the person they are about to face is a criminal willing to take a life, or just a gentle, old lady who forgot to signal.

On the other hand, our officers are faced with a very different scenario, one that also offers anxiety and fear. But with us, every time we approach someone inside the walls of a state penitentiary, we know, without a doubt, that this person is a convicted, often violent, felon, most of whom would like nothing more than to watch us lay on the yard and bleed to death at the hands of an inmate.

And if you think the inmates are always unarmed, you haven't been paying attention.

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