Back to Squeaky. We’d been nothing but polite to this woman. Gergen and I were showered, neatly attired, well-behaved, and completely sober, and we carried no weapons, narcotics, or other contraband. But for reasons known only to her, she’d selected us for harassment. I tried to appeal to her better nature: “Look, it’s a five-hour round trip. We’re not criminals. We just want to visit our friend.” She could at least let Gergen in to visit him, I pleaded. It might help Allen’s path to rehabilitation. Wasn’t that her goal too?
Nothing doing. So, as many of us do when we’re being dismissed by some clerical creature, I asked to speak with her supervisor. I had to ask her twice. “All right,” she said, drawing out the last syllable, pronouncing it as though we’d asked to be sheared and castrated. Squeaky picked up the phone and moved away from us so that we couldn’t hear the conversation. Throughout all this, Gergen said not one word. He was a glib, loquacious Aussie who could tell funny stories all night about fights and trysts he’d experienced during a lifetime at the boxing trade, but he preferred to let me do the talking on this one.
We waited several more minutes and then heard something I recall quite distinctly—a voice from far away, booming, angry, as though somebody were shouting insults at a referee across a football field: “Who’s been giving one of my people trouble?” It felt vaguely familiar, almost like déjà vu, and then it was repeated, closer this time: “Awright, where are they? Who’s been giving one of my people trouble?” Later I would make the connection to a fairy tale I’d first heard as a toddler: “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.” After climbing the beanstalk, Jack heard the giant before he could see him.
The shouter turned a corner and came into full view. He was a water buffalo, white, coming at us fast. I was waking to a bad dream with everything reversed because reality was suddenly bizarre. The illusion had been the belief that we were operating in a world of reason and sanity. No wonder Squeaky looked so delighted. She knew all along she had this wrathful ringer on the bench.
The bellowing was in the form of a question, so I volunteered an answer. “I’m the one giving her trouble.” But that wasn’t correct. “What I mean is, she’s giving us trouble.” The shouter, now shifting his course a mite so it was aimed straight at me, was also in uniform, but not the wrinkled regulation gray. He wore a white, pressed shirt with military-type patches and captain’s bars on the shoulders and dark trousers. He had a mustache, a balding crew-cut, a bull neck, weighed about 240 pounds, and was in his early forties. What to do? Here he comes. I stood my ground, forcing him to barrel into me or stop. He pulled up nose to nose, playground style.
I’d been training at a boxing gym for years, and although I considered ballooned-out weight lifters a threat, I knew the ones to watch out for were the wiry Tommy Hearns–type guys who could paralyze you with a four-punch combination you wouldn’t see coming. And I knew something more important. If this ape managed to hurt me, I had Gergen in my corner. And Gergen was one of those Tommy Hearns–type guys who could paralyze him with a four-punch combination he’d never see coming.
But then what? Guards armed with mace and clubs were moving in and out of the lobby all the time. Even if we were able to fight our way out of this place, we were, as Gergen would recount later, city slickers in Deliverance country. And of course prison officials had our names and addresses. We’d filled them out on the visitor forms. This was a variation on the typical prison dynamic, which involves mostly urban prisoners and rural guards. Each group looks on the other as a bunch of aboriginal aliens who don’t belong, except the guards are more obsessed with the inmates than the inmates are with their guards. To convicts, guards are usually the lesser of far worse evils. As a minimum security prison, this place was supposed to exude less tension than a typical penitentiary, but apparently no one had told this to Mongo and Squeaky, who generated hostility and strife for no apparent reason. They seemed to have categorized us as uppity inmates, and their mistake was so vivid that against my will, I too was infected. I felt a terrible powerlessness, a dreadful inability to exert control over my situation. What hell it must be to be a prisoner.
At this point, the only reasonable response was to move on, if that was still possible. I saw no way to turn this situation around, and if Gergen had a solution, he’d have tried it. No matter how legitimate your grievance might be, it’s against the law to break into a prison. It was Mongo’s move. Each moment he did nothing eroded his position. This allowed a saner dynamic to creep into the room. They sensed we weren’t actually the typical inner-city targets that they normally tormented and that there might be an awful stink if they called in the cavalry. They’d have to settle for the satisfaction of knowing they’d done a good day’s work: we ended up driving five hours for nothing.
Clearly the Mongo and Squeaky farce had wider implications. After all, these prison workers had authority over people’s lives. Although their jobs called for an even temperament, the woman was vicious and the captain was a standard bully bereft of diplomatic skills. Almost certainly their behavior had caused problems for others before us and would do so again. When I was a newspaper reporter, I visited numerous lockups—local, state, and federal. Never had I run into guards or administrators anything like Mongo and Squeaky. Prison and jail staff might not always be particularly kind, but in my experience they were always polite enough and never clearly crazy. Nor had inmates ever told me stories resembling what we’d witnessed in Taft. But I hadn’t dealt with a for-profit prison before. Had this made the difference? In a word, yes.
In 1971 Stanford psychologists hired male students to play roles in a mock prison for two weeks, twenty-four as inmates, twelve as guards. It all seemed harmless enough, an intriguing experience for everybody. The idea was to study the psychological effects of their roles on the volunteers, both guards and prisoners. But in almost no time at all the guards turned abusive, and although instructed not to harm prisoners, they resorted to torture to secure obedience. Prisoners reacted in various degrees of shock, distress, anger, and depression. Five showed such acute symptoms that the researchers let them out early. Others staged a rebellion. There was madness in the air, a sinister, almost supernatural force akin to whatever seized Stephen King’s Jack Torrance in The Shining. The project director, also feeling the lure of sadistic authoritarianism, shoved the malevolent genie back in its bottle by shutting down the experiment after six days.2
The events at Stanford provide disturbing clues about the darkness that, under absolute conditions, can overwhelm our humanistic tendencies. The experiment, no doubt still providing thesis material for grad students, appeared to be pretty strong evidence in favor of careful selection when staffing jails and prisons. But if you pay only nine or ten bucks an hour, you can’t always find perfection. The presence of Mongo and Squeaky and their bullying behavior was a logical result of the inefficiency and indifference that are part of the for-profit prison dynamic. Like them, the “guards” at Stanford were trained in a hurry and not paid handsome wages.