There was a six-month wait — one that felt like a decade — between the end of my internship and a full-time job offer. During those six months my Mother died after a long battle with cancer, and I had to drop out of school to care for my Father, who had advanced Alzheimer's. My half-brother died of an overdose, and I eventually had to place my Father in assisted living. When the job offer came, I was packing up a 3,000-square-foot house and moving it into storage. I drove home to Alabama and started the job.
The first two years were more than I could have hoped for. I was given free rein to develop the classes as I saw fit. We studied the biopsychosocial model, denial and grief, criminal thinking, and emotional intelligence, and we read from a fantastic book called *Houses of Healing*. I learned the vocabulary the inmates used that kept them stuck. We broke barriers regularly and had genuine progress. My boss was super supportive and made me feel like a real asset to the state. We went to ASADS conferences that were very informative.
The only thing lacking was in my co-workers: a general indifference to rehabilitation. They were clearly interested only in a paycheck and their institutional nap time. I wondered what it would be like to have other counselors around who wanted to talk about what was working and what wasn't. I longed for that kind of interaction, but it did not exist.
Then the other shoe fell — you know the one, when everything seems to be moving forward and then something stops you dead in your tracks. I came into work and my boss was cleaning out his desk. He was leaving to work in the non-profit world, and the person replacing him was not an ambitious person like myself, but the full-time napper who insisted on keeping the lights off in the office from noon to four.
In the first week of the new world order, I came home to a voicemail on my machine that was incredulous. The voice said: "I drove by your home today and saw you bent over in short-shorts in your garden. You shouldn't do things like that where people could take a picture of you. I wonder what all the guys would think of that picture. You should be glad I didn't take one."
The voice was none other than my new boss.
I sat in stunned silence. I cried briefly over the betrayal. Then I agonized over how disgusting it was, and how unbelievably stupid he had to be. Then I recorded it onto my cell phone to save the evidence.
The next day I made an appointment to meet with the warden. I continued to work my job admirably but quietly until the day of our meeting came. I played the voicemail for the warden and he was visibly upset. He told me he would handle it directly, and to go back to work.
My new boss was gone for the next three days. I was never called back to the office or consulted about the outcome. My other co-workers said nothing either. When Monday arrived and he came back to work, not a word was said. Within a week, though, I noticed a stark change among the inmates in my class and among officers of different ranks across the compound. I did not know that my life was about to become a daily hell for the next several years — because my new boss had told everyone I was a racist, rather than admit that he had sexually harassed me and mentioned blackmailing me with photos.
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There had been a few times in the past when an inmate overstepped boundaries and had to be reported to the Sergeant or Captain on duty. The inmates all knew I would not stand for it, so it rarely happened. When it did, paperwork was formally drawn up and the individual was removed from the program.
Now, though, the Captains' and Sergeants' responses were very different. They questioned me instead. What were you wearing? Where were you standing? Is there a witness? Did you report it to the officer? What were you talking about before this happened? I complied with their questions, but I couldn't help feeling that gaslighting was taking place.
As the days went on, I would find myself called to the warden's office and questioned about things I had supposedly said in class — things that were untrue or drastically taken out of context. For so long I had felt I was doing the next right thing, always. Now I felt like the target in a witch hunt.
Stay tuned for more of this series, and as always, thanks for reading. Click on my profile for past essays.