Mark Dostert
Step to Your Room
Toward the end of grad school, I spent nearly a thousand dollars on three plane tickets for the chance to be a Children’s Attendant in Chicago. Reading the 57-word job description in my native Texas, the position sounded like a glorified babysitter. For me though, it held the possibility of becoming a proxy parent or Big Brother-type to some of America’s most at-risk youth. My potential place of employment was the five-story Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. I didn’t envision, if hired, having to order kids to their cells.
Four years earlier, as a volunteer counselor with Good News Jail & Prison Ministries at this very facility while a senior at a downtown Chicago Christian college, I never witnessed any defiance or violence. I also never stood close to any of the seven-feet wide by fifteen-feet deep cells, whose walls were brick or steel, aside from a window in the back, six feet off the floor. I’d only leaned my head into the cellblocks on Monday evenings that fall and spring semester to ask the two Children’s Attendants on duty if any four or five inmates in their khakis and white t-shirts wished to follow me down the hallway to a small unstaffed visitation room with chrome-legged chairs just big enough for the furniture and us. And four or five boys always did. Cellblock chairs were exclusively plastic to lessen their lethalness if swung or chucked. In our special chamber though, no inmate raised a forearm or fist at me, much less a metallic chair. For half an hour we perched on our deadly chairs, pondering the Golden Rule and God so loving the world and the Samaritan bestowing mercy upon his enemy. The boys, charged with everything from narcotics and weapons violations to carjacking and first-degree murder, tilted their chins in consent. They spoke in turn. They bowed their heads to pray. They never cursed or complained or badgered me to do something fun or whispered about my smuggling them a bag of hot chips or a Milky Way. No blurt-outs about Tupac or Biggie Small and which rapper was better or didn’t deserve to die. A fifteen-year-old named Jerome gave me his home address so that I could write and visit him after his release. Being in jail helps turn bad kids good, I concluded.
Nearing my 120-page thesis completion and defense, I was tired of academia. Longing to make a difference in the real world again and remembering Jerome and his peers, I pursued becoming a Children’s Attendant back at Chicago’s juvenile jail. No applying to doctoral programs. No applying for teaching jobs at private high schools like my grad school contemporaries. After the plane trips for an application, a written exam, and an in-person interview, Cook County hired me. Cook County hired me for a position, which, to my shock, turned out to be that of an unarmed guard. No uniform. No badge. No baton. No mace. As one fellow attendant put it during my first week, “All you have is your mouth.” We were the guards.
*
Day One my trainer Children’s Attendant picked up a clear plastic clipboard with adhesive nameplate holders and sat me down on a chair on the far end of our rectangular cellblock’s back perimeter—the cell row. Under non-school day or non-school hour circumstances, there would be the two of us and two dozen inmates. But right then our block’s inmates were one floor below us in the School Area. The thirty-year Children’s Attendant veteran pointed to the numbered nameplate holders with card stock name labels. “Here’s all our rooms,” he said. “Rooms” not cells. I’d noticed “rooms” as well in the inch-thick training manual the day before in orientation. The facility’s administrators must have decided that a young man falling asleep and waking up in a “room” instead of a cell was less detrimental to his soul and psyche. Whatever their name, if you stood outside any one of the jail’s 500 rooms, you could see through the graffiti-etched Plexiglas window spanning most of its steel doorframe painted Mississippi mud brown. So the inmate inside had limited privacy when using the stainless steel toilet mounted to the brick front wall. Requiring us to call these cells “rooms” still heartened me because I’d applied for the job hoping to render those cells less depressing spaces for the inmates as a result of my interactions with them outside their cells. Because of the way I treated them and took interest in their lives, their cells would indeed become rooms. For at least a few moments each day, I wanted them to feel like they weren’t in jail.
But working as a Children’s Attendant wasn’t like volunteering as a counselor. Five willing boys in a visitation area were much different than twenty-five inmates restricted to a cellblock’s common areas. Up close and personal with the rooms now, having to inspect them for contraband and unlock and relock their doors all shift long, they became cells. I soon scoffed at “rooms” the way I did the training manual’s substitution of “residents” for inmates, “group disturbance” for riot, and “living unit” for cellblock. When a kid cursed at us, threatened us, or threatened or attacked another inmate, we instructed him to enter his “room.” Then we wrote a major rule violation report. The kid would remain in his room until a caseworker or supervisor decided how many hours or days of Confinement he would serve. If the offense happened on a weekend, holiday, or during non-school hours, this meant no TV, no ping-pong, no cards, no gymnasium basketball, no softball or touch football in the outdoor cement-surfaced courtyard. Such inmates didn’t even go to school. No Protestant or Catholic chapel either. Only five minutes outside his room for a shower in the Bathroom Area and sixty minutes off the cellblock for recreation in a small group of other such Confinees. Sometimes we summoned the Chicago Police Department if we discovered weed or little cocaine “rocks” in a kid’s shoes or hidden in a hole in his mattress.
Whether or not we contacted police after such a major violation, we ordered the violator into his room. Some Children’s Attendants used: “Step to your room!” or “Step to yo house!” Others, if a supervisor wasn’t within earshot used: “Step to yo crib!” or even “Step to yo shit!” Whatever we called the inmate’s cell—his shit, his crib, his house, his room—if the inmate did something major, he had to go there. If he refused, we were not to touch him unless he created danger to himself, other juveniles, Cook County property, or us. Instead we phoned a caseworker or supervisor. If they showed up and couldn’t cajole the inmate into the room, then the group of us had to place or put him there. That way potential injuries (the inmate’s or ours) would be witnessed by multiple staff members. Should an inmate lunge at us, Policy And Procedure did govern our use of force. “Justifiable self defense, protection of staff and residents, protection of property, and prevention of escapes” were the only instances when force could be applied—“only as last resort.” It couldn’t be punishment and “only the least force necessary under the circumstances shall be employed.” So there were rules to govern our application of the rules.
*
The most challenging room-worthy juvenile was the juvenile who became physically hostile about a potentially bolted room. On a Saturday afternoon months after finishing my initial training, I was playing ping-pong with an inmate when another inmate, a jumpy kid, taller than average, dropped himself into a chair, which he’d slid up next to the ping-pong table. Immediately, he whacked a fist and palm together. After each smack of skin, he would stiffen and curl his fingers into various formations at chest-level—likely gang signs, or close enough. He leered and laughed, suspecting, I’m sure, that I was ignorant of exactly how any specific gang’s hand signal was formed, thus “playing” me as if on stage right there in the open space of our cellblock’s middle. With members from multiple gangs on the cellblock, one member “signifying” his membership could trigger a brawl with members of his rival gang.
I turned to him. “Young man, you’re gonna be countin’ bricks if you don’t stop!”
What I meant was Wall-Time. For minor violations, we could stand an inmate facing the cellblock’s brick wall for up to forty minutes. My Wall-Time threat would hopefully stop his “stacking”—one of the more overt gang hand-signal methods. Forever flinching and gyrating, no way could this fifteen-year-old just sit and watch a spectator sport. I’d yet to see him speak more than a couple sentences to the same person in the same conversation.
More stacking.
“I wouldn’t do that again!” No warnings. No second chances. Make another gang sign and you’re on the wall. I wouldn’t be a broken record like I’d mistakenly been in earlier months on rougher cellblocks with less experienced coworkers committing the same folly.
Promptly, the inmate rushed another fist and palm at each other but froze both an inch apart. Some of the boys seated around him cackled, enjoying the show, loving his mocking my warning. Doing this another five or six times, the kid sneered wide at me like this was the meaning of his life, self-actualization right there on cellblock 3G, jacking with the Newjack—a rookie Children’s Attendant. I didn’t order the showman to the wall because he would have screamed loud and proud that he hadn’t done anything. In the few minutes since my warning, by the book, he hadn’t.
I returned volleys while Mr. Gang Signs, seated to my right, flailed his arms and hands in front of his chest, doing his damndest to come as close as he could to manually gang represent without actually doing so. My ping-pong opponent and I volleyed on for dozen-odd more shots. Then my antagonizer’s palm and fist finally collided.
I turned and looked at him: “Step to the wall!” It was twenty feet to our right.
The boy rocketed off his chair, squeaking his sneaker soles against the floor around the table. Then he bellowed something indecipherable.
I flung the paddle down on the table and moved away from the table toward him.
“Step to your room!” My hands, free at my sides, were open, my elbows cocked.
The half-dozen other juveniles watching the game went silent. I scanned beyond the upright, now prancing inmate. Forty-some feet away in the TV Area heads swiveled in our direction. My lone coworker squirmed in his chair on the back row.
Then like an old muffler backfiring on a tranquil night, it came: “Fuck You, Motherfucker!”
Before working at this jail, no one had ever said Fuck You to me or designated me as a Motherfucker. This kid was my height but thirty pounds lighter. He raged around the block’s middle space waving his arms, forming all the gangbanger hand signals he could, slapping more skin and belting out three or four bonus Fuck You, Motherfuckers!
I said it again: “Step To Your Room!” In my pants pocket were the keys to unlock his room, whose door was part of the same cell row perimeter twenty feet to our right where I’d ordered him to do Wall-Time.
Should he lunge or swing, I had no set plan. In training, we’d received nothing on self-defense. Clutch one arm and hope that he would halt? Ram my hands into his chest and jam him against the wall? Defer to gravity and my weight advantage and yank him to the floor and pin him underneath me? I could attempt a Full-Nelson, although weaving my arms under his armpits and my hands behind his head would be difficult with him already squared up in front of me. My coworker held the other fifteen inmates with him in the TV Area, but the ping-pong watchers and card players fidgeted in chairs very close to this willing belligerent and me. Should we engage, they could be on us, on me, before my coworker, hardly the quickest or fittest Children’s Attendant in the facility, arrived.
The war dance throbbed on with more yelling, flying arms, and stomping feet. He didn’t charge, so I edged back around the ping-pong table and to the staff desk and pulled out its chair, plunked down, and found a rule violation report form and a pen. Halfway through my paragraph, I looked up. We locked eyes. He stopped. His feet were pointed toward the TV Area, but his eyes were on me. Checkmate. No more shoes thudded into the tile. No more F-bombs echoed off the brick walls. My coworker, about fifty-years-old with a couple dozen extra pounds stuck around the waist, shorter than me and the inmate, ambled out of the TV Area and shadowed the boy, cornering him near his room.
“Son, the longer you stay out here, the longer you’re gonna spend in there.”
They two-stepped in a half-circle opposite one another like north and south magnetic poles repelling each other. My coworker jawed more, driving the boy closer to his steel and Plexiglas door. I tossed my coworker the keys.
“Okay, but I’m not goin in for Confinement!”
My coworker unlocked his room. The kid halted a few feet from his door, turned to me, scowled, and then strutted into his cell as if he was the last man standing—he’d cursed me out without my cursing him back.
I finished my report and phoned a caseworker who said he would be by soon to read my account of the incident and determine how much Confinement the inmate merited. Hanging up, I remembered my initial interaction with this young man. One evening a week prior, my coworker had taken the cellblock’s inmates to the basement gym. I had to stay to check on our one Confinement—this kid. After they left, I picked up the log sheet for my first walk-by and paused in front of the Confinement cell. Poised in the window, looking at me, was this tall, hyper kid. I scanned the log. His name was spelled liked Jason but began with a T. “Tayson?” His hips and shoulders twitched, correcting me, “Ta-son,” as if to accent his name’s second syllable. Unaware of his offense to be Confined, I pictured the endorphin rush Tason was missing right then downstairs on the basketball court and toyed with violating Policy and Procedure by letting him out of his cell for a game of ping-pong or chess with me. We were alone. Unlikely it was that a supervisor would happen by and see me breaking this rule. Being new and overly cautious though, I decided against even this low-risk gamble.
Later in the shift the caseworker arrived and read my report quoting the Fuck You, Motherfucker! lines. Tason paced his cell the rest of that day.
The next day he was still locked up. He’d received two full Confinement days. Now Tason could only scowl at me through his Plexiglas. My ping-pong on cellblock 3G would be borderline fun again. So there Tason. Fuck You too, you Motherfucker.
Jesus wouldn’t have thought this. Jesus would have turned his other ear for a matching “Fuck You,” but I failed to be Jesus in those shameful and defeated moments, converting Tason’s room into a cell, converting us back to inmate and guard.
Counterproductive and tone-deaf-to-history was my reciprocating animosity in the shadow of the animosity-fueled Fuck You that our nation’s founders collectively issued to Tason’s ancestors. This and the collective animosity and Fuck You’s issued since by so many American institutions, and thus so many Americans, in our nearly two and a half subsequent centuries to Tason’s bloodline, now incalculably overrepresented in America’s criminal justice industrial complex.
Mark Dostert is the author of Up in Here: Jailing Kids on Chicago’s Other Side, excerpted in Salon and featured at the 2015 Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit Fest. He teaches at Writespace and holds a Master of Arts in English from University of Houston. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Ascent, Cimarron Review, The Dallas Morning News, Dash Literary Journal, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hayden’s Ferry Review Online Content, Punctuate., Southern Indiana Review, and Superstition Review, and been cited as Notable in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011, The Best American Essays 2011, The Best American Essays 2013, and The Best American Essays 2019.