Trite

Amber was lovely to me the day before I had to report to my high-security facility, cuddling against me as we enjoyed a Labor Day barbecue. She woke early the first day to feed the cats, so I did not have to, but I already had from habit. Instead, to justify her waking, she makes me tea. I am deeply fond of her, no less for this kindness. Without her, this setback would impact me far more than seeming like a series of accumulating irritations.

Amber offered that we could drive to see the facility the Sunday before. I intentionally did not remind her of this suggestion, so I see it for the first time as I pull up to it minutes before my first shift.

This is a prison. My old facility was so unassuming that locals were consistently confused about where I worked, even when they lived on the same street. Without fencing, that facility looked like nothing more offensive than an office building. Two perimeter fences encompass this facility with tumbleweeds of razor wire crowning the tops and, in places, bunched at the bottom to discourage any attempts at climbing. This metal riles in me the instinctive fear people would have to a wall of hornet nests; I would not want to be within three feet of their keenness. The only way in is to be buzzed through two sturdy gates, the sound of each lock a massive shotgun cocked before one's face.

If I needed a breather at my old facility, I could unlock a side door to the grass of the baseball field. I could take short walks along paths belonging to the facility. My keys don't work to get outside here, and "outside" only means within the razor wire fences. The only way out is through three doors whose locks are controlled by guards in a booth, watching us on cameras.

Some teachers seem beaten down by the circumstances or have lost what it was to teach outside this system. I did not expect this to be a hopeful place. With residents who are adjudicated to life in the system -- not by any future choice, but what they have already done -- hope would be a waning commodity. At my old facility, even the walls were irrationally bright. There is a constant dreariness here, as though it is not even worth the tiny, false effort of pretending, which would not entirely be for the benefit of the kids.

Given the restrictions of COVID, we are still masked most of the time. People can introduce themselves as much as they would like. Still, there is a distinct unlikelihood that I will have the slightest idea of who they are when next we cross paths (unless there is something immediately distinctive about them, but this is not in the nature of male professional dress).

I am taken on a tour. Looking out of the high windows in one of my classrooms, I see the clear blue sky. Or I would see it, but it is interrupted by loops of the gleaming razor wire, the threads of spiderwebs within shining in the sunlight. It is so cartoonishly on-the-nose that I cannot help but scoff. It is a verse in a lazy high school poem.

I work with the girls (in that we have six students on that wing, and two of them are trans boys -- about par for the course). I prefer a small group of colleagues where I can get to know everyone and work with a team, three of whom came with me from my old facility. As long as I consider myself a member of this exclave that we might reform from within, I feel better. I enjoy two of my students, who are academic, fun, and at once took to me. The other four are not unfamiliar sorts, so I am prepared for their brands of relatively minor misbehavior.

I have said before that I was more than apprehensive about working with the girls. The boys will hate you, scream and threaten, and be okay with you the next day. The girls plot and scheme, sweet to your face until they find a way to make it truly hurt. Yet would I rather have six schemers or sixty erratic boys? I'll try these odds.

I am teaching Living Environment and Earth Science to good students, so I do not mind much, despite this not being my subject area. I am also on the schedule to teach -- and this is how it is written -- "Science," which started with me trying to get the college students interested in something scientific and is now a study hall where I try to get them to write scholarship essays. I can handle that.

My supervisor, who has assumed the duties as the education coordinator of the former girls' facility, did make the generous mistake of letting the boys' facility know that I only have four classes with the girls in the morning. They snatched me up to co-teach with one of their established teachers and visit whichever boys are on the quarantine unit -- though they consider sufficient personal protective equipment to be my facemask and keeping away from my temporary students. There are other units, but I have no need to enter them (nor permission). I may not meet the majority of the residents sentenced here. I do not mind.

My team will do our damnedest to make our girls' wing as close to my former facility as possible, but we are laboring in a willingly crippled system. In part, there is a prevailing "What would be the point of reforming?" The residents will be entering the adult correctional system. They will never get to be kids again, so why care what happens to them?

I couldn't spend a decade at my nonsecure facility without absorbing Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Sanctuary up to my eyeballs. One needs a healthy system in which to work. One can't hate going to work every day, which does seem to be the other option. I have yet to meet a clinician, though I assume they must exist here if just to avoid the wrath of state regulators. Aside from seeing YDAs in my classroom, there is no interaction between the teaching staff and our security guards. There is no open communication, and that's how the system wants it because that is how it has long been.

Underscoring the odd sense of futility is that my old facility is not closed. One student remains until they find him a placement or the formal closing date of October 17th. We graduated him in June using some creative application of credits and COVID canceling Regents exams. He does not need teachers at this point. He still has a full staff attending to him: a director and assistant director, a clinician, YDAs, maintenance workers, and cooks. I am sure that the team is also working to close the facility, but it does seem ridiculous to have so many working for the arguable benefit of one young man. (Legally, they cannot put him in another facility because the courts adjudicated him to a nonsecure. What will happen to future residents sentenced to nonsecure placements is unclear.) When he does leave, or the facility is forced to close, some staff may come to this facility to help, but there is no guarantee. These men and women do not owe this facility or system anything.

Stepping through the door the first day, this facility had no idea that we would be coming and had not prepared to incorporate us. As far as they knew, we were not going to report before October 17th. There was a quick scramble to figure out who would be where, settling on having the teachers double up most periods to have us doing something.

In the orientation meeting, a woman leans over and, amid a story about her poor health leading to being hired here, confesses that she has never been scared. I know this tack. I've said it to people startled that I worked in a juvenile detention facility. Syllogistically, I am to this facility as civilians were to my old facility.

The education office has no windows to the outside world (nor do many of the rooms). Given that it provides a landing area for most of the teachers at some point, it is understandably cramped. There are a few computers along one wall, a small kitchen, and a bathroom to which I do not have a key. A skeleton with a phone cord wrapped around his mouth and neck is stuffed into a corner, its jaw replaced by a black basket. No one else seems to find this curious, and so I do not bother asking about it.

With between five and ten times more students on the grounds than I am used to, it is not a great surprise that more problems are called over the radio. Coupled with more felonious youth who have spent years here, the motivation to behave is slight. They have murdered before. What is another fight? What can we possibly do to them that the courts haven't already?

There is a lack of resources already, not enough paper or pencils. I quip that, given that Cuomo shut down my facility to save a paltry (and unnecessary) fifteen million dollars a year, they could afford to give us materials. No one else finds this funny.

Years ago, I worked at Maplebrook, a prestigious boarding school for the learning disabled children of the wealthy. I was as miserable. With good cause, I felt tricked, trapped, lied to, and cut off from the people whom I loved. When I came home to my partner at the time, Emily, I had taken to venting about that day's indignities so that I could get them out of me and find sympathy. After a few days of this, she cut me off sharply, saying that she couldn't put up with my unloading, even though I was not blaming her for any of it. After that, I tried to keep it inside, to not make my problem her problem.

I consciously try not to do this with Amber now, though she is subject to it the first few days. She says that she wouldn't mind and that she would rather I am unburdened than pent-up.

I prided myself on rarely letting the problems in my previous facility come home with me -- and I do not deny that I had a few. However, I had confidence then that we helped our population with our cloyingly therapeutic approach. It is easier to effect change with a small, open facility of three to eighteen kids rather than a poorly funded inner-city high school behind two barbed wire fences, primarily populated by lifers.

I feel as though I am a cell that worked to exhaustion healing a dying body until, almost miraculously, the body thrived. As my reward, I was extracted and transfused into someone much closer to death. Worse, this body does not want to work in a united purpose.

I thought I would teach the girls (and trans boys) exclusively, which was some mental separation. Yes, I was locked behind these walls, needing to be buzzed to move from different sections, but I was in a different school within this facility.

When I enter the unit -- the boys do not leave their units but instead go to an attached classroom -- I recognize it. At my old facility, we watched a training video of a unit falling into a violent mass disturbance, and we were tasked with figuring out everything the staff had done wrong. I am standing in that unit or its twin.

I have tried in the past to keep my previous students' offenses out of my mind. For the most part, I considered their crimes under the umbrella of "being stupid." Mugging, burglary, dealing drugs, acting as a gang patsy? Stupidity to varying degrees.

My students now are murderers. Not so much my girls (though, I gather, also my girls). It doesn't impact how I treat them.

In meeting a class of boys, I cannot shake the feeling that I know them. Individual students remind me so hauntingly of kids I have taught that I want to inquire if they might be related. But, no, they are descended of similar archetypes.

In the cuddliness of the therapeutic milieu from which I came, the clinicians talked endlessly about radical acceptance. You have to look at what is in front of you and accept without conditions. You can work from that point, but you cannot fight the reality of this situation. I am here. I am not quickly going to find another job at this pay scale and benefits, so I have to accept it and find my place within it.

As I let go of the healthier facility to which I was acclimated, a facility in which I felt I had a hand in making, every day in this high-security placement is a little easier. I follow my supervisor in hoping we can affect positive change in this entrenched dysfunction. To believe that we will labor in a place beyond redemption is to accede to despair. I know how much progress we made at our last facility, though we did not have nearly as far to go. I admit that we were able to build stronger foundations because the state changed its mind about giving us the (slightly) less felonious city cousins of this population, who were sentenced to twenty to life before they could grow a beard. It is better for my mental health to focus on the moment and how it will inspire the following lessons.

last watched: What We Do in the Shadows
reading: Waypoint Kangaroo