Brent McCall

Don Pesci: In a place of unchecked, secretive power

Entrance to the MacDougall Walker Correctional Institution, in Suffield, Conn., where Brent McCall spent time.

Sham: Inside the Criminal Correction Racket, by Brent McCall ($12.95). {He was convicted of violent crimes.}

VERNON, Conn.
People who have never been inside a prison – most of us -- think: 1) the purpose of a prison is to provide punishment, not rehabilitation; 2) justice essentially means, “If you did the crime, you do the time; 3) every prisoner has duped himself or herself into thinking he or she is innocent and therefore any punishment, however unjust, is merited; 4) egotism does not stop at prison doors, and the notion that one should  take a prisoner’s testimony as gospel truth over that of prison authorities is patently absurd; and 5) books written by prisoners nursing grievances should be taken with two tons of salt.

People convinced that the above propositions are indisputably true will not be persuaded otherwise by Brent McCall’s latest book, Sham, which presents a strong case that the administrative architecture of modern prisons, many of which put themselves forward as rehabilitation centers, have yet to throw off certain medieval characteristics. Sociologists who spend their days probing various administrative organizations – schools, the family, corporations, political parties, etc. -- should turn the pages of Sham with some interest, because prisons are among the first age-old repositories of unchecked, secretive and personalized administrative power.

When the cell door is locked and the key thrown away, also discarded is any critical word from prisoners concerning administrative justice or humane treatment. At its most primitive, punishment without mercy is terror. Central to terror is arbitrary, personalized treatment by an overpowering force. That is the message of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s partly autobiographical novel The Idiot.

Written twenty years after Dostoevsky’s own imprisonment, Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of the novel, tells a story of an execution that intentionally resembles Dostoyevsky’s own mock execution: “...But better if I tell you of another man I met last year...this man was led out along with others on to a scaffold and had his sentence of death by shooting read out to him, for political offenses. About twenty minutes later a reprieve was read out and a milder punishment substituted...he was dying at 27, healthy and strong...he says that nothing was more terrible at that moment than the nagging thought: "What if I didn't have to die!...I would turn every minute into an age, nothing would be wasted, every minute would be accounted for... (Part I, chapter 5).”

In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky traces the path of a “diseased tyranny,” always related to the unbridled personal power of one man over another: “The human being, the member of society, is drowned forever in the tyrant, and it is practically impossible for him to regain human dignity, repentance, and regeneration...the power given to one man to inflict corporal punishment upon another is a social sore...it will inevitably lead to the disintegration of society.”

The subject of McCall’s Sham is not personal vindication. Sham is a brief against personal tyranny, the tyranny of an administrative organ hidden from public view and, deployed outside of administrative guidelines, inescapable. Sunshine, we are often told, is the best disinfectant. What is brought to light no longer festers in the dark. Prisons are meant to be, by design, dark. And prisoners are meant to be invisible. Any prisoner who flips on the light switch is bound to be greeted with sour disfavor.

Sham is McCall’s second book. I also reviewed his first, Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime, co-written with Michael Liebowitz, McCall’s friend and cellmate at (MacDougall-Walker CI in Suffield, Conn.) in February, 2018.

Following the publication of their first co-written book, the two co-authors were separated, McCall being shuttled off to Cheshire Correctional Institution.  Both authors had been heard semi-regularly on Todd Feinberg’s radio talk show program at WTIC News/Talk 1080. 

At the center of McCall’s disfavor was an embarrassing sham he had uncovered that involved salary padding on the part of prison officials. Both McCall and Liebowitz had agreed that none of their publications should be made available to other prisoners, a stipulation that since has been faithfully adhered to by all parties. The publications were intended to be corrective, not unnecessarily destructive to prison order or discipline. Both authors favor discipline when it is merited, just punishment and administrative order.

Indeed, the chief point of both books is that chaos on occasion replaces both discipline and order in some prisons because in some instances non-professional administrative staff and administrators find chaos, for a number of reasons, to be preferable to order and discipline.

Sham is jam-packed with such incidents. Such “troublesome themes,” McCall writes, play out time and again in many prisons, even when gross “dereliction of duty” presents clear and present dangers to both prisoners and guards.

An episode involving a guard and two quarreling prisoners in which the guard was clearly baiting the prisoners rather than repressing the quarrel, a clear dereliction of duty, induced McCall to write a letter to the Commissioner of prisons. Naturally, as on so many other occasions, McCall was not advised that the guard had been disciplined.  Prisoners who had witnessed the quarrel drew the right conclusions from it, namely that order and disciple in the prison was not a high priority for administrators.

McCall writes that the same theme, always destructive of rehabilitation, “took place at MacDougall’s prison industries… First, there was obviously nothing of rehabilitative value in staff colluding with inmates to bilk Connecticut taxpayers out of fraudulent overtime hours (not to mention the various other kinds of thefts going on there).

“Secondly, I went from being ignored to being transferred, with the staff creating the climate that ostensibly made that transfer necessary… Finally, even after all this time, I have no idea whether any of the staff at MacDougall industries were ever held responsible for the crime they had committed or the CDOC [Connecticut Department of Corrections] directives they openly violated.”

True discipline should not be confused with a “foolish consistency,” the “the hobgoblin of little minds,” according to Ralph Waldo Emerson. In prison environments, the two often walk hand in hand.

Chapter 5 of Sham, headed “Correctional Lemmings”, carries a quote from George Orwell: “The heresy of heresies was common sense,” and it describes in meticulous deatail the orderly procession of chow lines at Cheshire CI. “On the whole,” McCall writes, “East Block’s chow procedure is one of the most orderly and well managed things I’ve ever seen the Connecticut Department of Corrections do.”

It is a choreographed dance, flawless in every step.

Then comes chow. The prisoners are seated, and chaos – disruptive conversations that run afoul of CDOC’s Code of Penal Discipline – follow in due course, while unperturbed guards pretend not to notice the disorder.

“Why regulate seemingly innocuous behavior, McCall ruminates, while ignoring misconduct that would likely get one arrested for breach of peace and disorderly conduct at the local Burger King?”

Why must arbitrariness rule like a king in prisons? Is not the arbitrary the enemy of discipline, precisely in the same way a foolish consistency is the enemy of constructive order?

McCall makes the attempt – most often successfully – to answer questions such as these.

Full of footnotes but lacking a proper index for quick reference, Sham is an easy read, because McCall writes well, and his analytic powers are fully mature. The purpose of analytical writing is to dispel the darkness and shed light.

After he had finished reading Witness, Whittaker Chambers’s account of his own rise from demon communism to the light, Andre Malraux told the former soviet operative, “You did not come back from hell with empty hands.”

Sham is brave, clear in its witness, and well worth a read.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.


Brent McCall: Fraudulent staffing in prisons

At the Cheshire Correctional Institution, in Cheshire, Conn.

At the Cheshire Correctional Institution, in Cheshire, Conn.

The following two letters were written by Brent McCall, co-author along with Michael Liebowitz of Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime. Both concern what prisoners in New York call “clocksuckers,” prison employees who engage in stretching their paychecks at the expense of taxpayers. 

— Don Pesci, Vernon, Conn.-based columnist

Editor’s note: Both McCall and Liebowitz were convicted of violent crimes.

CHESHIRE, Conn. 

You’ve probably heard that Connecticut’s prison population is the lowest it has been in 30 years. Much less touted by the powers that be is that staffing levels within the Department of Corrections (DOC) remain at record highs. There are currently somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 corrections employees guarding fewer than 9,000 prisoners, And at a costyt of more than half as billion dollars a year to run the state’s prison system, it’s hard to imagine how such staffing levels may be justified. Even when they cannot be justified, DOC employees readily conspire to make it look like they can.

This occurred recently  in the carpentry class at Cheshire Correctional Institution when, for reasons not entirely clear to me, Mr. Toth, the carpentry teacher who used to work at York Correctional Institution, was transferred here. The story Mr. Toth tells is that the DOC defunded the carpentry program he taught at York. The thing is, however, it has not funded a program for him here at Cheshire.

Since Cheshire Correctional Institution already has a carpentry teacher, Mr. Toth, for the first several months he was here, would just come into work and hang out in an empty room all day with nothing to do. Recently, however, there have been efforts by several staff members here to make it look like Mr. Toth’s services continue to be needed.

For example, On Feb. 4 the inmates of the existing carpentry class, myself included, were told that the class roster would be split in two in order to provide “justification,” their  word, not mine, for Mr. Toth being here. We were also told at the time that although Mr. Toth could answer student questions, he would be unable to run a class on his own because he would not have access to the tool crib. And it didn’t take long for his so called “students” to learn what that meant.

On March 6, the original carpentry teacher was absent from his work. Despite this, Mr. Toth came into the housing unit to collect “his students.” Before leaving the unit, he got six of us together and told us that we would be going out to the shop, but that he wouldn’t be able to actually do anything because he didn’t have the keys to the crib or the office.

He further stated that he was only “going through the motions” because he had to “justify” his being here. And, sure enough, he wasn’t even able to provide as much as a single pencil for the six of us to share. Our sole purpose in being there was to help him bilk the taxpayers of Connecticut out of another day’s pay and benefits, something he had been doing, with the apparent blessing of his superiors, for more than six months.

Not only does this scheme violate at least a dozen departmental directives, it also violates the law, because documents were fabricated in order to create the illusion that Mr. Toth actually has students and therefore duties to perform. The split roster may be the tip of a larger iceberg, and while I’ll spare you the legalese, this type of document fabrication is clearly identified as second-degree forgery by Connecticut General Statutes (#53a-139); and, of course, to the extent that employees of the DOC had agreed to create this illusion, conspiracy as well (#53a-48). According to the General Statutes, second-degree forgery and conspiracy to commit forgery are both class D felonies, each punishable by up to five years in prison. Also, prisoners are conscripted into an unwitting co-conspiracy.

This brings us back to my original question: When does government mismanagement become a crime?

There are undoubtedly a number of ways this could be answered. But surely I have presented one of them here; which is to say, when state employees conspire to create “official” documents in an effort to protect a co-worker’s employment. That, I am afraid, is fraud. And if we allow the employees of any state agency to do such things with impunity, there really is no limit to the financial abuses they can perpetuate.

 

What Can Be Done With The ‘Clocksuckers’?

 

Abusers of the Department of Corrections overtime policy in New York State are known throughout the prison population as “clocksuckers.”

Indeed, abuse of overtime within the Connecticut Department of Corrections (CDOC) has been glaringly widespread for years. Year in and year out, the CDOC consistently has the highest overtime expenditures of any state agency.

In the two years prior to the Coronavirus pandemic, for instance, the CDOC spent nearly $80 million on overtime, with 2019’s expenditures exceeding 2018’s by several million; this during a period of time when the overall workforce increased while the prisoner population actually decreased.

The simple fact is Connecticut’s taxpayers spend tens of millions annually funding overtime for prison guards who have no legitimate reason to be working overtime. And the thing is – everyone in the department, from the commissioner on down, knows it.

The scheme works like this: The contract that the state has with the Corrections unit dictates that prison guards be paid time and a half after working eight hours – rather than forty hours. This has led to a culture of corruption wherein officers routinely trade shifts with one another in a way that allows each of them to work as many doubles as they like. Rather than earning straight pay for their scheduled hours, prison guards are able to pad their paychecks – by as much as 50 percent or more – merely by taking advantage of the department’s over-generous overtime policy. And since CDOC retirement benefits are tied directly to an employee’s highest earning years, the graft continues to pay dividends long after one’s employment with the department has ended.

It’s clear this practice violates the law, even if authorities refuse to recognize it as such. After all, we are ultimately talking about individuals committing fraud for financial gain.

The fact that the union contract permits time and a half after eight hours in no way excuses or justifies the abusive practices in which so many CDOC employees engage. But even if an argument could be made that prison officials shouldn’t report the overtime abusers to law enforcement for arrest and prosecution, it’s hard to understand why they refuse to enforce the department’s own policies regarding the issue.

Although the CDOC Administrative Directives do not expressly prohibit abuse of overtime, there are several directives that implicitly prohibit the practice. For example, the CDOC’s Code of Employee conduct prohibits personnel from “Engaging in unprofessional or illegal behavior… that could reflect negatively on the Department…” (A.D. 2l.17~ (5)(b)12). Clearly, staff manipulating overtime policy to the detriment of taxpayers reflects negatively on the department. I know it does this with the inmate population. And I imagine it would with the public too, if the public wasn’t kept in the dark about it.

The CDOC Code of Ethics prohibits staff from engaging in “Any financial interest… which ‘substantially conflicts’ with… the public interest (A.D. 1.13 ~ (4)(B)(1).”

If prison guards fleecing the taxpayers of Connecticut out of millions of dollars a year through what amounts to nothing less than a contractual sleight of hand doesn’t “substantially conflict” with the public interest, then I don’t know what would.

The directive which mandates that employees “Promptly report any corrupt, illegal, unauthorized, or unethical behavior (A.D. 1.13~(4)(A)(7)” has proven entirely ineffective at putting a stop to overtime abuses. But I suppose that’s not all that surprising: co-conspirators rarely roll over on each other without a credible threat of punishment.

If you ask me, the solution to the widespread abuse of overtime by CDOC personnel is pretty simple. Even if prison officials refuse to report the culprits to law enforcement, they should at least move to fire the clocksuckers.

At the York Correctional Institution, in Niantic, Conn.

At the York Correctional Institution, in Niantic, Conn.