What It’s Like to Work in a Prison

By Morgan Lake, September 2024

“Sagebrush gal is here, we need an escort.”

—Gatehouse Officer

Inside Carson City’s Northern Nevada Correctional Center, I am known as a “free staff” member—someone approved to work inside the institution, but not for the institution. This means that I am a familiar face and have a role independent to me, but that I can’t walk across the prison yard by myself to my jobsite—hence the needed escort. While this title may limit my parameters of influence, it also lets me off the hook for the long shifts and strenuous work many of the other prison staff endure.

Being free staff seems to sway the way incarcerated individuals interact with me, especially amongst my crews. They respect my role and follow my lead, but not being a Department of Corrections authority figure allows them to be a little more vulnerable with me as well. This doesn’t mean opening up about their entire lives, and especially does not mean asking about mine, but allowing little glimpses into their minds to be seen. I witness this in nonchalant ways: when a squirrel scrambles up towards us and someone mentions that it’s a mama and loves a certain treat, or when I am told about an exciting PBS special that was aired the night before.  I also see it in more explicit ways. Being thanked for taking the time to teach them something and prepare a fun educational activity, hearing about how hard a change in routine is for the entire crew, or seeing the fear in their eyes as they inform me about a recent cancer diagnosis.

When I first started this job, the previous woman in my role told me about how she was thanked for treating her crew members, “like actual humans.” I didn’t understand in the same way that I do now. I had never given much thought to how the prison system worked, or how the incarcerated individuals lived their lives within the system. From where I stand now though, I can’t imagine progress being made in reform efforts without treating these men and women like the humans they are. Some of these individuals may have never had that luxury—even before incarceration.

Bringing the sagebrush program into these environments does just as much for these crews as it does for the damaged landscapes we are growing plants for. It brings the opportunity for an ecological and horticultural background as well as experience in working as a team, troubleshooting problems, addressing conflicts, and being attentive to new protocols and information. I think the biggest gift the program brings these individuals is the ability to be part of something bigger than themselves. These crews are so incredibly hands-on with every part of the process in growing these seedlings- from cleaning cones and counting individual seeds to protecting the plants from hail, hand fertilizing and thinning out the excess numbers.  This gives each of them the chance to give back to the community from which many of them came from. I have seen how this program begins to give confidence back to some of these individuals, and it is beautiful. A crew member once told me, “They don’t let us pay our debts to society, they just keep telling us that we need to.” I hope this program has helped in some way to begin paying those.