By Tim Potter
The Wichita Eagle, Kan.
WICHITA, Kan. — When the woman began working as an El Dorado state prison officer in 2004, she didn’t intend to get into a close relationship with an inmate.
“It’s not like I went there to find a husband,” says the woman, who requested her name not be used. “I had a very low opinion of inmates in general.”
But by the time she lost her prison job in 2005, she was well on her way to marrying an inmate with a murder conviction.
Their relationship would cost her more than her job. The woman, now 47, would end up a convicted felon herself.
As last week’s prison escape has shown, she isn’t the only female officer to get into trouble for contact with an inmate while working at the all-male prison.
A relationship between a former officer — Amber Goff — and at least one inmate played a key role in an escape from a high-security unit at the El Dorado Correctional Facility last Sunday, the Kansas Department of Corrections says.
Goff’s family has said that the 23-year-old was forced to resign early last month because of inappropriate contact with an inmate.
Authorities have accused Goff of aiding in the escape of two inmates. On Wednesday, police in New Mexico arrested Goff and the escaped inmates, Jesse Bell and Steven Ford.
The Corrections Department has no readily available data on how often prison staff across the state are disciplined or fired for improper contact with inmates, department spokesman Bill Miskell said Friday.
“It is not a large number, but it occurs too often. One is too many,” Miskell said in an interview last week.
Because inmates can be especially manipulative, it’s important for prison systems to use pre-employment screening and training to prevent potentially dangerous relationships from occurring, experts say.
The woman who lost her job at the prison and ended up marrying the inmate said she can’t fault screening or training for her decision to get involved with the inmate.
The Eagle agreed to her request not to be named. She said her husband is an inmate from outside Kansas. For security reasons, the Department of Corrections does not disclose information about inmates accepted into its prisons through agreements with other states, Miskell said.
‘It’s easy to be duped’
J.R. Roberts, a long-time security consultant based in Savannah, Ga., says pre-employment screening and questioning should be aimed at finding two kinds of people not suited for prison work -- sadists or bullies looking for a job to exert power, and, at the other end of the spectrum, people who are vulnerable to manipulation.
“You’re going to find them in the guard population,” Roberts said. “Sometimes they’re winnowed out, and sometimes they’re promoted. We only hear about it when there’s a disaster, and there’s a lot of disasters waiting to happen out there.”
Federal prisons seem to do more screening than state systems, Roberts said.
Being a corrections officer isn’t easy, he said.
“They’ve got to be thick-skinned,” Roberts said. “They’ve got to be pretty independent and tough.”
And he said, “there are more temptations than you think” -- inmates offering sex or drugs for favors.
One way to prevent relationships from forming, he said, is rotating guards around prisons so they don’t oversee the same inmates day after day.
“That also protects the guard from becoming complacent,” Roberts said.
Kansas prisons move officers around, Miskell said, only partly so that they do not get too familiar with inmates.
“The flip side of it is you want staff to know who the inmates are,” he said, so they can help inmates change their behavior.
Rotation also helps officers gain new skills, and that is the main reason they are moved around, Miskell said. “We move inmates probably more often than we rotate staff ... for a number of reasons,” he said — often when their custody level changes.
Anyone dealing with inmates has to be wary, said Gregg McCrary, a former FBI profiler, now based in Virginia, who teaches college-level forensic psychology.
Much of McCrary’s experience comes from contact with psychopathic inmates.
“They look at the world as if everything and everybody in it is all there to meet their needs,” he said.
“It’s easy to be duped by a psychopath, easier than you think.”
McCrary might know that an inmate committed a murder. Still, he said, “by the end of the day, he’s almost got me convinced that he didn’t do it.”
“They can persuade you into believing or doing things,” McCrary said.
“You get kind of mesmerized by these guys.”
He calls them “natural psychologists.”
“They just can read people extraordinarily well,” he said.
‘You feel for a guy’
Jonathan Crutcher — the older brother of Goff, the former prison officer charged in the escape — said he learned from his own work as an El Dorado prison officer not to underestimate inmates.
“They say inmates are stupid because they got caught,” Crutcher said. “You know what? I met some of the smartest people in the world in that building.”
Avoiding anything but a strictly professional relationship with inmates is harder than it might seem, Crutcher said.
“You spend just as much time with them guys as your family. You feel for a guy who’s sitting in a cell (and crying) because his mom just died or his grandmother just died,” he said.
“You feel for him because he’s human ... no matter what his crime.”
Crutcher worked at the El Dorado prison for about nine months. When he quit in April, he was making $12.41 an hour and receiving “better-than-average” benefits, he said.
He had recommended the job to his sister, a 23-year-old single mother, because of the pay and benefit package.
And there’s the promise of stability.
“The prison is always going to be there,” he said. “You’re not going to get laid off.”
He said he left the job because he grew tired of physical confrontations with inmates. One tried to stab him, he said.
Officer got disillusioned
The woman who got into a close relationship with an inmate said she maintained a professional distance with all of the other inmates at the prison.
“There’s plenty of females that work in prison who don’t develop familiarity with inmates,” she said.
As of Dec. 31, 2006, one in five of the Corrections Department’s uniformed security staff were women.
Some of the woman’s attitudes began to change after she started working at the prison.
At the time, she was separated from her husband.
She found herself starting to sympathize with inmates.
“Sometimes, bad things happen to good people,” she said. “There are good people in there.”
She became disillusioned with the actions of some of her fellow officers. They wanted her to help “railroad” inmates with unfounded disciplinary complaints, and she refused, she said.
And some male officers seemed to her to be on power trips. “They had no power anywhere else in their life but right there,” she said.
She said the prison allowed a double standard by which male officers could get away with patting an inmate on the back and using his first name but female officers couldn’t.
Asked to respond, Miskell, the corrections spokesman, said: “Staff should not be patting people on the back in most circumstances. They should not be calling inmates by first names.
“You can be friendly. You can’t be friends.”
Friendly means being respectful and professional. “Staff should not be talking about their personal life with inmates,” Miskell said.
‘We just connected’
The woman who worked as the prison officer met the inmate who would become her husband while he was working on a maintenance crew.
“We just connected,” she said.
It took about a year for the relationship to fully develop.
“He pursued me,” she said.
They talked while she patrolled a day room where inmates gather.
“We thought we were being discreet,” but others had to have noticed a bond between the two, she said.
He has been in prison for decades now, serving time for a murder conviction.
“His world is the prison,” she said. “That’s all he’s ever known.”
But she saw good in him.
“He was not judgmental at all,” she said. “He was very honest with me. It was just the way he carried himself.”
When she received a new assignment in the prison, it took her away from him.
“I missed him. I just wanted to talk to him,” she said.
She won’t discuss the details, but somehow he received a cell phone. “It was my phone,” she said.
It cost her the job, and it drew a felony charge of trafficking contraband into a correctional facility, to which she pleaded guilty, she said.
She received a 17-month prison sentence but instead was placed on a year of probation. The probation period ends in January.
She never had a criminal record before, she said.
They’ve been legally married about a year now.
He has been moved to another prison. They communicate by letters and telephone. He can call her, collect.
He could be released in a few years, she said.
In the meantime, she’s become a full-time student at Wichita State University, with a goal of working as an artist.
In hindsight, she said, she realizes she should have left her job before the relationship reached the point it did.
“There’s a lot of people who just will not hire convicted felons,” she said.
Still, she has no regret because her relationship means the most to her.
“If I had to do it all over again to get to the point I am now, I would,” she said.
The woman said this about Goff:
“Just not to judge her. They don’t know what her side of the story is. She could have been coerced.
“She could have been in love.”
But in a follow-up interview, the woman drew a distinction between herself and the actions Goff stands accused of.
When asked if she would have helped her husband-to-be to escape, the woman didn’t hesitate in saying no.
“It would have ruined our future together,” she said.
Copyright 2007 The Wichita Eagle