Story from inside the Main Jail in San Jose

Nancy Rutherford, a mother of two adult children with a pleasant personality, has been a licensed vocational nurse for 38 years. She now works in a local psychiatric unit, but she worked previously in Salinas Valley State Prison, San Quentin and then the San Jose Main Jail. At the Jail her job was dispensing medications to the inmates, many of who were psychiatric clients. She passed to two to three hundred inmates every shift.

“I came in the afternoon,” she said, “and I had to pack the meds, getting them in their drawers to pass them in little cups. It took a long time, and then I would go out at a certain time for pill call. The officers wanted you to not talk to the inmates, but I like to greet someone. Just to say, ‘Good evening, Mr. So and So.’ They would say ‘Thank you.’ Many of them just reacted to this—one of them told me: 'When you come in, I’m so glad to see you.' Because I just can’t treat people like a number.

"Some needed psych meds who didn’t get them—a couple were really distraught—so I went up to the 8th floor, got their meds, and stayed a little bit over. The staff there say, ‘Oh, they’re just prisoners,’ but they’re human beings, it could defuse a problem if they didn’t have to wait another day for their meds.”

She said psychiatric clients who are arrested face a “terrible experience.” “From what I heard the police and corrections officers are pretty brutal when suspects are booked and received in the jail. These people, imagine, they come off the streets, maybe they drank on top of their other meds, and they don’t know which end is up. Then if you’re kind of brutalized and shoved around or whatever, it’s a pretty bad experience. If these officers bring them in and say they’re feisty or something, I’m sure they’re rough with them. If the prisoners are mentally challenged, then they’re going to act out.

“You feel like you’re crying out and no one’s listening. Something might be urgent to you, like you’ve got to use a phone. The corrections officers are verbally abusive, and, you know, your rights are taken away.

“I think there could be a better way. There are 33 state prisons in California, and they each house 4-5000 inmates. There are two women’s and 31 men’s. Some of the corrections officers can be very condescending, abusive, isolating these people, putting them in solitary confinement; some of it to me is going overboard. You might almost get them into a partial psychotic state, being alone and treated like this. You would treat an animal better.

“In prisons like Salinas Valley and San Quentin there are watchdogs who oversee conditions and inmate rights. I didn’t see that in the Jail.”

Ms. Rutherford said her heart goes out to people with psychiatric illnesses. She said police, and corrections officers, need to expect that people with illnesses do not come to them all sanitized. They will often be acting out and the officers need to defuse the situation. Instead the officers might make remarks that further upset the person in custody. “If you’re mean and nasty,” she said,” you just make things worse. I’ve seen the results myself. Say someone’s really acting out, all you do is go with them, talk with them, and they will often stop. And there’s ways to restrain people without hurting them.

“Some prisoners might be diagnosed as bipolar, schizophrenic, but amazingly enough, all the ones I’ve taken care of—in the general population or in their own private cell—were alert and oriented. They knew what I was saying to them. There were so many inmates you couldn’t look at all of their diagnoses, and unless they’re in infirmaries a lot of times you’re not even told, you’re just giving these drugs. They give a lot of psychiatric medication. My take on it is that they’re chemically controlling a lot of people. Years ago they had rehab; now they’re more controlled, I think, by the psychiatric drugs. Our society has become drug-infested. These drugs have a lot of side effects. They have to be monitored well and I question sometimes if they’re being monitored properly.”

One guard was tough, but fair. When a pen was taken off Ms. Rutherford’s cart, it was seen as a potential weapon. The guard went through a list of the people she recently gave meds to and questioned them. The pen was returned. “There was no meanness, no verbal abuse.”

Ms. Rutherford told of helping one inmate when things went wrong: “One of my colleagues told me there was an inmate who needed attention. She said ‘Boy! They really hit him in the eye!’” Ms. Rutherford went to the inmate’s cell with ice, where she ran into some corrections officers. She was angry and she asked, “May I see the inmate that was assaulted?” “’What do you mean assaulted?!’” an officer said. She went in.

“There was a young fellow who had a Southern accent. He looked pretty together. He said, ‘Ma’am, they hit me, and I was handcuffed.’"

The corrections officers reported Ms. Rutherford to their commander. The commander said to her, “We have to maintain a certain form of discipline here, you don’t want the prisoners to hear about dissention among the staff. You really have to watch what you say, because the news media may be around.”

“Then the corrections officers said they didn’t want me to pass meds on this floor because I had made that comment. They were saying I was slow. Yes, I was slow, but I was new, and there are so many prisoners. Some people just kept their mouths shut. I wonder if some of these other characters are checking on the prisoners. I’m really conscientious and I’ve had a lot of experience. Other people say 'Oh, don’t worry, it’s just an inmate.’"

Shortly afterwards, it all came together for Ms. Rutherford. “It was my father’s birthday. He’s deceased, but I remembered him, he loved the underdog. I thought to myself, ‘Hey, I’m out of this.’” She left the job behind.

She spoke philosophically about the situation there in the Main Jail: “The inmates are desperate, they’re isolated, they’re dehumanized. Unless you’re really strong, like Nelson Mandela, the jail is hard to take. A lot of people had a horrible childhood, been kicked around and treated badly, and then you put them into something like this … Some of the guards seem to have a vendetta, hurting people and being nasty. Some of them have that edge. You can see it. They don’t have a lot of compassion.

“Everyone isn’t kind in there.”