Women are working as uniformed correction officers in greater numbers than ever, and in many respects, they are changing the culture of Ne York City’s jails.
In her 19 years as a corrections officer on Rikers Island, Barbara Williams has been trapped in a mess hall with rioting inmates and thrown against an iron gate by a man twice her size who left her with a fractured shoulder. But nothing makes her wince like remembering the time an inmate commented on the way her hips swayed ever so slightly beneath her boxy blue uniform, back when she first came on the job. “He said: ‘Damn! You remind me of a pantyhose commercial,’ ” recalled Ms. Williams, who is in her late 40s and has a compact build and a deep, raspy voice. “The feeling I had all that day was as if he had touched me or something.” Ms. Williams cited the man’s comment as a crucial moment in her career. “I saw right off that I have to change my demeanor: I have to be more forceful; I have to harden myself.”
… Women have worked in the city’s Department of Correction for decades, but never in such large numbers as they do today. Women make up 45 percent of about 9,300 uniformed employees of the department, according to the agency. From guards to wardens to the four-star chief, Carolyn Thomas, they fill almost every rank. And in many respects, they are changing the culture of the city’s jails. Walk down the corridors of any of the city’s 11 active jails, and it is clear that not only are there a high number of female officers, but a majority of those women — 75 percent — are black, said Stephen Morello, a department spokesman. They are former soldiers, beauticians and bank tellers. They are single mothers who took the job to support their children. They are grandmothers like Angela Crim (“Crime without the ‘E,’ ” she says sweetly), who carries handwritten Scripture in her purse and says she tries not to judge the men whom she guards …
Ask any woman in the city’s Correction Department why she wanted a job that brings with it such stress and potential danger, and she’ll tell you that it’s the security. Such a career, in which no college degree is required and the top yearly pay for an officer is $75,000, can mean the difference between a life of hardship and a ticket into the middle class. “I don’t think anybody grows up saying, ‘I want to be in charge of inmates,’ ” said Chantay Forbes, a 30-year-old single mother from East New York, Brooklyn, who took the corrections officer’s exam about a decade ago when she was pregnant with her son. She recently bought a house upstate. “All I saw was what it could do for my future,” added Ms. Forbes, a newly promoted captain. “If it wasn’t for this job, I might not be able to own a home right now.”
… Last year was the safest on record for the city’s jails, according to the department, and many female corrections officers think that the decrease in violence is linked in part to their presence. “The female touch is a little more gentle,” said Joandrea Davis, a warden who runs a jail for sentenced male inmates on Rikers and keeps her office stocked with bottles of Perrier and candy-apple-scented hand lotion. “You don’t have that machismo that comes into confrontational situations, and sometimes we’re able to quell things.” But not all the time. “It is a jail,” she added. “We’re not dealing with choirboys here.”
… If anyone has been a visible role model for female corrections officers, it is Carolyn Thomas, 50, a 27-year veteran of the department. Two years ago, Ms. Thomas was promoted to chief of the department, the highest-ranked uniformed officer, second only to the commissioner. One of the first female corrections officers to work with male inmates, she manages a staff of nearly 10,000 and an inmate population of about 14,000, overseeing the daily operations of all the city’s jails, court holding pens and prison wards … Recently, Ms. Davis has begun grooming other women for promotions within the department. Ms. Thomas also mentors women eager to move up. In return, they give her homey mementos, among them a painted tile that reads, “It’s a rare person who can take care of hearts while also taking care of business.”
A Brooklyn judge has cleared the way for the city to resume sending inmates to the Brooklyn House of Detention, which stopped housing them overnight in 2003, but has ruled that the city’s effort to nearly double the size of the jail required environmental and land-use reviews. Story from the New York Times.
