by Tina Alvarez

What is it like to work in a prison? How are the correctional officers trained? What do their experiences in prison tell us about the state of criminal justice?

These are some of the questions Assistant Professor of Media Arts Michael Mulcahy delves into in his PBS documentary, with the working title "Security, Custody, Control: The Making of a Correctional Officer."

Mulcahy, who received his M.F.A. in film and media arts from Temple University and his B.A. in general fine arts from the University of Arizona, teaches both film and video production courses in the department.

The idea of the project initially began in 1999 when the State of Arizona was planning to build two federal prisons. Two counties, Pima and Cochise, were competing to get prisons in their area.

"Prisons are often looked at in one way as an economic base. They supposedly bring in salaries, taxes and provide steady employment and that's how they're sold," he explained. "And the reality is more complex than that."

Mulcahy began researching the issue but before he could begin the project the Arizona Legislature awarded the contract to Pima County (construction of that prison has since been put on hold). But the seed of an idea had been planted. Mulcahy began to think about an aspect of prison rarely covered in other documentaries, that of the training correctional officers receive and their experience working within prison.

"I've always looked at work as an important part of my life and in most people's lives, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Work is a common denominator for almost everybody. So I began to think about work in prison with fairly basic questions Ð what would it be like to work in a prison and why would somebody work in a prison," Mulcahy said. "But as I began to do more research and think more about the project, I became interested in how the officers are trained and what their training might say about the way the State approaches those people who it has total control over. I decided to follow a class of recruits through the seven-week training academy and then as a part of that I would follow a limited number of people after that, through the first six to nine months of their time working within prison."

For the documentary Mulcahy initially received grants from the Arizona Humanities Council as well as several grants from the University, one from the College of Fine Arts and one from the University itself, to support faculty research. After completing the bulk of production work, Mulcahy partnered with KUAT-TV, the PBS affiliate in southern Arizona, to apply for funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting through ITVS (Independent Television Service). In the summer of 2000, he followed the 477th correctional officer training academy class of 35 individuals, half of whom were women. After that class graduated, he followed four of those officers for the first nine months they worked within the Arizona prison system.

The Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) has a central training academy in Tucson called the Correctional Officer Training Academy (COTA). Essentially a person who wants to work for the ADC fills out an initial job application, submits certain documentation and then has a series of interviews and evaluations. A recruit will indicate which prison he would want to work at and when there's an opening in that prison, he's called to attend COTA. There are 10 prisons run by the State and three private prisons, and there is a consistent turnover so people are called to COTA relatively quickly.

Mulcahy found that COTA had two main purposes. "One was to train the officers in the routines, the policies and procedures that determine how the prisons operate, what officers and inmates can and can't do on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis," he said.

"Not surprisingly, a lot of the policies and procedures they teach at the Academy change when the officers get into the prison environment, where each unit has adapted the policies to fit their specific circumstances." The other purpose of COTA was to create a vision of the people incarcerated in prison.

"The thing that struck me the most was the way the Academy trains the officers to approach and understand what an inmate is," he said. "The inmate becomes someone completely outside of an individual or social context. Once they become inmates they lose their individuality and instead take on certain group characteristics; they can never be trusted, they must always be viewed as wanting to get over on the system and that anything they say or do is designed with this in mind."

COTA also establishes the inmate as a threat to the officer, as someone to be feared.

"The Academy communicates that it's not just a fear of physical violence that the inmates pose," he continued, "but more so a fear that the inmates can emotionally and mentally trick the officers into doing something wrong."

The way officers, the inmates and the system balance that conflict is part of the everyday drama of prison. In the documentary, Mulcahy followed one male officer, Michael Burns, and three female officers Ð Diane McDougal, Lori Peterson and Maureen Santry. Burns and McDougal worked with high-level custody inmates at the Eyman prison complex, one of two state prisons in Florence. Peterson, a Native-American officer, worked in the prison in her hometown of Winslow. Santry was the only member of her class to work with female inmates at the Perryville prison complex, west of Phoenix. "Not all of the officers expressed this conflict but several of them did. The officer who expressed it the most strongly was Michael Burns, who at the beginning of the Academy was completely gung-ho and ready to work with the toughest inmates in the lockdown units," Mulcahy said. "And yet he quit the department about 18 months after he started, feeling that the system was breaking down everyone involved, the inmates as well as the officers. But all of the officers experienced the effects of trying to balance what is perhaps an impossible task."

Mulcahy is currently working with an editor in San Francisco.

"We're exchanging files back and forth with the idea the documentary will be done this summer." Since ITVS provided the bulk of the funding, they essentially purchased the broadcast rights that have been secured for the PBS system.

"ITVS has a funding program that encourages independent producers to work with local member stations, so that's what I did. I approached KUAT, presented the work already done at that time and they agreed to become a partner if the grant came through. I have been really pleased with the help and support I received from KUAT. Their involvement will make the project stronger."

Mulcahy has involved several of his students in the project and has integrated aspects of the documentary in classes he teaches. A former student acted as a sound person when the COTA footage was taped. This student also helped Mulcahy, acting as a sounding board to discuss the issues they faced during the initial round of taping. Another student of Mulcahy's is working as an assistant editor, managing footage, doing research and cutting rough versions of scenes from the documentary.

Mulcahy said it was sometimes a balancing act to find time for this project. Luckily, he wasn't teaching classes during the summer the COTA footage was taped, so he and his sound person went to the Academy every day for seven weeks. He also taped the officers he tracked for nine months four different times, structuring those visits around his teaching schedule.

"I found it easier, during production, to say on this day I'm going to leave my office and go shoot. I'm lucky to have editing equipment in my office to do post-production, but it's more difficult to carve out time to edit.

"Yet, there is a strong connection between teaching and creative activity," he continued. "It invigorates my teaching, talking about production, showing footage to my students, getting feedback into what I'm doing. Sometimes it's a hard balance, but it's a fruitful one.

"One of the reasons I'm making this documentary is I want to show a side of prison and state operations and state control that people don't normally see. I'm very interested in giving my audience some insight into how the State trains correctional officers and what happens inside their State prisons," Mulcahy explained. "Prison is at the end of the criminal justice system and once people are convicted and go off to prison, society typically forgets about them."

He said currently, at the political level, there is no measuring of whether prisons are a success, no measuring of whether our justice system is working other than to say high prison rates means criminals are off the street. Mulcahy said the State's nine percent prison budget is protected by the governor and legislators, so it will not be affected by the budget cuts in Arizona. He estimated the correction's portion of the budget this year to be $600 million.

(Top) Mulcahey goes over last-minute preparations for a camera lab with media arts students Stephanie Beran (l) and Pamela Merideth(r). (Bottom) Inside the media arts department Automated Dialog Replacement Room, Mulcahy discusses sound recording issues with student Paul Rose. (Photos: FOTOSMITH)

"The equation is usually that high incarceration rates equal a safe society, yet after a bit of thought that equation doesn't really hold up," he said. "Yet prison as a whole in society functions in the same way the inmate does within the Academy, as an object of fear. During recent negotiations for the State budget, a legislator essentially said if it's a question of funding for the arts or continuing to fund anything that would be seen as tough on crime, they are going to put the money into corrections."

Mulcahy said as he made the documentary he tried to be as open-minded as possible. So what did he learn from the experience?

"Everybody in prison is ready for the worst thing to happen and a good day is when nothing happens. I've come to think that we will be better served as a nation, as a state, if we do as much as we can to keep people out of prison. If we are incarcerating more people that's the problem. That's not a measure of success."

According to the Arizona Department of Corrections, there is about a 50 percent retention rate of correctional officers after 18 months. The remaining 50 percent had quit, been fired or left for various reasons.

"I found prison to be a terribly complex place and one that doesn't support the common stereotypes of guards and inmates. I ended the project very discouraged that so much money and so many lives are revolving around the system. Correctional officers end up doing the dirty work of our society and as long as we have prisons, there's going to be a need for that job to be done," Mulcahy said.

The documentary will be completed in summer 2003 and it should air in Arizona in the fall of 2003. It will be offered to the PBS system and may air nationally or be broadcast by individual PBS member stations.